Ship of Fools (16 page)

Freytag offered her a cigarette. “Would you like to walk a little?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose it is time to start tramping around the deck saying ‘
Grüss Gott
' to everybody.”

“It's a pleasant Christian greeting,” said Freytag amiably. “But I like better the way the country Indians say ‘
Adios
.' Still,” he said, nodding slightly towards a group of the Spanish company strolling by, “I'm afraid it wouldn't be suitable for those.”

“They're really tough, aren't they? An
Adios
would bounce off them like a rubber ball on a sidewalk.”

“They're attractive-looking, though,” said Freytag, “and perhaps a little dangerous.”

“They are exactly as dangerous as we allow them to be,” said Jenny; “why flatter them? Really all we need to do is watch our pocketbooks. Otherwise they are bores, I think—all that dingy picturesqueness. Such weather,” she remarked, “isn't it merry?” and stared upward with a melancholy face.

They walked slowly, nodding to various passing figures by now more or less recognizable on fiftieth sight. They exchanged amused glances when they saw Arne Hansen walking with big Elsa, her small parents following half a dozen steps behind with tactful feet and discreet faces. Elsa wore an absurd white beret much too small, and she was stiff with shyness. Hansen was silent, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Jenny and Freytag fell into a kind of half-confidential talk about themselves with the ease of travelers who hardly expect to know each other better; that near-candor which comes of the possibility of future indifference. German as he was, he told her, he had a great deal of English and Scottish in him, also Hungarian, on his Austrian grandmother's side. That branch of the family had been reckless marriers, the more farfetched the match, the better. Beyond that, God knows what—it seemed better not to inquire. In turn, Jenny recited her mixed ancestry of which she was rather proud: “Western broth,” she said. “No Tartar, no Jew, no Chinese, no Bantu, just the old home mixture: Dutch, Scotch-Irish-English-Welsh, French and one great-great-grandmother with a Spanish name who was just the same half-Irish—no Hungarian even,” she told him, “and above all no German. No German at all.”

He wanted to know how, among so many nations, all blood-cousins as they were, she could be so certain—did she dislike Germans? Because of that beastly war? That had been everybody's fault, everybody had suffered, the Germans most of all; if the Americans had taken the part of Germany in that war, the whole future of the world would have been changed for the better! His eyes kindled, he grew quite eloquent. Jenny smiled a little: no matter whose fault it was, she was glad her country had not gone with the Germans. But at once she had a twinge of conscience, and said, “No, not even the war.” She had, she told him, no prejudices of any kind. She had been partly brought up by her grandmother and grandfather, her father's parents, for her mother had died young: and these grandparents were old-fashioned eighteenth-century rationalists, just simple descendants of Diderot and d'Alembert, her grandfather used to say; and to them nothing could have been more vulgar and unenlightened than even the faintest shade of disapproval of anything or anybody on grounds of nationality or religion. All this was concerned with manners as related to morals. “Negroes came to the back door, of course,” said Jenny, “and I never saw a Red Indian or even a Hindu at our dinner table, and all sorts of persons were excluded for this and that reason, mostly on the grounds that they were underbred, or bores; but this was mere observance of local custom, they told me, or they were exercising their natural right to choose their own society—both an important part of the manners of good breeding. Oh,” said Jenny, “what a museum piece of an upbringing it was! Yet I loved it, I believed every word of it, I still do … so I've never caught up with my generation. I'm bogged down in a whole set of ideal precepts and nowhere to practice them! My radical friends look upon me as a youthful fossil. They can pronounce ‘lady' as if it were an indecent word; and one of them said, ‘Listen to the way she pronounces “Chantilly”—wouldn't you
know?
'”

“How did you come to pick up radical friends?” asked Freytag. “The only ones I ever saw had dirty fingernails and needed haircuts, and they cadged cigarettes from anybody and then stubbed them out in their coffee cups. Do your radical friends behave like that?”

“Some of them,” said Jenny, rather reluctantly, “but they some of them have very interesting minds.”

“They'd better,” said Freytag. “Is your friend Mr. Scott a radical?”

