Ship of Fools (25 page)

Freytag was silent for so long that she turned her amiable smile, somewhat brighter than usual, upon him. He was picking at his thumbnail and looking as if he had got a blow over the head. “I shouldn't have tried to talk about it,” he said, with some underlying resentment, “I should never say anything about it.”

“Perhaps you are right,” said Mrs. Treadwell, thinking, What do you expect of me? What can I do? She moved to put her tray aside. He took it from her and set it on the deck beside his own. They rose.

“That was lovely, having breakfast here,” she told him, “it was wonderful of you to think of it.” “Charmed, I am sure,” said Freytag, in a rather stagy manner. Mrs. Treadwell moved away again, from the threat of human nearness, of feeling. If she stayed to listen, she knew she would weaken little by little, she would warm up in spite of herself, perhaps in the end identify herself with the other, take on his griefs and wrongs, and if it came to that, feel finally guilty as if she herself had caused them; yes, and he would believe it too, and blame her freely. It had happened too often, could she not learn at last? All of it was no good, neither for confidant nor listener. There was no cure, no comfort, tears change nothing and words can never get at the truth. No, don't tell me any more about yourself, I am not listening, you cannot force my attention. I don't want to know you, and I will not know you. Don't try to come nearer.

Through David's blurred eyes and rather seedy morale, Jenny had seemed so fresh and fair at the bulletin board before breakfast, and her manner to him had been so misleadingly sweet, his anger against her began to simmer again; it was indecent for her to look and behave like that after what had happened, whatever
had
happened, last night. Jenny for her part was in a fine state of mind, and for a strange reason. She had wakened early out of a nightmare, and even after her eyes were open she was holding her breast in horror, afraid to take her hands away because of the blood on them. Then her brain cleared and the vision dispersed like smoke, she was able to explain quite logically the whole train of her dream and its connecting links. Of course. The night before, David had stayed in the bar until he was glassy-eyed drunk, then had followed her and Freytag about, skulking along very like a private detective collecting evidence for the suspicious husband. Freytag had seen it all too soon, but pretended not to notice. They danced again, and hoped to escape, but David had pushed in between them and seized her by the arm with a foolish mean look on his face. After trying to free herself, she gave way and went with David, who kept his hard clutch on her arm. She had seen at a distance that he was utterly drunk; he would be stubborn, silent, unmanageable, a lunatic in fact; at such times she was afraid of him; it was best to walk along with him and work her way towards his cabin, where she could manage to leave him. She realized very soon that his intentions were otherwise. He was leaning upon her shoulder and regarding her with a glazed, wandering, but lustful eye, and their direction was towards her cabin, not his. She turned cold with anger and disgust; at the door, she wrenched her arm free, taking him by surprise, swung through and turned instantly to close it in his face. He braced against the panel with his shoulder, and she strained with all her strength on the other side. He stopped instantly when Elsa, who had started up in terror, cried out, “Who is it? What are you doing here?” The door closed then and Jenny slipped the bolt.

“Don't be nervous,” she said, her voice shaking. “He is only drunk and a little confused. He forgot you were here.”

Oddly enough, Jenny thought, Elsa connected the sordid little episode somehow with love. She wanted to talk about love. She confessed she was afraid she might fall in love—she drooled the word rather, Jenny noticed, which is perhaps the right way—in love with the wrong man, with that beautiful Cuban student, the tall one who sang and danced so well.

“But I dare not let my mother suspect,” said Elsa, with something very like a tremor of delight in her tone. “Can you imagine what she would say?”

“Oh yes, I can,” said Jenny, “and you had better be careful. That Cuban will make you nothing but trouble.”

Elsa thought this over for a while, then ventured, “But I have always been told that love makes trouble—that is what it is for. Trouble.” She drew a deep quivering happy sigh. “I shouldn't mind!” Then she ventured rather timidly: “I think it must be divine to have a man so much in love with you. It seems to me so sad that you must shut him out.”

