Ship of Fools (21 page)

She bowed her head upon her raised knees and broke into a kind of sobbing, a crying complaining voice full of incoherent words, but, Dr. Schumann observed, without tears. He sat beside her and began to remove various contrivances from the black instrument case he carried. She stopped crying and peered into its depths with instant curiosity. He took advantage of her silence to ask her some plain necessary questions about her bodily functions and she answered plainly and sensibly. When, however, he asked her to take off her bedgown and lower her nightdress over her shoulders and back, she simply sat and looked at him with a provocative flicker in her black eyes, and began to smile with sly glee; she sat quite still, smiling so, while he removed them himself. She lifted her arms to help him with the sleeves, but that was all.

He counted her pulse and listened to her heart and breathing, setting his ear firmly to her breast and shoulder blades, noting her long thin delicate bones. He flashed small white lights into her eyes, and took her blood pressure. He caused her to breathe deeply and say oh and ah several times while he peered down her throat with another little light. He tapped her ribs front and back rather sharply with two fingers, kneaded her stomach in careful exploration, fetching a slight sigh from her. “Clench your fist, please,” he told her, and took some blood in a tiny glass pipe from the thin blue vein of her inner arm. Her dilated eyes gradually became calmer, she lay back at last with hands and shoulders flat and still, gazing at him as if she were rather pleasurably hypnotized, and said in an entirely changed voice, “All these charming attentions are making me deliciously sleepy, dear Doctor. Perhaps I only needed a human touch after all those interrogations and those military police. They are very heavy-handed.”

She breathed out lightly with her mouth open, and the smell of ether on her breath was very strong. The Doctor leaned towards her to speak, concealing his moral disgust at the discovery he had made in the first few seconds of the interview.

“You don't need stimulants,” he said gravely, taking one of her wrists and holding it lightly, “nor narcotics, either. Whatever you may need,” he said, his forehead gathering in a frown, “it is not ether. What a debased sort of habit for a woman like you! Why do you waste my time calling for me? So far as I am able to see, you are not sick at all,” he told her, severely; “you are in enviably good condition, organically quite sound. How old are you?”

“Old enough as you can see,” she said. “Much too old.”

“Perhaps fifty?”

“When you guess so well,” she said, “you deserve to be told you are right. Fifty, then.”

“That does not seem so great an age to me now,” said Dr. Schumann. “I should be pleased enough to be fifty again.”

“Ah, I would not be a day younger for anything. Believe me, there is not one day of my dreadful life I would live again … or so I think now. What shall I do? Where shall I go? What is to become of me? I am exiled,” she said, sitting up again, and beginning to weave and sway, “my husband is dead … my husband, thank God, is dead,” she repeated without levity, “but my two sons, my children, they are fugitives somewhere—here, now, while we are here talking comfortably, sheltered in this mean ship, but sheltered! my sons are … where do they sleep at night, who befriends them, who gives them food, where are they—when shall I see them again? My house was burned too,” she went on in a lifeless voice as if she were reading a dull page aloud, “and my beastly servants all ran away, looting as they went—money, silver, clothes, furs, anything, whatever they had coveted; they scattered out of the gates like the cattle they are. Every face I saw then was the face of someone who no longer regarded me as a human being.…” Her hands began to dance, her lips drew back over her teeth, she struggled to get out of bed and knocked the instrument case to the floor.

“Wait,” said Dr. Schumann. He rose, picked up the black case, and began to prepare a small hypodermic needle. She became silent at once and watched him with her air of easily distracted attention. “This for tonight,” he explained, “only. And you must not take any more ether. Where do you hide it? I shall take it away with me.”

She motioned towards one of the sprawling pieces of luggage. “It is all there somewhere.”

He pinched up the flesh of her arm, and at the slight stab of the needle she shuddered and said, “Ah, how delicious. How I love drugs, any kind of drug, to wake me or to make me sleep, I adore them all. You should praise me a little, because I do not, ever, take all the kinds of drug I should like. It would be so easy, so easy …”

She dropped back among the pillows, and Dr. Schumann rummaged carefully among the disorder of the suitcase, bringing up a flask of ether.

