Even after she had seen the Atlantic in a January hurricane, Kim Ravenal always insisted that the one body of water capable of striking terror to her was the Mississippi River. Surely she should have known. She had literally been born on that turbid torrent. All through her childhood her mother, Magnolia Ravenal, had told her tales of its vagaries, its cruelties, its moods; of the towns along its banks; of the people in those towns; of the boats that moved upon it and the fantastic figures that went up and down in those boats. Her grandfather, Captain Andy Hawks, had lost his life in the treacherous swift current of its channel; her grandmother, Parthenia Ann Hawks was, at eighty, a living legend of the Mississippi; the Flying Dutchman of the rivers, except that the boat touched many ports. One heard strange tales about Hawks’ widow. She had gone on with the business after his tragic death. She was the richest show-boat owner on the rivers. She ran the boat like a female seminary. If an actor uttered so much as a damn, he was instantly dismissed from the troupe. Couples in the company had to show a marriage certificate. Every bill—even such innocuous old-timers as East Lynne and The Gambler’s Daughter and Tempest and Sunshine—were subject to a purifying process before the stern-visaged female owner of the new Cotton Blossom would sanction their performance on her show boat.
Kim herself remembered many things about the Mississippi, though after her very early childhood she did not see it for many years; and her mother rarely spoke of it. She even shook her head when Kim would ask her for the hundredth time to tell her the story of how she escaped being named Mississippi.
“Tell about the time the river got so high, and all kinds of things floated on it—animals and furniture and houses, even—and you were so scared, and I was born, and you wanted to call me Mississippi, but you were too sleepy or something to say it. And the place was near Kentucky and Illinois and Missouri, all at once, so they made up a name from the letters K and I and M, just till you could think of a real name. And you never did. And it stayed Kim. . . . People laugh when I tell them my name’s Kim. Other girls are named Ellen and Mary and Elizabeth. . . . Tell me about that time on the Mississippi. And the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre.”
“But you know all about it. You’ve just told me.”
“I like to hear you tell it.”
“Your father doesn’t like to have me talk so much about the rivers and the show boat.”
“Why not?”
“He wasn’t very happy on them. I wasn’t, either, after Grandpa Hawks——”
Kim knew that, too. She had heard her father say, “God’s sake, Nola, don’t fill the kid’s head full of that stuff about the rivers and the show boat. The way you tell it, it sounds romantic and idle and picturesque.”
“Well, wasn’t——?”
“No. It was rotten and sordid and dull. Flies on the food and filthy water to drink and yokels to play to. And that old harridan——”
“Gay!”
He would come over to her, kiss her tenderly, contritely. “Sorry, darling.”
Kim knew that her mother had a strange deep feeling about the rivers. The ugly wide muddy ruthless rushing rivers of the Middle West.
Kim Ravenal’s earliest river memories were bizarre and startling flashes. One of these was of her mother seated in a straight-backed chair on the upper deck of the Cotton Blossom, sewing spangles all over a high-busted corset. It was a white webbed corset with a pinched-in waist and high full bosom and flaring hips. This humdrum garment Magnolia Ravenal was covering with shining silver spangles, one overlapping the other so that the whole made a glittering basque. She took quick sure stitches that jerked the fantastic garment in her lap, and when she did this the sun caught the brilliant heap aslant and turned it into a blaze of gold and orange and ice-blue and silver.
Kim was enchanted. Her mother was a fairy princess. It was nothing to her that the spangle-covered basque, modestly eked out with tulle and worn with astonishingly long skirts for a bareback rider, was to serve as Magnolia’s costume in The Circus Clown’s Daughter.
Kim’s grandmother had scolded a good deal about that costume. But then, she had scolded a good deal about everything. It was years before Kim realized that all grandmothers were not like that. At three she thought that scolding and grandmothers went together, like sulphur and molasses. The same was true of fun and grandfathers, only they went together like ice cream and cake. You called your grandmother grandma. You called your grandfather Andy, or, if you felt very roguish, Cap’n. When you called him that, he cackled and squealed, which was his way of laughing, and he clawed his delightful whiskers this side and that. Kim would laugh then, too, and look at him knowingly from under her long lashes. She had large eyes, deep-set like her mother’s and her mother’s wide mobile mouth. For the rest, she was much like her father—a Ravenal, he said. His fastidious ways (highfalutin, her grandmother called them); his slim hands and feet; his somewhat drawling speech, indirect though strangely melting glance, calculatedly impulsive and winning manner.
