Ship of Fools (55 page)

Frau Hutten shuddered and shook her head. “Oh, how can I? But thank you,” she said hastily, turning away biting her lips and winking her eyes.

“What did the Doctor say his name was?” asked the Professor, standing where she had left him, his attention fixed not on Bébé, but on some point beyond the cabin wall, beyond the ship, as if somewhere there were bounds, a limit, a shoreline to his perplexity.

“A strange one,” she said, “almost comic, outlandish … Etchege—Etchege—”

“Etchegaray,” said her husband. “Ah yes. I remember several Basques of that name in Mexico City.… I confess, my dear, to being deeply puzzled as to the motives of the unlucky man. The hope of reward—of course, but that is almost too simple. Did he wish to attract attention to himself, to be regarded as a hero? Did he—unconsciously of course—long for death, and so took this way of committing suicide without being actually guilty of it? Did he—”

“Oh how do I know?” cried his wife, ready to seize her own hair with exasperation; but Bébé saved her from this rash gesture by starting to retch and vomit salt water again, and went on with it for some time as Frau Hutten and the Herr Professor took turns rubbing him with brandy and drying him with bath towels until the stewardess, beady-eyed and simply crackling with indignation, brought them the beef broth they demanded, a quart of it in an ample bowl. She handed it to Frau Hutten at arm's length and did not wait to witness the desecration of good broth meant for human beings—think of all the innocent starving poor in the world, the little babies—down the gullet of a worthless dog! And who in that stinking steerage was beside him when the man who saved this beast was strangling to death on sea water, what did he get but a little dry wafer from that hypocrite of a priest, and a wicked parody of God's word? The stewardess felt herself strangling too in a wild sea of salt rage; her very joints stiffened with it, she began hobbling like a cripple down the long passageway. Divine Providence sent her the chance to explode her wrath in the face of an undergrown cabin boy rushing somewhere with an armload of linen.

“One should be a dog in this filthy world! A rich man's dog drinking broth made from the bones of the poor. What is the life of a man compared to a dog's, tell me that? A rich man's dog, naturally!”

The fourteen-year-old boy, himself the pallid growth of a lifetime of underfeeding, recovered instantly from his fright when he realized her fury was not directed at himself. “A dog, Fräulein, please if I may ask?” he said with his ritual air of servility towards his betters, which included everybody on the ship, and without any hint of self-respect which they one and all would have taken for pure impudence.

“Broth for that dog!” she broke out again, almost choking. “And the man is dead! Dead to save the life of a dog!” she screamed, lashing out around her with her long flail of an arm. The boy, extremely uneasy, sidled past her and ran, his knees trembling. “I would have let them both drown and you too,” said the cabin boy to himself, “you crazy old mule.” He liked the feel of the words in his mouth so well he went on repeating them under his breath until his feelings of injury were soothed.

No matter what the efforts of Herr Professor and Frau Hutten, Bébé went on being violently agitated—convulsion racked his awkward frame. He raised himself at last and sat stupefied and passive under their anxious hands. Frau Hutten said, “He makes me feel so guilty!” for he seemed to be asking her a terrible question, with doubt in his bleared eyes. Even his silence seemed to be accusing her of some wickedness against him.

“He is by nature silent,” her husband reminded her, “this is not new.”

“Oh but it is not the same!” she said, appalled.

She forgot that she had displeased her husband deeply, that she was not in his good graces. She leaned towards him confidingly as ever, head bowed and tears flowing again. She reached for his hand and he responded at once. “He trusted us,” she wept, “he was part of our past, our happy past,” she said, “of our life together.” She sat on the side of the bed, disheveled and forlorn, and her husband moved over and sat beside her. “Mexico!” she cried out, sobbing with a depth he had never heard in her. “Mexico! Why did we leave it? What sent us on this terrible voyage? We were happy there, we were young together there … why have we thrown it all away?”

