Free The Immigrants by Howard Fast

his own si lence began to fill him with oppression. Jean Seldon came to his rescue, and he wondered whether she had any notion that never before in his life had he dined with people like this in a room like this or a house like this.
    “How on earth do you know so much about ships?” she asked him.
    “I don’t.”
    “But of course you do.”
    “Well, about the Oregon Queen, I guess a little. I know more about boats. I been in boats most of my life, I guess.”
    “And a ship isn’t a boat?”
    Whittier heard this. “No, indeed, my dear,” he said. “A boat is not a ship, although some say that a ship is a boat.” His small joke amused him, and he chuckled over it.
    “A ship is large; a boat is small. That’s about the difference,” Dan said. At least he was talking to her, sitting alongside of her. A maid placed a plate of crab meat and mayonnaise on his service plate and the butler poured white wine into the outside goblet of the three that were lined up before him. He had no taste for crab meat, and he wondered whether he would be offending them if he did not eat it. Jean was only picking at hers; he had no way of knowing that her appetite had fled with his presence there.
    “Could be off one of your own boats, Lavette,” Whittier said.
    “The crab, I mean.” Whittier was hostile, contriving his hostility in witless remarks. Dan said nothing, only thinking that if this small, pompous, fool ish man, so uninformed about the essence of his own business, was a measure of the hundred tycoons who ruled the hills of San Francisco, then his own way up would be none too difficult.
    It came down to money; if you had money, you functioned and you could do with out guts or brains; and if you had money, you saw a girl like Jean Seldon more than once, more than by acci dent.
     
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    He took the outside fork after the others had picked theirs up, and he forced himself to eat the crab meat.
    “I’d like to think that it is,” Seldon said, taking the edge off Whittier’s remark. “Young Lavette here owns three crabbing boats,” he explained to Mrs. Whittier, “and that’s quite an achievement for someone his age.”
    “When most young fellows are still in college,” Whit tier said.
    “Eating out of their daddies’ pockets,” Jean said sweetly, smiling at Whittier. “John’s in his last year at Yale, isn’t he?”
    “That’s right.”
    Mary Seldon looked at her daughter disapprovingly, but Jean refused to meet her eyes. The maid was pick ing up the fish plates and the butler was serving a clear soup. Trying not to look at her directly, Dan watched Jean.
    “And then he’ll go into your business, Mr. Whittier?”
    “Of course.”
    “What a pity he can’t start a shipping line of his own, as Mr.
    Lavette intends to do. But then he wouldn’t know how, really, would he?” she added, with a smile.
    Dan watching, listening. Match their spoons. They dipped away instead of toward them. She turned to him and smiled.
    “That’s hardly called for, Jean,” her father said. “Why on earth would John want a shipping line of his own?”
    “Do you like the soup, Mr. Lavette?” Her question abandoned the rest of them.
    “Why—yes.”
    “You don’t like crab?”
    He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well, but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and
     
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    functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews—and be damned with the lot of them if he’d go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use.
    “Neither would I, if I were in your place, Mr. La vette,” Jean said.
    “I would hate fish and I would hate crabs—ugly little beasts.”
    He found himself