Surely no little girl had ever had a more fantastic little girlhood than this Magnolia Ravenal who had been Magnolia Hawks. By the time she was eight she had fallen into and been fished out of practically every river in the Mississippi Basin from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota. The ordinary routine of her life, in childhood, had been made up of doing those things that usually are strictly forbidden the average child. She swam muddy streams; stayed up until midnight; read the lurid yellow-backed novels found in the cabins of the women of the company; went to school but rarely; caught catfish; drank river water out of the river itself; roamed the streets of strange towns alone; learned to strut and shuffle and buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces dotted the boards of the Southern wharves as thickly as grace notes sprinkle a bar of lively music. And all this despite constant watchfulness, nagging, and admonition from her spinster-like mother; for Parthy Ann Hawks, matron though she was, still was one of those women who, confined as favourite wife in the harem of a lascivious Turk, would have remained a spinster at heart and in manner. And though she lived on her husband’s show boat season after season, and tried to rule it from pilot house to cook’s galley, she was always an incongruous figure in the gay, careless vagabond life of this band of floating players. The very fact of her presence on the boat was a paradox. Life, for Parthy Ann Hawks, was meant to be made up of crisp white dimity curtains at kitchen windows; of bi-weekly bread bakings; of Sunday morning service and Wednesday night prayer meeting; of small gossip rolled evilly under the tongue. The male biped, to her, was a two-footed animal who tracked up a clean kitchen floor just after it was scoured and smoked a pipe in defiance of decency. Yet here she was—and had been for ten years—leading an existence which would have made that of the Stratford strollers seem orderly and prim by comparison.
She had been a Massachusetts school teacher, living with a henpecked fisherman father, and keeping house expertly for him with one hand while she taught school with the other. The villagers held her up as an example of all the feminine virtues, but the young males of the village were to be seen walking home from church with this or that plump twitterer who might be a notoriously bad cook but who had an undeniable way of tying a blue sash about a tempting waist. Parthenia Ann, prayer book clasped in mitted hands, walked sedately home with her father. The vivacious little Andy Hawks, drifting up into Massachusetts one summer, on a visit to fishermen kin, had encountered the father, and, through him, the daughter. He had eaten her light flaky biscuit, her golden-brown fries; her ruddy jell; her succulent pickles; her juicy pies. He had stood in her kitchen doorway, shyly yet boldly watching her as she moved briskly from table to stove, from stove to pantry. The sleeves of her crisp print dress were rolled to the elbow, and if those elbows were not dimpled they were undeniably expert in batter-beating, dough-kneading, pan-scouring. Her sallow cheeks were usually a little flushed with the heat of the kitchen and the energy of her movements, and, perhaps, with the consciousness of the unaccustomed masculine eye so warmly turned upon her. She looked her bustling best, and to little impulsive warm-hearted Andy she represented all he had ever known and dreamed, in his roving life, of order, womanliness, comfort. She was some years older than he. The intolerance with which women of Parthenia Ann’s type regard all men was heightened by this fact to something resembling contempt. Even before their marriage, she bossed him about much as she did her old father, but while she nagged she also fed them toothsome viands, and the balm of bland, well-cooked food counteracted the acid of her words. Then, too, Nature, the old witch-wanton, had set the yeast to working in the flabby dough of Parthy Ann’s organism. Andy told her that his real name was André and that he was descended, through his mother, from a long line of Basque fisher folk who had lived in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées. It probably was true, and certainly accounted for his swarthy skin, his bright brown eyes, his impulsiveness, his vivacious manner. The first time he kissed this tall, raw-boned New England woman he was startled at the robustness with which she met and returned the caress. They were married and went to Illinois to live in the little town of Thebes, on the Mississippi. In the village from which she had married it was said that, after she left, her old father, naturally neat and trained through years of nagging to super-neatness, indulged in an orgy of disorder that lasted days. As other men turn to strong drink in time of exuberance or relief from strain, so the tidy old septuagenarian strewed the kitchen with dirty dishes and scummy pots and pans; slept for a week in an unmade bed; padded in stocking feet; chewed tobacco and spat where he pleased; smoked the lace curtains brown; was even reported by a spying neighbour to have been seen seated at the reedy old cottage organ whose palsied pipes had always quavered to hymn tunes, picking out with one gnarled forefinger the chorus of a bawdy song. He lived one free, blissful year and died of his own cooking.
