Ship of Fools Read Online Free PDF Page B

and groom turned and waved once, a trifle wildly, to their tormentors, then holding hands, almost running, they went straight through the ship to the farther deck. They arrived at the rail as if it were a provided refuge, and stood leaning together, looking towards the sea.
    The ship shuddered, rocked and heaved, rolled slowly as the pulse of the engines rose to a steady beat; the barking sputtering tugs nosed and pushed at her sides and there appeared a slowly widening space of dirty water between the ship and the heaving collision mats. All at once by a common movement as if the land they were leaving was dear to them, the passengers crowded upon deck, lined along the rail, stared in surprise at the retreating shore, waved and called and blew kisses to the small lonely-looking clusters on the dock, who shouted and waved back. All the ships in harbor dipped their flags, the small band on deck spanked into a few bars of “ Adieu, mein kleiner Garde - Offizier, adieu, adieu —” then folded up indifferently and disappeared without a backward glance at Veracruz.
    There emerged from the bar an inhumanly fat Mexican in a cherry-colored cotton shirt and sagging blue denim trousers, waving an immense stein of beer. He strode to the rail, elbowed his way between yielding bodies, and burst into a bull bellow of song. “ Adios, Mexico, mi tierra adoradal ” he roared, tunelessly, his swollen face a deeper red than his shirt, the thick purple veins standing out on his great sweating neck, his forehead and throat straining. He waved the stein and frowned sternly; his collar button flew off into the water, and he tore open his shirt further to free his laboring breath. “ Adios, adios para siempre !” he bawled urgently, and faintly over the oily-looking waves came a small chorused echo, “ Adios, adios !” From the very center of the ship rose a vast deep hollow moo, like the answer of a melancholy sea cow. One of the young officers came up quietly behind the fat man and said in a low voice, in stiff Spanish, his schoolboy face very firm, “Go below please where you belong. Do you not see that the ship has sailed? Third-class passengers are not allowed on the upper decks.”
    The bull-voiced man wheeled about and glared blindly at the stripling for an instant. Without answering he threw back his head and drained his beer, and with a wide-armed sweep tossed the stein overboard. “When I please,” he shouted into the air, but he lumbered away at once, scowling fiercely. The young officer walked on as if he had not seen or heard the fat man. One of the Spanish girls, directly in his path, smiled at him intensely, with glittering teeth and eyes. He returned her a mild glance and stepped aside to let her pass, blushing slightly. A plain red-gold engagement ring shone on his left hand, the hand he raised almost instinctively as if to ward her off.
    The passengers, investigating the cramped airless quarters with their old-fashioned double tiers of bunks and a narrow hard couch along the opposite wall for the unlucky third corner, read the names on the door plates—most of them German—eyed with suspicion and quick distaste strange luggage piled beside their own in their cabins, and each discovered again what it was he had believed lost for a while though he could not name it—his identity. Bit by bit it emerged, travel-worn, halfhearted but still breathing, from a piece of luggage or some familiar possession in which he had once invested his pride of ownership, and which, seen again in strange, perhaps unfriendly surroundings, assured the owner that he had not always been a harassed stranger, a number, an unknown name and a caricature on a passport. Soothed by this restoration of their self-esteem, the passengers looked at themselves in mirrors with dawning recognition, washed their faces and combed their hair, put themselves to rights and wandered out again to locate the