Ship of Fools (49 page)

Never before had he encountered a woman who would not let herself be overcome properly at the correct moment: her intuition should tell her when! In despair, his jaw by now benumbed, his eyes wandered as if seeking help. The half-darkness showed a white blotch which proved to be the motionless form of Bébé, who had found the Hutten cabin door ajar, and had wandered aimlessly alone until at last he stood there not three feet away from them, openly gazing.

“Lizzi, my dearest,” gasped Herr Rieber, “Lizzi, the dog!”

His agonized tone brought Lizzi out of her carnivorous trance. Her teeth parted, she breathed “Where?” Herr Rieber snatched his face out of her reach. Her arms loosened and he seized her wrists, at the same time rolling over until he was at least lying beside her. At last by a series of resolute disentangling movements, for now Lizzi seemed quite inert in his hands, he brought them both to a sitting position once more.

Bébé, balanced on his bowed legs and wavering slightly with the roll of the ship, the folds of his nose twitching, regarded them with an expression of animal cunning that most embarrassingly resembled human knowledge of the seamy side of life. Plainly he could see what they were up to, their intentions were no secret from him, but because of their strange shapes, and the weird sounds they made, he was puzzled—puzzled, and somewhat repelled. Indeed he was not at all sympathetic.

“Go away, get out,” commanded Herr Rieber, in as deep a growl as Bébé himself could have fetched up; but because Bébé wore a hairy hide and was on all fours he was therefore sacred, there was no question of using sterner measures. Herr Rieber was the soul of sensibility on this question: as a child, he had cried his eyes out on seeing a horse fall in the icy street, tangled in his harness, prisoner to a beer truck. He wanted to beat, to kill the cruel driver who had let him fall. No tenderness could exceed Herr Rieber's for the entire brute kingdom—indeed, he still believed hanging too good for any person who abused even the humblest member of that mystical world. When for the most unavoidable reasons of discipline he was forced to beat his own dogs, his heart almost broke, every time. He spoke now to Bébé in his most wheedling tone. “Go away, there's a good doggie,” he said, looking around hopefully for something weighty to throw at him. “Good doggie!”

Lizzi began to laugh uncontrollably, her head between her hands. “Ah hahaha,” she uttered in a voice thin as a twanging wire. Bébé went away then in silence, padding softly on his big feet, dismissed but not minding, full of his own business. He had ruined the occasion, though. Herr Rieber had not the heart to take up again at this perhaps more promising point with a now somewhat chastened Lizzi. He contented himself with taking her hands and saying soothingly, “No, no—there now, there!” She scrambled to her feet talking incoherently, gave Herr Rieber a weak little poke in the chest, and ran ahead of him down the steps without looking back. Herr Rieber followed but more slowly, thoughtfully fingering his jaw. He must not for a moment admit discouragement. After all, this was only another woman—there
must
be a way, and he would find it. He thought with some envy of the ancient custom of hitting them over the head as a preliminary—not enough to cause injury, of course, just a good firm tap to stun the little spirit of contradiction in them.

Earlier in that evening at dinner, Herr Professor Hutten, still lacking his proper appetite, barely refrained from pushing away his loaded plate, rising and seeking fresh air; but his wife was eating well, and though the sight was faintly repugnant to him, still that was no good reason for interrupting her. The other guests seemed as usual, the Doctor amiably silent, Herr Rieber and Fräulein Lizzi exuding their odious atmosphere of illicit intimacy, Frau Schmitt unremarkable as ever; only Frau Rittersdorf was chatting away lightly in the direction of the Captain—a frivolous woman, with what a vanity at her age!—and even if Herr Professor Hutten had no hope of hearing anything in the least edifying or enlightening, he listened in the wan hope of some distraction from his inner unease.

Frau Rittersdorf noted his attention, saw the other faces beginning to take on a listening look; without loosing her hold on the attention of Captain Thiele, she turned clever glances upon the others and raised her voice a little to include them in the circle of those who had been lately amused or annoyed or both with the antics of the zarzuela company and their
outré
notions of the etiquette of social occasions on shipboard—if such a word could be used even remotely in such a connection. There was above all that impudent creature they called Tito, who had tried to sell her some tickets of one kind or another for some sort of petty cheat they had thought up among themselves, who knew what?

