Ship of Fools (8 page)

“Yes, after all these years,” said his wife, drearily. “Yes, now when it is too late, when nothing will be the same, when Elsa is grown up and a stranger to her own people—oh think what trouble we had to keep her from speaking Spanish first, before her mother tongue! Yes, now of course, we can go back in style, and set up in business and feel important. What for?”

“As for feeling important,” said Herr Lutz, “let us wait and see.”

“Mama,” said Elsa timidly, trying to change the subject, “my cabin mate is that American girl who came on board with that light-haired young man. I thought they were married, didn't you? But he is in one cabin and she another.”

“I am sorry to hear all this,” said her mother, severely. “I had hoped you might be with an older woman, somebody respectable. That girl, I don't like her looks or her ways. Pantaloons in the street, imagine! And is she really traveling with a man who is not her husband?”

“Well,” said Elsa, uncertainly, seeing that this topic was a failure also, “I suppose so. But she is in a separate cabin, after all.”

“I hardly see the difference,” said her mother. “I am very sorry. Now listen carefully to me. You are to be always very reserved with that girl. Do not take her advice or follow her example in the smallest thing. Treat her with perfect coldness, don't take up with her at all. Never be seen on deck with her. Don't talk to her or listen when she talks. You are in very bad company, and I shall try to have your cabin changed.”

“But who would I be with then?” asked Elsa. “Another stranger.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed her mother, looking about her at various women passing them or walking near them. “Ah, yes, who knows? One may be worse than the other! Just you obey me, that is all!”

“Yes Mama,” said Elsa, attentively and submissively. Her father smiled at her and said, “That is our good little girl. You must always do as your mama says.”

“But Papa, when she changed to a skirt, she looked like anyone else, she looked very well, not like an American at all.”

“Let her alone, just the same,” said Frau Lutz, shaking her head. “She is an American, don't forget that. No matter how she looks.”

The bugler stepped out on deck sounding his merry call for dinner. Instantly the Lutz family faced inward and hastened their steps. At the top of the stairs they were almost overwhelmed from the back by the troupe of Spanish dancers, who simply went through, over and around them like a wave, a wave with elbows. The Lutzes were so outdistanced the Spaniards were already seated at a good-sized round table near the Captain's and the six-year-old twins were tearing at a dish of celery before a waiter could find the small table set for three—against the wall, to be sure, but happily near a porthole.

“I am glad to see they have washed their faces,” said Frau Lutz, beginning to read her dinner card with an eye of foregone disillusion, “but it would look better all around if they washed their necks, too. I saw very distinctly: their necks are gray and stiff with old dirty powder. Elsa, you wonder why I always say to you, wash your neck. And your wrists, too, and as for powder—I hope you will never be so foolish.”

Elsa glanced down her own nose, where the shininess was refracted into her eyes. She rubbed her nose with her handkerchief, carefully refrained from sighing and said nothing.

The dining room was clean and well polished. There were flowers on the tables and an adequate display of fresh white napery and tableware. The waiters seemed refreshed and stimulated by the beginning of another voyage, and the famished faces of the new set of passengers wore a mollified, expectant air. The Captain was absent, but at his table Dr. Schumann greeted the Captain's guests, and explained to them that it was the Captain's custom to dine on the bridge during the serious first hours of voyage.

The guests all nodded in generous agreement and acknowledgment of the Captain's heavy task of getting them safely to sea; and all was sedate remark and easy understanding among the chosen ones: Herr Professor and Frau Hutten, Herr Rieber, Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker, Frau Rittersdorf, Frau Otto Schmitt, and the “presentable” young man whom Mrs. Treadwell had seen sitting with Jenny Brown. His name was Wilhelm Freytag, he said several times over in the round of exchange of names when the company had sat down. Within three minutes Frau Rittersdorf had ascertained that he was “connected” with a German oil company in Mexico, was married (a pity, rather) and was even then in that moment on his way to Mannheim to bring back his young wife and her mother. Frau Rittersdorf also decided instantly that Herr Rieber bounced and chuckled rather vulgarly and was hardly up to the rest of the Captain's table. Frau Schmitt and the Huttens were at once well disposed to each other when it came out that they were all former teachers in German schools, the Huttens in Mexico City.

