Ship of Fools (71 page)

A large square hand with fingers the same thickness from one end to the other, a rude-looking thumb attached to a palm powerfully secured to a muscular wrist covered with a thatch of hair that gleamed red under the table light, reached over Herr Rieber's shoulder and plucked the place card from its metal holder.

Herr Rieber's skin crawled coldly and colder still when a familiar voice brayed reverberating, outlandish, altogether repulsive German: “I am sorry to trouble you, but this is
my
table,” and coming around where he could face Herr Rieber, Arne Hansen brandished the card under his nose. Back of him stood Herr Glocken, wearing a single large colored quill pen in his hair; his pink necktie flourished the words
Girls, follow me
! painted on it. Hansen picked up the second card from before Lizzi's plate and brandished that. “Can you not read?” he asked. “This says
Herr Hansen
and this
Herr Glocken
. So, I do not understand why …”

Lizzi reached out and struck him lightly on the forearm. “Oh, but dear Herr Hansen, do try to understand—”

“Please,” said Herr Rieber, pulling himself together, the top of his head bedewed with large clear drops that shortly began to join and run, “please, Fräulein, this is for me to settle …”

“There is nothing to settle,” bawled Hansen in his unmodulated voice heavy as a club, “nothing but that you find your own table and leave me mine!”

“Herr Hansen,” said Herr Rieber, swallowing violently and shooting his chin out of his collar, the baby cap bobbing, “I cannot overlook your rudeness to a lady. Please meet me on the main deck.”

“Why should I meet you anywhere?” bellowed Hansen, staring down at him overpoweringly. “I ask you for my table, you make trouble about that?” and he gave Lizzi a look of contempt that scalded her. She rose with her knees shaking and implored Herr Rieber, “Let us go, let us go,” and walked away so swiftly he had to run to overtake her. “Find us our table,” he shouted to the nearest steward, almost as ferociously as Herr Hansen. The steward said instantly, “Come with me,
mein Herr
,—never was there such confusion in this salon.” But he seemed to recognize Herr Rieber, found their table quickly, pulled out Lizzi's chair, and said briskly, “
Jawohl
!” to Herr Rieber's demand: “Champagne, at once!”

“He
insulted
me,” said Lizzi in a small whimper, and lifting her mask she dabbed at a tear. Herr Rieber had never seen her in such a mood. He was delighted in spite of its cause.

“Don't think of it again, he shall pay for it,” he declared stoutly, mopping the top of his head and running his handkerchief inside his collar. “Let us not have our evening spoiled by such a lout!”

“He is always claiming your chair—remember that first day? I knew then he was a low person. He is a Bolshevik I think, from his talk …”

“Ha!” said Herr Rieber. “I threw
him
out that time! This is his revenge.” The thought restored his good humor. “Now I shall make him sorry for this!”

“What will you do?” asked Lizzi in delight.

“I'll think of something,” he answered her, beaming with confidence.

They watched furtively under their eyebrows halfway across the room while Hansen put on the red cocked hat at his plate, glanced around him sourly, and took it off. That hunchback Glocken was grinning like a gargoyle. He would have been glad of a fight, no doubt—he would be in no danger! “Will you look at that nasty dwarf,” she said, as the champagne was being poured. “Why are such horrors allowed to live?”

“That is a great question,” said Herr Rieber, beaming at her and mounting one of his favorite subjects. “As publisher my aim is to direct the minds of my readers to the vital problems of our society. I have lately got a doctor to begin a series of articles, very learned, very scientific, advocating the extermination of all the unfit, at birth or as soon as they prove themselves unfit in any way. Painlessly, of course, we really wish to be merciful to them as well as to everyone else. Not only defective or useless infants, but the old as well—all persons over sixty, or sixty-five, perhaps, or let us say, whenever they lose their usefulness; in bad health, exhausted, a drain upon the energies of the gifted, the young and strong of our nation—why should we handicap them with such burdens? The doctor is preparing to present this thesis, with the strongest arguments, examples and proofs drawn from medical research and practice and sociological statistics. Jews too, of course, and then all persons of illegitimate mixtures of race, white with colored of any kind—Chinese, Negroes … all such. And for any white man convicted of serious crime—well, as for him,” he twinkled at her mischievously, “if we do not put him to death, at least the state shall make certain he does not bring any more of his kind into the world!”

“Wonderful,” sang Lizzi in rapture, “then we would not have that dwarf around, nor that dreadful little man in the wheel chair either—nor those Spaniards!”