As pilot, river captain, and finally, as they thrived, owner and captain of a steamer accommodating both passengers and freight, Captain Andy was seldom in a position to be guilty of tracking the white-scoured kitchen floor or discolouring with pipe smoke the stiff folds of the window curtains. The prim little Illinois cottage saw him but rarely during the season when river navigation was at its height. For many months in the year Parthy Ann Hawks was free to lead the spinsterish existence for which nature had so evidently planned her. Her window panes glittered, her linen was immaculate, her floors unsullied. When Captain Andy came home there was constant friction between them. Sometimes her gay, capering little husband used to look at this woman as at a stranger. Perhaps his nervous habit of clawing at his mutton-chop whiskers had started as a gesture of puzzlement or despair.
The child Magnolia was not born until seven years after their marriage. That Parthy Ann Hawks could produce actual offspring was a miracle to give one renewed faith in certain disputed incidents recorded in the New Testament. The child was all Andy—manner, temperament, colouring. Between father and daughter there sprang up such a bond of love and understanding as to make their relation a perfect thing, and so sturdy as successfully to defy even the destructive forces bent upon it by Mrs. Hawks. Now the little captain came home whenever it was physically possible, sacrificing time, sleep, money—everything but the safety of his boat and its passengers—for a glimpse of the child’s piquant face, her gay vivacious manner, her smile that wrung you even then.
It was years before Captain Andy could persuade his wife to take a river trip with him on his steamer down to New Orleans and back again, bringing the child. It was, of course, only a ruse for having the girl with him. River captains’ wives were not popular on the steamers their husbands commanded. And Parthy Ann, from that first trip, proved a terror. It was due only to tireless threats, pleadings, blandishments, and actual bribes on the part of Andy that his crew did not mutiny daily. Half an hour after embarking on that first trip, Parthy Ann poked her head into the cook’s galley and told him the place was a disgrace. The cook was a woolly-headed black with a rolling protuberant eye and the quick temper of his calling.
Furthermore, though a capable craftsman, and in good standing on the river boats, he had come aboard drunk, according to time-honoured custom; not drunk to the point of being quarrelsome or incompetent, but entertaining delusions of grandeur, varied by ominous spells of sullen silence. In another twelve hours, and for the remainder of the trip, he would be sober and himself. Captain Andy knew this, understood him, was satisfied with him.
Now one of his minions was seated on an upturned pail just outside the door, peeling a great boiler full of potatoes with almost magic celerity and very little economy.
Parthy Ann’s gimlet eye noted the plump peelings as they fell in long spirals under the sharp blade. She lost no time.
“Well, I declare! Of all the shameful waste I ever clapped my eyes on, that’s the worst.”
The black at the stove turned to face her, startled and uncomprehending. Visitors were not welcome in the cook’s galley. He surveyed without enthusiasm the lean figure with the long finger pointing accusingly at a quite innocent pan of potato parings.
“Wha’ that you say, missy?”
“Don’t you missy me!” snapped Parthy Ann Hawks. “And what I said was that I never saw such criminal waste as those potato parings. An inch thick if they’re a speck, and no decent cook would allow it.”
A simple, ignorant soul, the black man, and a somewhat savage; as mighty in his small domain as Captain Andy in his larger one. All about him now were his helpers, black men like himself, with rolling eyes and great lips all too ready to gash into grins if this hard-visaged female intruder were to worst him.
“Yo-all passenger on this boat, missy?”
