“Oh, how do we know?” moaned Herr Glocken, but in a few minutes David saw that he was asleep. He slept also at last, for an hour, and woke in the horrors of headache fit to crack his skull, a leaping gorge, blazing thirst, and a stomach so estranged it refused to harbor its only friends, aspirin and cold water.
Denny was awake again, too, this time merely groaning at intervals, begging for water, but unable to lift or turn his head to drink it. David said, “Just keep still for God’s sake and open your mouth as much as you can, and I’ll pour a little and you swallow!” This was done with much commotion and spilt water and sounds of choking from Denny, with Herr Glocken pleading, “Bitte, bitte, bitte, my medicine, Herr Scott, please my medicine, I am late with it, bitte—”
David gave him his medicine, swallowed more aspirin, and while he washed lightly at the stand and changed his clothes, he asked Denny whatever had happened to him. Denny’s beaten mouth moved and he told the story of his afflictions, or rather his version of them, slowly in a vocabulary that astonished even David, who thought he knew all the words and most of their meanings. He almost lost track of the events in his fascinated attention to the language, but the name Pastora did emerge from the depths of boiling pitch.
“Are you sure?” asked David. “Last time I saw her she was running from you like a rabbit, way ahead, too—”
“I finally got to her cabin,” said Denny in a low hoarse voice, “and she came right out and lit into me with an ice pick. I bet her pimp put her up to it. I bet he was right there back of her—” His mouth pouted and twitched at the corners. “She already had my money,” he whispered, “all the hell she was going to get. I guess they figured it all velvet and no wear and tear—”
David left the cabin without waiting for more, pretending that he didn’t hear Herr Glocken pleading earnestly that Herr Scott should not leave him alone. “Let him get out on deck by himself,” David decided, “I’m through.” Hunched and sick, he found his table. For once he was not hungry but drank coffee, hoping for Jenny and fearing she would not come, glancing around in spite of himself every time someone entered, hating the very thought of seeing her and hardly able to endure his waiting for her. At last he felt he had something to say to her that she would not be able to answer. Would she dare to say to him again, “It wasn’t love, David—” Well, this time he didn’t care what it was. It was the end for him and he was going to walk off the ship at Vigo.
When he glanced about again, Jenny was there, coming towards him. He was so blinded with excitement he could not see, until she was quite near, that she was pale, exhausted, her eyes swollen; but she was freshly washed and smelled of roses, her smile was quite frank and friendly if a little shamefaced. She seated herself, shook out her napkin and said, “Lord! that was heavy going last night, wasn’t it? I’ve never been so absolutely blotto in my life. What happened to the raffle, I wonder? Finally? Or to anything else? David darling, you look downright done in. What became of you?”
She had not looked straight in his eyes, in spite of her smile; she now asked the steward for orange juice and coffee and toast and jelly and milk, then said, “Heavens, it’s just force of habit. I can’t eat anything! Is coffee all you’re having, too?”
David said in a crackling voice, “Look here, Jenny, what are you up to? What are you trying on this time? Pretend you don’t remember? Well, you never believed me when I told you that, and now I don’t believe you.”
“That’s fair enough,” said Jenny, “but now I do believe you, because I don’t remember one single thing after a lot of dancing and scurrying around the ship with Freytag and drinking a lot, and then I woke up this morning with a crashing head in my own chaste narrow bunk with Elsa lying there staring at me across the cabin, and the minute I opened my eyes she asked, ‘How do you feel now?’ I was delighted to tell her I felt simply immeasurably awful and it seemed to cheer her up.”
David saw that she was really uneasy and kept a cold steady eye upon her as she rambled along, but interrupted to ask: “You don’t remember?”
Jenny said, “I am trying my best to tell you that for the first time in my abandoned career, I don’t remember a thing after a certain point. We joined up for a while with Mrs. Treadwell and her little powder puff of an officer, and we were all over the ship and we seemed to drink everything in sight, but I can’t remember how I got back to my cabin. Oh,” she said painfully, drooping her face into her hands.
