Ship of Fools

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Ric and Rac, more than usually savage and unkempt, climbed to the rail and straddled it as if they were riding a tree branch, leaning out perilously to get a better view of things, mouths open, eyes sharp and wild. No one paid any attention to them, not even a sailor passing by took the trouble to order them down. Each pair or individual of the watching group kept strictly apart without any acknowledgment of the others presence, and each had found a vantage point of his own; yet all of them gazed at a certain spot, like persons being photographed together.

  Jenny stood with her hands clasped breast high, and gazed too, at the ritual grouping below, observing the composition of the foreshortened figures with the long bluish shadows running sideways from them, storing it in her mind to sketch the instant she got back to pencil and paper, wondering why she had not brought them with her; and wondering too at her lack of feeling. It was quite unreal, a pantomime by dolls worked with strings, there was nothing that had ever been alive in that dark swaddle of canvas; and even as she wondered at her callousness, she felt her eyes filling with perfectly meaningless tears, tears for nothing at all, that would change nothing, that would not even ease the pain of her emptiness; and through a mist she saw the canvas leap outward and strike the water.

  She was so absorbed in trying to follow its path into the depths, she almost missed the commotion of the battle, it happened so quickly and was so summarily ended. While Denny was shouting quite close beside her, “Well, I be dog! They got him! Well, I be dog!” she saw several sailors hauling the fat man into the clear, while others were industriously breaking up the formation of attackers, who fell back easily and made no further disturbance. They could see at a glance their work was done, they were quite eased and satisfied and perfectly ready for all consequences. Arne Hansen raised both fists and shook them in rage, shouting, “Cowards! Fools! Slaves! Kill your enemies, not your friends! Fools! Fools!” he went on shouting convulsively as if he could not stop, and at last the group near him began to exchange uneasy glances. Below deck, several of the attacking crowd glanced up, their faces tough as pickled walnuts, and one of them shouted back contemptuously, “Shut your big mouth, you cabrón of a Swede! Keep out of our business!” and all of them burst into galling jeering laughter. Hansen took off in his long lumbering stride, head between his raised shoulders.

  The fat man lay sprawled on his back, bleeding sluggishly from a shocking-looking wound that glistened and gaped in the sunlight. Dr. Schumann did not wait to be called for, but appeared almost at once on the lower deck, spoke to Father Garza, who was departing with his characteristic promptness and detachment, but took time to say, “It’s nothing serious, Doctor—you won’t need me!” with a sardonic hoot that was nearly laughter.

  David had come out of his fit of self-absorption rather abruptly, and though his face had not changed expression, his eyes had a curiously pleased, excited fire in them. “Well,” he said, “they’ve done it! I always thought they might.” “That’s just what Denny said,” flashed Jenny in sudden anger. He peered at her closely then and saw the tears not yet dried on her face, and he said bitterly, “My God, is there nothing you won’t try to take part in? What on earth have you got to cry for now?”

  “Everything,” said Jenny, her voice shaking. “Everything in the whole world. That lets you in, somewhere …” She saw in his eyes the beginning gleam of pleasure it gave him to be able to work her up into a temper in which she would say anything and everything and have to be sorry for it afterward. And no matter how sorry she was, she knew she would never be forgiven. It would be just one more thing. Jenny peered at him in turn as if she were as nearsighted as he, and said very sharply in a quick low voice, “No, David, no you don’t—not again—not this time!” Rather slowly, so he might see that she was in perfect control of herself, she started to walk away from him, then turned back and said savagely, “Don’t you follow me—don’t you speak to me!”

  “Don’t worry,” said David, his whole face cold and sharpened, “I shan’t.”

  Ric and Rac, still straddling the rail, began screaming shrilly one word over and over, waving their heads and their arms frantically towards the open sea.

