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.”