Ship of Fools (70 page)

“They were certainly wrong to bash his head in,” he said, carefully, “but I'm not so sure he deserves much sympathy. There must be something wrong with a fellow who will make a row at a funeral, and after all, of a poor workingman like himself. But you'd think he'd want to pay a little respect to the dead, wouldn't you—”

“Always the same,” groaned Hansen, seizing the top of his hair with both hands for a moment, “respect for the dead, never for the living!”

“Let's go up and have a drink,” suggested Freytag as a way out.

Hansen dropped his hands and shook his head. “I don't want a drink,” he said, as self-centered and frank as a five-year-old. Freytag heaved a deep breath as he stepped outside, and shook his shoulders as if the Old Man of the Sea were clinging to them.

Mrs. Treadwell, her narrow hand on the rail, descending the stairs towards the dining salon, observed critically her reflection in the broad looking glass on the landing. Her gilded sandals exposed her toes with bright red varnished nails. Quite a good figure, she decided again, if a little on the flat side, and not such a bad head. She wished there were not those lines from nose to mouth, deeper on the right side, or that small shadow of a fold under the chin. With those away she would have nothing to worry about for a long time; but they were there, and to stay and to grow deeper, and to be joined by other shadows and folds and lines marking every step of the long solitary journey towards old age. Forty-six is the second awkward age. Which would turn out worse, to be fourteen, not child, not woman; or as she was now, not young, not old? What is expected of me now, I wonder, she asked herself as she had done at fourteen, almost in the same bewilderment. I still dance as well as I did, still ride, still swim, still like doing most of the young things I did like—still, still—What a terrible word. She had dressed herself carefully for a possible evening of a kind of enjoyment; she longed to be merry and light hearted indeed, but how could she be since there was no one to be lighthearted with? A pink-faced young officer or two would spin her around sedately a few times at arm's length, but she loved dancing so much a dull partner was sometimes better than none. I wish one of those good-looking gigolos would ask me to dance, but of course none of them will, the little pests. They'll go on dancing and quarreling and making love to their sluttish girls—they're young, at least, and that's what's wanted. With a thin line forming between her eyebrows, a new one she had first noticed a few days before, she paused before the looking glass on the landing and examined her face sharply under the harsh light. It was true, she was old, she had not been young for years and she had not known it, nor feared it, nor even thought of it; now seeing herself clearly and without mercy, the way others must see her, it was bitterly obvious and impossible to believe. Her age seemed something temporary, outside of herself, a garment she could put off at will, a mask painted on her face that she could by some simple magic wash away at any moment in her bath. Oh dear God, I'll be paying gigolos to sit with me in night clubs if I don't take care. Soon there won't be anybody left of my charming friends to send me flowers and dance with me and take me to the theater. I'll be sitting by myself at corner tables or on terraces and a creature with waved hair and a border-line eye will come smirking up: “Dear Madame, will you be pleased to dance?” and I—no, I'll never, never never! I'm going to grow old gracefully as they used to warn me I must—in those days when I knew I was going to be young forever—with a fine false front of dignity. Nobody is going to suspect that I am that unfortunate girl who couldn't grow up, that under my sober old-lady skin I am hiding carefully my sixteen-year-old heart. That's going to be my own dreary business. The first thing I must do in Paris is to get everything new and more suitable to my years. Her thin light pleated gown, rose-red, with a wide gilded leather belt, falling smoothly from her bare shoulders over her sharp little pointed breasts neatly sustained by a harness of lace—all very pretty, but none of it matched her face, she noticed for the first time. Should I wear more black, I wonder? And if I painted my toenails green, would anybody really care?

Such a profound melancholy fell upon her spirits at this point, she had half a mind to turn back and change to an ordinary gown. David Scott, who had been following her, overtook her and stopped to speak, and to gaze at her with that pleased, approving glint which she knew well in the eye of a man and never tired of seeing. “You are looking wonderful,” he said, in exactly the right tone; and this was so extraordinary, coming from him, Mrs. Treadwell took his arm and smiled at him with great confidence and charm. “You are simply a dear to say so,” she told him and they walked on together. She noticed that his black knitted tie was a little crooked, his linen suit slightly rumpled, but no matter. She rested her fingertips on his forearm and kept step with him, reassured and consoled by his attractive unequivocal male presence.

