“I’ve seen it,” in the tone of one who did not care for what he has beheld. His eyes were on a line with the Cotton Blossom’s deck. His gaze suddenly became concentrated. A tall slim figure in white had just appeared on the upper deck, forward—the bit of deck that looked for all the world like a nautical veranda. It led off Magnolia’s bedroom. The slim white figure was Magnolia. Preparatory to going ashore she was taking a look at this romantic city which she always had loved, and which she, in company with Andy or Doc, had roamed a dozen times since her first early childhood trip on the Creole Belle.
Her dress was bunchy, too, as the mode demanded. But where it was not bunchy it was very tight. And its bunchiness thus only served to emphasize the slimness of the snug areas. Her black hair was drawn smoothly away from the temples and into a waterfall at the back. Her long fine head and throat rose exquisitely above the little pleated frill that finished the neckline of her gown. She carried her absurd beribboned and beflowered high-crowned hat in her hand. A graceful, pliant, slim young figure in white, surveying the pandemonium that was the New Orleans levee. Columns of black rose from a hundred steamer stacks. Freight barrels and boxes went hurtling through the air, or were shoved or carried across the plank wharf to the accompaniment of shouting and sweating and swearing. Negroes everywhere. Band boxes, carpet bags, babies, drays, carriages, wheelbarrows, carts. Beyond the levee rose the old salt warehouses. Beyond these lay Canal Street. Magnolia was going into town with her father and her mother. Andy had promised her supper at Antoine’s and an evening at the old French theatre. She knew scarcely ten words of French. Andy, if he had known it in his childhood, had quite forgotten it now. Parthy looked upon it as the language of sin and the yellow back paper novels. But all three found enjoyment in the grace and colour and brilliance of the performance and the audience—both of a sort to be found nowhere else in the whole country. Andy’s enjoyment was tinged and heightened by a vague nostalgia; Magnolia’s was that of one artist for the work of another; Parthy’s was the enjoyment of suspicion. She always hoped the play’s high scenes were going to be more risqué than they actually were.
From her vantage point Magnolia stood glancing alertly about her, enjoying the babel that was the New Orleans plank wharves. She now espied and recognized the familiarly capering little figure below with its right hand scratching the mutton-chop whiskers this side and that. She was impatient to be starting for their jaunt ashore. She waved at him with the hand that held the hat. The upraised arm served to enhance the delicate curve of the pliant young figure in its sheath of white.
Andy, catching sight of her, waved in return.
“Is that,” inquired Gaylord Ravenal, “a member of your company?”
Andy’s face softened and glowed. “That? That’s my daughter Magnolia.”
“Magnolia. Magnol—— Does she—is she a——”
“I should smile she is! She’s our ingénue lead, Magnolia is. Plays opposite the juvenile lead. But if you’ve been a trouper you know that, I guess.” A sudden suspicion darted through him. “Say, young man—what’s your name?—oh, yes, Ravenal. Well, Ravenal, you a quick study? That’s what I got to know, first off. Because we leave New Orleans to-night to play the bayous. Bayou Teche to-morrow night in Tempest and Sunshine. . . . You a quick study?”
“Lightning,” said Gaylord Ravenal.
Five minutes later, bowing over her hand, he did not know whether to curse the crack in his shoe for shaming him before her, or to bless it for having been the cause of his being where he was.