Show Boat quotes

Her face and head were long and horse-like, at variance with her bulk. This, you sensed immediately, was a person possessed of enormous energy, determination, and the gift of making exquisitely uncomfortable any one who happened to be within hearing radius.

She was the sort who rattles anything that can be rattled; slams anything that can be slammed; bumps anything that can be bumped.

Her name, by some miracle of fitness, was Parthenia Ann Hawks; wife of Andy Hawks, captain and owner of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre; and mother of this Magnolia Ravenal who, having just been delivered of a daughter, lay supine in her bed.

… her mother Parthenia Ann Hawks, and her husband Gaylord Ravenal, and the whole troupe of the show boat, and the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre itself, now bobbing about like a cork on the yellow flood that tugged and sucked and tore at its moorings.

Two tantrums of nature had been responsible for the present precarious position of the show boat and its occupants. The Mississippi had furnished one; Magnolia Ravenal the other.

Or perhaps it might be fairer to fix the blame, not on nature, but on human stupidity that had failed to take into account its vagaries.

Bert Forbush, utility man, in shirt sleeves, check pants, and carpet slippers, playing a sleep-inducing game of canfield—all this on the stage, bare now of scenery and turned into a haphazard and impromptu lounging room for the members of this floating theatrical company.

Mrs. Hawks, in her fine new cabin on the second deck, off the gallery, was putting her sparse hair in crimpers as she would do if this were the night before Judgment Day.

Flood, storm, danger—all part of river show-boat life. Ordinarily, it is true, they did not proceed down river until daybreak. After the performance, the show boat and its steamer would stay snug and still alongside the wharf of this little town or that.

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.

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;

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.

“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.

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.

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 women were not always young. Magnolia noticed that often they were actually older than her mother (Parthy was then about thirty-nine). Yet they looked lively and somehow youthful, though their faces bore wrinkles. There was about them a certain care-free gaiety, a jauntiness.

They looked, Magnolia decided, as if they had just come from some interesting place and were going to another even more interesting.

This was rather shrewd of her.

The storm broke, raged, beat about his head, battered his diminutive frame. He clutched his whiskers and hung on for dear life. In the end he won.

All that Parthy ever had in her life of colour, of romance, of change, he brought her.

But for him she would still be ploughing through the drifts or mud of the New England road on her way to and from the frigid little schoolhouse.

see stirring sights; meet the fantastic figures that passed up and down the rivers like shadows drifting in and out of a weird dream. Yet always she was to resent loveliness; fight the influence of each new experience; combat the lure of each new face.

Tight-lipped, belligerent, she met beauty and adventure and defied them to work a change in her.

For three days, then, following Andy’s stupendous announcement, Parthenia threatened to leave him, though certainly, in an age that looked upon the marriage tie as well-nigh indissoluble by any agent other than death, she could not have meant it, straight-laced as she was.

If it had not been for the grim figure at his side and the restraining hand on his arm, it is not unlikely that the two—father and child—would have skipped and capered together down to the water’s edge.

Mrs. Hawks’ tread and mien were those of a matronly Christian martyr on her way to the lions.

As they went the parents talked of unimportant things to which Magnolia properly paid no heed, having had her way. . . . Gone most of the time. . . . It wouldn’t hurt her any, I tell you. . . .

When April came, and the dogwood flashed its spectral white in the woods, the show boat started.

It was the most leisurely and dream-like of journeys. In all the hurried harried country that still was intent on repairing the ravages of a Civil War, they alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on another plane.

When April came, and the dogwood flashed its spectral white in the woods, the show boat started. It was the most leisurely and dream-like of journeys.

In all the hurried harried country that still was intent on repairing the ravages of a Civil War, they alone seemed to be leading an enchanted existence, suspended on another plane.

Miles—hundreds—thousands of miles of willow-fringed streams flowing aquamarine in the sunlight, olive-green in the shade. Wild honeysuckle clambering over black tree trunks. Mules. Negroes. Bare unpainted cabins the colour of the sandy soil itself.

In her old capacity as school teacher, Parthy undertook the task of carrying on Magnolia’s education during these truant spring months. It was an acrimonious and painful business ending, almost invariably, in temper, tears, disobedience, upbraidings.

Unconsciously Andy Hawks had done much for the youth of New England when he ended Parthy’s public teaching career.

