Ship of Fools (29 page)

He moved away from her abruptly and, frowning a little, leaned on his folded arms and let his eyes rest on the people below. They were milling about, replacing each other at the tables; great heaps of dirty plates were being taken away, the platters of hot food were again being thumped down on the oilcloth. Jenny's face was a little dulled with melancholy; rather suddenly her mood changed for no reason that Freytag could surmise. Amparo and Pepe, with sulky morning faces, paused for a glance into the pit, another glance of calculated insolence at Jenny and Freytag, and passed on, their narrow, highly specialized behinds swaying gracefully.

“Wasn't Hansen funny in the bar just now, with his poor crooked mind trying to straighten out the question of justice?” asked Jenny. “All animals are sad after making love.”

“Except women and mares,” said Freytag.

“I don't know about mares,” said Jenny, “but it seems to make Hansen angry.”

“He's an extreme character,” said Freytag. “Something is troubling him. He groans and yells and thrashes about at night and gets into fearful scrimmages with some enemy who attacks him in that upper berth.”

“A political enemy, no doubt,” said Jenny. She enjoyed Freytag's good looks, he was a delight to her eyes. She liked his harmless dandyism; every man she had ever liked except David had been beautiful and vain as the devil. It had been her ruin, she decided, this weakness for handsome men. If a man were sufficiently good-looking she granted him all desirable qualities without hesitation. Freytag was almost too conventionally handsome to draw—David had a much more interesting face, really. Or had he? A clinical expression dawned in her eye: she wanted to see the bones.

“Whatever
are
you looking at?” asked Freytag uneasily, and barely restrained himself from running his hand over his hair, twitching at his necktie. He was not the first man so affected by Jenny's intent but not flattering stare.

“At your head, I like your head,” said Jenny. “I wish I could see the brains …”

“Oh
God
, what an idea!”

“The brain is most beautifully designed,” said Jenny loftily. “Maybe you would let me try to make some drawings of you?” It might mean a few pleasant hours sitting about on deck; she'd like to see David try to make a scene about that.

“Of course, I would,” said Freytag, “but—”

“Nothing would happen,” she said, cheerfully. Then she took the plunge. “I don't understand David at all,” she told him. “I never pretended to, and he is always surprising me by some new glimpse of him. Nearly always when he is drinking. And there is a certain kind of truth in drunkenness. I know that what I do and say when I am drunk is just as true as the other different things I do and say when I am sober. It's just another side of me coming up for air!”

“Do you get drunk?” asked Freytag. “Amazing. You seem a very sober person to me.”

“I am sober, even when I'm drunk,” she said, anxiously. “It's always by accident and just for fun. But I am apt to say things I'd have sense enough to hide at other times. And I know David does the same thing …”

David gives himself away badly, she thought. That is what I am saying now, cold sober. The next step is to apologize for him. Explain that he really is not that sort of man—or not often. That is not at all the kind of thing he usually does. He is ever so much nicer than you might think from what you have seen of him. He's had a terrible kind of life and has to work harder than most people to keep his balance. You must know him pretty well before you can see his true qualities clearly. I do know him well and when I say I don't understand him it's because I am ashamed for him and for me about what happened last night. It was the least important part of David who did that. I know a great deal more about him, I know some lovely things, I love him. Shameful, shameful. The next step would be to break out with what was really hurting her; about that terrible dream last night that just left her nowhere to go but out and away …

“When you are in love,” she said aloud above the chattering of her thoughts, “it is nearly impossible to make yourself see straight, isn't it?”

“I'm not sure I can agree with that,” said Freytag. “Love,” he said speculatively, giving the word just so much weight and no more. The nape of her neck was very white and exposed-looking as she turned away her head, but she listened attentively when he talked about love, boasting a little, perhaps.

