Ship of Fools (39 page)

Pepe was hard as nails about getting every last peso, franc, dollar, no matter what, from her, because he was saving to open a little place of his own, in Madrid, where Amparo, as long as she lasted, would be the main attraction as dancer; he had often, in a cold still fury, threatened to kill her in such ferocious ways she knew he did not really mean it; but she was saving too. All through the bad times in Mexico, and here on this boat, Amparo was holding back part of her money from Pepe, who would undoubtedly strangle her at least if he knew. But he did not know; and Amparo meant one day to be a star all by herself, traveling everywhere and getting rich and famous like the great Pastora Imperio.

The Captain was increasingly annoyed by the slow drift of rumors that came to his ears he hardly knew how; crosscurrents of gossip he could scarcely realize he had heard at all until in his solitary hours on the bridge they began to move and mingle in his head. The most persistent of these were murmurs about the life of La Condesa in her private stateroom, if private it could be called any longer, with those students making free of it at all times. The Captain turned over rather sourly in his mind the notion of putting a stewardess in there as guard; but he knew well there was no stewardess to spare for such duty. He thought now and then halfheartedly of keeping her confined to her stateroom for the rest of the voyage, but he had no means of doing it short of force, the very idea of which horrified him. He had heard from someone—was it that Frau Rittersdorf? a very strait-laced woman—that La Condesa had been seen clinging in hysteria to Dr. Schumann, who had great trouble in controlling her. Well, Dr. Schumann was her doctor for this occasion, let him take his luck. The Captain could not think it too hard a fate to be embraced and wept upon by a beautiful noble lady, no matter how hysterical. When the Captain had asked Dr. Schumann, as discreetly as he was able, how his patient was doing, Dr. Schumann said, “Very well indeed. She has decided to keep to her bed for a few days. She is reading.”

The Captain hoped he concealed his surprise. “Reading? She? What, I wonder?”

“
Romans policiers
,” said the Doctor. “The students bring them to her from the ship's library. She tells me there is a fine collection on board.”

The Captain said, in some pique, “I cannot imagine how they came there, unless they were left by passengers.”

“Possibly,” said Dr. Schumann. “I am grateful to whoever did leave them. She was very overwrought the other evening, and I have decided to put her on a régime. She reads her detective and murder mysteries, then she plays chess with one or another of those students, and I give her a sedative at night.… I am much more hopeful of her condition than I was.”

The Captain said warily, “Then you think the presence of the students at all hours does not upset her nerves?”

“For some mysterious reason,” said the Doctor, “they amuse her. They are rowdy, noisy, disrespectful, ignorant—”

“I have heard them mention Nietzsche, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,” said the Captain, “in those loud discussions at table.”

“Oh yes,” said the Doctor, “they have all been to the University.”

The Captain occasionally invited the Doctor for an afternoon coffee or an after-dinner schnapps in his quarters, and a little pleasant, if always reserved, conversation with one whom he could, in a way, regard as an equal. The Captain did not really care for the society of his equals—he got on best looking down his nose, or up under his brows. He had hoped to find the Doctor a source of information as to any disorders or strangenesses among the passengers, which he himself would hardly have occasion or opportunity to observe. For example, it appeared that an odd thing had occurred—nobody's fault, he supposed, unless the purser's, and yet! no, not even his … the first time in his whole experience as a seafaring man, indeed, the first time in his whole life, so far as he could know, he believed that he was sitting daily at the same table with a Jew. Had Dr. Schumann, by any chance, heard anything about this?

Dr. Schumann said easily that yes, he had heard something of the sort two or three days ago, but from a source he considered very unreliable; his tone seemed to say, “The ladies, God bless them, of course, but don't listen to them.” He did not even have to restrain himself from saying he was not in the least concerned whether Freytag was a Jew or not, and that he thought the whole question beneath contempt. He regarded the unbridled expression of opinion on all topics and at all times as mere self-indulgence, if not actually the mark of a mischievous nature. Also Dr. Schumann had been all over this rather dreary subject many times before with too many persons long before he had come on this ship, and he was a little tired of it; he no longer felt able to fight with those strange senseless states of mind, as shapeless and uncapturable and real as smoke.