“Nine times seven, I said. . . . No, it isn’t! Just because fifty-six was the right answer last time it isn’t right every time. That was seven times eight and I’ll thank you to look at the book and not out of the window.

Mrs. Hawks clapped a maternal hand to her daughter’s somewhat bulging brow, decided that she was feverish, needed a physic, and promptly administered one.

As for geography, if Magnolia did not learn it, she lived it.

She came to know her country by travelling up and down its waterways. She learned its people by meeting them, of all sorts and conditions. She learned folkways; river lore; Negro songs; bird calls; pilot rules; profanity; the art of stage make-up;

Sometimes they strolled in the woods at springtime when the first tender yellow-green hazed the forest vistas. They fished, though the catch was usually catfish. On hot days the more adventuresome of them swam.

The river was their front yard, grown as accustomed as a stretch of lawn.

They were extraordinarily able to amuse themselves. Hardly one that did not play piano, violin, flute, banjo, mandolin.

By six o’clock a stir—a little electric unrest—an undercurrent of excitement could be sensed aboard the show boat. They came sauntering back from the woods, the town, the levee. They drifted down the aisles and in and out of their dressing rooms.

Years of trouping failed to still in them the quickened pulse that always came with the approach of the evening’s performance.

Down in the orchestra pit the band was tuning up. They would play atop the show boat on the forward deck before the show, alternating with the calliope, as in the morning. The daytime lethargy had vanished.

By half-past six the levee and landing were already dotted with the curious, the loafers, the impecunious, the barefoot urchins who had gathered to snatch such crumbs as could be gathered without pay.

They fed richly on the colour, the crowds, the music, the glimpses they caught of another world through the show boat’s glowing windows.

Up the river bank from the boat landing to the top of the bluff flared kerosene torches suspended on long spikes stuck in the ground. Magnolia knew they were only kerosene torches, but their orange and scarlet flames never failed to excite her.

The curtain rose. The music ceased jerkily, in mid-bar. They became little children listening to a fairy tale. A glorious world of unreality opened before their eyes. Things happened.

They knew that in life things did not happen thus. But here they saw, believed, and were happy.

Innocence wore golden curls. Wickedness wore black. Love triumphed, right conquered, virtue was rewarded, evil punished.

wind, snow, rain, flood. The women forgot for an hour their washtubs, their kitchen stoves, childbirth pains, drudgery, worry, disappointment. Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. It was Anodyne. It was Lethe. It was Escape. It was the Theatre.

It was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A place in which one saw one’s dreams come true.

A place in which one could live a vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions long pent-up.

They would come upon wild honeysuckle, opalescent pink. In autumn they went nutting, returning with sackfuls of hickory and hazel nuts—anything but the black walnut which any show-boat dweller knows will cause a storm if brought aboard.

Sometimes they experienced the shock of gay surprise that follows the sudden sight of gentian, a flash of that rarest of flower colours, blue; almost poignant in its beauty.

It always made Magnolia catch her breath a little.

From some part of her person where it doubtless was needed Julie would extract a pin and with it fasten up the tail of her skirt.

Having thus hoisted the red flag of rebellion, they would plunge into the woods to emerge hot, sticky, bramble-torn, stained, flower-laden, and late.

They met Parthy’s upbraidings and Steve’s reproaches with cheerful unconcern.

Often Magnolia went to town with her father, or drove with him or Doc into the back-country. Andy did much of the marketing for the boat’s food, frequently hampered, supplemented, or interfered with by Parthy’s less openhanded methods.

He loved good food, considered it important to happiness, liked to order it and talk about it; was himself an excellent cook, like most boatmen, and had been known to spend a pleasant half hour reading the cook book.

The butchers, grocers, and general store keepers of the river towns knew Andy, understood his fussy ways, liked him. He bought shrewdly but generously, without haggling; and often presented a store acquaintance of long standing with a pair of tickets for the night’s performance.

Her voice was true, though mediocre; but she got into this the hoarsely sweet Negro overtone—purple velvet muffling a flute.

Between Jo and Queenie flourished a fighting affection, deep, true, and lasting.

There was some doubt as to the actual legal existence of their marriage, but the union was sound and normal enough.

That Mrs. Hawks could introduce into the indolent tenor of show-boat life anything so methodical and humdrum as five-finger exercises done an hour daily was triumphant proof of her indomitable driving force.