“Are you sure you went to your cabin at all?” asked David with a scorching smile.
“I woke up there, if that’s any proof,” said Jenny, feeling a chill in her spine, for David was about to tell her something she did not want to hear, and her blood knew what it was. “Why?”
“Why, nothing,” said David. “This alcoholic blank is convenient, isn’t it?”
“Why, no,” said Jenny, drearily, “not if you’ve been trailing me around again and peeping. What was it? What did I do?”
He turned his head away and his profile was one tight small secretive smile. “Ask Freytag,” he said, watching acutely her pallor taking on faint greenish shadows.
Jenny knew that expression in his face too well, and resented it again. “I’ll do that, later,” she said. “There’s no hurry.” The anger in her voice didn’t match the tears slowly filling her eyelids. More tears, yes, she could draw them at will—this time they wouldn’t work. “Don’t cry, Jenny, or not before people. They’ll think I’ve been beating you—” he said. “You do cry so nicely, but it’s a little late for that now. We’ve crossed a line, it’s all over, why can’t we say so and let go?”
“Haven’t we been doing that, letting go little by little, all along?” asked Jenny, her tears drying at once and her face beginning to glow pinkly with anger. “Does it have to be a wrench? Do we have to break bones? I wish we could let it come of itself when we are really ready for it—when it won’t hurt so much! We’ll get used to it gradually—”
David flared up in turn. “What exactly am I supposed to get used to? Seeing you sprawled flat on your back in a fairly public place, the boat deck? And the only reason you stayed nearly faithful to me is that you were too drunk to be interesting to your seducer, after all.” He poured another cup of coffee and said, “Let’s drop this subject. I’m sick of it already.”
Jenny took a good swig of too hot coffee, gasped a little and said, “You are a monster, did you know that, you monster?”
“Are you still drunk?” asked David in something like triumph. “Sometimes when I thought I was sobered up and could face the mean trivialities of real life again, one cup of hot coffee would slam me back into the ditch, I’d have to crawl out once more through the slime and weeds—”
“You’re pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” asked Jenny accusingly. “You’re glad this happened, aren’t you? You were really hoping all along for something like it, weren’t you? I’d give a good deal to know what you really have had in mind all this time—not that it concerns me.”
“It did concern you,” said David in a new tone, as if he were talking pleasantly with a stranger, “but you are right. It doesn’t now.”
Jenny stood up calmly, her face quietly intent, but David saw her hands shaking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I must run away now. I’ve got a question to ask somebody.”
“I’ve told you already.” David raised his voice a little, but did not glance at her again as she went. He poured more coffee, and said to the waiter, “I’ll have scrambled eggs and ham now, thank you.”
Mrs. Treadwell and Herr Freytag greeted each other pleasantly on a morning stroll around the deck and agreed that breakfast together in the open air would be a very nice way to dispel the lingering miasma of last night’s uproar. They were both clear-eyed, in amiable mood and inclined to smile at each other when some specially used-up-looking reveler strayed by their chairs. They exchanged one or two universal if minor truths—pleasure was so often more exhausting than the hardest work; they had both noticed t
hat a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not. “Both equally disfiguring,” said Freytag. “The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own—even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being—”
Mrs. Treadwell turned her dark blue eyes on him in faint surprise. “I never thought of that,” she said. “I just thought beauty was a phase of living and would pass with everything else in time—”
“Maybe,” said Freytag, “but that is not the same as hurrying to kill it, do you think?”
“Maybe not,” said Mrs. Treadwell, watching Jenny Brown coming towards them slowly, head towards the sea, hands crossed and folded at the wrists. She passed without seeing them, all pallor and melancholy. “That poor girl,” said Mrs. Treadwell, rather idly, turning to Freytag. He started so sharply the things on his tray rattled, he gazed after the retreating Jenny, and his dilated pupils turned his gray eyes to black fire. Mrs. Treadwell instantly was warm with embarrassment, as if Freytag had spoken some dire impropriety: he simply had no reserve, no dignity. It did not matter what kind of thing existed between him and that girl, it was so weak of him to let every feeling he had show in that way. She carefully avoided facing him. It was like that other morning when the talk about his wife came up; like the time he had picked the quarrel with her in the writing room. Mrs. Treadwell set her tray carefully on the deck between their chairs, alighted feet together, and rose as if she were getting out of a motor car.