“Ah yes,” Lizzi broke in, “for a raffle! I bought one and got rid of them.”

“You should have told me!” cried Herr Rieber. “For I bought
two
—you must give one of yours away!”

“I'll return it to them and get back my money!” whinnied Lizzi, tossing her head.

“Oh,” said Frau Rittersdorf, “that should be something to see, anyone getting back a
pfennig
from those bandits, for I know they are that! No, dear Fräulein, good businesswoman, that you are, everyone knows, but you will want to be better than that!”

“But wonderful dancing partners, don't you find, Frau Rittersdorf?” asked Herr Rieber, gleefully. Lizzi slapped his hand, annoyed, because she had meant to say that herself. “Shame on you,” she said, “you are not very kind. Dancing partners are sometimes scarce, one cannot always choose too delicately.”

Frau Rittersdorf, shocked at this turn of talk just when she was ready to give a sparkling account of that unusual incident, cried out in a high yet ladylike soprano, “Ah, but there are effronteries so utterly unexpected one is taken off guard, one is defenseless, it is better to follow one's instinct—yes, as well as training! and to behave as if nothing out of the way were happening—how could I dream of such a thing as that?” She sat back and held her napkin to her lips, staring over it in distress at Lizzi, whose laugh was a long cascade of falling tinware.

“Ah, but that is just what ladies are supposed to dream about,” called Herr Rieber in delight, leaning forward to make himself heard over Lizzi's clamor. “What is wrong with that, please tell me?”

Pig-dog, thought Frau Rittersdorf, her dismay turning in a flash to a luxury of rage, at least I am not reduced to dancing with you! She bared her teeth at him and lifted her brows and narrowed her eyes: “Are you sure you would know what
ladies
dream about, Herr Rieber?” she inquired, dangerously.

These tactics impressed Herr Rieber, who had got his face smacked more than once by easily offended ladies, and at that moment Frau Rittersdorf resembled every one of them, in tone and manner. A man couldn't be too cautious with that proper, constipated type, no matter how gamey she looked. He wilted instantly, unconditionally.

“I meant it as a pleasantry,
meine Dame
,” he said, with rueful respect.

“No doubt,” said Frau Rittersdorf, turning the knife-edge of her voice in his wounded vanity. “No doubt at all.”

Herr Rieber could not quite give up, but floundered and floundered. “It was a roundabout allusion to a theory of Freud's on the—ah—the meaning of dreams …”

“I am well acquainted with his theories,” said Frau Rittersdorf icily, “and I see no connection whatever between them and our present topic!”

Herr Rieber sat back, his underlip pouched, and began loading his fork, sulkily. Frau Rittersdorf turned to the Captain with her most sparkling smile, full of confidence after her plenary chastisement of that presumptuous fellow—Freud, indeed!—and said: “We are all of us taking these Spaniards very lightly, and indeed, we may as well, seeing there is no help for it, we must endure their presence until Vigo, I believe. But tell me, how can it happen that such people are traveling first-class on a respectable German ship? One finds oneself in unheard-of situations which they invent.…”

The Captain did not relish hearing his ship called “respectable” in a tone implying she was barely that; he did not like hearing the quality of his passenger list criticized, though privately he respected none of them except La Condesa, and she was turning out to be a grave disappointment in a personal way. His chin jerked forward irritably, he spoke as bluntly as possible: “The Mexican government paid their fares; no doubt it was worth it to be rid of them.”

“No doubt at all,” agreed Frau Rittersdorf, gaily, “and what a relief it will be, to see them really going ashore at Vigo, and the rest of us going on in quiet and safety … for Captain, I believe those people are dangerous criminals. They are evil people, the kind who need to be controlled by the police, they are capable of anything.”

Lizzi fired an instant barb out of loyalty to Herr Rieber: “Even to dancing with you?”