He told her, as if not making much of a point of it, that he believed love was based on faith, complete loyalty its first attribute. Far from being blind, real love helped one to see clearly perhaps for the first time. Any smallest betrayal of the loved one, whether the act came early or late, was total betrayal from the first, and it destroyed not only the future but the very past itself, for every day lived in confidence had been a lie and the heart a dupe. To be unfaithful even once was never to have been faithful at all …

“No,” said Jenny, “to be unfaithful once is to be unfaithful once, and you can be repentant and get back in the fold just like an old-fashioned Methodist. I used to have a lover,” she said, clearly but without boldness, “who always said he never realized how much he loved me except when he was being unfaithful to me. There's a flaw in that doctrine,” she said, beginning to laugh rather sharply, “but I was never able to convince him.”

Freytag laughed with her, and agreed that men's techniques of having it both ways had a comic side. Then he went on quietly as if he were talking to himself: Love, he said, was a benevolent passion, full of patient kindness and fostering tenderness, faithful not by choice nor design but by nature, hardy and lasting, full of courage. Flowers crept into his sentences, life, death, even eternity, were mentioned: bread and wine, and the perpetual recurrence of hopeful mornings with no evil memories and no remorses.

Jenny listened as if hypnotized. The dreamy voice was soothing as a cradlesong, a song her own wishful deluded heart sang to itself. It mingled with the soft dance of light on water and the fresh wind on her face. She heard a strange voice, now with the faintest trace of a German inflection in it, echoing not what she knew in her bitter mind, but her feelings; it seemed sick and sentimental and false. At the last word her eyes flared open, and she cut through his maunderings.

“I think it is a booby trap,” she said, with a violence that made her shake all over. “I hate it and I always did. It makes such filthy liars of everybody. But I keep falling into it just the same.”

“With all the wrong people,” he said, flatly, but in a covert tone of triumph which annoyed her at once, “and what you fall into isn't love.”

“I know, I know,” said Jenny, intolerantly, “it's only Sex, you'll be telling me next. How do you manage to keep True Love and Sex separated?”

“Why, I don't,” said Freytag, surprised and indignant, “I don't at all, of course not. It never occurred to me that it was possible!”

“I don't know what I fall into, then,” said Jenny, and her face was pale, woebegone, no sparkle or warmth at all, “only that it comes to no good and it could be love.” The word fell softly between them and chimed in them both.

“It
might
be,” agreed Freytag gently after a moment. “Maybe we get the kind of love we are looking for.”

Jenny turned on him in a blaze. “Stop tying everything up in your neat little bowknots!” she said vehemently. “That's just a way of side-stepping your own responsibility for the trouble you cause somebody else. ‘She asked for it,' you can always say, ‘I only gave her what she wanted!'… that's just moral imbecility and you know it!”

“Oh come now, Jenny,” he said masterfully, using her name for the first time, quite sure of her feeling for him by now, “you're talking nonsense. I won't listen to it. We have no quarrel, none at all. Can't we be friends, can't we be loyal good friends and talk things over sensibly? Isn't there something besides love?”

Oh God, thought Jenny, that's the next gambit.

“Oh yes, of course, and much better as a rule,” she said, in order to end the talk, and they stood together in a baffled silence. As for loyalty, thought Jenny, you shouldn't be talking about love to a strange woman on shipboard, nor I to a strange man. It's the narrow end of the wedge. Your wife would hate it and so would David, and they'd be quite right. That's one thing about David. He'll never be mooning around about love to any other woman. He won't even talk about it to me. David hates love worse than I do, even. You've got a roving eye and the sidelong approach. If you belonged to me I wouldn't trust you any further than I could throw you by the ear. I can always trust David. David is going to be mean and tough and stubborn and faithful to death. We aren't going to kill each other because I mean to get away before that happens. But we'll leave dents in each other. When I get through with David, he'll know the difference between me and the next woman, and I'll be carrying David like a petrified fetus for the rest of my life. She felt empty and sick and tired enough to lie down.

“Love,” she remarked, wrinkling her nose, “this ship is simmering with it. I'm sure it's all Real Love. I must fly,” she said, “Elsa's in love, too, and I promised to help her fix her hair in a new way.”

