Ship of Fools (14 page)

A great deal of this he knew had been aimed at Jenny, who had been brilliant as a macaw when he first fell in love with her, wearing for her own delight high, cool colors, and splashing her little canvases recklessly with geometrical designs in primary colors like fractured rainbows. She had seemed quite serious about it, too. Little by little he had succeeded in undermining her confidence in this nonsensical way of painting. Her palette lowered in tone; gradually, too, she had taken to dressing in muted colors or black and white, with only now and then a crimson or orange scarf, and she was not painting much, but working almost altogether in charcoal or India ink.

Deeply he hoped she would give it up altogether—there had never been a really great woman painter, nothing better than some superior disciple of a great man; it disturbed him to see a woman so out of place; and he did not believe in her talent for a moment. The best she could hope for was to be a good illustrator, and that she despised. But there was something in her whole nature that obstructed the workings of his own: when she was painting, he could not; just as when she was in a loving tender mood, he felt himself beginning to grow cold and defensive, to hold her off and deny her.

Jenny was like a cat in her fondness for nearness, for stroking, touching, nestling, with a kind of sensuality so diffused it almost amounted to coldness after all, for she almost never wanted to make love outright as he did, suddenly, violently, grimly, and have it over with. She would drink from his cup and share a fruit with him, bite by bite: she loved to tell him how much she loved him, though she was getting over that; but she was never happy with him, and when they slept together, they quarreled. David in the wave of repulsion he suffered at the sight of Herr Glocken's red pajamas hated Jenny for a violent moment, as he did often, and oftener. As for Glocken—on deck in daytime, except for his silly bright neckties, his clothes were shabby and dull, his shoes broken. Almost everyone avoided him. He scared people off; his plight was so obviously desperate they were afraid some of it would rub off on them. At night, behind that curtain, in the dark, wrapped in his red silk, what did he dream about himself?

Denny was pulling on his trousers, his face thoughtful. “Say,” he remarked suddenly to David, “you know that little one with the red ruffles on her skirt they call Pastora? Well, she looks to me hot as a firecracker. And she has been giving me the eye, from time to time. What do you suppose it would cost?”

David said, “I suppose about whatever the traffic will bear.”

“Well, traffic's jammed right now, so far as I'm concerned. But I think I'll prospect around a little. We're going to be on this boat nearly a month, you know. That's a long long time. I'm beginning to worry about the future.”

David said, “You'd better try to keep on ice until you get to Berlin where they're government-inspected, or you may have to go to see Dr. Schumann before you get to Bremerhaven.”

“I know,” said Denny, turning a little pale, “I've thought of that. But there are all kinds of things you can—well, I think I can take care of myself.”

“Things might work and they might not,” said David. “They can talk all they like, there aren't any sure ways.”

“God,” said Denny, sincerely. He got up and looked at himself in the mirror and took a last swipe at his hair with the brush. “But she certainly looks all right, healthy and everything.”

“You never can tell,” said David, with malice.

“Well,” said Denny, “we aren't there yet. If I can ever get her cut out from the herd,” he said. “They run together so close you can't get a word in between them.”

Bébé, Frau Hutten decided, was recovering. She brought him food when she came from breakfast, and after consulting with her husband, fed Bébé, who made out a very good meal. “The dear blessed one,” said Frau Hutten, watching him eat with pleasure, “with his so fine instincts and feelings, eating his food humbly face downward like any animal; it is a great pity. He is too good for that.”

“He does not mind in the least, dear Käthe,” said her husband. “He is more comfortable in that posture, on account of the construction of his frame. It would not be natural or right for him to sit up to his food. I have seen children with unconscious cruelty try to train their pets to eat at table, and it was so much labor lost, besides the suffering of the animal. No, I think our good Bébé does very well, and misses nothing that he should have.”

