Show Boat

by Edna Ferber

  “What’d you stop for, then, and look like you’d seen spooks!”

  “I stopped a-purpose. She sees her husband that she hates and that she thought was dead for years come sneaking in, and she wouldn’t start right in to talk. She’d just stand there, kind of frozen and stiff, staring at him.”

  “All right, if you know so much about directing go ahead and di——”

  She ran to him, threw her arms about him, hugged him, all contrition. “Oh, Schultzy, don’t be mad. I didn’t go to boss. I just wanted to act it like I felt. And I’m awfully sorry about Elly and everything. I’ll do as you say, only I just can’t help thinking, Schultzy dear, that she’d stand there, staring kind of silly, almost.”

  “You’re right. I guess my mind ain’t on my work. I ought to know how right you are. I got that letter Elly left for me, I just stood there gawping with my mouth open, and never said a word for I don’t know how long—— Oh, my God!”

  “There, there, Schultzy.”

  By a tremendous effort (the mechanics of which were not entirely concealed) Schultzy, the man, gave way to Harold Westbrook, the artist.

  “You’re right, Magnolia. That’ll get ’em. You standing there like that, stunned and pale.”

  “How’ll I get pale, Schultzy?”

  “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? And then you open up with your big scene—so and so and so and so and so and so——”

  Outwardly calm, Magnolia took only a cup of coffee at dinner, and Parthy, for once, did not press her to eat. That mournful matron, though still occasionally shaken by a convulsive shudder, managed her usual heartening repast and actually spent the time from four to seven lengthening Elly’s frocks for Magnolia and taking them in to fit the girl’s slight frame.

  Schultzy made her up, and rather overdid it so that, as the deserted wife and school teacher and, later, as the Parson’s prospective bride, she looked a pass between a healthy Camille and Cleopatra just before she applied the asp. In fact, in their effort to bridge the gap left by Elly’s sudden flight, the entire company overdid everything and thus brought about the cataclysmic moment which is theatrical show-boat history.

  Magnolia, so sure of her lines during rehearsal, forgot them a score of times during the performance and, had it not been for Schultzy, who threw them to her unerringly and swiftly, would have made a dismal failure of this, her first stage appearance. They were playing Vidallia, always a good show-boat town. The house was filled from the balcony boxes to the last row downstairs near the door, from which point very little could be seen and practically nothing heard. Something of the undercurrent of excitement which pervaded the Cotton Blossom troupe seemed to seep through the audience; or perhaps even an audience so unsophisticated as this could not but sense the unusual in this performance. Every one of the troupe—Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Mr. Means, Frank, Ralph, the Soapers (Character Team that had succeeded Julie and Steve)—all were trembling for Magnolia. And because they were fearful for her they threw themselves frantically into their parts. Magnolia, taking her cue (literally as well as figuratively) from them, did likewise. As ingénue lead, her part was that of a young school mistress earning her livelihood in a little town. Deserted some years before by her worthless husband, she learns now of his death. The town parson has long been in love with her, and she with him. Now they can marry. The wedding gown is finished. The guests are invited.

  This is her last day as school teacher. She is alone in the empty schoolroom. Farewell, dear pupils. Farewell, dear schoolroom, blackboard, erasers, water-bucket, desk, etc. She picks up her key. But what is this evil face in the doorway! Who is this drunken, leering tramp, grisly in rags, repulsive—— My God! You! My husband!

  (Never was villain so black and diabolical as Frank. Never was heroine so lovely and frail and trembling and helpless and white—as per Schultzy’s directions. As for Schultzy himself, the heroic parson, very heavily made up and pure yet brave withal, it was a poor stick of a maiden who wouldn’t have contrived to get into some sort of distressing circumstance just for the joy of being got out of it by this godly yet godlike young cleric.)

  Frank, then: “I reckon you thought I was dead. Well, I’m about the livest corpse you ever saw.” A diabolical laugh. “Too damn bad you won’t be able to wear that new wedding dress.”

  Pleadings, agony, despair.

  Now his true villainy comes out. A thousand dollars, then, and quick, or you don’t walk down the aisle to the music of no wedding march.

