Ship of Fools (38 page)

“It is nothing much, our own indisposition—but ah, our poor Bébé,” said Frau Hutten. “First he is a little better, and then he is worse,” she said in wonder, as if this phenomenon were entirely outside nature. Jenny showed no surprise but leaned over and patted Bébé between the ears. As she straightened up, she glanced right and left, and saw, first, David seeming to lurk on one side of the deck, while Herr Glocken, approaching from the other side, obviously had seen them and was hurrying to join them. Jenny tried to pretend to herself that she had not seen either of them, or rather, that it did not concern her.

Herr Glocken, suffering more than usual, drowsy and dazed with his narcotic but unable to sleep, drew near them hopefully as if he expected some sort of relief and help from them. They all greeted him pleasantly, and when he said that such air and such a sea and such moonlight should never be wasted in sleep—“Above all,” agreed Jenny, “in such stuffy little dens.” Out of curiosity Herr Glocken turned his attention to Jenny, for that strange young man David Scott, her lover, had treated her much more like a wife or a sister than a mistress: he had never once mentioned her to his cabin mates. While he spread his arms and rested his chin on the railing, Jenny repeated that one should never waste moonlight in sleep anywhere, especially not on a ship—above all not in the Atlantic … She had never voyaged anywhere except in the Caribbean, among the summer islands, and to Mexico; didn't he find the Atlantic much more impressive? The very ship seemed to know she was in bigger waters, and was sometimes playful as a dolphin, et cetera, et cetera; she babbled on as if talking to herself, now and then glancing away, to her left. Herr Glocken understood easily that she was not talking to him, that she was not going to let him say a word, nor would she say anything to him that could possibly call for an answer at any future time; so when she paused for breath, he said, “Ah, yes, quite, Mees Brown,” in English; and Jenny, turning to look at him, realized what she had done when she saw the dwarfish shape make her a bow, with a slight click of the heels, and swing away without hesitation.

“Oh, I am afraid I hurt his feelings!” she said almost in a whisper to Frau Hutten, who drew away and seemed confused. Herr Professor Hutten intervened with words of reassurance. “You need not distress yourself too much, my dear Fräulein,” he said, addressing her kindly over the slightly bowed head of his wife. “Persons with incurable physical defects, especially of a congenital nature, invariably and always show an excessive sensibility to the attitudes of others, more particularly in situations of a social character, and peculiarly so in all that concerns the other sex … you can hardly avoid wounding such persons at one time or another, no matter how unintentionally.…”

“I just didn't want him near me,” said Jenny, almost in tears. “I have a kind of horror of him!”

“I should think he'd be used to that by now,” said Frau Hutten, gently. She tightened the leash on Bébé, took her husband's arm, and said, as they moved away slowly, “Ah, well, we must try again to sleep a little! Good night.”

“Good night,” said Jenny, noticing for the first time that Frau Hutten limped slightly. Jenny felt a little pang of fright: had Frau Hutten been born to a limp, or was it an accident? And she thought she must be changing in some evil way: she had never been repelled by deformity, or any affliction, before. What was happening to her? And did David think she was flirting with Herr Glocken, as well as with Herr Freytag, and for that matter, anything on board ship in trousers? She walked slowly in the direction where she had last seen David, meaning if she saw him to put her arms around his neck and kiss him and say, “Good night, darling,” for she could not in the least control her terrible rushes of tenderness for him. But resolutely she left the deck and walked through the ship and down the long corridor to her cabin, hoping that Elsa was safely asleep.

David, after his appalled glimpse of Jenny and the new company she appeared to be keeping, went back to his cabin, lay down in his clothes, turned out his light, and crossed his hands palm upwards loosely over his eyes. Who wouldn't she take up with, he wondered. She'd run off with just anybody—if a band passed playing in the street, she'd fall in step and march with them … would say just anything she pleased to the merest stranger—did she ever really see a stranger? Listens to just anybody, as interested in the idlest silliest chatter as she is in the most intelligent talk—more so, damn it! Can't pass a beggar without handing out; her house full of stray cats and dogs—given away at last, when she left, to people who didn't want them. She would sit and listen with an eager look to that big dull Elsa mumbling along—as if Elsa were telling the most marvelous thing in the world. Get out and picket with strikers without even asking what they were striking for, or even where they worked. “Tobacco factory, I think,” she said one night, when he came in and found her very exhausted, in bed drinking hot milk. “I lost five pounds today,” she told him, bragging.