  “Whales, whales, whales, whales!” they screamed in pure ecstasy; and so there were indeed whales passing, as everyone present could not help but see in a reluctant glance; there was a common thought in every mind, that this was frivolous, inappropriate: and yet, after that first glance, they all stared with enjoyment: not too far away for a good view, three enormous whales, seeming to swim almost out of the water, flashing white silver in the sunlight, spouting tall white fountains, traveling with the power and drive of speedboats, going south—not one person could take his eyes from the beautiful spectacle until it was over, and their minds were cleansed of death and violence. “Whales!” screamed Ric and Rac, rising on their perch, losing their balance, and almost going overboard. They balanced dizzily, teetered, recovered, and dropped to the deck again, unharmed. Not a single hand had been stretched to aid them, though a dozen were near. No one moved. They all regarded the peril of Ric and Rac not precisely with indifference, something a little more positive perhaps, as if their going overboard would have been accepted with entire equanimity as some unexplained but not disastrous freak of natural law. Deeply, deeply not one of them but would have found a sympathetic agreement with all the others that overboard, the deeper the better, would have been a most suitable location for Ric and Rac. Any one of them would have been indignant if accused of lacking any of the higher and more becoming feelings for infancy; but Ric and Rac were outside the human race. They were outside undeniably, and they had known it for a good while; it was where they chose to be and they could more than hold their own. So they recovered their balance, hung on firmly and lithely as monkeys, shouted and screamed and enjoyed themselves; enjoyed their funeral of the man they had killed—the crazy old man in the wheel chair had told them so, to their delight—their fight on deck, their whales. It was a fine day. The only thing lacking was, they had not been able to ride on the whales’ backs.

  About halfway down the deck Jenny stopped to watch the whales, and forgot her grief. David went straight to her, and took her arm, and said, “Haven’t we had enough of this? Let’s go get some coffee.” “Yes, let’s,” she said, and as they walked she began, “David darling, I remember once I was swimming far out in the Bay of Corpus Christi, on a beautiful day, and I was coming towards land again, and a whole school of porpoises came straight at me, oh they looked like mountains rising and dipping in the waves, and I thought I might die of fright; but they just divided around me and went on, sweeping out to the Gulf of Mexico. And I was suddenly very happy, and thought, ‘Oh, this is the pleasantest thing that ever happened to me!’”

  “And was it?” he asked, very tenderly and a little teasingly.

  “Nearly,” she said.

  “No knives, thank God, due to the firmness and foresight of our Captain,” Herr Baumgartner was heard to remark in the bar a few hours later.

  “They didn’t need knives,” said the purser, his satisfaction with events making him recklessly indiscreet. Not that he cared what happened to Catholics, their mummery was their own business, but it was high time for somebody to stop that Bolshevik in his tracks, and if the Catholics did it, why, a worthy deed all the same. “They had something as good,” he said, smiling deeply into his morning beer. “That Bolshevik—those Catholics! Let them all kill each other—a good thing!”

  Father Carillo, normally a lover of peace and an uncontentious man, happy to say his daily Mass and leave the rough work to Father Garza, who enjoyed it, was sitting at a small table some distance from the bar, sherry glass in hand, but he heard the purser’s few and foolish words. “He is a very ordinary type of low Spanish syndicalist,” he said, “not a Bolshevik at all. That is a careless use of terms on your part,” he said, mildly, “a mistake many persons make.” His self-possession nearly deserted him, his face was illuminated with fury. “And if you wi
sh others to respect your religion, whatever it may be, you will do better to speak decently of the faith of others.” He rose abruptly, left his untasted sherry and walked away.

  The purser, dismayed at his own breach of discipline, scrambled off his stool and stood at attention. “I beg your pardon, sir, I beg your pardon,” he called after the rigid figure of the priest. “Sir, I am deeply sorry!” But the title Father refused to pass his Lutheran teeth, and the priest went on as if he had not heard him. The purser, still standing, turned unusually red and swollen in the face and neck and emptied his seidel down his throat as if it were into a drain.