Parthy Ann surveyed disdainfully the galley’s interior, cluttered with the disorder attendant on the preparation of the noonday meal.
“Passenger! H’mph! No, I’m not. And passenger or no passenger, a filthier hole I never saw in my born days. I’ll let you know that I shall make it my business to report this state of things to the Captain. Good food going to waste——”
A red light seemed to leap then from the big Negro’s eyeballs. His lips parted in a kind of savage and mirthless grin, so that you saw his great square gleaming teeth and the blue gums above them. Quick as a panther he reached down with one great black paw into the pan of parings, straightened, and threw the mass, wet and slimy as it was, full at her. The spirals clung and curled about her—on her shoulders, around her neck, in the folds of her gown, on her head, Medusa-like.
“They’s something for you take to the Captain to show him, missy.”
He turned sombrely back to his stove. The other blacks were little less grave than he. They sensed something sinister in the fury with which this garbage-hung figure ran screaming to the upper deck. The scene above decks must have been a harrowing one.
They put him off at Memphis and shipped another cook there, and the big Negro, thoroughly sobered now, went quite meekly down the gangplank and up the levee, his carpet bag in hand. In fact, it was said that, when he had learned it was the Captain’s wife whom he had treated thus, he had turned a sort of ashen gray and had tried to jump overboard and swim ashore. The gay little Captain Andy was a prime favourite with his crew. Shamefaced though the Negro was, there appeared something akin to pity in the look he turned on Captain Andy as he was put ashore. If that was true, then the look on the little captain’s face as he regarded the miscreant was certainly born of an inward and badly concealed admiration. It was said, too, but never verified, that something round and gold and gleaming was seen to pass from the Captain’s hairy little brown hand to the big black paw.
For the remainder of the trip Mrs. Hawks constituted herself a sort of nightmarish housekeeper, prowling from corridor to cabins, from dining saloon to pantry. She made life wretched for the pert yellow wenches who performed the cabin chamber-work. She pounced upon them when they gathered in little whispering groups, gossiping. Thin-lipped and baleful of eye, she withered the very words they were about to utter to a waiter or deck-hand, so that the flowers of coquetry became ashes on their tongues. She regarded the female passengers with suspicion and the males with contempt. This was the latter ’70s, and gambling was as much a part of river-boat life as eating and drinking. Professional gamblers often infested the boats. It was no uncommon sight to see a poker game that had started in the saloon in the early evening still in progress when sunrise reddened the river. It was the day of the flowing moustache, the broad-brimmed hat, the open-faced collar, and the diamond stud. It constituted masculine America’s last feeble flicker of the picturesque before he sank for ever into the drab ashes of uniformity. A Southern gentleman, particularly, clad thus, took on a dashing and dangerous aspect. The rakish angle of the hat with its curling brim, the flowing ends of the string tie, the movement of the slender virile fingers as they stroked the moustache, all were things to thrill the feminine beholder. Even that frigid female, Parthenia Ann Hawks, must have known a little flutter of the senses as she beheld these romantic and—according to her standards—dissolute passengers seated, silent, wary, pale, about the gaming table. But in her stern code, that which thrilled was wicked. She belonged to the tribe of the Knitting Women; of the Salem Witch Burners; of all fanatics who count nature as an enemy to be suppressed; and in whose veins the wine of life runs vinegar. If the deep seepage of Parthy Ann’s mind could have been brought to the surface, it would have analyzed chemically thus: “I find these men beautiful, stirring, desirable. But that is an abomination. I must not admit to myself that I am affected thus. Therefore I think and I say that they are disgusting, ridiculous, contemptible.”
Her attitude was somewhat complicated by the fact that, as wife of the steamer’s captain, she was treated with a courtly deference on the part of these very gentlemen whom she affected to despise; and with a gracious cordiality by their ladies. The Southern men, especially, gave an actual effect of plumes on their wide-brimmed soft hats as they bowed and addressed her in their soft drawling vernacular.
