Ship of Fools (36 page)

“Oh now, imagine—that Spanish Condesa, the prisoner, you know her?—well, they say she is sleeping with every one of those students by turns. They are always in her cabin, sometimes two or three of them, and they say it is quite fantastic what goes on there. They say the Captain is outraged by it, but what exactly can he do? Should he put a spy under her bed?… and here is a marvelous thing; you know that little sick man in the wheel chair? Well, if you don't watch carefully, he will reach out and touch and stroke you—that is, if you are a woman. He will pretend he is curing you of whatever ails you. The old hypocrite, at his age, and with one foot in the grave! And do you know that miserable Jew they put by mistake with Herr Rieber? Well, the other day he asked Herr Rieber, ‘What time is it? My watch has stopped,' and Herr Rieber said, ‘Time to stop all Jew watches.' Herr Rieber is very witty. He says the look on his face would have done anybody good.”

Mrs. Treadwell threw off the gabbling Fury-like echoes, got up suddenly shaking out her long gown and went to the porthole. The pure cool air bathed her face, she opened her mouth to breathe more freely, feeling soiled by what she had listened to in that cabin. The sea and the sky were almost one in the vast darkness, the waves just beneath rolled and washed back upon themselves in white foam in the rayed lights from the ship. What am I to do, she asked herself, where am I to go? Life, death, she thought in cloudy fear, for she was not able to face the small immediate situations which might demand decision, action, settlement no matter how temporary. Her very vagueness frightened her, for life and death, rightly understood, were ominous dreadful words, and she would never understand them. Life, as she had been taught in her youth, was meant to be pleasant, generous, simple. The future was a clear space of pure, silvery blue, like the sky over Paris in good weather, with feathery playful clouds racing and tumbling in the lower air; all clean and crisp as the blue tissue paper in which all the white things of her childhood had been folded, to keep them white, to make them whiter, to give them icy-blue whiteness. She was always going to be gay and free, later, when she was rid of nurses and school was over, and there was always to be love—always love.

Well, well, she said, drawing in her head, Life has been in fact quite disagreeable if not sordid in spots. If anybody called me a lady tramp I hope I should not have my feelings hurt. Nasty things have happened to me often and they were every one my own fault. I put myself in their way, not even knowing they were there, at first. And later when I knew, I always thought, But this is not real, of course. This is not Life, naturally. This is just an accident, like being hit by a truck, or trapped in a burning house, or held up and robbed or even murdered maybe—not the common fate of persons like me. Was I really ever married to a man so jealous he beat me until I bled at the nose? I don't believe it. I never knew a man like that—he isn't born yet. It's something I read about in a newspaper … but I still bleed at the nose if I am frightened enough at anything. Would murder seem real, I wonder? Or would I just say, Oh, this isn't happening either—not to me!

Yet, here I am cooped up in a dingy little cabin with a vulgar woman who will come in presently and begin talking about her “affairs.” She is a woman I would never have in my house except to dress my hair or to fit a new frock; and I sit here smelling her horrible perfumes and sleeping in the same room with her; and I have drunk too much wine and played thirty games of solitaire without winning once. Because otherwise life—this life, this is life, this beastly little business here and now—would be too dreary and disgusting to be got through with another moment.…

She turned the covers down, smoothed them out again, and went back to bed; drew her nightgown about her legs, shook her sleeves down into pretty folds, and poured another glass of wine, all her movements very calm and orderly, like a convent-bred girl. Maybe her ruinous childhood was to blame for everything. A doctor had told her once, years ago, that sometimes it was as disastrous for a child to be loved too much as too little. How could a child love, or be loved, too much? She thought the doctor was silly. Her childhood had been very bad for her on the whole, no doubt, and very lovely. The memory seemed to be in her blood, alive and breathing in her. The old house in Murray Hill was a beautiful ample house, she realized later; then it had been merely her home. In her blood still were all those years of softness and warmth and safety, the easy procession of days, the luxury she had not known was luxury, everyone she knew lived so. And the gentleness of the voices and hands around her every day—her nurse's voice, “I declare, this child is almost
too
meek!” and her mother answering, “No, not meek at all—just very good-tempered.”

