Ship of Fools (60 page)

Herr Glocken brightened at this combination of human kindness and no doubt professional medical interest. “I am not feeling very well,” he said, eagerly. “I have a kind of strangling feeling in my chest, all the time.”

“What are you doing for it?”

“Well, nothing much,” said Herr Glocken. “It just came on lately.”

“Maybe you'd better come down to my office and let me look at you,” said Dr. Schumann, his mind clearing a little at the prospect of serious work. Herr Glocken looked amazed and pitiably hopeful. “Now?” he said, unbelievingly.

“Now,” said Dr. Schumann.

Herr Glocken needed not only materia medica, his soul was shattered. Lola had come towards him, swinging her skirts, her left hand spread on her hip. She looked down smiling, holding out her right palm to him like a gypsy fortuneteller. “Cross my palm with silver, little man,” she said, “and I promise you a ticket with a lucky number, that will win you a beautiful lace fan to take home to your pretty German sweetheart!”

Herr Glocken shuddered and could not control the convulsion of pain and horror in his face. He turned his head away and closed his eyes. She bent over him intently and struck at his hump cruelly with her sharp fingers. “For luck, that's the only thing you're good for!” she said, then whirled on her heel to join the others, waiting nearby. They closed about her silently and drifted along together, lighting cigarettes.

The next morning, there was another bit of paper tacked on the wallboard in the bar:
If you are a hunchback, symbol of every kind of degeneration, you may be excused from behaving like a normal human being
.

Herr Glocken, who had been seen to smile with deep satisfaction over some of the other bulletins aimed at other victims, stood motionless reading the dreadful words over and over; then, after a quick glance around him, he snatched the shabby little scrap and crumpled it in his pocket, then walked on, face raised, hands clasped and dangling below his knees in the back, his thin legs carrying him safely out on deck, where no one had witnessed his humiliation. The passengers, whoever they were, had always each one taken pains to treat him well, to greet him and give him the time of day. They now greeted him again kindly, smiling over their morning cups of broth, noting in a brief incurious glance his face passing their line of vision stiffened in its look of perpetual grief and pain. They observed him without thinking of him, the moment he had passed they forgot him with the easy indifference of those who view a misfortune from which they feel themselves in no danger. They need never hate or fear him, his disease was not contagious, his bad luck was strictly his own; “But how terrible,” said little Frau Schmitt to Frau Rittersdorf, “how fortunate I feel when I see him!”

Frau Rittersdorf responded with the look described by many of her former suitors as “cryptic,” lifted one corner of her mouth, wrinkled her nose a trifle, and wrote rapidly in her red leather book: “Query, whether it would not be a benefit to the human race if there were a well-enforced law providing that all defective children should be given the blessings of euthanasia at birth or as soon afterwards as it might become evident that they are unfit? Let me think seriously about this, and read all the arguments in favor of it. I have never heard one against it that seemed to me at all valid.” She closed the book, which now had very few remaining blank pages.

Amparo, seeing Jenny enter one of the small writing rooms alone, bore down upon her under full power, stepped before her without hesitation and spoke abruptly as one who had no time to waste: “You have not yet bought a ticket for the raffle—why not?” Her voice and manner were so righteously censorious Jenny was almost thrown off guard. Amparo stood solidly fixed, waiting, right hand extended holding a bit of cardboard, head up, left hand flattened on hip, toes turned out as if she were about to begin a dance. Jenny's refusal to admit the existence of the woman now turned to a deep resentment that somehow she must be dealt with and disposed of, unpleasantly—a nonexistence not to be ignored. She said, with a good sharp voice and a stare she hoped was as steely as the other's: “I shall not buy a ticket and I do not wish to be annoyed about it.” She stepped in turn around Amparo, whose gaze held and followed her own. A thug's eye if ever I saw one, Jenny decided, and wondered what character her own expression might suggest to an observer uninstructed in the meaning of the situation. “Let me alone,” she said furiously.

Amparo slapped her inner thigh and whirled about. “No money, no man, and nothing
here
,” she said, slapping herself again, “
Jesús
!” and went her way superbly.

