“God in Heaven,” she said, turning towards Lizzi as to a known being who could offer her reassurance, “God in heaven, what can one do with such people?”
“One can always dance with them!” said Lizzi, and Frau Rittersdorf felt her malice flickering out of her very pores like electric sparks.
Seeing Frau Rittersdorf’s chin tremble at this, Lizzi went on in a tone of false sympathy. “They really are making fun of you, the little pigs.… Look at them, Frau Rittersdorf, did you ever see such impudence? They are all but thumbing their noses at you. What could that fellow have said, I wonder? I did not catch it, but it sounded frightful.”
Frau Rittersdorf began at once correcting her terrible error in giving Lizzi such a brilliant opportunity to display her peculiar gifts. “I am not the only one, perhaps,” she said. “It may be your turn next, if you have not had it already!”
Lizzi fanned herself with her magazine. “Oh, one of them—not that fellow, the one they call Manolo—and one of the women, I don’t know which, approached me this morning—it seems their plan is well under way … you really had not heard?”
“No,” said Frau Rittersdorf, faintly, “no one told me.”
“I was happy to bribe them for peace,” Lizzi confessed smugly. “It cost me only four marks to be rid of them. It would have been worth twice as much.”
“They can laugh at you for another reason, then,” said Frau Rittersdorf. “At least, they cannot make a dupe of me!”
“Do you think I would really go to their low little party?” asked Lizzi. “I gave them the money as I would give it to a beggar.”
“I shall not go to their party, either,” said Frau Rittersdorf, recovering her spirits slowly. “And I shall not pay a pfennig for my right to stay away!”
The two women fell silent and watched with deep resentment the flying feet of the Spaniards disappearing around the upper end of the deck. Their magpie voices floated back only to deepen the gloom around the two stiff figures stretched in the deck chairs.
Frau Rittersdorf opened her diary and went on with her account of events. After a little thought, pen suspended, she wrote resolutely: “That little mealsack of a Frau Schmitt, my cabin mate, who has not one claim to any consideration whatever from anyone, has within the past few days commenced to show signs of a changed character. She monopolizes the washhand stand and the looking glass. She sits quite coolly and powders her face and dresses that mouse-colored hair of hers in a bun as leisurely as if she were not keeping me waiting. I consult my watch from time to time, remark how late it is getting, and that I, too, must dress. But it has no effect so far. Incapable as I am of rude behavior to anyone, I shall be forced to take steps to correct her bad manners. It is an offense against morality to overlook or condone insolence in an inferior. The effective practice of severity—I learned this with those beastly English children—lies in ceaseless, relentless, utter persistence, never an instant’s letdown, but vigilance, vigilance, all the way, or they will be upon you like a pack of hyenas.” She considered this, and added: “Note Bene: I must be especially on my guard with certain very low elements on this ship, who mean no good to anyone. Vigilance, vigilance.” Frau Rittersdorf felt very tired, famished as if she had not eaten for days, she longed for the dear homely sound of the dinner bugle. Her mind was full of thoughts that did not belong there, strange ideas were bumping around colliding and threatening her with a headache. She added a line before closing her diary. “All this can be very wearing, but I must suppose it is necessary, and that the meaning of it will become clear later.”
“Those greasers are up to something,” Denny remarked to David. “They got a plan on foot.” He was examining three new pimples on the underside of his jaw in his shaving glass, which magnified the disasters of his skin fivefold and kept him in a state of perpetual alarm. “My God, look at these things!” he said to his cabin mates, holding up his chin.
Herr Glocken was curled up in the lower bunk, waiting for the two young men to change their shirts and ties before dinner. “From here I can’t even see them,” he said, meaning to reassure.
“Maybe you’re nearsighted,” said Denny, who did not intend to have anyone make light of his afflictions. Herr Glocken reached in his jacket pocket and put on his spectacles. “Even so,” he said, peering keenly, “I can barely make them out.”
