Ship of Fools (28 page)

“Religion?” said the Captain haughtily. “What do they know about that?” And they dismissed the matter. But Professor Hutten thought it interesting enough to mention to his wife and Frau Rittersdorf. Meeting Arne Hansen on deck, Frau Rittersdorf made bold to ask him if he had heard any further details about the riot in the steerage. Hansen, being barely awake, had heard nothing, but he asked a sailor in passing, and the sailor told him it had been a pretty good fight, though short. He had missed it, but he heard they drew knives.

Frau Hutten, airing Bébé, fell in with the Lutz family, and in some agitation told them what she had heard from her husband, what she believed she had heard, and the Lutzes got the impression there had been a full-scale free-for-all scrimmage among dangerous criminals lurking below, with much bloodshed.

Herr Lutz asked Herr Glocken, who was walking, swinging his long arms, whistling a tuneless air, if he had heard of the battle in the steerage, adding his hope that their grievances might be settled to their satisfaction. “Or they'll be up here cutting all our throats,” he said, only meaning it halfway. Frau Lutz turned pale at such scandalous levity, and added as her personal opinion that it was probably a food riot: “Our own is not improving, you may have noticed,” she remarked.

Herr Glocken was pleased to find Wilhelm Freytag knew nothing of the disturbance. “Odd,” Freytag said, “I saw Dr. Schumann just a few minutes ago, and he said nothing of such a thing.” But he took the cheerful view. “So they are fighting down there already? Good,” he said, “good. What about?”

Herr Glocken did not know. Opinion was divided. People drifted into the bar. Arne Hansen's booming intolerant voice could be heard in English saying to the company assembled in a line on the high stools: “When they are all starving, in rags, shipped like cattle only not with such good care, can you guess what they find to fight about? Religion. My God. They give each other bloody noses because one man kneels and another does not.”

“Maybe religion is the only subject on which they have opinions,” said Mrs. Treadwell, gently whirling her stein of beer to make the foam rise again.

“Ach,” said the purser, next to her, in distress, “please don't whirl your beer. You will spoil it.”

“Sorry,” said Mrs. Treadwell, smiling at him and setting down her stein.

Hansen leaned forward, his pale eyes glaring under his knotted brows. “Opinions? What opinions? What do they know to have opinions about? Only the fat man has opinions and the Captain says he is to be put in irons … so much for the right to opinions among those people.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the purser, “the Captain has said only if the fat man makes more trouble he will—”

“And who is to judge what is trouble?” bawled Hansen.

“Why, the Captain, of course,” said the purser, readily but a little uneasily as if he were dealing with a lunatic. Hansen nodded his head. “Just so,” he agreed, sourly.

“How could anyone have an honest opinion about religion?” intervened David, and Jenny noticed that he spoke with a slight Spanish accent, one of his more irritating habits: pure affectation, she called it, though David denied it bitterly and claimed it was the natural result of speaking Spanish almost constantly for eight years. “All the claims are just prejudice against prejudice; blind feeling fighting for the upper hand.… People love the right to hate each other with moral sanction. The real basis of the religious question is political—”

“Just so,” boomed Hansen. “All is politics, who said otherwise? Who would give a damn what a man's religion was if religion was not part of politics? Who will go to jail in this case? The man who is against religion. Why? Not because he does not like the Church, but because his acts disturb the government. The Church and the government are like
that
!” Hansen held up two fingers pressed together. “He could knock down altars all day and who would care? Nobody, if it was only a question of religion.” He turned his frown upon Freytag as to someone he knew. “Isn't that so?”

Freytag said in a calm reasoning voice: “Perhaps the man whose altar was knocked down might fight for pure religious reasons. His act might be useful to a political party, but his own feelings needn't have any political meaning at all.… I don't suppose either of those fellows could give a reasonable explanation of why they hit each other, but on one side at least I like to think it was something better than politics.” ("Now I really like you!” Jenny said to herself, and hid her pleased face behind her tilted stein.)

