Ship of Fools (20 page)

He sat down carefully in the nearest chair, breathing as lightly and deliberately as he could, holding himself together with intent stillness. He had a very ordinary kind of heart trouble and might drop dead at any moment. He felt his pulse softly with two fingers, but he knew the count already; he knew exactly what was happening, what always did, or could, happen at the slightest shock or sudden movement: he had been over this rather dull case so often in the past two years there was nothing new to say or think; above all, alas, nothing new to be done.

He had always tried to avoid diagnosing and treating himself, he made a habit of consulting doctors he believed more able than he, he wished to believe in their procedures in his case, but he had not needed to be told what his trouble was. In the end, there was nothing in medical science related in his mind to what he knew about himself as physician, and what he felt about himself as a man in danger of death from one moment to the next. He sat with the fated calm of a man caught in a thunderstorm in an open space, rather humorously counting on a scale of chance he knew to be mythical. At last, cautiously, he felt in his inside pocket and brought out the small phial of crystal drops.

… The thing he could never explain to himself about this incident was this: knowing about himself such a simple daylight fact, with his orderly plan to live as long as he could on whatever terms he could make with his disease, he had endangered his life to save the life of a cat, a kind of animal he disliked by temperament; he was devoted to dogs. Given a moment for reflection, would he have leaped so and risked the stopping of his heart to save—even his wife? He had never been required to face that emergency, and the idea was an absurdity, of course—of course the answer was clear, that question had been settled long ago, or so he hoped. He smiled inwardly, with a composed face, at the thought of the cat, that supposedly most astute and self-possessed of all animals, being seduced within an inch of his life by a tickling of his nerve endings, the pleasant crackle of his own electricity along the fur of his spine. Nothing in his celebrated instincts had warned him that those stroking hands were willing to give him a moment of his private pleasure so that they might the more easily seize him by the scruff for their own satisfaction.

Perhaps that should not be surprising. It happened to others besides cats. Love! said the Doctor, surprised that the word should have popped into his thoughts. He put it out again at once, with a proper regard for its true meaning. He had spent the best years of his life—after all, he had prepared well for it, how else should he have spent them?—patching up the deceived, the foolhardy, the willfully blinded, the lover of suffering; and the most deadly of them all, the one who knew what he was doing and what he was bringing upon himself, and yet could not for anything resist one more fling at his favorite hot thrill of the flesh—drink, drugs, sex, food—whatever his particular concupiscence might be, though it might be his own death.

His own death, or my own death, I know it is of no importance, Dr. Schumann told himself, especially my own if I have made peace with it; he touched his wrist again with two fingers and waited. He longed so deeply to live, even merely to breathe, to move within his familiar body, to stay safely within himself, a place he knew as home, he could not control the warm wave of excitement which ran all through him as if he had drunk hot spiced wine. “My God,” he said, and fixed his eyes attentively on the deep waves of the sea, turning upon each other endlessly, without thought, without feeling, moved by a power they obeyed in universal harmony. “My God, my God!”

Dr. Schumann believed in God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and the Blessed Virgin Mother of God finally, in a particularly forthright, Bavarian Catholic way; and having spoken the Name which included all the rest, he closed his eyes, gave himself over to the hands of mercy, and became soothed and quiet. Deliberately he removed his fingers from his pulse, ignored the beat of his heart upon his eardrums, and for a few seconds his whole being reconciled itself almost completely to the prospect of death, despising briefly, but with satisfaction, the cowardice of the flesh. He realized then that the drops were working, as they had worked before, as they might again and again work; that the attack, a light one, was passing over; he had escaped once more. He opened his eyes and crossed himself unobtrusively, noticing at the same time an arresting scene about twenty feet away.

