Ship of Fools (32 page)

Herr Graf opened his eyes with a leap of the nerves, thrilling with pain all through: he must have dozed and dreamed, there was some terrible nightmare at the edge of his memory. Weakness and despair almost overwhelmed him. “Johann, Johann,” he muttered, his tongue thick, “water, water,” and then, “My God, my God,” but the prayer, whatever it was, stopped on his lips. He did not dare to pray, he did not know what to pray for. The soul after death may discover, may wake in morning radiance, to a bliss it is now unable to imagine, and no matter how mysterious its longings now, it will understand everything then. Ah, maybe heaven itself is only this: that Wilibald Graf may never once remember he was Wilibald Graf, miserable lost pilgrim in this terrible world. Is that what is meant, perhaps, by the blessed words “forgiveness of sins”?

“Water, water, Johann, my sweet child,” he said again, but there was no answer. He felt the slight swaying motion of the chair being wheeled again smoothly after a long pause. As they turned the corner the dark shadow of his nephew's head and shoulders fell across his own, lay upon his knees and stretched before them upon the deck. The silence stretched too until it broke with the strain of its own hatred.

“You want water?” asked Johann, with false solicitude, mimicking the tone of kindness with elaborate cruelty. Gathering himself, he spat out his poison: “Well, wait until you get it, you stinking old corpse.”

“Shame on you, Johann,” said his uncle calmly. “I leave you to God.”

Without warning, in silence, Johann spun the chair around violently, guided it swiftly through the main salon, down the stairs and through the long passageway into their cabin with its bitter smells. At the door he simply gave the chair a shove through; it rolled to the opposite wall and fetched up with a bump. Herr Graf had not protested, nor even turned his head. The chair slithered a little sideways, and in a flash of fearful hope Johann saw his closed eyes and dropped jaw like a newly dead man's. Slamming the door behind him, he raced back to the deck, his stomach so sunken and tight between fury and terror, his heart pounding so heavily he could hardly hear, his eyes dancing so that he was nearly blinded. Yet he could see Concha, not clearly, but enough. He halted then and moved to the rail and stared at her; she stared back in perfect stillness, meaning with her look to motion him to her. He did not move, and with his hot, fixed eyes he resembled uncommonly a famished tiger regarding its prey, lips drawn back, teeth bared. Concha had seen this look often and had never been dismayed by it. On the contrary, it exhilarated her, lightened for her often her rather dull occupation, to find a young one full of fire and awkward eagerness. She was young too, the youngest of her company, not yet hardened altogether, and she was not at all deceived by this unhappy boy, standing there gazing at her like something lurking behind a bush, slouched over a little, hands in pockets, trying to carry it off, longing to be a man.

Concha walked towards him smiling, and without hesitation held out her arms to him while she was not yet within reaching distance. Johann took one bound towards her, seized her waist accurately at arm's length, and strode away with her in the dance, still with the look of one caught between flood and fire. Concha put her nose to his chest inside his open shirt front and took a deep luxurious breath. He smelled like a clean baby, with rich undersmells of a real male. She took a good hold of him then; her breast rose high under her thin shabby black dress, her neck arched; she preened and strutted and murmured like a pigeon. Head back, eyes raised and shining, she smiled at him deeply, gave him a long heart-shaking look, then dropped softly against him the full length of her body, and rested her pale cheek on his chest as if she slept. Meanwhile, asleep or not, her neatly rolling little hips kept tireless rhythm, she stepped and swayed and spun in the perfection of her delicate art. Little by little Johann's desperate face smoothed and softened, he rested his cheek on her sleek black hair and danced too with closed eyes.

