The Death Ship (4 page)

The night was pitch-black. It was a bad road we walked, rough, broken up. When we had gone about a mile and a half, we turned off the road and entered a narrow path crossing a meadow. For another mile we walked only across meadows.

Suddenly we came to a halt. I wonder if Belgian cops are mind-readers. Just when I was about to swing out and land one on the jaw, one of them grasped my right arm. “We are here now. We will have to say good-by to each other; don’t mind the tears.”

I had an ugly feeling in my throat now, when I knew the last minute had arrived. All my life I had wanted so badly to live in Australia and make good. Now my life was snatched away from me. There were hundreds of things I had planned to do some day. All over now. Too late. Terrible words: too late.

I felt so dry that I would have liked to ask them for a bottle of that fine stuff they used to prove that they still wore the pants. But really, I thought, what does it matter whether my throat’s dry or not? What difference does it make whether I go to hell with a drink or without one? I had always pictured hangmen as morons, not the sort these two guys were. Anyway, hanging for money and as a profession is a dirty business. I don’t know why people do it when there are so many other jobs in the world just as interesting, as, for instance, being a piano-player during the rehearsals of the Follies, or something like that.

Never before in my life had I realized how beautiful life really is.

“Oui, oui, mister. We have to say good-by,” the interpreter said again. “We have no doubt you may be a fine fellow and a good sailor, but right now we have no use for you here in Belgium.”

For such a simple reason they hang a man in Belgium. What people!

He raised his arm, apparently to throw the noose over my neck and to strangle me first so as to make me entirely helpless, as I could see that they had not spent any money to erect real gallows. I wasn’t worth the gallows, because I had not committed a murder, and so no newspaper was interested about the way I was executed.

With his outstretched arm he pointed in a certain direction, and said: “Over there, just where my finger points, there is Holland. The Netherlands, you know. You have heard of the Netherlands, haven’t you?”

“Yes, officer.”

“You go right in the direction I am pointing out. See? I don’t think you will meet a customs officer or patrol on the way. But if you should see someone hovering around, then take care not to be seen yourself. Keep out of his way and don’t mind him at all. After going in this direction for about one hour you will come to a railroad track. Follow this track for a while in the same direction until you reach the depot. Hang around until dawn, but be careful. Avoid being seen. Early in the morning large groups of working-men will come to take the train to Rotterdam, where they work. You go then to the ticket-office and say: `Rotterdam, derde klasse.’ Don’t say one word more. There, take this money, five gulden.”

He gave me five coins and then said: “Here is a bite to eat. Don’t buy anything at the station. Your talk would betray you. Somebody might get suspicious and start to question you. Then everything would be lost and you’d be done for. Understand? Take this.”

He handed me a couple of sandwiches wrapped up nicely, two packages of cigarettes, and a box of matches.

“You see, you don’t have to buy anything. Here is everything you need. Soon you will be in Rotterdam. Don’t talk to anybody. Pretend you’re deaf.”

I was overwhelmed with joy. Ordered to hang me, they helped me to make off and clear out. I am glad we helped them win the war. These Belgians are people who really deserved to be on our side during the war. I don’t care if they never pay back the money we loaned them. I am paid in full, and whether others get their money or not certainly does not concern me any longer.

I jumped like a spring chicken and cried: “Thank you, thank you ever so much, and if you should ever come to Cincinnati or some other place up there in Wisconsin, be sure and call me up. Thank you, boys.”

“Don’t make a fuss,” he interrupted me; “one of those boneheads over there might hear you yelling. And I tell you that would be no good for you, nor for us either. Now, listen carefully to what I have to tell you.” He whispered, but he repeated every word three or five times so as to impress me with the full meaning of his warning. “Don’t you ever dare to come back to Belgium. I warn you, sailor. If we ever find you in our country again within the next hundred years, I swear we will lock you up for life, and ninety-nine years more. Life imprisonment. That’s something, sailor, believe me. I have orders to warn you properly so that you can’t say later you have not been warned. Because we don’t know what to do with you. Bums and unemployed and other thieves we have aplenty. We don’t need any more.”

