Читать книгу The Captain's Journal - Hans M.C. Mateboer - Страница 9

Formal night! The name alone brings up memories of the elegance and glamour of a bygone era. A time when travel on passenger ships was associated with dinner jackets, cigars, and port for the men and evening gowns and expensive jewelry for the ladies. As such, formal nights have preceded the present industry by many decades. When they first became fashionable I don’t know, but it must have been during the golden age of the transatlantic liners in the twenties and thirties of the past century when the grandeur on board ships reached unparalleled heights. That all the stories about those beautiful ships were true only for those very few who could afford a first class ticket is often forgotten.

Most of today’s cruise lines picked up the tradition and have kept this, in my eyes, beautiful custom alive, much to the delight of most passengers. I don’t think the companies have a real strong feeling one way or the other. They simply do what they believe the passengers want and there’s no mistaking what is desired.

After all, don’t the women spend countless hours preparing for this? Starting with buying their sparkling outfits, visiting just about every shop in town and beyond. Then the dressing up and the careful application of a great variety of makeup and powders to match the dress. Jewelry is selected, put on and then put back in the box again, in a quest to find just that piece that goes with the color of the eyes, the nail polish, or the other way around. No doubt, there are many more things to be thought of, most of which a simple man like myself hasn’t the sheer brainpower to remember. I have a very strong feeling that when the actual night is there and everybody is out-sparkling the other, it’s a bit of a letdown, like the last act of a marvelous play.

Most of the men pretend that dressing up is not for them, but they secretly enjoy it. Forgotten is the aggravation of buying their outfits and the desperate struggle to get stiff collars to fit around necks that seem to have grown another inch or two since the last cruise. Not to speak of the considerable investment in putting it all together which has to pay off in the satisfaction of adding to such a festive atmosphere.

Walking through a ship on a formal night is a feast for the eyes. Everybody looks good and is happy. Music is playing everywhere and the passengers are dancing and enjoying themselves. And the officers, even though it’s routine, enjoy walking around in their dashing outfits. Like the passengers, we too go through the hardship of putting everything together. Some parts of our uniform are obtained through the company, while others, usually the smaller and easy to lose items, we have to take care of ourselves. Bow ties, studs, and buttons are items easy to forget when packing to go to a ship.

Back on board after a vacation, it’s always the same when just before the first formal night, one discovers that something has gone missing. A frantic search for a cufflink or a small retaining pin while the time to go on stage is rapidly approaching is all too common. This usually results in an innocent junior officer ruthlessly being separated from this precious possession, in turn leaving him stranded for the evening.

I remember one time when there was a chronic shortage of gold chains used to hold the front of formal jackets together. The hotel storekeeper unknowingly became the source of this crucial part of the uniform. The poor man, unaware of the desperation among the officers, had mentioned that the latest batch of expensive cognac had come with a cute little chain around the necks of the bottles. The week following this innocent remark, just about every officer had small jobs to perform in the wine store like testing a sprinkler head or checking a drain. Slowly just about every chain disappeared from the cognac bottles and the officers unwittingly started to advertise for Hennessey!

It was during an early evening, just before I had to introduce the senior officers on stage, when I walked through the public rooms. My uniform was splendidly complete. This time, when I returned to the ship after my vacation, I wisely checked the smallest detail and counted every button to make sure everything was there. Apart from the pants being a little tight around the waist after the laundry had washed it in hot water, nothing was amiss.

With obvious pleasure I watched every room buzzing with activities and excitement. The bars were full, the crew was busy serving every possible exotic drink, and couples were dancing to the tunes the ship’s bands were playing. When I approached the casino, even before walking in, it was obvious to me that a brisk business was being conducted. The sound of the bells and clinking of the coins in the trays could distinctly be heard even two rooms away.

It was busy in the corridor, too. Women moved gracefully along in beautiful dresses, talking animatedly and often sipping an expensive cocktail, which was a sight of tremendous satisfaction since I was often pressed to help produce more revenue. I couldn’t help but notice a slender woman walking in front of me. From the back, her dress was stunning, and mostly because it was so very deeply cut, with the sides held together with an amazing number of thin straps crisscrossing her back. I marveled at this incredible sight because I remembered that earlier that evening, I had some trouble tying my shoes evenly with the laces crossed only three times. How in the world could somebody successfully master such an intricate puzzle, and that at one’s back!

Then from behind a slot machine, a man yelled and my mind was torn away from the walking labyrinth of straps in front of me. I knew that the yell wasn’t meant for me, but maybe the man had hit the jackpot, and such a thing always nice to see. Still looking sideways I walked on, not realizing that disaster was imminent.

