Ship of Fools

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Herr Glocken, much grieved and ashamed, said meekly, “I did not think. It was like getting caught in a hornets’ nest.”

  They went nearer the shop but did not venture in. The Spaniards were everywhere, the shopkeeper could not watch them all at once, she could not drive them out because they did not listen, but finally Lola, to fix her attention, with immensely prolonged haggling and fast talking and high contempt for the object, bought with hard money a small square of embroidered gauze with lace. Meantime the children had got back to their station; the desperate shopkeeper, wedged in a corner, shouted to them all to get out. Even as Lola handed over the money, and the woman was counting change, they all surged out into the street, and very plainly the watchers saw that the shapes of the company were all lumpy in odd places, and from under Amparo’s black shawl there dangled the fringed corner of a pure white one.

  They dashed across the plaza and hailed a large open conveyance drawn by a big sad bony horse. The women and children piled in upon one another first; Manolo, Pepe, and Tito squatted on the steps and Pancho crowded in beside the driver. “Hurry,” he said, “hurry, we are late!”

  “For what?” inquired the driver. “Look, Señor, this carriage is for six persons, you are ten; you will pay me for ten. I charge by the passenger.”

  “That’s mere robbery,” said Pancho, “I will not pay it.”

  The driver drew his horse to a stop. “Then all must get out,” he said convincingly. Lola leaned forward and said, “What are we stop ping for?” an edge of panic in her voice.

  “We are being robbed,” said Pancho, though without much force.

  “Tell him to drive on, drive on!” screamed Lola. “Goat, mule! Drive on.”

  Pancho said, “Who are you talking to? Shut your big mouth!”

  Tito said, “Listen, Pancho, you’re not talking to Pastora. Lola’s running this, don’t forget. Get on there now …” and he said to the driver, who seemed to have gone to sleep along with his horse, “How much do you want?”

  The driver roused to full life instantly and named his price. “And I want it in hand, now, Señor,” with the self-possession and readiness of a man long experienced in human trickiness. “Now,” he said, without lifting the reins, holding out his hollowed hand so that whoever had the money could put it where it belonged. Tito paid.

  The Lutzes and the Baumgartners had wandered about, enjoying such pastimes as the island afforded, including the sweet heavy aromatic wines of the country, so festive and so soothing. Herr Baumgartner had taken two or three more than he should have, and had bought a bottle of Malavasia, promising his wife he would drink it instead of brandy. They now being chance-met at this place, Mrs. Baumgartner remarked that it seemed to be a fate that they were not to be free of those sinister characters the dancers for a moment—they had spoiled the voyage until now and they would go on spoiling it to the end …

  “No, they leave at Vigo, thank God,” said Herr Lutz, “and so do the rest of the steerage people.”

  “It will be a pleasant ship then,” said Frau Baumgartner to Frau Lutz.

  “I cannot think improvement will go so far as that,” said Frau Lutz, quelling all hope, “but we have the right to expect at least decency. Those creatures,” she said, bobbing her chin towards the old carriage lumbering away like an overcrowded bird’s nest, “should be left here in jail, if there were any such thing as justice—”

  “Instead of that poor Condesa,” said Herr Baumgartner. “I am sure she was an innocent afflicted lady, suffering and not strong enough to bear her pains without the relief of drugs—”

  “I never approved of that woman,” said Frau Lutz. “I cannot find one argument in her favor, still I think it injustice that she should be punished for her faults—not that she doesn’t deserve it—but that these worse criminals than she should escape without a scratch … Well, what do you expect of this world?”

  Herr Glocken, who dimly resented Frau Lutz’s tactless intervention in his favor, saving him but making him ridiculous, spoke up to get the talk down to facts. “They were stealing everywhere today, they have been cheating on the ship all the time—that raffle!—those children, those little monsters, stole La Condesa’s pearls and threw them overboard—”

  “It was never proved,” said Herr Lutz. “It is not known whether they were real pearls, even—nor whether the object thrown overboard was her necklace or a string of beads—”

  Frau Lutz broke into cold indignant speech. “My husband is very nearsighted,” she said, “or at least, he does not see well. He cannot possibly know what went on when those children collided with us on deck.… I did see, and I do know now, though I doubted at first, that it was a pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, and those unnatural children stole it and the girl threw it into the sea. That is all,” she said, with sarcasm. “All. It is by no means enough to disturb anyone, we are wrong to concern ourselves with such peccadilloes—”

  Herr Lutz rebuked his wife by speaking in turn to the others as if she were not present: “My poor wife has the highest principles, and no misdeed is too trivial not to call for hanging at least; I have never known her to overlook the slightest fault in anybody’s character but her own, and it is no good to tell her that no matter what appearances may be, what circumstances may indicate, we must not rely on them as positive evidence, no, not even in the lightest cases—”

  Frau Lutz spoke up firmly: “Elsa! You saw it too, did you not?” Elsa, who had stood silent and lumpish, looking away from her elders and hardly listening, started and answered instantly, “Yes, Mama.”