La Condesa was talking to a young sailor. He was a very attractive-looking fellow, with a fine show of manly muscles in shoulders and arms, his cap sitting forward over an ingenuous sunburned face with a broad mouth and slightly snubbed nose. He stood perfectly straight with his hands at his sides, but his head was inclined away, and he looked past La Condesa with an occasional quick, uneasy glance at her. His back was to the rail, he was almost touching it, and La Condesa stood before him, talking very intently but slowly, spreading her arms as if she would bar his way. Her thumbs were turned in flat to her flattened palms, which moved in a monotonous beat; her eyes were like agates, and she swayed from side to side, stretching her neck, trying to force the boy to look her in the face. His head turned from her, far to one side and then in a slow swing back again, nodding slightly always as if in deferential agreement, but full of shame and confusion. La Condesa patted him on the arm, at which he leaped as if touched by a live electric wire-end. His hand flew to his cap in automatic salute, he stepped past her and seized his bucket and brush, and made off in a long stride, his ears a burning red, leaving La Condesa standing. After a moment she walked slowly in the same direction, her neck and spine very straight, her hands clenched at her sides.

Dr. Schumann, finding himself of at least three minds in the matter, that is, simple human curiosity at this freakish behavior, an unwilling admiration for the woman, who struck him as unusually beautiful, and that professional interest which had become second nature in him, rose and followed her at a good distance, keeping the appearance of being on a casual promenade.

Within the next hour, the Doctor had seen enough to make him very thoughtful. Wherever she saw a man alone, any sort of man so long as he was young, the Doctor observed with a good deal of moral disapproval, whether sailor or officer or passenger, she backed him into a corner, or against a wall, or rail, and somehow managed to pin him there, standing before him and talking always in the same intimate way, as if she were imparting some agonizing secret with which they would be bound to sympathize.

The effect on the several different young men was astonishingly similar. They began with polite listening expressions deepening rapidly to surprise, pained embarrassment, then to utter restlessness. Their faces would freeze in strange smiles, their eyes would begin to roam seeking a way out. At last in some pause in her uneasy flow of words, or suddenly as if signaled from afar, they would break away, no matter how.

Dr. Schumann never came near enough to hear what she was saying, but her gestures shocked him deeply, modest man that he was. She stroked her own breasts and thighs, patted the face of her listener, laid her hand upon his heart. Yet the expression of her face was grief-stricken, her words seemed grave and hopeless. “Perhaps I am not young enough to attract her eye,” Dr. Schumann thought a little acidly, “I am no doubt much too far from the cradle for her,” but he decided deliberately to put himself in her path. He had a powerful sense of time and its effects on the human organism, and he felt that man owed it to his own dignity to live with philosophy within the limitations of his own time in the world.

All other considerations aside, he reflected, there was something scandalous and perverse in older persons, especially women, who at their very best showed always disturbing signs of innate perversity, turning back to youth for sexual satisfactions: unnatural parents devouring their own young—a species of incest, in short, to put a severe word upon it.… Well, he would see. It was obvious the woman suffered from some acute form of nervous disorder; she should not be traveling alone, her situation as prisoner itself proved her irresponsibility, and she must be friendless indeed. That was the first, the most dreadful effect of even a simple “breakdown”—the loss of human love and sympathy, the literal alienation from the common life of one's fellow beings. Madness, he considered, having never separated the practice of his medical science from his theological beliefs, was the temporary triumph of Evil in the human soul; he had never seen mania assume any but ignoble shapes. Let science do what it might, there was a mystery in the destiny of man beyond fathoming except in the light of divine revelation; at the very bottom of life there is an unanswerable riddle, and it is just there, concluded Dr. Schumann, his softened eyes still observing La Condesa, just there, where man leaves off, that God begins.

La Condesa disappeared, walking rather fast, around the upper end of the deck, and Dr. Schumann turned through the bar and emerged on the opposite side intending to approach her slowly. But at sight of her, three of the Cuban students left their shuffleboard and swarmed about her. She put on a new air for them, gentle, graceful, indulgent. They fell in step with her and with each other, and fairly outdid themselves in deference and attentiveness to her. She was talking as they passed Dr. Schumann, and he caught a few words in her frail, complaining voice: “Hunted like beasts, my children, my children, my lovely ones, and they ran away to sleep in the woods … and I could only wait and suffer, suffer and wait—I could not lift a hand for them—” Her hands flew up and described a whirling ring around her head. “But they were right to revolt, they were right, my children, even if they die for it, or I must die, or be in exile.…”

