Ship of Fools (67 page)

“It will wait for us,” said Herr Lutz. But in all of them, the fog and glow of the wine they had drunk seemed to fade. Each face showed uneasiness to the others, and in a mild state of common panic, they hailed a row of caleche, and drove in unexpected state to the very foot of the gangplank, which was indeed prepared for rising. They scrambled up out of breath with only minutes to spare and joined the other passengers, who were lining up to witness the commotion of sailing. There were rumors of rising seas outside the harbor. The band started playing, “
Adieu, mein kleiner Garde-Offizier
!” and the shoals of Syrians prowling the docks trying to sell sheepskin rugs and opium scattered away.

As the strip of water widened between pier and ship, with Santa Cruz at the right distance taking on again its first beauty, the zarzuela company huddled at the rail in silence but with intent bristling attention, watching a frantic weeping woman on shore who shook her fists screaming desperate curses and accusations at the upper deck of the moving ship. One of the invincible-looking Civil Guards left his patrol partner to quell this unseemly disturbance. He turned the woman round by her shoulders and marched her briskly out of sight of the foreign ship and its passengers. It was part of his duty to guard against such bad propaganda. This kind of behavior gave the town an inhospitable appearance. “Keep away from here,” he instructed the woman, harshly. She covered her head with her shawl and went away without looking back.

Jenny and David rested their elbows on the rail and Jenny said, “That's one station past. Now—David, I'm going to try for a French visa at Vigo—”

“If we stop at Vigo,” said David.

“There's talk now that they will stop. All those dancers … and then I'll leave the ship at Boulogne.”

“If we stop there,” said David.

“We're going to stand out and a tender will come for us,” said Jenny. “We'll make it.”

“Who said so?”

“The purser.”

“Who are we?”

“Mrs. Treadwell, and I, and those silly students. Oh David, do please come with me. It makes me sick even to think of your going on. What will you do in Spain by yourself?”

“What will you do in Paris?”

“That's a question,” she said. They strolled around to the other side of the deck. “We're setting out tonight off the coast of Africa … there was nothing new or strange in Santa Cruz, was there? It could have been Mexico, crooked old streets and the sound of Spanish and the little markets and the colors of the plaster—but did you notice how it seemed strange in the new part of town where the real international business is? Did you notice that brass plate on the brick wall saying here is a branch of the Bank of British West Africa?”

“Why, no,” said David. “What about it?”

“Just for a second, I felt far from home, in a strange, strange land, and I didn't want to be there.”

“Where is home, Jenny angel?” asked David, with the always unexpected tenderness that could dissolve her at her highest melting point; her eyes glistened, she blinked at him and smiled carefully.

“I don't know,” she said, “I still don't know, but it is very far away.” They leaned together and rubbed cheekbones and nuzzled a little and then kissed. David said in an offhand, take it or leave it tone, or even somewhat as if he did not expect to be heard, “We'll get French visas at Vigo and we'll get on that tender outside Boulogne harbor, and we'll land in Paris next day. I'm through with the argument, Jenny.”

“Would you like me to cry on your neck, rubbing my nose on your necktie and dribbling tears down your collar, darling? I don't care who sees us,” she said, wrapping her arm around his neck, nudging under his chin with the top of her head.

“Stop it, Jenny,” said David, “where do you think we are?”

She straightened up and took her powder case out of her pocket. “We'll go to Spain a little later,” she promised, “to Madrid and Avila and Granada and everywhere there is. David, if you want, let's go to Spain first and
then
to Paris … really, darling, I don't mind. I shan't care where we go, after this. Let's land at Gijón? And go on to Madrid.”

Anger came up in David as if it had been patiently ambushed nearby waiting to be recalled to its natural place. It was her old trick of holding out until he gave way, then turning on him suddenly by yielding everything, pretending it was what she really wanted all along, leaving him bare and defenseless. But first he must give way. “I'll stop if you will …” “I'll do anything you want if you'll do what I want
first
—” Now having won, again, she was all for giving him the victory, for showing him how easy it was to be generous, to drift along with him in happy agreement—everything she should have done from the beginning without all this pull and haul. Now, of course, she was all set to take over the Spanish trip, to manage everything, starting with Gijón, a port he had never for a moment considered as a landing place. My God, now it was all to do over again, in a kind of reverse. His silence worried Jenny.