  “To hell with him,” said Denny, sympathetically. The purser, who had even a lower opinion of Denny than he had of the Catholic religion, ignored him ostentatiously: it was entirely safe to be rude to him. One of his most important duties was, of course, to be impartially polite to passengers, one and all, no matter how disgusting any number of them might be to him personally. It was a sacrificial daily task, for in every voyage for going on thirty years he had fought and conquered the natural deepest impulses of his very being to beat the head off at least twenty persons, all passengers and nearly all of them males. His utter contempt for the female sex, mixed with a dash of wholesome fear and an entire inability to fathom its motives or cope with its vagaries, found expression in a false front of indulgent good humor which deceived or at least placated most women; they all of them only wanted to be flattered, he had found out for himself long ago, and that simplified matters immensely. Without a word but a glare of piglike malice for Denny, and without waiting to order his second beer, which he had been looking forward to pleasurably even while in the middle of the first, he heaved himself into ponderous motion, belly rolling, backsides heaving, the cushion of fat across the back of his neck quivering.

  Denny gave a muffled snort. “Kraut!” he said, into his empty stein. He waved it at the barman. “Here!”

  Arne Hansen was sitting three stools away, bowed over, head in hands, his beer untouched. He now turned a face of monstrous despair to Denny, and spoke in a low moist growl like a sick bear. “If I believed in a God I would curse him,” he said. “I would spit in his face. I would send him to his own hell. Oh, what a foulness is religion! Those people down there in the steerage. They cringe and they bow and they give their money to priests and live like mangy dogs kicked by everybody and what do they get? A string of beads to fumble and a scrap of fish bread in their mouths!…” He pulled the hair on top of his head and wrung it. Denny decided this speech was meant for him and he was not only embarrassed but shocked. “Aw, take it easy,” he said, for he felt dimly it was all right to curse and damn around as much as you pleased just so long as it was understood that you didn’t mean it. It was all right to make jokes about religion, there’s a funny side to everything, a man has got to laugh off a lot of things in this world or he’d go nuts, but still that didn’t mean he didn’t believe in something. He had been brought up scared to death of the Old Man With Long Whiskers Up Yonder, a real fire-eater who in the long run sent nearly everybody to hell. There was a heaven of course, but Denny had never heard of anybody going there, or at least not in his time, and not from his community. An older cousin of his, a big bully twice his size and age, grabbed his hand one day and held a lighted match to the palm. While Denny danced and screamed and licked the scorched place, the cousin said, “Well, I just wanted to show you what you’re going to get all over, all the time, soon’s you die and go to hell!” Denny had yelled back, “You’re going to hell yourself!” but it hadn’t done him much good. He felt like a boob when he remembered how long that hell business had worried him. He’d got over it though, good; religion was about the least of his troubles, but just the same, funny, he couldn’t stand atheists. This fellow sounded like an atheist if Denny had ever heard one. He wasn’t joking, either.

  “Take it easy,” he said, “what you got against religion—I mean, well, religion? I don’t mean beads and fish bread and mumbo-jumbo, I mean—well, I just don’t understand, that’s all.”

  “No, you don’t,” groaned Hansen. “Do you know what happened this morning at the funeral of that poor man who gave his life for a worthless dog, a pampered pet of those fat middle-class people who—”

  “I nearly missed it,” said Denny, “I just got in for the scrimmage. Why, hell, man, I was standing right next to you!”

  “I did not see you,” said Hansen.

  “Well, I damned near didn’t make it,” said Denny, having lost the thread of his argument, whatever it was. Hansen, glowering knottily into his beer, said nothing further and seemed to forget that Denny was there. Herr Löwenthal sidled over to the bar, with a face of distress, and nodded to Denny, one of the few passengers with whom he still felt on speaking terms. He grimaced and laid his flattened hand on his midriff. “It still makes me feel sick,” he said. “Think of being sewed up in a sack and thrown overboard like a dog! Makes me sick …”

  “Well, I can’t think what else they could do with him,” said Denny, reasonably.

  “Why, they could put him in a box with ice and keep him until we got to dry land,” said Löwenthal, “and bury him like a human being.”

