Ship of Fools (23 page)

In the midst of brushing his hair, David vomited suddenly into the washbasin. Furtively with shame he scrubbed the bowl, thinking that his hair tonic was as bad as Denny's patent medicines and laxatives and sleeping pills. He turned away from the sight of his hangdog face in the mirror, and the dreadful muddled feeling of moral self-reprobation which Jenny called a Methodist hangover clutched him, not for the first time, in the vitals.

He had done something ridiculous last night, what was it? He remembered Jenny's face somewhere along the evening, her eyes very brightly cold; she was closing a door in his face—what door, and where, and why? A great thunderous gap of darkness existed in his mind between a last series of drinks with Denny at the bar, and Jenny's glittering eyes at the closing door. But she would remember, she would be glad to give him a full account. He had only to wait until they met at breakfast or on deck. She would tell him a story to please herself, half invention, half true, he would never know which was which, and she would be certain to add something like: “Don't feel badly about it, darling. I'm probably making it all sound much sillier than it really was. I wasn't quite sober myself, remember,” she would say with purest hypocrisy: for Jenny was a sober little creature who didn't depend upon alcohol for anything. The thought of Jenny's mere existence at that moment was a fresh accusation against him. He should marry Jenny, or offer to marry her, anyway: they should have got married before they left Mexico—this way everything was plainly going to be a mess. But Jenny was not the wife he wanted if he wanted a wife, which he certainly did not want now: in fact, he faced it coldly, he would never in the world marry Jenny, he did not intend to marry at all; marriage was a bad business, a mug's game. On reaching this candid conclusion, his spirits improved somewhat: he felt able to face Jenny on her own terms.

Herr Professor and Frau Hutten opened their eyes, moved their heads experimentally and asked in duet, “How do you feel, my dear?” Comparing notes, they decided their seasickness was past, they must rise and face the day. Bébé, seeing them stirring, took heart and walked about confidently, and when Frau Hutten kissed him on the nose, he responded with a hearty lap on her chin.

The Indian nurse waked Señora Ortega gently and tucked the baby to her breast for the morning nursing. The mother drowsed and waked deliciously to the steady warm mumbling of the ravenous mouth, the long forward rolling surge of the ship, the sleepy beat of the engines. Her pains and fatigues were gone at last. Folded together, mother and baby slept as one in soft animal ease, breathing off sweet animal odors, cradled both like unborn things in their long dark dream. The Indian woman, who slept in her white chemise and full white petticoat, filled her palms with cold water, washed her eyes and smoothed her hair, slipped into her embroidered wool skirt, put on her earrings and necklaces, and lay down again, her meek bare feet, pointed and delicate, close together; and dozed. Now and then she twitched a little, and opened one eye. A voice she did not recognize, but believed to be her dead mother's, often called her name in a tone of warning as she slept. “Nicolasa,” the voice said very tenderly as if she were a child again. But it meant to tell her the sad news that she was needed, she must break her night's rest, she must all day long be silently ready to do whatever was required of her. She often wept in her sleep because she lived her whole life among strangers who knew only her christened name, not a word of her language, and who never once asked her how she felt. “Nicolasa,” said the soft voice, urgently. She sighed and sat up; saw that her poor little baby was still asleep and the poor mother also, but perhaps they would be quieter, sleep longer and more deeply, if she kept watch over them. She drooped on the edge of her bed, smiling vaguely at mother and child; then dropped to her knees and took her rosary out of her pocket. A charm of dried herbs in a cheesecloth bag was attached to the rosary, and she kissed this charm before she kissed the crucifix.

Wilhelm Freytag woke feeling a fresher, cooler wind blowing upon his face. The round bit of horizon shone through the porthole, not clear but a thick cloudy blue. They were six days out, yes, this was Sunday and the ship had settled to her speed such as it was in a beeline across the waters, already, he noticed, putting out his head, a little troubled. It was real sea air, dense yet sweet and mild, with long sooty streamers of cloud trailing from deep blue thunder banks to the east. It seemed late; perhaps he had missed breakfast. The ship's bell clanged. Eight o'clock; time enough if he speeded up a little. Hansen would miss it, though. The breathing of deepest slumber stirred behind the curtain, and Hansen's huge feet, with smooth glossy soles and assertive great toes standing apart from the others, stuck out of the upper bunk as usual. Freytag wondered how he managed in cold weather, and remembered being half wakened by the noise of Hansen scrambling into bed at what must have been a very late hour.… Probably up to no good with that Spanish woman he had been dogging from the first.