Herr Rieber, in top spirits, twinkling irrepressibly at Lizzi, but decently subdued by the society in which he found himself, proposed by way of a good beginning that he might be allowed to offer wine to the whole table. This was received with the best of good will by the others. The wine was brought, real Niersteiner Domtal of the finest label, so hard to find in Mexico, so expensive when found, so missed by them all, so loved, the beautiful good sound white wine of Germany, fresh as flowers. They sniffed their chilled goblets, their eyes moistened and they beamed at each other. They touched brims lightly, clinking all about, spoke the kind round words of health and good fortune to each other, and drank.

Nothing, they felt, could have been more correct, more charming, more amiable than that moment. They fell upon their splendid full-bodied German food with hot appetites. They were all going home, home at last, and in this ship they had in common for the first time the feeling that they had already set foot upon a mystic Fatherland. Restored, fortified, they paused now and again to wipe their teeming mouths, nodding at each other in silence. Dr. Schumann ate with the moderation of an abstemious man who could hardly remember when last he had been really hungry. The guests gave him admiring glances as they ate and drank. The highest kind of German good breeding, they could see, with the dignity of his humane profession adding still more luster; and his fine scar, showing that he had gone to a great university, that he was brave and coolheaded: so great a scar so perfectly placed proved that he had known the meaning of the
Mensur
, that measure of a true German. If he seemed a little absent, thoughtfully silent, that was his right; it belonged to the importance of his duties as ship's doctor.

“Pig's knuckles, David darling,” said Jenny Brown, restoring his private particular name to David Scott for the first time in three days. His own mood was not so easy—he reflected that she probably would not become Jenny angel to him for several days more—if ever. How much simple fraying of the nervous system can love survive? How many scenes?

“I'm boning up on German from the water taps and all the little signs about, but nearly all these people speak English or French or both. Do you see that fellow I was walking with? Over there—the Captain's table. The one with the invincible haircut. I didn't even know he was German until he told me—”

“With that face?” asked David.

“What's wrong with his face?”

“It looks German.”

“David darling, shame on you! Well, I wanted to practice my German on him, but after the first sentence he simply couldn't bear it, and I must say, he speaks better English than I do—awfully English, in fact. I thought maybe he had been brought up in England, but no, he learned it in school in Berlin.… Well, my Swiss girl—did I tell you I'm stuck in the same cabin with that big Swiss girl? She wears a white linen corset cover with tatting around the edges. I'll bet you never saw one …”

“My mother used to wear them,” said David.

“David! You mean you peeped while your mother was dressing?”

“No, I used to sit in the middle of the bed and watch her.”

“Well,” said Jenny, “my Swiss girl speaks Spanish and French and English and a kind of dialect she calls Romansh—besides German—and she's barely eighteen. And she will speak only English to me, though I certainly do as well at Spanish as she does. I don't see an earthly chance to pick up any language, if this is the way it's going to be.”

“These people aren't typical,” said David, “and neither are we. Just roaming around foreign countries, changing money and language at every border. We do the same. Look at me, even learning Russian—”

“Yes, look at you,” said Jenny, admiringly. “But you even learn the grammar, from the book, a thing that would never occur to me. I can't learn grammar, that's flat, but then, I don't feel the need of it.”

“If you could hear yourself sometimes,” said David, “you'd feel the need. You say some really appalling things, in Spanish I mean.”

“You look pretty as a picture in that blue shirt, darling,” said Jenny. “I hope that doesn't appall you. My God, I'm starving! Wasn't Veracruz deadly this time? What came over that town? I had the tenderest memories of the place and now I hope I never see it again.”

“It seemed to me as usual,” said David, “heat, cockroaches, Veracruzanos and all.”