“Why are you going?” asked Freytag simply as a small boy.
“My cabin mate is not well, I promised to help her.”
“Isn’t that the screeching hag who made all the trouble?” asked Freytag with a writhing mouth. Mrs. Treadwell walked away. Freytag got up and went in the opposite direction, looking for Jenny. He did not find her after a half hour’s search.
As Mrs. Treadwell neared her own door, the door of the cabin next hers was opened, and the Baumgartner family emerged, the little boy in front with his timid hangdog air. Herr Baumgartner held the door for his wife and stepped aside for her with an almost theatrical show of deference on his weak-mouthed, self-pitying face, with its beaten look of guilt. His wife passed him like a stranger, yet her perpetually grieved air was now touched with shame, the silence among the three was like some burdensome secret they were carrying together. Mrs. Treadwell opened her door and, halfway in, said hastily, “Grüss Gott—” over her shoulder, then closed the door, and Lizzi, pushing the ice cap off her brow, said plaintively, “Please, what is it now?”
“Nothing,” said Mrs. Treadwell. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I would like another sleeping pill,” said Lizzi, drearily. “Tell me, did you hear anything new upstairs? What happened to the party?”
Mrs. Treadwell handed her the pill and a glass of water. “There are rumors,” she said, “not very interesting. There was almost nobody at the raffle, and one of those twins drew the tickets out of an open basket, and the Spanish company won all the prizes except a little white shawl for the pianist and a pair of castanets for one of those Cuban students.… I only overheard this—some of the Germans talking, those Huttens and others. Nobody told me anything directly. Now then,” she ended amiably, “will you go to sleep again?”
“I think so,” said Lizzi, almost entirely chastened. “You did not hear any word of Herr Rieber?”
“He is resting,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “and I hope you will too.”
Out she went near desperation, but managed to make her way to the small writing room, where almost no one went these days, without a glance or greeting for anyone. She sat there alone reading stale magazines until the luncheon bugle sounded. The exact vision of the Baumgartners’ faces would not leave her. It was plain they too had suffered some sort of shabby little incident during the night. Mrs. Treadwell did not even wish to guess what it might have been. That sad dull display of high manners after they had behaved no doubt disgracefully to each other and their child was intended no doubt to prove that they were not so base as they had caused each other to seem. That dreadful little door-holding bowing scene had meant to say, You can see, can’t you, that in another time or place, or another society, I might have been very different, much better than you have ever seen me? Mrs. Treadwell leaned back and closed her eyes. What they were saying to each other was only, Love me, love me in spite of all! Whether or not I love you, whether I am fit to love, whether you are able to love, even if there is no such thing as love, love me!
A small deep wandering sensation of disgust, self-distaste came with these straying thoughts. She remembered as in a dream again her despairs, her long weeping, her incurable grief over the failure of love or what she had been told was love, and the ruin of her hopes—what hopes? She could not remember—and what had it been but the childish refusal to admit and accept on some term or other the difference between what one hoped was true and what one discovers to be the mere laws of the human condition? She had been hurt, she had recovered, and what had it all been but a foolish piece of romantic carelessness? She stood up to take a deep breath and walk around the stuffy room. All morning long she had been trying in the back of her mind to piece together exactly what had happened last night to her, and what she had done. The scene with that young officer was clear enough. She remembered Herr Baumgartner hanging over the rail looking sick. Lizzi was delivered to her hands later, when she had been amusing herself painting her face; and then—
No good putting it off any longer. She could not find her gilded sandals when she was putting her things in order. There were small random bloodspots on the lower front of her nightgown. And as she walked, she remembered, and stopped, clutching a chairback, feeling faint. Walked again, then left the room and set out to look for Jenny Brown. She should know everything about it, being the “girl” of that rather self-absorbed young man, Denny’s cabin mate.… Mrs. Treadwell remembered very well what had happened, what she had done; she wanted a few particulars of the damage she had caused, and above all to learn whether her enemy had recognized her.