“Whatever for?” he asked. “For fun,” she said, not bothering to try to explain anything to him. Yet there had been a time when he felt so close, so nearly identified with Jenny, so tenderly in love with her, she could have done anything with him, have made him understand anything no matter how preposterous: or so he believed now; and why had she refused to become that part of him which was missing, which would have made him whole—why had she been so strange and wild and made their life together so impossible? It occurred to him bitterly for the first time that, in fact, Jenny seemed to get along on the simplest terms with anybody, everybody, but himself. The notion, too, of that Glocken prying into his private affairs, getting on terms with Jenny, made his blood run cold. He was astonished to find that he disliked Glocken intensely. God knew what Jenny would say to him, what impression he would get of her; he could imagine Glocken turning a low, mean opinion of Jenny over in his warped little mind—

The light flashed on and there was Herr Glocken, grinning like a complacent gnome. “Ah, awake still?” he asked, and added almost at once in what David took to be an intolerably intimate tone: “I cannot rest until I tell you what an entirely charming young lady your fiancée is … We talked a little on deck just now,” he said. “She is delightful.”

David had a singular gift of hardening instantly into silence that extended long after the speaker had ceased to expect an answer, expressing disapproval and disagreement in terms much stronger than words. The air of the cabin froze with this silence now as David rose, undressed deliberately—though omitting to wash his teeth as being an act too ridiculous to perform before this detested stranger—put out his light again and turned his face to the wall, every nerve humming and every fiber dancing in outrage. It was long before he gave way and slept, in his sleep contracting convulsively again and again; but longer still for Herr Glocken, bewildered, stung, mystified. He had thought that being on speaking terms with Jenny, even though she had snubbed him so rudely—who need ever know that?—would have meant a pleasant friendship with her lover. He had felt very elegant and worldly and correct in substituting the French “fiancée” for the less musical if more exact German word he had in mind; but everything had gone wrong between him and these young people, and he must be more careful. He had not known many Americans, and those only in Mexico; he could never make them out, nor had he tried particularly. But these had seemed a little different, because they spoke Spanish and were obviously living in a Bohemian style. Just the same she was an attractive young woman, no matter about her poor manners, and Herr Glocken wondered what she could see in that cranky, bad-tempered young man. Finally he slept. In the morning, feeling very poorly, he asked Herr Denny, by name, please to hand him his medicine.

The sailors were out again washing down the decks, which rolled gently as the
Vera
set out resolutely for the Canaries, with only a head or two looking out of her portholes to watch the eternal love affair between the moon and the sea. Pepe, again turned out of his stateroom for Arne Hansen, began to look at his watch, deciding that even for the money, Amparo was giving the fellow too much time. She had done that before, with other men, often, and no amount of beating had cured her of the habit. However, he would try it again, but not until they landed at Vigo, where she could scream as much as she liked without attracting attention. He stepped tiptoe around the sailors' buckets and brushes, and stood on the coping of the deck rail looking into the steerage deck. Everybody seemed to be settled down and sound asleep; the very sight caused him to yawn heavily. Some of them lay stretched in canvas chairs, some were flattened out on hard bare benches, others were curled like snails in hammocks. One man in blue overalls lay stretched crosswise in his hammock, his head hanging over one side, his great crooked dirty bare feet over the other. Pepe knew all of them well, he was an Asturian, and just like them; yes, there were times when he even felt kinship with an Andalusian, but not with any of those down there! If he had been as stupid as they, he would have been sleeping among them or in the fleas and lice of some hovel in Spain. He shuddered fiercely as if a snake had crawled over his bare foot. All those shouting, singing, dancing, fighting, cursing Asturians as he remembered the people of his childhood, now lay, most of them, among the quieter Andalusians and Canary Islanders, in the attitudes of well-disposed corpses; under the ghostly white moonlight, the muffling sheets gave them the look of bodies waiting to be taken to the morgue. Pepe selected the man hanging at both ends out of his hammock and deftly flicked his lighted cigarette into the folds of dry cloth which muffled his middle. That might wake him up!