David, buttoning his shirt, did not turn his head. “What ‘greasers’?” he asked. He detested Denny’s vulgar habit of calling all nationalities but his own by short ugly names; yet even for his own he had a few favorites—“cracker” for example, but that applied strictly to people of the state of Georgia; “white trash” was another, specifically applied to persons of low social station combined with financial insolvency, and in general to anybody whose attitude towards him or his point of view he found unsympathetic.
“Those Spanish dancing greasers,” said Denny, suspecting an implied rebuke in David’s tone; Denny suspected often that David Scott disapproved of any number of things, though he could never be quite certain what they were. But this hoity-toity voice about the word “greaser,” now—
“Well, what do you call ’em?” he asked. “Wops? Dagos? No, that’s Italians. Polacks? No. Guineas? No, they’re from Porto Rico, ain’t they? Or is it Brazil? They’re not niggers. Nor kikes. Kike is the name the Jews made up for a low-life Jew. Like that Löwenthal, for instance. But he’s not a bad guy. I’ve talked to him. Did you know I never saw a Jew in my life until I was fifteen and went away to school? Or if I did see one I didn’t know what he was. We didn’t have a thing against Jews in our town—we didn’t even have any Jews!”
“Maybe you were so busy lynching niggers you couldn’t take time out for Jews,” remarked David in a tone so remote and unheated, Denny’s mouth dropped open and he shut it with a snap.
“Where are you from?” he asked, after a loaded pause.
“Colorado,” said David. Denny tried to remember what he had ever heard, if anything, about Colorado except silver mines. He could not recall any traits of character of the people of that state, and so far as he knew, they had no nickname, like Hoosier or Cajun. You couldn’t hardly call him a Yankee.
“Mining?” he ventured.
“Sure,” said David, “timekeeper in a mine in Mexico.”
“I thought you said you’re a painter,” said Denny.
“I am. Timekeeping in a mine was the way I made my living, so I could work,” said David. Denny thought this over a while, and then said: “Look, that’s something I can’t understand—you spend time working at something you can’t make a living at, and then you take a job so you can make enough money to go on working at the work you can’t live on—it gets me down,” he said. “And you call yourself a painter, but why aren’t you just as much a timekeeper in a mine? Why can’t you call yourself a timekeeper?”
“Because I really am not one,” said David, “I just make my living that way, or did.… Now I’m going to try to make a living painting, but if I can’t, why, I can always get some kind of job, to keep me while I paint.”
Herr Glocken uncurled himself, ran his hand over his face and hair before the looking glass, pulled his tie knot a touch to center, gave himself a slight shake to straighten his rumpled clothes, and was ready to go. “Ah well,” he said to Denny, “that is the heroic life! That is the way men who trust themselves can afford to live! Me—I never had courage. Me, I run my little stand, my newspapers and magazines and birthday and Christmas cards, yes and ink and pens and writing paper, and every day I have the small change running through my hands, and every night when I close shop I have made my day’s living, yes and a little more, and that I invest so a few more pfennigs—centavitos—will be coming in always, a little more and a little more, for I have had no life—I only exist! And I have no existence coming except old age, and if I am not careful, I shall die under a bridge, or in a pauper’s hospital …”
“Maybe I shall too,” said David cheerfully, though Herr Glocken’s
sudden flood of confidences chilled him.
“Maybe,” said Herr Glocken. “No man knows his end! But you will not have to die in despair because you never had courage to live! You have taken hold of your own life, for that no man can ever make you sorry!”
He spoke with such fervor the two young, straight-backed, lucky men had perhaps their first emotion in common: a twinge of apologetic shame, as if they owed him some reparation for the misfortune of his body, some explanation of why it was easy for them to have courage—for Denny felt that he too was launching out, taking hold; it was a fact that a trained engineer had forty good jobs waiting for him, but he had the right to choose the one that would take him farthest from home and deepest into adventure—that freedom at least he had. He couldn’t see the point in being plain foolhardy, though—David Scott struck him as just being plain foolhardy, and that poor hunchback was buttering him up about it as if he envied him; he spoke up:
“It’s not the shape of your body but your mind that shapes your life,” he said, and he heard his own philosophical statement with amazed delight—he hadn’t known that he thought that. “I’ll bet no matter what, you’d have wound up with a newsstand,” he said. “I tell you something, I believe we get what we want!”
