Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 17

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In the Norwegian sailors’ home in Rotterdam I wrote a letter to Erika Zcympanski, asking her to inform the Party of my whereabouts. It was my plan to stay in Rotterdam until instructions arrived. The Comintern, I knew, had its organizations in every civilized country, and I felt it did not matter whether I was in Germany or not so long as I remained loyal and willing to serve the cause. Though stunned by the Hamburg horrors, my faith was intact. The movement to which I belonged was international; the doctrine that no worker has a fatherland was firmly rooted in my mind, and it was with open defiance and ill-concealed pride that I told myself: “You have not lost your fatherland. You never had a fatherland. You are an internationalist who has but a single task—to help put the capitalists and their henchmen into the grave all over the world.”

From the sailors’ home I went to the offices of the Communist Party to ask for aid as a refugee from Germany, and to put myself at the disposal of the local organization. The red-cheeked, sleepy-eyed Dutch Bolshevik who received me, glanced slowly around his disorderly office and said:

“Well, you’ll have to wait until we inquire about you from the German Party.”

Exasperated, I cried: “The Party in Germany is outlawed.”

“We can do nothing for you if you have no mandate from your Party,” the Dutchman said.

“Just give me an address where I can sleep and eat for a couple of days.”

“We are no charitable institution,” the Dutchman said.

Angry, on the verge of tears, I left him.

Later that day a detective picked me up and took me to a little jail which gave me the impression of being a detention place for assorted alien beach-combers. I had clambered into the fish-tank of a discharged trawler to pick up left-overs which I intended to cook over a fire built by bums in a nearby freight car, when the detective leaned over the coaming and told me to come along.

I had no papers to prove my identity, and refused to give my name to the policemen who questioned me. I feared they would bring me to the border and surrender me to the German police.

“I got drunk and lost my ship in Antwerp,” I told them. “So I came to Rotterdam to find me another ship.”

They gave me a pound of excellent bread, a hunk of cheese and coffee. Before it got dark a gendarme called, and I was told to go with him. He brought me to a train. No other travelers were in the compartment. The gendarme sat in a corner by the door which he barricaded by keeping his feet on the opposite seat. Soon the train began to move.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You are going where you came from,” the gendarme said.

I almost blundered. “Germany?” I wanted to ask. I rose to open the window.

“Keep it closed,” my guard advised. “It’s cold.” Patting his belt, he added: “Don’t try to run away. If you run, I must shoot at you.”

“Well, where are we going?”

“To Belgium.”

I was relieved. The gendarme gave me a guilder. I was grateful. He never smiled. He had curiously tender eyes in a harsh-featured face, and he began to ask me about the life on ships. It seemed that he liked the sea, but he liked more a warm stove in the evening. At a small station he led me out of the train. The lights were frosty. The night was dark and raw. I shivered in the cold. Despite my six-foot frame, I felt weak and worn-out. The gendarme obtained for me a glass of rum and hot water from a fat girl in the waiting room.

“We are near the frontier,” he said, pointing out of the window. “Yonder is Belgium.”

A young border patrolman wrapped in a thick woolen shawl and a camel-hair coat, was waiting for us. The gendarme yawned and shook my hand, and the border guard grabbed my arm and led me out into the night. By-and-by the weather cleared, the stars shone, and a howling wind blew across the flat country.

We trudged over fields and waded through shallow ditches. Thrice the border guard sat down in the shelter of barns to smoke a cigarette. While he smoked, he forced me to lie face to the ground. When we neared the strip of no-man’s-land, we began to crawl on our hands and knees. Behind a thin barrier of brushes we paused.

My escort pointed into the gloom ahead.

“Go straight that way,” he whispered, “one hundred meters, and you will be in Belgium. There are no patrols. Belgian patrols like to make fires. Now go and keep on going, and don’t ever come back to Holland.”

“All right,” I said.

“Remember, one year in jail if you come back.”