Another childhood memory was that of a confused and terrible morning. Asleep in her small bed in the room with her father and mother, she had been wakened by a bump, followed by a lurch, a scream, shouts, bells, clamour. Wrapped in her comforter, hastily snatched up from her bed by her mother, she was carried to the deck in her mother’s arms. Gray dawn. A misty morning with fog hanging an impenetrable curtain over the river, the shore. The child was sleepy, bewildered. It was all one to her—the confusion, the shouting, the fog, the bells. Close in her mother’s arms, she did not in the least understand what had happened when the confusion became pandemonium; the shouts rose to screams. Her grandfather’s high squeaky voice that had been heard above the din—“La’berd lead there! Sta’berd lead! Snatch her! SNATCH HER!” was heard no more. Something more had happened. Someone was in the water, hidden by the fog, whirled in the swift treacherous current. Kim was thrown on her bed like a bundle of rags, all rolled in her blanket. She was left there, alone. She had cried a little, from fright and bewilderment, but had soon fallen asleep again. When she woke up her mother was bending over her, so wild-eyed, so frightening with her black hair streaming about her face and her face swollen and mottled with weeping, that Kim began to cry again in sheer terror. Her mother had snatched her to her. Curiously enough the words Magnolia Ravenal now whispered in a ghastly kind of agony were the very words she had whispered after the agony of Kim’s birth—though the child could not know that.
“The river!” Magnolia said, over and over. Gaylord Ravenal came to her, flung an arm about her shoulder, but she shook him off wildly. “The river! The river!”
Kim never saw her grandfather again. Because of the look it brought to her mother’s face, she soon learned not to say, “Where’s Andy?” or—the roguish question that had always made him appear, squealing with delight: “Where’s Cap’n?”
Baby though she was, the years—three or four—just preceding her grandfather’s tragic death were indelibly stamped on the infant’s mind. He had adored her; made much of her. Andy, dead, was actually a more vital figure than many another alive.
It had been a startling but nevertheless actual fact that Parthenia Ann Hawks had not wanted her daughter Magnolia to have a child. Parthy’s strange psychology had entered into this, of course—a pathological twist. Of this she was quite unaware.
“How’re you going to play ingénue lead, I’d like to know, if you—when you—while you——” She simply could not utter the word “pregnant” or say, “while you are carrying your child,” or even the simpering evasion of her type and class—“in the family way.”
Magnolia laughed a little at that. “I’ll play as long as I can. Toward the end I’ll play ruffly parts. Then some night, probably between the second and third acts—though they may have to hold the curtain for five minutes or so—I’ll excuse myself——”
Mrs. Hawks declared that she had never heard anything so indelicate in her life. “Besides, a show boat’s no place to bring up a child.”
“You brought me up on one.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hawks, grimly. Her tone added, “And now look at you!”
Even before Kim’s birth the antagonism between Parthy and her son-in-law deepened to actual hatred. She treated him like a criminal; regarded Magnolia’s quite normal condition as a reproach to him.
“Look here, Magnolia, I can’t stand this, you know. I’m so sick of this old mud-scow and everything that goes with it.”
“Gay! Everything!”
“You know what I mean. Let’s get out of it. I’m no actor. I don’t belong here. If I hadn’t happened to see you when you stepped out on deck that day at New Orleans——”
“Are you sorry?”
“Darling! It’s the only luck I’ve ever had that lasted.”
She looked thoughtfully down at the clear colourful brilliance of the diamond on her third finger. Always too large for her, it now hung so loosely on her thin hand that she had been obliged to wind it with a great pad of thread to keep it from dropping off, though hers were the large-knuckled fingers of the generous and resourceful nature. It was to see much of life, that ring.