Life had miscast her in the rôle of wife and mother. She was born to be a Madam Chairman.

Committees, Votes, Movements, Drives, Platforms, Gavels, Reports all showed in her stars. Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as the Cotton Blossom afforded.

Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as the Cotton Blossom afforded. Parthy had never heard the word Feminist, and wouldn’t have recognized it if she had.

One spoke at that time not of Women’s Rights but of Women’s Wrongs.

On these Parthenia often waxed tartly eloquent. Her housekeeping fervour was the natural result of her lack of a more impersonal safety valve. The Cotton Blossom shone like a Methodist Sunday household. Only Julie and Windy, the Mollie Able pilot, defied her.

“Best actress in the whole caboodle, that’s why.”

Something fine in little Captain Andy had seen and recognized the flame that might have glorified Julie had it not instead consumed her.

“That girl had the right backing she’d make her mark, and not in any show boat, either. I’ve been to New York. I’ve seen ’em down at Wallack’s and Daly’s and around.”

Windy’s victory was more definitely dramatic, though his defensive method against Parthy’s attacks resembled in sardonic quiet and poise Julie’s own. Windy was accounted one of the most expert pilots on the Mississippi. He knew every coil and sinew and stripe of the yellow serpent.

River men used his name as a synonym for magic with the pilot’s wheel.

Starless night or misty day; shoal water or deep, it was all one to Windy. Though Andy’s senior by more than fifteen years, the two had been friends for twenty. Captain Andy had enormous respect for his steersmanship;

He looked around benignly and resumed his reading of the New Orleans Times-Democrat.

Profanity, frowned upon under Parthy’s régime, now welled up in Andy and burst from him in spangled geysers.

Words seethed to the surface and exploded like fireworks. Twenty-five years of river life had equipped him with a vocabulary rich, varied, purple. He neglected neither the heavens above nor the earth beneath. Revolt and rage shook his wiry little frame.

Years of henpecking, years of natural gaiety suppressed, years of mincing when he wished to stride, years of silence when he wished to sing, now were wiped away by the stream of undiluted rage that burst from Captain Andy Hawks.

It was a torrent, a flood, a Mississippi of profanity in which hells and damns were mere drops in the mighty roaring mass.

“Out with your crowbars there. Pry up that hatch! I’m captain of this boat, by God, and anybody, man or woman, who nails down that hatch again without my orders gets put off this boat wherever we are, and so I say.”

Did Parthenia Ann Hawks shrink and cower and pale under the blinding glare of this pyrotechnic profanity? Not that indomitable woman.

The picture of outraged virtue in curl papers, she stood her ground like a Roman matron.

She had even, when the flood broke, sent Magnolia indoors with a gesture meant to convey protection from the pollution of this verbal stream.

He stood a moment, chewing, and peering mildly into the dimness of the bedroom, Sphinx-like, it seemed that he never would speak. He stood, champing. The Cotton Blossom troupe waited.

They had not played melodrama for years without being able to sense it when they saw it.

He spoke. “Seems that skunk Pete’s up to something.” They waited. The long tobacco-stained beard moved up and down, up and down. “Skinned out half an hour back streaking toward town like possessed. He yanked that picture of Julie out of the hall there.

Magnolia, at fifteen, was a gangling gawky child whose eyes were too big for her face and whose legs were too long for her skirts. She looked, in fact, all legs, eyes, and elbows.

It was a constant race between her knees and her skirt hems.

Parthy was for ever lengthening frocks. Frequently Magnolia, looking down at herself, was surprised, like Alice in Wonderland after she had eaten the magic currant cake, to discover how far away from her head her feet were.

Singing Negroes. Fighting whites. Spawning Negroes. A life fantastic, bizarre, peaceful, rowdy, prim, eventful, calm.

On the rivers anything might happen and everything did.

She saw convict chain gangs working on the roads. Grisly nightmarish figures of striped horror, manacled leg to leg. At night you heard them singing plantation songs in the fitful glare of their camp fires in the woods; simple songs full of hope.

Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri small-town housewives came to be Magnolia’s friends, and even Parthy’s.

The coming of the show boat was the one flash of blazing colour in the drab routine of their existence.

To them Schultzy was the John Drew of the rivers, Elly the Lillian Russell.

