Ship of Fools (26 page)

“David,” she said, in a soft, blurred voice, and he saw with surprise again the now familiar change in her face, just when she had been in her most difficult and perverse mood, the gentle blinded look of abject tenderness, mysterious but real for the moment, touching and believable.

“What is it, Jenny angel?” he asked very gently, and waited for her to repent of something, to offer some concession he had not asked of her, which later she would take back and deny when her mood had changed and hardened again. He was tired of trying to understand her, and he knew by now that he could not depend upon her for anything at all.

“I am glad you have decided to go to Spain,” she said. (A lie, thought David, you are anything but glad!) “Let's go there first. I've always wanted to go to France, I shall always want to go. Any time at all. And one day I shall. It will always be there. I have time. But you want to go to Spain now. So let's. I wish we had never drawn those straws.”

“It was your idea,” said David, relentlessly. “I have a notion we'll land up in France, after all.”

“Oh no!” cried Jenny, though her eyes lighted at hearing the mere words. “No! We are going to Germany, God help us, unless we can get a visa at Vigo, and if the ship stops at Boulogne, after all. Those Cuban boys are saying there is an old maritime law the Captain is bound to put you down at the port you have paid passage to. But the purser told Mrs. Treadwell that the fare is the same to every port beyond Gijón onward, and the Captain isn't bound to stop anywhere he doesn't please between Gijón and Bremerhaven. And the Captain has said positively he doesn't please to stop at Boulogne. So darling—when we get to Bremerhaven, let's toss a coin,
once:
heads for Spain, tails for France; and let's buy our tickets then and there before something else happens to start us off on another tack.” She became very gay at the prospect of settling a question. “Oh, David, let's just do this and end the worry. This would be such a nice voyage if only we knew where we were going!”

David could not or would not make the decision. “Let's wait,” he said, after a long uneasy pause. “I don't know yet where I want to go.”

He was annoyed at the situation getting out of his hand, rather; he had meant to quarrel with her about her carryings-on with that preposterous Freytag; for once he had her fairly in the wrong. She had intended to turn the thumbscrews hard, and give him a comic and cruel account of his behavior of the evening before. But there was nowhere to start, no common ground—their separation had begun, the distance between them had widened without warning. There is no moment of peace, thought David, except in that split second of hope, of belief even, that now, now you have it. If we go on together, she is going to be unfaithful to me, she is going to have “affairs” as she did before. Why go to Spain with her? Why should we go anywhere together? Her life, or her version of it to him, had been a disordered history of incoherent events, apparently meaningless wanderings. “Oh, no,” Jenny would protest, “it all meant something marvelous to me,” but what the marvel was she never said. She could never explain her real reasons for having been in certain places, or what she was doing there. “Why, I was painting, David. And I had no home any more. My grandparents were dead, and the house was sold, and they had almost nothing to leave me—I had to make a living, didn't I? And I wasn't very good at it—I'm still not, but I do try! I had a
job
there.” A man, or men, always seemed to lurk in the background. “Good heavens, David, of course there were men. What do you take me for?” … “Why no, David, of course I never married anybody, why should
I?”

She would never admit that she had loved any man but David, and more curious still, she would never admit that any man, except perhaps David, she would wait and see, had ever loved her. “None of it meant anything at all, David darling,” she assured him over and over with earnest innocence, “nothing lasted. It was just for the excitement, David. It wasn't love, it was fox fire.” She could never understand why, for him, the whole wrong lay precisely there. It should have been love, it was a disgrace to her that it was not love; and, he told himself with bitterness, it isn't love again, I expect. Maybe it will never be anything but fox fire.

