The Death Ship (2 page)

“All right. Ten. My last word. Ten or nothing. I’m not obliged to give you even a nickel.”

“Well then, sir, I’ll take the ten. But I think it’s lousy the way they treat us here in a foreign country.”

“Shut up. Sign here for the ten. We’ll write it in the book tomorrow.”

The truth is I didn’t want more than ten in the first place. But if I had asked for ten I wouldn’t have got more than five. The fact is I couldn’t even use more than ten. Once in your pocket and out in town, the money is gone, whether you have ten bucks or two hundred.

“Now, don’t get drunk. Understand. There’ll be plenty of work tomorrow and you’ve got to be ready to go on hand when we’re putting out,” the mate said.

Get drunk? Me get drunk? An insult. The skipper, the other mates, the engineers, the bos’n, the carpenter haven’t been sober for six consecutive hours since we made this port. And I am told not to get drunk. I didn’t even think of Scotch at all. Not for a minute.

“Me get drunk, sir? Never. I don’t even touch the cork of a whisky bottle, I hate that stuff so much. I know what I owe my country in a foreign port. I am dry, sir. I may be a Democrat, but I am dry. Ever seen me drunk, sir?”

“All right, all right, I haven’t said a word. Forget it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Ashore.

2

It was a summer twilight, beautiful and dreamlike. I was in full harmony with the world as it was. I could not under stand how anybody on earth could be displeased with life. Communists, reformers, and hell-drummers ought to be kicked out of this beautiful world of ours. I strolled along the streets, looking at the windows where the riches of the world were on display, calling to be bought and carried away. All the people I met seemed so satisfied with themselves and with everyone else. The girls smiled at me, and the prettiest were the ones who greeted me best.

I came to a house that had a fine gilded front. It looked friendly, inviting, and very gay. The doors were wide open, and they said: “Come in, good friend. Come in and be happy with the happy. Just drop in here, and forget all your worries!”

I had no worries. Yet I felt fine that somebody should call me and remind me that I might have worries. In I went. There was a jolly crowd there. Singing. Music. Laughter. Gay talk. Everything friendly.

I sat down on a chair, at a table. Immediately a young man came, looked me over, and said in English: “How do you do, mister?” He put down a bottle and a glass. He filled the glass and said: “Drink to the greatness of your country!” So I did.

For weeks I had seen only the guys of the bucket, and water and more water, and stinking paint. So I thought again of the greatness of my country. And again. There is really too much water on earth. And most of it is salty, at that. And paint is no perfume. Well, to the greatness of my country!

There was foggy weather around me. The longer I sat at the table, and the more I thought of my country, the thicker became the fog. I forgot all the worries I could remember ever having had during my life.

Late at night I found myself in the room of a pretty girl. She was laughing and friendly. She was sweet.

Finally I said to her: “Now look here, Mademoiselle whatever your name may be, you’re a piece of sugar. That’s what you are. Tell me, what time is it now?”

With her sweet laughing mouth she said: “Oh, you handsome boy —” Yes, sir, that’s exactly what she said to me. “Oh, you handsome sailor boy from the great and beautiful Amerique land, you want to be a cavalier, don’t you? A real cavalier. You wouldn’t leave a little defenseless lady alone in her room at midnight, would you? Burglars might come and rob me or take me away to dark Africa. They might even murder me or sell me as a slave to the wild Arabians. And I am afraid of mice, I am.”

“I am not afraid of a mouse,” I said.

“Oh, you bad sailor man! That’s what you are,” the pretty lady said. “Please don’t leave me alone here at midnight. I am so afraid of terrible burglars.”

I know what a real red-blooded American must do when he’s called to rescue a defenseless lady. It was almost a daily sermon from the time I was a kid: “When a lady asks you to do something, you jump up and do what she says, even if it should cost you your life. Just remember that every woman is a mother or may be a mother some day. That’s a good boy.”

What else could I do? It’s in the blood. You have to do what a lady asks you to do. Even if it should cost you your life.

Early in the morning, before the sun came up, I hurried to the docks. There was no
Tuscaloosa
to be seen. Her berth at the pier was abandoned. She had gone back home to sunny New Orleans. She had gone back home without me.