Later she knew so many women who envied her because she had traveled in France and Italy every year of her childhood, and because she had been brought up in her girlhood in French and Swiss schools. She had not thought it so grand—mostly she remembered the discomforts of those schools, the stuffiness of the mistresses, the cold water, the tasteless food, the niggling rules, the constant chapel, the horrors of examination papers; and the strange pleasure of weeping or rejoicing with her roommate over the letters and little gifts from home. Each of them could weep or rejoice quite as freely over the other's news and presents as her own. What was that girl's name? Her name, her roommate? As if it mattered. As if she could even invent a regret for a bond that had no more substance than a drift of cigarette smoke. She turned the light on and took a cigarette and tried to break through the senseless melancholy blur of her thoughts.

All those parties and dinners and dances and flowers of the year of her coming-out had whirled into one soft shimmer; could they have been anything like so joyous as she remembered them now? No dream of war—no dream of change. Her memories of that life—of her nurse who had in time become her maid, and always her near friend and confidante, how much more about her did this old nurse know than any parent or kin—had become a warm soothing mist, a rosy cloud moving in her head, she had long got in the way of putting herself to sleep with them; she had in this memory the happiness she had expected, had been taught to expect, in first love.

Time had juggled everything, time was a liar and a cheat, but it could not touch anything that lay on the other side of that first love which had cut her life in two, leaving all that had happened before it enclosed and changeless, and true, so far as she could see, for all she had been able to learn. Keep it, keep it, her heart said, it is yours whether it was true or not. What if her father and mother could not recognize her now if they saw her? In her flesh they slept serenely, loved and loving, not as remembered faces, nor in any arrested act or posture, but as her blood running softly in her veins, as the beat of her heart and the drawing of her breath. It was all real, it had happened, it was hers. Until she was twenty, life—life, what a word!—had been believable, for the more wonder in it, the more she could believe; oh it had been anchored fast yet always in slow movement, like a ship in harbor. She had fallen in love with the wrong man, how wrong her parents never knew, for they never saw him, and she never went home afterwards—and the long nightmare had set in. Ten years of a kind of marriage, and ten years of divorce, shady, shabby, lonely, transient, sitting in cafés and hotels and boats and trains and theaters and strange houses with others transient as herself, for half her life, half her life, and none of it had really happened. Only one thing real had happened in all that time—her parents had been killed together in a motor accident, and she had not gone home to see them buried. For all the rest, she denied it, not a word of it was true.

Not a word. If it were I couldn't bear it, she said, and sat up again. I
can't
bear it. I don't remember anything. Oh my dears, she said to her parents as if they were in the room with her, if you had known you wouldn't have let it happen. Oh why didn't I come home? Why didn't I tell you?

She reached for the wine bottle and held it up to the light. There was nearly half the bottle left. That will be enough, she decided, if I drink it fast. She poured steadily into the glass, smiling. After all, soon she would be in Paris. In Paris there would be somebody—a dozen names and faces trailed through her mind—somebody to sit with her at the Flore, or we'll go and play roulette at the Cosmetics Queen's Husband's Polite Gambling Hell. We can lose our money, what there is of it, until it is time to go to Les Halles for onion soup. We can drive through Paris after midnight with the horse's feet going clop-clop, echoing in the dim houses, and watch the vegetables coming in on the little old-fashioned train running straight through town like a child's toy. We shall go again, again to the flower stalls and find one of those poisonous-looking flowers, what's its name? like a bleeding tongue on a pike, and drive home again with the sun just turning the sky opal colors, the clouds and the houses all gray and rosy, and the workmen beginning to drop into the cafés for coffee and cognac.

We'll drop in too, and we will kiss each other because we've had such a good time together—who will it be first, I wonder?—and are such good friends. And we will watch the sun come up as if we had never seen it before, and vow to get up early every morning, or stay up all night to see it because sunrise is much the prettiest sight in the world. These are the simple kind of human pleasures I love, the kind I can do with, the things one can just naturally do if one is a resident tourist in Paris. I don't really live there any more, I'm really no better than those American drunks at the Dôme I used to sneer at with my French friends.