For the first time in years, the tears rolled unrebuked down Herr Professor Hutten's face. “Try not to grieve so, my poor child,” he said. “It puts a great strain on your heart, and will seriously upset your nervous system. You are not,” he reminded her, drops forming on the end of his nose, “exhibiting your usual characteristics here of late—that discretion, that foresight, that stability of temper which have been the admiration of all who know you …”

“Forgive my weakness, forgive me, I need your help. You are goodness itself. I am certain I left the door open, it is all my fault, you are always in the right,” she implored; and though the Herr Professor drew out his handkerchief and dried his tears and mopped his brow, resolving to be firm in this crisis, and not let a flood of emotion sweep from his mind the truly important events of the day, and his just grievance against her, yet he could not control or deny some melting in his whole being. The sore spot in his mind was eased, his hurt self-esteem ceased to throb, as if some magic balsam had been poured into the open wound of his soul. Benevolence, magnanimity, Christian charity, uxorious warmth, even human tenderness itself marched in bravely to reoccupy their rightful place in his bosom, all in perfect order and called at once by their right names. The Professor had not known such luxury of feeling in years; a bliss exuded again from this indwelling potpourri of virtues which, in her simple words, his wife acknowledged and invoked once more.

He kissed her full on the mouth deeply, as if she were a bride, thrusting his tongue almost into her throat, and seized her head in the old way, pulling her hair painfully as ever in his eagerness. They began to fumble awkwardly at the more obstructive articles of each other's clothing as if they meant to tear each other apart, and slumped over in a heap grappled together like frogs. After inordinately prolonged labors, floundering, groaning, grunting and rolling in a savage wrestling match, they collapsed melted together into nerveless quivering and long moans of agonized pleasure; then lay joined for a pleasurable time in a triumphant glow of exhaustion, their marriage mended almost as good as new, their feelings fresh and purified.

“My little wife,” murmured the Professor, as he had done after the long exhilarating siege of deflowering her on their wedding night. “My husband,” she had replied then, with perfect propriety, and by now she spoke the word occasionally as part of a ceremony.

From his rug in the corner, in his haunted sleep, Bébé uttered a long hoarse sobbing terror-stricken howl which brought them out of their sensual inertia with a sickening shock. Frau Hutten began to weep again almost by habit. “Oh, he knows, he knows they tried to drown him,” she cried accusingly, “his heart is broken.”

The Professor's nervous system, somewhat mangled by his unusual exertions, now rebelled. He groaned again, this time in real anguish. “I forbid you to shed another tear about this matter,” he said, resonantly, all his manly authority restored and in working order. “And what do you mean by They? Be careful of reckless speech, my dear.” He gave her an affectionate little shake, and she enjoyed pretending to fear his anger, for this never failed to please him even when his anger was real and not pretended as now. It occurred to her that the only time in her life she had ever been afraid of him, just a few hours ago, when she believed she had offended him mortally, she had no power at all over him, no charm for him, no wile to play. How strange, how terrifying—it must not happen again. “Please let me go to him,” she said, drying her eyes on his shirt sleeve. “I meant those indescribable children,” she told him, in a carefully moderate tone. “Surely only they could do such a thing?”

“I agree,” said her husband, “but still we must not say so, for we cannot prove it. And besides, it is perhaps no crime, legally, to drown a dog?”

“Ah, but they caused the death of a man!”

“In what way?” asked the Professor. “Was he forced to his rash act? Did anyone, even those children, dream of that?”

Frau Hutten said no more, but knelt slowly: her knee was paining her again: took Bébé's big sorrowful face between her hands, and said, “It was not us, not your little Vati and Mutti, remember? who did this to you. We love you,” she told him earnestly, fondling his ears and chin. “He understands perfectly,” she told her husband. “Go to sleep, my darling,” she said, laying his head down on his rug.

“Ah, I could sleep too,” said the Professor, helping her to rise. They got off the rest of their clothes and into night dress as if they were already asleep, and the movement of the ship under them, so hateful before, was like the rocking of a cradle. Half asleep, the Professor whispered, “What did the Doctor say his name was? Odd now I cannot remember.”

“Oh what would be the use?” breathed Frau Hutten wearily. “Let's not try to remember.”

Elsa, lying flat, arms under her head, gazed sleepily at the bright blue sky which seemed just outside the porthole. “So early?” she asked without curiosity, seeing Jenny washing and dressing in a hurry. “Oh, I couldn't, I'm too lazy.”

