Tramp Royale (42 page)

Ticky suggested hiding our American Express cheques and ignoring the business. The notion suited me but I doubted the practicality of it; the officers at the docks would know that we must have funds of some sort; if we failed to show an export license, we would simply be in trouble. So I set about getting one.

It did not seem to be too difficult, since there was a branch of the Commonwealth Bank right in the hotel. I went there. They examined my papers with interest, talked it over, and decided that there was nothing they could do for me. They suggested that I go to the main office of the bank.

The breaks were with me; it was less than half an hour away. I went there, queued up at the foreign-exchange window, eventually was referred by the teller to one of the officers of the bank. He considered my problem and told me that I did not want to be in the bank proper at all, but should go to the eighth floor to the controller of trade & export licenses. To get there I should leave the bank, go around the corner, enter the office-building entrance, and find the lifts. I whistled to my dog team and mushed on; I was beginning to find the search fascinating.

The office I was sent to was not quite the right one, but it was close; the side activity which actually dealt with such matters turned out to be on the same floor. By now the morning had passed (and our three o'clock sailing was coming apace); the man I wanted to see was out to lunch. No one else was permitted to stamp the form, naturally; these things have to be done properly.

But the wait was hardly thirty minutes and the official was quite helpful when he did return. By now we had only some forty-seven checks left and it did not take very long to inventory them, list them by denomination and number, and fill out the rest of the blanks; in another half hour it was all done. The bank official was a bit dubious about the fact that some of the cheques were made out in my name and some of them in Ticky's name, but, since she was not present and our ship was sailing very shortly, he stretched a point and made out a license which mentioned both our names and issued it to me, granting me permission to remove from the sovereign Commonwealth of Australia bits of paper showing that I had paid dollars to the American Express Company back in Colorado, U.S.A.

I hurried back to the Hotel Australia where Ticky was waiting in the lobby. She had been sitting there, watching our baggage and wondering what had happened to me, since we had had to vacate our room earlier in the day-in general, hotels in the Commonwealth do not follow the gracious custom of extending the courtesy, on request, of a later check-out to a guest who is not leaving town until after the regular check-out time, so she had stayed with our baggage in the belief that I would return in ten minutes or so.

All it cost us was our lunch.

XII
The Dreary Utopia

Our stateroom in the New Zealand steamship
Monowai
turned out to be even smaller than I suspected from the berthing diagram; if one of us inhaled it was a good idea for the other one to exhale. There was a single straight chair which had to be moved in front of the door to permit us to get at the wash basin, then moved back in front of the wash basin to permit us to go out the door.

I went at once to the purser's office, having in mind that a shipping company will often hold a V.I.P. room right up until sailing and sail with it empty, provided no politician, lord of industry, or relative of the chairman of the board needs it. I planned to offer the purser a sackful of Yankee dollars and ask him to shift us to the V.I.P. room, if any.

Either New Zealand lines do not follow this practice or the V.I.P. had claimed the room earlier; the purser assured me that there was no unoccupied stateroom of any sort in the ship. I was inclined to believe him, as the ship was as crowded as a department-store elevator on Dollar Day. Besides that, although the ship was in all respects luxurious in its fittings and furniture, everything about it was a little bit skimpy, like a wartime suit. The passageways were not quite wide enough for two people; when you encountered anyone it was necessary for one of you to stop and flatten against the bulkhead to avoid collision. I felt, the whole time we were in her, as if I were taking a shower in a stall too small to permit me to raise my elbows.

I went back and told Ticky the situation. She had been trying to sort out what we needed and what we could do without from the ten suitcases, and she was hot and tired and dirty. She looked up, wiped dust across her face, and made a suggestion both unladylike and impossible. I reproved her. "Besides, you don't even know the purser."

"I don't want to. Knowing his ship is enough."

"He's really a very nice man. It isn't his fault. Come to think of it, it's your fault. If you weren't old-fashioned and a pantywaist besides, we'd be half way to New Zealand this minute, by air, and we'd be sleeping in a nice, big hotel room tonight, with a big bed and a big bathtub." She did not answer so I added, "Come on now, 'fess up. We're here because you wanted it this way."

Ticky took refuge in the Nineteenth Amendment.

I said, "You don't mean the Nineteenth, you mean the Fifth."

"I know which one I mean! The Fifth is the one the communists are always hiding behind. I'm not going to hang around with
them
-so I use the Nineteenth."

I looked it up later. She really did mean the Nineteenth.

We had signed up for second table but shortly before dinner the chief steward came around to our little smokehouse. Captain's compliments and would we join him at his table?

We looked at each other, astounded. I managed to say, "Tell him 'yes,' " and the steward left. Ticky said slowly, "I don't really want to sit at the Captain's table."

"I know, and neither do I. But what else could I say? You can't refuse such an invitation, you simply can't. Not from a master in his own ship."

"Oh, you did just exactly right. But I don't have to like it."

"No, you don't have to like it. But you do have to be polite, or I'll keel-haul you myself."

"You and eight sturdy seamen, maybe. Want to swap a little judo?" I refused with dignity. Ticky knows some awfully dirty holds.

To our surprise, we enjoyed sitting at the Captain's table. Captain F. W. Young was both a taut shipmaster and a cultured, charming man of the world. The shortcomings of the
Monowai
were either inherent in her design or derived from company policy ashore; he himself ran a clean, disciplined ship. His other guests at his table were most pleasant people, too-Mr. and Mrs. Adman from Sydney, Mr. Field from Victoria. But we never did find out on what basis he had selected us. Ticky and I finally concluded that it was possible that we had been tapped simply because we were the only Americans aboard, which still left open the question of whether we were picked as curiosities or whether our country was being honored through us. We never asked-I suppose we were a little afraid that we might find out.