The students put on faces of exaggerated melancholy. She smiled at them blindly with frowning brows. One of the students fell back a pace or two, and boldly with crassest impudence he winked at Dr. Schumann and swiftly tapped his forehead with a forefinger. He got in return a stare of such stony severity it abashed even him and he made haste to catch up with his gang. Dr. Schumann looked at his watch, drew a careful slow breath, feeling oppressed in flesh and spirit, and decided to lie down quietly for the rest of the afternoon.

Lizzi Spöckenkieker and Herr Rieber were having a very fast game of ping-pong, which had begun lightly and at once developed into a duel. They smashed the little ball back and forth over the net, crack pop pop crack, their strokes speeding up shorter, faster, their faces darkening with blood, until both grimly, silently, struck like automatons. It was a matter of life or death to win and they were smiling no longer. La Condesa with her three students who were singing “
La Cucaracha
” bore down upon them suddenly at Lizzi's back, sailed by her without a pause or glance; but Lizzi faltered, her eyes flashed aside, and Herr Rieber won, at last.

“Ah, shame!” screamed Lizzi, and running around the table with long strides she cracked the triumphant Herr Rieber over his bald head with her little paddle. “Ah, if it had not been for that crazy woman and those stupid boys—they—they—Oh why must things like this always happen to me?”

Herr Rieber ducked and sidestepped; indulgently he soothed her: “Come now, even the best of us must lose sometime. Let's not mind so much. Remember, it is the playing of the game that counts, not winning!”

“You can talk,” cried Lizzi, lifting her paddle again. Deftly he seized her wrist, brought her hand down to his mouth and imprinted a large, juicy kiss upon it. “There now,” he said, “what a quick pretty hand it is and it shall be much quicker the next time. Don't mind not winning from me. I am ping-pong champion of the
Sportsverein
in Mexico City now three times over.”

“I can believe it,” said Lizzi, calming down a little. “I am not used to losing at this game.”

Herr Rieber twinkled instantly with immense meanings. “At what game then
do
you lose?”

Lizzi shook his elbow violently. “If you talk like that I shall leave you!” she threatened, tossing her head like an unmanageable mare. “No, I shan't listen to such things or answer them.”

“Clever girl,” cried Herr Rieber, “nothing escapes you. Now suppose we take a little swim and cool off, unless of course you want to beat me
again
,” he said with infinite slyness, “at ping-pong or at any game at all—any game you choose?” He squeezed her arm with such warmth that Lizzi blushed.

“No no, let's swim,” she said, her voice rising, “ah, we must have a race!”

At six o'clock a steward brought Dr. Schumann a message from La Condesa, saying she was ill and must see him at once. A stewardess, waiting outside La Condesa's cabin, knocked rather loudly when she saw the Doctor approaching, and moved as if to follow him in.

“You may go, thank you,” said La Condesa to the stewardess, in the metallic quiet distant voice of a woman skilled in handling servants whom she hated and who hated her, and she looked a shade to the right of the stewardess as if she were already not there. The woman, trained in the same school, backed out at once with her eyes fixed on a point in air about the height of the washbasin.

The air of the cabin was thick with Turkish cigarette smoke, a mixture of heavy scents, and ether. Expensive-looking, badly worn luggage was spread about open, with shoes, evening wraps, improbable hats, wrinkled soiled fine gloves, and pale-colored unbotanical flowers of crumpled silk and shattered velvet tumbling out on all sides in a confusion past ordinary remedy. La Condesa was in bed, a faded pink satin bedgown falling off her white shoulders, barely veiled in thin violet-colored stuff. She sat up staring, opened her mouth without speaking, her clasped hands snapped apart and flew backward, forward, backward again, and she gasped at last, “You must help me, I believe I am going to die!”

Dr. Schumann summoned his calmest and most reassuring air, laid his palm on her forehead as though she were a child, and said, “I don't think so, at least not just yet.”