“I thought, though,” said David, “we had all agreed to ignore this party.”

“Well, it is a party, after all,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “no matter how it happened. I mean to dance a little, I should like to drink champagne, and I shan't mind in the least pretending that I feel a little better than I do—at least, now. Something even halfway pleasant, or just funny, you know? absurd—may happen. Think of those slummy dancers giving a party for anybody! Suppose they did steal the prizes and pick pockets besides? I didn't give them a penny, and neither did you. Why should we miss the show, if there is going to be one?”

“Oh, they'll get away with it,” said David. “They always do.”

“I get so tired of moral bookkeeping,” said Mrs. Treadwell, gently. “Who are They? Why does it concern me what They do?”

David, chilled to the marrow at this hateful indifference, tightened his arm and drew it to his side impulsively. She lifted her fingers from his sleeve at once and dropped her hand to her side, and said, “For me
They
are just Others who bore me, or behave stupidly to me—anything of that kind. These Spaniards—what do I care what they did, or what they may do? They dance well, they are good-looking in their savage unkempt style, let them be amusing at least! What else are they good for? But even they make it sound dull with their horrid little unkind notices about people.…”

“It's a form of blackmail,” said David, “and it nearly always works.” He glanced at Mrs. Treadwell, whose attention had wandered. They were coming into the crowd entering the dining room, and she nodded lightly in several directions—to Freytag, who nodded back without smiling; to the young Cuban pair with their two children; to the bride and groom, who did smile; to the purser, who beamed at her with his broadest smirk; to anybody and everybody, David noticed, without appearing really to see anyone. She behaved in fact like Jenny, except that Jenny was looking for something, a response of some kind, almost any kind at all, always either a little too hard or too soft, with no standards that he could understand or believe in. An intense resentment aganst Jenny rose in him when he saw her at work trying to undermine him, to break down by any means his whole life of resistance to life itself—to whatever environment or human society he found himself in. He preferred Mrs. Treadwell's unpretentious rather graceful lack of moral sense to Jenny's restless seeking outlaw nature trying so hard to attach itself at any or at all points to the human beings nearest her: no matter who. It was just that he could not endure promiscuity. He almost forgot the woman beside him in the familiar hatred of Jenny which moved all through him in his blood; then he saw her standing near the wall below, waiting for him, looking upward, very beautiful in one of her plain white frocks that looked well at any time of day. She had the severity and simplicity of a small marble figure, smooth and harmonious from head to foot, no rouge or powder visible, no varnished nails, fresh and sweet as a field of roses: she was smiling at him, and he smiled back, with such a deep intake of breath that Mrs. Treadwell, glancing down, nodded to Jenny, then turned back to David. The whiteness and tightness of his face and the blaze of his eyes astonished her. “There she is,” he said, and with the barest bob of his head to Mrs. Treadwell, he left her and leaped down the stairs while even then Jenny was coming towards him.

Herr Rieber had not for a moment given up his notion that he was still going to find ways and means to seduce Lizzi successfully and thoroughly. “Sometime, someday, somewhere, somehow,” he sang to himself silently the refrain of his favorite popular song; but no, it must be done on the boat, tonight or never. Once he set foot in Bremerhaven there would not be a moment to spare; he was in fact to be met at the pier by several of his employees. He would be able to do no more than bid Lizzi the most amiable of farewells—amiable but formal, of course, and final—as he put her on the motor coach for Bremen. Since that unfortunate evening of the dog, Bébé, and all the confusion that followed, he had been able only once to entice Lizzi to the boat deck again; and that time she had been all modesty and reserve, refusing to allow him even to touch her in any way that mattered, until at last he had thought of a new strategy—that of humility and childish gentleness. He laid his head in her lap and called her his little lamb. She stroked his brow a few times, as if she were thinking of something else. As indeed she was. She was wondering why, in all this whirligig, Herr Rieber had never once mentioned marriage. Not that she wished to marry him—far from it. For a permanent settlement, and she had resolved that her next settlement should be permanent, wedlock locked and double-locked, secured with the iron bolts of premarital financial contracts, she looked, materially speaking, considerably higher than Herr Rieber. Still, it would never do to let any man run away with a situation, whatever it was; it must be clearly understood always—and not just by implications, hints, threats, glances, by mute understandings, but plainly in so many words—that she was a woman of the marriageable kind, and any amorous frolics with her were only preliminary to a possible march to the altar. Every other man she had known unfailingly pronounced the magic word “marriage” before ever he got into bed with her, no matter what came of it in fact. This one had not, and until he did, well! so far and no further.