“They are going to bury that poor drowned man this morning,” said Jenny, “just think of him being left here all by himself.”

“Why, he doesn't know,” said Elsa, quite sensibly. “So how could he mind? My father said last night it was a very foolish thing for him to do. He said it is stupid thoughtless people like that who make all the trouble for others. He said—”

“He meant saving other stupid people's stupid dogs? Things like that?” asked Jenny in a chilling voice. Elsa sat up, her features gave a little twitch of distress. “My father did not mean that,” she said anxiously. “He is a kind man by nature, he would never harm anybody. He did not mean he was not sorry for the poor man. It is something hard to explain—”

Jenny coldly finished doing her hair in silence and let Elsa struggle.

“It is just that he is too practical sometimes, like my mother, almost. He says life is for the living, that the dead need nothing, that we must not let our feelings run away with us when it doesn't do any good! And my mother says—”

Jenny melted into laughter. “Oh Elsa, won't you be glad when school lets out?”

Elsa eyed her distrustfully, as she did more and more often of late. Her cabin mate seemed like anybody else, yet—and she couldn't quite put her finger on it—there was something odd about her. “I am not in school,” she said.

Jenny wrapped a dark silk scarf around her head. “Never mind,” she said. “I'm going down to say good-by to him when he goes, whether he hears it or not.”

The early sunlight reflected in the water danced and glittered in Father Garza's eyes as he stood at the rail on the steerage deck near his altar, but his dazzled glance upward took in the row of curiosity seekers on the deck above—vultures who smelled death and could not keep away from it. Father Garza through a long experience of his own human nature and that of others had learned to doubt the purity of gratuitous sympathy or pity in any form. He dared to venture there had not been a Christian thought among them, nor a prayer uttered. Before him, the body was ready to be sent over the side at the right moment, a long stiff narrow mummy shape wrapped in dark canvas balanced outward on the rail, held in poise by several towhaired young sailors, their rosy faces ceremonially solemn above their white cotton garments. The steerage passengers in their rags and dirt and darkness stood back respectfully, massed and humming like a swarm of bees, rosaries swinging, hands agitated in ceaseless signs of the Cross, eyes fixed, lips moving. Only the fat man, wearing a bright orange shirt, stood somewhat apart with his small party of followers, all of them set and brightly ready for trouble. Now and then the fat man would let out a loud belch, and with spread fingers would make the sign of the Cross with his thumb on the end of his nose. He was quite aware that a number of the men saying their prayers were also watching him closely with murder in their eyes, and it seemed to stimulate him to fresh feats of imaginative blasphemy.

Father Garza saw all this as he saw everything around him in spite of his absorption in the Burial Service, reading it to himself as if it were his breviary. “Come to his assistance, ye Saints of God, meet him, ye Angels of the Lord, receiving his soul, offer it in the sight of the Most High … Eternal rest give to him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. Receiving his soul, offer it in the sight of the Most High … Be merciful, O Lord, we beseech Thee, to the soul of Thy servant Juan Maria Etchegaray, for which we offer up to Thee the sacrifice of praise, humbly beseeching Thy Majesty that, by these holy peace-offerings, it may be found worthy to win everlasting rest. Through our Lord.”

The rhythmic smash of the waves, the steady drone of massed voices, the nervous perpetual movements of the crowd, the obscenities of the fat man, had no effect on the silence and stillness of the disciplined group gathered around the dead. With every due prayer and ceremony, every movement of respect, with holy water, bell, book and candle, with incense and the sign of the Cross, the sealed and weighted body that had contained a human soul was released, tilted slowly downward, and as it slid forward was given a decisive thrust that sent it clear of the side, falling straight, striking the water feet first and sinking at once without haste even as the ship moved away from it. “God receive his soul,” whispered Frau Schmitt, and the young Cubans, and Dr. Schumann, and Señora Ortega the Mexican diplomat's wife, all secretly uttering the same words, and even Frau Rittersdorf crossed herself; and the body was still visible to them a good depth under the water in the long slanting rays of sunlight. Even as it disappeared, the ship had moved far: before Father Garza could reach the upper deck, the dead was left behind.