“Better?” asked Hansen, and his heavy voice took on reproach and grief. “You think it is better for religion to make dupes of those poor people so that they fight each other instead of fighting their enemies together?”

His sorrow and indignation were real, but their origins so mysterious to his listeners no one could answer him. The purser only clicked his tongue against his teeth several times and wagged a finger at him, shaking his big head with paternal gravity. Hansen ignored him.

Herr Baumgartner spoke up from his table in a voice of deep emotion. “I am a lost soul, perhaps,” he said, “but never would I deny the power of true religion. It is the spiritual source of our civilization, our one hope in eternity. Poor as we may be now, what would we be without it?”

Hansen swung around and glared at Herr Baumgartner under his pale eyebrows. “Which true religion?”

“They are all true,” spoke up Herr Baumgartner, stoutly.

“Oh,” said his wife in a tiny prolonged scream, “
how can you say such a thing?
”

Herr Hansen paid no attention to Frau Baumgartner. “Civilization,” he said, with blunt contempt, “let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!”

Herr Baumgartner flinched and closed his eyes and seemed about to reply; his wife set her lips and nudged him with her toe; he remained silent.

“What about the artist?” asked Jenny, egging him on. “What about him?”

“He comes last, he pretends everything is what it is not, he is a fake,” said Hansen simply, without looking at her. Denny, sitting next to Löwenthal, who kept saying under his breath “Bolshevik, Bolshevik!,” had been very gloomy during this exposition of Hansen's views. He now burst into a loud laugh. Nobody laughed with him. He lapsed into red-faced confusion. “Fakes, ha, that's right,” he said, at random. “Fakes!”

“I'd like to see what is really going on,” said Jenny to Freytag, who had been watching her face. “I think if the fat man is in the brig we ought to picket the Captain and carry banners and make a big day of it …”

Freytag followed her, and they watched the people in the steerage for a while, but nothing was happening beyond the ordinary. Men lolled and played cards on the deck, the women nursed their babies or did their washing, the hot sunlight poured over them, there were no signs of uneasiness.

At the other end of the ship, they found the Lutz family, the Huttens, the Cuban students, and Herr Glocken in a row looking down into the pit, where the canvas covering had been removed from the grating to give light and air to the quarters where the steerage passengers ate. The first table was already spread, a reassuring sight. Thick as flies the people were clustered around huge slabs of boiled ox-brisket, dumplings, bowls of cooked apricots, piles of fresh green onions. They fed in devoted silence, reaching out long arms for the chunks of bread scattered along the white oilcloth. They leaned on their elbows and ate, feeling their strength return, feeling their blood and bones renewing themselves, their hopes coming back, their desire to live rousing once more. The six students lined up and shouted something friendly and barbarous in their unfathomable argot; several of the men turned their faces upward, mouths full, cheeks bulging, and jerked a hand at them, good-naturedly. They were sunken hardened faces, but their eyes were the eyes of tired men who had at last slept and eaten.

The sight-seers moved on, a little bored with relief, their eased minds reflected in their slightly vacuous expressions. Murmuring among themselves like pigeons, the Lutzes and the Huttens and Herr Glocken seemed to be vaguely agreed that to mistreat the poor is not right, and they would be the first to say so, at any time. Therefore they were happy to be spared this unpleasant duty, to have their anxieties allayed, their charitable feelings soothed. Those strange foreign people did not appear to be dangerous; they were obviously not being mistreated at all; on the contrary they were enjoying an excellent dinner; and if there were mischief-makers down there, no one need worry—the Captain would know how to quell them.

