Ship of Fools (76 page)

The violinist by then regretted his gallant attempts to aid a distressed female who showed nothing but the most shameless ingratitude, who would scream “Don't touch me!” as if she were being raped, every time he tried to take her arm and guide her. Yet she was staggering all over the passageway, from side to side, bumping into the walls, and God knows she was the ugliest woman he had ever seen. Yet, slave to his decent upbringing and perhaps his natural good temper, he persisted, keeping a brave face to the business, and did succeed at last in landing his nuisance at the right door, where he knocked as loudly as he dared, and waited.

Denny struggled up from his bar stool for the first time that evening, and said, “I've got business. I'm going to cut in on Pastora. I see her buzzing around with one of those Cubans. She's going to do some tall explainin' now—little she knows!”

David, who had been benumbed for some time without having enjoyed any of the progressive pleasures of getting drunk, now felt detached enough to offer good advice to Denny, who was so obviously born to do the wrong thing no matter what he did: “You ought to have started earlier, maybe. You've lost control. You won't be able to gauge distance or pull your punches. Remember, it's dangerous to hit a woman
any
where, even when you're sober. They're all over soft spots, they can't take it.”

“This one will,” said Denny, firmly. He tottered, held on to the bar with his left hand, hit himself in the stomach with his right, and gave a loud belch. As if this had a steadying effect, he walked a fairly straight line towards the dancers. David followed along, hoping to see Denny snubbed properly. Not at all: the Cuban student surrendered all claim to his partner at once. Before she could refuse and take flight, Pastora was hedged in Denny's arms; while they wobbled about in a series of ellipses, Pastora held him away by both his elbows, and Denny hung on around her shoulders in gruesome silence, breathing a miasma of mingled unclean fumes into her face. “Let me go, you smell like a buzzard!” Pastora was crying out, turning away and struggling. Altogether, a most unpromising situation, David was pleased to see. With a cheerful heart he wished Denny a fine busy evening bringing Pastora under, and all the bad luck in the world at it.

He had troubles of his own, and as he had begun to do lately, when the whiskey, as he hoped, had cleared his head and taken the edge off his anxieties, he wondered at his lack of self-respect, letting any woman, and above all a woman like Jenny, weigh on his mind and hound his feelings day and night and interfere with his plans and sidetrack him into places he had never meant to be, and corner him with unfair arguments and work on his weaknesses with her tears and her lovemaking, upset his work and drive him to drink—simply no end to her bitchery—what in God's name could he have been thinking of? Here he was, getting drunk every day simply to get away from her and the thought of her, and what had come of it? What had become of Jenny? For the girl he thought he knew had disappeared so entirely he had almost to believe he made her up out of odds and ends of stuff from his own ragbag of adolescent dreams and imaginings. Of course, it was time he grew up. There never was, there couldn't possibly be, any such living girl as he had dreamed Jenny was.…

His drunkenness almost bowled him over. He leaned on the rail holding his head, and though his knees shook under him, and his gorge rose as it did too often even under less provocation, his heart and his will hardened as if they had separate lives of their own not subject to the caprices of alcohol. “Darn you, Jenny angel, I give you up. I won't fight with you any longer. It's not worth it. I can't live like this.” When he heard his own voice he glanced about in dismay, but no one was near. Jenny's bright voice spoke up with its unbearable gay mockery: “… and the Emperor Cuautomoc then spoke to him from his pit of fire and asked, Think you that I am on a bed of roses?'” She had already said that a long time ago when he did not take her seriously; when he let her know she was causing him distress and making him unhappy, she had always answered in some oblique way that she was unhappy too, and it was his fault, and it was her belief that if they tried hard enough, they were bound to be blissful together. But she never said how they were to try, nor who should begin.

Pastora, with a face of fury, passed him in full flight, her ruffled skirts and black lace mantilla flowing backward; with a glance over her shoulder she dived through the nearest door. Denny, far off his center of gravity, approached more slowly but in earnest pursuit. He blinked at David and rounded on him confidentially: “She thinks she's goin' to get away,” he said easily, “but there isn't any place on this ship she can hide. I'll get her, don't worry.”