A rather routine performance perhaps, Freytag was thinking. Considering all the uproar it can cause, the instrument is strangely limited; a mere reed flute with a few monotonous notes—but this girl does have style. She may teach him something he'll never be sorry for knowing. He could see that Concha was not just running through her repertory like a wound-up doll, as she had done at the rehearsal with the company, but was putting her heart, or whatever stood for her heart, into the matter, with perfect effectiveness. It was easy to see that she had reduced that glittering-haired boy, who had struck him as no great specimen of wit at best, to a state of bliss bordering on idiocy, in this sudden half-relief from the hopeless ferocities of his desire which was, if only he could have known, so simple, so usual, and at his age and in his prime condition, so easily satisfied. Why could he not put on a cheerful grin, and jingle a few coins in his pocket? However, in his situation, obviously under the thumb of his dying old uncle, the lack of money was no doubt the main reason why he could not put on the cheerful grin. That too was a commonplace. Freytag, having somehow recovered his own self-approval, left them dancing and walked on.

Jenny, who had borne all she was able of David's silence and sulkiness, and tight, white-ringed mouth at dinner, after a day of sitting or strolling about with him, the air between them twanging painfully at every passing breeze, disappeared into her cabin to write letters to several members of her family. Though David never believed it, no matter what she told him, Jenny had, in a mid-Southern state, a small but pertinacious family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, even a small niece and nephew, the quite most conventional assortment, really; and she was fond of them all, in a baffled, detached sort of way. As she began “Dear …” she thought again that it did not matter which of the lot she addressed the letter to, for they presented to her the impermeable front of what she called “the family attitude”—suspicion of the worst based on insufficient knowledge of her life, and moral disapproval based firmly on their general knowledge of the weakness of human nature. Jenny couldn't possibly be up to any good, or she would have stayed at home, where she belonged. That is the sum of it, thought Jenny, and wouldn't their blood run cold if they could only know the facts? Ah well, the family can get under your skin with little needles and scalpels if you venture too near them: they attach suckers to you and draw your blood from every pore if you don't watch out. But that didn't keep you from loving them, nor them from loving you, with that strange longing, demanding, hopeless tenderness and bitterness, wound into each other in a net of living nerves.

It was no question at all whether they were the kin you would have chosen, would have preferred, at any rate; they were the family you belonged to, and there you were, stuck for good, for life and for eternity itself, no doubt. At this point in her half-conscious meditations with her pen hesitating above the paper, Jenny dropped the “you” form, and stopped thinking in words, only knowing in her bones that she could not live near her family because she was afraid of their weaknesses and faults—they were also her own; and most of their virtues repelled her even more than their faults. She had spent years of strategic warfare trying to beat those people out of her life; then more years trying to ignore them; to forget them; to hate them; and in the end she loved them as she knew well she was meant in simple nature to do, and acknowledged it; it brought her no peace, and yet it put a certain solid ground under her feet. She did not turn to them at last for help, or consolation, or praise, or understanding, or even love; but merely at last because she was incapable of turning away. They were the family and she was the stray sheep; they never let her forget it, they were full of malice and resentment they could not hide, and they invented little slanders about her among themselves to justify their view of what they called her “desertion.”

And moreover, they couldn't be fooled for a moment with all that nonsense about wanting to paint, to be an “artist.” A young woman of good family leaves her home and place for only one reason: she means to lead a shameless abandoned life where her relatives and her society cannot restrain or punish her. Artist indeed! What was to stop her painting at home in the back garden?

With all this and a good deal more running not exactly in her mind but in her bloodstream, Jenny was writing, “Dearest Cousin or Brother or sweet Nephew or Aunt … weather is beautiful, getting cooler … I am in wonderful health … looking forward to Paris … let me hear from you … yours, yours and yours with my love …” yours indeed, with my love, my devilish dear family! She was folding up the last when Elsa came in from the moving pictures, with traces of tears in her eyes, yet cheerful and ready to talk.

She sat on the side of her bed and began letting down her hair. “Mama doesn't like it this way,” she told Jenny, shyly.

“I don't either, really,” said Jenny, “the other is prettier.”

There had been moving pictures for the first time, and when Jenny had suggested to David that they see them, David had said he couldn't imagine a reason for passing an evening in such a stupid way, and Jenny had retorted at once that she couldn't imagine anything more stupid than the way they were passing it now. That had settled the question and ended the talk, and they spent the evening apart, Jenny writing letters.