“Is this all?” he asked. “I expect you to tell me the truth.”

She prolonged her silence, waiting to be cajoled, but he said nothing more. He went over to the washbasin and emptied the flask. The fumes rose in his face and he coughed. “You have taken too many drugs of one kind and another,” he said, “say what you please.”

“Don't scold,” she said, “you have not told me what is to become of me, with or without them.”

“With your good health,” said Dr. Schumann, “I could wish you a sufficient settled income and some reconciliation with society. And nothing more could happen to you.”

“How dull,” she said, blankly.

“Maybe,” said Dr. Schumann, “for one of such specialized tastes.”

“Here is the difference between you and me. I do not intend to reconcile myself with a society I despise. Yet it was not I who quarreled with society, but my sons—I was content to despise it. It was my sons who turned me out into this world.… Look, I have such good health as you say. But no income at all. A prisoner on her way to a dreary island in the Canaries …”

“I do not find Santa Cruz de Tenerife so bad,” said the Doctor, comfortingly.

“You have not been deported there,” said La Condesa. “Cuba, God knows, is dull enough, but Santa Cruz! No, don't try to console me.… You know what? You sound to me like a man with money in the bank, entire personal freedom, all you want—and your health is perhaps not so good? How right am I?”

“Right enough,” said Dr. Schumann, sitting beside her again. “Where is the rest of the ether?”

“You can see how useless, how unkind really, it will be for you to give me good advice,” she said, stroking his hand that lay on his knee near her. “But don't stop giving it. Don't go away. I love your good advice, I love to hear you scold and see you frown straight into my eyes, as if you meant it just for me—as if you cared what happened to me. I should like being dull for a little while. I promise to stop taking ether, at least for this voyage. I do this for you, not for myself. I know I will begin again afterward.… I tried everything, anything at all, in the end ether seemed best, vulgar as you seem to think it! A lovely excitement without pain. Have you ever taken it?”

“No.”

“You must try it sometime,” she said, in a drowned voice. “The other flask is in the red leather dressing case.”

“It is time for you to sleep,” said Dr. Schumann, and he laid her hand back at her side. “I shall send the stewardess now, and I shall see you again tomorrow.”

“What is this heavenly drug I have now?” asked La Condesa, her eyes closing slowly. “I don't recognize it; is it something new?”

Dr. Schumann gave a short laugh, at which she opened her eyes shining with delight upon him. “Do you expect me to tell you?” he asked, as if he were speaking to an obstinate child.

“You laughed,” she said, tenderly, “I never heard you laugh before! But never mind, I'll try to guess this drug, or maybe you will give it to me again.… I adore you,” she said, “you are such a preposterous good moral dull ridiculous man, but charming, charming!”

Her eyes closed again, she lifted both hands and slowly stroked her small breasts upward, and her expression, especially about the mouth, quite startled Dr. Schumann. He shook her shoulder with careful violence. “Look at me,” he said sternly, “stop that nonsense!” Her hands fell back and her face turned to one side. He stood almost holding his breath watching her sink into sleep as into the bottomless pit—he touched her pulse lightly, and almost feared to leave her. He gathered up his black case and turned away resolutely, stopped himself from saying “Good night,” and opened the door.

The dank air of the passageway struck upon him as a fresh breeze after the fetid sweetness and rot of the cabin. He instructed the waiting stewardess and returned to his quarters, feeling unpleasantly exhausted and freshly apprehensive about his own condition. He lay down with his rosary in his fingers, and began to invite sleep, darkness, silence, that little truce of God between living and dying; he put out of mind, with deliberate intention to forget forever, the last words of that abandoned lost creature; nettles, poisoned barbs, fish-hooks, her words clawed at his mind with the terrible malignance of the devil-possessed, the soul estranged from its kind.

On the second evening out from Havana, with twenty-odd days to go, the ship's commissary began doling out the modest pastimes and amusements of the voyage in the attempt to make life on shipboard resemble a perpetual children's party on land. Dinner was “gala,” so the dinner card read, and fresh flowers appeared on every table. Beside every plate were small gilded paper snappers with noise-making machines inside, and comic paper hats for everybody. Several of the women wore dinner gowns; beer foamed in great steins; waiters twirled bottles of Rhine wine in ice pails, with a flourish.