“Sometimes,” said Jenny, “for the sake of the argument. It all depends on which side the other person takes.”

Freytag laughed at this and Jenny joined in a few notes. After a moment's silence he spoke of his wife, as he always did sooner or later in any conversation. He described her coloring, very dear to his taste: wheat blonde, rosy-faced, true Rhine-maiden sort of girl; and told again her charming name. “Mary Champagne,” he said, fondly. “I think I fell in love first with her name,” he said. It came out this time that she selected his clothes and did rather better for him than he could do for himself, he believed; and he looked perfectly satisfied with himself. In another sort of person, Jenny decided, all this could be a horrid complacency. She told him she thought it took a special kind of self-confidence for a woman to choose a man's neckties for him. She herself would never dare. He thought it depended entirely on the man.

“I have a fantastic respect for my wife's taste and judgment in everything, or nearly,” he said. There was another vacant pause while Jenny brooded on David's dull black knitted strings. David's kind of conceit was really much worse than Freytag's kind, which had a little warmth and generosity in it: poor David! sitting in himself like a hermit in a cave, peering out, determined not to share the parings of his nails with
any
body.

“My wife is visiting her mother in Mannheim,” said Freytag. “I am going to bring them both back with me to Mexico. We have decided to live there.”

His air of satisfaction and repose in happiness deepened until it was a positive radiation, like fine health or the mysterious enchantment of beauty. Jenny felt that his pleasure in himself was not vanity, after all, but came of something in his state of being: something he possessed, something he had found or that had been given to him. He is lucky in some way, she thought; lucky, and he knows it. As they rounded the bow, she leaned toward him slightly, gaunt and empty and famished, to breathe in the air of good fortune.

The bride and groom were sitting stretched at ease in their chairs. She was a beautiful creature, with the grace and silence and naturalness of a fine shy wild animal. The other passengers glanced at them quickly whenever they appeared, glanced away again. Dazed and smiling, the bride sat or walked all day with her husband, her narrow curved hand lying loosely in his. He was, Jenny thought, a quietly merry person; she liked his witty, irregular features, thin and quick; he would be the intelligent one of the two, with the undisputed moral upper hand from the beginning.

“Aren't they lovely together, really?” said Jenny, and hoped there was no forlorn envy in her voice. “Something to look at, aren't they?”

“All brides should look like that,” said Freytag. “She has just the right look, somehow. I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it when I see it. Eden just after the Fall. That little interval between the Fall and the driving out by that tricky jealous vengeful old God,” he said. “Anyone who doesn't know that, once in a lifetime, once anyway—and maybe it doesn't happen oftener—is unlucky, no matter what else good may happen to him.”

“I suppose so,” said Jenny, dryly.

“You will call that German sentimentality,” he said, and smiled as if he were smiling to himself about something he knew that pleased him, something he need not tell anyone.

“I haven't the faintest notion what it is,” said Jenny, “but it sounds very attractive.” Her tone did not match her words, and her answer struck him unpleasantly as having a flinty little edge on it. He felt again that odd contraction of dislike for her he had felt when he first saw her, before they had even spoken to each other. He put the width of another step between them and said nothing.

Jenny saw this and was curiously chilled by it. You are perhaps purposely making yourself very attractive with this light conversation about the Fall, as if you know something you could teach me that I need badly to learn. Maybe I shall fall in love with you, maybe I am in love with you already, the way I fall in love: always with utter strangers and as if I were going under water, and I'll fall out again as if I were falling off a cliff. I'm glad I don't know anything about you, except that you have the kind of looks I like—one kind, anyway—and that you are married and anxious for me to be sure that you love your wife. Don't insist—I am happy to believe you. And if I knew you better I might not like you at all—in fact I don't even like you now. And I can tell
you
now that you aren't ever going to like me—you will hate me in fact. There would be something about the whole thing I shouldn't be able to put up with at all. It doesn't matter what it might be, and I can't even imagine what it is.… If we could sleep together without too much trouble and lose ourselves together for a little while, I'd be easy again, I'd be able to see better. It's only—how did it happen? I'm just starved and frozen out; my man won't share with me, he wants everything to himself. What is that Spanish saying—“Is this bread good or is it my hunger?” And what's the other—“What dog will refuse meat that is thrown to him?” But that one of course will be for you.