“Oh!” said Herr Glocken with a groan, and he began moving towards the door. “Oh no, excuse the strong word, it is not for you, but for this so-false belief—it is one of the great lies of life! Ah no, no—for I wanted only one thing in the world—” He paused to make his effect.
“What was that?” asked David, obligingly.
“To be a violinist!” said Herr Glocken as movingly as if he expected them to shed tears.
“But why was that impossible?” asked David.
“You can wonder in such a way, after one look at me?” Herr Glocken’s eyes were stricken … “Ah, well,” he ended, “it is impossible to make one understand. But I had the soul,” he said, patting himself lightly on the pointed misshapen ribs of his chest, “and I have it yet, and that consoles me a little.” He smiled his painful jester’s smile, and vanished.
“Well,” said Denny, “that’s that, I hope,” and not another word was said about Herr Glocken.
“You never did tell me the nickname for Spaniards,” said Denny.
“I don’t know what they call each other when they want to be insulting in Spain,” said David, “but in Mexico, the Indians call them Gachupín. It means a spur, really, or a boot that stings like a viper, the Aztec roundabout for the spur.”
“Too good for them,” said Denny.
“What do you think they’re up to?” asked David, returning to the zarzuela company. “I see them about buttonholing people and talking but they haven’t come near me yet. The gossip is they’re getting up some kind of show, and a raffle with chances, and so on: a kind of old-fashioned feria on shipboard, which will be a novelty. I can’t say I like their looks or ways …”
“That Arne Hansen has blown his top about that Amparo,” said Denny, with unconcealed envy. “They’ve got something I could use right now. That Pastora …”
He stopped, teetering dizzily on the edge of giving himself away by telling the true story of his encounter that very afternoon with Pastora. He thought better of it, for he wished to maintain the view of his character he hoped he had built up in David Scott’s mind, of himself as a man not to be taken in by women, who were every last one of them after nothing in God’s world but money. And it should be the positive pleasure of any man in his right mind to see that she didn’t get a nickel she hadn’t earned the hard way.… But he drew back into himself and saw it happen again: Pastora, who had never bothered to hide her contempt for him, met him head-on in the promenade around the deck, and suddenly stretched her arm at full length towards him with a frank graceful gesture, and stopped him in full stride, her hand on his necktie. Her deep eyes wide open, she smiled in the most inviting way, and said in childish English: “Come help us make our fiesta! We will dance, we will sing, we will have games, we will kiss, why not?”
“How much?” he heard himself asking, but he felt like a bird gazing into the eyes of a serpent.
“Oh nothing almost!” said Pastora, winsomely. “Two dollar, three, five—ten—what you like.”
Denny had broken into a light sweat, he felt he ought to say, “Make it two dollars then, that’ll suit me,” but he was afraid if he let this chance slip, he wouldn’t get another. “Have a drink?” he asked recklessly. They sat together in the bar for a good while over a bottle of German imitation champagne, at twelve marks a bottle, he noticed; but Pastora sipped with great pleasure, their feet nestled together under the table, and Denny, who thought champagne, even the best, tasted like thin vinegar with bubbles in it, was so wrought up and full of anticipation he could hardly swallow. Pastora also wanted cigarettes. “Have one of these,” offered Denny, producing his Camels. Pastora could not smoke that kind of cigarette. She wanted a slender gold-tipped jasmine-scented cigarette in a purple satin box stamped in gilt lettering: “La Sultana.” Denny hastily figured out the exchange from marks to dollars—one dollar ninety cents a box of twenty. He bought it. And then Pastora sold him two tickets for the raffle, at five marks a ticket—one mark more than the printed price. Denny paid for them and did not notice the deception until much later. Pastora had slipped her foot out of its narrow black shabby little satin slipper, and her tiny foot ran caressingly up within his trouser leg, the little toes pressing and twiddling delicately as fingers on his calf muscles. “When—when is this party going to come off?” he inquired, trying not to squirm in mingled pleasure and embarrassment. “Oh not until just before Vigo,” she told him. “But when are we to—to—get together?” he stuttered.