If only the yell had been from somebody winning the jackpot, it would have been far preferable to me, even considering that a jackpot would cost the company money. In fact, it was meant for the woman in front of me, who, recognizing a friend or her husband, I will never know exactly who, suddenly stopped in her tracks. If in turn I’d seen this a split second sooner, the cruise would have been so much more pleasant for me. As it was, I noticed her unexpected stop too late, and I bumped into her.

During a lifetime, one bumps into a lot of other people. Just about every time, you apologize and walk away from each other and forget about it. Well, for me in this case, there was no walking away. The straps of her dress, which just seconds ago were a source of wonder to me, became a nasty and treacherous spider web in which the twelve shiny gold buttons of my formal uniform were hopelessly entangled. The lady, doing what everybody would do when bumped into, was startled and jumped away from me. This was just about the last thing she should have done, but who could blame her?

The move caused two problems. First, it jerked me forward when I wanted to move back (thus disturbing my precarious balance) and second, it jerked her backward when she expected to be able to freely move away from me. Her high heels didn’t help either when they painfully and with full force stomped on one of my toes. This caused me to jerk my foot away, pulling her left foot from under her and she fell.

As I said earlier, she was a slender woman, but even so, her weight was more than I could carry, what with her hanging from the buttons at the front of my uniform. I simply could not stand up and tumbled over, as well. Not only did I fall, which would have been embarrassing enough, but also, because of our close button-strap connection, I fell right on top of her. She uttered a strangled cry alerting everybody around to our predicament and aghast, with my hands on the floor on each side of her, I tried to push myself away. In this I only partially succeeded. I wasn’t able to increase the distance between us to more than half a foot or so, before pulling her up with me. My uniform buttons were hopelessly entangled with her dress and wouldn’t let go. Even worse, my strenuous efforts only resulted in the woman gasping as the air was choked from her lungs by those blasted killer straps being pulled tight. If only there had been just a few, they would have been torn from her dress. This, too, would be undesirable but definitely preferable to the present situation.

The best and least embarrassing thing would have been if my buttons had given out, and a few did obligingly pop off, but the others held. Of course, it need not be said that within the few seconds this all took place a huge number of people gathered around us.

Even from my very difficult position, I gathered that the general atmosphere was one of amazement. Never before had anybody in the audience seen a woman being harassed so openly. However, even though the consensus seemed to be in favor of the woman, nobody appeared to be inclined to assist her. A situation like this clearly should be savored for a while and not be broken up too quickly.

The casino manager was the first to take action, not so much from a genuine desire to help his captain in distress, but more from the fact that his level of business had dropped to just about zero within seconds. Breaking through the crowd, it still took him more time than I thought necessary to assess the situation and even longer to decide what to do about it.

Being on my hands and knees over a woman, and a total stranger at that, in the middle of a casino, desperately trying not to be too close, but at the same time invoking sobbing gasps when increasing the distance, was very unnerving to say the least.

“Get some scissors and cut her loose,” I hissed at the casino manager. “Somebody must have nail clippers or something!”

As if on command several purses opened and an impossibly small gold colored pair of scissors was produced. The casino manager, clearly unaccustomed to dealing with situations like this, white-faced and with shaking hands, started to stab at the buttons of my uniform and the lady’s straps.

“Ouch! Be careful,” I said, wincing when the sharp tip of the scissor painfully stabbed my stomach. It took more than a few of those stabs, alternately given to me or to the still gasping lady, to finally cut through the straps of the dress. A fine and expensive dress no doubt, but both the lady and I were beyond caring.

Luckily, the man who’d started the whole episode by yelling at her from behind his slot machine assisted in holding her now-strapless dress together when she got up, because I had no desire to get more involved than I already was. The crowd, strangely enough, kept rather quiet and I sensed disappointment that the scene they had witnessed was nothing more than an innocent accident.

When the woman finally saw me face to face and realized who had done this to her, complete embarrassment took over. Still red in the face from the lack of air she mumbled something like, “See you later,” and sped off, her friend doing his best to hold on to the back of her dress.

News travels very fast on a ship, because to my dismay later that evening when I had to introduce my senior officers, I saw the room was filled to the last seat and that even the corridors were crowded. Just about every passenger and several officers looked at me with broad smiles on their faces. It did my normally smooth speech little good.

I never saw the lady again. Like me, she must have kept a very, very low profile for the rest of the cruise.