A sailor on deck below picked up the sandal and tossed it back so accurately he hit Ric in the chest, and almost at the same instant the twins were seized by an arm each from the back, and a stern voice of absolute authority said, “What are you doing here?” They were hauled downward so strongly they had not time to stiffen their spines, but they refused to meet the cold eye of the young officer, who shook them quite freely and said, “If you do such things again you will be locked up for the rest of the voyage. Now remember!” He gave them a little push, and they ran in silence, with impudent faces.
They almost collided with the dying man in the wheel chair being pushed along like a baby in a carriage by the tall angry-looking boy. “Get out of my way,” snarled the boy in Spanish, and they dodged around him, putting out their tongues.
The man in the chair sat among his pillows and coughed, as he did nearly all day and all night, his weak little beard agitated, his eyeballs mustard-yellow.
“Stop here,” he said to the boy, and they paused while he craned feebly to see the people on the lower deck, a sick pity in his face in the presence of so much misery. Some of the men were getting on their feet by then; they stood jammed together along the walls of the ship and at the rail while the sailors went on hosing down the filth of their sickness into the sea. They then piled back upon each other, on the wet canvas chairs in their wet clothes, and in the abominable heat a strange mingled smell of vegetable and animal rot rose from them.
Herr Graf said in a low voice as if talking to himself: “I can think only of how all that sinful flesh must suffer before it shall be allowed to die. We must all earn the blessing of death at a great price, Johann.” At the sound of his name Johann’s mouth quivered with rage and disgust. He did not reply. The dying man spread one hand out in the direction of the steerage in a gesture of blessing. “God, heal them, give them health and virtue and joy.… If only I could touch them. Johann,” he said to the boy his nephew, in a weak but natural voice, “you must help me down there among them, to touch some of those sick; they must be eased, it is not right to let them suffer.”
Johann’s sulky mouth curled with exasperation, his hands jerked on the chair: “You know you will not be allowed to go down there. Why do you always talk nonsense?”
In silence they moved on, the chair creaking faintly. “I forgive you, nephew Johann, I forgive you your hard heart and evil will. You cannot harm me by any means, but I might help you if you would let me.”
“You can help me by dying and letting me go free,” said Johann in a low shaking voice, giving the chair a sharp swerve. “You can die and let me go home!”
His uncle considered this awhile, and then said in a reasonable tone as if in ordinary conversation: “I promised I would leave you the money, Johann, if you would come with me and see me safely to Germany once more, for a last look. Is that not worth considering?”
“When?” asked Johann wearily. “When?” and the chair wheels rattled a little.
“It should not be long, Johann, in the very nature of things. Do you expect me to set the exact date for you? But I told you in the beginning that if you would come—”
“Don’t go over that,” said Johann, “I know all about it.”
“And your mother my poor sister, she was glad of the chance for you. I renew my promise to leave you everything in my will, though you do not deserve it, you have not merited it; for charity and kind behavior were part of your agreement. But leaving all that aside, you may now finish your education in Germany; you may not have to go back to Mexico at all; I hope not.”
“I will go where I please,” he said bitterly. “And what did my mother care what happened to me? She wants only the money.”
“It is perhaps true, my dear nephew,” said Herr Graf, choking and beginning to cough. “Yet in fact the money will be yours and not hers.” He spat into a folded paper box which he produced from under his light rug. “I can see that you are my sister’s own child. She was never like the rest of us. She had a cold nature, a hard heart, from the beginning.”
“It is time for me to go and ask for your breakfast,” said Johann. He broke out suddenly as if he were near tears. “Why can’t I have my meals with the others in the dining room? It is making me sick to eat always with you in that nasty cabin. Why can’t you sit up here on deck by yourself for an hour and let me breathe? You are a beast of selfishness, Uncle, I say it to your face. So.”
Herr Graf groaned and hid his face in both hands. “My God,” he said, “go, go and leave me. Yes, leave me alone. God will take care of me. He will not let me suffer by your cruelty. Stay as long as you like. But remember, I have made my will in your favor, and you shall have everything. Be sure of that. The rest is between you and your conscience.”