They brought vast chocolate cakes; batches of cookies; jugs of home-brewed grape wine; loaves of fresh bread; jars of strained honey; stiff tight bunches of garden flowers.

Offerings on the shrine of Art.

Periodically Parthy threatened to give up this roving life and take Magnolia with her. She held this as a weapon over Andy’s head when he crossed her will, or displeased her. Immediately boarding schools, convents, and seminaries yawned for Magnolia.

“

You’ll feel pale inside and the audience’ll think you are.

” (The whole art of acting unconsciously expressed by Schultzy.) “Then Frank here has his sneery speech—so and so and so and so and so and so—and thought you’d marry the parson, huh?

There, leaning over the box rail, his face a mask of hatred, his eyes glinting, sat a huge hairy backwoodsman. And in his hand glittered the barrel of a businesslike gun. He was taking careful aim.

Drama had come late into the life of this literal mind.

He had, in the course of a quick-shooting rough-and-tumble career, often seen the brutal male mishandling beauty in distress. His code was simple. One second more and he would act on it.

heroes, bound hand and foot and left to be crushed under iron wheels, were rescued by the switchman’s ubiquitous daughter. Sheriffs popped up unexpectedly in hidden caves. The sound of horses’ hoofs could always be heard when virtue was about to be ravished.

They were the minstrels of the rivers, these players, telling in terms of blood, love, and adventure the crude saga of a new country.

Frank, the Heavy, promptly fell in love with Magnolia. Parthy, quick to mark the sheep’s eyes he cast in the direction of the ingénue lead, watched him with a tigress glare, and though he lived on the Cotton Blossom, as did Magnolia;

In them, onrushing engines were cheated of their victims; mill wheels were stopped in the nick of time; heroes, bound hand and foot and left to be crushed under iron wheels, were rescued by the switchman’s ubiquitous daughter. Sheriffs popped up unexpectedly in hidden caves.

The sound of horses’ hoofs could always be heard when virtue was about to be ravished.

They were the minstrels of the rivers, these players, telling in terms of blood, love, and adventure the crude saga of a new country.

Women had always adored Gaylord Ravenal. He was not a villain. He was, in fact, rather gentle, and more than a little weak. His method, coupled with strong personal attractiveness, was simple in the extreme.

He made love to all women and demanded nothing of them.

Swept off their feet, they waited, trembling deliciously, for the final attack. At its failure to materialize they looked up, wondering, to see his handsome face made more handsome by a certain wistful sadness. At that their hearts melted within them.

At that their hearts melted within them. That which they had meant to defend they now offered. For the rest, his was a paradoxical nature. A courtliness of manner, contradicted by a bluff boyishness. A certain shy boldness.

He was not an especially intelligent man. He had no need to be.

His upturned glance at a dining-room waitress bent over him was in no way different from that which he directed straight at Parthy now; or at the daughter of a prosperous Southern lawyer, or at that daughter’s vaguely uneasy mama.

… one of her sudden moves, as was her jerky habit, or when she coughed raspingly by way of emphasizing her presence, he could be felt, rather than seen, to tighten in all his nerves and muscles, and the idly swinging foot took a clonic leap.

The words they spoke with their lips and the words they spoke with their eyes were absurdly at variance.

“Have you really been in Paris, Mr. Ravenal! How I should love to see it!” (How handsome you are, sitting there like that. I really don’t care anything about Paris. I only care about you.)

Louis to Chicago for his perfect poker face, was equally ignorant of the tides that were seething and roaring within him now.

They were prisoners on this boat; together, yet miles apart.

Guarded, watched. They had their scenes together on the stage. These were only aggravations. The rather high planes of Magnolia’s cheek-bones began to show a trifle too flat.

With a sigh Magnolia donned her second best—the reseda sateen, basqued, its overskirt caught up coquettishly at the side. She determined on her Milan hat trimmed with the grosgrain ribbon and pink roses.

After all, Parthy or no Parthy, if one has a hat with pink roses, the time to wear it is at one’s wedding, or never.

Ravenal vanished beyond the river bank immediately after breakfast next day; a meal which he had eaten in haste and in silence. He did not, the general opinion ran, look as crushed as his misdemeanour warranted.

A little unaccustomed flush surged over Magnolia’s pallor—the deep, almost painful red of indignation.

She was an inexperienced woman, but she was no fool.

