The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (23 page)

AN IRISHMAN AND A JEW

THE liner plunged down the first of the great Biscay seas and met the second with a crash and shudder that set in motion all movable objects within her. The sigh of human beings, each in his prison of paneled teak or painted iron, sounded through the
Alhaurin
like a passing ghost, while a loose water pipe, a chair sliding across the lounge, a falling shaving brush, and the crated locomotive at the bottom of No. 3 Hold mingled their sounds with a thousand others into one distant and all-pervasive groan.

Mr. Flynn, finding his feet suddenly higher than his head, was inspired to raise them still higher and to kick a tattoo against the springs of the empty bunk above him.

“Danno, me boy,” he said loudly, “ye've been shipped to Buenos Aires like an old maid's dream. Ye're dishonored forever, Danno, and the little yellow man that bought your soul will be driving you to market seven days a week. Or would they be eating horseflesh, now, in Brazil? God help you, you have the drink taken, and there's none to listen to you!”

Danno Flynn heaved himself down his bunk until the small of his back was resting upon the foot of it. From this position he could reach the bell with his big toe; he fang it, propped up his heel on the rosette, crossed his legs, and fell asleep again.

His precarious balance was disturbed by the opening of the stateroom door. Mr. Flynn raised his knees to his chest, and a simultaneous and violent pitch of the ship rolled him head over heels so that he came to rest on all fours. With his dark skin, his hair falling over his eyes, and the black and grey of his unshaven bristles and untidy moustache, he looked remarkably like an excited sheep dog. The steward stared at this tousled quadruped, which stared back at him.

“Wuff, wuff!” barked Danno Flynn, suddenly appreciating his own fantastic appearance.

“Is there anything you want, sir?” stammered the steward, carefully keeping all but his head and one shoulder behind the door.

“There is,” said Danno. “Will ye tell the Canine Defense League of Connemara that I am shipped to Buenos Aires?”

“It says on your card that you're going to Santos, sir.”

“Do you have the time now, steward?” asked Danno, seeing that conversation with this literal-minded Englishman would be difficult.

“Eight o'clock—and the second day out from London, sir,” answered the steward pointedly.

“And where the devil are we?”

“In the Bay.”

“Be God, if it's a bay,” said Danno Flynn, “'tis no liking I will have for the ocean. Or is it a bay now beyond the western isles where the waves dance from the four corners of the world, and the heroes catting into them from the right hand and from the left as they sail to their long home?”

“It's the Bay of Biscay, sir,” said the steward.

“Then I'll be having a beer.”

“Sorry, sir! Bar's shut!”

“Ah, to hell with you!” said Danno, rolling backwards and pulling the sheets over his head.

At midday the
Alhaurin
was a dripping nucleus of solidity between the low grey sky above her and the grey seas that she rode. The squalls blew up from the west, driving hard and low into the promenade decks. The spray and rain swept the main deck so that the hatches between the first and third class were low islands in a miniature surf that broke against them with every roll of the ship. There was no one about save an occasional oilskinned seaman or officer paddling grimly to duty. Under the lee of the smoking room two hardy Englishwomen were bundled up in chairs and regarding the Bay with well-bred contempt; they gave an impression of holding under their rugs Britannia's shield and trident.

Mr. Flynn lurched out of the smoking room, attired in an old sweater and tweed trousers. He had neither shaved nor brushed his hair, and was wet, dirty, and unsteady as the
Alhaurin
herself. He greeted the ladies loudly.

“Good morning to you!”

“A nice, fresh morning,” answered the elder Britannia cheerfully.

“It is, ma'am. But it's a poor ship, God help us!”

“Oh dear!” said the younger. “Don't you think she's safe?”

“Safe, is it? She'd float with the gas that's in the bottled beer,”—Danno raised his hand to his mouth and produced a sound as sudden and alarming as a sergeant-major's word of command,—“and I ask you, ma'am, would ye have shipped to Buenos Aires and you knowing there's not a barrel of beer in her?”

“My dear,” whispered the younger Britannia, “I'm afraid he's a little—er—”

“
Good
morning,” said the elder Britannia severely.