“David?” she asked, leaning gently and speaking in her “melted” voice. “What do you think? Wouldn't it be nice to go somewhere we'd never even thought of going, and just stroll through the country until we got to Madrid?”

David said, “Why Madrid, particularly? I hadn't thought of Madrid. I should like to stay along the coast awhile—Santander, maybe, or San Sebastián, or up to the French border, to Irún—”

“Well,” said Jenny, feeling chilled, “anywhere you like.”

“You seem to forget we're going to Paris,” said David, “Spain's out, remember? We're going to Paris together, and then we'll see—”

Jenny turned upon him a severe, censorious face, not angry, nor wounded, nor intimidated, nor resentful—just a regard of critical disapproval, and she spoke evenly in her normal voice raised to the
n
th, David thought with a sour little humor.

“I wish you'd just make up your mind
once
, David, just once, and then
keep
it made up until we could get one thing finished, or one thing decided, or just even—well, this is like all the times you walked me two miles to a certain restaurant for dinner at nine o'clock, and then changed your mind at the door, and walked me off somewhere another mile, and more than once we wound up eating green tamales out of a tin boiler on a street corner … and is this whole trip going to turn out like that, too? Why don't we just jump overboard now and call it a day? David, what do you
want?
”

David let her words pour over his ears like rain off a tile roof. When the fishwife streak in Jenny's nature took hold, and her entire being fused all its elements into pure mindless femaleness condensed into words having no thinnest thread of a hold on reason, David's central knot of tension loosened, he felt pleasantly released from the burden of taking her seriously, of trying to answer, to explain or placate: any quarrel lost its edge, any question of love its meaning; no man owed one iota of his manhood, one moment of attention, one shred of consideration to a woman who was all the same as jabbing him with a hatpin. With relief he saw Jenny, that so-special creature, the woman like no other woman, merge into the nameless, faceless, cureless pestilence of man's existence, the chattering grievance-bearing accusing female Higher Primate. Jump overboard? What for? He noticed that the waves were rising, the boat was beginning to plunge a little. That was a speech silly for Jenny even when she was talking like a woman.

“My mind
is
made up,” he said. “You weren't listening, Jenny angel. We are going to Paris, and that is settled, once for all.” It seemed as good a place as any to run through this business and make an end of it—Berlin, Madrid, Paris, what would be the difference? “Let Spain alone for a while. It's time to begin arranging France.”

“You arrange it,” said Jenny, as amiably as if she had never spoken a bitter word. “We'll see what happens at Vigo.” Then she said almost shyly, “You are a dear love not to take me up when I fly off the way I did. David, I don't expect you to believe it, but I'm perfectly happy—perfectly. Please don't think about what I said—”

“I won't any more,” David said reassuringly, with good-tempered malice spreading like an inner smile all through him.

The dinner bugle sounded, but they delayed a few minutes. The ship was leaving the harbor, and the sea was so wild the pilot launch was almost swamped. The man at the wheel was drenched and had hard work to stay on board.

The pilot came down the rope ladder like a spider dropped down his web, and swung into the launch, which almost capsized. He took the wheel and nosed her away. After a good sharp tussle, the engine died. For a moment the pilot stood there, steadying the wheel, looking up at the tall bow of the ship louring over him. Jenny said, “Oh David,
look
at him!” She leaned far out, took off her square red scarf and waved at him in great circles until she caught his attention. He removed his sober pilot's hat with a beautiful sweep and waved back. David clenched the rail with both hands and leaned away, arms stiffened to the shoulders. He shuddered. Jenny lingered, her scarf dangling, her face softened and full of gaiety and tenderness. David took her arm and drew her away.

“Let's wait and see how he does,” she said, but David had had enough of Jenny for one day. “He'll do very well, and now it's dinnertime,” he told her, and she came along with one of her rare entirely fraudulent but well-played acts of complaisance. It usually meant she had thought of something else to do later that would amuse her more.