These last few months had taught her many things. Also the teachings of her school-teacher mother had not, after all, been quite forgotten, it appeared.

Uneasy though she was, Magnolia could manage to smile at the thought of her mother’s verbal destruction of this raffish crew.

There were no half tones in Parthy’s vocabulary.

A hussy was a hussy; a rake a rake. But her father, she thought, would have been interested in all this, and more than a little amused. His bright brown eyes would have missed nothing;

The heads of departments in Mandel’s or Carson Pirie’s or even Marshall Field’s said, “I have something rather special to show you, Mrs. Ravenal. I thought of you the minute it came in.”

Sometimes it seemed to Magnolia that the Cotton Blossom had been only a phantom ship—the rivers a dream—a legend.

It was all very pleasant and luxurious and strange. And Magnolia tried not to mind the clang of Clark Street by day and by night. The hideous cacophony of noise invaded their hotel apartment and filled its every corner.

And no one is too broke for one cigar a day. Twelve o’clock—noon—found you awake. Twelve o’clock—midnight—found you awake. Somewhere between those hours you slept the deep sweet sleep of the abstemious.

You were, in short, a gambler—and a gentleman.

Thus, when the Ravenals moved, perforce, from the comfort of the Sherman to the threadbare shabbiness of the Ontario Street boarding house, there was nothing in Gaylord Ravenal’s appearance to tell the tale. If his cronies knew of his financial straits, they said nothing.

made no comment. If you were seen to breakfast for days—a week—two weeks—at the Cockeyed Bakery, you were greeted by your confrères with the same suavity that would have been accorded you had you been standing treat at Billy Boyle’s or the Palmer House.

Your shoe might be cracked, but it must shine.

Your linen might be frayed, but it must be clean. Your cheeks were perhaps a trifle hollow, but they must be shaven and smell pleasantly of bay rum. You might dine at Burkey and Milan’s (Full Meal 15c.)

She, or her counterpart, never returned, but many of the lost luxuries did, from time to time. There were better days to come, and worse. Their real fortune gone, there now was something almost humdrum and methodical about the regularity of their ups and downs.

There rarely was an intermediate state. It was feast or famine, always.

They actually settled down to the life of a professional gambler and his family. Ravenal would have a run of luck at faro. Presto! Rooms at the Palmer House. A box at the races. The theatre. Supper at Rector’s after the theatre. Hello, Gay!

… collars turned up in artless attempt to conceal the absence of linen, sallying forth, pail in hand, at ten or eleven in the morning in search of the matutinal milk and rolls to accompany the coffee that was even now cooking over the gas jet.

Morning was a musty jade on these streets; nothing fresh and dewy and sparkling about her.

The ladies of the neighbourhood lolled huge, unwieldy, flaccid, in wrappers. In the afternoon you saw them amazingly transformed into plump and pinkly powdered persons, snugly corseted, high-heeled, rustling in silk petticoats, giving out a heady scent.

There was the zoo; there was the lake; there was the grass. If the lake was their choice it led inevitably to tales of the rivers. It was in this way that the background of her mother’s life was first etched upon Kim’s mind.

The sight of the water always filled Magnolia with a nostalgia so acute as to amount to an actual physical pain.

The childish treble would repeat the words as the two sat on a park bench facing the great blue sea that was Lake Michigan.

A hundred superstitions swayed their play.

Luck was a creature to be wooed, flattered, coaxed, feared.

No jungle voodoo worshipper ever lent himself to simpler or more childish practices and beliefs than did these hard-faced men.

Parthy Ann Hawks, owner and manager of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, strong, erect, massive, her eyebrows black above her keen cold eyes, her abundant hair scarcely touched with gray, was now a well-known and important figure on the rivers.

She ran her boat like a pirate captain. He who displeased her walked the plank.

It was said that the more religious rivermen who hailed from the Louisiana parishes always crossed themselves fearfully at her approach and considered a meeting with the Cotton Blossom a bad omen.

This Magnolia would not do, though there were many times when her need was great. There was Kim, no longer a baby. This feverish and irregular life could not go on for her.

Magnolia’s letters to her mother, especially in lean times, were triumphs of lying pride.

Sentimental Tommy’s mother, writing boastfully home about her black silks and her gold chain, was never more stiff-necked than she.

It was strange: they were all quiet, rather sad-faced women, home-loving and usually accompanied by a well-dressed and serious child. Much like herself and Kim, she thought. Sometimes she met them on Ohio Street.