It was Sunday morning, after all, as the godless were reminded by a sight of the godly wearing Sunday faces going each one to his own kind of worship. At six o'clock Father Carillo was down on the steerage deck, saying Mass before a portable altar adorned with small lighted candles and limp red paper flowers. The people knelt and rose and knelt again, huddled shoulder to shoulder, with bowed heads and moving lips, their hands fluttering constantly in a complicated series of signs of the Cross. Among them all, only six women were in a state of grace. They crawled forward on their knees, their heads shawled in black, to receive Holy Communion. Raising their chins and closing their eyes, they opened their mouths wide and thrust forth their pallid tongues to inordinate lengths to partake of the Angelic Bread. The priest went through the ceremony severely and hastily, placing the wafers on the outstretched tongues expertly and snatching back his hand. He ended the Mass in due form but at top speed, and almost instantly began to pack up his altar as if he were removing it from a place of pestilence.

At the farthest end of the deck from the altar, a considerable group of men who had stood throughout the ritual with their backs to the priest now faced about and began to disperse. In silence, without any other demonstration, they expressed contempt and anger even in the movements of their hands, exchanged scornful derisive smiles. The fat man in the cherry-colored shirt seemed to be the ringleader. He walked deliberately against a man who was still kneeling, his ragged cap in hand, almost knocking him over. The man got to his feet, put his cap on slouchwise and squared up to the other, who stopped short, looking down his nose with exaggerated disdain.

“Wipe that dirty look off your face in the presence of the Host,” said the man who had been jostled, with extraordinary ferocity.

“In the presence of what?” asked the fat man. “I see a eunuch with a bread pill.”

They struck at each other's mouths almost at the same instant; the smaller man leaped and tripped the fat man, they crashed to the deck together and fought with deadly fury for a few seconds, when half a dozen men seized and separated them by force, holding them intently, while the women scattered, crying out and stumbling over chairs and bundles.

Father Carillo picked up his altar and made for the stairs without even a glance towards the unseemly disturbance. When the men who had fought were freed and standing, there was blood on their faces and their torn clothes. Their eyes, quite murderous and calculating, met for an instant in a promise that this was not the end; then they walked away from each other in silence, each mopping his face with a dirty rag, each surrounded by his own friends, or guards as they had become.

At seven, in the small library off the main salon, Father Garza said Mass attended by the troupe of Spanish dancers, the bride and groom, Dr. Schumann, Frau Otto Schmitt and Señora Ortega, who was pale and blotchy so early in the morning, and who leaned upon the shoulder of her Indian nurse. All knelt upon the carpeted floor, missing their padded prayer stools, the soft hot wind bringing out drops of sweat on their foreheads. The Spaniards knelt closely together, their bitter faces closed smugly, their dingy slender hands twiddling with their rosaries.

Frau Schmitt, observing that the bride and groom knelt at a discreet distance from each other and did not even once exchange a glance, approved this delicacy of behavior. She then covered her face with her hands to shut out all distractions, and gave herself up to soft emotions, remembered blisses of mingled love and prayer, a melting sweet, ageless vision of divine joys to come. Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world only in Thy grace shall my soul be healed. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Near her, Amparo stirred, rustling her petticoats and rattling her beads, hissing her prayers under her breath, exuding from every pore a warm spermy odor mixed with the kind of perfume only the lowest sort of woman would ever use. Frau Schmitt, disturbed by the sounds and the smells, body odors and stale hair oil added from all sides, moved away a few paces on her knees, then stopped, feeling foolish. Her happy mood was shattered. She sat back on her heels, resigned and dull, opened her eyes and followed Father Garza's formal gestures as he murmured in a low voice. She knew it all by heart, but feeling cheated of her rapture, she stole glances now and then at the Spaniards, who had cheated her.

