Ship of Fools (44 page)

“Do come out and watch the clouds with me,” she said. “This is my birthday.”

He came towards her, pale and frowning, and asked in utter incredulity, “
What
did you say?”

“Well, what
have
I said?” she asked. “Herr Freytag, what is wrong?”

“Mrs. Treadwell, will you please tell me what you want? What are you doing here, after your mean treachery to me, betraying my confidence, gossiping about my wife to that hag Spöckenkieker, making me all this stupid trouble …?”

His words were exploding in hot puffs of breath in her very face; she shrank and began to tremble, not for fear but for dismay of conscience, for she remembered everything and knew what Freytag was talking about, saw that she had fallen into the trap Lizzi had set for her. “Oh, tell me what has happened,” she said, in a low shaking voice, and she spread her two hands flat, palms out, before her breast. “She said you would know!”

“How stupidly cruel you are!” he burst out again, incandescent with fury. “Do you mean to ridicule me besides what you have already done? Can you pretend—look, don't you know that—that—” he stumbled on the brink of a foul name for Lizzi, drew back—“that she babbled at the table before everybody, how you were drunk …”

Mrs. Treadwell sat with a slight stagger on the nearest chair, holding her head.

“—Drunk and oh shame on you repeated what I had told you in confidence … and that swine of a Captain, that stinking swine—”

“Don't call ugly names,” said Mrs. Treadwell, raising her voice a little, shaking her head as if she could rid her ears of his clamor. “And I was not drunk, that is a slander—”

“He is not only a swine, but the worst sort of swine, the self-satisfied swine who cultivates and loves his own swinishness; he boasts of it, he imposes it on those around him; he thinks and talks like a swine, he gobbles and guzzles like a swine, he is swinishness itself, he would look much better and be more comfortable on four feet—”

Mrs. Treadwell stood up again and put her hands over her ears.

“I won't listen any more,” she called through the words pouring like a rockslide, “unless you tell me what he did.”

“He put me at the table with the Jew!” shouted Freytag in a climactic mystical spin of outrage, and stopped as if a hand had been laid on his mouth.

“Is that so bad?” asked Mrs. Treadwell, gently, as if she were humoring a madman. “Do you really mind?”

Freytag, still furious and colorless, quieted somewhat, but stuck to his point, which was to force her to see, acknowledge, and accept the fact that she was to blame for the whole thing. She could sidestep and throw him off track as long as she liked, but he was going to tell her the facts.

“What I mind is your treachery,” he said. “The Captain meant to insult me, and to insult my wife through me, but he cannot insult us. He is capable only of impudence, the filthy—”

“No,” said Mrs. Treadwell, shaking her head, “not that again.”

“If you had been a dear friend,” Freytag said, his voice now hoarsened and full of pathos, “or a member of my family, or anyone I had loved and trusted, what you did would not have surprised me. But how could I expect such treachery, such malice, from a stranger?”

Mrs. Treadwell was silent as a prisoner on trial, turning this unanswerable question over in her mind rather coldly, wishing the talk might end, but knowing it must go on until the suffering man, her accuser, had cleared his mind of her.

“Of course I do not mind Löwenthal, and I am sure he does not mind me,” said Freytag, and was hypnotized almost into calm by the quite civilized relationship he began inventing between Löwenthal and himself. “We would probably bore each other to death if we tried to talk, so I imagine we won't try it. He is obviously of low origin, but I prefer him to the Captain and that dull crowd at his table—at least he has decent feelings and—” he hesitated a moment—“and really, quite good manners—”

Here he paused, unable to go on with his fiction. Mrs. Treadwell had sat down again, and was listening intently. Freytag sat down too, and leaned towards her to speak again, when she said, “But he sounds rather nice!”

Freytag seemed to collapse as if he could no longer contest with such an impermeable being. “My God, nice!” he said finally. “No, he is not nice, and I don't like him, and not because he is a Jew; if he were seven times a Christian I should still not like him because he is the kind of man I don't like. Can you understand that?” he asked her with some curiosity, as if he were trying out a strange language on her. “It is true, he is not even the kind of Jew I like, or is that going too far?”

