The Cotton-Pickers

by B. TRAVEN

  The girls were sitting on the long settee waiting for dancing partners, while the men sat at the bar or in the recesses. Two or three men had girls with them and were conversing with great decorum and with as much animation as if they were in a ballroom of New York’s upper set. But they were enjoying themselves more because they could, if they so wished, say what was in their hearts, whereas in the upper set such talk might lead others to suspect that you didn’t know the niceties of the language.

  A one-step dance piece was blaring from the platform, but the men were slow to react; they seemed embarrassed and shy, and if the girls hadn’t given them such friendly and encouraging smiles they never would have brought themselves to dance. They tried to conceal their shyness by sitting at the bar and drinking and drinking, drinking more than they really wanted. It was their way of showing their manliness, for they lacked the courage to show it in any other way. They went on drinking so as to be able to stay in the Pacifico near the girls whose smiles they loved and whose pretty faces they were delighted to see. But despite the smiles of the girls, the men held back and obliged the girls to dance with each other. Finally, a few men plucked up courage and asked a señorita for a dance. Then others began to unbend a little.

  After a dance, the men as a rule escorted their partners back to their seats while they themselves went to the bar or to a seat in the recesses; but now and again a gentleman might invite one or two — if he didn’t feel confident, three or four — girls to share his table and drink a bottle of beer or take a shot of something stronger.

  “What will you have to drink, señorita?”

  “A whiskey and soda for me.”

  “I’ll have a cognac.”

  “For me, a bacardi.”

  “I’ll have a bottle of beer.”

  “I’d like a pack of cigarettes.”

  They never ordered champagne or expensive wines on such easy invitation, but if a man happened to be there who felt like showing off or was bent on getting through four months’ wages in one night, he would order champagne and goodness knows what else and issue the invitation, “It’s on me, señoritas!” Twenty or more of them might then join in the spree, and things would warm up. On such occasions nothing was forbidden and there was no closing time.

  The proprietor had his legal license, all stamped and hung up in plain sight, to manage his business so that it did not run at a loss. To avoid misunderstanding, he had signs hung up, such as “All Drinks One Peso.” There was no need for police regulation, in price or anything else. The customers and proprietors regulated things between themselves by the free play of supply and demand, through free competition, and the absence of conditions imposed by over-restrictive licenses. If too many bars opened there was no need for the authorities to intervene; the ones that were superfluous went broke of their own accord. Only the ones that gave good value for their money survived.

  Antonio and I had taken a table when we came in. We ordered beer. Then we danced with two girls and invited them to sit with us; they ordered whiskey. We didn’t quite know what to say to them, and I felt sorry for them while they were making every effort to get a conversation going. I was glad when another dance started; we could make more progress with our feet than with our tongues.

  For the sake of talking, we asked them all sorts of silly questions. Did they have to see their health doctors every week or every two weeks? Did those who didn’t dance in the cafés have to pay more rent for their apartments than the dancers? What were their earnings?

  They must have thought us very green to be asking such silly questions, when we might have been talking about more interesting things. But their amiable manner didn’t desert them; it couldn’t, for they couldn’t allow themselves the luxury of moods and pouts, which would be bad for their business.

  “Will you have another of the same to drink, señorita?” I asked the girl with whom I had danced. “Thank you, señor, that will be fine.” “Then I’ll order,” I said.

  There she sat, and after a few sips of the drink I had ordered, the girl started a conversation.

  “I’m from Charlottenburg,” began Jeannette. “Oh, I thought you were a Parisienne,” said I.

  She was flattered. The genuine French girls, she said, called her “Boche” when they were having one of their frequent rows. Her real name was Olga, but she had her health certificate in the name of Jeannette, with a photo to authenticate it.

  Jeannette had lived in Buenos Aires during the war of 1914-1918. She had been very active in her profession there and had made a small fortune.

  “I suddenly got the urge to go back home and see what it looked like,” she told me.

  She found her father and mother living in the most pitiful circumstances. Before the war her father had been with a big Berlin firm as factory doorman, but had been dismissed after the war because a disabled veteran had been given preference. Her father and mother had lived poorly all their lives, saving and saving for their old age, investing their money in government savings bonds; but when the government devalued the currency, and thus cheated orphans, widows, servant girls, and honest old folks out of their savings so unscrupulously that if any private individual had dared to do it he would have been publicly branded and perhaps imprisoned, the supposedly gilt-edged security of the Bartels family — Jeannette told me this was her German family name, though I didn’t believe it — became scraps of paper so worthless that they couldn’t even have been put to good use in an outhouse.

  The Bartels decided to gas themselves, but just at that point they received a two-week supply of groats, rice, and dried vegetables along with a tin of corned beef from some charitable organization, and with this they kept body and soul together for another four weeks.

  Then one fine afternoon Jeannette arrived without warning, having traveled from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. She brought with her so much money that she could have bought up a whole street in Charlottenburg, for she had dollars from the New World.

  “My dear girl, how did you come by so much money?” her mother asked.

  “I married a cattle rancher in the Argentine. He owned two million head of cattle, and when he died he left me a little fortune.”

