Ship of Fools (62 page)

The people in the steerage who were about to go were gathered at the foot of the steep iron stairway, packed solidly together, their lumpy sack bundles on their shoulders, the smaller children riding above them, all the faces turned upward waiting for the signal that would bring them to the wide freedom of the upper deck, for the blessed word that would give them permission to cross the gangplank and set foot once more on their own earth. Every face wore its own look of private expectation, anxious joy, tranced excitement; and as they stood each body inclined, straining upwards in perfect silence and stillness, their breathing made a small moaning sound and there was a tight trembling of the whole mass. A short young fellow with black-jawed blunt easy-going features, a wild shock of hair, his bare feet clutching into the steps, rushed uncontrollably up the stairs to the rail of the upper deck and poised there on his spread toes, his gaze soaring out from him like a bird to the little towns lying at the foot and climbing up the sides of the stony island. Oblivious, smiling, the round instinctive eyes filled with tears. Even as Wilhelm Freytag saw him and envied him his homecoming, even as Jenny said, “It must be wonderful to cry for joy!” a young officer dashed at the man as if he would strike him, stopping short three feet away, mouth open and square and noisy with outraged authority.

“Get back
down
there, you!” he shouted, but the man did not hear. “Get back
down
!” bawled the officer in an indecent fury, his bad Spanish almost failing him, his face turning purple. Mrs. Treadwell, passing the door on her way to breakfast, paused to glance at him with some curiosity. Yes, no doubt about it, that was her young dancing partner who had practiced such downright pretty manners. She went on, one eyebrow slightly raised. The man at the rail blinked, heard and understood at last, and turned upon the frantic officer the same tender smile, the bright film of water covering his eyes; still smiling, he turned obediently as an unoffended dog and dived back down into the crowd, swinging his hemp bundle. Even before he had turned about again, the officer leaned over and shouted at the waiting people: “Come on, you, come on up, hurry up there, get on up here and get off this ship! Don't crowd, come three abreast, come on, get off, get off!” As he heckled and nagged, several sailors below herded the crowd and urged them on.

The young fellow leaped ahead instantly and led the people upward. They approved of his boldness, and they had found new heart. They scrambled and stumbled and shoved each other about in good-tempered play, laughed aloud in a ragged chorus of free voices calling out jokes and catchwords to each other, no longer oppressed and intimidated, but home from exile, back to the troubles they knew, in their own country where a man's life and death were his own business. They ignored the little yelling angry man with the purple face and the comic Spanish; nothing he could do, or say in any language, could make any difference to them any longer; they could hardly wait to leave his ship. They turned back and shouted blessings and farewells to those left behind, who shared their joy and shouted back hopefully.

Seven women who had borne children during the voyage came up slowly in a group, some of them supported by their husbands or leaning upon other women, carrying their young in tightly wrapped bundles. They were flabby and pale, some of them with brassy spots on their foreheads and cheeks, their bellies still loose and soft, with their milk staining the fronts of their faded clothes. Their older children, with sad, disinherited eyes, clung determinedly to their skirts. A boy of about twelve years with a fierce, burning smile turned about as he reached the upper deck, and saw them.

“
Olé, olé
,” he called out, raising a clenched fist and shaking it in the air. “We are many more than when we started!”

One of the mothers lifted her worn dark face and called back in triumph, “Yes, and men, too, all of them!” A great rollicking torrent of laughter rolled through them all. Shouting they rose and poured like a tidal wave upon the deck, spreading, forcing the officers and the other passengers back to the rail and within doors, thinning out in good order at the gangplank and flowing off the ship without a backward glance. The officer turned aside, his face writhing with nausea. He looked straight into the eyes of Dr. Schumann, on his way to say good-by to La Condesa and to help prepare her to go ashore. “God, how they stink,” he said, “and how they breed—like vermin!”

Dr. Schumann said nothing, and the young officer calmed down a little, interpreting the Doctor's absent glance as sympathy. The Doctor watched two sailors helping the fat man up the steps. He was wearing the same cherry-colored shirt he had come aboard in at Veracruz, but he was dazed and leaned heavily on his escorts. Dr. Schumann had been down to change the dressing and re-bandage his head, and the wound was doing very well. No doubt he would recover and get into more mischief. As the man passed he looked out from under his huge helmet of surgical dressings directly at Dr. Schumann, but gave no sign of recognition.