She thought she could recognize the wife of a gambler by the look in her face.

Frequently she saw them coming hurriedly out of one of the many pawnshops on North Clark, near the river. The windows of these shops fascinated her.

He took off his black derby hat and mopped his forehead and the headband of his hat’s splendid white satin lining.

He fell to swearing, softly, this being the form in which the male, relieved after fright, tries to deny that he has been frightened.

He turned to look at her, his eyes narrow. She turned to look at him, her great eyes wide. She leaned toward him a little, her hand over her heart.

“But I do!” cried Magnolia. “I do think so. I loved it. Everybody in the company was acting because they liked it. They’d rather do it than anything in the world.

Maybe we weren’t very good but the audiences thought we were; and they cried in the places where they were supposed to cry, and laughed when they should have laughed, and believed it all, and were happy, and if that isn’t the theatre then what is?

”

The Mayor of the city called a genial, “Hope you’re all winning, boys!” as he dropped in for a sociable drink and a look at the play; or even to take a hand.

“What’ll you have?” was Chicago’s greeting, and “Don’t care if I do,” her catch phrase.

Hetty Chilson was the recognized leader of her sinister world, and that this world happened to be prefaced by the qualifying word, “under” made little difference in Chicago’s eyes.

Accusations. Bitterness. Longing. Passion. The long periods of living in sordid surroundings made impossible most of the finer reticences. Garments washed out in the basin. Food cooked over the gas jet. One room. One bed. Badly balanced meals. Reproaches. Tears. Sneers. Laughter. Understanding. Reconciliation.

They loved each other. Over and above and through and beneath it all, thick and thin, warp and woof, they loved each other.

It was when their fortunes were at lowest ebb; when the convent tuition had now been two terms unpaid; when the rent on the Ontario Street lodgings was overdue;

Perhaps that was what you missed in it. The skin and hair and eyes, the set of the shoulders, the lead of the hand from the wrist, bespoke a virile man. But vigour—vigorous—no, he was not that.

This was a fencer, not a fighter.

But he had fought for her, years ago. The shambling preacher in the little river town whose name she had forgotten. That simple ignorant soul who preached hell fire and thought that play actors were damned.

“It makes the life of a successful actress like Kim so complicated. And the actors and actresses all lecture on the Trend of the Modern Drama at League Luncheons given at the Astor. I went to one once, with Kim. Blue voile ladies from Englewood.

In my day critics criticized and actors acted.

”

“Just for that I think I’ll turn elegant on you and not grant any more interviews. Maude Adams never did. Look at Mrs. Fiske! And Duse.

Anyway, interviews always sound so dumb when they appear in print. Dignified silence is the thing.

Mystery. Everybody knows too much about the stage, nowadays.”

Lulu, Mississippi, in May, was humid and drowsy and dusty and fly-ridden. The Negroes lolled in the shade of their cabins and loafed at the water’s edge.

Thick-petalled white flowers amidst glossy dark green foliage filled the air with a drugging sweetness, and scarlet-petalled flowers stuck their wicked yellow tongues out at the passer-by.

Magnolia, on the Cotton Blossom upper deck that was like a cosy veranda, sat half in the shade and half in the sun and let the moist heat envelop her.

It had turned out well enough.

She had gone on, blindly, and it had turned out well enough.

Kim. Kim was different. Nothing blind about Kim. She had emerged from the cloistral calm of the Chicago convent with her competent mind quite made up. I am going to be an actress. Oh, no, Kim! Not you!

“But she doesn’t act. Everything she did and everything she said was right. And I was as carried out of myself as though I were listening to a clock strike.

When I go to the theatre I want to care.

In the old days maybe they didn’t know so much about tempo and rhythm, but in the audience strong men wept and women fainted——”

Magnolia wondered, sometimes, but certainly it was not for her to venture opinion. Her own marriage had been no such glittering example of perfection. Yet she wondered, seeing this well-ordered and respectful union, if Kim was not, after all, missing something.

Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?

She was wrong, of course. Ken’s manner toward Kim was polite, tender, thoughtful. Kim’s manner toward Ken was polite, tender, thoughtful. Are you free next Thursday, dear? The Paynes are having those Russians. It might be rather interesting. . . . Sorry. Ken’s voice.