  “Whoever would have thought that my girl would have such a stroke of luck?” said the mother. Thus, Jeannette was known in the neighborhood as the Argentine millionaire’s widow.

  With a handful of dollars, Jeannette bought her parents an apartment house that before the war had been worth maybe a half million marks. She had the title made out in her own name, so businesslike had she become in the New World, but her parents were assigned the income from the apartment house. Then she bought them a good number of sound shares that would move with the stock market prices; these she deposited with a dependable banking firm, with instructions that the dividends when due were to be paid to her parents.

  This business over, Jeannette took a few weeks off to treat herself to a good time, which she well deserved after the strenuous years that lay behind her.

  For the proper enjoyment of these weeks of pleasure the cooperation of the opposite sex was, of course, required. Pleasure is barely conceivable without it. But Jeannette didn’t make it a matter of her professional business; being on vacation, she carefully chose a gentleman with whom she knew she could enjoy herself.

  The Bartels had moved into the apartment house; with official permission from the housing authorities they were allowed to occupy the flat on the top floor, which Jeannette had had built at her own expense. One morning Father Bartel went to Jeannette’s bedroom to speak to her and found her in bed with a gentleman. Jeannette and her friend had sat up late in a cabaret, drinking plenty of champagne, and for that reason he had not wakened in time to take his leave at a respectable early hour, in propriety and silence.

  Father Bartel wanted to beat up the man, or shoot him, or deal with him in some other drastic manner. The gentleman, however, was tactful and well-bred; so with supreme dexterity he succeeded, despite Bartel’s aggress
ions, in getting himself more or less dressed. Then, with Jeannette’s help, he maneuvered himself to the door, onto the stairway, and away. He was safe.

  Not so Jeannette. Her father, no longer obliged to deploy his forces on two fronts, gave her the full fury of his anger.

  “Why did you come here, you whore, and shame us in front of everyone?” he roared at his daughter. “Better I’d have committed suicide as an honest doorman than to be so disgraced by my own daughter. You’re nothing but a whore, damn you. I’m done with you! Leave my house at once!”

  The mother tried to calm him, but only made matters worse. The old man was furious, for the honor of a factory doorman had been trampled into the dirt. He had, as he insisted a hundred times, grown old with honor, and now when he had one foot in the grave, he had to suffer humiliation at the hands of his own daughter whom he had always regarded as an angel from heaven.

  Jeannette listened to all this in silence. It seemed to her so remote, so strange, and indescribably silly that she felt it was all taking place on a stage, and that she was in the audience watching an old-fashioned piece of melodrama.

  When Father Bartel repeated for the third time, “Never darken my door again, you’re my daughter no longer!” she suddenly realized that he was speaking to her.

  Then she let him have it. She didn’t get worked up, but told him in a lively, conversational tone: “Not your daughter? Maybe you were responsible for bringing me into the world, but I didn’t ask you to, and I don’t think I’d have chosen you if I’d been consulted. What right have you to turn me out of this house? A fine father! No one ever called me a whore before. If any man had, I’d have clawed his face into shreds. Only my own father takes it upon himself to call me a whore! Anyhow, there’s no misunderstanding; you’re right! I’m just what you say. And what you are living on now are whore’s earnings!”

  The father was silent. He just stared at her. The mother meanwhile sat down and cried quietly to herself. As a woman, with finer perceptions largely denied to men, she already had suspected the truth. But her homely common sense acquired over a lifetime of hard work had taught her not to probe needlessly into things which are best left alone. She thought it wiser not to know the precise truth; that way, life was easier to bear.

  Jeannette was anxious to put her cards on the table and be done with it. Her role as a millionaire’s widow hadn’t been to her liking from the first, but the words had been put into her mouth by persistent questions on the origin of her riches. Now she was sick of the pose, even for the short time she meant to be in Charlottenburg.

  “Yes, whore’s earnings,” she repeated with emphasis. “Every two, three, or four dollars means one man. Now you can figure out for yourself how many I’ve had and how many it took to save you from gassing yourselves. And as to your honorable watchman’s life, it’s no great honor to be buried a suicide! But of all the men who came to me not one ever called me a whore, not even the drunks, not even the sailors who come from long voyages and carry on like young bulls. All of them have said a friendly and courteous “Goodnight” when they left me, and most of them added a polite and genuine, “Thank you, señorita.” And why? Because I never cheated anyone. What you call honor isn’t my kind of honor; my honor and my pride are that everyone who comes to me gets an honest deal. I’ve always been worth the money, and today with all my experience I’m worth it more than ever. That is my pride and honor, never to cheat anyone.

  “All right then, I’m a whore! But I’ve got money, while you with your watchman’s honor have none. Nobody will give you anything for your honor. And if I don’t give you spending money you hang around the place here all day and make Mother’s life a hell with your moaning. If it’ll give you any pleasure, you’re welcome to run out in the street and tell everyone that the Argentine millionaire’s widow is a whore! I don’t care. I just don’t give a damn. I’ve already got my visa, and I hadn’t thought of going this month, but now I’ll be off in an hour. I can still have a good time for a few weeks in Scheveningen and Ostende — I can afford it. Then I’ll start work again. I need another fifteen thousand to reach my goal. And now, please leave me alone. I’m going to dress and pack my trunks.”