  “It wouldn’t be practical,” said Denny. “Too expensive. And besides, that’s a regular custom … if you die on board ship you get buried at sea, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been back and forth, back and forth, how many times already, and never till now did I see a thing like this. It looks like heathens.”

  “Well, yes,” agreed Denny reluctantly, “those Catholics. But what do you care?”

  “I don’t,” said Herr Löwenthal, “I should worry about what Christians do to each other—I got enough trouble without. But it made me sick.”

  It was Denny’s turn to brood. He was in a bad position. Here was an atheist on one side, talking like a Bolshevik. And here was a Jew on the other side, criticizing Christians … that is, Catholics. Well, he didn’t like Catholics any more than he did atheists, on the other hand he didn’t like the idea of a Jew talking against Christians. Suppose he, Denny, said to Löwenthal, “I think Jews are heathens,” how would he take it? He’d accuse him right away of persecuting Jews … Denny began to feel tired in the head. He began to look forward to the end of his stay in Germany, and to getting back to Brownsville once more, where a man knew who was who and what was what, and niggers, crazy Swedes, Jews, greasers, bone-headed micks, polacks, wops, Guineas and damn Yankees knew their place and stayed in it. That fat guy in the steerage got what was coming to him, treating a funeral like that, and he acted like an atheist too, but it stuck in Denny’s craw that a bunch of those spic-Catholics had conked him. “Wops,” he said loudly, to nobody, “just a lot of wops.”

  “Wops?” asked Herr Löwenthal, uneasily, a red spark glowing deep in his eyes. “What wops?” He did not wait for an answer, but walked away rapidly, carrying his drink. “I don’t know any wops,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Kike,” said Denny to himself, in a confidential tone, “that’s all.”

  Freytag and Löwenthal, though they would never know it, or if they had known, would never admit it, shared a common cause for thankfulness in the diversion of the passengers’ attention towards such dramatic events as the drowning and burial at sea of the reckless Basque, whose name even now no one remembered, except perhaps an equally nameless few in the steerage. Freytag’s rage and resentment at the mean little scandal at the Captain’s table had swept him away into postures he had not intended; had exposed him in a peculiarly false, unbecoming light, no less false because the incident was only a variation of many that had happened before, and would happen to him again and again, so long as he was married to Mary. The sinister thing about this episode was, it was the first time any unpleasant thing of this kind had happened to him when he was traveling without Mary. He had to admit that he looked forward to the few occasions that separated them for even a few days, when he enjoyed again, with a great lightness of heart,
the privilege—and what a divine privilege it was, how ever had he taken it so for granted in the old days?—of being a member of the ruling class of the ruling race of the world, capable of extending his career as far in any direction as his own talents could carry him; free to rise without challenge to any level of society he chose. Oh, what had he thrown away in this insane marriage—yes, and what had he done to Mary, whose life was as threatened as his own? Suddenly without any care for appearance, for he was sitting in his deck chair, he doubled his fists over his eyes and groaned, “Mary, darling, forgive me.” He heard her light pretty voice saying instantly, “Why of course I forgive you—what have you done?”

  The whole thing from start to finish was his own fault; he could only accept this hard fact, writhing with wounded pride—how could he trust himself for anything if he made such a fool of himself in this matter of his whole life and Mary’s? His rage rose again in its first freshness against everyone who had witnessed his humiliations, those who presumed to pity him, to make apologies—that wretched Baumgartner—and those who presumed to share his wrong—that Jenny Brown, with her sentimental habit of trying to get into everybody’s skin. Really, he liked Mrs. Treadwell better, with her complete insensibility. And as for the rest of them, especially the dullards at the Captain’s table, who would take pleasure in snubbing him if only they could catch his eye, he wished deeply that Mary were with him: she would have made them positively entertaining with her ruthless humor and charming utterly heartless malice. “Why, Mary!” he said to her once, shocked and admiring, “How can you be so cruel? Don’t you belong to the human race?” She had paused briefly, shot him a keen sidelong glance, and said: “No, not really—I am a Jew, remember?”