Ship of Fools (12 page)

Wilhelm Freytag watched their antics for a while, decided they were no doubt going to be a complete nuisance for the whole voyage, and wondered if he had ever been so puerile, so callow, so absurd. He was thirty now, five years married, and life was getting to be a pretty tough business, a good deal more than he had bargained for; but then, he had not been looking for a bargain, after all. But could he ever have been such a fool as any one of these in that crowd? He remembered well that he had been, indeed; but he had not reached the age of sentimental reminiscence of youthful imbecilities: he had just come to the place where he shuddered to be reminded of them. He now did in fact shudder and walk on hunched a little, like a man facing a blizzard.

He paused on his way to bed and glanced into the dim pit of the steerage. The deck was covered with huddled figures, their heads resting on bundles, with only the floor under their bones. A few men were in hammocks, a few women with young babies sleeping on their stomachs were leaning back in canvas chairs. The rest slept piled upon each other like dirty rags thrown out on a garbage heap. He stood and contemplated the inviolable mystery of poverty that was like a slow-working incurable disease, and there was nothing in his own mind, his history or his temperament that could even imagine a remedy for it. He had been comfortable all his life in the way of his middle class; and to them, though they furnished largely to all the professions and esteemed them warmly, money-making was the career undisputedly theirs, to them the most becoming of all occupations for a well-brought-up, well-trained young man. He was not yet rich, but it had not until lately occurred to him that there could be any obstacle to his getting as rich as he liked. And it would be very rightly—after giving due thanks to his father and mother for his education—very rightly all due to his own efforts; if he failed it would be through some weakness in himself that he had not suspected. He had a moral aversion to poverty, an instinctive contempt and distrust of the swarming poor spawned like maggots in filth, befouling the air around them. Yet, he thought, moving on with a reluctant tinge of pity, they are necessary, they have their place, what would we do without them? And here they are, being sent from a place they are not wanted to a place where they cannot be welcome; they are going from hard labor and hunger to no labor and starvation, from misery to misery—what kind of creature would endure this except a lower order of animal? He shook off his pity as hateful to him, and went back to his own dilemma, and realized that the chill of horror the sight of the wretched people gave him was for himself, his own fears taking monstrous shapes in his imagination. He, a German of a good solid Lutheran family, Christian as they come, against terrible opposition from both families, against his own better judgment, against all common sense and reason, had married a Jewish girl with a beautiful exotic name, Mary Champagne. The family had come from wherever Jews did come in the Middle Ages, and had dropped Abraham ben Joseph or whatever it was, named themselves for the district and settled down for a few hundred years. Some of them turned Catholic or married Gentiles and were kicked out, and changed their names once more and became really French; but Mary's branch were diehards and they started roaming again, through Alsace into Germany, God knows why. Pretty poor judgment it seemed to him. But they kept the fine French name they had picked for themselves. And they all made a point of broad-mindedness and liberality, and mingled socially with Gentiles, if they were of the right class and would still have them. Yet he and Mary fell in love, and so honestly and surely in love, it was like knocking down a hornet's nest. They had patiently fought the battle to a finish with his family and connections as well as with hers; in the end they had got married in a Lutheran church, with wails and sobs of
Oi oi oi oi
! rising from one spot in the small group on the left-hand side of the main aisle.… His parents could not conceal their relief when he announced he was going to Mexico, plainly they were grateful to have an impossible situation cleared up so simply. Mary's mother, a widow, did not consider her daughter as married at all, except perhaps legally, but she was rather a worldly gay woman, not especially religious, being at times no more Jewish than she felt suitable to the occasion: what people didn't know wouldn't hurt her, she argued; whose business is it but mine what I am? What she had feared in the marriage was scandal and ostracism from her family and friends, and she got plenty of both, poor woman. In the end she had come over to her daughter and son-in-law, cast in her fate with theirs and was prepared to live and die with them—bless her! he thought with gratitude, what a good heart. And he remembered they had all three begun to be proud of themselves and each other for being able to throw off stupid prejudices and live like free people, making a good life for themselves in an open world. “Oh, God,” said Wilhelm Freytag, almost aloud. Then he smiled to himself a little grimly. “God of Israel,” he added, “where are You?” and turned into the passage leading to his cabin.