“Sad?” said Jenny, surprised at the bitterness of her feelings. “No, that isn't exactly the word for it.”

After a long time of lying still in the darkness, listening to Elsa turn and sigh, Jenny slept and lived through again in her sleep something she had seen once in broad day, but the end was different as if her memory had patched together two or three unrelated bits and pieces to contrive a meaning for the whole which the separate pieces lacked. During the first month after she began to live with David, she had gone by bus from Mexico City to Taxco, to look at a house there. At noon of the burning bright day they had slowed down in passing through a small Indian village with the little thick-walled windowless houses sitting along the road, the bare earth swept before each door. The dust was bitter to taste, the heat made her long for sleep in a cool place.

Half a dozen Indians, men and women, were standing together quietly in the bare spot near one of the small houses, and they were watching something very intensely. As the bus rolled by, Jenny saw a man and a woman, some distance from the group, locked in a death battle. They swayed and staggered together in a strange embrace, as if they supported each other; but in the man's raised hand was a long knife, and the woman's breast and stomach were pierced. The blood ran down her body and over her thighs, her skirts were sticking to her legs with her own blood. She was beating him on the head with a jagged stone, and his features were veiled in rivulets of blood. They were silent, and their faces had taken on a saintlike patience in suffering, abstract, purified of rage and hatred in their one holy dedicated purpose to kill each other. Their flesh swayed together and clung, their left arms were wound about each other's bodies as if in love. Their weapons were raised again, but their heads lowered little by little, until the woman's head rested upon his breast and his head was on her shoulder, and holding thus, they both struck again.

It was a mere flash of vision, but in Jenny's memory it lived in an ample eternal day illuminated by a cruel sun, full of the jolly senseless motion of the bus, the deep bright arch of the sky, the flooding violet-blue shadows of the mountains over the valleys; her thirst; and the gentle peeping of newly hatched chickens in a basket on the knees of the Indian boy beside her. She had not known how frightened she was until the scene began repeating itself in her dream, always with some grotesque variation which she could not understand. But this latest time, she had been among the watchers, as if she were at a play, and the two narrow white-clad figures were unreal as small sculptured altar pieces in a country church. Then with horror she saw that their features were changing, had changed entirely—the faces were David's and her own, and there she was looking up into David's blood-streaming face, a bloody stone in her hand, and David's knife was raised against her pierced bleeding breast.…

In her relief at waking, and her melancholy in remembering that time when she had been enchanted with David and had believed in their love, she almost wept. The tears rose back of her eyes and dried there. She still believed she loved David, but whatever it was that he understood as love was a mystery to her. She believed she thought of love as tenderness and faithfulness and gaiety and a true goodness of the heart to the loved one; she wanted David to be comfortable, she wished to be easy within herself, and though David seemed coldly to devour everything, yet it was as if he were alone, he would not take her into his confidence, he would give nothing back. He sulked when she was painting and could not do his own work, but wandered about aimlessly. He disliked her friends, and made none of his own. He would not listen to music with her, he would not dance, he would not share her moods or allow her to share his, or to make some sort of life of his own that she might share, if he could not take part in hers; he lived like a willful prisoner within himself, he would not let the door be unlocked.

Lying there with her arms under her head, her list of accusations grew. They had agreed in the beginning not to marry because they must be free, marriage was a bond cramping and humiliating to civilized beings: yet what was this tie between them but marriage, and marriage of the worst sort, with all the restraints and jealousies and burdens, but with none of its dignity, none of its warmth and protection, no honest acknowledgment of faith and intention. Ah, it was high time to think a little. She had fallen in love with him recklessly, on sight (why?), and she went over the hurdle at once because she did not dare to hesitate, to think of anything. Once they were together, she no longer felt reckless, but happy and right in her feelings and strangely bound to David. She had believed he felt the same, for a year at least she had been certain the bond was real and would hold fast. They were going to make a splendid life together.