Johann gave a great explosive sigh and pushed the chair very fast. He was ravenously hungry, ah, he would sit in the pleasant bright dining salon among the lively young people and maybe get into a conversation with one of those pretty girls. He would get away from death for just an hour, the smells, the praying, the phlegmy rattle in the throat, the smothering air of old age, sick and whining and clutching …
“You will be all right, I will fix everything and you can read for a while,” he said, and he felt cold and determined. No, not for any money could he bear another day without relief, a little freedom, just a few turns on deck by himself before he lost control and smashed something. No, not for any money. He eased the chair downsteps with unusual gentleness, turned expertly through the cabin door, opened the porthole; and feeling the half-fainting gaze of his uncle heaping untold reproach upon him, he bounded out again. Half a dozen paces away he was whistling gaily a doleful little tune: “Das gibt’s nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder,” as if his heart would break for joy.
David Scott, who slept on the narrow bunk against the wall, was wakened by Denny climbing out of the upper berth. David, after a quick glimpse, pretended to sleep. There seemed nothing much wrong with Denny except he was a bore. His mind seemed to run monotonously on women, or rather, sex; money, or rather his determination not to be gypped by anybody; and his health.
He got up early every morning and took a dose of effervescent laxative salts, making the same nauseated face after the draught. Then he ate a cake of yeast, nibbling it little by little as he shaved. He would dash cold water in his face and examine the whites of his eyes apprehensively. He had small, mattery pimples on his neck and one cheek, like a boy of fourteen. He had, by a long roundabout arrangement through German friends of his father, got a chance to work with a great chemical manufacturer’s firm in Berlin, and now and then he made a vague reference to his future as a chemical engineer. But as David displayed not only an utter ignorance of the subject but a total indifference as well—and Denny thought David meant signboards or houses when he called himself a painter—their topics of conversation had narrowed almost to nothing unless Denny’s three preoccupations could be called topics.
Herr Glocken said little, but after a few days’ rest he seemed in fair health, and began to show himself at moments to be rather a good-humored twinkling little man in the friendly male atmosphere of the cabin, with the two young fellows who never seemed to notice that his back was not like theirs. Sometimes they talked German together, gossiping about the affairs of the ship, and the young men never made Herr Glocken feel that their general experience of life was particularly different from his own. Herr Glocken was at ease. He slept well, and kept the curtains drawn in the morning until he could emerge fully dressed, saving them the sight of his unseemly frame except under the best disguise he could manage.
At that moment there was no sign of movement behind his curtain. David did not stir, but was outraged to observe that Denny proceeded to strip and give himself a sponge bath from the communal washbasin. But I have to wash my face in that, he thought, and viewed with horror and repulsion the naked brown flesh of the other, like badly tanned leather, all overgrown with sparse curly hair which came off on the soapy clot
h and stuck to the sides of the bowl in a light scum. If he does that again, I’ll stuff him through the porthole, resolved David, seething. Still he said nothing and realized that probably he never would. He would wait until the fellow was gone and scrub the bowl with disinfectant. Hot and nervous, he sat up and felt for his straw sandals with his wriggling toes.
“Hello,” said Denny in a cautious voice, “I’ll be the hell out in a minute. It’s a tight fit in here.”
David, feeling that for him it would be a tight fit anywhere that he had to put on his shoes before a stranger, or speak to anyone except perhaps Jenny before he had had his coffee, said, “I’ll try to get in the shower, don’t hurry yourself.”
Herr Glocken’s head appeared between the long curtains, his thin confused hair all on end. His long face with its pseudo-Hapsburg jaw was a network of fine wrinkles. “Good morning,” he croaked, though not gloomily. “Would you be so kind as to hand me that little flask?” and he pointed towards it, standing beside his water glass. “And some water, if you will please.”
