“But Papa, when she changed to a skirt, she looked like anyone else, she looked very well, not like an American at all.”
“Let her alone, just the same,” said Frau Lutz, shaking her head. “She is an American, don’t forget that. No matter how she looks.”
The bugler stepped out on deck sounding his merry call for dinner. Instantly the Lutz family faced inward and hastened their steps. At the top of the stairs they were almost overwhelmed from the back by the troupe of Spanish dancers, who simply went through, over and around them like a wave, a wave with elbows. The Lutzes were so outdistanced the Spaniards were already seated at a good-sized round table near the Captain’s and the six-year-old twins were tearing at a dish of celery before a waiter could find the small table set for three—against the wall, to be sure, but happily near a porthole.
“I am glad to see they have washed their faces,” said Frau Lutz, beginning to read her dinner card with an eye of foregone disillusion, “but it would look better all around if they washed their necks, too. I saw very distinctly: their necks are gray and stiff with old dirty powder. Elsa, you wonder why I always say to you, wash your neck. And your wrists, too, and as for powder—I hope you will never be so foolish.”
Elsa glanced down her own nose, where the shininess was refracted into her eyes. She rubbed her nose with her handkerchief, carefully refrained from sighing and said nothing.
The dining room was clean and well polished. There were flowers on the tables and an adequate display of fresh white napery and tableware. The waiters seemed refreshed and stimulated by the beginning of another voyage, and the famished faces of the new set of passengers wore a mollified, expectant air. The Captain was absent, but at his table Dr. Schumann greeted the Captain’s guests, and explained to them that it was the Captain’s custom to dine on the bridge during the serious first hours of voyage.
The guests all nodded in generous agreement and acknowledgment of the Captain’s heavy task of getting them safely to sea; and all was sedate remark and easy understanding among the chosen ones: Herr Professor and Frau Hutten, Herr Rieber, Fräulein Lizzi Spöckenkieker, Frau Rittersdorf, Frau Otto Schmitt, and the “presentable” young man whom Mrs. Treadwell had seen sitting with Jenny Brown. His name was Wilhelm Freytag, he said several times over in the round of exchange of names when the company had sat down. Within three minutes Frau Rittersdorf had ascertained that he was “connected” with a German oil company in Mexico, was married (a pity, rather) and was even then in that moment on his way to Mannheim to bring back his young wife and her mother. Frau Rittersdorf also decided instantly that Herr Rieber bounced and chuckled rather vulgarly and was hardly up to the rest of the Captain’s table. Frau Schmitt and the Huttens were at once well disposed to each other when it came out that they were all former teachers in German schools, the Huttens in Mexico City.
Herr Rieber, in top spirits, twinkling irrepressibly at Lizzi, but decently subdued by the society in which he found himself, proposed by way of a good beginning that he might be allowed to offer wine to the whole table. This was received with the best of good will by the others. The wine was brought, real Niersteiner Domtal of the finest label, so hard to find in Mexico, so expensive when found, so missed by them all, so loved, the beautiful good sound white wine of Germany, fresh as flowers. They sniffed their chilled goblets, their eyes moistened and they beamed at each other. They touched brims lightly, clinking all about, spoke the kind round words of health and good fortune to each other, and drank.
Nothing, they felt, could have been more correct, more charming, more amiable than that moment. They fell upon their splendid full-bodied German food with hot appetites. They were all going home, home at last, and in this ship they had in common for the first time the feeling that they had already set foot upon a mystic Fatherland. Restored, fortified, they paused now and again to wipe their teeming mouths, nodding at each other in silence. Dr. Schumann ate with the moderation of an abstemious man who could hardly remember when last he had been really hungry. The guests gave him admiring glances as they ate and drank. The highest kind of German good breeding, they could see, with the dignity of his humane profession adding still more luster; and his fine scar, showing that he had gone to a great university, that he was brave and coolheaded: so great a scar so perfectly placed proved that he had known the meaning of the Mensur, that measure of a true German. If he seemed a little absent, thoughtfully silent, that was his right; it belonged to the importance of his duties as ship’s doctor.
