Ship of Fools (24 page)

“It is always rough in the Bay of Biscay,” said Freytag. “Well, at least these people are lucky in one way—they are all going home.”

“So they are,” said Dr. Schumann. “I hope only we can get them there without further suffering for them.” He seemed rather gloomy and under the weather himself, and barely nodded when Freytag moved away.

In the areaway leading into the dining room, the bulletin board was a morning gathering place. David saw Jenny, looking very smooth and fresh, standing before the board with Mrs. Treadwell. He went straight up and joined them, meaning to take Jenny away at once and have it out with her.

“Why, hello, David darling,” said Jenny, easily, and slipped her arm through his. He gave it a small pressure, at the same time pushing her away. She let go at once and moved away a step from him. Mrs. Treadwell nodded a greeting, and together they read the thin array of pastimes, already somewhat frayed with repetition: religious services in the morning, a variation because this was Sunday; horse races at two o'clock, swimming at all hours, music on deck at five, tea in the bar, a band concert after dinner, dancing on deck later.

The little flags on pins, stuck every day in the map to mark the progress of the ship, were marching in a curve across the blue field of the Atlantic. “We are really getting somewhere,” said Mrs. Treadwell to David. “I can't sight land anywhere with my strongest glass.” From the Caribbean to the Canaries would be fourteen days; from the Canaries to Vigo, to Gijón, to Southampton, to Bremerhaven, eight days more or ten perhaps. “We can begin to look forward to the end of this voyage,” said David. News dispatches were rather nautical in character and the movements of ships unknown to landlubbers were thought worth mentioning, with passing references to dockworkers' strikes almost simultaneously in San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Gijón. Passengers advertised on little thumbtacked slips of paper that they had lost or found jeweled combs, down pillows, tobacco pouches, small cameras, pocket mirrors, rosaries. The ship's pool was there with the name of yesterday's winner.

Mrs. Treadwell traced with a bright red varnished fingernail the ship's course on the blue map. She spoke, perhaps to David. “It's true,” she said, “we do not stop at Boulogne.” Her face was amiable, timid, composed into a smile. He watched her sparkling fingernail glide into port, into Boulogne. “And that happens to be the only place I wish to go,” she told him, speaking into the air.

“Then why did you take this ship?” asked David. He waited confidently for some preposterous feminine explanation. She was undoubtedly a woman who lost her keys, missed trains, forgot her engagements, and mailed letters full of indiscreet gossip to friends in the wrong envelopes. But no, she had a reasonable answer.

“The man at the North German Lloyd in Mexico City sold me a ticket for Boulogne and said the ship stopped there,” she said carefully, without indignation or complaint. It was, she added, nothing unusual or surprising. Ticket agents often did that. “My ticket reads …”

She opened her handbag and rummaged among the contents delicately with a forefinger. David glanced over her elbow at a clutter of expensive trifles in gold, silver, leather and tortoise shell. Mrs. Treadwell removed a flat envelope of red ostrich skin bound in gold, her passport case. “It should be here,” she said, without expectation. “Wherever do things go?” she asked herself aloud. “At any rate, it said Boulogne, clearly.”

“You haven't lost your ticket?” asked Jenny, alarmed.

“I haven't it with me, but it's about somewhere. I am not the only passenger for Boulogne. Those Cuban medical students …”

“Montpellier, yes, I know,” said David.

“I wonder what they mean to do there, what possibly?” asked Mrs. Treadwell. “Surely not to study medicine?”

“Poor Cuba!” said Jenny, idly.

David asked how they would get there, in the first place. Mrs. Treadwell supposed they would be put off, all of them and herself, at Southampton and from there—

“It would be nice,” remarked Jenny, “if the Captain might just put them off in a leaky lifeboat, with two oars maybe, and a small keg of old water with tadpoles in it and a few biscuits full of weevils—I'd love seeing them start out and I bet you anything they'd get there.”

“But what about me? I want to go to Boulogne too; from where I stand, that's the shortest route to Paris.”

“Ah, so do I want to go to Paris,” said Jenny. “The more I think of it, the more I hate going to Germany. That same man in Mexico told us if we changed our minds about Germany, we could always get a visa from the French consul at Vigo, and that is my one hope now.”