She longed to say to him, “Where do you belong, Gay? Who are you? Don’t tell me you’re a Ravenal. That isn’t a profession, is it? You can’t live on that.”
But she knew it was useless. There was a strange deep streak of the secretive in him; baffling, mystifying. Questioned, he would say nothing. It was not a moody silence, or a resentful one. He simply would not speak. She had learned not to ask.
“We can’t go away now, Gay dear. I can’t go. You don’t want to go without me, do you? You wouldn’t leave me! Maybe next winter, after the boat’s put up, we can go to St. Louis, or even New Orleans—that would be nice, wouldn’t it? The winter in New Orleans.”
One of his silences.
He never had any money—that is, he never had it for long. It vanished. He would have one hundred dollars. He would go ashore at some sizable town and return with five hundred—a thousand. “Got into a little game with some of the boys,” he would explain, cheerfully. And give her three hundred of it, four hundred, five. “Buy yourself a dress, Nola. Something rich, with a hat to match. You’re too pretty to wear those homemade things you’re always messing with.”
Some woman wisdom in her told her to put by a portion of these sums. She got into the habit of tucking away ten dollars, twenty, fifty. At times she reproached herself for this; called it disloyal, sneaking, underhand. When she heard him say, as he frequently did, “I’m strapped. If I had fifty dollars I could turn a trick that would make five hundred out of it. You haven’t got fifty, have you, Nola? No, of course not.”
She wanted then to give him every cent of her tiny hoard. It was the tenuous strain of her mother in her, doubtless—the pale thread of the Parthy in her make-up—that caused her to listen to an inner voice. “Don’t do it,” whispered the voice, nudging her, “keep it. You’ll need it badly by and by.”
It did not take many months for her to discover that her husband was a gambler by profession—one of those smooth and plausible gentry with whom years of river life had made her familiar. It was, after all, not so much a discovery as a forced admission. She knew, but refused to admit that she knew. Certainly no one could have been long in ignorance with Mrs. Hawks in possession of the facts.
Ten days after Magnolia’s marriage to Ravenal (and what a ten days those had been! Parthy alone crowded into them a lifetime of reproach), Mrs. Hawks came to her husband, triumph in her mien, portent in her voice:
“Well, Hawks, I hope you’re satisfied now.” This was another of Parthy’s favourite locutions. The implication was that the unfortunate whom she addressed had howled heaven-high his demands for hideous misfortune and would not be content until horror had piled upon horror. “I hope you’re satisfied now, Hawks. Your son-in-law is a gambler, and no more. A common barroom gambler, without a cent to his trousers longer’n it takes to transfer his money from his pocket to the table. That’s what your only daughter has married. Understand, I’m not saying he gambles, and that’s all. I say he’s a gambler by calling. That’s the way he made his living before he came aboard this boat. I wish he had died before he ever set foot on the Cotton Blossom gangplank, and so I tell you, Hawks. A smooth-tongued, oily, good-for-nothing; no better than the scum Elly ran off with.”
“Now, Parthy, what’s done’s done. Why’n’t you try to make the best of things once in a while, instead of the worst? Magnolia’s happy with him.”
“She ain’t lived her life out with him yet. Mark my words. He’s got a roving eye for a petticoat.”
“Funny thing, Parthy. Your father was a man, and so’s your husband, and your son-in-law’s another. Yet seems you never did get the hang of a man’s ways.”
Andy liked Ravenal. There was about the fellow a grace, an ease, a certain elegance that appealed to the æsthetic in the little Gallic captain. When the two men talked together sometimes, after dinner, it was amiably, in low tones, with an air of leisure and relaxation. Two gentlemen enjoying each other’s company. There existed between the two a sound respect and liking.
Certainly Ravenal’s vogue on the rivers was tremendous. Andy paid him as juvenile lead a salary that was unheard of in show-boat records. But he accounted him worth it. Shortly after Kim’s birth, Andy spoke of giving Ravenal a share in the Cotton Blossom. But this Mrs. Hawks fought with such actual ferocity that Andy temporarily at least relinquished the idea.