Jenny Brown was reading the bulletin board. A ragged-edged imitation of an ancient proclamation announced: The victims of last night’s violence and bloodshed are resting quietly. The suspected criminals are under surveillance, not yet apprehended, but an early disclosure of some interesting identities is expected. Signed: Les Camelots de la Cucaracha.
For the rest, news from the faraway world mentioned the shipping strike, the number of ports tied up, the number of men involved, the amount of wages lost, the many millions of money lost to the shipping business, and no end in sight; the situation in Cuba was not improving, all attempts at a settlement between factions had failed; unemployment was world-wide and growing worse, a real threat everywhere; yesterday’s ship’s pool, so much, had been won by Herr Löwenthal; the horse races would begin at two o’clock, and whoever had lost a gold-banded fountain pen with the initial R engraved on it, please call at the purser’s office.
Mrs. Treadwell said to Jenny: “But no bulletins about the casualties in last evening’s engagement. I wonder how they are doing.”
Jenny said: “It seems to have all been very gay. That dancer called Pastora is said to have attacked that William Denny with an ice pick. And that long-legged Swede hit that Herr Rieber over the head with a beer bottle. These are notes I have just picked up in my travels around deck.”
Mrs. Treadwell suddenly and surprisingly laughed out—not a loud laugh or an empty one—a small rich trill of merriment, pure pleasure; Jenny was so taken with the sound she laughed too, in a small shaken voice; she had not expected to feel like laughing about anything, and now she laughed without knowing why.
“So it was that little dancer, after all?”
“That’s what he says, and I’d think he should know,” said Jenny, and they went on with light laughter in their voic
e, quite blithe and ruthless, perfectly frank in their delight that the insufferable fellow had got his comeuppance.
“It nearly restores my faith in life,” said Jenny. Her face then changed, instantly, became pale and anxious once more. Mrs. Treadwell saw Freytag coming towards them, and without any sign of uneasiness, she drifted away in her strange motionless walk as if she did not use the ordinary human muscles. Jenny stood until Freytag came straight towards her and waited until he spoke. He leaned very close and said gently: “I’ve been worried about you.”
Jenny said, “Don’t, please.”
He said, “I’ve been looking for you all over. Where were you?”
Jenny said soberly, “Oh, here and there. No one can get really misplaced for long on this ship.… Oh, I can’t bear it much longer. Oh, I want to leave at Vigo, but I haven’t got a visa for Spain.”
“Stop saying ‘Oh,’” said Freytag, soothingly. “Things aren’t so bad as all that. You haven’t got anything to be sorry for.”
“Oh, what do you know about it? Tell me, tell me, what happened—?”
“If you could see your face!” he told her. “Jenny, you’re such a strange sort of girl. You’d think you’d just been sentenced to death. Listen to me,” he said, familiarly as a brother. With something of a brother’s impersonal touch he took her elbow lightly and steered her out to deck center and strolled along with her. “You’ll not believe this maybe, but nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing happened, we were both too drunk, I’m very sorry to say; I was good for nothing and you were—well, not there at all, on the moon, I should say; and Jenny, it was perhaps a little dull and certainly absurd and nothing for either of us to think about again. Do you hear me?” he said, leaning forward and peering into her face. She stopped short, and to his astonishment, laughed with convincing merriment. “How idiotic!” she said. “Nothing, after all. For all the trouble you’ve made me, I should have had something out of it! Something more than just trouble! You needn’t think of it again, but David will for the rest of his life. He saw us last night—saw something that about finished him, I think …”
Ship of Fools Page 62
