Ship of Fools (37 page)

“Isn't all business low?” asked Mrs. Treadwell, turning again, and yawning. “Doesn't everybody cheat?”

“Oh, Mrs. Treadwell, that is the way the old-fashioned socialists talk; all business is graft and corruption. No, not at all! In Germany at least, it is only the Jews. That is what is the matter with German business and finance, Herr Rieber was saying only last evening, at dinner.”

“It must be wonderful to have intellectual companionship,” said Mrs. Treadwell, sweetly, in German.

Lizzi turned upon her the eyes of puzzled, dawning suspicion. Mrs. Treadwell's eyes were closed, her features looked quite innocent.

“Oh yes, naturally,” said Lizzi, after a stiff pause. Then, “You have really such an American accent I could hardly understand you at first. The best German of course is spoken in my own city of Hanover; you were never in Hanover, I imagine?”

“Only in Berlin,” said Mrs. Treadwell, patiently.

“Oh, you will never learn good German if you go only to Berlin,” said Lizzi, oiling her hands freely and drawing on a pair of large soiled cotton gloves “Perhaps you cannot hear the difference, but for example, Frau Rittersdorf for all her airs and graces speaks a vile Münchener accent; the Captain speaks Berliner style, atrocious; the purser speaks Plattdeutsch, the worst of all except some of those sailors from up around Königsberg who talk like mere Baltic peasants!”

Mrs. Treadwell's head swam slowly, the darkness behind her lids was full of fiery sparks. What she wanted to hear, God let her live to hear again, was Parisian in every street and alley and
place
and park and terrace in Paris, all of it, from Montmartre to Boulevard St. Honoré to St.-Germain-des-Prés to Ménilmontant; from the students on Mont-Ste.-Geneviève to the children in the Luxembourg—the speech of Paris, and in every accent from the Haute Savoie and the Midi to Rouen and Marseille. She wished she might be unconscious until she got there, she wished she might sleep the voyage out or be dead drunk all the way. Would that bloodcurdling voice go on all night?

“Even Herr Rieber,” said the voice, now coming from the berth above, “even he comes from Mannheim and his accent is a little provincial—only a little.”

The sounds came nearer, and Mrs. Treadwell opened her eyes to see the shadowy little nubbin of a head waving like a cobra's in the air over the berth side, the face a blur dropping its words with mincing elegance, Hanover style. “As for that high and mighty Herr Wilhelm Freytag, he prides himself on his Oxford English, but as for his German—well, it is hard to explain, but he has some odd little turns of speech, not really German. Also, words, perfectly proper in meaning, you will understand, but in a dreadful dialect … Herr Rieber says he thinks it is Yiddish, can you imagine? And it is true, he does not eat pork in any form, nor oysters.… When we speak of Jews we have observed a certain expression on his face. It is not the right expression for a good German. And so in a word, Herr Rieber and I think—and we are not the only ones—that he is a Jew.
And at the Captain's table
! Could anything be more scandalous?”

“Easily,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “many things. I can think of a great number in fact.” Through her maze of wine and sleep and boredom she suddenly came wide-awake, feeling thoroughly competent to clear up at least one small area of confusion in this woman's afflicted mind, senseless and restless as a caged monkey's. “You are entirely wrong. It is Herr Freytag's wife who is Jewish, not he. He told me this himself. He is very much in love with her. So you see,” she said, sweetly, with satisfaction, “you are in no danger of contamination.”

“He told you this himself?” asked Lizzi in a shocked hoarse whisper. “You are on such terms with him? Well!—may I ask you one little question. Do you like Jews?”

“Not particularly,” said Mrs. Treadwell, watching the porthole swimming like a blue globe filled with the dark, hypnotic sky. “Should I? Is there something about them?”

“
Should
you? Oh, my dear Frau Treadwell, how amusing you can be, like a little child,” cried Lizzi, and she fetched up two nervous hiccups to prove it. “Oh, you Americans who go through the world and never understand anything! Should you? Oh, what can you mean?” Waiting, head cocked for an answer, she heard at last a sigh of resigned weariness from the berth below. After which, the silence continued until morning.

