Ship of Fools (69 page)

“What innocent children?” asked Mrs. Baumgartner, with a severe glance at Hans, who winced. “Innocent? You mean those criminal twins who threw poor Bébé overboard and caused that poor steerage wretch to be drowned? Do you mean them, too?”

“Why not?” asked Herr Baumgartner, with the irrelevant piety his wife always found so exasperating. “God must be their judge, not we. It is not even proved that they did it, you know.”

“Not proved!” said his wife, purposely keeping her voice down. “What proof was needed? Who else on this boat, who in the wide world but that pair would have been capable of such a thing? Oh, but
you
are the innocent one, after all.”

“I hope I have managed to preserve a little of that blessed quality after all these years,” said her husband smugly, putting on a huge red papier-mâché nose by means of wire hooks over his ears. “What I am doing is quite simple. I shall get some toys for the children, and try to amuse them a bit—that is all. But my dear, I wish you would be a little kinder sometimes about these happy little occasions.”

“I don't mean to be unkind,” she said, stricken, “it is just that sometimes I do not quite understand …”

“Please dress up a little,” said her husband, “wear your pretty Bavarian peasant dress you used to wear to our parties in Mexico. Do that for me,” he wheedled, his eyes glazed with tenderness over the clownish red nose.

“I'll think about it,” she answered, and her husband understood at once that she would do it. Hans, sitting by with a large paper cowboy hat on and a small drum hanging around his neck, waited patiently as always for the dispute to end and the next thing to begin. When his father said, “Now, my Hans,” he leaped up and took a step towards the door. His mother's voice with the familiar warning note in it chilled the back of his neck and stopped him in his tracks.

“Come and kiss me,” said his mother. This done, he and his father escaped together, his father frowning as if he had a stomach ache again. Before they appeared on deck, Herr Baumgartner paused, and fished out of his back pocket a paper brownie cap given him by a steward, and pulled it down over his ears.

“Now,” he shouted gleefully, bending down to Hans's face, “tell me, what is my name?” And he did a hop-skip-jump sort of dance in a circle.

“Rumpelstilzchen!” shouted Hans, at the top of his voice.

“Right!” bawled his father heartily, and they hurried forward, feeling that the party had already begun.

Jenny sat on the edge of her chair in the late afternoon light, sketching a sea gull in flight, from memory. She had filled several pages, everything from a half dozen hasty dashes that might be a bird of some sort in flight to a tight drawing of a sea gull's head encased in a design of feathers that resembled chain armor. Everything wrong, as usual. David sat near, reading
Don Quixote
again, perhaps for the dozenth time—“Nothing like it to warm up your Spanish,” he said; his sketchbook tied with a tape was propped beside his chair. Since she had made the scene about showing him her drawing, he no longer sketched in company with her, and never asked to see what she was doing. Jenny pretended not to notice, wondering how long he would hold out.

“I think I'll go now, time to change,” she said. “The steward may be able to get me an extra shower.”

David without raising his eyes from his book inquired carefully: “Are you really going to dress for this fool party?”

“No,
change
,” said Jenny, “I always do, every evening. Hadn't you noticed?”

Herr Baumgartner appeared at the head of his parade, twirling a stick like a drum major, doing the goose step, the children goose-stepping after him in shrieking disorder. The commissary had distributed trumpets, drums, maracas, whistles, which they rattled, struck, beat, blew as they pleased. Hans marched beside his father, the small Cuban boy and girl came after, and Ric and Rac drew up in the rear, knocking dried gourds together and beating a drum, with a strange look of almost childish pleasure in their faces. Jenny stood smiling as they approached, and applauded lightly. Herr Baumgartner glared at her over his false nose and called out with joyless vehemence: “Why don't you join us? Why don't you help?”