The Captain understood the Doctor's detachment as his professional unwillingness to take sides: after all, everybody on board was his potential patient, he could not choose any on personal grounds. Yet tactfully as he could, he hinted to the Doctor that in his special situation he must learn a great deal about all sorts of persons. “Priests, lawyers, doctors,” he said, cordially, “how many secrets must be unloaded on you! I don't envy you, really,” and the hint was rather broad that the Doctor would find a way to pass on to the Captain any scandals, queernesses, indecorums which might need to be corrected. The Doctor did not pretend to misunderstand: he simply ignored the suggestion, amiably refused a second cup of coffee, shifted the topic almost imperceptibly, and very soon took his leave. The Captain, newly flushed, uneasy, irritable, resolved that no later than tomorrow he would proceed to settle this dubious and unbecoming state of affairs, whatever it was. The Doctor had left with him an uncomfortable impression that he, the Captain, was listening to women's gossip. Well, this was a question to be settled strictly between men, and the first thing to be done was to get the women out of it, and keep them out. The unsavory fact remained that women had started the whole thing: that American Mrs. Treadwell had told Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker some confidence she had got from Herr Freytag, and Lizzi had told Herr Rieber, who had passed it about freely until it had come to the ears of the Captain, who now, as a matter of social duty and his own dignity, must at once take steps. He shook his head as if in a swarm of gnats, and decided to dine alone that evening.

Freytag was a few minutes late to the dinner table. Everybody was present except the Captain; Dr. Schumann conveyed the Captain's regrets to his guests for his unavoidable absence, which were received in form. Freytag slipped into his chair with a smiling nod of greeting all around, which was returned not so smilingly—or was it his own state of nervous exasperation which caused him to imagine all these rather dull strangers were looking at him with a kind of furtive curiosity, except Dr. Schumann, whose air of benevolent detachment was beginning to annoy Freytag somewhat, as being a little patronizing; and Frau Hutten, who gazed in her plate, as usual.

The steward presented him with the appetizer, Westphalian ham folded delicately beside a slice of melon. He shook his head, and the steward asked, “What would you like instead, sir? Smoked salmon? Herring in sour cream?”

“Either will do nicely,” said Freytag. “The herring.”

Herr Professor Hutten, observing Herr Freytag's lack of conformity in choice of food, as usual, remarked almost absent-mindedly, as if his thoughts had taken off from some very distant point of origin: “The condition of Jewishness offers to the Western, more especially the Christian, mind an endless study in spiritual and moral contradictions, together with a mysterious and powerful emotional and psychological cohesiveness. Nothing can equal the solidarity of the Jew when attacked from the outside, by the heathen, as they say; nothing can exceed the bitterness of their rivalries in every field among themselves. I have asked many in all scholarly seriousness and philosophical detachment, ‘Tell me, please—what is a Jew?' and not one of them has been able to give me an answer. They call themselves a race, yet that is absurd. They are just a tiny fragment of a branch of the white race, like ourselves!”

“Oh, not Nordic!” squealed Lizzi, “not that! Since when?”

“Are they Hamitic then?” answered the Professor, turning upon her witheringly.” “Mongolic? Or Ethiopic?”

“They are everything, utter mongrels to the last degree, from every dregs of every race and nation!” said Herr Rieber, suddenly losing his merry temper and turning quite scarlet. “And so they were from the beginning of time …”

“In that sense,” said Wilhelm Freytag, putting down his fork, “we are all mongrels by now, I expect …”

“Oh, speak for yourself, dear Herr Freytag,” said Frau Rittersdorf, and she leaned forward to smile at him with her teeth closed. “But I am astounded. How can you, a German of the purest type, blond, tall, gray-eyed—”

“… and I ask them, ‘What is a Jew?' and I ask them, ‘Are you a nation?'—No.—A race?—No.—Are you then only a religion?—No.—Do you practice your religion, do you observe dietary laws? No.” Herr Professor Hutten raised his voice and chanted, silencing Frau Rittersdorf and forging on determinedly to his little joke, which he would not be denied. “So then, I ask them—and I would have you remember that I choose only those who could easily have been mistaken for pure Germans, anywhere—I ask them, ‘On what grounds then do you call yourself a Jew?' And without a single exception, every one of them said with perfect obstinacy, ‘Still, in spite of all, I
am
a Jew!'—So then, I say to them, ‘Ah, so! it is clear that Jewishness is a state of mind!'” He beamed under the approving smiles of his hearers.