Elsa, it came out, had a lovely time. The pictures were just the kind she liked best, the kind one saw so seldom in Mexico, where they were always about bandits fighting on horseback in the mountains, and burning ranches; and low women always after men; and all sorts of ugly people playing bad tricks on each other. No, these two pictures were very different. They were German, and so sweet. As she sat getting ready for bed, she remembered the plots utterly. There was one about the miller's beautiful daughter who was loved by two rich gentlemen, real lords—father and son. She will not have the father, who forbids her to have the son, whom she loves. By a vile plot, she is seized by two villainous servants of the old lord, while she is picking flowers by the millstream, and taken to the lodge of the gamekeeper, and there she is heartlessly married off to that low person, who is a widower with a daughter her own age, the old lord standing by giving the orders for everything in the most cruel way!

“Where was the son?” asked Jenny, stamping envelopes.

“He had just happened to go on a journey,” said Elsa. “But the gamekeeper's daughter thought of a way to help her. She pretended to go with the bride to her room to help her undress, but instead she tied sheets together and let her down out of the window and the new bride ran home through the woods—oh it was beautiful with the moonlight shining in the treetops—and the wicked gamekeeper sets out after her; but his foot slips on the bridge of the millstream—it is an act of God, you understand—and he is drowned. And just at that moment the young lord comes home and learns everything; and the girl is restored to him a virgin widow!”

“What became of the old lord?” asked Jenny.

“He repented and gave them his blessing,” said Elsa. “The last scene was the wedding in a great church full of flowers and music, and then a dance on the village green. I wish they would show more pictures like that … the girl was so pretty, and the young man was so handsome, and they were so happy together!”

“It's a fine big wedding cake with plenty of icing and sugar birds and roses,” said Jenny, “like the one you'll have someday.”

“Oh, I hope so,” said Elsa, but doubtfully as ever. “The second picture was nice too …”

Jenny reached for a light wrap, laid it across her knees, and sat waiting for the end. “It was a little hard to follow because there was so much happening all the time, but there was a handsome young Archduke who wished to marry only for love, and he would not wed the Gräfin von Hohenbrecht sight unseen, out of obedience to his dear parents, who arranged the marriage for his own good—you know how parents are,” said Elsa, with a surprising lapse into everyday common sense, “and the poor old people, who want him to be happy, make a plot with the Gräfin's father and mother to bring them together in some way so that they are both disguised and take each other for simple peasants. You will understand that the Gräfin, too, is romantic and has also refused even to meet the Archduke, for she wants to marry only for love. Well, the Gräfin's parents tell her it is time for her to know something about life and how to run a castle, and that she is to dress like a laundry maid and go with servants to the river for the washing day. But she doesn't do any work, you know, she just orders the others around. Meantime they have arranged for the Archduke, disguised as a forester, to be hunting in that part of the woods with some of his men. He sees the beautiful maiden, she sees him, they fall in love on sight, of course! that's the point; and the young Archduke tells his parents he has met the true love of his whole life, and will marry only the laundry maid and no one else. Then the two families have a great time carrying on the joke and making difficulties until they are sure the love is real. Meantime the Archduke and the Gräfin put on their disguises and run away to meet each other in the forest every time they can manage. This goes on for a long time, until finally everything comes out; and there is a great wedding, in a cathedral, and afterwards a gay ball at the castle, and the servants all dance on the castle green. Oh,” said Elsa, suddenly, “you'll think I'm just silly. I know already that life is not like that, I don't expect any such thing. And yet,” she said, “I don't understand those Cuban students. Even that tall nice-looking one who sings so well—you remember the one I like?—well, he was just like the rest. All through, in the love scenes and even the sad parts, they jeered, and whistled, and yowled like cats and behaved so badly a steward asked them for silence. So they all got up and went away with that Condesa, you know the prisoner, and she was making fun too. I can't understand people being so hardhearted—they were sweet pictures full of lovely scenes—”