Free Show Boat by Edna Ferber Page A

back April first, sure. Been with the
Cotton Blossom
, those two have, ten years and more. Painters been cluttering up here, and what not. And will you look at the way the kitchen looks, spite of ’em. Slick’s a whistle. Look at that stove!” Crafty Andy.
    Parthenia Ann Hawks looked at the stove. And what a stove it was! Broad-bosomed, ample, vast, like a huge fertile black mammal whose breast would suckle numberless eager sprawling bubbling pots and pans. It shone richly. Gazing upon this generous expanseyou felt that from its source could emerge nothing that was not savoury, nourishing, satisfying. Above it, and around the walls, on hooks, hung rows of pans and kettles of every size and shape, all neatly suspended by their pigtails. Here was the wherewithal for boundless cooking. You pictured whole hams, sizzling; fowls neatly trussed in rows; platoons of brown loaves; hampers of green vegetables; vast plateaus of pies. Crockery, thick, white, coarse, was piled, plate on plate, platter on platter, behind the neat doors of the pantry. A supplementary and redundant kerosene stove stood obligingly in the corner.
    “Little hot snack at night, after the show,” Andy explained. “Coffee or an egg, maybe, and no lighting the big wood burner.”
    There crept slowly, slowly over Parthy’s face a look of speculation, and this in turn was replaced by an expression that was, paradoxically, at once eager and dreamy. As though aware of this she tried with words to belie her look. “All this cooking for a crowd. Take a mint of money, that’s what it will.”
    “Make a mint,” Andy retorted, blithely. A black cat, sleek, lithe, at ease, paced slowly across the floor, stood a moment surveying the two with wary yellow eyes, then sidled toward Parthy and rubbed his arched back against her skirts. “Mouser,” said Andy.
    “Scat!” cried Parthy; but her tone was half-hearted, and she did not move away. In her eyes gleamed the unholy light of the housewife who beholds for the first time the domain of her dreams. Jo and Queenie to boss. Wholesale marketing. Do this. Do that.Perhaps Andy, in his zeal, had even overdone the thing a little. Suddenly, “Where’s that child! Where’s——Oh, my goodness, Hawks!” Visions of Magnolia having fallen into the river. She was, later, always to have visions of Magnolia having fallen into rivers so that Magnolia sometimes fell into them out of sheer perversity as other children, cautioned to remain in the yard, wilfully run away from home.
    Andy darted out of the kitchen, through the little rabbit-hutch door. Mrs. Hawks gathered up her voluminous skirts and flew after; scrambled across the orchestra pit, turned at the sound of a voice, Magnolia’s and yet not Magnolia’s, coming from that portion of the stage exposed below the half-raised curtain. In tones at once throaty, mincing, and falsely elegant—that arrogant voice which is childhood’s unconscious imitation of pretence in its elders—Magnolia was reciting nothing in particular, and bringing great gusto to the rendition. The words were palpably made up as she went along—“Oh, do you rully think so!… My little girl is very naughty … we are rich, oh dear me yes, ice cream every day for breakfast, dinner, and supper.…” She wore her mother’s dolman which that lady had unclasped and left hanging over one of the brass railings of a box. From somewhere she had rummaged a bonnet whose jet aigrette quivered with the earnestness of its wearer’s artistic effort. The dolman trailed in the dust of the floor. Magnolia’s right hand was held in a graceful position, the little finger elegantly crooked.
    “Maggie Hawks, will you come down out of there thisinstant!” Parthy whirled on Andy. “There! That’s what it comes to, minute she sets foot on this sink of iniquity. Play acting!”
    Andy clawed his whiskers, chuckling. He stepped to the proscenium and held out his arms for the child and she stood looking down at him,