Show Boat (22 page)

Magnolia stood erect. Indignation blazed in her fine eyes. “But, Gaylord!” she said.

“Yes!” Certainly she had never before called him that.

“I mean this Gaylord. I mean the one who came after Samuel and Jean. Why isn’t—why didn’t——”

“Naughty boy,” said Ravenal, with his charming smile.

She actually yearned toward him then. He could not have said anything more calculated to bind his enchantment for her. They swayed toward each other over the top of the little glass-encased relic. Andy coughed hastily. They swayed gently apart. They were as though mesmerized.

“Folks out here in the churchyard?” inquired Andy, briskly, to break the spell. “Ravenal kin?”

“Acres of ’em,” Gaylord assured him, cheerfully. “Son of … and daughter of … and beloved father of.… For that matter, there’s one just beside you.”

Andy side-stepped hastily, with a little exclamation. He cast a somewhat fearful glance at the spot toward which Ravenal so carelessly pointed. A neat gray stone
slab set in the wall. Andy peered at the lettering it bore; stooped a little. “Here—you read it, Nollie. You’ve got young eyes.”

Her fresh young cheek so near the cold gray slab, she read in her lovely flexible voice:

Magnolia rose, slowly, from the petals of her flounced skirt spread about her as she had stooped to read. “Poor darling!” Her eyes were soft with pity. Again the two seemed to sway a little toward each other, as though blown by a gust of passion. And this time little Captain Andy turned his back and clattered down the aisle. When they emerged again into the sunshine they found him, a pixie figure, leaning pensively against the great black trunk of a live oak. He was smoking a pipe somewhat apologetically, as though he hoped the recumbent Ravenals would not find it objectionable.

“I guess,” he remarked, as Magnolia and Ravenal came up to him, “I’ll have to bring your ma over. She’s partial to history, her having been a schoolma’am, and all.”

Like the stage sets he so cleverly devised for the show boat, Gaylord Ravenal had a gift for painting about himself the scenery of romance. These settings, too, did not bear the test of too close scrutiny. But in a
favourable light, and viewed from a distance, they were charmingly effective and convincing.

His sense of the dramatic did not confine itself to the stage. He was the juvenile lead, on or off. Audiences adored him. Mid-western village housewives, good mothers and helpmates for years, were, for days after seeing him as the heroic figure of some gore-and-glory drama, mysteriously silent and irritably waspish by turn. Disfavour was writ large on their faces as they viewed their good commonplace dull husbands across the midday table set with steaming vegetables and meat.

“Why’n’t you shave once in a while middle of the week,” they would snap, “ ’stead of coming to the table looking like a gorilla?”

Mild surprise on the part of the husband. “I shaved Sat’dy, like always.”

“Lookit your hands!”

“Hands?… Say, Bella, what in time’s got into you, anyway?”

“Nothing.” A relapse into moody silence on the part of Bella.

Mrs. Hawks fought a good fight, but what chance had her maternal jealousy against youth and love and romance? For a week she would pour poison into Magnolia’s unwilling ear. Only making a fool of you … probably walk off and leave the show any day … common gambler … look at his eyes … murderer and you know it … rather see you in your grave.…

Then, in one brief moment, Ravenal, by some act of
courage or grace or sheer deviltry, would show Parthy that all her pains were for nothing.

That night, for example, when they were playing Kentucky Sue. Ravenal’s part was what is known as a blue-shirt lead—the rough brave woodsman, with the uncouth speech and the heart of gold. Magnolia, naturally, was Sue. They were playing Gains Landing, always a tough town, often good for a fight. It was a capacity audience and a surprisingly well-behaved and attentive. Midway in the play’s progress a drawling drunken voice from the middle of the house began a taunting and ridiculous chant whose burden was, “Is ’
at
so!” After each thrilling speech; punctuating each flowery period, “Is
’at
so!” came the maddening and disrupting refrain. You had to step carefully at Gains Landing. The
Cotton Blossom
troupe knew that. One word at the wrong moment, and knives flashed, guns popped. Still, this could not go on.

“Don’t mind him,” Magnolia whispered fearfully to Ravenal. “He’s drunk. He’ll stop. Don’t pay any attention.”

