Ship of Fools, Page 4

  “Ah, what a wicked girl,” he said, dodging punishment at last but still beaming at her, unvanquished—indeed, quite stimulated. She rose and pranced along the deck. He rolled out of his chair and bounced after her. “Let’s have coffee and cake,” he cried eagerly, “they are serving it in the bar now.” He licked his lips.

  Two inordinately dressed-up young Cuban women, frankly ladies of trade, had been playing cards together in the bar for an hour before the ship sailed. They sat with crossed legs in rolled-top gauzy stockings to show their powdered knees. Red-stained cigarettes sagged from their scarlet full mouths, smoke curled towards their narrowed eyes and heavily beaded lashes. The elder was a commanding beauty; the younger was smaller, thinner, apparently in frail health. She observed the other attentively and played her cards as if she hardly dared to win. The tall shambling young Texan, whose name was William Denny, came in and sat in a corner of the bar and watched them with a wary, knowing eye. The ladies ignored him; though they paused in their game now and then to sip their pousse-cafés and glance haughtily about the comfortably crowded bar, they never once glanced at Denny, who felt it as a personal slight. He rapped sharply on the bar as if calling the barman, still staring at them, a mean cold little smile starting in his face. Chili Queens. He knew their kind. He had not lived most of his life in Brownsville, Texas, for nothing. They were no treat to him. He rapped again, noisily.

  “You have your beer, sir,” said the barman. “Anything else, please?”

  The ladies glanced at him then, their contemptuous eyes fixed upon him as if he were a drunken hoodlum making trouble in a bar. His gaze quivered, his smile vanished; he dived into his mug of beer, drank, lighted a cigarette, leaned over and examined his own shoes intently, fumbled for his handkerchief, which wasn’t there, and at last he gave up and broke for the open air, like a man on urgent business. There seemed nowhere to go, though, and nothing much to do, unless he went back to his cabin to start unpacking a few things. Might as well try to settle down.

  Already he was beginning to feel exhausted from his efforts to maintain his identity among strange languages and strange lands. Challenged as he felt himself to be, to prove his own importance in every separate encounter, he was badly confused as to what appearance that importance should assume. The question presented itself not for the first time but most sharply when he reached Veracruz. In the small town on the border where his father was a prominent citizen, mayor for many years and rich from local real estate, the lower classes consisted of Mexicans and Negroes, that is, greasers and niggers, with a few polacks and wops but not enough to notice; and he had always relied simply on his natural superiority of race and class, backed by law and custom. In Veracruz, surrounded by a coastal race of Negro-Indian-Spanish, yellow-eyed, pugnacious people, whose language he had never troubled to learn though he had heard it all his life, he had taken the proper white man’s attitude towards them and they had responded with downright insolence. He had begun by feeling broadminded: after all, this was their country, dirt and all, and they could have it—he intended to treat them right while he was there. He had been made to realize his mistake almost at once: when he was polite to them, they thought he was patronizing them; when he was giving a perfectly legitimate order, they let him see he was trying to treat them like slaves; if he was indifferent and let things go, they despised him and played tricks on him. Well, damn it all, they are inferior—just look at them, that is all you need. And it won’t do to let the bars down for a minute. At the Migrations, he had called the little clerk Pancho, just as back home he would have called a taxi driver Mac or a railway porter George, by way of showing good will. The little nigger—all those coast Mexicans had nigger blood, somebody had told him—stiffened as if he had been goosed, his face turned purple and his eyes red. He had stared at Denny and said something very short and quick in his own lingo, then in good English had asked Denny to sit down, kindly, for a few minutes until the papers could be filled out. Denny, like a fool, had sat there streaming with sweat and the flies buzzing in his face, while the clerk looked after a whole line of people who had come in later than he. It came over him slowly that he was being given the hot-foot. That taught him something though. He had got up and gone to the head of the line and shouldered in towards the clerk and said very distinctly and slowly, “I’ll take those papers now,” and the clerk instantly produced and stamped them and handed them over without even a glance at Denny. That was what he should have done in the first place and the next time he’d know.