“Well, ma’am, and how are you enjoying your trip on your good husband’s magnificent boat?” It sounded much richer and more flattering as they actually said it. “. . . Yo’ trip on yo’ good husband’s ma-a-a-yg-nif’cent . . .” They gave one the feeling that they were really garbed in satin, sword, red heels, lace ruffles.
Parthenia Ann, whose stays always seemed, somehow, to support her form more stiffly than did those of any other female, would regard her inquirers with a cold and fishy eye.
“The boat’s well enough, I suppose. But what with the carousing by night and the waste by day, a Christian soul can hardly look on at it without feeling that some dreadful punishment will overtake us all before we arrive at the end of our journey.” From her tone you would almost have gathered that she hoped it.
He of the broad-brimmed hat, and his bustled, basqued alpaca lady, would perhaps exchange a glance not altogether amused. Collisions, explosions, snag-founderings were all too common in the river traffic of the day to risk this deliberate calling down of wrath.
Moving away, the soft-tongued Southern voices would be found to be as effective in vituperation as in flattery. “Pole cat!” he of the phantom plumes would say, aside, to his lady.
Fortunately, Parthy Ann’s dour misgivings did not materialize. The trip downstream proved a delightful one, and as tranquil as might be with Mrs. Hawks on board. Captain Andy’s steamer, though by no means as large as some of the so-called floating palaces that plied the Mississippi, was known for the excellence of its table, the comfort of its appointments, and the affability of its crew. So now the passengers endured the irritation of Mrs. Hawks’ presence under the balm of appetizing food and good-natured service. The crew suffered her nagging for the sake of the little captain, whom they liked and respected; and for his wages, which were generous.
Though Parthenia Ann Hawks regarded the great river—if, indeed, she noticed it at all—merely as a moist highway down which one travelled with ease to New Orleans; untouched by its mystery, unmoved by its majesty, unsubdued by its sinister power, she must still, in spite of herself, have come, however faintly and remotely, under the spell of its enchantment. For this trip proved, for her, to be the first of many, and led, finally, to her spending seven months out of the twelve, not only on the Mississippi, but on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Kanawha, the Big Sandy. Indeed, her liking for the river life, together with her zeal for reforming it, became so marked that in time river travellers began to show a preference for steamers other than Captain Andy’s, excellently though they fared thereon.
Perhaps the attitude of the lady passengers toward the little captain and the manner of the little captain as he addressed the lady passengers did much to feed the flame of Parthy Ann’s belligerence. Until the coming of Andy Hawks she had found favour in no man’s eyes. Cut in the very pattern of spinsterhood, she must actually have had moments of surprise and even incredulity at finding herself a wife and mother. The art of coquetry was unknown to her; because the soft blandishments of love had early been denied her she now repudiated them as sinful; did her hair in a knob; eschewed flounces; assumed a severe demeanour; and would have been the last to understand that any one of these repressions was a confession. All about her—and Captain Andy—on the steamship were captivating females, full of winning wiles; wives of Southern planters; cream-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, indolent, heavy-lidded, bewitching; or women folk of prosperous Illinois or Iowa merchants, lawyers, or manufacturers making a pleasure jaunt of the Southern business trip with husband or father.
And, “Oh, Captain Hawks!” they said; and, “Oh, Captain Andy! Do come here like a nice man and tell us what it means when that little bell rings so fast? . . . And why do they call it the hurricane deck? . . . Oh, Captain Hawks, is that a serpent tattooed on the back of your hand! I declare it is! Look, Emmaline! Emmaline, look! This naughty Captain Andy has a serpent . . .”
Captain Andy’s social deportment toward women was made up of that most devastating of combinations, a deferential manner together with an audacious tongue. A tapering white finger, daringly tracing a rosy nail over the blue coils of the tattooed serpent, would find itself gently imprisoned beneath the hard little brown paw that was Andy’s free hand.
“After this,” the little captain would say, thoughtfully, “it won’t be long before that particular tattoo will be entirely worn away. Yes, ma’am! No more serpent.”