As we became better acquainted with our table mates it was natural that they should see our stateroom and we should see theirs. Mr. Field had a large cabin outboard of ours, with portholes, a private bath and plenty of deck space; the Admans had an equally nice one forward, with a semi-private bath, shared with one other couple. We showed the dark, cramped Iron Maiden we lived in and told them our story. Had it been necessary for them to make reservations months ahead to get the accommodations they had?

Not at all-in one case the reservation had been made two weeks ago, in the other case a little longer.

I thought of our cash deposit made the previous year and I began to burn. At the earliest opportunity I braced the Captain himself about it, telling my story and then saying bluntly that I thought that the company had a fixed policy under which Americans were not given even treatment with Australians and New Zealanders.

He smiled, did not comment, and changed the subject at once. I am not sure whether he knew of such a policy and did not care to admit it publicly, or whether he simply considered my remarks silly and wished to avoid unpleasantness. It is even possible that he was unaware of the truth either way; after all, captains do not sell tickets.

But I remain convinced that Americans are discriminated against by this line. We had clear proof that they could have given us decent and comfortable accommodations at the time we put up our deposit, and I strongly suspect that they could have booked us out of New Zealand in one of their ships running to the United States if they had honestly followed the policy of first-come-first-served.

New Zealand maintains travel commissioners in major American cities to try to persuade us to come to New Zealand and spend those dollars. Hmm . . .

The four-day passage to New Zealand was without incident; it was merely uncomfortable. The Captain invited us up to the bridge to see the landfall and passage in through the heads into Auckland Harbor, but we could not see much as the weather was dirtying up rapidly; we were scooting in just ahead of a cyclone-a cyclone in these latitudes is the same as a hurricane; it is not the local twister of the Kansas plains. I was surprised to discover that the harbor was on the east coast of North Island, as a small-scale map makes it appear to be on the west coast.

"It's not surprising," Captain Young told me. "All the world's best harbors face east."

"So? How about San Francisco Bay? Or San Diego?"

"You've named two. But take a look at your own east coast. Take a look at the map of the whole world. For every fairly good harbor on a west coast there are half a dozen excellent ones on the east."

I thought it over and decided that he was largely correct, but I certainly had never realized it until he pointed it out.

Entrance into New Zealand required more paperwork than did any other country, plus an unusually tedious process at customs. I had another minor crisis with Ticky, for New Zealand had thought up a brand-new piece of nonsense: every visitor must sign a statement and swear a formal oath before an immigration officer not to do anything harmful to the Queen.

They handed these forms out the morning we arrived; Ticky read hers and blew her top. "I am not going to swear allegiance to their blankety-blank queen!"

"Now quiet down, honey. It doesn't say anything of the sort."

"It does so. And I won't sign it!"

"No, it does not. All you are promising to do is to obey the laws of New Zealand while you are in their country. I know you won't, but I'm hoping that you will be discreet enough not to get caught. So why not sign it?"

"It doesn't say anything about their laws; it's an oath that I will uphold their queen. I won't."

I tried again to explain it in a way she would accept- very wearily, for I considered it as nonsensical as she did. A criminal or a foreign spy would take such an oath and not turn a hair, while an honest man surely did not need to take it. "See here, baby, it's just a peculiarity in semantics. When they frank an envelope they put on it: 'In Her Majesty's Service,' while we put on it: 'Penalty for Private Use to Avoid Payment of Postage $300'-and they both mean precisely the same thing: 'Official Business, Free.' All this means is that you promise not to break the Queen's laws, which right here means the laws of New Zealand. You obeyed Perón's laws while you were there, but that didn't mean that you approved of Perón."

"All right, I'll sign a statement that I won't break any of their silly laws-but I won't sign that thing!"

I gave up, which is often the only way to win with Ticky; lack of opposition makes her unsure, I think. "Have it your own way. If you won't sign, they won't let us off the ship. We will have to stay right where we are for three days in port and then four more days at sea, then we are back in Australia. I suppose the police there will want to know why we were deported from New Zealand, but at least our visa is still valid. We can start tramping the streets of Sydney again, trying to book some sort of passage back home."

With that I dropped the matter. When the time came she signed the form, put up her right hand when she was told to, and muttered something. I did not hear what she said and I am sure the immigration officer could not hear it either. Perhaps it is just as well.

But will somebody tell me, please, why it is that countries will advertise for tourists, then do their very damndest to make the tourist feel like a child being kept in after school?

Once we were through customs we piled our bags into a taxi and asked the driver to take us to the Waverly Hotel, where a room had been reserved for us by the Union Steamship Company. The ride turned out to be only a few hundred yards, as the docks in Auckland rub elbows with the main downtown business districts, instead of being weary miles away as is so often the case. But during that short ride I looked around more eagerly than ever before, for New Zealand, of all countries in the world other than my own, interested me the most.

From time to time for more than twenty years I had made a hobby of New Zealand, studied its history, its laws, its geography, pored over statistics of its economy and its foreign trade. I knew how it was explored, how it was settled, the organization of its government; I had studied its Polynesian people from tattooed lips and cannibalism to their present status as political and social equals of the white English. So far as study will take one I felt that I knew New Zealand. Here was a country that had everything, physical wealth, an ample food supply, a people with high educational standards, civilized culture, democratic traditions, and homogeneity save for a colored minority with whom they had worked out the most decent
modus operandi
in the black history of the white race's relations with other races. Spurning communism, without resorting to socialism save on a purely pragmatic, non-doctrinal basis where needed, they had produced an economy with comfort and security for all, more entitled to the name "The Middle Way" than was that of Sweden. Their laws were ideal objectives for liberals all over the world, conceded to be at least fifty years ahead of any other nation.

Why, they had even solved the baby-sitter problem with graduate mother's-helpers!