“You don't need it,” answered Jenny, but she followed them, just the same, and David held his breath for fear she would break into a goose step; she was more than capable of it, she could not be depended upon one minute not to make a holy show of herself. He had a horror of female clowns, and it came over him miserably in moments like this that Jenny had more than a streak of low comedy in her nature. He watched her disappear into the bar in the wake of the miniature carnival, still walking sedately but clapping her hands in marching time, for Hans and Herr Baumgartner were now singing breathlessly, “
Ist das nicht ein gülden Ring
?
Ja, das ist ein gülden Ring
…” while the twins and the Cuban children simply shrieked more or less in rhythm. They marched around tables swinging their legs straight up and out, the drinkers seizing glasses out of the way as they passed. Herr Baumgartner stopped singing long enough to admonish the gathering to right and left, with his anguished frown and grieving voice: “Why don't you join us? Why don't you help?” and though the little merrymakers were favored with the kindly glance and sweet smile customary to such occasions; the all-too-brief joys of childhood were of course sacred, no matter how boring they could be, sometimes; yet nobody stirred from his place, nor turned his head after them when the disturbance passed. Herr Baumgartner concealed his despair, and went stamping out on deck, keeping up the spine-shattering goose step he had loathed all through his military service. He led them once around, and turned them loose near the bar, where each child might find his family—except Hans, who was sent back to his mother as if he were being punished for something. He went, carrying his toys, ready to cry; what had happened, what had he done? The other children separated at once without a word or glance exchanged, each hugging his loot, and forgetting Herr Baumgartner instantly. Herr Baumgartner wanted only to be forgotten, and to forget: he longed only for privacy, invisibility, and a bottle of brandy. Failing all, he asked for a stein of beer, and sat over it with a face of guilty apology, not daring to drink brandy until his wife came; she had made him promise solemnly he would never again drink except when she was with him. After a few minutes' brooding, he remembered to take off his whiskers and nose and brownie cap. When his wife joined him, with Hans, just before dinner, wearing her lacy headdress with ribbon streamers, her ruffled blouse and abundant skirts, freshly powdered and smelling of
eau de lilas
, he set down his third stein of beer and leaned toward her gratefully. “My Greta, how lovely you are—my same little girl. You have not changed since our wedding day! All these years—”

“Ten,” she said, with good-tempered abruptness, “and you are very forgetful. You promised not to drink except—”

“Ah,” he said, jovially, for his stomach was eased and warmed, “I thought that meant only brandy!”

“No,” she answered, “nothing was said about brandy. You were never to drink alone!”

He chose to be whimsical. “Not even lemonade? Not water? Coffee?”

“Nonsense,” she said, a little edgily. “You are talking like a lawyer. We both know what you promised. And I do wish you wouldn't wear my jacket. You are stretching it out of shape. I do not think a man should wear women's clothes, even in a masquerade.” She looked around uneasily, but the bar was nearly empty. “People talk,” she said.

“I'll find something else,” said her husband, miserably.

“Why?” asked his wife. “It's too late now—everybody has already seen you … I think I'll have a beer, too.”

Hans sat elbows on table, chin in hand, waiting until one or the other of them would remember to ask for his raspberry juice.

Freytag went in, thinking of a bath and shave, and found Hansen, half dressed, sprawling in the upper berth with his bare feet dangling.

“What's the matter? Seasick?”

Hansen's great worried face hung out over the edge. “I, seasick?” He seemed ready to take offense. “I was born on a fishing boat.”

After this personal confidence, if it was that, he rolled back and gazed upward. “I am thinking.”

Freytag stripped off his shirt and started the warm water in the hand basin.

“I am thinking,” said Hansen, “about all the things people everywhere do to make each other miserable—”

“What was your mother doing on a fishing boat?” asked Freytag. “I thought no woman was allowed to set foot—”

“It was my father's boat,” said Hansen, gloomily. “Look, the big trouble is, nobody listens. People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers …”

At this point Freytag stopped listening and devoted his whole attention to brushing lather on his face. Balancing expertly with the roll of the ship, he proceeded to shave himself with a straight razor, a feat of which he was proud. If any witness remarked on this, he was certain to say it seemed to him the only way to get a real shave. Not once during the entire voyage had Hansen noticed Freytag's way of shaving; he rubbed on readymade lather out of a tube and scraped his cheeks and chin briskly with a small safety razor, and appeared to be quite unconscious that there was more than one way of shaving. When next Freytag heard Hansen's voice he was saying: “No. They won't. In France, for example—all the bottles, white wine, red wine, pink wine, everything but champagne—the bottles have shoulders, no?”

“Quite,” said Freytag, rolling up his socks and putting them in a brown linen bag with the word
WÄSCHE
embroidered in green.