Mrs. Treadwell heard the stagy sarcasm and decided she had let him be rude long enough, out of deference to his sense of wrong against her. Now she went back to the subject.

“I can't defend myself at all,” she told him, choosing her words. “But why did you give me your confidence? I did not want it. I did not even imagine it was a confidence. If you had told me—but you accuse me of such ignoble motives—” She stammered, repelled by the almost unbearable, shameless pathos in the now puzzled mournful anger of his face. He looked as if his teeth were on edge; he had frowned until a new set of wrinkles was already fixed between his eyebrows. He looked as moody as Arne Hansen. He now turned this alienated face straight to her as if it helped him listen better, but the pale gray eyes with their sick look avoided hers at last.

“… not because I had any motive,” she went on, rapidly, “but exactly because I
hadn't
. I wasn't your friend, how could I be? If I had been your friend I would have known about your life and there would be no occasion to talk about it to anybody. What did you expect of me? I was not your enemy either. I just hadn't thought of you at all.”

“Thank you,” he said, with bitterness. “You were quite right.”

“Don't be childish,” said Mrs. Treadwell. “I meant nothing personal. I mean only to say, I didn't know enough about you to guard your secret—though why you look upon it as one at this point I can't understand.”

Freytag said in perfect simplicity, “When I travel alone, I go as a Christian. When my wife is with me, things are different: we never quite know … maybe you don't know Germany? Things are very uncertain there for us, and getting worse …”

“But if your secret was so important to you, why did you give it to me?”

“It was on my mind, you seemed sympathetic. I spoke without thinking of consequences.”

“Ah, so did I,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “and I will confess something. I had drunk a whole bottle of wine that evening. Out of boredom, out of stupor, out of indifference …”

“You are worse than a treacherous friend,” he said suddenly, harshly. “You are worse than a worst enemy. Out of your boredom! What right have you to be bored? Indifference—what right have you to live in this world and care nothing for the human beings around you? You did a mean treacherous thing to someone who trusted you and never harmed you, and then you don't even care—oh you don't even
know
, what you have done.”

Mrs. Treadwell felt anger flashing all through her. She would not be bullied any longer about this absurd episode.

“You betrayed yourself first,” she told him, with a light, glib inflection, “and you are carrying all this very much too far and you are quite wrong. I do really, with all my heart,” she said, wondering at herself for the phrase, “care about what has happened to you—”

“About what you
did
,” he persisted, maddeningly. “Remember, it was you, it was what you
did
that …”

“I have been amazed enough at myself,” she said, “and perhaps you are right, and you may blame me as much as you please; but you make it easy for me to be frank with you now and tell you that, yes, you are right again—I simply do not want to be annoyed with this business, I do not intend to worry about it at all, and I shall not talk about it any more.”

She rose and turned away a few steps, then faced about again, waiting for whatever he might want to say. Surely in such a case, the last word was his privilege. She was trembling deeply with resentment; the face before her was repulsive in its hardened expression of self-absorbed, accusing, utter righteousness.

“With all your heart,” he said, “you have no heart. And you do not understand what is happening. It is not just this one thing—no no, it is a lifetime of it, it is a world full of it—it's not being able ever to hope for an end to it—It is seeing the one you love best in the world treated like dirt by people not fit to breathe the same air with her! If you could see her, you would know what I am talking about. Mrs. Treadwell, she is a little golden thin nervous thing, most beautiful and gay in the morning, she is innocent, innocent, she makes life charming where she is, when she talks it is like a bird singing in a tree!”

He came very near to her and spoke urgently, so near that she could feel his breath again, his face strained in anxiety, his eyes bright with tears. Mrs. Treadwell, taken terribly by surprise, without in the least intending to and with no warning from her own feelings, gave way and consented to see him in his own light, understood his sufferings as real and terrible, admitted her fault, and took on as a penance her share not only of this pain but whatever other shapeless, nameless endless human anguish chose to search her out and accuse her. She dropped her hands to her sides and retreated a step. Of course it was her fault.