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “No! Where’s the money you been saving all these years?”

  “I haven’t a thousand dollars. I swear it.”

  “So!” Seizes her. Drags her across the room. Screams. His hand stifles them.

  Unfortunately, in their very desire to help Magnolia, they all exaggerated their villainy, their heroism, their business. Being a trifle uncertain of her lines, Magnolia, too, sought to cover her deficiencies by stressing her emotional scenes. When terror was required her face was distorted with it. Her screams of fright were real screams of mortal fear. Her writhings would have wrung pity from a fiend. Frank bared his teeth, chortled like a maniac. He wound his fingers in her long black hair and rather justified her outcry. In contrast, Schultzy’s nobility and purity stood out as crudely and unmistakably as white against black. Nuances were not for show-boat audiences.

  So then, screams, protestations, snarls, ha-ha’s, pleadings, agony, cruelty, anguish.

  Something—intuition—or perhaps a sound from the left upper box made Frank, the villain, glance up. 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.

  Frank’s hand released his struggling victim. Gentleness and love overspread his features, dispelling their villainy. To Magnolia’s staring and open-mouthed amazement he made a gesture of abnegation. “Well, Marge, I ain’t got nothin’ more to say if you and the parson want to get married.” After which astounding utterance he slunk rapidly off, leaving the field to what was perhaps the most abject huddle of heroism that every graced a show-boat stage.

  The curtain came down. The audience, intuitively glancing toward the upper box, ducked, screamed, or swore. The band struck up. The backwoodsman, a little bewildered but still truculent, subsided somewhat. A trifle mystified, but labouring under the impression that this was, perhaps, the ordinary routine of the theatre, the audience heard Schultzy, in front of the curtain, explaining that the villain was taken suddenly ill; that the concert would now be given free of charge; that each and every man, woman, and child was invited to retain his seat. The backwoodsman, rather sheepish now, took a huge bite of Honest Scrap and looked about him belligerently. Out came Mr. Means to do his comic Chinaman. Order reigned on one side of the footlights at least, though behind the heaving Venetian lagoon was a company saved from collapse only by a quite human uncertainty as to whether tears or laughter would best express their state of mind.

  The new ingénue lead, scheduled to meet the Cotton Blossom at Natchez, failed to appear. Magnolia, following her trial by firearms, had played the absent Elly’s parts for a week. There seemed to be no good reason why she should not continue to do so at least until Captain Andy could engage an ingénue who would join the troupe at New Orleans.

  A year passed. Magnolia was a fixture in the company. Now, as she, in company with Parthy or Mis’ Means or Mrs. Soaper, appeared on the front street of this or that little river town, she was stared at and commented on. Round
-eyed little girls, swinging on the front gate, gazed at her much as she had gazed, not so many years before, at Elly and Julie as they had sauntered down the shady path of her own street in Thebes.

  She loved the life. She worked hard. She cherished the admiration and applause. She took her work seriously. Certainly she did not consider herself an apostle of art. She had no illusions about herself as an actress. But she did thrive on the warm electric current that flowed from those river audiences made up of miners, farmers, Negroes, housewives, harvesters, backwoodsmen, villagers, over the footlights, to her. A naive people, they accepted their theatre without question, like children. That which they saw they believed. They hissed the villain, applauded the heroine, wept over the plight of the wronged. The plays were as naïve as the audience. In them, on-rushing 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.

  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; saw her all day, daily; probably was seldom more than a hundred feet removed from her, he never spoke to her alone and certainly never was able to touch her except in the very public glare of the footlights with some hundreds of pairs of eyes turned on the two by the Cotton Blossom audiences. He lounged disconsolately after her, a large and somewhat splay-footed fellow whose head was too small for his shoulders, giving him the look of an inverted exclamation point.