“I remember.”

I bent my body toward the ground and ran forward. The wet grass made sucking sounds under my feet. A hundred yards away I halted, and turned to yell insults at the border guard.

“Keep quiet, you smerlapp,” he answered. “Keep going!”

Early in the morning I stopped at a farmhouse and asked a clean-looking woman for permission to wash under the pump.

“Poor fellow,” she said. “Have they pushed you over the border?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Many come that way. Pushed here, pushed there, all the time.”

She gave me a piece of coarse soap and a towel. After that I had a breakfast of beans and bacon. I helped the woman to wring out a mountain of laundry until a farm helper harnessed the horse to get firewood from the nearest town. I went with him. The town was Esschen, only a few miles due north of Antwerp. I helped the farm-hand to load his cart and then I struck out on a shiny highway leading south.

The water-front of Antwerp is the home of many outcasts. It is more international than Shanghai; it is the most international water-front in the world. It was like a tonic to find myself in the pandemonium of harbor noises, docks and wharves cluttered with foreign freight, of seafaring sounds and smells. In the endless line of drinking places, Lascars and Norwegians guzzled away shoulder on shoulder, and a few francs and meal were to be had for the asking. In the Chrystal Palace and all its satellites around the Steen, naked women of all types pranced in tap-rooms full of noise and smoke and roistering men from the ships. And Antwerp was at that time one of the toughest places in Europe in which to find an out-bound berth; seven thousand men were on the beach, and battalions of bums besieged every ship as soon as it was moored.

I spent the first night in the common sleeping quarters of the Salvation Army, after obliging its dormitory baas with a prayer. Early the second night, bent on some form of deviltry to shake off the bothersome shadows of blood spilled in Hamburg, I met Mariette.

She was standing behind a window, which reached down to street level, and smiled at me as I entered the short, crooked street. She neither jerked her head nor beckoned with her arm as did the buxom Flemish girls in adjoining houses. She smiled and I stopped.

Small and trim, she had luminous coal-black eyes. The lights in the room drew her outline sharply. I went inside, into a cloud of perfume and tropical heat. There were some palms in pots, a thick rug, a massive radio, a couch as large as a life-boat, and pictures on the walls. The girl was draped in white silk. Her bare feet stuck in white sandals studded with colored beads. The grime of Antwerp was blotted out. Immediately she drew the curtains.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I replied. “What’s your name?”

“Mariette.”

“You are French?”

“I am from Marseilles.”

She slipped her hand under my coat and wriggled close. She was taut and warm.

“Maybe you like me?”

“I have no money,” I said.

“Such tales to tell,” she laughed. “You’re one of the nicest boys I touched.”

“You lie.”

“Listen, I never lie! You’ve smiling eyes. How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“I’m thirty,” she said, teeth flashing. “The Meisjes in the next house are twenty-two and twenty-three. Cows who will stink at thirty. It comes because I take very good care. See, I have skin like silk; a little bit yellow, but it is like silk.”

She prattled on like running water.

“Look here, Mariette,” I told her, “I have no money. Not one copper.”

“That’s bad.”

“If you hadn’t smiled, I wouldn’t have come in,” I explained.

She leaned back and laughed.

“I know how it is,” she said. “Tell me, what can I do with you if you have not one copper?”

“You can call a policeman,” I answered.

“You are crazy. I never call policemen.”

For a short while she eyed me curiously. Then she said: “It is bad business to waste time on a boy who hasn’t a copper. But listen, I know a man who pays me much money. He says his wife makes him sick. I can call him to come here, and he can sit behind this door and look. He’ll do nothing; just sit and look. You pay not one copper. He pays. All right?”

“No.”

“Why not?” She shrugged her firm shoulders. “If you have no copper, why not make money facilement?”

“I’ll visit you a lot when I have money,” I promised.

“Pouf! Where you from?”

“Hamburg.”

“From Hamburg and no copper, hah?”