Dr. Schumann noticed as he turned the knob of the door that his hand was bloodless, the veins a sunken greenish tracery. He felt weak and tired and wished he had stopped for coffee. He found La Condesa dressed and ready, even wearing a tiny rosy velvet hat with a short, coarse-meshed black veil over her face, lying almost flat as if posing for her effigy, ankles crossed, handbag on one arm, a pair of short white leather gloves in her left hand. She turned her head towards him slightly and smiled. The stewardess, who had long since made up her mind about the odd goings-on between this pair, who were certainly old enough to know better, bowed with an air of great respect to the Doctor, and swiftly closing the small hand valise she had been packing, left at once. The rest of the luggage had been taken away, the lights were turned off, and the place was altogether empty, gray and desolate.

He stood beside her with such grave, rueful depths of concern in his face, she shrank from him with the slightest quiver of her eyelids, and asked with an edge of fright in her voice:

“Have they come for me?”

“Yes, they are here. No, please listen. The Captain and I have talked with them to find out their orders for you. They have been instructed. They will not touch you, or even come near you. They are only to be at the foot of the gangplank—don't look around you, you need not even see them—to make certain you leave the ship, and that you are on the island when the ship sails again.…”

“When the ship sails again,” she said, “just to think, for me this voyage will have ended.”

“You have nothing at all to fear,” he said, taking her wrist and feeling for her pulse. Even now he refused to doubt that he had done, not right, perhaps—who could be certain of that, ever?—but the only thing possible. La Condesa drew back her hand and said, “Oh, what can a pulse matter now? That is all over too. You may say I have nothing to fear—how easy for you, who are going home! But I am going to be a prisoner here. Never think once I am left here at their mercy they won't put me in a dark dirty place by myself.”

He sat on the side of the bed and held her hand firmly. “You are not going to be a prisoner except on this whole island,” he told her. “A most beautiful place, and you may live where and how you choose in it.”

“As I choose?” she said, her voice rising but not in a question. “Alone? Friendless? Without a
centavito
? Without my children, not even knowing where they are? And how shall they ever find me? Oh, my friend, have you gone mad with virtue and piety, have you lost your human feelings, how can you have forgotten what suffering is?”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

He brought out the needle and the ampule and prepared deliberately to give her another
piqûre
. She watched him, not with her familiar expression of clever mischief, but passively, her eyes scarcely moving to follow him. She sat up in silence and took off her jacket, unbuttoned the cuff of her shirt and rolled the sleeve up for herself very slowly and said with a short intake of breath as the needle pierced the flesh, “Ah … how I shall miss this! What shall I do without it?”

“You are to have it when you need it,” he reassured her. “I am giving you a prescription and a special note to show to whatever doctor you choose there. I believe any doctor will accept it. I do not think you will be allowed to suffer.”

She took his hand between both of hers and clung with imploring inquiry: “Why will you not tell me what it is? Or better, give it to me and let me use it for myself—I know how to use a needle.”

“I don't doubt it,” said Dr. Schumann, “but I cannot. You are much too reckless, I can't trust you—remember? You told me so yourself.”

“That was
then
,” she cried, gaily, putting on her jacket again. “I am altogether changed now, as you see—reformed by your good example!” She put her feet over the edge of the bed and sat beside him. “Tell me something,” she said, “you know we shall never see each other again. Why then may we not talk like friends, or even lovers, or as if we two were meeting again on the other side of the grave. Ah come, let's play that we are two little winged, purified souls met in Paradise after a long Purgatory!”

“But you have told me you do not believe in the other side of the grave,” said Dr. Schumann, smiling, “much less in souls and Paradise.”

“I don't, but it shall make no difference—we shall meet there just the same. But why not tell me something now?”