  Opening the door of his cabin, he noted three names instead of two. Herr David Scott, said the sign, Herr Wilhelm Denny, and surprise Herr Karl Glocken. He looked in upon a crowded scene. The tight-faced medium-sized young man he had seen running around Veracruz with that bitchy-looking girl in the blue pants was cleaning the washhand basin with something that smelled like carbolic acid. There were two strange suitcases and a battered leather bag on Denny’s berth, the lower. His ticket called for the lower, and he was going to have it; no use starting out letting himself get gypped. The young man raised his eyes briefly, said, “How do you do?”

  “Fairly,” said Denny, moving inside one step. The young man went on washing the basin. Seated upon a footstool, Herr Glocken was fumbling among the contents of a clumsy duffel bag. He was the most terribly deformed human being Denny had ever seen, except perhaps the maimed beggar in the square at Veracruz. Bending over as he was, his body was so close to the floor his long arms could stretch further than his out-spread legs. He got up with an apologetic air, and stood almost four feet tall, his long sad face cradled in a hunch high as his head, and backed into that end of the lower berth not occupied by the luggage. “I’ll be out of here in just a minute,” he said, with a pained smile. He then eased himself down upon the edge of the mattress among the luggage and appeared to faint. David Scott and William Denny exchanged unwilling looks of understanding; they were obviously stuck with this fellow, and there was nothing to be done about it that either could see at the moment.

  “We’d better call the steward,” said David Scott.

  Herr Glocken opened his eyes and shook his head, waving one long hand limply. “No, no,” he said, in a dry flat voice, “don’t trouble yourselves. It is nothing. I am only resting a little.”

  “Well, so long,” said Denny, backing away, “I’ll be in later.”

  “Here, let me move these,” said David, laying hold of the suitcases. There was no place for them under the berth. Denny’s luggage was already there. The closet was too small to hold them. He put them on the divan bed for the present.

  Herr Glocken said, “I have no right here, I belong in the upper berth, but how am I to get there?”

  David said, “You take the divan and I’ll take the upper.”

  “I don’t know how I’ll sleep there, it’s so narrow,” said Herr Glocken, and David, measuring the curve of the monstrous body by the width of the couch, saw painfully what he meant. He looked away from both and said, “Better stay where you are, then—don’t you think?” he said to Denny.

  There was silence while David looked for a glass to hold his toothbrushes.

  Though his ticket called for berth number one, plainly, Denny, with a decency that surprised David, offered the lower berth to Herr Glocken, and Herr Glocken accepted with eager thanks.

  Herr Glocken fell asleep almost at once. He lay on his side, facing the light, knees drawn up to chin, near the edge of the bed to make room for the curved spine. His thin dry hair was rumpled like sunburned corn silk, the great misshapen face closed in deathly melancholy. The toes of his shoes turned up, there were patches in the soles.

  David observed the clutter of small articles belonging to Denny that already took up most of the small shelf above the washbasin. Denny had hastened to wash and comb on coming aboard, and had left as much disorder as if he were at home. “Eats yeast,” said David silently, and disgust was added to his deep sense of wrong. He had been assured by the ticket clerk in Mexi
co there would be only two passengers to a cabin. “Smokes a pipe, and reads improving literature.” He removed from the couch a fully illustrated clothbound book entitled Recreational Aspects of Sex as Mental Prophylaxis, with a subhead, A Guide to True Happiness in Life. “Jesus,” said David.

  The smell of disinfectant could not down the other fetid smells of unclean human garments, the rancid smell of Herr Glocken’s shoes, the old mildewed smell of the cabin itself. The ship rolled a little as she met the first waves of the sea outside the harbor. David saw his face in the mirror. He looked greenish, he felt qualmy, the floor visibly upended under him and his gorge heaved spontaneously. He rushed for the door, almost falling over Herr Glocken’s duffel bag, and made for the upper deck. Another outrage: he had been promised a cabin on the promenade deck, but he was actually on Deck C, with a porthole instead of a window.