“Don't!” she said. “Don't say any more. Listen to me. Listen to me for just a moment.” She drew a deep breath. “I want to be forgiven. You must try to forgive me.”

It was his turn to be surprised, to be reversed with a jolt, rather unpleasantly. He had been enjoying the scene, easing the pressure of his baffled fury on her; he had meant to insult her enough to satisfy his desire for revenge, and to leave her well cut up without letting her say a word. And now almost instantly, in spite of himself, a generous warmth of feeling came over him, and he said, “Oh, no, please not,” almost in embarrassment, “don't say it. I am sorry, too. We will have to forgive each other if we go on like this—”

“The thing that is so frightening,” said Mrs. Treadwell, her voice shaking a little, “is this. Here we are talking about this as if it were real, and I expect it is, but it seems to me like a horrid dream, I cannot believe it—”

“It's real, though,” he said, and now he wished to console her. “Oh no, surely you are not going to cry?”

“How absurd,” said Mrs. Treadwell, quite in her usual manner. “I never cry.” She gave a bubbling little laugh and burst into enormous, helpless tears. Freytag, with the presence of mind of a married man used to feminine emergencies, glanced round to see if any witness had entered the writing room, moved between her and the door to provide a screen, and offered her a large white linen handkerchief. “Now, now,” he said soothingly while she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Oh that's better. Do you know what I think? What do you say we have a good drink, a big cocktail?”

Mrs. Treadwell said, “Wait a minute.” She took a little looking glass and powder puff and lipstick out of her handbag, and for the first time in her life applied make-up in public. One witness was as damning as a crowd. She did not care. She was exhausted, serene, unnerved, all at once, this melodrama was the kind of thing she abhorred—oh, the dowdiness of making scenes, and she did not trust Freytag for a moment, he was obviously a born scene-maker—yet, no matter how it came about, she felt just for a moment, knowing even then it could not possibly last, an airy lightness of heart. In recklessness, or something like it, she said, “I'd love a cocktail, a huge one,” and they emerged into the passageway together like two amiable well-disposed persons apparently on the best of terms.

Freytag said, “I don't know if I am going to be able to sleep tonight, thinking about what fun it would be to throw the Captain overboard, drown the little rat off his own bridge. But I'll resist temptation now, thanks to you.”

“Why? I shouldn't mind what you do to the Captain.”

“You've cooled my mind, somehow. I have got to go to Germany and leave again with my wife and her mother, and that's all I have to think about, and I must do it without attracting any attention. Drowning the Captain indeed,” he said, “a pleasant daydream, but I mustn't give way to it. I must work things out.”

When they were seated, he asked, “Is it really your birthday? Is that what you said when you came in?”

She nodded. “The forty-sixth, imagine!” He was obscurely offended at her unfeminine frankness, and to hide it, he said, “How charming! Many, many more.”

“Not too many, please. I'll let you know if I want another.”

He surveyed the bar, now beginning to be crowded. Jenny Brown and David Scott, climbing on stools, greeted him Mexican fashion, right hands raised face-high, palms out, fingers fluttering. He responded with the same gesture, and Mrs. Treadwell said, “I think it's pretty.” Freytag said, “They say it means ‘Come nearer,'” and continued to move his look from face to face, as if he expected each one to notice his presence, though he had never thought of such a thing before. The Lutzes and Baumgartners in turn caught his glance, and nodded to him: the dullest of all the dull people on board, of course—they probably wouldn't have worldly sense enough to understand what had happened. Everybody from the Captain's table was there, apparently unconscious of his existence. Those appalling Spaniards, not even they turned an eye towards him, though one of the girls, the little young Concha, had been following him about lately, as if she had something on her mind. Even the young Cuban pair ignored him, though he had played games with their small children, tootling on paper flutes, letting them shoot at him with water pistols, walking around the deck with one straddled on each shoulder; even the hunchback, even that ridiculous fellow from Texas, Denny, somehow failed to see him; it did not occur to him to speak to anybody first, nor did he remember that ordinarily he hoped that his fellow passengers so-called would keep away from him.