Ship of Fools (73 page)

All the dancers, even Ric and Rac, shouted “
Viva
!” and swallowed their wine. The Captain, his head buzzing, not sure whether a toast or a curse had been proposed, for or against whom, rose and flung his napkin. The Cuban students at once leaped up waving large goblets of red wine, shouting cheerfully, “To eternal confusion! To dishonor! To shame!
Viva las Vergüenzas! Viva la Cucaracha
!” and they burst noisily into their song about the unhappy cockroach and her many privations. All over the salon voices joined in, a large untidy bawling at first which at once settled into a chorus, hands clapping, feet patting: “
Cucaracha, cucaracha, ya no puede caminar, Porque no tiene, porque no tiene, Marihuana para fumar
!” The Captain inserted his fingers into his collar as if he were being strangled, spat out the words “Thank you, thank you” between his teeth, and strode out of the salon charging blindly between tables.

The dancers ignored the situation, and all else except their chosen object; they trailed after him still crying “
Viva! Viva
!” though quite drowned out by the rowdy singing. At the head of the stairs they looked in vain for him; he had eluded them, had taken to the bridge like a fox to his burrow, and was not seen again for twenty-four hours.

Jenny broke down as David knew she would, and began swaying and patting and clapping her hands with the rest, singing at the top of her voice about the cockroach, going straight ahead from bad to worse, for each verse was a little more ribald than the one before, and Jenny sang them as they came, until people at nearby tables began staring. She was the only woman singing. “My
God
,” he said at last, in despair. “Do you know what you are saying?”

Jenny went on beating time hand and foot. “Of course, I do. If you like, I'll sing it in English. Please, David, I can't help it. I'm just as much a prisoner in myself as you are in you. I think this whole thing is wild, and everything about it is crooked, we both know it; but I don't understand why, if you know it is all so wrong, you didn't do something about it—why didn't you let me speak to the police, or tell one of the shopkeepers in time? We saw these people stealing right and left.”

David said shortly, “It was none of our business.”

“Well, then, what makes you so self-righteous about it? Why do you sit and sulk?” asked Jenny, quite reckless in her impatience.

“This is none of our business either,” said David, a traplike finality in his tone. Jenny drank her wine and watched passengers straggling slowly in the wake of the dancers. “Well,” she told him, “have a merry evening. I am going to dance with the first man that asks me!” And left him alone to the dessert and coffee.

The band leader had been well instructed by Tito and Lola; he was to play alternate German and Spanish dance music until time for the drawing of tickets for the prizes. After that, he could play what he chose; he was given five tickets for his obliging consent to this, and had already set his heart on the white embroidered silk shawl for his girl in Wiesbaden. As the zarzuela company with their followers appeared, he struck his favorite “Tales from the Vienna Woods” with great spirit. At the first sound of the music, a faint spark, a firefly gaiety, played through the crowd lighting each face with a wavering, hopeful smile. The Spanish company led the way, paired off and swung into step as their feet touched the deck, stepping out rhythmically pair by pair, matched like slender porcelain figurines alike in their practiced grace, serpent-litheness, thin-boned, smooth narrow heads, fine feet and hands. They seemed to be a beautiful, evil-tempered family of brothers and sisters, their hard eyes and bitter mouths denying their blithe motions. Several German pairs followed—Frau Rittersdorf with a young officer, the Baumgartners, sad-faced, Elsa and her father, Herr Rieber and Lizzi—they all looked rustic and awkward and mis-matched beside the Spaniards—their bodies all shapes and heights and widths, their faces nondescript, their coloring lifeless; nothing but a common heaviness proclaimed them as members of the same nation; that, and a certain fitful, uneasy vivacity as if practicing social graces not quite their own. The Spaniards did not favor them with so much as a glance, and the Germans could not take their gaze from the Spaniards. As they watched, first to one and then another came a vague impression that shortly settled into a disturbing certainty; the zarzuela company was no longer dancing a pure, classical Viennese waltz, with their birdlike lightness; they were—yes, no doubt of it—doing an imitation—an insulting parody, of the German style of waltzing.