“I ran away from the police.”

“Why?”

“I helped to try to make a revolution.”

Her attitude changed abruptly. “Tell me about it,” she said. I did.

We had been sitting on the couch. Mariette rose and brought me a glass of wine.

“I give you a little money,” she said.

“Why should you give me money?”

She watched me drink the wine. Her answer astonished me. “Were I a man, I’d be a revolutionist,” she said slowly. “But a woman, what can she do? People give me plenty money because I am a nice whore. I don’t care. I like revolution. When a revolutionist comes to me, I help him.”

We became friends and talked. Prostitutes I had known before had been covering their bedraggled existence with a sheen of irresponsibility, and one or two of them had been stupidly vile. Mariette’s outstanding mark was a certain level-headed self-reliance. She told me about her life. She had followed her profession for thirteen years. A Greek brought her into the business. She insisted that she had entered the house willingly; that was in Marseilles, when she was seventeen. “The Greek, he told to all his friends, ‘Come, I have a girl who sleep with no man before.’ Oh, la! They gave me no rest. Up the stairs, down the stairs, all the time. Then somebody made me sick. . . . But today, if a man is sick, I can see quick. I say, ‘Go!’ Is he drunk or mad, I take knife. I put the knife against his belly and say, ‘Go!’ So he goes.”

Mariette went on to explain that she felt herself responsible for the welfare of her sailor friends. “When a sailor love me one time, he comes back for more each time his ship is in port. Every morning I look in the paper. I see the names of the ships that have come. I know: this man will come tonight, and this one and that one. Fifteen, twenty, sometimes more. They are friends. When one does not come, I am sad. I ask: What is it? Is he sick? Is he dead? Is he married?”

I asked her if she knew some foreign revolutionists in Antwerp.

“I know Bandura,” she said. “You meet him?”

“No.”

“Maybe his real name is not Bandura,” she explained. “We call him Bandura, though. He’s always looking for revolutionists to help him.”

Inside of me something became alert.

“What does Bandura do?” I inquired.

Mariette drew her knees up to her chin, and put both hands against her temples.

“He makes trouble,” she said. “I buy him overcoat and shoes; sometimes he makes me afraid. He sends other men to me and makes me hide them from police. Police come around many times and ask, ‘Where is man from Riga? Where is little Chinaman? Where is big Pole?’ I laugh. Bandura, he only int’rested in trouble.”

“Maybe I’m from the police. How’d you know?” I interjected.

“Maybe some day you will be my sweetheart,” she said.

“The hell I will.”

“And when you’re a policeman and want to go away, I shall tell you: Come, take me one time more. Then I take the knife and—alas! you are a man no more, and then I say: Now go!”

“Well, I’m no policeman,” I said.

“I know that.”

“I want to meet Bandura.”

“Sure.” She paused and then said: “Soon it is nine. My friends will come from the ships. Now you must go.”

About five the next afternoon I met Bandura in Mariette’s den. He looked the part of a tight-lipped, picturesque brigand, a big-boned, starved-looking man with angular Slavic features. He wore brogans, a reeking old overcoat and a smeary sixpence cap from under which protruded the fringes of matted yellow hair turning gray. He sat on the extreme edge of a chair, peering at me as I came in and said, “Good you come.”

We talked. The simplicity and ability of the man impressed me from the start. I answered many searching questions. Bandura was a Ukrainian anarchist who carried on an independent war against all ship-owners whose vessels traded in ports in which Bandura happened to be at the moment. He worked for no organization and recognized no authority except the right of the underdog to help himself. His collaborators, he maintained, were proletarians of every creed, and nondescripts with a vein for rebellion.

Bandura was the typical representative of those itinerant water-front revolutionists I have since met in every port of call. One and all, they were fugitives from the political police of their own lands. Few had passports. Thus deprived of all chance to obtain a lasting refuge and steady work, they vagabonded from one country to the next, often voluntarily, more often hounded as dangerous undesirables.