“Pig’s knuckles, David darling,” said Jenny Brown, restoring his private particular name to David Scott for the first time in three days. His own mood was not so easy—he reflected that she probably would not become Jenny angel to him for several days more—if ever. How much simple fraying of the nervous system can love survive? How many scenes?
“I’m boning up on German from the water taps and all the little signs about, but nearly all these people speak English or French or both. Do you see that fellow I was walking with? Over there—the Captain’s table. The one with the invincible haircut. I didn’t even know he was German until he told me—”
“With that face?” asked David.
“What’s wrong with his face?”
“It looks German.”
“David darling, shame on you! Well, I wanted to practice my German on him, but after the first sentence he simply couldn’t bear it, and I must say, he speaks better English than I do—awfully English, in fact. I thought maybe he had been brought up in England, but no, he learned it in school in Berlin.… Well, my Swiss girl—did I tell you I’m stuck in the same cabin with that big Swiss girl? She wears a white linen corset cover with tatting around the edges. I’ll bet you never saw one …”
“My mother used to wear them,” said David.
“David! You mean you peeped while your mother was dressing?”
“No, I used to sit in the middle of the bed and watch her.”
“Well,” said Jenny, “my Swiss girl speaks Spanish and French and English and a kind of dialect she calls Romansh—besides German—and she’s barely eighteen. And she will speak only English to me, though I certainly do as well at Spanish as she does. I don’t see an earthly chance to pick up any language, if this is the way it’s going to be.”
“These people aren’t typical,” said David, “and neither are we. Just roaming around foreign countries, changing money and language at every border. We do the same. Look at me, even learning Russian—”
“Yes, look at you,” said Jenny, admiringly. “But you even learn the grammar, from the book, a thing that would never occur to me. I can’t learn grammar, that’s flat, but then, I don’t feel the need of it.”
“If you could hear yourself sometimes,” said David, “you’d feel the need. You say some really appalling things, in Spanish I mean.”
“You look pretty as a picture in that blue shirt, darling,” said Jenny. “I hope that doesn’t appall you. My God, I’m starving! Wasn’t Veracruz deadly this time? What came over that town? I had the tenderest memories of the place and now I hope I never see it again.”
“It seemed to me as usual,” said David, “heat, cockroaches, Veracruzanos and all.”
“Ah no,” said Jenny, “I used to walk about there at night, after a rain, with everything washed clean, and the sweet-by-night and jasmine in full bloom and the colors of the plaster walls very pure. I would come on those unexpected squares and corners and fountains, all of them composed, just waiting to be painted, and none of them looking the way they did in daylight. All the windows would be open and pale yellow light streaming out, with clouds of white mosquito netting over the big beds, and half-dressed half-asleep people moving about already in a dream; or sitting out on the little balconies just for the pleasure of breathing. It was lovely, David, and I loved it. The people seemed so friendly and easy—everybody. And once there was a terrible glorious thunderstorm and lightning hit the elevator shaft in my hotel about twenty feet from my room
and knocked me out, almost. It was fun! It was real danger and yet I was alive.”
David protested this memory coldly, doubtfully. “You never told me this before,” he said.
“I hope not,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be dull? But you never believe any memory that is pleasant, I wonder why? You must let me remember it in my own way, as beautiful at least once.” After a light pause she added, “I am sure that if you had been there it would all have looked very different.” She watched with clinical attention his smooth, tight-skinned face that gave absolutely no sign when he was hit.
“Who was with you then, that it was all so delightful?”
“Nobody,” she said softly. “I was there by myself and I saw it in my own way with no one to spoil it for me.”
“And no boat to catch.”
“No, I had come off a boat from New York. Nine lovely days when I didn’t know a soul on board, and spoke only to my waiter and my stewardess.”
“They should have been flattered,” said David darling, meanly. But it gave him no satisfaction.