David said, “Maybe you ought to wait now until morning, you'll be in better shape,” but Denny shook his head obstinately and said, “No, tonight's the night.” He hobbled on with a good deal of waste motion, but made it safely to the doorway where Pastora had disappeared, leaned against the jamb for a few seconds, and went on. David wandered without plan, meeting strayed revelers whom he saw through a mist—Mrs. Treadwell with that solemn young officer; poor Elsa being escorted probably to bed by her parents; Dr. Schumann, who appeared to be walking in his sleep: they swam past him, and from the other side of the ship floated the strains of that never-ending bore of a waltz, “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” At last he admitted where he was going, and who he was looking for and what he expected to find; he was beyond feeling, his nervous system felt dead, yet he was in anguish, a distress so deathlike it gave him a shock of fright, he really feared for the first time in his life that he might be going to die. There was nothing for it, though, but to keep going, up one flight of steps after another, to the boat deck, there to circle about warily and stealthily until he found them there together, and they were not even trying to hide. With a scalding shock in his blood as if he had not known all along they would be there, his search ended. They were huddled together on the deck, backs against a funnel, their knees drawn up, heads bowed thoughtfully, turned to each other, their foreheads touching, their bodies infolded, and fitted together smoothly. The twilight of the moon in a drift of cloud shone on Jenny's frost-white face, the look of one suffering in her sleep on her closed eyes and mouth. Freytag was holding her firmly and easily, his arms completely around her, her folded hands held in one of his rested on her closed knees turned helplessly towards him.

David's hands and feet turned cold, his nose grew thin and white and pointed downward, the nostrils working—he could feel it changing shape, drawing in upon itself in utter repulsion. A frightful confusion of simple jealousy, human outrage, pure disgust, a freezing hatred of Jenny set up their clamor in him at once. Yet he could not tell which was the more loathsome to him, the scene itself and its meaning, Jenny's face of shameless, painful rapture, or Freytag's self-possession, his easy, familiar hold on her, his control, the kind of professional expertness of a born handler and trainer of women.

This was what David, then and afterwards, could not endure; very murder rose in his soul at the sight of Freytag's amiable, composed face, with its rather pleasantly elated look. Obviously he was waiting for Jenny to move into another phase of her desire, with his attentive help, and to declare herself first, before he closed with her. They might have been in a tower or on an island, in their absorption with themselves. Freytag raised his forehead from Jenny's, and spreading one hand upon her hair, he held her head back, turned her face up to his, studied it with quiet interest for a few seconds, then kissed her deliberately with the utmost luxury on the mouth. Jenny stirred and seemed to try to bury herself in his arms. He gathered her to him fully, competently, without haste or excitement, and began straightening out her legs, until he lay at full length beside her, moving his hand over her breast.

Still watching her face, he shifted his shoulder easily and covered her upper body with his, and there he stopped, and put his cheek to hers as if listening to her breathing. Then he turned away, and lay beside her, cradling her head on his arm, and he laughed, a very odd small laugh, under his breath, all to himself. He shook her head a little, kissed her, drew her up sitting, and tried to raise her to her feet. “Shame on you, you wench!” he said, in the utmost good temper. “Imagine passing out at a moment like this!” Jenny moaned, and said, “Oh, let me alone. Leave me here!”

“You know I can't do that,” said Freytag in a tone very like brotherly annoyance. “Now stand up, Jenny, don't be tiresome.”

David, standing frozen there in the shadow of the funnel, now turned in an utter horror of humiliation and tiptoed down the steps, his head roaring like a seashell.

In the bar, Herr Baumgartner, his clown make-up streaked, his whiskers on the floor under his chair, fumbled for the stern of his liqueur glass, jostled his coffee cup and spilt coffee on his napkin. Using the napkin as a handkerchief, he wept in silence, wiping his mouth, eyes and forehead distractedly. His wife watched him with eyes like agates, and spoke in a lowered, hardened voice: “Everybody is very carefully not looking at you. So after all I suppose you are not making a show of yourself in public.”