“I hope you are no mutton thief,” Bandura said to me.

“What are mutton thieves?”

“Fellows who come with sample cases full of programs, big theories, big plans. Fellows who scram in danger. Heels in a cloud of dust. Fellows who want ham and eggs every morning.”

“Then I’m no mutton thief,” I said.

“You’ll have to prove it,” Bandura retorted. “Show us by picking a ship where the chow is rotten. Follow her around from port to port and make the crew raise Cain till the chow gets good. For action we need no politicians; we need ‘activists’.”

“How can a man get a ship in Antwerp?” I demanded.

“Antwerp is bad. But there are other ports. Best chance is England. Alien seamen can’t stay in England, so foreign ships are hard up for men in British ports, since Englishmen won’t work for less than eight-pound-ten.”

“I’ll go to England,” I said.

“Go to Liverpool. Liverpool is best.”

Throughout our conference Mariette was curled up on her couch, listening with apparent interest, but never saying a word. When I was about to depart, Bandura stopped me. “I go first,” he said. “I go first and come last.” Before he went, Mariette sprang up, took off his cap, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

I lived and worked with Bandura’s band for several days. They had their quarters in garrets above various small water-side saloons. The saloon owners, Greeks, Germans, Estonians, and even a Hindu, tolerated Bandura’s “activists” because they brought a lot of seamen with money to spend into the premises. We spent the day in the harbor, visiting ships, arguing with crew members, distributing a small action paper written and printed by Bandura in English, German, and Swedish. Bandura had a remarkable aptitude for languages, but his orthography was atrocious. Nevertheless, the paper had punch. It appeared, as stated under the title, “when needed.” Its name was Our Rudder.

Came the day when Bandura informed me that he had a ship for me to go to Liverpool. The ship, a British weekly steamer, was to sail from Ghent. In the night and in a pouring rain, a young Lett and I started out on the highway to Ghent. Toward morning, a half-tipsy businessman on his way to the Kortryck cotton exchange invited us to ride in his car, and two hours later he dropped us near the imposing old castle of the Counts of Flanders in the heart of the town.

The following night I was on my way to Liverpool in the coal-bunker of a little weekly tramp. Lying on sacks spread over the coal, a packet of sandwiches as a pillow, I counted the beams overhead and the raindrops which came through a crack in the bunker hatch. Hardly out of the canal, which connects Ghent with the North Sea, I was discovered by a trimmer who entered the bunker with a smoking kerosene lamp. I gave the trimmer ten of the sixteen shillings in silver from Bandura’s treasury. He agreed to say nothing. For the ten shillings he supplied me with a blanket and food,—on British weekly boats seamen buy and prepare their own provisions,—and kept me informed of the vessel’s progress along the coasts of England and Wales. North of Bristol Channel we ran into fog; the plaintive yells of the siren continued until we reached the Mersey after a scant four-day voyage. I dug down into the coal during the customs examination, and when that was over, I scrubbed myself off in the stokehold, dousing pails of hot water over my head.

The working class quarters of English cities are the most dreary in the world. The harbor gates are well guarded. By eleven o’clock, the whole city seems to be asleep except for staggering homeward-bounders and a few querulous whisky-Marys. I heartily disliked my new surroundings. Illegal shipping masters demanded four pounds in advance for an illegal berth on a Greek or Baltic tramp-ship. Two nights I slept in a boarding house for West Indian negroes, which was run by a toothless hag who charged ninepence per bed and night. I obtained meals during my cruises through the docks by washing dishes for ships’ cooks. By chance I fell in with crew members from a German steamer who told me that their ship was due to leave for the West Coast of North America.

The seamen with whom I spoke were, like most German seamen at that time, communist sympathizers. They supplied me with the remnants of a paillasse and with it I climbed into the starboard coal-bunker, and from there through a manhole in the after-bulkhead into hold number three. The cargo was pig iron. I put the ragged mattress on the pig iron and went to sleep. The thunder of winches on deck awakened me. “High tide,” I told myself. The ship was on her way.