“Ah no,” said Jenny, “I used to walk about there at night, after a rain, with everything washed clean, and the sweet-by-night and jasmine in full bloom and the colors of the plaster walls very pure. I would come on those unexpected squares and corners and fountains, all of them composed, just waiting to be painted, and none of them looking the way they did in daylight. All the windows would be open and pale yellow light streaming out, with clouds of white mosquito netting over the big beds, and half-dressed half-asleep people moving about already in a dream; or sitting out on the little balconies just for the pleasure of breathing. It
was
lovely, David, and I loved it. The people seemed so friendly and easy—everybody. And once there was a terrible glorious thunderstorm and lightning hit the elevator shaft in my hotel about twenty feet from my room and knocked me out, almost. It was fun! It was real danger and yet I was alive.”

David protested this memory coldly, doubtfully. “You never told me this before,” he said.

“I hope not,” she said. “Wouldn't that be dull? But you never believe any memory that is pleasant, I wonder why? You must let me remember it in my own way, as beautiful at least once.” After a light pause she added, “I am sure that if you had been there it would all have looked very different.” She watched with clinical attention his smooth, tight-skinned face that gave absolutely no sign when he was hit.

“Who was with you then, that it was all so delightful?”

“Nobody,” she said softly. “I was there by myself and I saw it in my own way with no one to spoil it for me.”

“And no boat to catch.”

“No, I had come off a boat from New York. Nine lovely days when I didn't know a soul on board, and spoke only to my waiter and my stewardess.”

“They should have been flattered,” said David darling, meanly. But it gave him no satisfaction.

Jenny straightened her knife and fork and took a sip of water. “I don't know,” she told him gravely as if she were considering deeply an important question. “I really don't know whether I am going to be able to sit at this table with you the whole voyage or not. At least I am glad we have separate cabins.”

“So am I,” said David, instantly, a cold fire in his eyes.

They both fell silent then, dismayed at how suddenly things could get out of hand; knowing as always there was no end to it, because there was no real beginning. The quarrel between them was a terrible treadmill they mounted together and tramped round and round until they were wearied out or in despair. He went on doggedly with his food, and she took up her fork again. “I'll stop if you will,” she said at last. “How does it begin? Why? I never know.”

David knew that her yielding was half fatigue, half boredom, but he was grateful for the reprieve. Besides, she had got in a good blow at him, and must be feeling easier.

He did not forgive her; he would take her by surprise someday in turn, as he had done often before, and watch her face turn pale; she always recognized revenge for what it was, yet admitted its barbarous justice. At least she had some little sense of turn and turn about, she didn't expect always to be allowed to get away with murder, and he would make it part of his business to see that she did not. Feeling within him his coldness of heart as a real power in reserve, he smiled at her with that sweetness which always charmed her, reached out and laid his hand over hers warmly.

“Jenny angel,” he said. Instantly she felt her heart—she believed firmly that her heart could feel—melting just a little, timidly and distrustfully: she knew what David could and would do to her if she let herself be “caught soft” as he described it. Yet she could not stop herself. She leaned forward and said, “You old thing, you! Oh, let's try to be happy. Let's not spoil our first voyage together, it could be so gay. I'll try, really David darling, I promise—let's try. Don't you
know
I love you?”

“I wonder,” said David with the most insidious gentleness. Mysteriously she seemed on the verge of tears, which she controlled, knowing that David regarded her weeping as simply another female trick shaken out of her sleeve at the useful moment. He watched with a reserved little smile to see if she would give way; she had never made a scene in public yet. She smiled back at him, instead, took up her glass of wine and held it out to touch his. “
Salud
,” she said. “
Salud
,” said David, and they emptied their glasses in one breath.

They were both ashamed of the evil natures they exposed in each other; each in the first days of their love had hoped to be the ideal image of the other, for they were desperately romantic, and their fear of exposing themselves, of showing and learning unlovely things about each other, made them dishonest and cruel. In their moments of truce both believed that the love between them was very pure and generous, as they wished it to be; there needed only to be … needed only to be what, exactly, they both wondered, secretly and separately, and found no answer. Only in such short moments as this, when they drank the wine of peace together, their bodies grew limp and calm, they breathed easily in the air of reconciliation, and made vague vows to themselves and to each other, to keep faith—faith with what? to love each other, to
try
—But David at least still knew that for himself, trying to be happy was perhaps half their trouble, or the cause of half of it. And the other half—?