The Death Ship Read Free Page B

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.
    The examination over, I had to stand up before a high desk, behind which sat a roan who looked at me as if I had stolen his overcoat. He opened a thick book filled with photographs. The guy that had pinched me acted as the interpreter. Without him I would never have known, until the end of my days, what the man behind the desk wanted. Funny that these people understood our language pretty well when they needed our boys to fight for them, and when they wanted our money.
    The high priest at the desk looked at all the photographs, and after each photograph he looked at me. He did this a hundred times. He had that way of looking upwards with his nose kept close to the thick book that people have when they look over the rims of their eye-glasses.
    At last he got tired of moving his neck up and down. He shook his head and disgustedly closed the book with a bang. It seems he hadn’t found my photograph. I could have told him before that he wouldn’t, if he only had asked me, because I knew damn well that I had never been photographed in Antwerp. I too got tired of this lame business, and I said: “Now I am hungry. I want to eat. I haven’t had any breakfast this morning.”
    “Right,” the interpreter said. I was taken into a small room, with nothing in it that I would call furniture.
    I wonder if all the Belgians call what I got a breakfast coffee, bread, and margarine. It was the minimum in quantity and quality.
    Then I was left alone to occupy myself with counting the bars at the window, a job I did rather well.
    About noon I was again brought before the high priest. “There are nine,” I said right away, “exactly nine.”
    “What nine?” the high priest asked with the help of the interpreter.
    “Nine bars at the window,” I answered.
    The high priest looked at the interpreter, and the interpreter looked at him, and then both of them looked at me, finally shaking their heads; and the interpreter said: “Well, they are this way, sir. You know it from the war. There is something loose in their upper stories. One cannot take them seriously.”
    “Do you wish to go to France?” the high priest asked me.
    “No, y’honor, I don’t like France. Under no circumstances do I wish to go to France. I don’t like war-mothers running wild about the battlefields. No, France is no place for me.”
    “What do you think of Germany?” He asked.
    “I don’t care to go to Germany either, if you please, sir.”
    “Why, Germany is quite a fine country. Take Hamburg for instance. You could easily find there a good ship to take you home.”
    “No, I do not like the Germans. They often go out of their minds without any warning.”
    The high priest assumed a dictatorial attitude: “Well, then, it is all settled now, once and for all. No more objections on your side, sailor. You are going to Holland. And understand, this is final.”
    “But I do not like the Dutch,” I said, and I was just about to tell him why, when he cut me short: “We do not care a rag if you like the Dutch or if you don’t. You may fix this with the Dutch yourself, when you meet them in person. In France you would be best off. However, for a rich gentleman like you, France is not good enough. Too bad we have nothing better to offer you. You don’t want to go to Germany either. The Germans also are not good enough for you. Hell, just tell me what people other than your own do you like? None apparently. So you are going to Holland, and that is that. We have no