After a few hours, someone hailed me from the bunker.

“All is clear—you can come out.”

I crawled back into the bunker and out on deck. It was dusk. We had cleared the river, the pilot had gone, the land dropped down, and the clean horizon of the sea rose high. I went to the forecastle. The iron stove glowed red. I ate a good meal, answered questions, asked for news from Germany, and was content. Life seemed so infinitely sweet and rich.

After breakfast the following morning, I bathed and shaved, put on whatever clean clothes the comrades could spare, and went amidships to report myself to the captain.

The ship’s name was Eleonore, home port Hamburg, and she had been resurrected from a boneyard by an enterprising Jewish merchant named Regendanz, whose initial was painted in white on the withered green of the funnel. It turned out that Captain Walter, a stout, mild-mannered, white-haired man, with a huge head, had known my father well. He treated me with the utmost kindness. He was too pensive and gentle a man to deal with the rabid radicalism of his crew.

“And in America,” he asked me, “you intend to run away?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“I can’t blame you,” he said sadly. “Germany is going to the dogs.”

Without turning his head, he wiped a tear from his eye.

Among the Eleonore’s crew were men who had taken part in the wild voyage of the Lucy Woerman. Before leaving Hamburg, they had formed a syndicate of sailors and stokers, and laid in a contraband cargo of liquor which they hoped to sell in the United States at a great profit. They drank it themselves instead. In the Caribbean, the engine room personnel became thoroughly drunk. The blazing sun and the heat reflected by the iron decks did the rest. Quarrels broke out, knives flashed, and a coal-heaver tottering away from a pursuer who was swinging a knife, went clear over the rail.

The ship was stopped and the drunken comrades of the coal-heaver fought some more in the attempt to man and lower a boat. When they were stopped, they became raving mad. The watch on deck, aided by volunteers from the watches below and led by the chief mate, a former submarine commander, overpowered the drunken stokers. It was an ugly job. Each man, and most of them were naked in the grim sunlight, had to be stunned by blows and then tied to ring-bolts on the hatch-coamings and drenched with cold water. Meanwhile a sailor whose name was Ronaikal swam out to the man who had fallen overboard. He dragged him to the ship’s side and both were hauled aboard with bowlines. The coal-heaver was dead.

For me this was a lucky break. I signed the ship’s articles and became a regular crew member in the drowned man’s place. I became a coal-heaver, carting coal in a wheelbarrow from the reserve bunkers to the fires on the watch from twelve to four. So, when the Eleonore steamed into San Pedro harbor two weeks later, the immigration officers had no reason to detain me as a stowaway.

I was jubilant to be back in America. Here a man could roam over a whole continent without being accosted by a border guard. I deserted ship the first night in San Pedro, slept in a Mexican colony of shacks known as “Happy Valley,” and in the morning I walked into the nearest lumber yard and asked the foreman for a job. He hired me on the spot at five dollars a day.

Ten days I worked in the lumber yard. Half of my earnings I sent to Bandura. The following five days, I worked in a sardine cannery in Wilmington. Then I was discharged, having been caught lugging a case of canned sardines to the I.W.W. hall where traveling delegates slept on crude benches. I had a high admiration for those ingenious and resolute invaders who traveled a thousand miles on freight trains with nothing more than a red card and a dollar or two. A few days I worked in Los Angeles as a dish-washer. Then, with a young hobo from Iowa, I loafed through the orange plantations toward the town of San Bernardino, sleeping in the bungalow of a man who had the obsession that his mission was to build a church. For a bed and breakfast I promised him to collect a ton of stones for his church. We struck a bargain; but he happened to be a homosexual. The bargain ended with the builder of churches yelling for help, with sudden flight as my lot. In the San Bernardino mountains, I leaped aboard the first freight train that toiled slowly up an incline. It carried me across a most dismal stretch of desert and at a village called Barstow I was obliged to get off. I was promptly arrested by a cheerful ruffian with a gun in his holster and a badge on his chest. He told me to choose between going to jail for vagrancy or going to work on a bridge construction job in the desert. I chose the job, and the deputy sheriff drove me to a railway camp.

