« p. 28-34: Intentions
The Captain’s Dinner
p. 34-37
The last evening on board. The people from first class come down to eat. The dining hall is well decorated with colorful flowers on the tables and tiny paper Japanese umbrellas which the women stick in their hair. When in place, they look like large tropical flower arrangements in the women’s hair. Our table is getting a lot of champagne. This evening will decide if the friendships we made at sea will still hold up on land. We, the well-dressed, lean back in our chairs and look over at the other tables to find that decision in smiling faces or similar expressions.
Up on the promenade deck, somebody marked out the dance floor with colorful flags. Colorful light bulbs hang down from the roof (that’s what they call the sundeck). The couples display German and American flags before stepping out to dance. The brave stewards play American dance music, interspersed with unsophisticated folk dances or waltzes fresh from Vienna. Everyone in the audience is afraid of being the last person without a partner. Even the people who had been running around here and there during the trip or had sat under the deck, pale and bored, are dancing. Many of them have an utterly strange rhythm you never would have thought them capable of. A small, pale lady, who had splashed around in the same watery novel for six days, has suddenly fallen in love with the devil. The lady-killing cardshark from the table next to me dances with his flirt, and the flirt presses his curly hair tightly against his ascot. It’s as if two backs are dancing, but the male half is dancing like a young girl.
The sailors don’t have it easy tonight. One of them tells me that no one is sleeping tonight. To port, the mail sacks are already piled up. Early in the morning, the mail ship will come and take them away. One hour before arriving in Hoboken, the sacks are divided into groups. I climb over the rope and look at the labels on the sacks. Port au Prince, Yukon Pacific, Nicaragua -- I hear the lust for travel crying within myself.
On deck, the second-class passengers stare at a giant hole in the floor. A crane carries packages out of a depth five stories deep, suitcases, boxes, the general cargo of the ship. The giant cord is constantly coming and going. I walk the entire deck and enjoy my last evening on a ship I have really begun to love.
A two-step flutters over the dance floor. Americans, Germans and Spaniards are dancing. The floor is full of dancers. Even May and Marjorie, the daughters of the dead man, are dancing together. It is the right of the young! They wear white silk blouses, and one of them has a small black mesh with a diamond clasp attached to her chest. They are dancing very well, but the brother feels a little left out -- famished. The living go ahead and dance. It is allowed them, there is no doubt about that.
In a drawing room, the old commodore sits with his old wife. The both of them are working on a puzzle. You can already tell that it’s the Blue Boy by Gainsborough. The elderly couple have been working on their task since Bremen. Now and then, the white-haired man nods his head a little. His wife takes it calmly. When he lets out two snores, she smiles at him, and then he wakes up and grabs the wooden pieces again.
The wife of the dead man sits in a corner and plays a game of solitaire. I wait for about a quarter an hour and watch over the edges of my book as she starts another game. She loses that one too. And then a third. There is no movement in her face, the hopelessness squeezes itself out. She’s not young anymore, her face is pallid and yellow, but she’s not playing solitaire just to pass the time.
The night is full of stars. The crowd around the flags has thinned a bit. The stewards play their last two-step while a couple of persistent couples dance under the light bulbs. May and Marjorie are dancing. The brother stands with a curly-haired woman in the shadows on the deck. As I walk over, I notice him using a match to try to light the cigarette in her hand. This young man is only half a child.
Still the second-class passengers, three steps from the dance floor, watch the large cord coming and going. It lifts the ship’s cargo, the suitcases and boxes, out of the depth. Before going to sleep, I try to see a box shaped like a coffin. Sure enough, the coffin-shaped box is lifted out.