Jenny Brown and Elsa Lutz, in their stuffy little cabin, were brushing their hair and preparing for sleep in an amiable silence. They were getting on very well, with small talk about life on the ship, mild gossip and harmless opinion. Elsa in spite of her mother's warnings was quickly disarmed by her cabin mate's gentle, rather orderly ways, and sat by fascinated while Jenny did up her face with sweet-smelling waters and layers of ointment like whipped cream. The roar and tramp of the students passed for the third time on the deck just over their heads; the noise, rising above the sea and the engines, poured through the portholes. Again Elsa lifted her head to listen, with thoughtful face.

“The ship is full of boys now,” she said, almost hopefully.

“Very,” said Jenny. “It will be nice if they happen to know more than one song.”

They both were startled by an unusual noise in the passageway just beyond their door: they listened, staring at each other, to a violent confused rushing and stumbling about, like a struggle of some sort, ending with a heavy soft thud as if a sandbag had been hurled against the panel. Two voices, male and female, in which they recognized members of the Spanish dancing troupe, rose in a fierce quarrel. The quarrel was about money. They screamed hotly in a ragged duet about money, calling each other by name, Concha and Manolo. Manolo wanted, he wanted instantly with no more talk, the seven Cuban pesos he knew Concha had got that evening. He had seen the man give her the change after paying the barman. Concha denied it brazenly, she was shrewish and fearless. Jenny, following the logic of the fight, realized that Concha did not for a moment question Manolo's right to the money if she had it to give. She took what might seem the easy way out and denied she had it. It was not going to be easy.

“I saw it,” said Manolo, fiercely. “Give it me or I'll rip your lying tongue out!”

Concha screamed that he could rip her entrails out if he liked, he would not find the money. Their voices joined again and crashed like breaking crockery, then stopped dead to the sound of a ringing slap. An instant's pause and Concha began to weep, helplessly, tenderly, submissively as if this was what she had been waiting for, and Manolo's voice purred as softly as if he were making love, “Now will you give me the money, or do you want me to—”

Jenny glanced uneasily at Elsa to see how much of Manolo's threat she understood. The voices faded around the corner into the main corridor.

“Well, did you ever?” asked Elsa in English. Her big childish mouth, eyes, nostrils were wide open. “Now what kind of woman is that? He doesn't sound like her husband to me.”

“They're in the same cabin, you know,” said Jenny.

“But you do not occupy the same cabin with your husband,” said Elsa, “so how can one ever tell?”

“We are not married,” said Jenny, beginning to file her nails.

Elsa waited hungrily for more. There was no more. Her cabin mate smiled at her pleasantly and went on with her filing.

“Well,” said Elsa in disappointment, “I don't understand a woman who lets a man treat her like that. She must be from the lowest class. No woman is expected to put up with such things.”

“It's part of her business,” said Jenny, yawning. “Are you ready to have the light out?”

“Her business?” Jenny saw that Elsa was sincerely shocked, confused, even pained.

“Never mind,” she said, uncomfortably. “I'm talking nonsense. I expect they're just a married pair fighting over money. They often do, you know.”

“Oh yes, I
do
know,” said Elsa.

In the darkness, when Jenny was growing drowsy, Elsa spoke from her divan bed under the portholes, an important confidence. “My father, all my life, told me to believe in love, and to be loving, and it would make me happy; but my mother says it is all just make-believe. Sometimes I wish I knew—I love my mother, but it seems to me that my father knows more.”