“Ho, Mr. Robinson,” he called. “Here’s a stiff who wants to work.”

I went to work. I carried cement sacks on my shoulder, from a shed to a greedy concrete mixer, at a run, ten hours a day at fifty cents an hour, with an angry sun beating down from a cloudless sky. Cement mixing with sweat entered my pores and hardened. I shivered through a cold night in a boxcar crowded with Mexican fellow-workers. In the morning, the deputy sheriff came around to see if I was still there. The second night I pretended to go to sleep, but slipped out into the night when all was quiet. The stars shone brilliantly. The yellow mountains loomed in the moonlight. Without regrets, I abandoned two days’ pay and boarded the first freight toward the coast. It was a cattle train. While I clung precariously to the lattice work of the cars, the wheels thundering beneath me and striking showers of sparks, I felt the tongues of cattle inside run over my hands and wrists. I managed to climb to the roof of the car and there I fell asleep. When I awoke, it was daylight and the train had stopped. A man stood above me, prodding me with his foot.

“Got a gun on you?”

“No.”

“Get up. Raise your arms.”

He searched me. Then he ordered me to climb down and walk ahead of him to a station house. I asked the man who he was. “I’m a special officer of the Southern Pacific Railroads,” he said. Then I asked him to let me go. He demanded a dollar. I gave him the dollar and he commanded me to get out of town.

“What town is this?”

“San Berdoo,” he said.

A man in a big blue car offered me a ride. I accepted. He was a cameraman who had traveled far and wide. He drove at break-neck speed. When I got out of his car, stiff-legged and tired, I stood in front of the William Fox Studios in Hollywood.

In a cafeteria on one of the boulevards a fat man was looking for pirates. I told him I was a sailor. Deeply bronzed, without a haircut for many weeks, and wearing only dungarees and a blue shirt with its sleeves cut off, I looked fit enough for a pirate. The fat man hired me at seven dollars a day, for two days.

In the early morning I and a horde of other dark-haired and sun-scorched men were loaded into comfortable trucks and taken to the San Pedro water-front where three imitations of old galleons were moored to a wharf. We boarded the galleons and were towed out toward Catalina Island. Those among us who were not dark enough were painted brown. Some, half naked and in chains, became galley slaves; others, armed with swords, axes and knives, became pirates. Directors, assistants, cameramen rushed about and snapped directions. The stars, Milton Sills among them, came in motor-boats. The day went by in filming a battle at sea. Ships were rammed, boarding parties flew at each other’s throats, whips cracked over the backs of the rovers, men pitched overboard, and slaves ran amok. Between the scenes everybody drank lemonade and played dice for dimes and quarters. This went on until the sun stood low. The second day passed in similar ways. The galley slaves who had been painted brown were warned not to wash or bathe overnight.

During one of the intervals, between two spurious battles, I ran into Romaikal, my former shipmate who had fished the drowned coal-heaver out of the Caribbean. He seemed quite prosperous. His alertness and perseverance, together with his fine physique and a quick mental grasp of things, had carried him to an average of five days of work weekly with various motion picture companies. Since the filming of further sea battles was delayed, Romaikal took me to a casting office on Spring Street and introduced me to a man who was then corraling teamsters for a Wild West production. I became a teamster. The pay was five dollars. The job consisted of driving a covered wagon, one among hundreds in action, at top speed down a long grassy slope of a location farm about twenty miles out of Hollywood. At first I had difficulties; I had never touched or handled a horse before. But the natural liking I had for dogs and horses enabled me rapidly to manage the team as well as the next man. Finally a wheel came off, and my wagon capsized. One of the megaphone men yelled enthusiastically, “Fine! Fine!”