“Why, we are together now,” she reminded him, disingenuously.
“Yes, I know,” he said, trying to pull himself together, all his deepest suspicions rushing back upon him, “but this can’t go on like this, you know perfectly well what I’m talking about …”
“I no understand Enlish very well,” she told him, “but you mean you want sleep with me?”
Denny was delighted with this turn of the conversation. “You bet,” he said, “now you’re talking. I want to know when!”
“No,” said Pastora seriously, “first, monee, how much monee.”
“Well, how much?”
“Twennee dollars.” Denny, in the act of swallowing his last mouthful of wine, now choked violently and spewed it back in the air above her head. She was liberally besprinkled, wiped her hair with her paper napkin, and said, with some dignity: “That is not nice. Now I go.” Denny took her wrist as she stood up and said, desperately, “Tonight?”
“Not tonight,” she said coolly disengaging herself. “Tonight, I am tired.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Maybe. Let my arm go. People will think you are going to try to make love to me here on the table.” She drew herself away with finality, and left him. It was all he could do to pay the bill and get out with everybody staring at him, or so he believed. He hadn’t dared to look around to see.
Now he decided to tell David Scott a reconstructed story of the event. “Cost me a bottle of that lousy champagne,” he admitted, rather shamefacedly, omitting to mention the cigarettes and the raffle tickets. “She doesn’t drink much, but she wants only the best—I mean, she wants champagne. She’s got the cutest little feet I ever saw, no bigger than a baby’s and soft as a bunch of feathers. She took off her shoes and we played footie the whole time, like two school kids. But she wants more monee, as she calls it, than she’s going to get, from me.” And he wasn’t going to cross her palm with silver until after the ball was over. He knew better than that, he hoped. A few drinks now and then and he would string her along, but that was all. No bed, no board, that was his policy.
“You sure had better get what you’re going to get before you start crossing her palm with silver,” said David. “She’ll never put out afterward, let me tell you—I know the type.”
“Well, in a way, that’s fair enough,” said Denny. “If I can get it before I pay her, and I’m going to, well, I won’t pay her, either!” He brooded on his words a moment, surprised to find he had made this drastic decision. He’d never tried to do a girl out of her money yet. He had always simply been careful not to pay her too much. But there was something about the way this one was trying to play him for a sucker that made him want to get back at her. “Listen!” he said, with indignation as hot and real as if the cheat had already taken place, “if I give her any money before, she’ll put out all right or it’ll be the last white man she’ll ever gyp.” David said nothing, and after a moment Denny added, “Up till now I’ve never had anything to do with anybody but white girls.”
“These girls are white,” said David.
Denny was plainly baffled. “Well, I mean white—American girls.”
David, who had spent a long hard apprenticeship learning to be a man among men in the mixed society of the Mexican mining camp, took his bottle of genuine sour mash, Old Cedar Rail, out of the Gladstone bag. “Have one?” he asked. Denny nodded and watched him pouring into the thick cabin tumblers. “Get the champagne out of your mouth,” David said.
“One thing,” Denny pursued his single idea in a worried tone, after a good swig of his drink, “one thing is, there’s no place on this boat. She’s got that pimp of hers in with her, and of course, I know that Amparo’s pimp dodges around the ship all hours of the day and night while Hansen is in their cabin, but that kind of stuff gives me the jitters. It just wouldn’t work, that’s all. I see Rieber and that long-legged road-runner of his crawling around into dark places on the boat deck and anywhere else, but I don’t think they really mean business. I think they just like to tickle each other. And besides, Pastora didn’t say a thing practical except about money. She never did say where, or when.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I did. She said, tomorrow, maybe. But where, that’s what’s on my mind.”
Ship of Fools Page 36