While he shaved he riffled through his ties and selected one, thinking that people on voyage mostly went on behaving as if they were on dry land, and there is simply not room for it on a ship. Every smallest act shows up more clearly and looks worse, because it has lost its background. The train of events leading up to and explaining it is not there; you can't refer it back and set it in its proper size and place. You might learn something about one or two persons, if you took time and trouble, but there was not time enough and it was not worth the trouble; not even that American girl Jenny Brown was interesting enough to try to know better. By herself, a nice enough person, he believed; good dancer and full of lively talk and odd random humor that amused you at the moment, though you could not remember a word of it afterwards. But that strange young man she was traveling with gave her own personality a dubious cast: such as that odd behavior of his last night, when he came between them abruptly during a waltz, seized Jenny Brown by the elbow and snatched her away, and had performed a few steps with her of a kind usually seen only in the lowest dance halls. Jenny Brown had tried to fight her way out of his clutches, and she succeeded for a moment; turned to wave good night to Freytag, and then David Scott had seized her arm and she had given up and walked away with him. It was all pretty cheap and stupid, from Freytag's viewpoint, and it illustrated the danger of getting involved with strangers and their messy situations.

What he, Freytag, preferred from strangers was a friendly indifference, a superficial pleasantness. This was quite enough for any voyage, any evening at all among strangers, but it is just these things that too many persons know nothing about, he said, now beginning to carry on a silent, internal conversation with his absent wife Mary. People on a boat, Mary, can't seem to find any middle ground between stiffness, distrust, total rejection, or a kind of invasive, gnawing curiosity. Sometimes it's a friendly enough curiosity, sometimes sly and malicious, but you feel as if you were being eaten alive by fishes. I've never been on a boat, remember, said Mary in his mind. Ah, but you will be soon, you will be. You'll see for yourself then. Would you believe, I danced with a girl, her name was Jenny something-or-other, had a drink with her, and a young man she was traveling with, rather a common sort of chap I think he must be, made the oddest scene about it. Traveling with? He realized at once that such an episode was not the kind of thing he could tell Mary. It had no meaning, no importance, it was outside of their lives altogether, he would have forgotten it by the time he saw her again. And then too, if Mary heard such a story, she might say slyly, as she had said before when he told her of his travel adventures, often rather charming, he thought: “More Goyim, I expect?” And he always had to say, “Yes.” And she would remark, “It's so strange that you never meet any Jews when you travel alone!” Once when he had tried to show her why he felt that this was an outrageous thing for her to say, they had almost quarreled; she would not at these times accept a fact she knew well: that it was the Jews who drew the line and refused associations and friendship. But the subject was dangerous ground between them, and he had learned to avoid it. He felt his own life within him thriving safe and sound, something intact with a smooth surface very hard for the fishes to get their teeth in. He would keep away from that Jenny Brown and her private affairs, whatever they were. She was evidently at loose ends, ready for a little excitement. Her way of talking was too intimate, too personal; she asked questions; she wished to confide and explain about herself. She was not so interesting as her vanity led her to suppose.