David gave him both, and noticed that the flask was marked “Every three hours or when required,” and it occurred to him that perhaps Herr Glocken was never altogether without pain. Herr Glocken, reaching out, parted the curtains more than he intended, and David noted with intense surprise that he wore a bright red silk pajama coat. Profusion of color in anything was offensive to David; it offended more than his eye—he distrusted it on moral grounds, and nowhere more so than in dress. His own neckties were black knitted strings he bought by the half dozen from sidewalk peddlers, his socks were black cotton, his suits were mottled gray, dark gray, light gray, Oxford gray and blue-gray, besides the chaste white linen and canvas he wore in summer. His favorite palette was a mixture of grays, browns, ochers, and dark blues with a good deal of white; and his favorite though not original theory was that persons who “expressed themselves” by wearing color were merely attempting to supply its inner lack in their own natures, adding a façade that fooled nobody.
A great deal of this he knew had been aimed at Jenny, who had been brilliant as a macaw when he first fell in love with her, wearing for her own delight high, cool colors, and splashing her little canvases recklessly with geometrical designs in primary colors like fractured rainbows. She had seemed quite serious about it, too. Little by little he had succeeded in undermining her confidence in this nonsensical way of painting. Her palette lowered in tone; gradually, too, she had taken to dressing in muted colors or black and white, with only now and then a crimson or orange scarf, and she was not painting much, but working almost altogether in charcoal or India ink.
Deeply he hoped she would give it up altogether—there had never been a really great woman painter, nothing better than some superior disciple of a great man; it disturbed him to see a woman so out of place; and he did not believe in her talent for a moment. The best she could hope for was to be a good illustrator, and that she despised. But there was something in her whole nature that obstructed the workings of his own: when she was painting, he could not; just as when she was in a loving tender mood, he felt himself beginning to grow cold and defensive, to hold her off and deny her.
Jenny was like a cat in her fondness for nearness, for stroking, touching, nestling, with a kind of sensuality so diffused it almost amounted to coldness after all, for she almost never wanted to make love outright as he did, suddenly, violently, grimly, and have it over with. She would drink from his cup and share a fruit with him, bite by bite: she loved to tell him how much she loved him, though she was getting over that; but she was never happy with him, and when they slept together, they quarreled. David in the wave of repulsion he suffered at the sight of Herr Glocken’s red pajamas hated Jenny for a violent moment, as he did often, and oftener. As for Glocken—on deck in daytime, except for his silly bright neckties, his clothes were shabby and dull, his shoes broken. Almost everyone avoided him. He scared people off; his plight was so obviously desperate they were afraid some of it would rub off on them. At night, behind that curtain, in the dark, wrapped in his red silk, what did he dream about himself?
Denny was pulling on his trousers, his face thoughtful. “Say,” he remarked suddenly to David, “you know that little one with the red ruffles on her skirt they call Pastora? Well, she looks to me hot as a firecracker. And she has been giving me the eye, from time to time. What do you suppose it would cost?”
David said, “I suppose about whatever the traffic will bear.”
“Well, traffic’s jammed right now, so far as I’m concerned. But I think I’ll prospect around a little. We’re going to be on this boat nearly a month, you know. That’s a long long time. I’m beginning to worry about the future.”
David said, “You’d better try to keep on ice until you get to Berlin where they’re government-inspected, or you may have to go to see Dr. Schumann before you get to Bremerhaven.”
“I know,” said Denny, turning a little pale, “I’ve thought of that. But there are all kinds of things you can—well, I think I can take care of myself.”
“Things might work and they might not,” said David. “They can talk all they like, there aren’t any sure ways.”
“God,” said Denny, sincerely. He got up and looked at himself in the mirror and took a last swipe at his hair with the brush. “But she certainly looks all right, healthy and everything.”
“You never can tell,” said David, with malice.
“Well,” said Denny, “we aren’t there yet. If I can ever get her cut out from the herd,” he said. “They run together so close you can’t get a word in between them.”