He swallowed his Benedictine, his expensive, festive after-dinner treat, in one gulp without tasting it. Reaching over the stack of saucers between them, he touched the back of her hand with a forefinger, tapping lightly. She could see only one blurred hopeless eye behind the napkin, and the tremulous corner of a mouth full of unspoken reproaches. “
Mein Liebchen
,” he said, “have you forgotten? We have been married ten years today.”

“What is there to remember?” she asked him unforgivingly. “What has it been? A hell, a little hell on earth from the beginning.”

“No,” he said, “not from the beginning. That is not true—”

She hurried on, fiercely determined to deny everything but her unhappiness, unable, unwilling to remember anything but disappointment. “Don't tell me I don't know what it has been! Oh, aren't you ashamed of the life you have made for us?”

He covered his face again and groaned through the cloth. “Yes, yes, I am ashamed, I am always ashamed. But I am dying, Gretel, you know I am dying with these ulcers, maybe cancer, how do we know? I am dying and what do you care, what have you ever cared …?”

“If you stopped this swilling day and night you would be well,” she told him, leaning nearer. “You want to be sick, you want to make me wretched, you want to ruin all our lives—I understand you now. You hate me. You do it to spite me …”

Herr Baumgartner straightened his shoulders, drooped again, swayed, braced his fists on the table. “Very well,” he said, “that is the last straw. Think what you please. I am finished, I have lived too long already—not another hour of this torment. I am going to kill myself.”

“Of course,” said his wife, freezing with anger and fright, “now begin that again! Well, just how and when do you propose to end your life this time? I should like to know your plans for once.”

“I shall jump overboard in this next minute,” he said, gulping his coffee. “That will be—” He smashed the cup down so violently it shattered and several persons glanced about, glanced instantly away again. He caught every eye as it turned and gave a stagy hoot of joyless mirth. “That will be the safest way!”

“Yes,” she said, taunting him, “you will make a big disturbance and be rescued like Bébé—”

“Or maybe like the Basque,” he reminded her.

“Bah!” she said. “You make me sick!”

He saw with dismay that she was simply and purely angry, that she was taking this merely as another quarrel, but he had gone too far to draw back; he must persist until he had driven her to believe in the seriousness of his threat and to take action to prevent him from carrying it out, as a wife should do.

Frau Baumgartner almost read his thoughts. She saw him waiting for her next move, a wicked childish calculation in his gaze, trying to measure the limits of her resistance, to break her down into pleading until he would at last consent, for her sake, to live. Instead, she folded her arms and leaned back and said wearily, “You will never do anything, so stop talking nonsense. I am tired of this, I am going to bed and you may stay here as long as you please.”

He leaped up blindly at that and took long strides towards the nearest door before he looked back. His wife had not unfolded her arms, and she was not watching him. When he looked back again from the deck she had left the table and was walking in the opposite direction from him, the gaudy streamers of her peasant's headdress fluttering.

Benumbed from the shock of this treachery, this desertion, the last thing in the world he could have expected from her, he tottered out and lagged along the rail, his eye roving, looking for her to appear presently from almost any direction; she surely meant only to punish him for a few minutes, then she would come round from somewhere to intercept him, to prevent him, to plead with him, to bring him to reason as she had so often tried to do. Waiting, he stopped short, holding his head, elbows at rest, trying to pretend that he really meant to jump. Gazing into the steeply rising and falling sea, staggered by the unruly heaving of the deck, he shuddered in horror at his vision of himself, poised upon the rail for one split second over the frightful depths, leaning forward with the leaning of the ship, falling in a curve, head downward, just at the very split second Gretel should come running with her arms stretched towards him, hands clasped, imploring, “Oh, nonono, waitwait my love forgive me!”

He fell back in such terror he almost lost his balance, and nearly collided with Mrs. Treadwell, who was walking with that boyish-looking young lieutenant Herr Baumgartner had noticed with her before. They were laughing merrily and zigzagging with the roll of the deck, his arm around her.