Alone, Freytag regretted what he had said to her, or most of it; she was rather plainly laughing at him more than once. No doubt she thought him a touch soft-headed. But she would live to learn better. She might have been lovely before she was maimed and perverted by her disordered life, her false notions of love and reckless waste of her womanly substance. He had known girls like her before, in several countries—wild and confused and lonely, full of mistrust, letting him come nearer with a wary look in their eyes as if they would dash away if he tried to touch them. Their waywardness, homelessness, and lack of scruples had freed him from any sense of obligation to them, they asked nothing of him, and had left him at last free to enjoy a remembering pity and tenderness for them.

But that was all in the past. Such follies as Jenny promised to be belonged to his other life, that life peopled with phantoms and foolish dreams; he knew what they were worth, compared to the solid reality of his marriage. He was certain that he was by nature the most singlehearted and faithful of men, he had needed only to find his Mary, his love, and he had found her. Now, he had been separated from her for nearly three months, and his flesh was uneasy, desirous; he was sleeping as badly as when he was a bachelor, spending far too much time and energy trying to find relief from sex: and accepting too often, he remembered with a chill, some pretty sad versions of it. It was a very bad sign when he began feeling sentimental about the first possibly available woman not a professional whore, at least, who crossed his path in an unlucky moment.

What was he thinking about? He brought himself up short; a slight uncomfortable twinge—could it be guilt?—went over him, almost a tremor of the nerves. This tremor of guilt and the beginning of sexual uproar were hardly to be told apart: his preoccupation shifted without warning from Jenny to one of those available Spanish dancers—Lola for choice, she was the basest-looking of the lot. Something good and dirty and hot—that would do. He gripped the rail and stood there holding himself together resolutely, and trying to get his impulses under control again. The first sign of returning sanity was that he damned Jenny freely for a teasing bitch: invoked the name of his wife fervently and made up his mind to write her a long letter after dinner, and to read all her sweet, passionate, wifely letters again before sleeping.

The Cuban medical students on their way to Montpellier had become more than ever a hermetic society, with ritual greetings, secret handgrips which when applied properly wrung responsive yells of facetious anguish from the initiates, and a jargon so recondite they referred constantly in speech to small typewritten code sheets. They engaged in what appeared to be long, learned debates, carried on with farcical solemnity always where they might be seen, but in such lowered tones their rather bored audiences were in no danger of sharing their secrets.

It became known however that they called themselves “
Les Camelots de la Cucaracha
,” and they published on the ship's press every morning copies of a miniature newspaper bearing in highly visible type the banner
El Pi-pi Diario
. Midmorning they were often seen going into La Condesa's stateroom, and coming out being a little boisterous among themselves later; and one day in the small writing room off the bar, they held a meeting and elected La Condesa president, or Cockroach Extraordinary.

Dr. Schumann, who was sitting outside the window, could not have helped overhearing and in fact had not tried to avoid it; and he was outraged to hear in what lewd and disrespectful terms the students talked about her. They believed her to be insane, that was clear, and the designated object of their monkeyish ridicule, but why they chose to expend their boyish filth upon her the Doctor could not understand. Above all, she was not a fool, but a woman of the world and wise in it, and why would she let herself be made a figure of fun by these particularly crass young men?

Upon her appearance in the dining room, Dr. Schumann observed again that La Condesa seemed to have all confidence in her young admirers, and enjoyed their company. They rose as one, bowed deeply, and escorted her to their own table. Her chair was brought, and she sat among them with her elegant manner and, Dr. Schumann thought, a slightly distracted smile. He continued to watch her while she read their no doubt dreadful little newspaper, and she laughed most unbecomingly, showing gold teeth in the back. Taking first the student on her right, and then the one on her left, by the head with both hands, she whispered things in their ears that set them off with shouts of applause and eager questions from the others. Her hands then flew to her own breasts and she stroked them up and down, her face pained and thoughtful. No doubt she had reserved for herself a third flask of ether, and perhaps a fourth, Dr. Schumann concluded with resignation, and a great temptation to give her up, to make no further attempts to help her.