Ship of Fools (58 page)

“I could have told you not to say anything to Löwenthal,” said David. “It's none of your business, to begin with, and even if it were, he wouldn't think so—you're just another Goy, so far as he's concerned, the Enemy.”

“I should think he'd be able to see when a person is really friendly to him,” said Jenny, and her melancholy expression began to settle on her face.

“You mean you'd think he'd make an exception for you? He just couldn't help seeing how sincere you are? Well, Jenny angel, he might hate you worse for that very thing! Oh, can't you ever see?”

Jenny said carefully, cross-hatching a hasty sketch of Manolo's back view: “I don't think that is what I felt at all. I somehow wanted to have my part in the business straightened out. I wanted him to know …”

David said, “Angel, get it in your head that he doesn't want to know. He knows what he knows already.”

“All right, David darling,” said Jenny, “let's not run this into a quarrel. I feel lovely with you today. Please let me sit here near you and don't scold me. I'm tired of quarreling … only, my feelings are real, and my thoughts are part of me, I can't just throw them away; I can't go all my days
not
saying this, and
not
doing that, and
not
feeling what I do feel, anyway, no matter what I might pretend to you—just to keep the peace! Well, I'll see you dead and damned first.” She kept her voice low and never stopped drawing.

David went on drawing too, without a word. His face was taking on the paleness and coldness that Jenny dreaded and was seeing more and more often. She loved David's roseate flush, a fresh masculine young tone of coloring, thin-skinned and healthily tough. If he didn't look out, all that food and alcohol would catch up on him someday, he'd wake up some morning to find that fatal ruby network on his nose and cheeks. This treacherous thought having come of itself expanded at once into action. David sat very still and intent on his work, and Jenny, stealing slant-eyed glimpses at him, began a prophetic portrait of David, say at fifty. She draped forty sagging pounds on David's familiar bony framework, added jowls, thinned his hair back level with his ears, doubled the size of his unbelievably handsome acquiline nose, extended his chin so extravagantly he began to resemble Punch, and as a last satisfying luxury of cruelty, she added a Teutonic roll of fat across the base of his skull. She was so happily absorbed and soothed in the execution of her little murder, her features assumed the sweet serenity and interior warm light that David loved to see, and saw only when he surprised her really sunk in work. Of himself, by no means could he bring that look to her face. When Jenny faced him, she was always under tension, poised for the encounter, full of contradictory emotions, her eyes always seeking, wandering, gazing, flickering, dilating and wincing. She had got in the habit of expecting trouble from him, no matter what. He thought grimly, “And she won't settle for less now, won't have anything else. That's what it has come to, it is simply no good any more, no matter if we can fool ourselves into thinking so a little while every day. And what a rotten painter she is! Why can't she see it for herself and give up?” He studied her a few seconds longer. Her knees were drawn up to make a table for her drawing pad, her graceful slender ankles were crossed, and a smile curled delicately at the corners of her mouth, not ecstasy, but something tender and pleasant and happy. He could not resist breaking it up. He reached out abruptly to seize her drawing. Jenny jumped violently, snatched it out of his reach, crumpling it. He rose out of his chair and took hold of the drawing and was surprised at the ferocity of her resistance.

“What is this you're so pleased with?”

“No, David, let go—let go—you shan't see it—”

“Look out, Jenny—you're going to tear it!”

“I mean to.” She stuffed the drawing down the front of her dress and held the sketching table over it with her crossed arms. “Do I go peeping and snatching at your papers?”

“Oh,” said David, offended, and he gave way sulkily. He detested Jenny's obstinate insistence that there was any comparable connection between his ways with hers and her ways with him. She fought with him bitterly about his habit of opening her letters—he had no such right, she said. “I don't open your letters,” she argued.