Bébé, Frau Hutten decided, was recovering. She brought him food when she came from breakfast, and after consulting with her husband, fed Bébé, who made out a very good meal. “The dear blessed one,” said Frau Hutten, watching him eat with pleasure, “with his so fine instincts and feelings, eating his food humbly face downward like any animal; it is a great pity. He is too good for that.”
“He does not mind in the least, dear Käthe,” said her husband. “He is more comfortable in that posture, on account of the construction of his frame. It would not be natural or right for him to sit up to his food. I have seen children with unconscious cruelty try to train their pets to eat at table, and it was so much labor lost, besides the suffering of the animal. No, I think our good Bébé does very well, and misses nothing that he should have.”
Frau Hutten, her confidence restored and her mind set at ease as always by her husband’s words, fitted on Bébé’s leash and the three went for a good fast walk. Seven times around the deck was, Professor Hutten calculated, just the right distance for a proper constitutional. But Bébé, who started briskly enough, began to lag on the third lap, and midway of the fourth he stopped in the grip of his familiar convulsions and disgraced himself most hideously then and there. Professor Hutten knelt and supported his head, while Frau Hutten went to look for a sailor who could bring a bucket of water.
A few feet away, she heard a shout of laughter, a raucous chorus with no gaiety in it, and recognized with a chill the voices of the Spanish dancing troupe. They had a way of sitting together, and without warning they would laugh dreadfully, with mirthless faces, and they were always laughing at somebody. They would look straight at you and laugh as if you were an object too comic to believe, yet their eyes were cold and they were not enjoying themselves, even at your expense. Frau Hutten had observed them from the first and she was afraid of them.
Without looking, she felt that they had seen her husband and her poor Bébé; and she was right. They came on in a pack, sweeping around the forlorn tableau, and as they passed her, their unfriendly eyes took her in from head to foot. Their teeth were disclosed and they were making those gruesome sounds of merriment. She felt her fatness, her age, her heavy ankles; the Spaniards’ slenderness and youth cast contempt on her and on all that she was, in one bitter, mocking glance.
She found a sailor, a nice big boy with a good square fa
ce who was used to seasickness. He brought water, washed up after Bébé and went away. The Huttens laid Bébé beside their deck chairs, folded bath-towels under his head, and sat together in massive silence, feeling themselves figures of fun to those debased creatures, real hoodlums who should never have been allowed to travel first class at all. There were many good people, Frau Hutten was sure, in the steerage who better deserved to be on first deck.
In Mexico they had been accustomed for years to an easy atmosphere, among Germans of the solid cultured class who lived well and were treated with great consideration by Mexicans of the corresponding class. They had never been sneered at for their shapes nor their habits. But as for these Gachupínes, these low Spaniards, the Mexicans knew how to treat them! The Huttens remembered a Mexican saying that the Germans in Mexico were never tired of repeating: Mexicans loathe the Americans, despise the Jews, hate the Spaniards, distrust the English, admire the French and love the Germans. An immensely clever Mexican gentleman had composed this saying at a dinner party, and it had spread like wildfire among their little circle. It was the kind of thing that almost reconciled one to living in a foreign country with mixed races and on the whole rather barbarous customs.
Herr Professor for years was the head of the best German school in Mexico City, where the little boys carried their school packs on their backs and wore round student caps; and the little girls wore black pinafores over their sober-colored frocks, their hair shining in smooth blonde braids. Now and again, standing at the window of his classroom in the big solid Mexican-French house which the German colony had bought and remodeled in the seemly German style, Professor Hutten watched the children walking sedately yet vigorously in small groups, their faces and their simple clothing so immaculate; observed the meek looks and good manners of the German young, heard them speak their mother tongue with good accent and pure diction, and fancied that he might almost imagine himself to be in Germany. Oh, that the whole world of men might be so orderly, so well arranged, so virtuous in its basic principles. This hope, coming as it did to him at long intervals, making him feel he was a part of a great universal movement towards the betterment of mankind, had no doubt, as he confessed to his wife, kept him alive. But they had their private grief, their personal loss. They were childless, and would always be so.