I have seen children who, at a fair or in a crowd, had lost their mothers. I have seen people whose homes had burned down, others whose whole property had been carried away by floods. I have seen deer whose companions had been shot or captured. All this is so painful to see and so very sorrowful to think of. Yet of all the woeful things there is nothing so sad as a sailor in a foreign land whose ship has just sailed off leaving him behind.

It is not the foreign country that makes him so sick at heart, that makes him feel inside like a child crying for its mother. He is used to foreign countries. Often he has stayed behind of his own free will, looking for adventure, or for something better to turn up, or out of dislike for the skipper or the mates or some fellow-sailors. In all such cases he does not feel depressed at all. He knows what he is doing and why he did it, even when it turns out different from what he expected.

But when the ship of which he considers himself still a useful part sails off without taking him with her, without waiting for him, then he feels as though he had been torn asunder. He feels like a little bird may feel when it has fallen out of its nest. He is homeless. He has lost all connection with the rest of the world, he thinks; he has lost his right to be of any use to mankind. His ship did not bother to wait for him. The ship could afford to sail without him and still be a good and seaworthy ship. A copper nail that gets loose, or a rivet that breaks off, might cause the ship to sink and never reach home again. The sailor left behind, forgotten by his ship, is of less importance to the life and the safety of the ship than a rusty nail or a steam-pipe with a weak spot. The ship gets along well without him. He might as well jump right from the pier into the water. It wouldn’t do any harm to the ship that was his home, his very existence, his evidence that he had a place in this world to fill. If he should now jump into the sea and be found, nobody would care. All that would be said would be: “A stranger, by appearance a sailor.” Worth less to a ship than a nail.

Pretty, isn’t it? So I thought. But the depressed feeling that was looming up within me didn’t grip me in full. Before it could get hold of me I knocked it cold.

Shit the bucket. There are lots of other ships in the world. The oceans are so very big and so full of ships. They have hardly room enough to sail without choking each other. How many ships are there? Surely no less than half a million. One of those half a million seagoing ships, one at least, will need, some time sooner or later, a plain sailor. My turn will come again.

As for Antwerp, well, it’s a great port. All ships make this port some day or other. What I need is just patience. That’s all. Who would expect that somebody, maybe the skipper himself, would turn up immediately and yell out: “Hey, sailor, what about signing on? Union pay!” I can’t expect anything like that to happen.

Thinking it all over, well, what’s there to worry about a faithless bucket leaving me flat in Belgium. Like all women do leave you the first time you try it out with another dame. Anyway, I have to hand it to her, she sure had clean quarters and showers and swell grub. No complaints about that. Right now they’re having breakfast. Those guys will eat up all of my bacon, and the eggs too. The coffee will be cold again when I come into the mess. If they leave any coffee at all. Sure the cook has burned the bacon again. He’ll never learn. I wonder who made him a ship’s cook. Perhaps a Chinese laundry man. As for Slim, I see him already going through all my things, picking out everything he likes, before he hands the bag over to the mate. Maybe they won’t even turn in my things to the mate. Those bums. Not a decent sailor among them. Just running around with dames. Using perfume and facial soap. How I hate them! Sailors? Don’t make me laugh. But I’d never have expected this from Slim. Seemed to be a regular guy. You would not have believed Slim’d be that bad; no, sir. You can’t trust anybody any longer. But then he always used to steal my good toilet soap whenever he could lay his hands on it. What can you expect from a fellow who steals your soap when you’re out on deck?

What’s the use worrying about that bucket? Gone. It’s all right with me. Go to the devil. The ship doesn’t worry me at all. What worries me is something different. I haven’t got a red cent in my pocket. She told me, I mean that pretty girl I was with during the night, protecting her against burglars and kidnappers, well, she told me that her dear mother was sick in the hospital, and that she had no money to buy medicine and the right food for her, and that she might die any minute if she didn’t get the medicine and the food. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of her mother. So what could I do as a regular red-blooded American except give her all the money I had left over from the gilded house? I have to say this much, though, about that pretty dame: she was grateful to me for having saved her mother from an early death. There is nothing in the whole wide world more satisfying to your heart than making other people happy and always still happier. And to receive the thousand thanks of a pretty girl whose mother you have just saved, that is the very peak of life. Yes, sir.