Certainly not—why should she? “Do you suspect me of getting love letters?” she inquired indignantly. Of course not—or rather, well, no. That was not the point. It was just that he could not admit that Jenny had any privacies he was bound to respect. At least that was her view of the matter. His own boundaries and reserves were inviolable, and Jenny was little by little finding it out; but she had not found out, nothing could teach her, what it was a man really wanted from a woman. At this point, he felt lost in a fog, as usual. A man, a woman, meant nothing to him. Jenny was the question and he could not find the answer. She had got back into her chair, knees up, ankles crossed, hugging her drawing close. She met his eye gaily and cunningly. “This is one thing you'll never see!” she assured him, and burst out laughing all over, shaking from head to foot, wriggling her bare toes in her flat thonged Mexican sandals.

He gave up his grudges and his bad temper as useless, charmed again by Jenny's laugh, always so fresh and merry; you couldn't call it a belly laugh exactly, proceeding from that flat little midriff, but it was right out of the cellar, every time. He said, “Look, tell me the joke, I'd like to laugh, too.”

“No, then it wouldn't be funny,” said Jenny. Still smiling in high good humor, she said gently, “David darling, if only you could know how beautiful you are to me this minute. Let's never get old and fat.”

“All right, grasshopper. Not fat, anyway.” They were agreed that to grow fat was the unpardonable sin against all the good in life, from ethics to morals to esthetics and back again. “Not like the Huttens.”

“Not like Bébé,” said Jenny. “What was that you said about those dancers having social consciousness?”

The Cuban students, deprived of the society of La Condesa by her jealous lover the Doctor, somewhat bored with their secret society into which no one had attempted to intrude, and their newspaper, read by no one but themselves, took to chess tournaments and pingpong. Their style however continued the same, implying that fascinating sophisticated secrets were to be read by initiates into their symbolic speech and ritual. It was coming over them gradually that really, nobody cared; they were not annoying anyone enough to make a difference. They decided to attack directly. Where the zarzuela company merely stared bitterly at their victims and uttered their jeering laughter, which never failed to raise a responsive blush of anger or shame, the students thought of a method they believed more subtle and deadly. They consulted with each other gravely, then turned to regard some chosen subject with clinical detachment, saying to each other audibly:

“A serious case?”

“No hope,” the other would reply. They would shake their heads, glance piercingly again at their patient, and go on with their chess.

On deck, in passing, they exchanged critical medical views. “Chronic skeletonism,” they said of Lizzi, gloating over the instant look of fright in her face. “No hope.”

“Congenital albondigitis,” they called loudly to each other as the Huttens approached with weighty tread, Bébé waddling laboriously on a leash. “No hope!” Professor Hutten glanced swiftly at his wife to see if she had heard. Of course she had, and her feelings were hurt again. The Professor recalled that from the beginning he had expressed his disapproval of these savage boys, and his astonishment at hearing them bandying about, in their unintelligible gabble, the noble, the revered names of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant; did his ear mislead him or had they dared also to take in vain the name of Goethe? Besides lesser yet still venerable names such as Shakespeare and Dante. Their faces even in relative repose were never serious, their voices not thoughtfully modulated. They chattered like monkeys while daring to utter the name of Nietzsche, no doubt misinterpreting and dishonoring him to their own base satisfaction. No reverence, no proper humility in the presence of greatness—these were the failings of all the non-Nordic races, Iberian, Latin, Gallic, especially; indeed, frivolity was endemic among them, a plague they had carried with them to the whole New World, truly appalling in its lack of intellectual sobriety. Professor Hutten felt he could despair once for all of the human race if there did not remain some hope of the survival of the old Germanic spirit. Rallying bravely, he tried to comfort his wife.

“Don't listen to them, my dear, they are mere ragamuffins, naturally stupid, and stupidity is always evil, it is not capable of anything else.” These words dismayed him, they sounded like an echo—from where?—in his mind. Surely he did not believe that any human being, no matter how sunk in sin, was irredeemable? What had come over him? He could not imagine, but he could not deny either that this strange point of view struck him powerfully as revealed truth. There was such a thing as incurable love of evil in the human soul. The Professor tasted such bitterness in his mouth he wondered if his gall bladder had emptied itself suddenly on his tongue.