Jenny, who felt she had escaped from a real hold-up, pistol and all, had no vanities that Amparo could have recognized. After her first brief anger, she went looking for David to tell her little story, and rounding the bow from port to lee, she saw David, back to the sea, elbows on the rail, seeming to lean away from Lola, bending towards him, her face almost touching his. David did not seem unhappy, he was looking Lola straight in the eye and smiling, a watchful little smile, but pleased, too—Jenny, whose first impulse was to interfere, or, as she said, “rush to the rescue,” had leaped forward one step, then slowed down at once and strolled past, pretending not to see the absurd tableau at the rail. She saw that David was not saying much, but he was keeping his hands out of his pocket, too; yet she did not quite trust him, and resolved clearly that if he should buy one of those ridiculous pieces of pasteboard, she would lay hands on it, tear it into bits and cast it into the sea. She passed by resolutely not giving the pair a glance. But soon David was beside her, and said, “I think we're through with that question. It's all settled that I am a man with no mother, no entrails, no human feelings; in Lola's country they keep creatures like me in cages—”

Jenny laughed and David joined in. “Oh that isn't so bad! Amparo told me I had no money, no man, and nothing here,” and unselfconsciously as a cat washing itself, Jenny slapped herself high up on the inner thigh. David turned instantly so bright a scarlet his eyeballs flushed too, and he said quite desperately, “Jenny
angel
,” with such violence the words sounded like a curse, “do you ever think how you
look?
”

She studied his face silently, in a smiling sort of detached wonder—“I never saw you actually bare your teeth, before,” she said. “We used to have a horse that was always trying to bite people, and you looked just like him there for a second—I could hardly believe my eyes—”

“I can hardly believe mine, some of the things you do,” said David, getting hold of his temper heroically. When Jenny began ridiculing him she was out of control and reckless.

“I think it is a wonderful gesture,” said Jenny. “You used to think it fun when two Indian women started a fight over a man, trailing their skirts and stomping nearer and nearer each other, all slit-eyed and showing their teeth, slapping themselves there, right in the middle, each one bragging about what she's got that the other hasn't—”

“Yes,” said David, in spite of himself, “and the man they're fighting over just stands there looking like a fool—”

“Why, David! I always thought he looked proud and fatuously pleased and full of curiosity as to which one would get him—how would you feel if I got into a catfight with, let's say, Mrs. Treadwell over you?”

David broke down and laughed nearly aloud over this notion. “Like a fool, of course,” he said.

“I can't see why,” said Jenny. “Those women are proving to the world he really is a man worth having, they don't tear each other's hair and eyes out and skin each others noses for a dildo. And the other men all stand back respectfully pretending they're not there, but they don't miss a lick. And the women all huddle together staring, their mouths moistened, and they give each other warning hard looks as if to say, ‘Look out, take care!' and the whole air around is so thick with sex you can lean against it—you see, David?” cried Jenny as if she had explained everything to him and proved something on her side. “You should have seen that Amparo. She was wonderful. I had to see if I could do it too!”

David said clearly and flatly, “You don't have to prove anything to me, Jenny angel.” He took her arm and they moved to the rail, and their blood surged up so hotly between them, they leaned together there speechless and breathless, feeling as if their flesh melted and fused where they touched each other.

Denny went by at speed as if he were really on his way somewhere, flung up his arm at David and Jenny, calling out excitedly, “Landfall, landfall, this evening, the purser told me!”

The news had got about, though it was not unexpected. Mrs. Treadwell and the Baumgartners and the Lutzes came on deck with their fieldglasses, and other passengers began borrowing them for long staring at sea and sky. The Cuban students hung cameras around their necks, made a procession blowing tin bugles, shouted “
Arriba España—Mueran los Anti-Cucaracheros
!” (“Up Spain—Death to the Anti-Cockroach Party”), then quite suddenly settled down to chess in a corner of the barroom. The bulletin boards were swept clean of landlubbers' irrelevant doings, and curt, sparsely scattered notices informed the passers-by that land had been sighted—the
Vera
was approaching Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the first island of the Canaries for eastbound ships. Other scraps were forthcoming in rather a grudging tone in language suitable to those persons ignorant of their whereabouts and the seagoing tongue. They expected to dock early in the morning, all ashore for the day who wished to go, the ship would sail again at half-past four. It was Wednesday the ninth of September, two days before the full moon. Frau Schmitt remarked this on a calendar in one of the writing rooms, and said thoughtlessly to Mrs. Treadwell: “The first quarter was on Wednesday the second. That was the night Etchegaray was drowned.”

