Ship of Fools

by Katherine Anne Porter

  “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!

  His stomach burning, he dabbled in his thin soup, afraid
of his food which had a way of turning and rending him. So—these Spaniards were no news to him even before he picked up the gossip and rumors about them from his table guests. It had all been abysmally beneath his notice, they were so obviously pimps with their prostitutes disguised as dancers in order to get proper passports, up to their shady tricks night and day. Anything would do, from scrounging money from passengers to stealing right and left from shops in Santa Cruz—he understood now the meaning of that howling leaping madwoman on the pier as the ship drew away; and the only question was, how had they managed to blackmail so many people, how had they got themselves seated at his table, where they had no right on earth to be, and what criminal effrontery had given them the notion in the first place? And what—this was the painful question, not to be answered: what had he been thinking of, to let such disorder thrive under his very eyes, and to consider it of no importance, something for the women to gossip about?

  He resisted an impulse to leave the table then and there. It would be better to stay, to observe them further, to let their impudence run its course, and to chastise them publicly with his contempt at the right moment. The one thing necessary with such people was to control them, to keep them firmly in their place. Once you allowed them the smallest impertinence, they would edge in and crowd you out like that camel who got his nose into the Arab’s tent, and after that, there was only one course to take: they must be put down with fire and sword.

  The Captain was fascinated by American gangster films full of gunfights, raids on night clubs, wild motor chases between police and bandits with screaming sirens and spouting machine guns; abductions, roadside murders, bullet-riddled bodies streaming blood sprawled about the streets, with only now and then at long intervals a lone gangster being led to the death chamber in the last scene. He now entertained himself with dreaming, as he sometimes did, that he was turning one of those really elegant portable machine guns on a riotous mob somewhere, always from a splendidly advantageous position, swiveling it in a half circle, mowing them down in rows. At this point there was some confusion in his mind, though not enough to interfere with the enjoyment of his fantasy; for though he could not imagine himself as being on any side except that of established government, he had in fact noticed that it was nearly always the gangsters who were shown operating the machine guns. There was no good reason why this should be so, and it was a state of affairs which could only exist in a barbarous nation like the United States. It was true that all the Americans were devoted to crime and criminals, to indecent dancing and drug-taking in low Negro jazz cellars, a debased people who groveled in vice, and left their police to depend mostly on tear gas bombs, or hand grenades or revolvers, all more awkward and less effective than machine guns. Even supposing that an American policeman might possibly be an honest man, though very unlikely, why put him at such a disadvantage? If it had not been for the constant gangster warfare among themselves, killing each other off in great numbers, they might easily have taken the country over entirely, years ago! But it was common knowledge that American gangsters and police were in close partnership, one could not thrive without the other. The leaders on both sides divided the power and the spoils, and they took in everything, from highest government posts to labor unions to the gayest night clubs and even the stock market, the food crops—yes, and the international shipping, God knows! All all was one vast gangster’s paradise, where only petty criminals and stupid policemen and decent workmen got killed or beaten and cheated. Besides the moving pictures which told him all this, the newspapers every day told him the same. In a word, the whole country was run by mobs of gangsters, there was not a single law in the land that they could not break as they pleased, and not a single man who would have dared to oppose them.

  The Captain, from his eminence of perfectly symmetrical morality, a man who steered by chart and compass, secure in his rank in an ascending order of superiors so endless the highest was unknown, invisible to him, took deep pleasure in his apocalyptic vision of the total anarchic uproar of the United States, a place he had never seen, for no ship of his carried him into any port more interesting than Houston, Texas, with its artificial canal in a meadow in a part of the country far removed from any marks of civilization. It was narrower and duller than the river Weser that took him into Bremerhaven.

  He reveled secretly in the notion of lawless murderous fury breaking out again and again at any time, anywhere—in some place he could not even fix on the map, but always among people whom it was lawful to kill, with himself at the center, always in command and control. Nothing worthy of his hopes of violence had ever occurred, not even in the war, where his part had been useful, honorable, if inconspicuous, as he was bound to admit, and altogether lacking in opportunities for him to exercise his real talents. This fate seemed to dog him: competent as he was to deal with the largest disorders and insubordination, here on his ship he dealt with silly rows, head-crackings in the steerage, a gang of petty knaves making themselves a nuisance: beneath his notice, yet he must deal with them.