Danno Flynn took a turn round the promenade deck and looked in through the windows of the lounge and writing room. The
Alhaurin
was carrying two hundred first-class passengers to the Atlantic ports of South America, most of them enjoying a three weeks' passage paid by an employer and without a worry except how to get the bar bill on to the expense account; but, under the circumstances, they were in no mood for conversation and glanced coldly at Danno's wild, dripping, and cheerful head. He gripped the rails of the companion in both hands and slid from B deck to C deck, from C deck to D deck, and from D deck into a puddle of water on the main deck. In the hope of human society he splashed across to the immigrant saloon.

In the third class were another happy group whose passages had been paid—Czech and Polish peasants contracted to work and expected to die in the Chaco—and an unhappy group of central European Jews who had paid their own. The saloon stank of oilcloth, stale cucumbers, and sweat. Wooden benches ran along the walls, and opposite them were iron tables and uncompromising wooden chairs screwed severely into the floor.

On four benches Danno saw prostrate bodies ending in heavy knee-high boots. On another was a shapeless mound of greasy shawls that finally resolved itself into a Polish woman, her small son, and a bundle of pitiable possessions which she did not dare leave in the cabin. In the recess on one side of the steward's pantry was a grave Jew in frock coat and skullcap staring at nothing and moving his lips; and in the other recess was a tall girl in a blue sweater and skirt with a red ribbon round her dark head. She was reading, and had bare, slim, impatient, and rather furry legs which ended in sandals.

“Good morning to you,” said Danno to the barman.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Have you beer, steward?”

“Draft or bottled, sir?”

“Now would ye believe that I must walk through six inches of raging ocean to quench my thirst when they have but to carry a barrel up a pair of ladders?” asked Danno triumphantly. “I'll have draft, me boy, and will you be taking one with me?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And the lady, too. Will ye have a beer, ma'am, or a drop of what you fancy?”

“Thank you,” said the girl with a slight foreign accent, “but I don't drink.”

“Ah, and what would ye say to that?” exclaimed Danno, unabashed.

He turned to the old man on the other side.

“Will your reverence take a beer?” he asked.

The Jew looked up, startled, and met Mr. Flynn's dancing eyes. What had been said to him he did not know, but, seeing that he had to deal with a rowdy, aggressive, powerful, and incomprehensible Gentile, he assumed that it had been an insolence. He did not reply, and returned with dignity to his meditation.

“Be God, 'tis an unsociable ship!” said Danno Flynn.

“He didn't understand you,” explained the girl. “My father speaks hardly any English.”

“Like me grandad,” Danno replied. “But he'd understand if you asked him what he would take—for it was not often he heard them words, he being the thirstiest man in Connemara. Beer?” he asked very loudly. “Will ye take a beer?”

He swayed to the motion of the ship, the surface of the beer in his glass forming an acute angle to the level of the floor. The girl's father, overcome by this monstrous prodigy of plane surfaces, collapsed upon the table with a groan.

Danno slid a hand under his shoulders and deposited him at full length on the bench with a rug beneath his head. His movements were so swift and confident that, though the girl had rushed simultaneously to her father, there was nothing for her to do but flutter anxiously around him.

“What is it?” she sobbed. “He is worn-out. Is there a doctor? Get me a doctor.”

“I am a doctor meself,” said Danno, “so let you not be troubling your pretty head. 'Tis the seasickness, and nothing else at all. I should not have been disturbing his reverence the way he is, and I the last straw that turns the camel's stomach.”

“Will it pass? Are you sure it will pass?”

“He'll be easy when 'tis calm,” answered Danno positively. “Is it the first time he is at sea?”

“The first time that either of us is at sea,” she replied.

“Ah, to be sure! You'll come from a far country.”

“From Germany.”

“And is it not a wonder,” exclaimed Danno cordially, “that you are after leaving Germany and I Eire, and we meeting in the rainy ocean with no land under our feet at all?”

The smell of the saloon and the effort of listening to an unfamiliar dialect of English were too much for her.

“Oh, please!” she cried. “You will excuse me. I—I am tired!”