  Father Bartel left the room like a robot, and Jeannette said to her mother, “Look after Father. Don’t leave him alone; he might do something silly.” So the mother left. Jeannette packed quickly; within half an hour she stood in the hallway with her trunks packed and locked. She went down to the fourth floor to phone for a taxi.

  Before the old couple had time to recover their senses, the taxi driver was tooting, and Jeannette called to him to come for her trunks. She took two hundred dollars from her handbag, put it on the table, and kissed her mother good-bye. Then calmly she took her father’s head between her hands, kissed him and said, “Good-bye, Father dear. Don’t think too badly of me, and don’t make a tragedy of it. Understand, I might otherwise have died of typhoid. I needed money for typhoid shots and hospital treatment, and that was how it all started. When I recovered, I was too weak to work, and so the whole thing went on. It saved my life, and both of yours. So… Now you know everything and can figure out the details for yourself. Well, good-bye. Who knows whether I’ll see you again in this life?”

  The old father started to cry, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Good-bye, child. I’m old, that’s all. It’s all right. You know best. Write us some time; Mother and I will be glad, always, to hear a word from you.”

  Then she was off. In time the old folks came to terms with the immoral earnings, and Jeannette sent money to them every quarter, which they never refused. Honor remains upright only if you don’t have to starve; for a sense of honor depends on the number of meals you eat each day, how many you would like to eat, and how many you don’t eat. That’s why there are three categories and three different conceptions of honor.

  “And then,” Jeannette continued with her story, “I went to Santiago, Chile, then to Lima, Peru, and, eventually came here. You have to know the ropes and understand men if you want to do business here. Competition is keen.”

  “But you can’t go on doing this forever,” I said.

  “Of course not. The saddest thing in this world is an old lady sitting in front of her door or walking the streets and lending herself to actions which we young ones would refuse with a wave of the hand. I’ll stay in this business until I’m thirty-six, and then I’ll quit. I’ve saved my money, never gone in for the high life and big spending. Would you like to know how my account stands with the American bank here? You’d never believe it! — besides, it doesn’t matter. Later on I’ll buy a small estate in Germany or a farm in Canada, and then I’ll get married.”

  “Married?”

  “Why not? Of course I’ll marry, at thirty-six, for that’s when a woman really begins to enjoy life; and I mean to make something of my life and my marriage. After all, I have experience and I understand men, and I’ll give my husband such a life and such a bed that he’ll appreciate what a treasure he has in me.”

  “But you’re taking a big risk, Jeannette. The world is small, very small, and a chance meeting with a — let’s be frank! — three-dollar or five-dollar acquaintance might wreck your marriage!”

  Jeannette laughed. “Not in my case. You don’t know me, yet! As I said to my father: My honor is that I never cheat anyone, least of all my husband when I have one. Before we ever come to a mutual agreement, I’ll tell him frankly how I got my money. If he rises above it, I’ll say, `All right, then, we’ll get married under these conditions: that you’ll never reproach me as to how I got my fortune, and that I’ll never reproach you for taking it easy on my money!”

  “I’ll keep the money, but he’ll get enough so as not to have to ask me for every penny. And I’ll give him a trial run beforehand, just to make sure that I’m not betting on the wrong horse!”

  So ended her story.

  And the man who gets Jeannette will have cause to be thankful. If he isn’t a moral pri
g, he’ll discover in a week, yes, or in a night, that Jeannette is worth five times her fortune, for she’ll never let a marriage get dull. As I personally learned, Jeannette leaves no desires unfulfilled!

  18

  We arrived at the bakehouse about half past eleven. In order to reach the dormitory, and change into our work clothes, we had to pass through the bakehouse, where the men were hard at work.

  The master saw us, and pulled out his watch. “It’s nearly twelve,” he said.

  “I know,” I replied, “we’ve just seen the cathedral clock. And while we’re at it, I might as well tell you that I’m through.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now.”

  “Then you’d better tell the old man. He’s out front in the café.”

  “I know. You needn’t tell me. I came in through the café.”

  “And I’m turning in my time, too,” Antonio joined me. “Why do you both have to leave?” asked the master.

  “We’re not a pair of suckers, to stay here and work eighteen hours a day,” said Antonio.

  “You’ve been drinking,” said the master.

  Antonio got belligerent: “What did you say?”

  “Well, I ought to be allowed to say that it’s nearly twelve,” the master retorted. “We’ve been here working since ten, there’s so much to do.”

  “You may say what you please, but not to us,” I put in. “You’re not our boss now.”

  “All right,” said the master. “If that’s how it is, clear out at once. You needn’t sleep here, and there won’t be any breakfast for you in the morning, either.”

  “We didn’t ask you for any,” Antonio replied, “and if we did want breakfast we wouldn’t come to you for the favor.”