Frau Hutten, her confidence restored and her mind set at ease as always by her husband's words, fitted on Bébé's leash and the three went for a good fast walk. Seven times around the deck was, Professor Hutten calculated, just the right distance for a proper constitutional. But Bébé, who started briskly enough, began to lag on the third lap, and midway of the fourth he stopped in the grip of his familiar convulsions and disgraced himself most hideously then and there. Professor Hutten knelt and supported his head, while Frau Hutten went to look for a sailor who could bring a bucket of water.

A few feet away, she heard a shout of laughter, a raucous chorus with no gaiety in it, and recognized with a chill the voices of the Spanish dancing troupe. They had a way of sitting together, and without warning they would laugh dreadfully, with mirthless faces, and they were always laughing at somebody. They would look straight at you and laugh as if you were an object too comic to believe, yet their eyes were cold and they were not enjoying themselves, even at your expense. Frau Hutten had observed them from the first and she was afraid of them.

Without looking, she felt that they had seen her husband and her poor Bébé; and she was right. They came on in a pack, sweeping around the forlorn tableau, and as they passed her, their unfriendly eyes took her in from head to foot. Their teeth were disclosed and they were making those gruesome sounds of merriment. She felt her fatness, her age, her heavy ankles; the Spaniards' slenderness and youth cast contempt on her and on all that she was, in one bitter, mocking glance.

She found a sailor, a nice big boy with a good square face who was used to seasickness. He brought water, washed up after Bébé and went away. The Huttens laid Bébé beside their deck chairs, folded bath-towels under his head, and sat together in massive silence, feeling themselves figures of fun to those debased creatures, real hoodlums who should never have been allowed to travel first class at all. There were many good people, Frau Hutten was sure, in the steerage who better deserved to be on first deck.

In Mexico they had been accustomed for years to an easy atmosphere, among Germans of the solid cultured class who lived well and were treated with great consideration by Mexicans of the corresponding class. They had never been sneered at for their shapes nor their habits. But as for these
Gachupínes
, these low Spaniards, the Mexicans knew how to treat them! The Huttens remembered a Mexican saying that the Germans in Mexico were never tired of repeating: Mexicans loathe the Americans, despise the Jews, hate the Spaniards, distrust the English, admire the French and love the Germans. An immensely clever Mexican gentleman had composed this saying at a dinner party, and it had spread like wildfire among their little circle. It was the kind of thing that almost reconciled one to living in a foreign country with mixed races and on the whole rather barbarous customs.

Herr Professor for years was the head of the best German school in Mexico City, where the little boys carried their school packs on their backs and wore round student caps; and the little girls wore black pinafores over their sober-colored frocks, their hair shining in smooth blonde braids. Now and again, standing at the window of his classroom in the big solid Mexican-French house which the German colony had bought and remodeled in the seemly German style, Professor Hutten watched the children walking sedately yet vigorously in small groups, their faces and their simple clothing so immaculate; observed the meek looks and good manners of the German young, heard them speak their mother tongue with good accent and pure diction, and fancied that he might almost imagine himself to be in Germany. Oh, that the whole world of men might be so orderly, so well arranged, so virtuous in its basic principles. This hope, coming as it did to him at long intervals, making him feel he was a part of a great universal movement towards the betterment of mankind, had no doubt, as he confessed to his wife, kept him alive. But they had their private grief, their personal loss. They were childless, and would always be so.

The white bulldog Bébé for nine years had lived with them, sharing their lives. He ate sitting on the floor beside the table, taking food from their hands. He had slept at their feet when he was a helpless crying puppy afraid of the dark and missing the comfort of his mother's milk. Professor Hutten admitted in his heart that he was fond of Bébé, in fact with his wife he loved Bébé warmly and tenderly and constantly, in spite of the trouble he gave them. To them, there was nothing absurd in their feelings; Bébé, of a nobly disinterested nature, deserved their care and repaid them with devotion. His wife was cut to the bone, he could see in her face, by the jeers and laughter of the particularly base kind of Spaniards on the boat. Professor Hutten shared her grief, mixed with indignation and it must be said a touch of shame. He did not feel it was unmanly of him to have held Bébé's head, but it was careless of him not to have a proper regard for appearances, and to have exposed himself to the ridicule of those coarse-natured persons. It was a consolation to remember that Bébé was an English bulldog of champion stock, of distinguished if not absolutely flawless ancestry; he had been awarded blue and purple ribbons without number in very creditable shows. Now he was a trifle aged perhaps and out of training, but he was still able and willing to defend his master and mistress and incidentally himself against all attacks. If the word was said to him it was still in Bébé to spring like a trigger, seize and hold one of those jeering little black people by the throat, never letting go until his master gave the command. Professor Hutten leaned over the sleeping Bébé and said in a low, urgent voice, “Attack, Bébé, attack!”