I want to live there again. I want to live in that dark alley named I'Impasse des Deux Anges, and have those little pointed jeweled blue velvet shoes at the Cluny copied, and get my perfumes from Molinard's and go to Schiaparelli's spring show to watch her ugly mannequins jerking about as if they were run with push buttons, hitching their belts down in back every time they turn, giving each other hard theatrical Lesbian stares. I want to light a foot-high candle to Our Lady of Paris for bringing me back, and go out to Chantilly to see if they've turned another page in the Duke's Book of Hours. I'd like to dance again in that little
guinguette
in rue Denfert-Rochereau with the good-looking young Marquis—what's his name? descended from Joan of Arc's brother. I want to go again to Bagatelle and help the moss roses open; in cold springs, they get stuck, poor things, halfway—all you do is loosen one outer petal and there it opens, before your eyes! I want to do that again. I'll go again to Rambouillet through those woods that really do look just as Watteau and Fragonard saw them. And to St. Denis to see again the lovely white marble feet of kings and queens, lying naked together on the roof above their formal figures on the bier, delicate toes turned up side by side.

I never saw such rainbows as I saw over the city of Paris, I never saw such rain, either.… I wonder if that Catholic society in Montparnasse still gives dowries to poor but honorable girls in the parish. I wonder if the little novices who used to climb ladders and go to the top of the apple trees to pick the apples—in that old convent garden under my window—oh I wonder if they have grown sober and sad living on greens, and apples and prayer?… I'm going again to St. Cloud next May to see the first lilies of the valley.… Oh God, I'm homesick. I'll never leave Paris again, I promise, if you'll let me just get there this once more. If every soul left it one day and grass grew in the pavements, it would still be Paris to me, I'd want to live there. I'd love to have Paris all to myself for even one day. Slowly, with strangely blissful tears forming under her closed lids, she drifted from her waking dream to quiet sleep.

“I can't see quite why it gets so stuffy in here,” said Lizzi, dropping her hairbrush and picking it up. “So sorry. Did I disturb you? When there's a whole ocean full of the most divine air outside.”

Mrs. Treadwell opened her eyes, shut them painfully and turned on her side towards the wall. “It's the way they build ships,” she said drowsily. “Little cubbies with little holes in them and all kinds of smells.… Sometimes they build houses the same way,” she said, feeling very reasonable and remote. “Very few houses are fit to live in either, it's the world makes it so, didn't you know? Who are you?”

“You were asleep with the light on,” said Lizzi, her glance darting over the wineglass and bottle on the floor. Lowering her voice somewhat, she added confidentially, “I had some delicious
Schaumwein
, with Herr Rieber. Are you awake? You sounded still asleep, somehow? Every day I learn new things about him. Just to think he is a publisher. I had not known that!”

“How fascinating,” murmured Mrs. Treadwell, from the depths of her pillow.

“Yes, in Berlin. It is a new weekly devoted to the garment trade, but it has literary and intellectual features besides. One of these is called the New World of Tomorrow, and he engages the very best writers to contribute, all on one topic, to be examined from every point of view. The idea is this: if we can find some means to drive all Jews out of Germany, our national greatness will then assert itself and tomorrow we shall have a free world. Is that not marvelous?”

Mrs. Treadwell deliberately kept silence. Perhaps the worst thing about her undesirable cabin mate was the extraordinary vulgarity of her talk about Jews. The word haunted her speech, it cropped up no matter what the topic, a most unpleasant obsession, and the sound of it gave Mrs. Treadwell again a creeping chill of distaste.

“He is very intellectual, Herr Rieber, in spite of the fact,” Lizzi smirked, leaning into the looking glass and brushing her hair as if she would scrub it off, “he is so very playful at times. He is part of the movement to restore German publishing, more especially in the trades and professions; it has been almost destroyed by the Jews. They are poisoning German thought, Herr Rieber says. And I quite agree, I know that in my business, lingerie, they are everywhere, making prices, cutting prices, tampering with fashions, bargaining, cheating, trying to control everything and everybody. You do not know what it is to try to deal with them in business. No trick is too low.”