A small ripple of shock ran around the whole table—even Dr. Schumann seemed startled at this reckless attack. The Captain intervened instantly as was his right and duty, and dealt the deciding blow. He favored the opened-mouthed Frau Rittersdorf with a glint of steel from the corner of his eyes, and said: “Dear lady, aren't you flattering them? It requires a certain force of character to be really evil, and these seem to me rather ordinary little people of the rubbish-born class, not worth mentioning. My ship, like any other, carries all sorts. I am invested with every disciplinary power. Please, may I beg of you? allow me to be the judge of how dangerous they are.”

Little Frau Schmitt could not help but observe with some mild glow of satisfied justice that it was Frau Rittersdorf's turn to flinch amazed, ready to burst into tears, blushing a clear bright becoming red from the edge of her hair to the depths of her modestly exposed front. Yet even as she observed, Frau Rittersdorf straightened up with great dignity, raised her chin, turned her head, and surveyed the other diners haughtily, then returned to her dinner and ate in a mannerly silence, the only sign of discomfiture being that her blush had vanished and left her pale as unborn veal. The silence began to weigh, even on Herr Professor Hutten, who suffered numbly at trivialities of any kind, especially rash unbalanced expression of ill-understood ideas.

He seized a text out of the floating confusion of words, “criminals—evil—capable of anything,” and spoke to the Captain with that mild deference and moderation which masked his sense of utter rightness, always soothing to the Captain because he did not have to listen or pretend to reply to the Professor, who was not interested in discussion, but in speaking his own thoughts aloud in company. As a public lecturer, the Professor had long since learned that a silent audience is an attentive one.

“Whole systems of philosophy are based on the premise of the total depravity of mankind,” he began, putting the tips of his fingers together before his chest, spreading and flattening them from time to time, then drawing them all together at the very points, “no need to name them, perhaps?” He glanced about him, thinking it would be quite useless. “And I must say some very superior minds have given us some very closely knit arguments in favor of this thesis. It is also undeniable that they can point, by way of powerful illustration, to aspects of mere human behavior proving that human nature is entirely and unredeemably evil. Yet, yet,” he said, “in spite of cogent evidence to the contrary, or say, rather, manifestations which the unphilosophical mind (or, minds insufficiently supported by sound religious training) might be impelled to regard as evidence to the contrary, I cannot help but believe unshakably—call it
sancta simplicitas
if you must,” and he tucked in his chin and huddled the tips of his fingers together in humility, “unshakably in the fundamental goodness of human nature as a principle; the God-intention, you might call it, irradiating the flesh. Men who do evil, who seem by nature inclined to evil, willfully following evil, are afflicted, abnormal—they are perverted from the Divine Plan; though it does not necessarily follow in the least that they may not be every one redeemed in God's good time.…”

Frau Schmitt surprised everyone by speaking up with some firmness. “Only if they repent and ask God's forgiveness,” she said. “Any Catholic knows that no man may lose his soul except by presuming on God's mercy, or by denying it—”

She quailed under Herr Professor Hutten's interruption. “That is not quite what is under consideration, dear Frau Schmitt,” he said, with awful blandness. “I was about to say, if men do evil through ignorance, they must not be condemned. It is because their education has been neglected, they were not subjected to good influences in their youth, in such cases, it is often enough only to show them the good, the true, the beautiful—the
Right
, in fact, for them to embrace it eagerly.”

Truth is sometimes hideous and cruel, thought Frau Schmitt, it is the truth that my husband is in his coffin in the hold, and I am a widow going home to nothing, and I have tried to be good and love God and what has it got me? For she was apt to stray off into such confusions if she was too long away from her confessor and spiritual adviser. She said nothing more, only thought sadly that she shouldn't be exposed to Lutheran doctrines. Not that they tempted her, no no—it just made her unhappy to think of so many people, really good people like the Professor, going astray like that. In spite of knowing two languages, she had never been very clear about the meanings of words. Truth was anything that had happened, and a fact was anything that existed.

“Very little in my experience,” continued the Professor, now in excellent health and spirits, “has occurred to disturb my confidence, founded firmly on the tenets of my childhood faith, in the absolute benevolence of God.…”

That is not Lutheran, though, thought the Captain, frowning. I am just as much Lutheran as he is, and even I know better than that. For he had been hearing in spite of all he could do.