“And a good many more besides! To our new world—” said Herr Rieber, lifting his glass to hers, his spirits rushing back so merrily in his vision of the glorious future he almost forgot that no amount of extermination of the kind of people he didn't like could possibly include the one he liked least—Arne Hansen, who was himself one of the strong, the healthy, the useful, the powerful, the man who knew how to defend himself, who would always, ever and anywhere, find the chair marked with his name and take it, or take it anyhow, as he had done with Herr Rieber's plainly marked deck chair. That hairy paw, fit to grapple a lion, that jaw with the big square teeth—

Herr Rieber shuddered abruptly. Such thoughts could ruin everything—let it all go until tomorrow. He gulped his champagne as if it were the first swig from a stein of beer. Lizzi tossed hers down too, and he poured again at once, and ordered another bottle. The great evening was begun at last, and where might it not end? Herr Rieber was certain that he knew.

The purser, dodging and striking at the colored balloons floating in his path as if they were perhaps horseflies, halted at Mrs. Treadwell's table with a bottle in one hand and two champagne glasses in the other. “We Germans,
gnädige Frau
,” he began, weightily, “are not allowed any longer since that war to use the word
champagne
to describe our German bubbling wine—not that we wish to do so. But I shall be happy if you will permit me to offer you a glass of our noble
Schaumwein
. I myself after many years' comparison am not able to distinguish between this and the very finest
Moët Chandon
or
Veuve Clicquot
.”

“Naturally not,” said Mrs. Treadwell, consolingly. “Do sit down, I'll be delighted. Have a chair brought, please.” The purser stood, holding his bottle uncertainly, a faint mistrust of her cordiality blowing like a small cold draft through his congenitally clouded mind. He set it on the table though, and motioned to a steward to bring the chair.

Jenny and David sat at their own table watching the joyless, agitated scene, noting certain absences—Dr. Schumann, Wilhelm Freytag. Jenny had seen Freytag in the bar a few minutes earlier, where dinner was being served him at a small table. He stood up, bowed and called out to her, “May I have the first dance this evening?” “Yes,” she called out without pausing, smiling back at him. She felt for the first time that the evening might not be a total loss. Pleasantly excited, she reached up and struck lightly at a balloon floating over her head.

“There,” she said, “David darling, that is my contribution to this wild, wild evening.” For when she saw David's face as he came down so swiftly to join her, with Mrs. Treadwell lingering so as not to come near them, she knew he was in love with her again, or trusted his feelings for her, or perhaps even believed for a moment in her love for him—no matter what, the blessed reconcilement was occurring again; and she felt such a warm surge of delight in him she had by internal violence to restrain herself from ruining everything by saying something hopeless and unanswerable, such as—“Oh, David darling,
why
can't we …
why
don't we, or why do we, or what shall we do or say or where shall we go, and why, why, when we have this, must we make each other so unhappy?” She kept silence and smiled at him, her eyes glimmering. David reached over and touched her hand. “Jenny angel, you're looking lovely, you really are,” he said seriously as if he did not expect her to believe it. But she did, she believed it with all her heart, and saw him transfigured as he always was in these mysterious visitations of love between them—reasonless, causeless, having its own times and seasons, vanishing at a breath and yet always bringing with it the illusion that it would last forever.…

“You're looking wonderful too,” she said.

Herr Löwenthal, alone at his table, his absurd paper bonnet askew above his censorious face, chose for his festive dinner schmalz herring in sour cream, buttered beets, boiled potatoes, and Münchener beer. The rather careless movements of the steward's hands caused him to glance up. He caught the brief shadow of a look he knew too well, a secretive, repelled, contemptuous amusement, ridiculing not only Herr Löwenthal personally, his whole race and religion, but his wretched dinner as well, symbol of his condition in life, his place as pariah in a swinish Gentile society: this dinner he had been forced to select carefully, even though it was not clean but only permissible, from a garbage heap of roast pork, pork chops, ham, sausages, pig's knuckles, lobsters, crabs, oysters, clams, eels—God knows what filth—until even nearly starved as he was, his stomach turned at the mere sight of the words on the card.

As the steward, a mild-looking young fellow, whose dislike of Jews was so ingrained, so much a habit of his second nature he was quite unconscious that it showed in his face, was about to pour the beer, Herr Löwenthal almost shouted, “Stop! That is not what I ordered … take back that bottle and bring me a stein of draft Münchener!”

The young man said, “I am sorry,
mein Herr
, but we have no draft beer left, and no dark beer at all. Only light beer, in bottles.”

“Then in such a case, you tell me before, and I do the ordering,” said Herr Löwenthal, furiously. “Do you pay for this beer, or do I? Who drinks it, you? What kind of place is this that you can change the order without telling the customer? Do you want I should report you to the head steward?”