There was nothing he wished to confide or explain to anyone but Mary. He was very simply transporting himself, like something inanimate sent by freight, stored in the hold, until, from the house he had taken and begun to prepare for Mary in Mexico City, he should set himself down in the house where Mary was waiting for him in Mannheim. In that interval nothing concerned him, he had no business with strangers. When they returned together, the ship and the passengers would still not matter, for it would be the voyage of their lives. They would never see Germany again, except for a miracle. Mary must be his native land and he must be hers, and they would have to carry their own climate with them wherever they went; they must call that climate home and try not to remember its real name—exile. A vision of Mary playing and singing at the piano formed in his memory, and he whistled along with her the song she was singing: “
Kein Haus, keine Heimat
.…”

That was the way it would be. And what would it be like to know always, to carry the knowledge like a guilty secret, that they had not come to any given place of their own free happy choice, but had been driven there; that they were in flight, harried over one frontier and then another, without power to choose their place or to refuse what shelter might be offered? His pride sickened. What a shameful existence for any man, what a doubly shameful existence for a German! No matter what he might say for the sake of politeness about his mixture of nationalities, he knew he was altogether German, a legitimate son of that powerful German strain able to destroy all foreign bloods in its own veins and make all pure and German once more; and the whole world had been for him merely a hunting ground, a foraging place, a territory of profitable sojourn until the day should come when he would go home for good, having never been away in his soul. Wherever he had been, he had felt German ground under his feet and German sky over his head; there
was
no other country for him, and how was this taken away from us, Mary? You are no longer a Jew, but the wife of a German; our children's blood will flow as pure as mine, your tainted stream will be cleansed in their German veins—

Freytag pulled himself up with a sharp turn, and wiped his streaming face. His reveries had turned to a painful rhapsody, some fearful daydream had taken hold of him, he was talking his madness even while the solid earth was slipping from underfoot, the house shaking overhead, the long flight was beginning, and he could not even imagine the end. The future was a vast hollow sphere, strangely soundless, uninhabited, without incident or detail; yet he knew that, visibly, nothing might be changed for a great while; perhaps things would change so slowly he might hardly be aware of change until one day it would be too late. No doubt he would continue as a minor executive in the German oil company until the time came to look about for something else in a firm where nobody would mind that he had married a Jewish girl. He dreaded introducing Mary to his circle in Mexico City—they would never be deceived by that blonde hair and her little tip-tilted nose. He had been deceived, but then he had loved her on sight, literally; she had told him almost at once, but he had not cared, and he could see no signs of Jewishness in her—but those colonial Germans in Mexico City, they would know what she was instantly and as far as they could see her. He had seen it happen in Germany, in all sorts of places, restaurants, theaters, all kinds of company—well, there it was, beyond belief and beyond help, and he could only hope that by the time the thing caught up with them he would have found another job as good or better, somewhere else. He might go in business for himself, in Mexico or South America, perhaps even in New York, but only as a last resort.

Facing the perpetual question as he did, his mind turned dry and practical. He could not feel fated, destined for catastrophe; actually he could not imagine himself being driven out of a place, or in peril of his life; surely he and Mary would never be put on a ship, penniless, prisoners, to be thrust into still another country that did not want them either—like that unbalanced Spanish countess prisoner with her wild tale of terror. Poor woman, he found himself thinking with impersonal pity, but his own worry was such he was unable to care deeply for her fate. Leaning over the rail, he looked again into the steerage deck.

Dr. Schumann was nearby, observing the steerage passengers also with a very thoughtful face. He greeted Freytag mildly and shook his head.

“They seem to be more comfortable this morning,” said Freytag. The people were moving sluggishly, but they were moving, busy with their hands, putting things to rights as well as their means afforded. Some of the men were smoking, and the huge fat man in the cherry-pink shirt, who had sung as the ship left Veracruz, stood among them, legs apart, roaring another song, a few scattered words rising on the wind. The other men, rolling up their bundles or opening canvas chairs, stopped now and then to listen, smiling broadly, joining in for a phrase or two. The women had managed to wash a few garments, faded shirts and baby rags; a long line of them flapped from a cord hung so low everyone crossing the deck had to stoop under it. There appeared to be somewhat more space, and nobody was actively sick.

“They will do well enough if we don't run into weather,” said Dr. Schumann. “Broken arms, legs, heads, maybe necks,” he said, brooding over them. “They have no place to make themselves secure—there are too many of them—it's a disgrace to the ship. I am hoping the weather holds at least to the Bay of Biscay, when more than half of these will be left at Santa Cruz de Tenerife.”