  The warm slow winds were clean and sweet and so moist they blew like soft steam against his face. The deeply slanted late afternoon sun cast long shafts of light into the sea, dark blue in the depths, clear green fluted with white at the surface. David saw Jenny Brown strolling towards him, the first time since they had separated to find their cabins. She had changed from the blue trousers to a white linen dress and white leather sandals, with no stockings; she was walking with a man, a strange man—David had never seen him before—as if he were an old friend. He noted with a pang that the man was good-looking in a detestable sort of way, like a sports jacket or whiskey advertisement, with a typically smug, conceited German face. Where and how had Jenny picked him up in this short time? He stood at the rail and pretended not to see them, then turned casually, he hoped, as they drew near.

  “Why hello—David?” said Jenny absent-mindedly with a vague air of imperfect recognition. “Are you all right?” and they moved by without pausing.

  Her wide light hazel eyes had the look of blind diffused excitement he knew best; she was probably talking already about the most personal things, telling her thoughts such as they were: for even when Jenny seemed intelligent, or sincere, he still distrusted her female mind, crooked and cloudy by nature: she was no doubt asking questions designed to lead the man to talk about himself, meaning to trap him into small confidences and confessions that later she could use as a weapon against him when needed. Already David felt she was building up a case against this fatuous foreigner which she would have well prepared when the time came to quarrel. He watched her small, neat figure, harmonious as a little classic statue; the round head with the knot of black hair, the rather stiff, modest walk, which managed to conceal or misrepresent everything he believed he knew about Jenny. She might, by that walk, be a prim little schoolteacher who kept in mind that she must carry her shoulders straight and her hips smoothly.

  David looked at his watch and decided it was time for the first drink of the day, the hour towards which he lived of late, and went in the bar, feeling all at once surrounded and smothered by the sea, which he hated, and which now filled him with a quiet deep horror. There was no place, no place at all to go.

  This whole wild escapade to Europe was Jenny’s idea; he had never intended to leave Mexico at all, but he had let her lead him by the nose, as usual. Still, not altogether, he reflected, when the first slug of whiskey had begun to take hold. She planned, taking his assent for granted, to go first to France; he at once determined, if he went anywhere at all, to go to Spain. They had two or three violent quarrels about it, and then compromised on Germany, which neither of them wanted to see. That is, they drew one from three named straws of different lengths—he held the straws and Jenny drew one—and the shortest straw, named Germany, came out. They were both so bitterly disappointed they quarreled again, and then drank a little too much, and then made love fiercely half the night as if in a revengeful rage against whatever it was that kept them apart; and all of it had settled nothing. They both stuck obstinately to the chance decision, so here they were—yet even so, Jenny had her plans. She came in one afternoon announcing gaily that in case they changed their minds, they could still get visas for France from the French Consul at Vigo. The German ship’s agent at North German Lloyd’s had sworn to her that this was a fact.

  “What about just being allowed to get off at Vigo for Spain?” asked David.

  “I’m not going to Spain, remember?” said Jenny.

  Well, if she felt better with an ace up her sleeve, let her. She might go to France if she liked. He would go to Spain. She’d find out in time whether she was going to have it all her own way.

  “Bitte,” said Mrs. Treadwell, timidly, thinking she might as well begin brushing up on her German, to the small round woman with the glossy braids and the gold necklace who was having tea at a small table by herself. Opposite her was the only empty chair. The bar was crowded, it looked festival enough, but the silence was rather odd Even those persons obviously related in whatever way sat mute as if with strangers.

  An amiable but vacant little smile spread over the plump fresh face with its soft features. A competent white hand was lifted, palm out, gently. “No, no,” she said, “don’t trouble yourself. I speak English for years now. I taught English even—do sit down please—in the German school in Guadalajara. My husband taught there also. But mathematics.”

  “Tea, please,” said Mrs. Treadwell to the steward. She had changed from dark blue to pale gray linen, with still shorter sleeves, and the disgraceful-looking big blotch on her arm was quite livid.