Herr Rieber had not mentioned marriage to her, much as he might have liked, for the simplest reason in the world—he had a wife from whom he was legally separated, who refused to divorce him, was blameless herself in any lawful sense so that he could not divorce her. He was supporting her and three children, a family of four who detested him and whom he detested, who would hang on him leeching his blood for life. Oh what had he done to merit such a fate? Yet there it was, and Lizzi must never learn of his embarrassing predicament; it would be an intolerable affront to his pride. Besides, he was certain she would never understand, and why should she? Ah, the fine tall creature who moved like a good racing mare, oh, for a nice soft bed in a quiet hotel in Bremen even for a night and a day before he must go on. No such hope. It must be here and now, during the party those impudent guttersnipe Spaniards were so unaccountably giving “in honor of our Captain”—honor, indeed!

He went on a tour of the boat deck, selected a likely spot, indulged again in his day dream that after plenty of champagne and tender words, after long waltzing to soft music on deck, she would be melted and oozing like hot cheese on toast. He would then persuade her to take a walk in the beautiful soft night—the nights were growing a little cooler and windier—and the deed could be done in a twinkling, while everybody else was dancing on the lower deck or drinking in the bar. Such was his eagerness by now he even feared an unmanly incontinence at the great moment, but even the thought was too great a shame to face. In his imagination it all was as easy and uninterrupted and blissful as the happy ending in a child's story.

He had scrubbed and polished himself until he appeared to be lacquered, and with his playful mood at top peak he was wearing a white baby bib, and a frilled baby cap sitting on his bald head with strings tied under the chin. Leaving a solid wake of Maria Farina cologne, straight as a homing pigeon he bored his way through the crowd of confused dinner guests looking for places to sit, for the seating arrangements had all been changed about, with the usual place cards but no one knew where to look for his own. Stewards hovered being helpful and people followed them about blindly.

The one thing certain, common knowledge to all, was that the Spanish company were to be seated at the Captain's table, and none of his original guests went near it. Herr Rieber lowered his head and charged through a group and took Lizzi by the elbow, who screamed with delight at his baby cap. She was wearing a long green lace gown and a small green ribbon eye-mask, and wanted to know at the top of her voice however he had managed to recognize her! Herr Rieber pushed her firmly towards a table for two under a porthole. “We'll sit here, no matter what!” he cried recklessly and burst into song in a high tenor: “Sometime, someday …!”

“Somewhere, somehow!” Lizzi joined in, off key two tones above him. They bent towards each other until their noses almost touched and sang the whole chorus into each other's mouth. “Bring champagne instantly,” he commanded the nearest steward, drawing out a chair for Lizzi himself. “At your service,
mein Herr
,” said the steward, who did not belong at that table. He disappeared at once and did not return.

“Champagne, champagne!” shouted Herr Rieber into the air. “We want champagne!”

“Sometime, someday,” sang Lizzi, and they were both overcome with enjoyment of her wit. They noticed that the Baumgartners, she in Bavarian peasant costume, he with his chalked clown face with false nose and movable whiskers, were observing them with particularly unfestive, censorious faces, their mouths prim and down at the corners, eyes glancing sidelong. The Cuban medical students came leaping in a line singing “
La Cucaracha
,” all wearing matelots and caps with red pompoms. They rushed upon their own table as if taking it by storm, and were prepared to defend it from a siege. The bride and groom, dressed simply as usual, went quietly to their own table, removed the cards and placed them on the table next to them, and sat smiling gently at each other. They opened the small packets beside their plates, unfolded the gilded paper hats and the noise-making devices and laid them aside. A bottle of wine was set before them, and they touched glasses before they drank.