Magnolia had learned to dread the idle winter months. During this annual period of the Cotton Blossom’s hibernation the Hawks family had, before Magnolia’s marriage, gone back to the house near the river at Thebes. Sometimes Andy had urged Parthy to spend these winter months in the South, evading the harsh Illinois climate for a part of the time at least in New Orleans, or one of the towns of southern Mississippi where one might have roses instead of holly for Christmas. He sometimes envied black Jo and Queenie their period of absence from the boat. In spite of the disreputable state in which they annually returned to the Cotton Blossom in the early spring, they always looked as if they had spent the intervening months seated in the dappled shade, under a vine, with the drone of insects in the air, and the heavy scent of white-petalled blossoms; eating fruit that dripped juice between their fingers; sleeping, slack-jawed and heavily content, through the heat of the Southern mid-afternoon; supping greasily and plentifully on fried catfish and corn bread; watching the moon come up to the accompaniment of Jo’s coaxing banjo.
“We ought to lazy around more, winters,” Andy said to his energetic wife. She was, perhaps, setting the Thebes house to rights after their long absence; thwacking pillows, pounding carpets, sloshing pails, scouring tables, hanging fresh curtains, flapping drapes, banging bureau drawers. A towel wrapped about her head, turban-wise, her skirts well pinned up, she would throw a frenzy of energy into her already exaggerated housewifeliness until Andy, stepping fearfully out of the way of mop and broom and pail, would seek waterfront cronies for solace.
“Lazy! I’ve enough of lazying on that boat of yours month in month out all summer long. No South for me, thank you. Eight months of flies and niggers and dirty mud-tracking loafers is enough for me, Captain Hawks. I’m thankful to get back for a few weeks where I can live like a decent white woman.” Thwack! Thump! Bang!
After one trial lasting but a few days, the Thebes house was found by Magnolia to be impossible for Gaylord Ravenal. That first winter after their marriage they spent in various towns and cities. Memphis for a short time; a rather hurried departure; St. Louis; Chicago. That brief glimpse of Chicago terrified her, but she would not admit it. After all, she told herself, as the astounding roar and din and jangle and clatter of State Street and Wabash Avenue beat at her ears, this city was only an urban Mississippi. The cobblestones were the river bed. The high grim buildings the river banks. The men, women, horses, trucks, drays, carriages, street cars that surged through those streets; creating new channels where some obstacle blocked their progress; felling whole sections of stone and brick and wood and sweeping over that section, obliterating all trace of its former existence; lifting other huge blocks and sweeping them bodily downstream to deposit them in a new spot; making a boulevard out of what had been a mud swamp—all this, Magnolia thought, was only the Mississippi in another form and environment; ruthless, relentless, Gargantuan, terrible. One might think to know its currents and channels ever so well, but once caught unprepared in the maelstrom, one would be sucked down and devoured as Captain Andy Hawks had been in that other turbid hungry flood.
“You’ll get used to it,” Ravenal told his bride, a trifle patronizingly, as one who had this monster tamed and fawning. “Don’t be frightened. It’s mostly noise.”
“I’m not frightened, really. It’s just the kind of noise that I’m not used to. The rivers, you know, all these years—so quiet. At night and in the morning.”
That winter she lived the life of a gambler’s wife. Streak o’ lean, streak o’ fat. Turtle soup and terrapin at the Palmer House to-day. Ham and eggs in some obscure eating house to-morrow. They rose at noon. They never retired until the morning hours. Gay seemed to know a great many people, but to his wife he presented few of these.
“Business acquaintance,” he would say. “You wouldn’t care for him.”
Hers had been a fantastic enough life on the show boat. But always there had been about it an orderliness, a routine, due, perhaps, to the presence of the martinet, Parthenia Ann Hawks. Indolent as the days appeared on the rivers, they still bore a methodical aspect. Breakfast at nine. Rehearsal. Parade. Dinner at four. Make-up. Curtain. Wardrobe to mend or refurbish; parts to study; new songs to learn for the concert. But this new existence seemed to have no plot or plan. Ravenal was a being for the most part unlike the lover and husband of Cotton Blossom days. Expansive and secretive by turn; now high-spirited, now depressed; frequently absent-minded. His manner toward her was always tender, courteous, thoughtful. He loved her as deeply as he was capable of loving. She knew that. She had to tell herself all this one evening when she sat in their hotel room, dressed and waiting for him to take her to dinner and to the theatre. They were going to McVicker’s Theatre, the handsome new auditorium that had risen out of the ashes of the old (to quote the owner’s florid announcement). Ravenal was startled to learn how little Magnolia knew of the great names of the stage. He had told her something of the history of McVicker’s, in an expansive burst of pride in Chicago. He seemed to have a definite feeling about this great uncouth giant of a city.