Mrs. Treadwell turned smiling to David and saw with amazement that his face was pale and tight and he seemed silently enraged. “How nice,” she told him, saying what she had meant to say before she saw his face. “Do you wish to go to Boulogne too?”

“Not in the least,” he said, “I am going to Spain.”

“And I am going to Paris,” said Jenny, sharply.

Mrs. Treadwell felt quite suddenly that she was standing between two persons throwing stones at each other. She stiffened and smiled, and almost furtively began to edge away, covering her retreat with little haphazard statements about the beautiful morning and a mention of breakfast. Could it have been possible they were ready to quarrel there before her? The notion filled her with embarrassment and fright. As she hurried along, the smile must have remained on her face, for Wilhelm Freytag asked her what she was looking so gay about so early in the morning? She had no idea, she told him, and watched his gaze resting on Jenny and David, who drifted past together, both a little pale and strained in the brilliant light; they exchanged sketchy nods. Freytag, with the stupid incident of the evening before fresh in mind, felt a certain lightly malicious satisfaction in his belief, his knowledge indeed, that no matter—no matter at all—what kind of appearances they chose to keep up, the match was no good; they were not in the least happy together and would never be; it couldn't go on. He turned as if for a last look at the retreating figures to fix an image in his memory even then changing and disappearing; and before he could stop it, suppress it, before he even realized he had thought the fearful thought, it formed in actual words shockingly in his waking mind: “If that were Mary walking yonder, even at this distance, at first glance, anybody—even I!—anybody would know she is a Jew.… What have I done to us both, Mary, Mary … what shall I do now?”

It was all in a fraction of a second that his image of his whole life split apart. He turned back to Mrs. Treadwell with an amazed face, and suggested in a slightly raised voice that they breakfast together on deck. “Delightful,” she agreed, after thinking about it. They settled themselves and hailed the steward. The sunlight poured upon them, the waves glittered. Coffee was brought, the trays with smoking broiled lamb chops, honey and hot rolls and butter. The big white napkins reflected softened light on their faces, their momentary well-being cast a brief pleasant glow forward over the whole unpromising day.

As their fellow voyagers passed, Mrs. Treadwell noticed that at least half of them did not salute each other, not from distaste but from indifference; she remarked to Freytag that the party last night had not seemed to change things much. Freytag said, in what sounded to Mrs. Treadwell a very good humor, that a few little incidents had happened, just the same, that might make changes in the long run. Mrs. Treadwell privately considered the few little things she had observed and decided that silence perhaps would be, as usual, best.

Herr Lutz, alone and at his ease, stopped to peer down at their trays. “Ha,” said he, wagging his head at them, “eating again, eh? Three times a day for a hundred years if we are lucky, what?”

Mrs. Treadwell's plate seemed to her at once too full, the food somewhat coarse; not the first time she had felt the coarsening effect of Herr Lutz's presence on everything around him. Freytag was piling honey and butter on half a roll. “How true,” he said cheerfully, and engulfed the hearty morsel. Too handsome in that wrong kind of German way, Mrs. Treadwell decided, too carefully dressed, too healthy entirely, not an idea in his head, and it was a sad fact that too often the very nicest Germans wolfed their food. It had been noticed and mentioned by travelers through the ages; she herself had never known one who was not a glutton. Freytag turned to her innocently, his mouth stuffed, enjoying his breakfast, and encountered her eyes for the first time fixed on him in a bland gaze, slender dark eyebrows lifted lightly, head on one side, a look that said nothing in particular but which threw him off center for an instant. He turned away and swallowed laboriously. When he looked at her again, her face was towards the sea.

“I like breakfast best of all,” he told her. “At home we used to have it English style, with all kinds of hot things, chops and scrambled eggs and broiled mushrooms and little sausages and muffins on the sideboard where you helped yourself, with a big urn of coffee steaming away. My wife—”

English style of course for breakfast, and French style for dinner no doubt, and other imported styles for other occasions, with just now and then a comfortable lapse into the native
Eisbein mit Sauerkohl
and beer. “What a hard-trying race it is,” thought Mrs. Treadwell, “and all their style, whether their own or imported, comes out in lumps just the same. ‘
Ich bin die fesche Lola
,'” she hummed, imitating Marlene Dietrich's broadest lowest style. Freytag laughed gaily, and joined in with the line about the pianola.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked. “It's my favorite of all.”