She leaned towards him until he felt her light breath and asked very simply without any special feeling in her voice:

“Did you come in here late last night and kiss me? Did you put your arms around me and almost raise me up from my pillow, and call me your love? Did you say, Sleep, my love, or was I dreaming? Tell me …”

Dr. Schumann turned towards her and took her deeply in his arms, and laid his head on her shoulder and drew her face to his. “I did, I did,” he groaned, “I did, my darling.”

“Oh why?” she cried, “Why, when I didn't know waking from sleeping? Why did you never kiss me when I could have known surely, when I could have been happy?”

“No,” he said, “no.” He raised his head and folded his arms around her again. She began to sway a little, from side to side, as if she were rocking a cradle; then releasing herself very gently and sitting back from him with her hands on his shoulders she said, “Oh, but it was only a dream then—oh, do you know what it is, coming so late, so strangely, no wonder I couldn't understand it. It is that innocent romantic love I should have had in my girlhood! But no one loved me innocently, and oh, how I should have laughed at him if he had!… Well, here we are. Innocent love is the most painful kind of all, isn't it?”

“I have not loved you innocently,” said Dr. Schumann, “but guiltily and I have done you great wrong, and I have ruined my life.…”

“My life was ruined so long ago I have forgotten what it was like before,” said La Condesa. “So you are not to have me on your mind. And you must not think of me as sleeping on stone floors and living on bread and water, for I shall not ever—it is not my style. It is not becoming to me. I shall find a way out of everything. And now, now my love, let's kiss again really this time in broad daylight and wish each other well, for it is time for us to say good-by.”

“Death, death,” said Dr. Schumann, as if to some presence standing to one side of them casting a long shadow. “Death,” he said, and feared that his heart would burst.

“Why of course, death,” said La Condesa as if indulging his fancy, “but not yet!” They did not kiss, but she took his hand and held it to her cheek a moment. He trembled so he could hardly write the prescription and the note he had promised. He opened her handbag and tucked the papers inside. They did not speak again. He walked to the gangplank with her, and handed her the small valise. She did not raise her eyes. He watched while she stepped into an elegant white caleche on the wharf, drawn by an inelegant shaggy small horse, and then noticed the two quite ordinary-looking men who took the next available equipage and drove away slowly after her, at a discreet distance.

“Have you any plans?” Freytag asked Jenny as they lingered while the students formed a line and went leaping down the gangplank shouting the chorus of “
Cucaracha
.”

“Aren't they tiresome!” said Jenny, watching them. “No plans at all. I'm waiting for David.”

“I'll be getting along, then,” said Freytag, easily, “maybe we can all meet somewhere for a drink on the island.”

“Maybe.” His retreating straight back and manly stride reminded her of an actor, a good-looking leading man used to taking the stage whenever he appeared. He veered expertly around a straggling little crowd of frowzy-looking persons, men and women with a child or two, coming on board with odds and ends of stuff to sell, bits of linen and silk, clumsy small objects not worth a glance. A very dark young gypsy woman stepped before Jenny as if she had been looking for her to give her good news. “Stop,” said the gypsy, in Spanish, “let me tell you something strange.” She came so close Jenny smelt the pepper and garlic on her breath, the weathered animal reek of her skin and great gaudy red and orange petticoats. She took Jenny's hand and turned the palm upward. “You are going to a country that is not for you, and the man you are with now is not your real man. But you will go soon to a better country, and you will find your man. You will be happy in love yet, don't be troubled! Cross my palm with silver!” She held Jenny's hand firmly, her eyes were shrewd and impudent, she smiled with her teeth closed.

“Go away, gypsy woman,” said Jenny, in English. “You don't know enough. You've got a one-track mind. I don't want any other man, the very notion gives me the horrors. I'll stick by the trouble I know. There are going to be a lot of other things much more interesting in my life than this man, or any other man,” she assured the gypsy with the utmost seriousness. The gypsy stared, her eyes glinting with suspicion; she held Jenny's hand, refusing to go without her coin. But their hands had changed positions—Jenny was now holding the gypsy's palm upward examining it studiously. “Those are the things I'd like to hear about! Now as for you,” she added in Spanish, “you are going to take a long journey and meet a dark man …” The gypsy snatched her hand away violently and stepped back.