“It is their claim of Chosenness that annoys me,” said Frau Rittersdorf. “It makes God look so stupid, don't you think?”

There was a shocked silence, as if no one dared to deal with this mixture of good sense and something too near blasphemy for comfort. Frau Rittersdorf instantly perceived her mistake and tried to right it. “I only mean,” she began, “I—I—”

Herr Professor Hutten rushed to her rescue kindly. “That mistaken idea, born of tribal vanity, is of such an extreme antiquity I think we may safely say it was a most primitive kind of god who chose that peculiar people. Or rather, let us say more precisely that they chose him—not an ignoble concept at the time,” he added, generously, “when we consider the nature of certain other gods equally ancient. By comparison at least, on the whole Old Jahweh does not come out so badly.”

“You are right!” cried Herr Rieber, swallowing and wiping his mouth. “It was Jahweh who chose the Jews, and he can have them—”

“Imagine a handful of people, a few little millions among nearly two billion others, having such impudence!” cried Lizzi. “I think it is that makes me most furious. Besides their manners, their tricks, their—”

“The divinely inspired truth of a God of Justice, Mercy, and Grace, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the great truth which Christianity brought to the world,” began Herr Professor Hutten, by now faintly discouraged, “proves …”

Frau Rittersdorf, while conscious of the social inferiority of Herr Rieber, yet in justice, swallowing her prejudice, agreed with him. “You are right, Herr Rieber,” she said, with condescension. “It is only their god who chose them, we must remember. We are under no obligation to emulate his poor taste …”

“I am not interested in the religious question,” said Herr Rieber, who never dreamed that Frau Rittersdorf was condescending, “I am anxious only that the German nation, the bloodstream of our race, shall be cleansed of their poison.”

“But you are a real anti-Semite!” cried little Frau Schmitt, suddenly, as if frightened. “I don't know any Jews, but I don't dislike them—”

“I am not an anti-Semite at all,” said Herr Rieber, contentiously. “How can you say that? I am very fond of the Arabs, I lived among them once and found them very good people …”

Frau Rittersdorf turned her smile upon Dr. Schumann. “You have said nothing, dear Doctor! What do you think about Jews?”

Dr. Schumann said mildly and precisely, “I have nothing to say against them. I believe that we worship the same God.”

“But Doctor,” said Lizzi, leaning forward and waving her head, “you are a Catholic, are you not? Do not Catholics worship the Virgin Mary first, and then God?”

“No,” said Dr. Schumann, crossing his knife and fork in the form of an x, laying down his napkin carefully, and rising without emphasis. “Allow me to be excused, if you please,” he said, and left them.

“He is subject to heart attacks,” said Frau Hutten to her husband. “Do you suppose we should send to inquire after him?”

“He is a doctor,” said the Herr Professor, “he does not need our attentions or advice.”

“Schumann,” said Rieber, pouting his underlip, “is that not a Jewish name?”

“There is no such thing as a Jewish name in the German,” said Herr Professor Hutten, who seemed a little on edge and spoke rather abruptly, for him. He observed that Herr Freytag had sat in stiff silence throughout the talk, now and then moving a morsel on his plate from one point to another with his fork, but not eating; and his face was so fixed and pale one might suspect oncoming seasickness. “There are only German names adopted by Jews in medieval times and later, when they decided to drop their ancient style—Isaac ben Abraham, let's say—a good old custom, and a pity they abandoned it; and these by lineal descent have become associated with Jewish families. Schumann is one of them, and Freytag, may I venture, is another. Is that not so, Herr Freytag?” He spoke directly across the table, unexpectedly, and Freytag raised cold gray furious eyes. “Have you never been troubled by discovering Jewish branches of your old German family name?”