After dinner Captain Thiele, still unsettled in his midriff and full of generalized, unsatisfied indignations, took a ceremonial, solitary tour of the main deck. He had said a short grace before soup and then sat in bitter patience waiting for the others to finish eating, successfully concealing, he hoped, his disgust at the gluttonous spectacle his guests were making of themselves. A breath of fresh air was what he needed before turning in early.

The unexpected and therefore annoying sounds of singing, and dancing, or rather a rhythmic thumping of feet, brought the Captain to the stern overlooking the steerage deck. Those people down there who had still seemed half-dead that very morning were now, he decided, showing a touch too much spirit. They had fetched from their abject bundles not clothing or household gear, of course not, thought the Captain with deepened contempt; but battered guitars and decrepit accordions, and numerous worn leather dice boxes and ragged packs of cards. The women and children, dark and shapeless as heaps of refuse, had moved back into a closely massed circle, in perfect silence; the old men were seated in another circle in front of them; and the center was a varied sports arena.

Graceful, light-boned, underfed boys, who the Captain admitted grudgingly seemed to have some sort of training in the art, wrestled among themselves so lightly it was more like dancing; but they were urged on as if it were a blood-combat with impassioned cries from the witnesses and beseechments to murder each other, and at once!

Older men danced strange outlandish dances in a ring, or facing each other in two lines; creaky in the joint, stiffened in the foot, yet they raised their heads and chests proudly and moved together with the rhythm and incessancy of a drumbeat, their faces solemn. Still others crouched over their slow, fatal gambling games, each man putting down his greasy card as if his head went with it, tossing the dice as if his life were on the cast; and each man bet what he had, from a frayed neckcloth to a packet of matches.

Little boys who knew better than to open their mouths were allowed to sit in front of the women, but at a respectful distance from their elders to observe and take serious notes on the conduct becoming to the state of manhood. Harsh toneless voices were raised in songs of despair almost beyond lamentation, while the sweet-toned guitars mocked them with their frivolous, heartbreaking irony; occasional boot heels tapped and rattled and cackled and clacked like gossip on market day.

The Captain, whose favorite composer was Schumann, and who admitted no dance but the true Viennese waltz to his graces, felt his ear and his nervous system being most impudently imposed upon; for there was, no doubt about it, something strange in those savage rhythms that moved the blood even against all efforts of the will; indeed, he recognized it for what it was, the perpetual resistance of the elemental forces of darkness and disorder against the very spirit of civilization—that great Germanic force of life in which—and the Captain began to feel a little more cheerful—in which Science and Philosophy moved hand in hand ruled by Christianity. Gazing downward, he despised these filthy cattle, as he should; yet, viewing the scene as a whole, he could not but in all fairness admit there was a kind of shapeliness and order in it; not even his rightly censorious eye could find any real harm, other than the harm of allowing such people any liberties at all; and harm of some sort was naturally, constantly latent in any human situation. It was possible that the spirits of the rabble in the steerage had been elevated by liquor. A limited quantity of beer had been made available for sale to them, though with what coin they were supposed to buy it, the Captain could not imagine. He had been told that not a man in the lot had more than ten Cuban pesos on him. Still, rumors had gone abroad, after the fight at Mass, that the fat man who had started the row was not only a labor agitator and atheist, but an unlawful seller of hard drink; he was said to have brought on board at Havana a large supply of a vile cane-juice concoction, you could hardly call it rum; and was dispensing it secretly and cheaply, hoping to attract followers and disciples. A search for this contraband ended in failure; perhaps the rumor had been only that, the Captain decided. Still it boded no good for these creatures, little better than four-footed animals—indeed it was a question whether they were not lower—to be showing so much energy all at once. The voyage was still new, Santa Cruz de Tenerife seemed a long way off; in fine, it always disturbed the Captain, annoyed him, put him off, to see the lower classes enjoying themselves; and never more so than in his own steerage. The premonitions of the day suddenly returned to him full force—this was no time for rosy optimism. Glancing at his watch, he decided on a reasonable step. His order given from the bridge was passed on until it came to the right man, who put out the lower deck lights, except for the essential two, fore and aft, two hours earlier than the usual time.

