The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (24 page)

The silence impressed even Danno. He was, for about the third time in his life, self-conscious. He had dressed himself up for a gala dinner in the first class and saw no reason for changing merely because he craved a beer. He met Berta's ironical eyes, and flushed. It occurred to him that he had been guilty of wanting to be admired, that he could, after all, have drunk whiskey in his own smoking room.

“But why would I not be showing meself to the darling,” argued Danno loudly to himself, “seeing she could know me for a hundred years and never see me in the like of these clothes again?”

He drank a beer with the steward and departed hastily, wishing the saloon a noisy good-night.

Meanwhile Berta had silently vanished into the night. She was hurt by his impudence in appearing amongst them with this bold admission that he belonged to another world. The suspicions which she had ridiculed haunted her. Paid to be here—was it possible? She determined to find out what he was. This was the moment to ask questions when she was at her coldest and he off his guard; she knew instinctively that he desired admiration.

Danno emerged from the severe cubical deckhouse which contained the immigrants' public rooms. The iron plates of the main deck and the tarpaulin-covered hatches were flooded with moonlight. The
Alhaurin,
at this level a ship rather than a floating hotel, swished through the calm water while a band faintly sounded from somewhere in the towering terraces of the first class and a light flashed on the horizon, reminding the traveler that even in the wastes of the Atlantic were the Azores.

Berta leaned over the rail, waiting. As the door of the saloon slammed, she turned and smiled invitingly at Danno.

“How is your da?” he asked.

“Still sick. He cannot eat or get up.”

“I'll see him,” said Danno.

“It's nothing,” she answered swiftly. “It will pass. Stay here and talk to me.”

A strand of her black hair, fragrant in spite of the saloon and the peasants and the paintwork of a stuffy cabin below the waterline, blew gently against his face.

“What land is that?” she asked, pointing to the light.

“'Tis Africa,” he replied, “with Negro slaves, and they holding out a jewel to you that you shall pass no further on your journey to the west, but stop and be the bride of their great king.”

“I would rather be where I am,” said Berta dreamily.

Danno felt the wind cold against his unaccustomed shirt front as two drops of sweat shot down his chest from hair to hair like the balls on a pin table.

“Then I would not be changing places with any king in the wide world,” he said.

He laid his hand over hers. It did not return his pressure, but remained warm and unresisting while Abraham looked down approvingly—or so Berta hoped—upon his handmaiden.

“You must know all the lands we pass so well,” she suggested, hoping to find out whether he traveled regularly by the line.

“I was always a great reader,” answered Danno cautiously, “and many's the beating I had for it. If it was not my da had the hide off me for not attending to the sheep, 'twas Father Donnelly for not attending to my book.”

He told her a little of his boyhood in Connemara, of the green hills and white villages, of the glimpses of the Atlantic and the soft rain that drifted inland like smoke from the sea. As he talked, it seemed to her that her budding suspicion had been utterly foolish. She protested to herself that the curse of her race was to suspect, always to suspect.

“So that is why you came here, down to the third class!” she cried with a warmth that surprised him. “You have been poor. You like simple people—true people!”

“And what more would I need to bring me here but the sight of your face?” he answered.

“But you didn't know I was there. And sometimes—those first days—you did not speak to me.”

“To be sure, I did not,” he admitted penitently. “But it was the sorrow of my heart at leaving Eire, and the thirst was on me would have floated the ship from under our feet. And, God help me, it was the barrel of beer that brought me to the third class and no other thing at all.”

“Have they no beer in the first class?” she asked.

“Devil a drop!”

It couldn't be true. Dear God, he was lying to her! And he wasn't a doctor—that was now quite obvious, but she had overlooked it in her eagerness to trust him. They were right. He was paid to be there—some sort of immigration agent watching them, listening to them, making a filthy dossier for the police at their destinations. That wild exuberance of his was simple; it was as coarse an invitation to confidence as the overheartiness of a salesman.

“You expect me to believe that?” she cried. “That we—cattle—down here can get something that you cannot?”

Her face was drawn and her mobile mouth twitching with disgust. Danno Flynn stared at the explosive young woman, his features showing a sudden and comical consciousness of guilt.