They were peculiarly repellent to her; how could anyone call such swarthy people beautiful? The presence of Dr. Schumann, the good and wise man, was comforting to her. She felt she knew him well, ah, he was the kind of man she understood and who would understand her. A tender, sunny memory of her honeymoon at Salzburg rose like a little painting framed in gold in her mind—her new, wonderful, ever-to-be-wonderful husband with her in their first room together in the White Horse Inn at St. Wolfgang's; the lovely green summer light everywhere; the small white steamer coming in from a trip around the lake, and everyone going down to a wharf no larger than a school platform, to meet it as if it came from across the sea … and the little gilded globes dancing in the fountain spray at Hellbrunn, and the darling little dwarfs and gnomes in glazed colored crockery peeping out from hedges and flowerbeds! Ah, those Spaniards with their harsh faces and hating eyes, if ever they had seen the white marble statue of the martyred Empress Elizabeth at Hellbrunn, they would understand what beauty is … This was a sad voyage, her last in this world maybe, and what a pity most of the people around her were so unpleasant. She was so bitterly lonely for her husband, one night she had put herself to sleep imagining that she might get up and go down into the hold, and just sit there by his coffin in the dark, for the dear company of it. Then in her sleep she had gone down, and there at the door stood her husband shining like moonlight on the sea, and he had said, waving his hand, “Go back, go back, go back,” just that and nothing more, three times; and had disappeared. She had waked in a fright, turned on her bed light and begun to say her rosary; and now she had only to resign herself to not seeing him again in this poor world, and to try not to let her heart be hardened against the poor and the unfortunate—for surely those dreadful Spaniards were both. She had always believed so deeply that human beings wished only to be quiet and happy, each in his own way: but there was a spirit of evil in them that could not let each other be in peace. One man's desire must always crowd out another's, one must always take his own good at another's expense. Or so it seemed. God forgive us all.

Herr Löwenthal, wandering moodily alone, after having put on his phylacteries and said his morning prayers, was brooding hopelessly on Herr Rieber's treatment of him. It was not a matter of rude words, for Herr Rieber would hardly speak to him, and if Herr Löwenthal asked a civil question he got only a grunt for answer: the trouble was that Herr Rieber behaved as if he were alone in the cabin, and had all the rights and space there. He pushed Löwenthal's belongings around as if they were mere trash in his way. Once he had deliberately swept all of Löwenthal's toilet things off the shelf to the floor, breaking a good bottle of shaving lotion, and he had not even the decency to pretend it was an accident.

If Herr Löwenthal hung his pajamas in the small locker near Herr Rieber's garments, Herr Rieber, with a nasty fastidious expression, handling the pajamas between thumb and forefinger, would remove them and let them drop to the floor. And all this, mind you, in the most confident insolence, as if he knew he could dare venture to any lengths without fear of consequence.

Herr Löwenthal, accepting all this without present protest, making up his mind painfully to endure in silence and wait as patiently as he could for the end of this monstrous situation, spent a good deal of his time trying to find a place of his own to stow his property that could not possibly be claimed by Herr Rieber. He repacked his suitcase and sample cases, put his new supply of toilet articles in a bag, and set them all in the corner opposite the bunks, at the foot of and under the couch. Once he found them all in the middle of the floor again, and once piled helter-skelter in the lower bunk. There would be no end to it, that was clear. Herr Löwenthal with some wry humor began to think of Herr Rieber as that fabulous German household sprite of mischief, the poltergeist. No poltergeist could have been more persistent in malice. All this so soon, what would not Herr Poltergeist think of to make himself tiresome before they reached Bremerhaven?

This dark question in mind, Herr Löwenthal on deck glanced through the window into the small library and saw the Mass going on. He restrained his impulse to spit until he had passed beyond the line of vision of the worshipers; then, his mouth watering with disgust, he moved to the rail and spat like a landlubber into the wind, which blew it back in his face. At his curse being thus returned to his very teeth, his whole body was suffused with superstitious terror, it scurried like mice in his blood, it shook his nerves from head to foot. “God forbid,” he said aloud, with true piety, and dropped shuddering all over in the nearest deck chair.

Father Garza came out in a few minutes, looking very refreshed and good-natured after the performance of his religious duties, lifting his cassock skirt and plunging his square bony hand into his trousers pocket to fetch forth a packet of cigarettes. Father Carillo joined him. They both beamed amicably upon Herr Löwenthal, whose gaze was fixed unseeing upon them. “Good morning,” said the fathers, affably, in very bad German, and Father Garza added, “It's a beautiful day we are having.” They paced on slowly, and Herr Löwenthal in his pit of misery did not even hear them until they were gone. He pulled himself up laboriously. “
Guten Morgen
,” he said forlornly, to the empty air and the bitter rolling sea.