Herr Glocken and William Denny, sitting together, put on their clownish hats first, grinned around vaguely and received a vague grin or two in return. Hats then bloomed on many heads; small colored balloons floated about over tables, tossed from hand to hand, now and again exploding to the noise of rattles and tin whistles. The band struck up “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” and continued with Strauss waltzes to the end. Dinner was going to be treated as a social event, so the voyagers seemed to agree, even if on the most provisional terms. There was a great deal of laughter and calling out of toasts between tables, and the Spanish dancing troupe leaned over and lifted their glasses to the Captain, who responded with a stony face but an elegant bow, raising his own in acknowledgment, setting it down again and seeming to put the whole thing out of mind.

Herr Baumgartner had got a false beard with his hat, and he sent two small children at the next table almost into fits of joy with his trick of making it waggle up and down, like a goat's beard. The children, a boy of five and a girl of three, were peaceably waiting for food with their parents, Cubans who had embarked at Havana. Hans, the Baumgartners' timid child, was enchanted with these children, such a change from Ric and Rac, who could terrorize him with just a glance. He had been hanging shyly around these new passengers without daring to speak, but now, by means of his amusing father, he saw his chance to make friends with them.

Herr Baumgartner quite outdid himself with fascinating devices, and the children squealed and giggled and peeped through their fingers most flatteringly. Hans made himself laugh louder and longer than he wanted, to bring himself to their attention. “Eat your dinner, though, Hans,” said his mother after a while, “and we shall play some more afterwards.”

Her husband disregarded this hint. He pushed the beard up to the middle of his forehead, parted it like a curtain and said “Boo!” The children screeched with delight and the parents smiled indulgently. Herr Baumgartner pulled the beard down under his chin and pushed the paper hat far back on his head. The children still laughed. Frau Baumgartner took a morsel of food and set about cutting up the roast duck on Hans's plate. She did not altogether trust his table manners in public for such things. Nearly eight years old and yet so awkward with his knife and fork—it made her feel that she was not a good mother. “Eat while it's hot,” she told him. Observing her husband uneasily, she reflected that his great weakness was a lack of the sense of propriety, or the limits of things. He simply never knew when to stop—drinking, making faces, anything. Her heart sank as she perceived that now in a split second he would go too far, and he did. He pushed the beard up under his eyes, dragged his hat forward, agitated the beard fiercely, growled like a lion, maybe, or a bear, and it was too much. Hans, his mouth half-open to receive food, stopped and smiled uncertainly; the other little boy laughed in a quavering artificial tone; but the baby girl was too young to pretend anything, and she gazed in growing terror, then burst into tears. Lamentably she wept “
Ay, ay, ay
,” her flooded eyes fixed unbelievingly on the sight that had been so jolly suddenly turned dreadful without warning. The young mother, with a quick sharp exclamation at Herr Baumgartner, took the child on her lap and pressed the crumpled face against her breast; the young father leaned forward to lay a tender hand upon his frightened baby.

Frau Baumgartner said, “Oh, I am so sorry,” and her tone, her manner, shut out her husband. Her eyes signaled to the other woman, You see how it is, please do not blame me … as woman to woman, as a mother who knows all that can happen, I beg of you.…

The young mother gave her back the guarded look of an indifferent stranger, refused confidences, rejected implied kinship of feeling, and managed a deprecating small smile and nod as if to say, This is nothing—and thinking all too clearly, Except perhaps a little stupid, and what trouble you are making for us!

Herr Baumgartner swept the hat and beard from him, cast it utterly away to the floor like a man in a play, his face tormented with remorse. “Oh dear sir!” he addressed the father in German, “I meant only to amuse the little ones.” The young father nodded, made a light gesture of waving away all misunderstandings, then exchanged a troubled glance with his wife, for they knew no German. Herr Baumgartner would have persisted, in Spanish, but his wife halted him. “Don't,” she said, “don't. You have said and done enough. They understand perfectly, and if they choose to pretend they don't at least please keep your dignity.”