Mrs. Treadwell, with her young officer, noticed this most amusing bit of comedy, and laughed merrily together as they moved into the dance. Jenny and Freytag saw it too, at the same moment. Jenny said, “Oh how cruel and funny!” and Freytag said a trifle grimly, “It's almost too true to be funny, I think,” and swung her firmly into step. Within a turn or two, it became impossible for them not to see clearly that the zarzuela company was now giving imitations of them—and it was further impossible for any of them to deny that they were as comic as those public figures of fun, Lizzi and Herr Rieber. Pepe and Amparo had become perfect impersonators of Mrs. Treadwell's mincing, arm's length style, her wooden young partner; Manolo and Concha did a wicked imitation of Herr Freytag's somewhat muscular aggressiveness and Jenny's abandoned, swooning manner, head thrown back loosely. Pancho and Pastora had from the first stuck firmly with their parody of Herr Rieber and Lizzi, Pancho bouncing like a rubber ball, Pastora turning on an axis like an animated flagpole.

“No, really,” said Jenny, stopping abruptly, “that is too much. Those people are really insufferable … I don't want to dance any more.”

“Neither do I,” said Freytag. “Let's make a tour of the ship. Let's see what makes it run. I'm bored with this.”

Mrs. Treadwell danced with her officer once, declined Denny's invitation, who thought she would do to pass the time until he could catch Pastora, and accepted the fat purser's, who walloped with astonishing speed three times around the narrow dance floor with his partner streaming from his clasp like a scarf, then halted suddenly, blowing and snorting, his face a rich red-violet, his eyes closed, until Mrs. Treadwell, alarmed, asked if there were anything she could do?

“Yes,” he gasped, “you may sit with me and have some more
Schaumwein
.”

But providentially her good-looking, gold-braided young officer intervened, and with a deferential bow to the purser, took her away again. He had a smooth fair face with no expression at all, she observed, none. He was as sleek, neat, immaculately correct and inhuman-looking as if he were poured into a mold. He danced with waxlike smoothness, with small even steps accommodated to hers, holding her at an unfashionable, formal distance, as if he had been trained at her own dancing school. “Why, he's young enough to be my son,” she could not help thinking, “and he reminds me of my grandfather.” She decided this was no real drawback, settled into the leisurely spin of his style and began to enjoy the floating lightness and the pleasant male nearness, no weight and no burden but only a presence. She closed her eyes a moment and danced in lulling darkness, with a diffused tenderness for this wraith who guided her with light fingers at waist and palm, the lover who had danced with her in her daydreams long before she had danced with any man. Opening her eyes, she found him watching her face with a peculiar intentness unexpected and disturbing. Was it her imagination, instructed in the ways of the lurking animal, was it her own seeking eyes? Or was it really a goatish gleam?—for as her glance met his, his eye became bland, distant, even maybe a touch bored, and he said, “Let's leave this to those ruffians. Wouldn't you like to make a little tour of the ship? It's a kind of custom on gala evenings.”

Mrs. Treadwell, remembering all the voyages she had made in all sorts of ships to how many ports, had never yet on the most gala of evenings made a tour of any ship. It was hard to imagine anything more boring, perhaps; she smiled at her escort, slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, and set out for new, if not amusing, sights.

When the music changed to a rumba, the Cuban students moved in a body to take the Spanish dancing girls for partners—it was a gaudy race in which each one claimed the girl he reached first. The two left out turned at once to look for other possibilities; one seized Jenny as she was leaving the dance with Freytag, and the other, smiling and humming the tune, slipped an arm around Elsa and took her hand, and she found herself in a daze looking into the eyes of her love, the stranger, the beautiful merry one for her. No, it could not be—yet he was still smiling, frowning a little, and she felt his arm tugging at her waist as she stood planted like a tree, unable to move a muscle. “Oh no, come now,” he said, in very civil persuasive Spanish, no argot at all, “we are going to dance.”

Elsa stood immovable. “I can't,” she whispered in a small child's voice, frightened. “No, no, please—I can't.”

“Naturally you can,” he assured her lightly, “anything with legs can dance!” And he performed the feat of dancing in one spot while embracing a motionless form too weighty to push from its foundation. “You see?”