Little by little she had been dismayed by his stubborn resistance to love, as if it were an evil force outside of them both, instead of a force of life they both possessed and exchanged with each other, and by his refusal to take part in any plan that would engage him for even the nearest future. She had believed that his recurring fits of long silence were evidences of strength and reserve power of character; but when he was drunk he was vulgar and silly, as if the binding strings of his character were cut and he fell apart. She had believed that his contemptuous dismissal of all her friends was the sign of a discriminating taste and judgment superior to her own. Now it seemed to her that David watched and listened so narrowly for the fallacy, the blind spot, the small but certain marks of weakness and vulgarity in others because finding them soothed his own fear, lulled his deep uncertainties about his own qualities. She wanted to cry out, “Oh David darling, there's nothing to be afraid of! It's only this world! Let's not mind it!” Had he always been like this, or was it his defense against her? And why should he defend himself? And had he been like this all along and she could not see it because she had been so much in love? But what was there to love in him, then? How could she have loved him?

She began to wash and dress with a wonderful exhilaration. The long fight was over, the question had been asked, and it carried its own answer—not the answer she had expected—what had she expected, then?—but it was an answer and she would accept it. We will go on for a while, and it will be worse and worse, and we will say and do more and more outrageous things to each other, and one day we will strike the final death-giving blows. There is nowhere to go back and begin again with this … there is no place to go. The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday—oh where did David go, I wonder? The place you are going towards doesn't exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot. Oh, God, don't let me forget any more what really happened to me. Don't let me forget. Please help me!

When Jenny saw David a few minutes later at the bulletin board, she felt very tenderly towards him, after the purging of her rancor. If she could possibly help it, she would not quarrel with him any more. She was going to separate from him at the dock in Bremerhaven, and go straight to Paris, and he could go to Madrid as he wanted; and meantime—

The very first words she spoke to him were full of provocation; she could hear them as they must sound to David. She could not stop herself. As she poured his coffee she glanced about the dining room and greeted almost everyone who entered. “I see that all the drunks and seasicks are up and tottering about,” she said, “even your cabin mates. Do you ever get lonely in there, darling? Ever feel like coming in to spend the night with Elsa and me?”

David turned a pallid green and braced himself. “Was that it?” he asked. “I knew it was something good. Go ahead and tell me.”

“That's all,” said Jenny, “unless you can remember something more—something interesting you did when I was not there? You never remember what happens when you're drunk, do you? I think that must be superbly convenient.”

He gazed into his plate and said nothing. She studied the very fine clear modeling in the outer corners of his eyes, and the touching inner corners with their thin blue veins in the lids. The nose was especially fine. The set of the ears. The whole head, long and narrow. She had made dozens of sketches of his head, trying to catch exactly what she saw, but none of them were ever enough like to please her; maybe she could bring it out in color. The face was a curious mixture of sensibility, with some elements very hard, and others very petty—perhaps it was in the mouth. David ate as if there were no God, and he never gained an ounce; there was a starved look about him. She had never even heard of anybody who could sleep as David did, like a dead man; sometimes it was terrifying. She would go back on tiptoe to have another look at him, listening to his breathing. On Sundays and holidays he slept for sixteen hours on end. He would wake looking tired as if he never hoped to catch up on his sleep. He loved to loll in water without ever having learned to swim, and he could lie on a mat suning himself for hours, idle as a dog. When he drank whiskey, deliberately he went on with it until he was in a stupor. He practiced all these dull excesses in a methodical, uncommunicative frenzy of cold yet sensual enjoyment; and when he made love, Jenny knew he forgot who she was. Yet he still managed to look like an innocent young monk during Lent. He had told her once that his mother had not been able to keep him after she was deserted by his father—he had a nasty younger brother who cultivated asthma as a means of getting his mother's whole attention—and she had turned him over to be brought up by three dreadful, sour-smelling old great-aunts who never gave him enough to eat. Hunger was in his bones, in his soul. Vague maternal feelings of the kind she abhorred in herself welled up in Jenny.