Ship of Fools (35 page)

“But you find me beautiful now?”

“Of course,” said the Doctor. After a short pause he said, “I will answer your question truthfully. I was never unfaithful to my wife.”

“How charming of you,” said La Condesa, sympathetically. “It must have been dull at times.”

Dr. Schumann, who had always viewed himself as the soul of reserve, found himself possessed by a demon of frankness. “It was,” he answered simply, amazed at himself, “but she was faithful to me, and that could have been a little dull for her, too, at times.”

“Were you really so very good because you wished to be, or was it your weak heart?”

“My heart was sound until about two years ago,” said Dr. Schumann with a faint trace of resentment, feeling that his confidence was being abused, and that perhaps he deserved it.

“But you love me just a little, don't you?”

“No,” said Dr. Schumann, “not at all. Not at all if I know in the least what love is. I know what I should say, I know that is not very gallant, but I am not a man who can afford to say what he does not mean; and would you wish to hear it? There is perhaps not time for that sort of thing.”

La Condesa took his chin between thumb and fingers and kissed him on the forehead twice. Her round mouth left two shiny red smears on his face. Dr. Schumann looked very pleased but quite calm.

“You are delicious,” she told him. “You are exactly right. I love you.” She added, “Let me wipe your dirty face.” She touched her wet tongue to her small lace-bordered handkerchief and scrubbed away the red spots and said, “If anyone saw us now, they would think we were the most devoted married pair.”

“Someone has already seen us,” said Dr. Schumann, “the very one of all people who would enjoy it most.”

They sat in silence, hands folded, heads inclined towards the sea, faces tranquil, as Frau Rittersdorf strolled by alone. “Such divine weather for sitting out,” she informed them in a high clear voice, full of the most intimate sympathy and comprehension. She paused, shivered a little, and wrapped her thin scarf about her bare arms. “Perhaps one should be careful of the night air, especially at sea,” she said, smiling gaily. She bent over and peered into their faces with the most ravenous inquiry. They gazed back calmly. A second's hesitation and Frau Rittersdorf moved on slowly, tossing back over her shoulder, “After all, rheumatism and arthritis lurk in night air and we're only young once.”

“What a museum piece,” said La Condesa, also in a high, clear sweet voice, aimed at Frau Rittersdorf's undulating shoulder blades.

“Oh come now,” said Dr. Schumann mildly, “do leave that sort of thing to her,” and he seemed ruffled and uncomfortable.

La Condesa gave a little saw-edged trill of laughter. Then she fell silent again for a moment, and her face was grieved and weary.

“I loathe women,” she said, in a tone of flat, commonplace sincerity such as the Doctor had never heard in her voice. “I hate being one. It is a shameful condition. I cannot be reconciled to it.”

“That is a pity,” said Dr. Schumann, who in his heart knew that he quite agreed with her. But he did his manly duty of reassuring her. “And you are quite wrong. It may be a misfortune to be a woman, so many of you seem to think so, but there is nothing shameful in it—it is a destiny to be faced, like any other. You are,” he told her earnestly, “a more than ordinarily perverse sort of being, and a change of sex would do nothing for you. There are many men of your temperament and of your habits; if you were a man, you would still be a mischief-maker, a taker of drugs, a seducer.”

La Condesa rose lightly as a cloud, opened her arms wide as if to embrace him, leaned over him smiling and exhilarated. “Naturally!” she said with delight, “but think with what freedom, and more opportunity, and no scolding from mossy old souls like you!”

Dr. Schumann rose deliberately and stepped back from her hands that were about to rest on his shoulders. “I am not scolding,” he said, in pure forthright anger, “and you are talking like any foolish woman!”

“And you sound like a husband,” cried La Condesa over his shoulder, for he had turned and was leaving her, “like
any
foolish man!” and her terrible peals and trills of laughter followed him, blowing like a cold rain down his collar as she ran after him, came abreast, slipped her arm around his elbow, folded her hand in his. “You are adorable and you
can't
shake me off,” for Dr. Schumann was trying to reclaim his arm without losing at least the appearance of dignity.

