She had noticed this man before at the gangway desk. He had checked in directly ahead of her. His assured manner with portfolio and travel papers, the straight way he held himself, the dressy gray topcoat and gray Homburg hat, the diagonal bluish scar across his forehead had caught her attention; she had guessed—in her generally excited frame of mind—that he might be a diplomat, or perhaps some well-known playwright or newspaper correspondent. At once she had compared him in her mind with Noel; she always did that when she saw an interesting man. In his leanness, with his tanned bony face, he was not wholly unlike Noel; but he was shorter, and if anything a bit slighter.
He wasn’t nearly as handsome as Noel; but he had just the look, she thought now, with another glance toward him, that Noel strove for and for some reason missed. Possibly not being Jewish, as this man rather obviously was not, made the difference. There had always been something exotic about Noel. The wavy thick blond hair, the charged blue eyes, the height, the energetic gestures, the very handsomeness, had all given him a touch of extravagance. This man’s appearance was dry, plain, adult; almost he might have gone unnoticed in a crowd. The contrast of gray hair and a young face, the scar, and a curious quiet keenness in his expression were what marked him off.
He said, glancing at her again and smiling, as he met her eye, “We seem to be almost the last brave ones. Isn’t it too cold for you?”
“Well, it’s all so new to me, I hate to go below and miss a moment of it.”
“Your first crossing?”
“Yes.”
“The weather should have been better. The city looks grand in sunlight, from the river. This is a pretty sad sailing.” He strolled along the rail and leaned beside her. The scar drew her eyes at this close view: faded blue, with faint stitch marks, running from under his hair slantwise to his left eye. Somehow it was not exactly a disfigurement, but a trait, a mark, that belonged to the face.
She said, “It’s just as well. I don’t feel sparkling, exactly. I’ve never said so many goodbyes all at once. It’s depressing.”
He looked at the book under her arm with mild curiosity. She had taken it along upon leaving the cabin, thinking she might settle down for a while in a deck chair. “Are you an English teacher?”
“No, I’m not a teacher. Why?”
“It hardly seems you’d be reading Tom Jones for fun.”
“Well, I’ve run through all the good mysteries. This is not bad. It’s long, anyway. I guess I’ll have plenty of time to read.”
He smiled, looking down at the tourist-class deck, which was full of young people, chattering and laughing with exaggerated gaiety in the first moments of getting acquainted. “I’m afraid you will, in first class.”
“Oh? Should I have gone tourist?”
“Well, no. First class looks so alluring and unattainable from below, it’s better to find out how tame it really is, first time out. You’ll never feel underprivileged after that.”
“You make it sound unpromising.”
“Do I? I guess I’m talking like this because the weather is so gray. You’ll love your crossing, I’m sure.”
There was a burst of laughter from a cluster of girls along the rail below, surrounded by young men. One of the men, in an American army uniform, said something with a baritone laugh, and the girls shrieked again. “I can’t help feeling I’m missing something,” Marjorie said.
“The joke might not have amused you. They look like college girls.”
“It’s fun just to laugh in company sometimes,” Marjorie said, “amused or not.”
“I think you’re better off with Fielding.”
“He’s been dead such a long time,” Marjorie said. “You’re not a teacher, are you?”
“No, just a businessman. Chemicals is my line…. Am I mistaken, or did your face fall?”
“Why, not at all. Why should it?”
“Because businessmen are dull.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, yes, maybe necessarily. Making money is dull work. That’s one reason why first-class passengers tend to be dull.” He puffed at his cigar, and tossed it over the rail. “That’s against the rules. Be sure the wind’s at your back when you do it, if you smoke. Or the butt goes sailing into someone’s porthole, or face, and it can be very unpleasant.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
After a moment, resting his elbows on the rail, he said, “My name is Michael Eden.”
“I’m Marjorie Morgenstern.” She looked for a flicker of reaction to the Jewish name, but there wasn’t any. He nodded, his eyes turned to the horizon, where the land was shrinking to a lead-colored line. She said, “I am getting cold, after all. My legs, mainly. It’s a freezing wind. But it smells so wonderful, so clean and fresh—”
“You’ll have five whole days of it. You may as well go below and warm up, like all the other sensible people. I like to watch the land until it’s gone.”
“You’ve travelled quite a bit, I gather,” Marjorie said.
“Yes. And you haven’t.”
“I haven’t been west of the Hudson or east of Jones Beach. I should think watching the land vanish is just for neophytes like me.”