Jenny straightened her knife and fork and took a sip of water. “I don’t know,” she told him gravely as if she were considering deeply an important question. “I really don’t know whether I am going to be able to sit at this table with you the whole voyage or not. At least I am glad we have separate cabins.”
“So am I,” said David, instantly, a cold fire in his eyes.
They both fell silent then, dismayed at how suddenly things could get out of hand; knowing as always there was no end to it, because there was no real beginning. The quarrel between them was a terrible treadmill they mounted together and tramped round and round until they were wearied out or in despair. He went on doggedly with his food, and she took up her fork again. “I’ll stop if you will,” she said at last. “How does it begin? Why? I never know.”
David knew that her yielding was half fatigue, half boredom, but he was grateful for the reprieve. Besides, she had got in a good blow at him, and must be feeling easier.
He did not forgive her; he would take her by surprise someday in turn, as he had done often before, and watch her face turn pale; she always recognized revenge for what it was, yet admitted its barbarous justice. At least she had some little sense of turn and turn about, she didn’t expect always to be allowed to get away with murder, and he would make it part of his business to see that she did not. Feeling within him his coldness of heart as a real power in reserve, he smiled at her with that sweetness which always charmed her, reached out and laid his hand over hers warmly.
“Jenny angel,” he said. Instantly she felt her heart—she believed firmly that her heart could feel—melting just a little, timidly and distrustfully: she knew what David could and would do to her if she let herself be “caught soft” as he described it. Yet she could not stop herself. She leaned forward and said, “You old thing, you! Oh, let’s try to be happy. Let’s not spoil our first voyage together, it could be so gay. I’ll try, really David darling, I promise—let’s try. Don’t you know I love you?”
“I wonder,” said David with the most insidious gentleness. Mysteriously she seemed on the verge of tears, which she controlled, knowing that David regarded her weeping as simply another female trick shaken out of her sleeve at the useful moment. He watched with a reserved little smile to see if she would give way; she had never made a scene in public yet. She smiled back at him, instead, took up her glass of wine and held it out to touch his. “Salud,” she said. “Salud,” said David, and they emptied their glasses in one breath.
They were both ashamed of the evil natures they exposed in each other; each in the first days of their love had hoped to be the ideal image of the other, for they were desperately romantic, and their fear of exposing themselves, of showing and learning unlovely things about each other, made them dishonest and cruel. In their moments of truce both believed that the love between them was very pure and generous, as they wished it to be; there needed only to be … needed only to be what, exactly, they both wondered, secretly and separately, and found no answer. Only in such short moments as this, when they drank the wine of peace together, their bodies grew limp and calm, they breathed easily in the air of reconciliation, and made vague vows to themselves and to each other, to keep faith—faith with what? to love each other, to try—But David at least still knew that for himself, trying to be happy was perhaps half their trouble, or the cause of half of it. And the other half—?
“To happiness then,” he said, touching her glass again.
Though it was still broad daylight, the August sun, dipping into the far horizon, threw a burning track over the waters which ran like oil in the wake of the ship. The ladies of trade appeared on deck in identical black lace evening gowns, their fine smooth backs gleaming to the belt, their jeweled sandals flashing. They paced about slowly and came face to face with the two priests, who were pacing slowly also, their dark trap mouths locked, their relentless eyes fixed on their breviaries. The ladies bowed respectfully, the fathers ignored or perhaps did not see them. William Denny followed them at a safe distance once around, pausing now and then to appear interested in something in the depths of the sea, his Adam’s apple bobbing ever so slightly. The bride and groom sat together in their extended chairs, watching the sunset in silence, their eyes tranced and mystified, their hands clasped lightly.
The Mexican Indian nurse brought the newly born baby to his mother, who received him rather helplessly in her inexperienced arms. Frau Rittersdorf, passing, took the liberty of a true woman who, though childless herself and never ceasing to be thankful for it, still appreciated instinctively the glorious martyrdom of motherhood as enjoyed by others. With a smile of intimate sympathy for the mother, she dropped silently on her knees to adore the divine mystery of life for a few seconds, admiring his feathery eyebrows and tender mouth, the complexion to the last degree enviable. His mother looked on with a formal, unwilling smile, thinking her son was spoiled enough already, she wished people would let him alone; remembering how he woke and yelled in the night and pulled on her like a pig when she was tired to tears and wanted only to sleep.