I didn’t want to leave these Belgian officers with a bad impression about a stranded American sailor. So I said: “Maybe my consul could —”

“Hang your consul,” he broke in. “Have you got a passport? You have not. Have you got a sailor’s card? You have not. What could your consul, y our consul, do with you without a sailor’s card? He would kick you in the pants, and we should have you again to support at the state’s expense. Don’t try your consul. You have been warned properly — life imprisonment. So you’d better cut this consul business.”

I shook hands with them again and again, and said: “You are right, gentlemen. I promise solemnly never again to set foot on Belgian soil.”

“That’s a good boy.”

“Because,” I added, “I am really happy to leave Belgium. I haven’t got anything here. I suppose you are right, Holland is far better for me. I worked for a while in Pennsylvania. That’s why I know I’ll understand at least half of what the Dutch say, while here among you Belgians I never know what’s wanted of me.”

“Don’t talk so much nonsense,” the interpreter said. “You’d better be going now. Be smart. Should you hear somebody popping up while on your way to the depot, you just lie down quietly until the danger has passed. Don’t let them get you. Never forget the life imprisonment. We would make it tough for you, sailor, believe me. I mean well. Good-by.”

They went like shadows.

I started off on my way to the depot.

5

Rotterdam is a beautiful city. If you have money. If you haven’t any, you are better off in New Orleans. Besides, New Orleans is just as pretty, and more interesting.

I hadn’t any money. So I found Rotterdam just a city like all others. To be sure, it is a great port. But there was no ship in dire need of a deck-hand or a plain sailor or an engineer. I would have taken the job of engineer at once if there had been an opening. The joke would have been on the ship as soon as she was out at sea. The skipper would not throw me overboard. That would be murder. Something in the line of painting or brass-polishing can always be found aboard, and you take it even if you have signed on as a second engineer. I would not have insisted on the pay for a second; no, sir.

I would have taken any job on any ship, from kitchen-boy to captain and everything between. As it happened, not even a skipper was missing.

In these European ports it is hard to get a ship. To get one that crosses over to the home country is impossible. Everybody wants to go across to God’s own great country. I simply can’t get it into my head what all these guys are looking for there.

They must have got the crazy idea that everybody lies on his back and needs only to open his mouth and in goes the roast turkey with cranberry sauce and all the trimmings; and no one has to work, everybody gets high wages just for doing nothing, sitting around watching baseball games.

What with hundreds of mugs hanging around waiting to take a job on a ship without pay, there was no chance for an honest, home-made sailor like me to get a bucket sailing home.

The Belgian cops had talked about my consul. Yes, why not? Why, hadn’t I thought of my consul before? My consul. The American consul. Good idea. Splendid. He, my consul, he clears scores of American ships. He makes out all kinds of papers for them. If there is any man who knows every American ship coming or going, it is he. He is asked to supply sailors when the skipper is short of hands. There are always guys who would rather stay in a wet country with low wages than live in a dry country with heaps of dollars a week. If you get the heaps of smackers, I mean.

The whole affair passed by quicker than the time it had taken me to get the idea about seeing His Holiness the American consul at all.

“You are American?”

“Yesser.”

“Where is your sailor’s identification card?”

“I have lost it, sir.”

“Passport?”

“Nosser.”

“Citizenship papers?”

“Never had any. Born in the country. Native state —”

“Never mind. Well, what do you want here?”

“I thought maybe, sir, I mean I was thinking, since you are my consul, that maybe you might what I was going to say, you perhaps might do something to get me out, because, you see, sir, I am stranded, to make it short.”

He grinned at me. Rather nasty. Strange that bureaucrats always grin at you in a nasty way when they want to thumb you down.

Still grinning, he said: “Your consul? My good man, let me tell you something: if you wish to address me as your consul, you will first of all have to prove that I am really your consul.”

“I am American, sir. And you are the American consul.”