Bébé rose drunkenly, scrambled on his feet trying to get a balance, his eyes rolling. He uttered a deep ominous growl, tottered, and pitched forward on his blunt nose, spread out flat. “What are you doing?” asked Frau Hutten, in wonder. “If we do not keep him quiet, he will be sick again.”

“It came over me to test the permanence of his training,” said the Professor, with a gratified air. “No, he has forgotten nothing. Ah, Käthe, how blood and training do form and sustain character. Look at the good animal: he will never fail us.”

Frau Hutten said, “How he reminds me of the past, of our life, now we are going home again.” She gazed at Bébé with tenderness, but her thoughts were disturbed with looking backward and looking forward, for nothing in the past seemed properly related to the future. She was almost afraid to hope, for things in the old country must be very much changed, and in ways she could not be prepared for. She said as much to her husband.

“Where we are going,” he reassured her sweetly, “people and things and ways change slowly. We will be among those of our own age, our own way of thinking and feeling; they were the friends of our childhood and youth, they cannot now be strangers to us—or so we may only hope,” he added, bravely.

Frau Hutten was silent, remembering when the whole German colony in Mexico City went to a theater to see the moving picture of the funeral of the Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria. They rose in silence as the great hearse appeared, surrounded by its horse guard of helmeted soldiers. Like brothers and sisters reunited at the graveside of their mother, they all wept together, each turned and embraced the one nearest him. Aloud they had wept together in broken sobs and gulps, until the whole theater was a place of mourning, full of the sound of this homesick, heart-soothing sorrow. They had sung “A Mighty Fortress,” “O Tannenbaum” and “The Watch on the Rhine,” with tears still on their faces. How near to the homeland they had seemed at that moment, but never to be so near again, because of what they had lost: the good, the gentle, the long-suffering Empress who had been symbol of all they revered in home and family life, the generous hearth-stone around which their best memories clustered.

“What will it be like now, I wonder?” she wanted to ask her husband again, but she knew he could not answer except with hopes; and she did not wish to trouble him.

Professor Hutten was sunk in his thought too: how he had worked all these years, hoping against all reason that the day of his honorable retirement with savings and pension would come, and God in his goodness would let him see again the house where he was born in the Todmoos country of the Black Forest; and now it had come, he was full of misgivings. What would it be like? He buried his face in his hands, leaning forward in the deck chair, and almost instantly a qualm caught him in the pit of the stomach, and a surge of most awful sickness chased out his comfortable piety. He raised his head, streaming with sweat. “Käthe,” he said in a low despairing voice, “help me. For God's sake quickly before anyone sees.”

It happened Frau Rittersdorf saw. But she was much too occupied searching for her goose-down pillow, pure white goose down covered with cream-and-pink striped taffeta, which had been sent to her from Germany all the way to Mexico as a Christmas present from her dear dead husband's dear mother. How she could have misplaced it, have forgotten it for a moment, Frau Rittersdorf was unable to explain to herself. It was really indispensable to her comfort, as the deck chairs were unusually hard, or seemed to be so at any rate on this ship where everything was undeniably more than a little on the second-rate side. In any case, since no doubt she had left it in her chair, it was the plain duty of someone—the deck steward for choice—to have salvaged and returned it at once to her stateroom.