“Such a splendid man-child,” said Frau Rittersdorf. “Is he your first?”
“Ah, yes,” said the mother, and there was a shade of terror in her face.
“A fine beginning,” said Frau Rittersdorf, “a perfect little general. El Generalissimo, in fact!” She had been told by her German friends that every second male Mexican was a general, or intended to be one, or called himself one, at least.
The mother could not after all quite resist the flattery, however crude, however German in its style. El Generalissimo indeed! How vulgar; still, she knew her child was superb, she loved to hear him praised, even in Spanish with such an atrocious accent. Somehow Frau Rittersdorf led the talk from infant to mother; began to speak pretty passable French, which delighted the Mexican woman, who prided herself on her command of that language. Frau Rittersdorf learned with great satisfaction that Madame was the wife of an attaché in the Mexican Legation in Paris, she was even now on her way there to join her husband; it had been impossible—“Well, you can see why,” said the mother—for her to accompany him. Frau Rittersdorf was soothed in her highest social sense to find a lady in diplomatic circles among the passengers; there would be someone to associate with, after all. Señora Esperón y Chavez de Ortega for her part seemed to sink rapidly in mood, to become a touch distrait, perhaps only natural in her new situation. El Generalissimo opened his eyes, waved his fists and yawned divinely in Frau Rittersdorf’s face. His mother frowned just perceptibly and pleaded, “Oh, please don’t wake him. He has only just got to sleep. If you could imagine the trouble we have with him—colic and all!”
Feeling rebuffed, Frau Rittersdorf rose instantly and took her leave with such exaggerated politeness it hardly stopped short of rudeness. The little Mexican woman was after all probably not particularly intelligent, perhaps not even particularly well bred. It was rather difficu
lt to judge of the standards of the dark races, though no doubt they had them; even Don Pedro in Mexico, whose failure to ask for her hand in marriage after what had seemed irreversible overtures—was there not something sinister in his nature? And yet—could it have been the fact of his owning a great brewery?—he had at times seemed to her so human, so Germanized, she had been quite lulled and led astray. She walked on faster, in a small chill of fright, shaking her head.
After dinner all the desks in the small rooms off the bar were occupied by absorbed letter writers, last words to Mexico to be mailed at Havana. Only the Spanish dancing women patrolled the deck, living in the moment. They had no friends in Mexico and very few in Spain, and this did not trouble them in the least. It was fairly noticeable that romance of a sort seemed to be simmering around them. Their skins breathing forth musk and amber, wearing fresh flowers in their hair, they were to be seen about in shadowy spots, each involved more or less with one of the blond young ship’s officers.
The officers were all poor, perfectly disciplined, dedicated to their calling, saving up their scanty earnings to be married: they all wore plain red-gold engagement rings on their left hands, and, bound to their narrow world always in motion, never set foot in any port. It was expensive, it could lead to international complications, and besides there were too many ports. They had clearly defined and not always onerous duties towards female passengers, such as dancing with them in the evenings if they seemed to lack partners, slighting no one, making themselves agreeable in a decorous way. They had no privileges, such as carrying an affair too far, but it was not to be supposed that any one of them should not avail himself of opportunities freely offered so long as appearances were preserved. In this particular case of the Spanish ladies, appearances obviously could not be preserved but must be disguised if possible.
Their experiences with many female passengers on many voyages to out-of-the-way ports had intimidated most of them to a certain extent. So, warily one by one the young officers in immaculate white, with gold or silver insignia at their collars and shoulders, found themselves on the first evening, in instructed gallantry but with also a good deal of pleasant excitement, each with an arm around a surprisingly muscular but slender Spanish waist, looking with mild expectation into the burning depths of eyes that meant business and nothing else.