3

I sat down on a box and followed in my mind the
Tuscaloosa
steaming her way home. I wished earnestly that she would spring a leak, or something, soon, and be forced to return and give me a chance to hop on again. I should have known better; she was too good a bucket to run foolishly on the rocks.

Another hope of mine went bluey. I had hoped that the crew might object to leaving me behind and make it tough for the skipper, or even engage in a mild form of mutiny. Apparently they didn’t care. Anyhow, I wished that damned canoe all the shipwrecks and all the typhoons any sailor ever heard of from old salts spinning yarns that made even drunken quartermasters get the shivers.

I was just about to doze off and dream of that little peach of a girl when somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

Right away, without giving me a chance to see what was going on, he talked to me so rapidly that my head began to buzz.

I got mad and I said: “Rats, be damned, beat it, leave me alone. I don’t like your damn jibbering. And besides I don’t know what you want. I don’t understand a single word of your blabbering. Go to the devil.”

“You are an Englishman, are you not?” he asked, speaking in English.

“Nope; Yank.”

“Then you are American.”

“Looks like it. And now that you know all about me, leave me in peace and go to your wifie. I’ve nothing to do with you, no business.”

“But I have some with you. I am from the police.”

“Your luck, old man. Fine job. How much do they pay the flats here? What’s troubling you with a swell job like that?

Something wrong?”

“Seaman, hey?” he asked.

“Aha. Any chance for me?”

“What ship?”

“
Tuscaloosa
, from New Orleans.”

“Sailed at three in the morning. A long way off, I dare say.”

That made me mad again. “I don’t need you to tell me any stale jokes.”

“Your papers?” he asked.

“What papers do you mean?”

“Your passport.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said; let me have your passport.”

“Haven’t any.”

“Then your sailor’s identification card or whatever you call it in your home country.” He sort of pushed me.

“My sailor’s card? Yes, yes.” Hell. My seaman’s card. Where have I got it? I remember now, it’s in a pocket of my jacket; and my jacket is in my sailor’s bag; and the bag is stowed nicely away under my bunk in the foc’sle in the
Tuscaloosa
; and the
Tuscaloosa
is now gee, where can she be right now? I wonder what they’ve got for breakfast today. Sure, that damned cook has burned the bacon again. I’ll get him some day and tell him what I really think of him. Just let me be around, painting the galley. Guess I’m getting hungry.

“Well, well,” said the flat, shaking me, “your sailor’s card. You know what I mean.”

“My sailor’s card? If you mean mine, what I want to say, my sailor’s card I’ll have to come clean about that card. The truth is, I haven’t got any.”

“No sailor’s card?” He opened his eyes wide in sheer astonishment, as if he had seen a ghost. The tone of his voice carried the same strange amazement, as if he had said: “What is that, you don’t believe there is such a thing as sea-water?”

It seems that it was incomprehensible to him that there could be a human being with neither a passport nor a sailor’s card. He asked for the card for the third time, almost automatically. Then, as though receiving a shock, he recovered from his astonishment and sputtered: “No other papers either? No identification certificate? No letter from your consul? No bankbook? Or anything like that?”

“No, no, nothing.” Feverishly I searched my pockets, so as to make a good impression upon him. I knew quite well I had not even an empty envelope with my name on it.

Said he: “Come with me.”

“Where to?” I wanted to know. Perhaps he was sent to fish up some derelict sailors for a rum-boat. I could tell him right then that not even wild horses could drag me aboard one.

“Where? You will find out pretty soon. Just keep going.” He wasn’t so friendly any more.

After some hopping we landed. Where? Yes, sir, you guessed right. In a police-station. Here I was searched, and how! When they had searched all over, and had left unsearched not even the seams of my clothes, one of the searchers asked, absolutely seriously: “No arms? No weapons of any kind?” I could have socked him one right then, I was so mad. As if I could hide a machine-gun in my nostrils, and a couple of automatics under my eyelids. That’s the way people are and you can’t do anything about it.