This measure did not have the desired effect at once; the people in the steerage were not used to lamps in the evening. They had played cards by moonlight often, it was not the first time they had danced by the light of the stars. The still-weary, more delicate ones gave way at last and slept, face downward on the edge of the crowd. A few mothers sighed with relief, sank limply into their canvas deck chairs, and shifted the weight of their babies to more restful positions. Gradually there was less shouting, and more singing, lower-toned; at last only the plaintive notes of the guitars, like sleepy birds in a far-off wood.

This died away; and a small group gathered around a bony, shambling shape with the loose weathered clothes of a scarecrow, his
boina
pulled to a rakish tilt over one jutting ear. He opened his great toothless mouth in his furrowed narrow face and lantern jaw, and began to sing improvised couplets on words suggested to him by his audience. They cleared a good circle for him, and clapped their hands as he sang a wandering tune in a strong deep voice, head bent, eyes fixed on his own feet. Someone would call out a theme, or word; he would mutter to himself for a moment, then break into a long cry, sing his verse, and wind up with a slow, flatfooted dance, backwards and forwards, stamping to the rhythm of the accompanying hands. His listeners would shriek for joy and shout merry double meanings at him, which he would pick up and improve upon.

This performance went on and on; and the young officer whose duty it was, and who had been peering down upon this scene as into a bear pit, decided that, until further orders, he could safely ignore the whole thing. Though his naval training and the practice of his vocation rested securely on the dogma that disobedience to his superior officer equaled disobedience to God—and was considerably more dangerous—still, in the farthest, deepest, darkest, most suppressed reaches of his being, there lay vast quicksands of reservations which now took partial form in a fleeting, heinous thought: the Captain took alarm at some very odd things and a little too easily? And he had a somehow amusing vision of the Captain breaking into a sweat at the thought of those harmless poor devils in steerage.

In this moment he noticed some night-prowling first-class passengers, and took himself off with the speed and silence of a ghost. He had got a bellyful of passengers for that day. These particular ones had no designs on him, if only he could have known—Jenny Brown and the Huttens with their bulldog Bébé; Jenny fighting restlessness and anxiety, the Huttens and Bébé fighting seasickness and insomnia; all looking for relief from themselves and from each other in the fresh winds from the sea and the lulling darkness. To the young officer it was not so much a matter of fleeing their designs to intrude upon his privacy, his few free moments of solitude in a long crowded day—though that was a never-absent threat. It was their mere presence he had learned by experience to deplore, to resent, and to avoid by flight whenever possible. He had no use for male landlubbers; he found his right and proper friendships with young officers of his own rank and class; and as for women traveling alone, he feared them, for no matter how amiable they might seem at first, if they once grappled they developed claws like a crab's. He realized that all this was quarreling with his bread and butter. Ship's passengers were like that, just hopelessly what they were and no help for it; and if they refused to sail on his wretched ship—for he was ashamed of the honest
Vera
, and schemed constantly to get a better berth—his noble calling, as he had once been taught to regard it, could not even survive. But the fact remained, he detested the very sight of passengers, all sorts: there was no point in pretending anything else.

Yet there was on board a rather prettyish American woman of maybe forty, a Mrs. Treadwell, who looked nice enough. He had begun little by little to feel a certain friendliness towards her, and he knew why—she had never even glanced at him, she did not know he was alive. That was the way he liked his women passengers: not like that high-smelling Spanish woman who kept trying to corner him. He was engaged to be married and glad of it, to a girl he had known all his life who would never be able to surprise him, or so he hoped; there should be some safe place to go when a man is on land. What he did not know, could not have imagined, and would have been displeased to know, was that Jenny and the Huttens were also entirely unaware of his existence. Indifference and reserve were his prerogatives—not theirs.

At this unexpected encounter, Frau Hutten was disposed to be a little more friendly to the American girl who, no matter what she said or did—indeed, even when just sitting silent with her hands folded—would always seem odd, unaccountable, unacceptable to her; but her natural amiability would not be suppressed altogether. After all, as her husband had reassured her earlier in the evening, this voyage was a thing that would end. Jenny was all sympathy for the family seasickness.