“You cannot harm us!” she stormed. “We are not afraid of you. Nothing can happen to us now, nothing any more. We—we snap our fingers!”

She burst into tears and ran from him. Even the beating of her feet upon the deck was angry.

“'Tis the long voyage,” said Danno, “and a young girl is a chancy thing and a vain. I should not have been telling her that I came for the beer.”

He climbed back to his own quarters and strolled into the smoking room in the certainty of finding the ship's doctor. Part of the girl's unaccountable moodiness was due, he thought, to worry about her father. Mr. Feitel ought to have been up and about long since, for the sea had been calm as a lake since they sailed from Lisbon.

Dr. Pulberry was in his usual chair and was, as usual, alone. His little red face and little white moustache were perched perkily upon the high butterfly collar of his mess uniform. His brusque and hearty manner did not gain for him all the free drinks that he felt to be his due; he accepted Mr. Flynn's offer of a whiskey with gratitude, made a joke about an Irishman, and, finding it well received, became very communicative.

“Yes, I've seen the old fellow,” he said in answer to Danno's questions. “I know those cases—have 'em every voyage! Nerves—funk—no stamina! Goes on being sick because it's less effort than exercising a little will power!”

Dr. Pulberry, having retired from practice ten years since, considered that his job should be a sinecure. One patched up the crew. One discussed their ailments with the first-class passengers, especially the good-looking women. But one resented immigrants. At his age one resented them very strongly. If they didn't have infectious diseases, they had diseases of malnutrition; and if they didn't have those they were seasick.

“Cannot ye give him a pill?” asked Danno.

“The usual sedatives. Of course! Certainly! But they don't stop him. I'll try a better cure on him soon.”

On his visit to the immigrant saloon the next morning Danno discovered that communication had become very difficult. Those passengers who had spoken English to him were absorbed in chess or meditation or excited arguments—which ceased when he drew near. Those who did speak to him, all of them fair-haired, spoke in tongues so utterly incomprehensible that Danno shouted back to them in Irish. This amusement, however, palled under the contemptuous gaze of Berta's large, clear eyes. She ignored his inquiries about her father by replying that he was better and instantly returning to her book.

Danno Flynn put a black curse upon the night that he had gone to the third class in a dinner jacket, and passed two whole days moping in his own smoking room and hanging over the rail for a sight of Berta as she lay peacefully on the hatch of the main deck. Whether it was to emphasize the difference between herself and the shapeless bundles of peasant women or whether because she knew Danno would be looking, she made a habit of taking the sun for an hour a day in a yellow swimming suit. This delightful sight led Dr. Pulberry and other pillars of the bar to desert their usual chairs for chairs on the verandah.

“Now I know why you went slumming! Pretty, eh?” said the doctor, digging Danno in the ribs.

“You should not be looking at her, Doctor,” said Danno severely, “and her da dying on you.”

“We'll have him up this very afternoon,” Dr. Pulberry answered, rubbing his hands. “Sedatives won't do it, so we'll use shock. Done it before! Always works! Come down with me about four o'clock and I'll show you!”

“Shock, is it?” asked Danno gloomily. “If he's a decent man, 'twould be enough for him to see his daughter parading herself the way an actress would not be doing in the moving pictures, and she paid a hundred pound a week for it.”

At four o'clock Danno accompanied the doctor into the maze of passageways below the third-class deck. They pushed past motionless peasant women, staring blankly at nothing, and cannoned off bands of Czech, Polish, and Rumanian children pointing fingers at each other round corners and shouting their international word—“Stikummup!”

Dr. Pulberry hammered smartly on a cabin door, and walked straight in. Mr. Feitel lay in a narrow lower berth, his shoulders imprisoned between the white rail of the bunk and the cheerless, bolt-studded iron of the white bulkhead. His face was sunken and grey, and he was breathing deeply as if the tiny cabin contained all the air that he could ever reach. Berta sprang up from the opposite bunk and faced the doctor challengingly, the distrust and anxiety of her face changing, as soon as she saw Danno Flynn, to an expressionless mask in which her large eyes burned with anger.