“Oh, no,” cried Elsa in despair, “I never learned how!”

He dropped his hands and stood back and she saw with terror a look of serious distaste in his face. “
Perdoneme
!” he said and turned swiftly away as from something extremely unpleasant, and as she stood there, was gone, without looking back. Oh, and he would never look back. In a few seconds he was dancing with Mrs. Treadwell, who left her officer for a brief turn with this diverting creature out of a carnival, and Elsa felt her heart break quite finally. She wished to go at once to bed, and cry as much as she wanted, but first she must tell her father and mother, or they would be looking for her. They were playing checkers in the salon. “No, Elsa,” said her mother, “if you go to bed so early, you will not sleep well. Why aren't you dancing?”

“I don't feel like it, Mother,” she said, so desolately both her parents gave her looks of intimate sympathy and understanding. “Ah well,” said her mother, so knowingly that Elsa blushed for shame, “you are wise to be quiet. So just sit here and play checkers with your father, and I will go on knitting, and we will have a nice evening together after all this hubbub and foolishness.”

Elsa, feeling her doom in her, where before she had only feared it, in some terrible future, smiled blindly at her father, and began her play.

Arne Hansen, sitting in a deck chair with a bottle of beer on the floor beside him, his big shoulders hunched and his eyebrows in a tangle over the bridge of his nose, watched Amparo dance first with Manolo and then with one of those crazy students, and she had not given him a glance all evening. When the third tune struck up, a German waltz, he lumbered over to her, standing near Manolo fanning herself. Manolo discreetly evanesced from the scene, and Hansen took her firmly by the elbows, his favorite clutch when dancing. Amparo wasted no words. She wrenched free violently, dropped her fan, which he did not notice. She bent to pick it up while he was lunging towards her a second time, ground her heel cruelly into his foot, and rising abruptly, cracked him under the jaw with the top of her head, closing his mouth so abruptly he bit his tongue, which bled.

“Now, see what you do,” he said, accusingly, getting out a large handkerchief and collecting bright red spots on it, dabbing and dabbing.

“Let me alone, then!” cried Amparo in pure rage. “This one evening I will not lug your stinking corpse around everywhere I go. I am working, it is nearly time for the raffle, you go and sit over there and drink your beer and keep out of the way.”

“I bought four tickets,” Hansen reminded her, feeling in his shirt pocket and bringing out his stubs.

“Yes, four, you cheap bastard,” said Amparo, deliberately. “Four!” and she spat just past his left sleeve.

“You'll take back that word,” said Hansen, with sudden dignity. “You'll be sorry you did that.” He returned to his chair and ordered two more bottles of beer.

Her student no sooner had grasped Jenny's waist and hand than he began manipulating her, whirling her around, tossing her out to arm's length and retrieving her on the beat, closing in and embracing her hotly, throwing her away again carelessly, until she almost expected to be seized by the legs and spun around head downward. She protested, out of breath. “I'm an infighter,” she told him brightly, “I like to slug it out toe to toe. All these acrobatics—what for?”

He was delighted with the compliment. “Ah,” he said unexpectedly in a species of English, “you like?
So
?” and he began winding her up as if she were a top.

“No,” said Jenny, “no,” and she broke away, laughing of course. “Too much!” She waved him good-by merrily, merrily, both of them laughing, and ran to Freytag.

He favored her with a very German, superior smile, saying: “Tell me, you should know this, do all women prefer thugs, and
maquereaux
, and guttersnipes at heart? What is this strange feminine taste for lowness?
La nostalgie de la boue
?”

“Low?” said Jenny, puzzled. “Mud? He's just a noisy middle-class medical student, he could be a bore, but what's low about him?”

“He was dancing with you without respect, as if he were making fun of you,” said Freytag, bluntly.

“He may have been,” she said, simply. “That's his affair, not mine.”

“Have you no pride?” he asked severely, for he was tired of trying to understand this strange girl who seemed to lack everything he required in a woman and yet disturbed him almost constantly with a sexual desire unlike any he had known—pure lust without one trace of warmth or tenderness. He did not even like her.