  “I am Frau Otto Schmitt,” said the round woman, stirring her tea and dropping more sugar in it. “I was from Nürnberg in my youth and I am returning there at last. It was to have been my great happiness, my husband’s long-looked-for joy, but now it is only grief and disappointment after all; and I am tempted though I know it is a sin sometimes to ask myself—what is life but that, after all?” She spoke in a low voice without complaint, but as if she wished even the merest chance acquaintance to identify her at once with her grief as the only fact of any importance to be known about her. Her pale blue eyes asked frankly for pity.

  Mrs. Treadwell shuddered with a painful twinge of foreboding. “Even here,” she thought. “How inevitable. I shall spend this voyage listening to someone’s sorrows, I shall sit down and have a good cry with somebody, no doubt, before this trip is over. Well, this is a fine beginning.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Frau Schmitt, after a sufficient pause in which the expected question leading to the story of her afflictions had not been asked.

  “To Paris,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “back to Paris.”

  “Ah, you were only visiting in Mexico?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have friends there?”

  “No.”

  Frau Schmitt’s water-blue gaze transferred itself to Mrs. Treadwell’s arm. “You have bruised yourself badly,” she said, with mild interest.

  Mrs. Treadwell said, “The astonishing fact is, a beggar woman pinched me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I would not give her an alms,” said Mrs. Treadwell, thinking for the first time how unusually selfish and stupid that refusal sounded, just told flatly. No decent person refused a beggar in Mexico; like everyone she knew, she carried by habit a handful of copper coins meant only for them. This was no beggar, but an impudent gypsy—the rap on the elbow! Still, the whole thing was somehow shameful to her; how could she have let a low creature like that stupefy her so? The thing was not to be explained, even to herself. “Naturally I don’t expect anyone to believe it,” she said, selecting a thin dry wafer with her tea.

  “Why not?” asked Frau Schmitt, childishly.

  “Well, anything can happen, I know that,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “but I always find myself thinking, not to me.” Now why had she said that? It gave such an opening for more whys and why-nots. Uneasily she glanced about, and saw instantly that, on the other side of the bar, with cocktails before them, the American girl Jane Brown was already seated with the only presentable-looking man on the boat. She turned
back to the dull little thing across from her, accepting this voyage and this society as a long boredom like any other, not to be denied, opposed or ignored, but to be fled from, lightly from point to point; moment by moment she would find a split second of relief from boredom in the very act of flight which gave her the fleeting illusion of invisibility.

  “Anything at all can happen to any of us at any time,” said Frau Schmitt with easy certainty. “My husband—how long has it been that we have hoped to go back to Nürnberg together? But now I am going alone, though his coffin is in the hold of this ship. Oh it smothers me to think of it! My husband died six weeks and two days ago today at seven o’clock this morning …”

  It is always death, thought Mrs. Treadwell, for this sentimental kind it can never be less than death. Nothing else could pierce through that fat to a living nerve. Still I must say something. “That is a very terrible thing,” she said, and was dismayed to find that in spite of her unfriendly thought, she really meant it, she pitied this woman’s sorrow; and that death, there beside them at the table, death was what they had in common.

  Frau Schmitt’s soft mouth turned down at the corners. She stirred her tea and said nothing. Her eyelids turned pink. She was quite alone all at once in her own private luxury of grief, once she had devoured the pink-iced teacake of sympathy. Mrs. Treadwell, leaving half her tea, quietly made her first escape of the voyage.

  On her way to her cabin she spoke and smiled, in the same tone and the same smile for each, to the ship’s doctor, noting his fine old Mensur scar; to the taffy-haired young officer whose name or rank she did not know and would never trouble to learn (though before the voyage was over, she would be kissed, seriously, by that very young man); to an earnest-faced, stiffly laced stewardess; and to a browbeaten little cabin boy, who stared back in silence with offended eyes. The name below hers on her cabin door struck her as too funny not to be unlucky: Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker: Spookpeeper?—and she wondered rather lightly which of the numerous unpromising-looking females on board she might be.