“Not at all. It’s the second best moment of the trip for me. The best moment is when I see it again, the good old USA, still there, poking its big snout up over the horizon.” He smiled at her. It was a peculiarly bleak, cool smile. “I’m just a Kiwanis Club boy, you see. It would be the easiest thing in the world to keep me down on the farm. I’ve seen Paree, and you can have it.”
She said, “Kiwanis Club boys don’t usually know that they’re just Kiwanis Club boys.”
For an instant a sharp look of appreciation flashed in his eyes. “Well, now and then I read. You can’t play cards forever. Though I certainly try.”
She said, pulling her coat about her, “Say goodbye to the good old USA for me, will you? I’m giving up.”
She found that her steward, an amiable little white-headed man with an enchanting British accent, had put the room perfectly in order. He pressed her to have tea; she agreed, expecting a pot of tea with perhaps a few cookies, but he brought her a lavish spread of sandwiches and exquisite cakes. When she could eat no more, most of the food remained.
She was in a large double bedroom on A deck with real beds, panelled walls, and smart severe drapes and furniture, all in rich tones of brown and gray. It was the off-season, so Marjorie was travelling in fantastic lone luxury. She took off her suit, put on a new silk housecoat, and propped herself on a bed with Tom Jones. The bed rocked slowly, easily; far from making her uneasy, it was the pleasantest sensation in the world. She had not felt so calm, so relaxed, so good, it seemed to her, since her girlhood days, before her first fatal glimpse of Noel Airman at South Wind. There was something miraculously liberating about being on a ship.
She tried to read, but she could not; her eyes rested unmoving on the page, while her mind went over the conversation with the man on the boat deck. How old was he? Hardly forty, despite the gray hair; he might not be over thirty-five.
“Mike Eden,” she said aloud, for no reason. The sound of her own voice startled her; she nestled in the pillows, and forced her attention back to Tom Jones.
Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe,
Falling in love with love is playing the fool…
It became obvious to Marjorie, on the first night of the crossing, that that song was going to remind her of Michael Eden for a long time. It was a favorite of the ship’s musicians, a protean group of four who played Beethoven quartets in the afternoon in one of the smaller salons, Victor Herbert melodies at dinner, and reasonably inflamed jazz after ten at night, in the vessel’s night club, a charming little oval room called the Verandah Grill on one of the highest decks, with tall windows looking out on the darkling ocean and the gently swinging moon and stars.
The musicians were playing Falling in Love with Love when she came into the night club with Eden for t
he first time, shortly before midnight. They played it twice more that evening, and several times each evening thereafter; and they sometimes obliged with it at dinner and at the tea-time concerts, too. The leader had worked up a florid passage for himself in the middle of the waltz. He would step forward and soar into his solo, swaying artistically, closing his eyes with pleasure at the sounds he was making; and when it was over he would blink and smirk around at the ladies, with a roosterish pride quite engaging to behold.
The first evening they were in the night club, when Eden saw him perform this solo, he stared at the violinist with eyes so wide that Marjorie asked him what was the matter. Eden looked around at her, then out through the windows at the sea and the low yellow moon, and then at the musician again. “Doesn’t he fascinate you?”
“Why? He’s just another conceited musician. I’ve known them by the hundreds. He’s not even very good.”
“That’s just it. There he stands, afloat on a black sea in a black night, fiddling a little song which is his pride and joy in a mediocre way, and so pleased with himself he could explode. Isn’t he Everyman?”
Marjorie regarded him inquisitively while he lit another of his long thin cigars. He smoked them almost constantly; they were an odd chocolate brown, unbanded, and their odor was peculiarly rich and agreeable. She had seen him playing cards for hours after dinner in one of the salons with three elderly Englishmen, and he had seldom been without a cigar.
She said, “Do they talk much about Everyman at your Kiwanis Club?”
With a quick glance at her, he said, “We have lectures about him every Monday and Thursday. Would you like to dance?”
Eden danced rustily at first, in a stiff formal way, and seemed rather bored. But then he warmed to it, and Marjorie found herself enjoying his dancing. She enjoyed talking to him, too. While they sipped their drinks he asked sharp questions about Tom Jones, seeming to know the book by heart. He said the only people writing like Fielding nowadays were a few mystery writers. “Well, thank heaven somebody has a good word for the mystery writers,” she said. “My—the fellow I go with—has nagged at me for years because I read mysteries.”
“He’s a snob,” Eden said. “There isn’t a mystery I won’t read. I think next to doctors detective-story writers are the chief benefactors of mankind.”
“He is a snob,” Marjorie said. “He’s the worst intellectual snob I’ve ever met. But at least he admits it.”