They had come round to her chair again. “I'll stop here,” she told him, and no longer troubled herself to pretend any interest in his company. He could not consent to be dismissed so offhandedly.

“Maybe you would like your morning beer,” he offered. “I'm quite ready for mine.” She shook her head with a shade of a grimace of distaste, without looking at him. He turned away instantly and within three steps' distance had joined up with the Huttens and Bébé, who seemed all three delighted to see him. Jenny knew they would sit down comfortably over their big steins together with nothing in particular to explain or conceal; each well nourished and self-sufficing on his own peculiar food. They would loll cool and at ease, with no starved animal sitting by feeding on the wind of a daydream, with a sorry monologue gnawing away silently in the brain; or talking nonsense aloud at a tangent—a stranger, a real death's-head, peering out at them through natural-enough-looking flesh.

She took up her drawing and went on with it. Her attention flickered away from what her fingers attempted on the page, and back and away, while she worried along in monotonous confusion and indecision, about Europe, about David—what a rotten sense of proportion! A man and a continent simply can't have the same importance, or not the same kind, or they shouldn't have—that's getting entirely the wrong kind of things mixed up, she decided, enslaved as she was to her notions of what life
should
be, her wish to shape, to direct, to make of it what she wished it to be; and if she let David spoil Europe for her, she must be even a greater fool than she had feared. Leaning back in her chair and dropping her papers into her lap, dry-eyed and staring up into the pure blue light of a day fit for the joy of angels, she gave way and despaired quietly and awfully.

It was very hard to admit to herself that she was a fool, but everything in reason pointed to that fact. Time to put on the hair shirt, her guardian demon prompted her. Time to say your prayers. Don't be a lost soul, it's so stupid, such a dull occupation. Jenny answered herself, for her colloquies with this other self took place with real words and a face-to-face encounter: I'm not lost, I never have been, I never will be, unless this is being lost here and now. No, I'm not lost. I can't get out of it that easily. It's only I don't know just how I came here or how I'm going to get out again, but I know where I am all right! Rehearsing for blowing bubbles through boiling pitch later on! It's the wrong place altogether, I never meant to be here, and I believed I was on my way somewhere else altogether different—maybe there never was any such place, or anyway, not for me. Never mind, my girl, pull yourself together—we aren't going to stay here.

She examined the drawings she had just made—had, unfinished, half-made, half-seen, not felt at all. All her feeling had gone into self-indulgence, self-pity, and she had done nothing but dull hard lines, enclosing perfect emptiness. What nonsense! Her dishonest remark to Freytag about her drawing being a form of solitaire rounded on her and became true with crushing suddenness.

In self-defense she abandoned herself to fury and hatred against David. She crumpled her drawings in both fists cruelly as if they were live things and she could hear them scream, went swiftly to the rail and tossed them overboard and turned away without another glance at them. Black and white—no more of that for her. She would draw directly on the canvas with brush and colors as she had done before, and damn David's advice. I sold out, she said, for a mess of pottage and I didn't even get that. Well, good God, can you imagine? I was letting that fellow tell me how to paint. But not for long, remember.

She stretched out in her chair and pulled her dark blue scarf over her eyes to shut out the hateful day, but for a good while a part of her unhappy guilty mind went on with its dialogue with another part. She explained and justified her mistakes, her hopeless errors, as well as she could to her indwelling enemy, who answered her always with the same cold unbelief, the same finality, saying still, No that won't quite do either. You know what you are doing, you know what is going on, how it must end—come out with it, why did you choose this particular kind of sordid mess? Speak up, woman, let's have the truth for once, if you think you can finally admit what it is.… The nagging voice went on, oafish and devilish at once, until at last, wearied out with self-torture, Jenny turned her face aside and fell asleep heavily, with sick eyelids twitching under the scarf when it moved lightly in the wind; her terror followed her in her sleep and gave her bad dreams and would not forgive her for anything or let her rest for a moment.