“But why?”
“Erosion, ma’am.”
“E—but I don’t understand. I’m so stupid. I——”
Meltingly, the wicked little monkey, “I’ll be so often kissing the spot your lovely finger has traced, ma’am.”
“Oh-h-h-h!” A smart tap of rebuke with her palm-leaf fan. “You are a saucy thing. Emmaline, did you hear what this wicked captain said!”
Much of the freedom that Magnolia enjoyed on this first trip she owed to her mother’s quivering preoccupation with these vivacious ladies.
If the enchantment of the river had been insidious enough to lure even Mrs. Hawks, certainly the child Magnolia fell completely under its magic spell. From that first trip on the Mississippi she was captive in its coils. Twenty times daily, during that leisurely journey from St. Louis to New Orleans, Mrs. Hawks dragged her child, squirming and protesting, from the pilot house perched atop the steamer or from the engine room in its bowels. Refurbished, the grime removed from face and hands, dressed in a clean pinafore, she was thumped on one of the red-plush fauteuils of the gaudy saloon. Magnolia’s hair was almost black and without a vestige of natural curl. This last was a great cross to Mrs. Hawks, who spent hours wetting and twining the long dank strands about her forefinger with a fine-toothed comb in an unconvincing attempt to make a swan out of her duckling. The rebellious little figure stood clamped between her mother’s relentless knees. Captured thus, and made fresh, her restless feet in their clean white stockings and little strapped black slippers sticking straight out before her, her starched skirts stiffly spread, she was told to conduct herself as a young lady of her years and high position should.
“Listen to the conversation of the ladies and gentlemen about you,” Mrs. Hawks counselled her, severely, “instead of to the low talk of those greasy engineers and pilots you’re always running off to. I declare I don’t know what your father is thinking of, to allow it. . . . Or read your book. . . . Then where is it? Where is the book I bought you especially to read on this trip? You haven’t opened it, I’ll be bound. . . . Go get it and come back directly.”
A prissy tale about a female Rollo so prim that Magnolia was sure she turned her toes out even in her sleep. When she returned with a book (if she returned at all) it was likely to be of a quite different sort—a blood-curdling tale of the old days of river banditry—a story, perhaps, of the rapacious and brutal Murrel and his following of ten hundred cut-throats sworn to do his evil will; and compared to whom Jesse James was a philanthropist. The book would have been loaned her by one of the crew. She adored these bloody tales and devoured them with the avidity that she always showed for any theme that smacked of the river. It was snatched away soon enough when it came under her mother’s watchful eye.
Magnolia loathed the red plush and gilt saloon except at night, when its gilding and mirrors took on a false glitter and richness from the kerosene lamps that filled wall brackets and chandeliers. Then it was that the lady passengers, their daytime alpacas and serges replaced by silks, sat genteelly conversing, reading, or embroidering. Then, if ever, the gentlemen twirled their mustachios most fiercely so that the diamond on the third finger of the right hand sparkled entrancingly. Magnolia derived a sensory satisfaction from the scene. The rich red of the carpet fed her, and the yellow glow of the lamps. In her best cashmere dress of brown with the polonaise cut up the front and around the bottom in deep turrets she sat alertly watching the elaborate posturings of the silken ladies and the broadcloth gentlemen.
Sometimes one of the ladies sang to the hoarse accompaniment of the ship’s piano, whose tones always sounded as though the Mississippi River mist had lodged permanently in its chords. The Southern ladies rendered tinkling and sentimental ballads. The Mid-western wives were wont to deliver themselves of songs of a somewhat sterner stuff. There was one song in particular, sung by a plain and falsetto lady hailing from Iowa, that aroused in Magnolia a savage (though quite reasoning) loathing. It was entitled Waste Not, Want Not; Or: You Never Miss The Water Till The Well Runs Dry. Not being a psychologist, Magnolia did not know why, during the rendition of the first verse and the chorus, she always longed to tear her best dress into ribbons and throw a barrel of flour and a dozen hams into the river. The song ran:
When a child I lived at Lincoln,
With my parents at the farm,
The lessons that my mother taught,
To me were quite a charm.