“When you go to McVicker’s,” Ravenal said, “you are in the theatre where Booth has played, and Sothern, and Lotta, and Kean, and Mrs. Siddons.”
“Who,” asked Magnolia, “are they?”
He was so much in love that he found this ignorance of her own calling actually delightful. He laughed, of course, but kissed her when she pouted a little, and explained to her what these names meant, investing them with all the glamour and romance that the theatre—the theatre of sophistication, that is—had for him; for he had the gambler’s love of the play. It must have been something of that which had held him so long to the Cotton Blossom. Perhaps, after all, his infatuation for Magnolia alone could not have done it.
And now she was going to McVicker’s. And she had on her dress with the open-throated basque, which she considered rather daring, though now that she was a married woman it was all right. She was dressed long before the time when she might expect him back. She had put out fresh linen for him. He was most fastidious about his dress. Accustomed to the sloppy deshabille of the show boat’s male troupers, this sartorial niceness in Ravenal had impressed her from the first.
She regarded herself in the mirror now. She knew she was not beautiful. She affected, in fact, to despise her looks; bemoaned her high forehead and prominent cheek-bones, her large-knuckled fingers, her slenderness, her wide mouth. Yet she did not quite believe these things she said about herself; loved to hear Ravenal say she was beautiful. As she looked at her reflection now in the long gilt-framed mirror of the heavy sombre walnut bedroom, she found herself secretly agreeing with him. This was the first year of her marriage. She was pregnant. It was December. The child was expected in April. There was nothing distorted about her figure or her face. As is infrequently the case, her condition had given her an almost uncanny radiance of aspect. Her usually pallid skin showed a delicious glow of rosy colouring; her eyes were enormous and strangely luminous; tiny blue veins were faintly, exquisitely etched against the cream tint of her temples; her rather angular slimness was replaced by a delicate roundness; she bore herself well, her shoulders back, her head high. A happy woman, beloved, and in love.
Six o’clock. A little late, but he would be here at any moment now. Half-past six. She was opening the door every five minutes to peer up the red-carpeted corridor. Seven. Impatience had given way to fear, fear to terror, terror to certain agony. He was dead. He had been killed. She knew by now that he frequented the well-known resorts of the city, that he played cards in them. “Just for pastime,” he told her. “Game of cards to while away the afternoon. What’s the harm in that? Now, Nola! Don’t look like your mother. Please!”
She knew about them. Red plush and gilt, mahogany and mirrors. Food and drink. River-front saloons and river-front life had long ago taught her not to be squeamish. She was not a foolish woman, nor an intolerant. She was, in fact, in many ways wise beyond her years. But this was 1888. The papers had been full of the shooting of Simeon Peake, the gambler, in Jeff Hankins’ place over on Clark Street. The bullet had been meant for someone else—a well-known newspaper publisher, in fact. But a woman, hysterical, crazed, revengeful, had fired it. It had gone astray. Ravenal had known Simeon Peake. The shooting had been a shock to him. It had, indeed, thrown him so much off his guard that he had talked to Magnolia about it for relief. Peake had had a young daughter Selina. She was left practically penniless.
Now the memory of this affair came rushing back to her. She was frantic. Half-past seven. It was too late, now, for the dinner they had planned for the gala evening—dinner at the Wellington Hotel, down in the white marble café. The Wellington was just across the street from McVicker’s. It would make everything simple and easy; no rush, no hurrying over that last delightful sweet sip of coffee.