  He brooded on his vanished Germany, the Germany of his childhood and earliest youth, the only Germany whose existence he admitted in his soul—that fatherland of order, harmony, simplicity, propriety, where every public place was hung with signs forbidding this or that, guiding the people so there could be no excuse for anyone making a mistake; whoever did so disobeyed clearly with felonious intent. This made the administration of justice more swift and certain than in other countries. Set the very tiniest sign saying Verboten at the edge of a grass plot, and even a three-year-old boy who could not read should know better than to put his toe over the edge. He had not known, or perhaps had been guilty of inattentiveness to signs, because in childish ignorance or carelessness, he had put his toe over the edge of the grass plot near the little sign, and his father, who had taken him for his morning walk in the park, had whipped him with his walking stick until his back was welted blue all over then and there, on the very spot, so that the lesson might sink not only into the culprit’s mind, but furnish a public demonstration of the discipline parents should practice on their young.…

  The Captain shuddered, leaped out of his revery, glanced at his watch and said to the steward, “Pour my wine please, and bring the fish.”

  At that moment the Spanish company erupted into the dining room in the full uproar of their professional native dress and arts, and bore in procession towards the Captain to the rhythmic strains of a popular bullfighter’s entrance march, played on two guitars by Tito and Manolo to the light flutter of castanets on the fingers of the ladies, whose brilliantly smiling faces were masks in black, white and red. They wore flimsy red and white figured cotton gowns with long ruffled trains. High tortoise-shell combs filled out in front with cotton roses and draped with short black lace mantillas adorned their shining black hair. They glittered with sequined fans, jingled with necklaces, earrings and bracelets of colored glass and ornaments of gold-colored metal; their skirts, shorter in front, showed their beautiful ankles and feet in black lace stockings and red satin high-heeled slippers.

  The men wore their uniforms of tight high-waisted black trousers, wide red sashes and short black jackets, their thin black dancing pumps with flat ribbon bows. Ric and Rac wore their bullfighter and Carmen costumes, a little disheveled from pulling each other back by clutching hair or garments, each wanting to go first in the parade.

  The whole company circled around the table in a bright carnival of bowing and strumming and clacking and whirling, every face fixed in an intent smile. The Captain, monumentally remote, rose and returned the greeting with deadly courtesy. They responded as to an enthusiastic audience. At last the stewards pulled out the ladies’ chairs, and they settled with excited little cries, like crows to a cornfield, Lola at the Captain’s right hand, Amparo at his left; the others found their places at the much extended board and there at last after their long fight, they found themselves seated at the Captain’s table, the high place they were determined to be eve
n if only once in their lives, and not only to be there, but to prove their right to the place they had won. Their smiles faded, their eyes were hard, glittering, savagely triumphant as they glanced around at the other passengers, some of whom were still pretending to ignore them. Let them! Not for a moment did they forget the point of their victory. They had come to do honor to the Captain, and they did him honor at length and in profusion. As food was set before them, grew cold and was taken away, except for Ric and Rac, whose appetites never failed, they rose in turn with lifted glasses and made speeches, each expressing in a slightly different arrangement of florid phrases the burning hope that this beautiful occasion would serve to bring those two great martyred countries, Spain and Germany, closer to each other, that the old splendid order might be restored—the Spanish monarchy, the German Empire, in all their glory!

  The Captain began to squirm slightly as oratory piled upon oratory; when the political trend of their words became clearer, he turned pale with rage. He had never ceased to mourn the Kaiser; he loathed with all his soul the debased pseudo-republicanism of defeated Germany, and was shocked to discover that this ragtag bobtailed lot were claiming as it were relationship with him, calling themselves Royalists; they were toasting a high glorious cause to which by the very nature of things they had no right to adhere—they were only to live under it, as under the whip of their master. Royalists? How did they dare to say the word, much less call themselves that? They were the beggars whose place it was to line the streets and cheer when royalty passed, to scramble for the money thrown at the cathedral door after royal weddings, to dance in the streets at fairs and pass the basket afterward.