She would often take me on her knee,
When tired of childish play,
And as she press’d me to her breast,
I’ve heard my mother say:
Chorus: Waste not, want not, is a maxim I would teach——
Escape to the decks or the pilot house was impossible of accomplishment by night. She extracted what savour she could from the situation. This, at least, was better than being sent off to bed. All her disorderly life Magnolia went to bed only when all else failed. Then, too, once in her tiny cabin she could pose and swoop before the inadequate mirror in pitiless imitation of the arch alpacas and silks of the red plush saloon; tapping an imaginary masculine shoulder with a phantom fan; laughing in an elegant falsetto; grimacing animatedly as she squeaked, “Deah, yes!” and “Deah, no!” moistening a forelock of her straight black hair with a generous dressing of saliva wherewith to paste flat to her forehead the modish spit-curl that graced the feminine adult coiffure.
But during the day she and her father often contrived to elude the maternal duenna. With her hand in that of the little captain, she roamed the boat from stem to stern, from bunkers to pilot house. Down in the engine room she delightedly heard the sweating engineer denounce the pilot, decks above him, as a goddam Pittsburgh brass pounder because that monarch, to achieve a difficult landing, had to ring more bells than the engineer below thought necessary to an expert. But best of all Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled; sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you—that is, Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. The river curved and twisted and turned and doubled. Mystery always lay just around the corner of the next bend. But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper, the chief pilot, always knew. You couldn’t believe that it was possible for any human brain to remember the things that Captain Andy and Mr. Pepper knew about that treacherous, shifting, baffling river. Magnolia delighted to test them. She played a game with Mr. Pepper and with her father, thus:
“What’s next?”
“Kinney’s woodpile.”
“Now what?”
“Ealer’s Bend.”
“What’ll be there, when we come round that corner?”
“Patrie’s Plantation.”
“What’s around that bend?”
“An old cottonwood with one limb hanging down, struck by lightning.”
“What’s coming now?”
“A stump sticking out of the water at Higgin’s Point.”
They always were right. It was magic. It was incredible. They knew, too, the depth of the water. They could point out a spot and say, “That used to be an island—Buckle’s Island.”
“But it’s water! It couldn’t be an island. It’s water. We’re—why, we’re riding on it now.”
Mr. Pepper would persist, unmoved. “Used to be an island.” Or, pointing again, “Two years ago I took her right down through there where that point lays.”
“But it’s dry land. You’re just fooling, aren’t you, Mr. Pepper? Because you couldn’t take a boat on dry land. It’s got things growing on it! Little trees, even. So how could you?”
“Water there two years ago—good eleven foot.”
Small wonder Magnolia was early impressed with this writhing monster that, with a single lash of its tail, could wipe a solid island from the face of the earth, or with a convulsion of its huge tawny body spew up a tract of land where only water had been.
Mr. Pepper had respect for his river. “Yessir, the Mississippi and this here Nile, over in Egypt, they’re a couple of old demons. I ain’t seen the Nile River, myself. Don’t expect to. This old river’s enough for one man to meet up with in his life. Like marrying. Get to learn one woman’s ways real good, you know about all there is to women and you got about all you can do one lifetime.”
Not at all the salty old graybeard pilot of fiction, this Mr. Pepper. A youth of twenty-four, nerveless, taciturn, gentle, profane, charming. His clear brown eyes, gazing unblinkingly out upon the river, had tiny golden flecks in them, as though something of the river itself had taken possession of him, and become part of him. Born fifty years later, he would have been the steel stuff of which aviation aces are made.