One evening in the large dormitory of the York Hotel, where I lived, I met Virchow, one of my comrades from Hamburg. He had deserted from the Westphalia in New York and had come to the West Coast on one of the Luckenbach ships. He showed me letters received from Party members in Germany. The German courts were grinding out wholesale sentences against communists for treason, insurrection, rioting, conspiracy and murder. Many had been sentenced to death, but all such sentences had been commuted to life imprisonment. Among those who were condemned for life was one of my friends who had helped to storm the Eimsbuettel police station, Wilhelm Willendorf, a big-boned, sad-looking, fearless militant.

The effect which this news had on me was overwhelming. The hatred I felt for a system which destroys in cold blood the best sons of the working class was so great that I was speechless for several minutes. Inside I boiled with helpless rage, and with shame! Over there in Germany comrades went into dungeons for life, and here was I—well on my way to enjoy the Hollywood humbug. Virchow pulled a soiled sheet of printed paper from his kit-bag and handed it to me. I stared at it. It bore the title, “Sturm”—Tempest—and a subtitle, “By Seamen—For Seamen.” It was an underground newspaper printed by the marine section of the Communist Party of Germany. Its contents were inflammatory. They gripped me and shook me through and through.

“I’m going back to fight,” I said.

Virchow drew back. “Germany is the lousiest, toughest country in the world,” he mumbled. “I’ll never go back.”

“Then you’re a deserter.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m going back.”

I threw away a fair chance for a peaceful life. I journeyed to San Pedro and pestered the skippers and mates of every ship bound for Europe. The captain of the United American Lines freighter Montpelier signed me on as an able-bodied seaman. Thirty days later, under a gloomy North Sea sky, the Montpelier maneuvered through the locks and moored in Antwerp’s Siberia Dock.

I went looking for Mariette. She was gone from her old place, and I concluded that she had moved to another street. So I made the rounds of the haunts of Bandura’s band—Rose of England, Monico Sam, Café Belgenland, Helgoland Bar, Susie’s Paradise. I found him in a Chinese drinking place on Brouwersvliet. He looked as gaunt and hungry and dauntless as ever.

“The girl Mariette has died,” Bandura said mournfully. “She was more lovable than all the debutantes west of the Rhine thrown together. We gave her a fine funeral.”

I sipped my tea silently. Bandura growled:

“Take off your cap in honor of Mariette.”

I took off my cap. Bandura told me about her funeral. He and his helpers had devoted two full days to collect money aboard the ships to bury Mariette with revolutionary honors. At night they had raided the parks and a number of private gardens, and had collected a mountain of fresh greens and spring flowers. They had carried her coffin on their own shoulders, and a train of water-front agitators of many nationalities had followed them with red and black flags. Bandura had made a speech over the open grave. The inscription on the tombstone, Bandura told me, read: “Mariette, who loved and aided the toilers of the sea.”

“I’m glad you did it that way,” I said.

“Rest assured,” Bandura said with a melancholy grin: “No decent whore has ever had more sincere mourners, nor was one ever buried with greater dignity.”

I made a violent attempt to break the spell of sadness, and shouted for beer. A plump young waitress with a bloated face brought beer. She put it on the table, then she suddenly ran her arm down Bandura’s neck through the opening of his shirt.

“Beer for me too?” she cried.

Bandura pushed her away. “Off with you,” he snarled. “You stink.”

“How goes your water-front campaign?” I inquired. Bandura leaned forward and, with a coughing laugh, replied:

“Well, very well. Right after we had closed Mariette’s grave, with all my boys assembled, the gendarmerie swooped down on us. We all went to jail for one night. A day later we were deported, some to France, others to Holland. The following night, we all turned around, and back to Antwerp we came.”