Mrs. Treadwell, standing at a table turning over the pages of a fashion magazine, said absently without raising her eyes: “How long ago that seems.”

Ric and Rac, on their routine patrol of the ship, found themselves at the end of a long corridor, empty except for that crazy woman with the necklace Lola and Amparo were always talking about. She was all in flimsy white and her feet were bare. She came along slowly, with her eyes half closed, and Ric said, pretending terror, “It's a ghost!” Their eyes met once, they seized each other's hand and dug their nails in, waiting to see what would come up, what they might do. As La Condesa approached with a slow, weaving step, they both saw in the same glimpse that her pearl necklace had loosened itself, had slid down her front and caught in a pleated fold of her sash, where it hung at full length, gently swaying outward and falling back with her step. She was quite near before she noticed them, and waved them out of her path with an absent-minded circling of her hand outward. Instead of turning back, or falling to one side, they rushed past her jostling her rudely, and Ric being nearest snatched the necklace as he went, stuffing it down his collar as they careened for the deck. La Condesa, at the sharp jolt of their passing, put her hand to her throat and knew at once they had taken her pearls. She spun round and ran after them until the ship's rocking brought her to her knees; and there she sat back on her heels, holding her throat with both hands until the stewardess found her. While putting her back in bed, the stewardess said, in the hard voice of one who has gathered desperate courage: “
Meine Dame
, I will not serve you any longer if I can help it. You are going to do yourself harm and I shall be blamed.”

La Condesa said: “Do what you like. But meantime, send for the purser. Those children have snatched my pearls.”

The stewardess said, “Where? When?”

“In the corridor where I was walking, just now.”

“I hope
meine Dame
will pardon me, but I must tell you, you were not wearing your pearls today, not since early morning. I noticed this and thought it strange when I asked to be absent for a few minutes. You were not wearing your pearls,
meine Dame
. They are in this room and will be found.”

La Condesa said, “The curse of my whole life has been that I must always deal with fools. Go and bring the purser. And wait until I ask you for your opinion.”

Elsa, walking with her father and mother, almost collided with Ric and Rac, who seemed to be more in flight, or pursuit as it might be, than usual. They dodged the Lutzes, but not quite enough; Ric jogged Mrs. Lutz's left elbow and hit that mysterious nerve that makes one shudder all over. Mrs. Lutz seized him instantly by the arm, all her maternal instincts for discipline of the young aroused. “Someone must teach you a little decent behavior,” she told him in her German-Mexican Spanish. “I will begin.” She slapped him soundly, and he scuffled so energetically the necklace dropped out of his shirt. Rac sprang to retrieve it, brought it up dangling in her hands. Herr Lutz then tried to seize her, but she escaped and ran to the rail, climbed up and dropped the pearls into the sea. Mrs. Lutz released Ric, who joined Rac at the rail.

Little Frau Schmitt, wandering about rather aimlessly, worrying about her husband, or rather, about his body and how it was faring in his coffin in the hold, noticed the rather agitated scene a little farther down the deck, but when she saw the twins, she asked herself no questions. Trouble went where they were, confusion and ill doings. Possibly it had something dimly to do with the will of God, His great mysterious plans. But what were they throwing overboard now? She greeted the Lutzes pleasantly as she passed, noticing they looked somewhat flushed and disheveled, but, as Frau Schmitt was learning on this ship the great lesson life had been preparing for her all this time—and to think she had never once suspected what it would be!—she must be quiet, keep to herself, express no opinions, bear no witness, carry no tales, make no confidences, nobody cared, nobody cared, there was nobody—this was the unbelievable thing!