  Herr Baumgartner roused and reached to Herr Lutz to shake his hand, saying, “But you talk like a lawyer, like a good defense man, it is rare to find a layman who has any grasp at all of the great principles ruling evidence, that crux of all legal procedure … Congratulations! Did you ever read, perhaps, for the bar?”

  “No, but I have good friends in the profession. In my business, I have needed them. They gave me good advice.”

  Herr Glocken was suffering from his sense of failure, of having run away when he should have stood his ground, to witness the zarzuela company do their thieving, to denounce them, to have seen them all arrested and dragged away to the juzgado—and instead of this heroic conduct, he had run, cravenly. He had let that Frau Lutz even defend him from children—children; what humiliation! He had then seen the dancers leaving with their loot, and so had all the others, and yet they stood there, gossiping all around the subject and never once admitting guilt or complicity.…

  “We should have done something, that I know,” he said to them all, and they all looked down at him with varying degrees of condescension.

  “Can you think of anything?” asked Herr Lutz. “In my business, we take no notice at all of petty pilfering, what we lose on one customer we make up on another. We have a budget for replacing all sorts of portable objects—you’d hardly believe what magpies tourists are; it does not matter how respectable they look. So I do not take it seriously—”

  Herr Lutz glanced at his watch and then at the sun. The great dark clouds were rolling up again from the east, just as they had yesterday. The others glanced too at their wrists and Mrs. Baumgartner said, “It is late. If we walk, we may miss the ship.”

  “It will wait for us,” said Herr Lutz. But in all of them, the fog and glow of the wine they had drunk seemed to fade. Each face showed uneasiness to the others, and in a mild state of common panic, they hailed a row of caleche, and drove in unexpected state to the very foot of the gangplank, which was indeed prepared for rising. They scrambled up out of breath with only minutes to spare and joined the other passengers, who were lining up to witness the commotion of sailing. There were rumors of rising seas outside the harbor. The band started playing, “Adieu, mein kleiner Garde-Offizier!” and the shoals of Syrians prowling the docks trying to sell sheepskin rugs and opium scattered away.

  As the strip of water widened between pier and ship, with Santa Cruz at the right distanc
e taking on again its first beauty, the zarzuela company huddled at the rail in silence but with intent bristling attention, watching a frantic weeping woman on shore who shook her fists screaming desperate curses and accusations at the upper deck of the moving ship. One of the invincible-looking Civil Guards left his patrol partner to quell this unseemly disturbance. He turned the woman round by her shoulders and marched her briskly out of sight of the foreign ship and its passengers. It was part of his duty to guard against such bad propaganda. This kind of behavior gave the town an inhospitable appearance. “Keep away from here,” he instructed the woman, harshly. She covered her head with her shawl and went away without looking back.

  Jenny and David rested their elbows on the rail and Jenny said, “That’s one station past. Now—David, I’m going to try for a French visa at Vigo—”

  “If we stop at Vigo,” said David.

  “There’s talk now that they will stop. All those dancers … and then I’ll leave the ship at Boulogne.”

  “If we stop there,” said David.

  “We’re going to stand out and a tender will come for us,” said Jenny. “We’ll make it.”

  “Who said so?”

  “The purser.”

  “Who are we?”

  “Mrs. Treadwell, and I, and those silly students. Oh David, do please come with me. It makes me sick even to think of your going on. What will you do in Spain by yourself?”

  “What will you do in Paris?”

  “That’s a question,” she said. They strolled around to the other side of the deck. “We’re setting out tonight off the coast of Africa … there was nothing new or strange in Santa Cruz, was there? It could have been Mexico, crooked old streets and the sound of Spanish and the little markets and the colors of the plaster—but did you notice how it seemed strange in the new part of town where the real international business is? Did you notice that brass plate on the brick wall saying here is a branch of the Bank of British West Africa?”

  “Why, no,” said David. “What about it?”

  “Just for a second, I felt far from home, in a strange, strange land, and I didn’t want to be there.”

  “Where is home, Jenny angel?” asked David, with the always unexpected tenderness that could dissolve her at her highest melting point; her eyes glistened, she blinked at him and smiled carefully.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I still don’t know, but it is very far away.” They leaned together and rubbed cheekbones and nuzzled a little and then kissed. David said in an offhand, take it or leave it tone, or even somewhat as if he did not expect to be heard, “We’ll get French visas at Vigo and we’ll get on that tender outside Boulogne harbor, and we’ll land in Paris next day. I’m through with the argument, Jenny.”

  “Would you like me to cry on your neck, rubbing my nose on your necktie and dribbling tears down your collar, darling? I don’t care who sees us,” she said, wrapping her arm around his neck, nudging under his chin with the top of her head.

  “Stop it, Jenny,” said David, “where do you think we are?”

  She straightened up and took her powder case out of her pocket. “We’ll go to Spain a little later,” she promised, “to Madrid and Avila and Granada and everywhere there is. David, if you want, let’s go to Spain first and then to Paris … really, darling, I don’t mind. I shan’t care where we go, after this. Let’s land at Gijón? And go on to Madrid.”