She loosed him then and stepped before him, and he saw that her eyes were wild and inhuman as a monkey's. “Stop,” she said, her laughter threatening to slide into tears. She held his hands and laid her head on his shoulder lightly for an instant. “Oh, can't you see? I am tired, I am crazy, I must sleep or die … You must give me a
piqûre
, a huge one that will make me sleep for days … Oh, don't leave me, you can't—you shan't, I won't let you go!… Oh, quiet me—put me to sleep!”

Dr. Schumann gripped her hands and held her off, searching her face shrewdly, hoping to be able to refuse her; but what he saw decided him at once. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

She turned at once, dropping her hands at her side, and they walked together through the ship towards her cabin. “Ah,” she said, and raised to him under the mottled light of the passage a ravaged and desolate face, unbelievably changed, “ah, you are so good. Oh, never believe I am not grateful … and now I can keep my promise not to take any more ether!”

“Ether,” said the Doctor, on a rising note of diciplinary severity. “You still have ether? You did keep back a flask, then?”

“Of course,” she said, responding instantly to his tone of voice with a faintly contemptuous impatience. “When will you learn not to trust me in anything?”

Dr. Schumann stopped short and turned to face her. “Even now?” he asked.

“Even now,” she said boldly. Before the expression in his face as he studied hers for the space of a breath, she lowered her eyelids and glanced aside.

“Well,” he said at last, in a dry distant voice, “you shall have your
piqûre
just the same. Go on by yourself,” he said, turning off towards his own cabin. “I will join you in a few minutes. You may trust me, as you know well enough,” he said, and was amazed at his own bitterness. She turned and went her way as if she had already forgotten him, as if his given word could be so taken for granted she could treat it lightly—which was true, he admitted to himself with a wry little grimace of humor, or had been true until now. As he was selecting and arranging the ampules for the
piqûre
, the doctor began to think fairly clearly and in a more or less straight line, with the reasonable, cooler part of his mind. He had not failed, he thought, in his responsibility to her as her physician. Yet he could not deny that his personal feelings for her had intervened and helped to create a situation very unbecoming to him—to her, also, he admitted with reluctance. But all these shocks and upsets—her constant turning of every meeting between them into scenes which left them both prostrated; the constant danger of his having another heart attack; her reckless disregard for appearances, which could so easily make the kind of scandal the Doctor shuddered even to think about—ah, well, it all must end. He called upon not only the reserves of his authority as ship's physician, but, if she resisted, upon the Captain's final word, and resolved that this unruly relationship should be put in order at once. She must be treated like a hysterical woman with no control over her own acts. She could have been the death of him with her silly melodramas. Nonsense, and there was to be no more of it. Yet, he intended to be merciful and consign her to a narcotic limbo, which was, after all, her notion of Paradise.

“Oh,” said La Condesa, sitting up at sight of him, her face shining with relief from anxiety, “I am so happy to see you again! I was so afraid you would not come!”

“What?” said Dr. Schumann, amazed. “When I had just assured you that I would not fail you?”

“Ah,” she said, “it is just then one should begin to doubt! The eternal vow—ah, that is the one that is always broken!”

“I did not make any such vow, remember,” said Dr. Schumann, “it was only a little promise for this very evening.” He resisted the slow ripple of apprehension that ruffled his own nervous system and disturbed the marrow of his bones; here at any moment, if he did not act with speed and decision, was the beginning of another scene.

“I am keeping here and now the promise I made you,” he told her, “and the only one I did make.” As he approached the side of her bed, needle poised, she dropped back on her pillows and gave him a melting glance of confidence. They smiled at each other lovingly as he took hold of her upper arm.

Mrs. Treadwell sat in the middle of her narrow bunk as if it were an island, and played an intricate game of solitaire with miniature cards on a folding chessboard. She drank wine in slow occasional sips from a small glass; when it was half empty she would pour a little more from a bottle of Burgundy standing on the floor beside her.