The steward appeared unmoved at this threat. “As you please,
mein Herr
,” he said in a respectful tone, and Löwenthal saw the shadow of that look again, undisguised this time—the upper lip curled ever so slightly, the naturally insolent blue eyes wandering for a second.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” demanded Löwenthal in fresh rage. “Pour it out, pour it out and bring me another!” He pushed his glass towards the edge of the table. The steward poured the beer, made a few ritual passes above the table as if refining his services, and went away swiftly. Herr Löwenthal then remembered his comic hat, snatched it off, crumpled it in his fist and kicked it under the table. He ate his potatoes and beets in chunks, piling herring and sour cream on them, the food sticking in his throat so that the beer could hardly wash it down. He had made a tour of the ship with some other passengers, and the sight and smells of the galley had sickened him. He remembered it again with loathing, the dirty cave below decks where everything was all the same as cooked in one pot; it was no good trying to keep clean, to eat decently, the way they handled the stuff it was dirty anyway from the start, enough to poison a man. He could not swallow another mouthful yet he was bitterly hungry. When the young steward came back with his second bottle of beer, he pushed away his plate and said: “Take this swill away and bring me a couple of hard-boiled eggs, and another bottle of beer.”

For dramatic effect, the zarzuela company delayed their entrance until everyone else was seated. The Captain, who knew nothing of this strategy, took his place at his accustomed hour. Glancing round at the empty chairs surrounding him, he proceeded to order his dinner without delay. The decorations reminded him of grave ornaments in peasant churchyards. The center was a large mass of red cotton roses, mixed with shiny tinfoil foliage and lace paper flowers of an unknown species. A stuffed dove with a few feathers missing was perched beak downward on a stick above the floral arrangements, carrying around its neck a placard bearing in multicolored crayon the single word “
Homenaje
.” The Captain leaned forward in idle curiosity, even amusement at this childish display, and drew into his nostrils an almost lethal cloud of synthetic rose scent. Sitting back and turning his head aside, he breathed out as long as he could, then began to sneeze. He sneezed three times inwardly, one forefinger pressed firmly to his upper lip as he had been taught to do in childhood, to avoid sneezing in church. Silently he was convulsed with internal explosions, feeling as if his eyeballs would fly out, or his eardrums burst. At last he gave up and felt for his handkerchief, sat up stiffly, head averted from the room, and sneezed steadily in luxurious agony a dozen times with muted sounds and streaming eyes, until the miasma was sneezed out, and he was rewarded with a good nose-blow. This cleared his head, but further dimmed his view of this ill-advised, extremely dubious occasion, unlike any he had known in his whole experience. With his own hands, at arm's length, he shoved the pestiferous homage clear across the table from him. The dove fell off his perch and the Captain did not notice. He glanced at his watch, and it was almost a quarter of an hour past the precise moment when his soup should have been set before him. The Captain had not been kept waiting, not even in his own house, since he became Captain. He began to brood in ruffled, glaring, swollen immobility, extremely resembling an insulted parrot. His dignity demanded that he begin his dinner at once as a rebuke to their impudence, and to further ignore as far as he was able the presence of these guttersnipes from Granada, or wherever they came from. He glanced about him until his eyes rested coldly on several members of his scattered dining circle—the Huttens and Frau Rittersdorf sat together, eating already, indifferent to the goings-on around them. That Rieber fellow and that Lizzi were behaving like monkeys as usual, waving glasses at each other. Little Frau Schmitt was sitting with the Baumgartners—at least he had been spared
their
company! He could not say he regretted the absence of any one of them, but he resented the reason for their absence. It was his due right and privilege to protect himself against the tedious society of his table, voyage after wearisome voyage of it; he could and did retreat to the sanctuary of the bridge, where he saw only subordinates, who would not dream of speaking until they were spoken to; who did as they were told instantly in silence as matter of course. That was his true world, of unquestioned authority, clearly defined caste and carefully graded privilege, and it irked him grievously to be forced to concern himself with any other. He knew well what human trash his ship—all ships—carried to and from all the ports of the world: gamblers, thieves, smugglers, spies, political deportees and refugees, stowaways, drug peddlers, all the gutter-stuff of the steerage moving like plague rats from one country to another, swarming and ravening and undermining the hard-won order of the cultures and civilizations of the whole world. Even on the surface, where one might expect at least the good appearance of things, what moral turpitude showed itself, given opportunity. He knew too well the respectable father of a family, or the trusted wife and mother, traveling alone for once, taking a holiday from decency as if they were in another country where no one could find out their names; as if a ship were merely their floating brothel!