  Anger came up in David as if it had been patiently ambushed nearby waiting to be recalled to its natural place. It was her old trick of holding out until he gave way, then turning on him suddenly by yielding everything, pretending it was what she really wanted all along, leaving him bare and defenseless. But first he must give way. “I’ll stop if you will …” “I’ll do anything you want if you’ll do what I want first—” Now having won, again, she was all for giving him the victory, for showing him how easy it was to be generous, to drift along with him in happy agreement—everything she should have done from the beginning without all this pull and haul. Now, of course, she was all set to take over the Spanish trip, to manage everything, starting with Gijón, a port he had never for a moment considered as a landing place. My God, now it was all to do over again, in a kind of reverse. His silence worried Jenny.

  “David?” she asked, leaning gently and speaking in her “melted” voice. “What do you think? Wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere we’d never even thought of going, and just stroll through the country until we got to Madrid?”

  David said, “Why Madrid, particularly? I hadn’t thought of Madrid. I should like to stay along the coast awhile—Santander, maybe, or San Sebastián, or up to the French border, to Irún—”

  “Well,” said Jenny, feeling chilled, “anywhere you like.”

  “You seem to forget we’re going to Paris,” said David, “Spain’s out, remember? We’re going to Paris together, and then we’ll see—”

  Jenny turned upon him a severe, censorious face, not angry, nor wounded, nor intimidated, nor resentful—just a regard of critical disapproval, and she spoke evenly in her normal voice raised to the nth, David thought with a sour little humor.

  “I wish you’d just make up your mind once, David, just once, and then keep it made up until we could get one thing finished, or one thing decided, or just even—well, this is like all the times you walked me two miles to a certain restaurant for dinner at nine o’clock, and then changed your mind at the door, and walked me off somewhere another mile, and more than once we wound up eating green tamales out of a tin boiler on a street corner … and is this whole trip going to turn out like that, too? Why don’t we just jump overboard now and call it a day? David, what do you want?”

  David let her words pour over his ears like rain off a tile roof. When the fishwife streak in Jenny’s nature took hold, and her entire being fused all its elements into pure mindless femaleness condensed into words having no thinnest thread of a hold on reason, David’s central knot of tension loosened, he felt pleasantly released from the burden of taking her seriously, of trying to answer, to explain or placate: any quarrel lost its edge, any question of love its meaning; no man owed one iota of his manhood, one moment of attention, one shred of consideration to a woman who was all the same as jabbing him with a hatpin. With relief he saw Jenny, that so-special creature, the woman like no other woman, merge into the nameless, faceless, cureless pestilence of man’s existence, the chattering grievance-bearing accusing female Higher Primate. Jump overboard? What for? He noticed that the waves were rising, the boat was beginning to plunge a little. That was a speech silly for Jenny even when she was talking like a woman.

  “My mind is made up,” he said. “You weren’t listening, Jenny angel. We are going to Paris, and that is settled, once for all.” It seemed as good a place as any to run through this business and make an end of it—Berlin, Madrid, Paris, what would be the difference? “Let Spain alone for a while. It’s time to begin arranging France.”

  “You arrange it,” said Jenny, as amiably as if she had never spoken a bitter word. “We’ll see what happens at Vigo.” Then she said almost shyly, “You are a dear love not to take me up when I fly off the way I did. David, I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m perfectly happy—perfectly. Please don’t think about what I said—”

  “I won’t any more,” David said reassuringly, with good-tempered malice spreading like an inner smile all through him.

  The dinner bugle sounded, but they delayed a few minutes. The ship was leaving the harbor, and the sea was so wild the pilot launch was almost swamped. The man at the wheel was drenched and had hard work to stay on board.

  The pilot came down the rope ladder like a spider dropped down his web, and swung into the launch, which almost capsized. He took the wheel and nosed her away. After a good sharp tussle, the engine died. For a moment the pilot stood there, steadying the wheel, looking up at the tall bow of the ship louring over him. Jenny said, “Oh David, look at him!” She leaned far out, took off her square
red scarf and waved at him in great circles until she caught his attention. He removed his sober pilot’s hat with a beautiful sweep and waved back. David clenched the rail with both hands and leaned away, arms stiffened to the shoulders. He shuddered. Jenny lingered, her scarf dangling, her face softened and full of gaiety and tenderness. David took her arm and drew her away.

  “Let’s wait and see how he does,” she said, but David had had enough of Jenny for one day. “He’ll do very well, and now it’s dinnertime,” he told her, and she came along with one of her rare entirely fraudulent but well-played acts of complaisance. It usually meant she had thought of something else to do later that would amuse her more.

  Jenny, tilting her first glass of wine towards David’s, felt, she could not say why, that she was having the loveliest, most charming time of her life. David was somewhat wrapped up in himself about something, the ship was rolling with long, swooning swoops enough to chill the pit of her stomach, yet she was not chilled. The same tables were occupied by the same passengers, yes, nearly all of them present, looking much the same. She was sober, so it wasn’t that delightful maze of Canary wine. The zarzuela company came in a little late, and seated themselves in silence with frowning faces; even Ric and Rac were not showing their usual spirits. Jenny said to David: “I heard they beat those children terribly about the pearl necklace—they beat them senseless. But they seem to be all right, don’t they?”