She wore a nightgown of smooth white satin, with a buttoned-up collar and full bishop sleeves. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and bound with a white ribbon, in the Alice in Wonderland style she had worn in bed since she was four or five. Yet viewed from without by an impartial eye, the scene, she decided, would be completely disreputable. The lack of a table and tray for the bottle and glass, the bottle itself even, in the circumstances; Lizzi's clothes lying about in heaps just as she had stepped out of them; the rank smell of Lizzi's stale mingled scents all based on musk; perhaps above all her own occupation, or pastime, contributed to an effect, oppressive to the last degree, of female disorder, hysterical solitude and general forlornness.

Mrs. Treadwell had been in a pleasantly self-sufficient mood when she left the boredom of the upper deck for what had then seemed a reasonable prospect of silence, seclusion, an evening with her own thoughts, such as they were, and early sleep. Lizzi's habits were fairly dependable. She stayed out usually until after midnight with that wretched little fat man; they were to be seen dodging about from one shadowy recess to another, with a great deal of giggling and squealing and not too furtive fumbling. Then Lizzi would come in, steaming hot, knocking against objects, her awkward stride accommodating itself too late to the confined space, clicking on the light and revealing herself with her hair like electrified strings, and her pupils excited as a cat's in the small mean-looking irises. She would step out of her shoes and kick them into a corner, step out of her flimsy frock and expose her long bony legs in their short pink pants and flesh-colored stockings. Dropping her brush and picking it up, without fail she would say in her insolent imitation of courtesy, “So sorry. I hope I didn't wake you,” in that voice which affected Mrs. Treadwell's nerves like the sound of a file on metal. It was absurd to pretend to go on sleeping after that.

The woman was, Mrs. Treadwell decided, the most entirely unattractive animal she had ever seen. Undressed, her ugliness was shocking. Yet she was possessed by the mysterious illusion that she was a beauty, as she sat before the spotty little looking glass of the washhand stand, looking deeply into her own eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching. She painted and powdered her face half a dozen times a day, putting on her mask as carefully and deliberately as an actress preparing to face her audience. Upon her head as if in baptism she poured her musky cologne out of a large square bottle, drenched her underarms until the liquid ran down her lean ribs, a flickering, self-absorbed smile on her face, her nostrils working like a rabbit's. All her talk ran on about perfume, about clothes, about her shops, and men. “Friends,” she called them. “A man I know in Hamburg, a real gentleman, very rich—a friend,” she would say coyly, and rear the undersized head on the long neck with the cords in it. “I almost married him, but now I am glad I did not,” because it turned out he had lost his money.

These friends however were not all so unfortunate, and they paid her at all times the most expensive attentions, the most overwhelming compliments; she had them at her beck and call. Only the difficulty had been that there were so many of them. “One must choose somewhere,
nicht wahr?
One can't marry them all, that's a pity!” Little by little though the truth leaked out; most of them were married already, but that was a detail of no consequence; they were all of them prepared to break up their domestic arrangements at any moment if she said the word. But she loved her freedom too well, that was her trouble. “When I left my husband, he accused me of going away to another man. ‘Ha,' I told him, ‘what do you take me for? There are five of them.'” She would writhe with laughter at passages like this, flapping her hands. “Well of course, you know that was not quite true, there were only three or four, and none of them serious. But believe me, I am finished with marriage. I mean to amuse myself, but no more marriage!”

Mrs. Treadwell gathered up her playing cards and fitted them into their case. She folded the chessboard and set it aside, smoothed the slightly rumpled sheet and light blanket. There was a new chill in the air; she shivered and closed her eyes. Why could she not remember what traveling was like in these out of the way places and on horrid little boats? Why hadn't she sense enough to stay in Paris the whole year round, yes even August—Paris was delicious in August—where she was always so safe from the sort of people she seemed to meet up with almost anywhere else? The faces and figures of her fellow passengers, if they could be called that, were all in a muddle with the wrong names attached, and the very thought of them confused and oppressed her mind. Lizzi gossiped about them perpetually, her dreadful voice grating along, with an affected superior little air.