Three shapes sprang instantly to their feet, and one of them, the huge fat man Pepe remembered as singing like a bull, found the cigarette and ground it between his fingers. He shook his fist at the slender figure above still leaning over the rail. “
Cabrón
!” he shouted furiously in his comic Mexican accent, even as he recognized one of the pimps he had seen floating about on the day of sailing. He changed his tone to a heavy jeer. “
Puto
!” he said. “Come down here and we'll—”

Then others woke and joined in, making a clamor. Pepe, glancing back uneasily, saw that the sailors had heard the noise. One of them was coming toward him, of course not threateningly, but solidly, calmly, striding like a horse, just in line of duty to find out what was going on. Pepe stepped off the coping and sailed gracefully as a swan but much faster in the opposite direction.

He found Amparo brushing her tangled hair, her lipstick badly smeared over her bitten-looking mouth, and the lower berth was in a tumble as usual. “Well?” he said. In sulky silence she nodded backward. He picked up one of the stale-smelling pillows and found the firm green notes there. “More dollars, good,” he said, smoothing them out and counting them.

Amparo frowned and said, “They are not so easy to get, let me tell you. That fellow keeps saying, ‘Five dollars more for one more time!' and he wants his money's worth.” She turned the tap in the basin.

“What are you doing?” asked Pepe, beginning to undress.

“I'm going to wash,” she said, still frowning. “I'm filthy.”

“Don't be too long about it,” he said, and at his tone as at a signal she shivered a little, her flesh rippled with excitement. She soaped a cloth and began washing herself and he watched without curiosity, yet following her hands intently as they moved over her body. He stripped to the skin and lay down.

“You were a good while at it,” he said, “even for the money.”

“Let me alone,” she said, “I've told you how it is.”

“Let you alone?” he asked, smiling. He got up very swiftly and quietly and gave her a solid openhanded blow on the flat of her shoulder blade where it would sting but not bruise. Then he grabbed her by the nape of the neck with one hand and shook her hard, his other hand stroking down her spine and ending with a blow of his fist. Her eyelids drooped, her mouth became full and moist, her nipples stiffened. “Now hurry,” he said.

“I won't hurry,” she said with bitter coquetry, powdering herself with a very dirty eiderdown puff. “I'm tired.”

“Not too much of that,” he said, taking the puff and tossing it away. “So you let him have everything did you, pouring your stuff down the gutter again? Do you want me to break every bone in you?”

“He is just an ox,” she said. “What do you take me for?”

She was standing near the berth. Seizing her by one wrist, with a light turn of his arm he threw her off balance and she fell easily full length upon him. Their supple dancers' legs writhed together for a moment like a nest of snakes. They sniffed, nibbled, bit, licked and sucked each other's flesh with small moans of pleasure, exploring for odors and savors and sensations in all its parts, their bodies going obediently through a repertory as complicated as a ballet, in the rhythms of a slow-motion film. He never wished to make love to her except when she had just come from another man, full of strange smells and heats, roused and disturbed, ready for him and his special ways with her. Since she had known him he was the only man who could please her in the least, and to please her she had only to let him please himself. She saved herself like a miser in the dull plungings and poundings of those men who were her business, and spent herself upon Pepe, who was tricky as a monkey and as coldly long-lasting as a frog. Pepe beat her often, for jealousy, he said, when he suspected her of some feeling for another man. But often after he beat her the hardest he made love to her for hours afterwards until it would seem their bones would dissolve in delicious exhaustion. He could beat her as much as he pleased, for she never tired of the pleasures he gave her.