Eight o’clock. He had been killed. She no longer merely opened the door to peer into the corridor. She left the room door open and paced from room to hall, from hall to room, wildly; down the corridor. Finally, in desperation, down to the hotel lobby into which she had never stepped in the evening without her husband. There were two clerks at the office desk. One was an ancient man, flabby and wattled, as much a part of the hotel as the stones that paved the lobby. He had soft wisps of sparse white hair that seemed to float just above his head instead of being attached to it; and little tufts of beard, like bits of cotton stuck on his cheeks. He looked like an old baby. The other was a glittering young man; his hair glittered, his eyes, his teeth, his nails, his shirt-front, his cuffs. Both these men knew Ravenal; had greeted him on their arrival; had bowed impressively to her. The young man had looked flattering things; the old man had pursed his soft withered lips.
Magnolia glanced from one to the other. There were people at the clerks’ desk, leaning against the marble slab. She waited, nervous, uncertain. She would speak to the old man. She did not want, somehow, to appeal to the glittering one. But he saw her, smiled, left the man to whom he was talking, came toward her. Quickly she touched the sleeve of the old man—leaned forward over the marble to do it—jerked his sleeve, really, so that he glanced up at her testily.
“I—I want—may I speak to you?”
“A moment, madam. I shall be free in a moment.”
The sparkler leaned toward her. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Ravenal?”
“I just wanted to speak to this gentleman——”
“But I can assist you, I’m sure, as well as——”
She glanced at him and he was a row of teeth, all white and even, ready to bite. She shook her head miserably; glanced appealingly at the old man. The sparkler’s eyebrows came up. He gave the effect of stepping back, courteously, without actually doing so. Now that the old clerk faced her, questioningly, she almost regretted her choice.
She blushed, stammered; her voice was little more than a whisper. “I . . . my husband . . . have been . . . he hasn’t returned . . . worried . . . killed or . . . theatre . . .”
The old baby cupped one hand behind his ear. “What say?”
Her beautiful eyes, in their agony, begged the sparkler now to forgive her for having been rude. She needed him. She could not shout this. He stepped forward, but the teeth were hidden. After all, a chief clerk is a chief clerk. Miraculously, he had heard the whisper.
“You say your husband——?”
She nodded. She was terribly afraid that she was going to cry. She opened her eyes very wide and tried not to blink. If she so much as moved her lids she knew the mist that was making everything swim in a rainbow haze would crystallize into tears.
“He is terribly late. I—I’ve been so worried. We were going to the—to McVicker’s—and dinner—and now it’s after seven——”
“After eight,” wheezed cotton whiskers, peering at the clock on the wall.
“—after eight,” she echoed, wretchedly. There! She had winked. Two great drops plumped themselves down on the silk bosom of her bodice with the open-throated neck line. It seemed to her that she heard them splash.
“H’m!” cackled the old man.
The glittering one leaned toward her. She was enveloped in a waft of perfume. “Now, now, Mrs. Ravenal! There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Your husband has been delayed. That’s all. Unavoidably delayed.”
She snatched at this. “Do you think—? Are you sure? But he always is back by six, at the latest. Always. And we were going to dinner—and Mc——”
“You brides!” smiled the young man. He actually patted her hand, then. Just a touch. “Now you just have a bite of dinner, like a sensible little woman.”
“Oh, I couldn’t eat a bite! I couldn’t!”
“A cup of tea. Let me send up a cup of tea.”
The old one made a sucking sound with tongue and teeth, rubbed his chin, and proffered his suggestion in a voice that seemed to Magnolia to echo and reëcho through the hotel lobby. “Why’n’t you send a messenger around for him, madam?”
“Messenger? Around? Where?”
Sparkler made a little gesture—a tactful gesture. “Perhaps he’s having a little game of—uh—cards; and you know how time flies. I’ve done the same thing myself. Look up at the clock and first thing you know it’s eight. Now if I were you, Mrs. Ravenal——”
She knew, then. There was something so sure about this young man; and so pitying. And suddenly she, too, was sure. She recalled in a flash that time when they were playing Paducah, and he had not come. They had held the curtain until after eight. Ralph had searched for him. He had been playing poker in a waterfront saloon. Send around for him! Not she. The words of a popular sentimental song of the day went through her mind, absurdly.