Jenny and Freytag lingered, some distance apart, then moved closer and stood together, their hands almost touching on the rail. Last night's absurd scene was between them, and David Scott might again appear at any moment behind them, like a ghost returning to confirm his first suspicions of their guilt, or guilty intentions at least. Freytag's belief in his own innocence took the form of an obscure resentment against Jenny: why did she allow that fellow to carry on like a cad, when he so obviously had no rights over her except such as she chose to allow? Freytag in the depths of his mind believed instinctively in legal rights only; marriage tacitly gave to a man the legal right to abuse his wife up to a certain point, and Freytag took rather for granted that the wife had consented to this state of affairs when she took the marriage vow. All this was fermenting in his brain shapelessly, but he was clear about one thing—a woman who allowed a man to mistreat her when he had no legal right to do so was a fool, or worse. His feeling about Jenny, such as it was, lowered and cooled within a few seconds. Could she be in love with that fellow? It seemed most improbable.

Jenny, leaning far over, searched among the crowd in the shadowy grated pit. “Yes, there he is,” she said, pointing out the fat man, who had changed to a grass-green shirt, “eating away. Not in the brig at all. So our parade is off, what a pity! No injustice has been done, isn't that a shame?” Her manner was entirely candid, her eyes very clear and gay.

“There is injustice, all right,” said Freytag, “but it lies far back and deep down, it is in our grain, incurable—look,” he said earnestly, “if there were not injustice how could we even have the idea of justice? An old lecturer I knew as a boy used to say, We right Wrong, and wrong Right.' It wouldn't have done any good to picket the Captain.”

“Oh, wouldn't it?” cried Jenny. She disagreed with him altogether. She thought he was just sitting down and letting things run over him. Nothing was incurable, not even human nature. And if you waited to get to the root you would never get anywhere. The top surface was quite enough to keep anyone busy! If you wanted things changed—always for the better, of course!—you just kicked over the nearest applecart, spilled the first available bag of beans. She believed warmly and excitedly in strikes, she had been in many of them, they worked; there was nothing more exciting and wonderful than to feel yourself a part of something that worked towards straightening out things—getting decent pay for people, good working conditions, shorter hours—it didn't much matter what. She had picketed dozens of times with just any strikers who happened to need pickets, and she had been in jail several times, and really, it was just a lark! She didn't stay long, anyway. Somebody always came from a mysterious Headquarters with plenty of money, so it was out on bail for everybody and back to the line. She had never held with those hotheads who advised her to bite policemen and kick them in the shins. She had heard gruesome stories of police brutalities to working women, really on strike, on the picket line and in jail, and knowing what she did about people, she could believe it. But she was glad to say she had got along very amiably with her policemen, all of them. She always made conversation and tried to convert them on the way to the station, and they were always quite polite, or at least decent, and impervious. They also knew what they knew and what they believed, and if this picketing stuff wasn't against the law, it ought to be. “And yet,” she said, “some of them were quite nice!”

She might have been a young girl talking about the gay parties of her debutante season. Freytag could not take her seriously. She did not say where or when these things happened, nor precisely how she had happened to be mixed up in them—where had an apparently well-brought-up young girl run into such company?—nor what were the beliefs that led her to such acts. Her light running talk was full of omissions and pauses which she seemed to expect him to fill in from his own experience of such events. He knew nothing whatever about them except from a distance: he had seen police breaking up picket lines before cigarette factories in Mexico and had approved of it thoroughly, waiting until the sidewalk was cleared before going about his own business.

He listened, then, not for what she was saying, for it sounded like childish nonsense, or was repellently hard and careless, he could not decide which; but she was full of feminine gentleness in her little person, harmoniously modeled and sweetly rounded. He realized with acute dismay that she seemed beautiful to him, and he remembered well that on first sight she had certainly struck him as nothing out of the ordinary. Out of his past, out of his restless, seeking sentimental youth before he knew Mary, there rose disturbingly a half dozen faces, dimmed, almost forgotten; none of them beautiful before he loved them, none of them beautiful since, some of them hateful even, but each one unbelievably enchanting for that brief time when he was hot after each in turn, bedeviled and blinded with illusion. It was always true love and it was always going to last forever.…