“He very probably does,” said Jenny, rousing a little. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said Elsa. “My father is happy by nature, he loves to have a good time. But my mother cannot laugh, she says only fools laugh, that life is not a thing for anybody to laugh at.… Once when I was little I remember … I remember so many things; but this time I was with my father and mother at a party—in Switzerland in the country they used to take all the children, even the little babies, to the parties—and my mother would not dance the first dance with my father, so of course, my father could not dance with anyone else. So he said to her, ‘Very well for you, all right, I'll find a nicer partner than you'; and he got a broom and danced with that, and everybody but my mother thought it was very funny. She would not speak to him for the rest of the evening. So my father drank too much beer and was very gay, and on the way home he said suddenly to my mother, ‘Now you are going to dance,' and he took her by the waist and swung her round and round until her feet were whirling off the ground, and she cried. I could not understand my mother. Really it was no harm, it was funny. But my mother cried and then I cried too; and my poor father walked along with us then very quietly, and I think now he wished to cry. She never has laughed at a single one of my father's jokes, and yet he will keep making them. Some of them are awful, don't think I don't know that. Oh,” said Elsa, her voice in the night slow with grieved wonder, “I am afraid I am like my mother; I cannot be funny and amusing to people, I would be ashamed to call attention to myself, but sometimes it is hard just to sit; and I think there must be something wrong with me or the boys would ask me to dance.”

“There's almost nobody on this ship you'd want to dance with,” said Jenny. “You wouldn't look at them if you were at home.”

“But I am not at home,” said Elsa, “and I have never been, for in Mexico the boys there, the ones I was allowed to go with, don't like my style.… My mother said just like you, ‘Don't worry, Elsa, in Switzerland they will think you are just exactly the right kind of girl, a real Swiss girl, the kind they like there, don't worry, it will be all right when we get home.' She thinks love is all nonsense, but she wants me to get married. She says it is what women are expected to do. But I am not in Switzerland yet, and I hardly remember it though my mother took me back for a visit when I was nine years old. But oh, it seemed such a strange place! I shall speak Swiss-German like a foreigner, because I spoke so much French and English and Spanish in Mexico. I was never at home in Mexico, but now maybe I shan't be at home in Switzerland, either. Oh, I am so sad about going there …” The small monotonous plaint went on like rain at midnight, and Jenny listened, touched and attentive. She thought she knew real trouble when she heard it.

“My mother said all this time, it is not fair to Elsa, we must take her home in time so that she can marry a Swiss, here it is no good for a Swiss girl. I hope she is right, I hope they like me in Switzerland.”

“Of course they will like you, you will be the new interest, the girl from a far country,” Jenny told her, and she felt an anxious tenderness, as if she had been asked for help which she was not able to give. What hope was there for the discouraged young face with its double chin, the crease of fat like a goiter at the base of the throat, the oily skin, the faded gray eyes without the light of spirit, the dull thick hair, the heavy haunches, the gross ankles. Good nose, good mouth, good enough forehead, these were all; no sparkle, no lift at all in that solid mound of not very appetizing flesh. And inside, there groped blindly, the young innocence and the longing, the pained confused limited mind, the dark instincts winding upon themselves like snails.

Jenny said, “This time, I feel your mother is right. Let me tell you I never knew a girl who wanted to marry who didn't get married, sooner or later.”

“Oh, I have,” said Elsa, rejecting the half-truth and the pity it offered with bitter pride and honesty. “I have … I think sometimes that if I had different clothes,” she said, “or maybe a permanent wave. Maybe if I had one of those. But my mother says young girls must be perfectly natural and pure in every way. No curls, even. They must wait for everything until they get married, even to use scent.… But suppose I never get married?”

Jenny said, “To marry properly, you must first, yourself, fall in love. Were you never in love?”

“Why no,” said Elsa, in a startled voice. “Never. But my mother says I must wait until a man shows interest in me first.”

“Interest!” said Jenny, rousing a little. “Listen,” she said, trying to sound very wise and final, for she could not stay awake much longer, “I'm frightfully tired, aren't you? It doesn't in the least matter who falls in love with who first, but first there must be falling in love and then marriage will take care of itself.”

“But what happens,” asked Elsa, with patient persistence, “if I never fall in love?”