Father, dear father, come home with me now.
The clock in the steeple strikes one.
She drew herself up, now. The actress. She even managed a smile, as even and sparkling and toothy as the sparkler’s own. “Of course. I’m very silly. Thank you so . . . I’ll just have a bit of supper in my room. . . .” She turned away with a little gracious bow. The eyes very wide again.
“H’m!” The old man. Translated it meant, “Little idiot!”
She took off the dress with the two dark spots on the silk of the basque. She put away his linen and his shiny shoes. She took up some sewing. But the mist interfered with that. She threw herself on the bed. An agony of tears. That was better. Ten o’clock. She fell asleep, the gas lights burning. At a little before midnight he came in. She awoke with a little cry. Queerly enough, the first thing she noticed was that he had not his cane—the richly mottled malacca stick that he always carried. She heard herself saying, ridiculously, half awake, half asleep, “Where’s your cane?”
His surprise at this matter-of-fact reception made his expression almost ludicrous. “Cane! Oh, that’s so. Why I left it. Must have left it.”
In the years that followed she learned what the absence of the malacca stick meant. It had come to be a symbol in every pawnshop on Clark Street. Its appearance was bond for a sum a hundred times its actual value. Gaylord Ravenal always paid his debts.
She finished undressing, in silence. Her face was red and swollen. She looked young and helpless and almost ugly. He was uncomfortable and self-reproachful. “I’m sorry, Nola. I was detained. We’ll go to the theatre to-morrow night.”
She almost hated him then. Being, after all, a normal woman, there followed a normal scene—tears, reproaches, accusations, threats, pleadings, forgiveness. Then:
“Uh—Nola, will you let me take your ring—just for a day or two?”
“Ring?” But she knew.
“You’ll have it back. This is Wednesday. You’ll have it by Saturday. I swear it.”
The clear white diamond had begun its travels with the malacca stick.
He had spoken the truth when he said that he had been unavoidably detained.
She had meant not to sleep. She had felt sure that she would not sleep. But she was young and healthy and exhausted from emotion. She slept. As she lay there by his side she thought, before she slept, that life was very terrible—but fascinating. Even got from this a glow of discovery. She felt old and experienced and married and tragic. She thought of her mother. She was much, much older and more married, she decided, than her mother ever had been.
They returned to Thebes in February. Magnolia longed to be near her father. She even felt a pang of loneliness for her mother. The little white cottage near the river, at Thebes, looked like a toy house. Her bedroom was doll-size. The town was a miniature village, like a child’s Christmas set. Her mother’s bonnet was a bit of grotesquerie. Her father’s face was etched with lines that she did not remember having seen there when she left. The home-cooked food, prepared by Parthy’s expert hands, was delicious beyond belief. She was a traveller returned from a far place.
Captain Andy had ordered a new boat. He talked of nothing else. The old Cotton Blossom, bought from Pegram years before, was to be discarded. The new boat was to be lighted by some newfangled gas arrangement instead of the old kerosene lamps. Carbide or some such thing Andy said it was. There were to be special footlights, new scenery, improved dressing and sleeping rooms. She was being built at the St. Louis shipyards.
“She’s a daisy!” squeaked Andy, capering. He had just returned from a trip to the place of the Cotton Blossom’s imminent birth. Of the two impending accouchements—that which was to bring forth a grandchild and that which was to produce a new show boat—it was difficult to say which caused him keenest anticipation. Perhaps, secretly, it was the boat, much as he loved Magnolia. He was, first, the river man; second, the showman; third, the father.
“Like to know what you want a new boat for!” Parthy scolded. “Take all the money you’ve earned these years past with the old tub and throw it away on a new one.”
“Old one ain’t good enough.”
“Good enough for the riff-raff we get on it.”
“Now, Parthy, you know’s well’s I do you couldn’t be shooed off the rivers now you’ve got used to ’em. Any other way of living’d seem stale to you.”
“I’m a woman loves her home and asks for nothing better.”
“Bet you wouldn’t stay ashore, permanent, if you had the chance.”
He won the wager, though he had to die to do it.