“I heard them, though,” said Frau Hutten, like a grieved child. “They called us meatballs.” She had not expected anything better of them; she was only tired of the unkindness of people to each other.

“In fact,” said the Professor, resolutely, “they said, in their low medical student dog-Latin, that we are hopeless cases of congenital meatballitis—an inflamed state, as you know. If you must hear unpleasant things, at least hear them right. In any case, such clownishness can do us no harm.”

“I think
they
are clowns,” agreed Frau Hutten, gently, “yet I never ridicule them. Why should they ridicule us?”

This was a topic for the Professor to get his teeth into. He took up the whole morning walk, and the round of beer that followed, explaining to Frau Hutten the mysteriously variable distribution of common traits in human nature which created the individual being—yes, in fourfooted beasts, also, and in every living thing, insect, fish, flower, bird—even no two leaves on any tree are exactly alike!—causing all these endless and incalculable points of view and needs and desires, the limitless kinds of personal satisfactions to be fought for even to death, in many instances, ranging from the vilest forms of abuse, cruelty, crime, to the very heights of sainthood and martyrdom itself. This group of Cuban students was a lamentable example of naturally base minds incapable of the higher understanding, exposed to education above their capacities, who naturally could make no good use of it, being constrained with their monkey paws to pull every superior thing down to their own level. They were unable to endure, indeed they hated, the very thought of nobility or greatness on any plane. “They think that if they should spit on Michelangelo's
Moses
they shall have proved it to be no better than they are,” he said, triumphantly. “That is their great mistake,” he ended, soothingly, “and they will be given their lesson, in time.”

Frau Hutten concealed her astonishment at this change in her husband's viewpoint, now so exactly agreeing with her own, and waited a respectful interval of consenting silence before going on with what was on her mind.

“They are publishing some kind of paper again,” she told him. “Something for those Spanish dancers. I saw them all reading a printed sheet together and laughing.”

Professor Hutten's train of thought was not interrupted. “It does not concern us, that is certain.” He went on further to expand and elucidate his convictions on his subject. “Our attitude is indicated clearly, we need have no doubts. We shall ignore their existence as heretofore, do not give them the satisfaction of even the slightest response, neither in word or look. If they persist in their savagery to a point where this is no longer possible or commensurate with our own dignity, then—retaliation, swift, painful, and certain. I shall find a way to let them feel the sharpness of my rebuke. Don't be troubled, my dear. We have dealt with intransigents before.”

Frau Hutten fondled Bébé's ears and smiled at her husband. “Of course,” she said. She could not help thinking, looking towards the future, that her husband was already beginning to miss his classes and his lecture room. It was obvious that a whole series of new lectures was forming in his mind. She resolved to offer to take them down at his dictation, and began to speculate on the possibility that some special appointment might be found for him in a small educational institution of some kind in the Black Forest, or perhaps even publication in a journal or philosophic magazine. Or maybe when he got back to a desk with his papers and books around him, and she would be so busy with housework, he would be glad to write his lectures for himself and give her a moment's peace. Frau Hutten admitted finally to herself that she was tired to death of Ideas. If she never heard another she would be perfectly happy. She went on petting Bébé and smiling at her husband.

“It is not a fracture,” said Dr. Schumann to Captain Thiele, choosing his words for a layman's ears, “but a long and deep head wound, to the skull, with some concussion. He has not regained consciousness.”

The Captain stirred his coffee once, took a gulp, and said measuredly, “It will be all for the better if he never does.”

Dr. Schumann stirred his coffee but did not drink. “It could be fatal, but not necessarily. He has an enviable heart—like an ox, I should say.”

“Such swine always have,” said the Captain, falling in easily with the barnyard images appropriate to the subject. “What interests me,” he said irritably, “is this. Where did the weapon—”

“The monkey wrench,” said Dr. Schumann, helpfully.

“The monkey wrench,” said Captain Thiele, accepting the correction with dignity, “where did it come from? Who struck the blow? That is the man we must find.”