The scene was theirs. They were approaching the big moment in the play when the brave Kentuckian renounces his love that Kentucky Sue may be happy with her villainous bridegroom-to-be (Frank, of course). Show-boat audiences up and down the rivers had known that play for years; had committed the speech word for word, through long familiarity. “Sue,” it ran, “ef he loves yuh and you love him, go with him. Ef he h’ain’t good to yuh, come back where there’s honest
hearts under homespun shirts. Back to Kaintucky and home!”

Thus the speech ran. But as they approached it the blurred and mocking voice from the middle of the house kept up its drawling skepticism. “Is
’at
so! Is
’at
so!”

“Damned drunken lout!” said Ravenal under his breath, looking unutterable love meanwhile at the languishing Kentucky Sue.

“Oh, dear!” said Magnolia, feeling Ravenal’s muscles tightening under the blue shirt sleeves; seeing the telltale white ridge of mounting anger under the grease paint of his jaw line. “Do be careful.”

Ravenal stepped out of his part. He came down to the footlights. The house, restless and irritable, suddenly became quiet. He looked out over the faces of the audience. “See here, pardner, there’s others here want to hear this, even if you don’t.”

The voice subsided. There was a little desultory applause from the audience and some cries of, “That’s right! Make him shut up.” They refused to manhandle one of their own, but they ached to see someone else do it.

The play went on. The voice was silent. The time approached for the big speech of renunciation. It was here. “Sue, ef he loves yuh and you love him, go with him. Ef he——”

“Is
’at
so!” drawled the amused voice, with an element of surprise in it now. “Is
’at
so!”

Ravenal cast Kentucky Sue from him. “Well, if you will have it,” he threatened, grimly. He sprang over
the footlights, down to the piano top, to the keyboard, to the piano stool, all in four swift strides, was up the aisle, had plucked the limp and sprawling figure out of his seat by the collar, clutched him then firmly by this collar hold and the seat of his pants, and was up the aisle again to the doorway, out of the door, across the gangplank, and into the darkness. He was down the aisle then in a moment, spatting his hands briskly as he came; was up on the piano stool, on to the piano keyboard, on the piano top, over the footlights, back in position. There he paused a moment, breathing fast. Nothing had been said. There had actually been no sound other than his footsteps and the discordant jangle of protest that the piano keyboard had emitted when he had stepped on its fingers. Now a little startled expression came into Ravenal’s face.

“Let’s see,” he said, aloud. “Where was I——”

And as one man the audience chanted, happily, “Sue, ef he loves yuh and you love him——”

What weapon has a Parthenia against a man like that? And what chance a Frank?

Drama leaped to him. There was, less than a week later, the incident of the minister. He happened to be a rather dirty little minister in a forlorn little Kentucky river town. He ran a second-hand store on the side, was new to the region, and all unaware of the popularity and good-will enjoyed by the members of the
Cotton Blossom
troupe. To him an actor was a burning brand. Doc had placarded the little town with dodgers and handbills. There was one, especially effective even in that day of crude photography, showing Magnolia in
the angelic part of the ingénue lead in Tempest and Sunshine. These might be seen displayed in the windows of such ramshackle stores as the town’s river front street boasted. Gaylord Ravenal, strolling disdainfully up into the sordid village that was little more than a welter of mud and flies and mules and Negroes, stopped aghast as his eye chanced to fall upon the words scrawled beneath a picture of Magnolia amidst the dusty disorderly mélange of the ministerial second-hand window. There was the likeness of the woman he loved looking, starry-eyed, out upon the passer-by. And beneath it, in the black fanatic penmanship of the itinerant parson:

A LOST SOUL

In his fine English clothes, swinging the slim malacca cane, Gaylord Ravenal, very narrow-eyed, entered the fusty shop and called to its owner to come forward. From the cobwebby gloom of the rear reaches emerged the merchant parson, a tall, shambling large-knuckled figure of the anaconda variety. You thought of Uriah Heep and of Ichabod Crane, experiencing meanwhile a sensation of distaste.

Ravenal, very elegant, very cool, very quiet, pointed with the tip of his cane. “Take that picture out of the window. Tear it up. Apologize.”