She rushed into the open air. The wind seemed to pick up her slim, swaying body and carry it away.

“To be sure, 'tis not all of us have voyaged to Liverpool with the cattle as I have meself,” remarked Danno. “Will ye take a beer, steward?”

The
Alhaurin
slid sideways down an invisible slope and recovered her balance with a lurch like that of a self-conscious drunk. A crate of bottles glided across the floor of the pantry, and the steward grabbed the edge of his sink with both hands. Danno Flynn, seeing the back of his neck turn from brown to green, gave up hope of further conversation and returned to his cabin in the first class.

Danno spent the following day drinking beer with the immigrants from eleven to one and six to eleven. While the ship was in Lisbon and the bar closed, he slept; but as soon as the steward, halfway down the Tagus, reopened his hatch he let in the upper half of Mr. Flynn's waiting body and began to serve his charges with Mr. Flynn's free drinks. So it went on for three days, until steady irrigation with beer broke the drought in Danno's interior. Thereafter he continued to spend his time in the third-class saloon and his hospitality was as promiscuous as ever, but he drank in half pints instead of pints; he shaved; he clipped his moustache; and he began to pay more attention to the slim Berta Feitel than to the bar.

The peasant immigrants did not worry themselves to account for the visitor and his streams of beer. If, having a first-class ticket, he chose to drink in the third-class bar, they assumed—those of them who were intelligent enough to assume anything—that it was because the drinks were cheaper. To the Jews, however, he was a mystery. They could not understand why anyone should prefer the cheerless, reeking immigrant saloon to the luxury, envied and therefore exaggerated, of the first class. Most of them, sitting in melancholy resignation before the punishment their God had inflicted on them, welcomed Mr. Flynn as a comparatively pleasant chastisement. A few were suspicious.

“Oy, Berta! What has he been telling you? A doctor? That man? Of course he is no doctor! Did he tell you so, Berta?”

Her questioner laughed irritatingly, making a sound like
fee-fee-fee
through his little round mouth. He had a gross body, a pink and featureless face, and the habit of generally being right. She disliked him intensely—the more so since it occurred to her that there was an air about doctors, Jewish or Gentile, that Mr. Flynn certainly did not possess.

“Why should he not be?” asked a small dark chess player, coming to the rescue. “He is an intellectual. I do not understand all he says, but he is an intellectual.”

“Everyone you like you call an intellectual,” said the fat man, nodding his head up and down with the air of one for whom human nature had no secrets.

“At any rate he has no prejudice,” Berta said.

“But why does he come here?” insisted the suspicious one. “Why does he try to make us drunk? Why does he listen to us—tell me that! Perhaps he is paid to listen to us.”

“And perhaps he likes us,” answered Berta impatiently. “Is it so very extraordinary?”

She was fascinated by Danno's shimmer of charm, drunk or sober; it was a lighthearted quality uncommon among her own people or indeed among any city dwellers. And it rested and healed her to be with him, a man who had never felt any prejudice against her race, never thought about it, never heard of it—or, if he had heard of it, then as a newspaper story of distant happenings in a very distant Europe. She was sure that he had not realized the two different religions in the immigrant saloon.

She was, however, uneasily aware that she knew nothing whatever about the man. His exuberance puzzled her and prevented intimacy. She longed for her father to come on deck; having spent a wise and simple life between the schools and the synagogue, he had a peculiar gift of seeing to the heart of any human being and could have summed up Danno Flynn for her. But Mr. Feitel was still in his bunk, continually sick though the sea was calm, and Berta had no wisdom to fall back on but the experience of her own agitated youth.

When one evening Danno turned up in a boiled shirt and a dinner jacket, a hush descended upon the saloon. The peasants shuffled their preposterous boots, stared, and breathed very loudly. Such raiment was connected in their minds with the President of the Republic or a marriage or the excitement of a traveling salesman; they expected Mr. Flynn to unfurl a banner and pull a diamond ring or a bottle of medicine out of his pocket. Israel in exodus questioned its trust in him, questioned his motives. He was rich. He had no good right to be there.