Read Online Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter - Free Book Online Page B

changed to a skirt, she looked like anyone else, she looked very well, not like an American at all.”
    â€œLet 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.
    â€œI 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