“But now, you go to Germany—yes, just barely across the line, not even to Germany, just to Alsace—and what do you find? All the bottles without shoulders, bottles like bowling pins!” His wrathful voice shook Freytag's nerves.

No wonder people don't listen, he thought unkindly. What is it now, I wonder—that Spanish woman or Herr Rieber, or what? For he had discovered about Hansen something he had surmised a good while ago about most persons—that their abstractions and generalizations, their Rage for Justice or Hatred of Tyranny or whatever, too often disguised a bitter personal grudge of some sort far removed from the topic apparently under discussion.

This elementary fact of human nature came to him as a personal discovery about others, he did not once include himself in it. His own plight was unique, peculiar to himself, outside all the rules. His feelings about it were right beyond question, subject to no judgments except his own, and not to be compared for a moment to such shabby little troubles as Hansen's.

“It is such things,” said Hansen, “men insisting to make bottles with shoulders on one spot; and not fifty feet away, on the other side of a purely imaginary line which would not exist except for the stupidity and greed of mankind, just to show their independence they make bottles without shoulders!”

Freytag felt patience settling and weighing down his spirits like a fog. “But the line is not imaginary, it is there to define something, to give shape to an idea, to express the language and ways of a certain kind of people … look,” he said, with a glance at the knotted, impenetrable face above him, “nobody fights about the shape of a bottle. They fight about the differences in their minds that shaped the bottles differently in the first place.…”

Hansen sat up and roared: “But yes, yes, that is just what I am trying to tell you. That is what I am saying.”

“I didn't quite catch that,” said Freytag, folding his razor.

“Naturally not,” said Hansen, his face so closed in despair his rudeness gave Freytag no offense. “Nobody listens.”

Hansen sat up, put on his socks and shoes and hurled himself out of the berth, reached for his shirt hanging on the top bar, and said: “All is crooked, everything—look at these Spaniards! You know they are whores and pimps, nobody wants their party—but here we are, we all pay and we all go, like sheep! They blackmail, they cheat, they lie, they steal from everybody all over Santa Cruz, everybody sees, knows—what do we do? Nothing. And that poor fat man below—what was his crime? He said the word
Freedom
in front of a priest! So—then they break his head open and sew it up again so it cannot be said they did not take care of him, yes, even such an outcast as him. Religion and politics—what did I tell you?” His hoarse dull bellow rose almost intolerably.

“Ah, yes, so you did,” said Freytag amiably, thinking what a restful cabin mate Löwenthal might have been if only he could have disposed of that Rieber, whom nobody wanted. Yes, even Rieber himself might be preferable to this obsessed suffering man. Suffering should be strictly private, he decided; it was part of the human privilege for a man to enjoy his own afflictions without having them mixed with someone else's—above all, he knew of nothing worse than to be offered sympathy for the wrong reason from someone who had no right to offer any sympathy at all. He was of course thinking of Jenny, who took the high ground that racial prejudice or any sort of prejudice was the symptom of psychic and moral disease, especially anti-Semitism, which was inexcusable and unpardonable on any grounds. He had been strongly tempted to interrupt her rhapsodic little homily by saying, “Why, I know lots of people who don't care for Jews, but you couldn't call them anti-Semitic—they're some of them very fond of Arabs!” She would never understand his joke on the precise meaning of a word, and it would be merely silly to shock and offend her. She was pleasant to dance with, and it was rather piquant, the way a curious innocence, naïveté, a priggish little moral earnestness rose now and then to the surface of her light chatter, like cloudy bubbles on a pool, causing you to wonder what strange fish swam below, or what drowned thing was sending up gaseous signals from the bottom. Mary would size her up in a glance, and dispose of her in a phrase—some shrewd and murderous flick of the tongue that need not be in the least true, or even near the mark, but it would be deadly and would make him ashamed of his interest in such a girl. Mary would never hear of Jenny—why should she? As he knotted his tie, he began to feel a tingle of excitement that rose to exhilaration, as if it were Mary he would find when he went on deck; as if the ship were even then being warped into the dock and Mary was there on the pier waiting for him, already looking for him with her field-glasses. His fantasy so lifted his spirits, so carried him away, that not until he was brushing his hair full speed with the pair of English whale-bristle brushes Mary had given him for his birthday did he realize that Hansen had fallen silent, and hastened to try to give him some sort of decent attention.