“Right-o. I am the American consul. But who are you to tell me that you are American? Have you got any papers? Birth-certificate? Or passport? Or authorized sailor’s identification?”

“I told you already that I lost it.”

“Lost. Lost. Lost. What do you mean by lost? In times like these one does not lose such important papers. Ought to know that, my good man. You cannot even prove that you have been on the
Tuscaloosa
.”

He pronounced “have” like hauve and “know” like knouw, trying to make us poor Middle West guys believe that he came from Oxford or Cambridge or I don’t know what.

“Cawn you prove thawt you hauve been on the
Tuscaloosa
?”

“No”

“Then what do you want here? I might cable the
Tuscaloosa
, provided she has wireless. But who pays for the cable?”

“I thought you could do it.”

“Sorry. I am not provided by the government with funds out of which I could pay for such cables. Did you sign on in New Orleans in the shipping offices of the company?”

“No, I did not. There was no time to do so, because the ship was already up and down when I came aboard, because two men had made up their minds to stay off.”

The consul meditated for a few seconds. Then he said: “Suppose you could prove that you really shipped on the
Tuscaloosa
; that is no proof that you are an American citizen. Any Hindu or even Hottentot may work on board an American merchant vessel if the mawster of the ship needs men and he is not in a position to get American sailors.”

“But, sir, Mr. Consul, I am American, sure.”

“That’s what you say, my good man. That’s what you’ve told me several times. But you have to prove it. With papers. That’s a rule. I cawn’t accept your declaration as sufficient evidence. By the way, how did you come from Antwerp to Rotterdam? And without papers? How did you cross the international lines without papers?”

“But, Mr. Consul, haven’t I told you, the Belgian police —”

“Nuts. Don’t try to pull my leg or I am through with you right here and now. The Belgian police! Who ever heard of such a thing that officials, state authorities, would send a man without papers, without his consent, across the international border in the middle of the night? To whom do you think you are selling that yarn? Authorities committing unlawful smuggling of aliens into foreign countries? Pshaw! Tsey, tsey, tsey. Nonsense. Where did you pick up that story? Out of a magazine? Come clean, come, come.”

While he was making this fine speech, he played with his pencil. When he had finished, he began to hum “My Old Kentucky Home,” beating time with his pencil upon his elegant desk.

So I knew that no matter what he had said, his thoughts were somewhere else. Perhaps at a supper for two with a dame from Louisville.

I was extremely polite. Nevertheless, something inside me told me to take the inkstand and fire it right into the middle of his grinning plaster sponge. Yet I knew how an American has to behave in an American consul’s office in a foreign country. Never forget it; as an American in a foreign country you are always representing your dignified homeland.

He looked at me with empty eyes for a long while. I was sure he was still at supper with his dame and was not quite  sure if the time had now come to tell her why he had invited her to have supper with him so late at night, and in his apartment, too, and all alone.

I didn’t want to wait until he had reached breakfast with that Kentucky dame, so I said: “Maybe, Mr. Consul, sir, there might be a chance to get me a ship making for home. A skipper may easily be short a man.”

He came to, and snapped: “Eh? What did you —? No, no, of course not. There is no such possibility. An American ship without papers? Not from me, no, sir. Not from me.”

“Then, where can I get papers, if not from you, sir?”

“Not my concern, old man. Did I take away your papers? I certainly did not. Any bum might step in here and ask me to provide him with legal papers. No, sir.”

“Has it never happened, here in your office, sir, that people have come in to tell you that they have lost their papers or that their papers have been stolen?”

“Of course. Things like that do occur. But those people have money. They are not just bumming about the world like sailors, getting drunk and selling their papers to get the money to buy more booze.”

“But I tell you, sir, I lost my papers. They are on the
Tuscaloosa
.”

“Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are not. Even if you left them there as you say you did, how do you know a fellow-sailor of yours hasn’t sold them? What do you say to that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Now, of course, if you had money, we could cable to Washington. But since you have no money, I can do nothing. My salary is not so high that I can afford to pay for a cable for you worth perhaps fifty or sixty dollars.”