The new Cotton Blossom and the new grandchild had a trial by flood on their entrance into life. The Mississippi, savage mother that she was, gave them both a baptism that threatened for a time to make their entrance into and their exit from the world a simultaneous act. But both, after some perilous hours, were piloted to safety; the one by old Windy, who swore that this was his last year on the rivers; the other by a fat midwife and a frightened young doctor. Through storm and flood was heard the voice of Parthenia Ann Hawks, the scold, berating Captain Hawks her husband, and Magnolia Ravenal her daughter, as though they, and not the elements, were responsible for the predicament in which they now found themselves.
There followed four years of war and peace. The strife was internal. It raged between Parthy and her son-in-law. The conflict of the two was a chemical thing. Combustion followed inevitably upon their meeting. The biting acid of Mrs. Hawks’ discernment cut relentlessly through the outer layers of the young man’s charm and grace and melting manner and revealed the alloy. Ravenal’s nature recoiled at sight of a woman who employed none of the arts of her sex and despised and penetrated those of the opposite sex. She had no vanity, no coquetry, no reticences, no respect for the reticence of others; treated compliment as insult, met flattery with contempt.
A hundred times during those four years he threatened to leave the Cotton Blossom, yet he was held to his wife Magnolia and to the child Kim by too many tender ties. His revolt usually took the form of a gambling spree ashore during which he often lost every dollar he had saved throughout weeks of enforced economy. There was no opportunity to spend money legitimately in the straggling hamlets to whose landings the Cotton Blossom was so often fastened. Then, too, the easy indolence of the life was beginning to claim him—its effortlessness, its freedom from responsibility. Perhaps a new part to learn at the beginning of the season—that was all. River audiences liked the old plays. Came to see them again and again. It was Ravenal who always made the little speech in front of the curtain. Wish to thank you one and all . . . always glad to come back to the old . . . to-morrow night that thrilling comedy-drama entitled . . . each and every one . . . concert after the show . . .
Never had the Cotton Blossom troupe so revelled in home-baked cakes, pies, cookies; home-brewed wine; fruits of tree and vine. The female population of the river towns from the Great Lakes to the Gulf beheld in him the lover of their secret dreams and laid at his feet burnt offerings and shewbread. Ravenal, it was said by the Cotton Blossom troupe, could charm the gold out of their teeth.
Perhaps, with the passing of the years, he might have grown quite content with this life. Sometimes the little captain, when the two men were conversing quietly apart, dropped a word about the future.
“When I’m gone—you and Magnolia—the boat’ll be yours, of course.”
Ravenal would laugh. Little Captain Andy looked so very much alive, his bright brown eyes glancing here and there, missing nothing on land or shore, his brown paw scratching the whiskers that showed so little of gray, his nimble legs scampering from texas to gangplank, never still for more than a minute.
“No need to worry about that for another fifty years,” Ravenal assured him.
The end had in it, perhaps, a touch of the ludicrous, as had almost everything the little capering captain did. The Cotton Blossom, headed upstream on the Mississippi, bound for St. Louis, had struck a snag in Cahokia Bend, three miles from the city. It was barely dawn, and a dense fog swathed the river. The old Cotton Blossom probably would have sunk midstream. The new boat stood the shock bravely. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed the high shrill falsetto of the little captain’s voice could be heard giving commands which he, most of all, knew he had no right to give. The pilot only was to be obeyed under such conditions. The crew understood this, as did the pilot. It was, in fact, a legend that more than once in a crisis Captain Andy on the upper deck had screamed his orders in a kind of dramatic frenzy of satisfaction, interspersing these with picturesque and vivid oaths during which he had capered and bounced his way right off the deck and into the river, from which damp station he had continued to screech his orders and profanities in cheerful unconcern until fished aboard again. Exactly this happened. High above the clamour rose the voice of Andy. His little figure whirled like that of a dervish. Up, down, fore, aft—suddenly he was overboard unseen in the dimness, in the fog, in the savage swift current of the Mississippi, wrapped in the coils of the old yellow serpent, tighter, tighter, deeper, deeper, until his struggles ceased. She had him at last.
“The river,” Magnolia had said, over and over, “The river. The river.”
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