  His unrequited and unexpressed passion for Magnolia would have bothered that young lady and her parents very little were it not for the fact that his emotions began to influence his art. In his scenes on the stage with her he became more and more uncertain of his lines. Not only that, his attitude and tone as villain of the piece took on a tender note most mystifying to the audience, accustomed to seeing villainy black, with no half tones. When he should have been hurling Magnolia into the mill stream or tying her brutally to the track, or lashing her with a horsewhip or snarling at her like a wolf, he became a cooing dove. His blows were caresses. His baleful glare became a simper of adoration.

  “Do you intend to speak to that sheep, or shall I?” demanded Parthy of her husband.

  “I’ll do it,” Andy assured her, hurriedly. “Leave him be till we get to New Orleans. Then, if anything busts, why, I can always get some kind of a fill-in there.”

  They had been playing the Louisiana parishes—little Catholic settlements between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, their inhabitants a mixture of French and Creole. Frank had wandered disconsolately through the miniature cathedral which each little parish boasted and, returning, had spoken darkly of abandoning the stage for the Church.

  New Orleans meant mail for the Cotton Blossom troupe. With that mail came trouble. Schultzy, white but determined, approached Captain Andy, letter in hand.

  “I got to go, Cap. She needs me.”

  “Go!” squeaked Andy. His squeak was equivalent to a bellow in a man of ordinary stature. “Go where? What d’you mean, she?” But he knew.

  Out popped Parthy, scenting trouble.

  Schultzy held out a letter written on cheap paper, lined, and smelling faintly of antiseptic. “She’s in the hospital at Little Rock. Says she’s had an operation. He’s left her, the skunk. She ain’t got a cent.”

  “I’ll take my oath on that,” Parthy put in, pungently.

  “You can’t go and leave me flat now, Schultzy.”

  “I got to go, I tell you. Frank can play leads till you get somebody, or till I get back. Old Means can play utility at a pinch, and Doc can do general business.”

  “Frank,” announced Parthy, with terrible distinctness, “will play no leads in this company, and so I tell you, Hawks.”

  “Who says he’s going to! A fine-looking lead he’d make, with that pin-head of his, and those elephant’s hoofs.… Now looka here, Schultzy. You been a trouper long enough to know you can’t leave a show in the ditch like this. No real show-boat actor’d do it, and you know it.”

  “Sure I know it. I wouldn’t do it for myself, no matter what. But it’s her. I wrote her a letter, time she left. I got her bookings. I said if the time comes you need me, leave me know, and I’ll come. And she needs me, and she left me know, and I’m coming.”

  “How about us!” demanded Parthy. “Leaving us in the lurch like that, first Elly and now you after all these years. A fine pair, the two of you.”

  “Now, Parthy!”

  “Oh, I’ve no patience with you, Hawks. Always letting people get the best of you.”

  “But I told you,” Schultzy began again, almost tearfully, “it’s for her, not me. She’s sick. You can pick up somebody here in New Orleans. I bet there’s a dozen better actors than me laying around the docks this minute. I got to talking to a fellow while ago, down on the wharf. The place was all jammed up with freight, and I was waiting to get by so’s I could come aboard. I said I was an actor on the Cotton Blossom, and he said he’d acted and that was a life he’d like.”

  “Yes,” snapped Parthy. “I suppose he would. What does he think this is! A bumboat! Plenty of wharf rats in New Orleans’d like nothing better——”

  Schultzy pointed to where a slim figure leaned indolently against a huge packing case—one of hundreds of idlers dotting the great New Orleans plank landing.

  Andy adjusted the pair of ancient binoculars through which he recently had been scanning the wharf and the city beyond the levee. He surveyed the graceful lounging figure.

  “I’d go ashore and talk to him, I was you,” advised Schultzy.

  Andy put down the glasses and stared at Schultzy in amazement. “Him! Why, I couldn’t go up and talk to him about acting on no show boat. He’s a gentleman.”

  “Here,” said Parthy, abruptly, her curiosity piqued. She in turn trained the glasses on the object of the discussion. Her survey was brief but ample. “He may be a gentleman. But nobody feels a gentleman with a crack in his shoe, and he’s got one. I can’t say I like the looks of him, specially. But with Schultzy playing us this dirty trick—well, that’s what it amounts to, and there’s no sense trying to prettify it—we can’t be choosers. I’d just step down talk to him if I was you, Hawks.”

