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!”