Jenny, tilting her first glass of wine towards David's, felt, she could not say why, that she was having the loveliest, most charming time of her life. David was somewhat wrapped up in himself about something, the ship was rolling with long, swooning swoops enough to chill the pit of her stomach, yet she was not chilled. The same tables were occupied by the same passengers, yes, nearly all of them present, looking much the same. She was sober, so it wasn't that delightful maze of Canary wine. The zarzuela company came in a little late, and seated themselves in silence with frowning faces; even Ric and Rac were not showing their usual spirits. Jenny said to David: “I heard they beat those children terribly about the pearl necklace—they beat them senseless. But they seem to be all right, don't they?”

“Who told you?” asked David. “I didn't hear about it.”

“Wilhelm Freytag,” said Jenny, “and the purser told him. And those students followed La Condesa to the little hotel where she went, and then took a carriage load of flowers from the market and stood them up against the walls under her window and got the servants to hang them on her balcony. But she would not come out, she would not speak to them.”

“Who told you this?” asked David.

“Freytag,” said Jenny, “while we were walking up the hill and you were lurking along behind.”

“Lurking,” repeated David, thoughtfully. Then he asked, “How had Freytag learned that, so soon?”

“One of the secret police who saw it came back to the ship before we left.”

“I give up,” said David, “I can't see where there was time for all this.”

“There was, though,” said Jenny, “it did happen.”

David changed the subject. He observed the Spaniards with some curiosity. They were eating quite seriously without talk and hardly raising their faces, taking large mouthfuls.

“They might as well be Germans,” said David, “but I suppose an afternoon of shoplifting makes you hungry.”

Jenny poked lightly at the wilted lettuce leaves before her. “Wouldn't you think they could have got some fresh salad on the island?”

“Typhoid, maybe, or cholera,” said David in a verbal shorthand, not to delay his mouthful of
Eisbein mit Sauerkohl und Erbsenpuree
to say nothing of a stack of fried onions.

“Fuddy-duddies,” said Jenny, whose life in Mexico, far from intimidating her on the subject of germs, had given her a hearty contempt for foreigners who boiled everything they ate or wore, and missed all the lovely fruit and the savory Mexican food from the steaming clay pots in the Indian villages. Now she was not hungry, or not for all this substantial, overfilling stuff. She wondered again at David's appetite that never failed no matter what, like a particularly voracious bird rearing up its gaping beak with blind punctuality to swallow whatever was dangled before it. At least, he had fairly good manners; he did not wolf or gulp or gobble or crunch or talk with his mouth full. Those stingy old aunts may have starved him out but they had taught him how to eat civilly what little they gave him. Still it was astonishing; he went on methodically reducing his plateful of food to the bare surface, then he took more. He could not leave a crumb or morsel of anything before him, and this was not only at breakfast, lunch, and dinner but midmorning broths and teatime sandwiches. Yet when his eyes strayed looking for another mouthful, downward and sideways, his eyelids had a pathetic, famished tightness, his mouth opened slightly in a spurious air of neglected orphanhood that hardened Jenny's heart every time she saw it. Her joyful mood turned into mischief and she began revising David's personal history. A changeling, of course, that is what he is. Those playful little pixies came and stole a mother's own boy out of his cradle and left one of their monsters instead. You've got all the signs, my poor David. That child eats and eats and never gains an ounce and is always starving; no matter how much he is loved he can't love back again; he can't feel pain either in himself or for others; he can't cry for anything and he doesn't care how much trouble he makes for everybody; and he takes all he can get and he never gives anything, and then one day, he disappears without a word, he just goes. “That is what becomes of those no-good fellows,” said the old Scots nurse when Jenny was six. “And so many poor mothers think their willful boys have run away to sea, or gone to roam the world in India or Africa, or the wild deserts of California, and they wonder, poor souls, after all they have done for the ingrates. But they don't know they've been warming a viper all that time—no, and those creatures aren't anywhere in human life any more, they've gone back to their own Bad People, and forever after they help to steal children and put changelings in their places!” A question occurred to Jenny at last, but years afterwards when it was too late: “What did they do with the children they stole?”