Sometimes, in deep water, Mr. Pepper actually permitted Magnolia to turn the great pilot wheel that measured twice as high as she. He stood beside her, of course; or her father, if he chanced to be present, stood behind her. It was thrilling, too, when her father took the wheel in an exciting place—where the water was very shoal, perhaps; or where the steamer found a stiff current pushing behind her, and the tricky dusk coming on. At first it puzzled Magnolia that her father, omnipotent in all other parts of the Creole Belle, should defer to this stripling; should actually be obliged, on his own steamer, to ask permission of the pilot to take the wheel. They were both beautifully formal and polite about it.
“What say to my taking her a little spell, Mr. Pepper?”
“Not at all, Captain Hawks. Not at all, sir,” Mr. Pepper would reply, cordially if ambiguously. His gesture as he stepped aside and relinquished the wheel was that of one craftsman who recognizes and respects the ability of another. Andy Hawks had been a crack Mississippi River pilot in his day. And then to watch Captain Andy skinning the wheel—climbing it round and round, hands and feet, and looking for all the world like a talented little monkey.
Magnolia even learned to distinguish the bells by tone. There was the Go Ahead, soprano-voiced. Mr. Pepper called it the Jingle. He explained to Magnolia:
“When I give the engineer the Jingle, why, he knows I mean for him to give her all she’s got.” Strangely enough, the child, accustomed to the sex of boats and with an uncannily quick comprehension of river jargon, understood him, nodded her head so briskly that the hand-made curls jerked up and down like bell-ropes. “Sometimes it’s called the Soprano. Then the Centre Bell—the Stopping Bell—that’s middle tone. About alto. This here, that’s the Astern Bell—the backup bell. That’s bass. The Boom-Boom, you call it. Here’s how you can remember them: The Jingle, the Alto, and the Boom-Boom.”
A charming medium through which to know the river, Mr. Pepper. An enchanting place from which to view the river, that pilot house. Magnolia loved its shining orderliness, disorderly little creature that she was. The wilderness of water and woodland outside made its glass-enclosed cosiness seem the snugger. Oilcloth on the floor. You opened the drawer of the little table and there lay Mr. Pepper’s pistol, glittering and sinister; and Mr. Pepper’s Pilot Rules. Magnolia lingered over the title printed on the brick-coloured paper binding:
PILOT RULES
FOR THE
RIVERS WHOSE WATERS FLOW INTO THE GULF OF
MEXICO AND THEIR TRIBUTARIES
AND FOR
THE RED RIVER OF THE NORTH
The Red River of the North! There was something in the words that thrilled her; sent little delicious prickles up and down her spine.
There was a bright brass cuspidor. The expertness with which Mr. Pepper and, for that matter, Captain Hawks himself, aimed for the centre of this glittering receptacle and sustained a one-hundred-per-cent. record was as fascinating as any other feature of this delightful place. Visitors were rarely allowed up there. Passengers might peer wistfully through the glass enclosure from the steps below, but there they were confronted by a stern and forbidding sign which read: No Visitors Allowed. Magnolia felt very superior and slightly contemptuous as she looked down from her vantage point upon these unfortunates below. Sometimes, during mid-watch, a very black texas-tender in a very white starched apron would appear with coffee and cakes or ices for Mr. Pepper. Magnolia would have an ice, too, shaving it very fine to make it last; licking the spoon luxuriously with little lightning flicks of her tongue and letting the frozen sweet slide, a slow delicious trickle, down her grateful throat.
“Have another cake, Miss Magnolia,” Mr. Pepper would urge her. “A pink one, I’d recommend, this time.”
“I don’t hardly think my mother——”
Mr. Pepper, himself, surprisingly enough, the father of twins, was sure her mother would have no objection; would, if present, probably encourage the suggestion. Magnolia bit quickly into the pink cake. A wild sense of freedom flooded her. She felt like the river, rushing headlong on her way.
To be snatched from this ecstatic state was agony. The shadow of the austere and disapproving maternal figure loomed always just around the corner. At any moment it might become reality. The knowledge that this was so made Magnolia’s first taste of Mississippi River life all the more delicious.
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