  IX

  THIS, then, turned out to be Magnolia’s first glimpse of Gaylord Ravenal—an idle elegant figure in garments whose modish cut and fine material served, at a distance, to conceal their shabbiness. Leaning moodily against a tall packing case dumped on the wharf by some freighter, he gazed about him and tapped indolently the tip of his shining (and cracked) boot with an exquisite little ivory-topped malacca cane. There was about him an air of distinction, an atmosphere of richness. On closer proximity you saw that the broadcloth was shiny, the fine linen of the shirt front and cuffs the least bit frayed, the slim boots undeniably split, the hat (a delicate gray and set a little on one side) soiled as a pale gray hat must never be. From the Cotton Blossom deck you saw him as the son, perhaps, of some rich Louisiana planter, idling a moment at the water’s edge. Waiting, doubtless, for one of the big river packets—the floating palaces of the Mississippi—to bear him luxuriously away up the river to his plantation landing.

  The truth was that Gaylord Ravenal was what the river gamblers called broke. Stony, he would have told you. No one had a better right to use the term than he. Of his two possessions, save the sorry clothes he had on, one was the little malacca cane. And though he might part with cuff links, shirt studs and, if necessary, shirt itself, he would always cling to that little malacca cane, emblem of good fortune, his mascot. It had turned on him temporarily.
Yet his was the gambler’s superstitious nature. To-morrow the cane would bring him luck.

  Not only was Gaylord Ravenal broke; he had just politely notified the Chief of Police of New Orleans that he was in town. The call was not entirely one of social obligation. It had a certain statutory side as well.

  In the first place, Chief of Police Vallon, in a sudden political spasm of virtue, endeavouring to clear New Orleans of professional gamblers, had given them all twenty-four hours’ shrift. In the second place, this particular visitor would have come under the head of New Orleans undesirables on his own private account, even though his profession had been that of philanthropist. Gaylord Ravenal had one year-old notch to his gun.

  It had not been murder in cold blood or in rage, but a shot fired in self-defence just the fraction of a second before the other man could turn the trick. The evidence proved this, and Ravenal’s final vindication followed. But New Orleans gathered her civic skirts about her and pointed a finger of dismissal toward the door. Hereafter, should he enter, his first visit must be to the Chief of Police; and twenty-four hours—no more—must be the limit of his stay in the city whose pompano and crayfish and Creoles and roses and Ramos gin fizzes he loved.

  The evening before, he had stepped off the river packet Lady Lee, now to be seen lying alongside the New Orleans landing together with a hundred other craft. His twenty-four hours would expire this evening.

  Certainly he had not meant to find himself in New Orleans. He had come aboard the Lady Lee at St. Louis, his finances low, his hopes high, his erstwhile elegant garments in their present precarious state. He had planned, following the game of stud poker in which he immediately immersed himself, to come ashore at Memphis or, at the latest, Natchez, with his finances raised to the high level of his hopes. Unfortunately his was an honest and over-eager game. His sole possession, beside the little slim malacca cane (itself of small tangible value) was a singularly clear blue-white diamond ring which he never wore. It was a relic of luckier days before his broadcloth had become shiny, his linen frayed, his boots split. He had clung to it, as he had to the cane, through almost incredible hazards. His feeling about it was neither sentimental nor superstitious. The tenuous streak of canniness in him told him that, possessed of a clear white diamond, one can hold up one’s head and one’s hopes, no matter what the state of coat, linen, boots, and hat. It had never belonged, fiction-fashion, to his sainted (if any) mother, nor was it an old Ravenal heirloom. It was a relic of winnings in luckier days and represented, he knew, potential hundreds. In the trip that lasted, unexpectedly, from St. Louis to New Orleans, he had won and lost that ring six times. When the Lady Lee had nosed her way into the Memphis landing, and again at Natchez, it had been out of his possession. He had stayed on board, perforce. Half an hour before coming into New Orleans he had had it again, and had kept it. The game of stud poker had lasted days, and he rose from it the richer by exactly nothing at all.