“I won’t do anything of the kind,” retorted the holy man. “You’re a this-and-that, and a such-and-such, and a so-and-so, and she’s another, and the whole boatload of you ought to be sunk in the river you contaminate.”

“Take off your coat,” said Ravenal, divesting
him-self neatly of his own faultless garment as he spoke.

A yellow flame of fear leaped into the man’s eyes. He edged toward the door. With a quick step Ravenal blocked his way. “Take it off before I rip it off. Or fight with your coat on.”

“You touch a man of God and I’ll put the law on you. The sheriff’s office is just next door. I’ll have you——”

Ravenal whirled him round, seized the collar of his grimy coat, peeled it dexterously off, revealing what was, perhaps, as maculate a shirt as ever defiled the human form. The Ravenal lip curled in disgust.

“If cleanliness is next to godliness,” he remarked, swiftly turning back his own snowy cuffs meanwhile, “you’ll be shovelling coal in hell.” And swung. The minister was taller and heavier than this slight and dandified figure. But Ravenal had an adrenal advantage, being stimulated by the fury of his anger. The godly one lay, a soiled heap, among his soiled wares. The usual demands of the victor.

“Take that thing out of the window!… Apologize to me!… Apologize publicly for defaming a lady!”

The man crept groaning to the window, plucked the picture, with its offensive caption, from amongst the miscellany there, handed it to Ravenal in response to a gesture from him. “Now then, I think you’re pretty badly bruised, but I doubt that anything’s broken. I’m going next door to the sheriff. You will write a public apology in letters corresponding to these and place it in your filthy window. I’ll be back.”

He resumed his coat, picked up the malacca cane, blithely sought out the sheriff, displayed the sign, heard that gallant Kentuckian’s most Southern expression of regard for Captain Andy Hawks, his wife and gifted daughter, together with a promise to see to it that the written apology remained in the varmint’s window throughout the day and until the departure of the
Cotton Blossom
. Ravenal then went his elegant and unruffled way up the sunny sleepy street.

By noon the story was known throughout the village, up and down the river for a distance of ten miles each way, and into the back country, all in some mysterious word-of-mouth way peculiar to isolated districts. Ravenal, returning to the boat, was met by news of his own exploit. Business, which had been booming for this month or more, grew to phenomenal proportions. Ravenal became a sort of legendary figure on the rivers. Magnolia went to her mother. “I am never allowed to talk to him. I won’t stand it. You treat him like a criminal.”

“What else is he?”

“He’s the——” A long emotional speech, ringing with words such as hero, gentleman, wonderful, honourable, nobility, glorious—a speech such as Schultzy, in his show-boat days as director, would have designated as a so-and-so-and-so-and-so-and-so-and-so.

Ravenal went to Captain Andy. I am treated as an outcast. I’m a Ravenal. Nothing but the most honourable conduct. A leper. Never permitted to speak to your daughter. Humiliation. Prefer to discontinue connection which can only be distasteful to the Captain
and Mrs. Hawks, in view of your conduct. Leaving the
Cotton Blossom
at Cairo.

In a panic Captain Andy scampered to his lady and declared for a more lenient chaperonage.

“Willing to sacrifice your own daughter, are you, for the sake of a picking up a few more dollars here and there with this miserable upstart!”

“Sacrificing her, is it, to tell her she can speak civilly to as handsome a young feller and good-mannered as I ever set eyes on, or you either!”

“Young squirt, that’s what he is.”

“I was a girl like Nollie I’d run off with him, by God, and that’s the truth. She had any spirit left in her after you’ve devilled her these eighteen years past, she’d do it.”

“That’s right! Put ideas into her head! How do you know who he is?”

“He’s a Rav——”

“He says he is.”

“Didn’t he show me the church——”

“Oh, Hawks, you’re a zany. I could show you gravestones. I could say my name was Bonaparte and show you Napoleon’s tomb, but that wouldn’t make him my grandfather, would it!”

After all, there was wisdom in what she said. She may even have been right, as she so often was in her shrewish intuition. Certainly they never learned more of this scion of the Ravenal family than the meagre information gleaned from the chronicles of the village church and graveyard.