“In Berlin, when I was there last,” said Mrs. Treadwell. “I loved her best when she was being comic in her wonderful bull-contralto. How much nicer she was when she wasn't being the romantic heroine in the movies.”

He agreed, and added, “My wife collects that kind of disk, we have hundreds of them, all nationalities, all delightful low types, we love them.” He went on to say what a knack his wife had for making everybody around her comfortable, and gay too. “Life, in fact,” he said, “goes on better wherever she is.” And for a moment he was reassured by the sound of his own words. His imagination began picking up the pieces of his shattered image and putting it together again; it did look almost the same. It was true, or had been—it could still be. It was Mary herself who made the difference to his whole life, her qualities were changeless, what had possessed him to fall into a fright about their future? The rest of the world would be no worse than it had been in Germany, maybe not so bad. He was sunk in shame and contrition for his abject disloyal thoughts; he must be careful not to betray anything of his doubts to Mary, who for all her gaiety and worldly smartness was easily upset and nervous: she woke screaming in nightmares and clung to him pressing her face under his arm as if she were trying to hide inside him; but she could never tell him what had frightened her in her sleep. And there were times when she retreated from him, from life itself, and would sit nerveless and sunken for a whole day, her face hidden in her hands. “Let me alone,” she would say, tonelessly, “I must go through it. Wait.” And he had learned to wait.

Mrs. Treadwell tried without much interest to imagine his life, a moment-by-moment affair, no doubt, running along night and day between four walls, with much hearty love-making under the feather quilts, and bushels of food; with a smooth rosy calm wife on the large scale, pouring out comfort and fun like thick crusty soup into deep bowls, her light hair in a braided crown. There would be an occasional opera or theater party; frequent visits to cabarets and variety shows to hear the latest comedians and bawdy singers. Plenty of wine and beer drinking at all times, and very special celebrations on birthdays and wedding anniversaries. She pondered his manifest contentment, based no doubt on lack of imagination and the family custom of hearty English-style breakfasts; and gnawed her lamb chop lightly, finding it delicious.

For all the money she had spent, and the things she had bought, and the places she had visited, she could hardly remember ever having been comfortable. Beggars pinch me, she reminded herself, and never for any price will I be able to buy a ticket that will set me down in the place I wish to be. Maybe the place does not exist, or if it does, it's much too late to go there. And my husband preferred sleeping with any chance slut rather than with me, though I tried hard to be slut enough to please him—and he talked day and night about how he loved me! Especially he talked about it to other people. And if there is a dull man on board ship I am certain to fall into conversation with him. Yet this one looked promising enough when Jenny Brown was hanging on his words.

Freytag had been saying something, and she emerged from her warm bath of self-pity in time to catch the tag of his sentences: “… my wife is Jewish, you know—and we are leaving Germany for good—”

“But why?” asked Mrs. Treadwell.

“I suppose there is no real hurry,” said Freytag almost apologetically, “but I prefer to make my own arrangements and to leave while there is time.”

“Time?” asked Mrs. Treadwell, without thinking. “What is happening?” Then her heart jumped, for she already knew the answer and did not want to hear it spoken.

“Oh, same old signs and portents,” said Freytag, already regretting his words, for the intelligent-looking, attractive woman beside him seemed remarkably obtuse and apathetic. “Warnings of one kind or another. Nothing too serious, I suppose, but we” (We? he asked himself) “have a habit of watching the weather,” he ended, and wondered at his weakness in having spoken so carelessly to this stranger.

“Oh, you needn't tell me,” said Mrs. Treadwell hastily. “I once knew a Russian Jew who remembered a pogrom he was in when he was a child. He was six when it happened,” she told him in a light, gentle voice, “and he remembered absolutely everything—he gave terrible details—everything, except how he got away alive. That he did not know at all. Isn't it strange? He was rescued and adopted and brought to New York by some people he had never seen until the pogrom, and he does not remember anything about any of it. He was a very sane, kind, learned man, a teacher of languages, all sorts; he looked as if he had never had a trouble in his life. Don't you think that's pretty beautiful?”