“Captain wants you at once!” said Dr. Pulberry roughly to Mr. Feitel. “Up with you!”

Berta translated to her father, who struggled painfully and raised himself on one elbow.

“What is it?” she asked. “What have we done?”

“No business of mine,” said the doctor briskly. “You're not allowed to land. Wireless from the Brazilian Government—and I expect you know why.”

Berta's voice as she poured out the Yiddish translation to her father was like the cry of a whole people going up to heaven against injustice.

“On deck in ten minutes!” said the doctor, unmoved. “Come on, Flynn!”

He left the cabin brusquely. Danno remained behind watching the sick man, who sat up, swayed, and fell back again on to the pillow.

“Whatever you want to let him alone,” said Berta slowly, as if every syllable were a tense muscular act, “I will give you. Do you understand?”

“I should not be mixing meself in this,” murmured Danno thoughtfully, feeling Mr. Feitel's pulse, “but if he goes on deck 'twill be the death of him.”

“Leave him alone!” Berta cried. “Don't you believe me? I will come to you when you like.”

Danno glared at her, suddenly aware of her presence.

“And are you not ashamed to be talking so with your da on his deathbed?” he roared. “You will stand up now and do what I tell you. You will go to the cook and turn your rolling eyes on him and ask him for an ounce of sugar and a teaspoonful of baking powder.”

“What do you mean? You're no doctor!”

“I am in a manner of speaking, though 'tis sheep I treat the most of.”

“Sheep?”

“Sure, if you saw one stand on his hind legs,” shouted Danno, exasperated by her tone, “you would know 'tis only human like the rest of us. Be off with you now!”

“I will not. He shall be on deck if I carry him on my back,” she said. “I know your sort. You only want a chance to say we were disobedient. Your sheep will go where they are told. They have learned that much.”

“The devil is in the girl!” said Danno. “Now will ye listen? The doctor is after telling you your da must see the captain. 'Tis a lie—though, bejabers, the shock would have cured him if it were the seasickness he had! But 'tis not the sea—'tis his stomach.”

“What do you know?” she asked contemptuously.

“Am I not telling you I am a veterinary surgeon and the best sheep doctor in all Eire? And I know that if it were a sheep or a pig or a horse or a saint from heaven, and he seasick, he would be breathing fast and slow and jerky as if the soul of him were in torment, and not hungry for air and breathing deep, as is your da. 'Tis what they call acidosis he has, and though 'twas the sea that started it, 'tis not the sea any longer nor the fear of the sea that turns his stomach.”

Berta stared at him, unable to take in all he said, unable as yet to escape from her fantastic vision of him, but aware that she was in the presence of kindliness and knowledge. Huge tears of relief spilled silently on to her cheeks.

“Sure, if she hasn't murder in her eyes, 'tis crying they are! Will ye go to the cook now,” he coaxed her, patting her hand, “and bring me a teaspoonful of baking powder and an ounce of sugar?”

Berta nodded, and vanished down the passage. Meanwhile Danno soothed, groomed, and massaged her father as if he had been a thoroughbred recovering from severe fright—which indeed he was. The old man thanked him in scraps of broken English and, when Berta returned with the remedy, took it trustfully and in absolute faith that it was going to stay down.

“Now keep him quiet, and he'll be better before night,” said Danno. “I will tell the doctor 'twas the shock that did it, and he will be speaking of his cure from one end of the ship to the other, and that pleased with himself he will order special food for your da.”

“But you'll come and see him?” asked Berta anxiously.

“You will have him on deck under the awnings tomorrow afternoon, and I will see him then. And I will send you one of them canvas chairs for him,” added Danno dryly, “so he shall not be sprawling on the hatches and the doctor and the proud English turning their opera glasses on him and jiggling their feet on the planks.”

By nightfall Mr. Feitel's condition had shown a marked improvement. A breakfast of eggs was followed by a lunch of chicken,—obtained through Danno's outrageous flattery of the doctor,—and at five o'clock he was sitting in a deck chair, watching the flying fishes in the strip of blue sky and blue water between the awning and the rail, and thankful for his return to so brilliant and curious a world.