“Where is he now?”
“In Paris. I’m going there to run him to earth and make him marry me. If I can.”
Eden’s smile was usually controlled and careful, his eyes remaining sombre, but now a wholly different look came over his face, a charming gleam of warm appreciation and pleasure. Like a sunny break in the clouds on a gray day, it came and went. “Is that really why you’re going to Europe?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I bet you’ll succeed.”
“I hope so. I’ve been chasing him for four years.” Marjorie inclined her head toward a table on the other side of the dance floor. “That blonde over there keeps looking and looking at you. In case you’re interested.”
“Does she?” Eden glanced toward the blonde, who was sitting with a thickset man, also blond. At this distance she looked exceptionally pretty; Marjorie had not noticed her before on the ship. She smiled at Eden, fluttering her fingers in a small gesture of greeting. He made a small bow, then turned away, wrinkling his forehead; the scar puckered deep. When his face was in repose Marjorie hardly noticed it. She said, “You know her?”
“Slightly. I met her on the Champlain a few months ago, coming home.”
“She’s stunning.”
“She’s a model. German.”
“Do you go into Germany much?”
“Most of my business is there.”
“Then you’re not Jewish.”
With a cold smile he shook his head. “It wouldn’t be very pleasant for me if I were, I guess.”
“What’s it like in Germany now?” Marjorie said after a silence.
“Not good.”
“Have you ever seen—well, any of the things we read about?”
“I haven’t been inside a concentration camp, if that’s what you mean. I’ve seen storm troopers wreck a restaurant. They’re like football players after a game, having a little gay horseplay. It’s sort of comical to watch, really. They’re laughing and joking. It’s a little creepy to see a policeman go by looking the other way, that’s all. Makes it seem like a dream.”
“Do you think there’ll be a war?”
Eden smoked for a while, looking at her. “Well, I’ll tell you, Marjorie. They’ve built these long six-lane highways everywhere in Germany. Broad white rivers of concrete, absolutely empty, not a car on them, stretching to the horizon. The roads don’t go anywhere, don’t detour for any towns—they go right to the borders, straight as parallels of latitude, and stop. What are those roads for?”
Marjorie was sorry she had started the topic. She was very uncomfortable under Eden’s direct gaze.
For years, now, she had been afraid even to think about Germany. Sometimes in her restless nights she had had nightmares of being pursued through Berlin by storm troopers. But it had never seemed quite real to her that somewhere on the face of the solid green earth human beings were doing to other human beings what the papers said the Nazis were doing to the Jews. She hoped that in the end the atrocities would turn out to be mostly newspaper talk, like the World War stories of the Huns eating Belgian babies. Her conscience had pricked her from time to time into giving part of her savings to refugee organizations. Beyond that, her mind was closed to the Nazis.
She said uneasily, “You know, I’m ashamed of myself. You’re giving me the horrors, and all I want to do about it is change the subject.”
“That’s all anybody is doing about it, Marjorie.”
“I’m Jewish. I should care a little more.”
“Jews are just people.”
She said, pausing for a moment to scrutinize his calm face, “That’s the best compliment anyone can pay us. Said in that tone, anyway.”
“I’m not so sure. I’m not particularly sold on people at the moment. I think, given the choice, I’d rather be a cat or a bear.”
“You remind me a lot—every now and then, the way you talk—of a man I know.”
“Really? A good man, or a bad one?”
“Well, some think he’s a monster. He’s the one I’m crossing the ocean for.”
“Maybe it would be best if you didn’t catch him.”
“Oh, is your wife a thoroughly miserable woman?”
“I’m not married. I was.” He puffed at his cigar. “My wife is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happened several years ago. Auto accident. That’s how I got my scar. I went through the windshield. My wife was killed.” He said this rapidly and dryly, as though to cut off further discussion; drank up his drink, and signalled for another. “You don’t have to keep pace with me, by the way, I have an unusual tolerance for booze…. Isn’t that Jackie May dancing?”
Marjorie looked at the dance floor. “So it is, by gosh. An honest-to-goodness celebrity after all. My trip is made.” Jackie May had been the nation’s favorite radio comedian when Marjorie was about fifteen, and he was still popular. He was a pudgy man, absolutely bald, with waggling eyebrows and flapping hands. He was dancing with a very pretty brunet girl about Marjorie’s age, half a head taller than himself.
“That’s his new wife, I believe,” Eden said. “He’s on his honeymoon, or so I seem to remember reading in Winchell.”
“Why, he looks past sixty,” Marjorie said. “Is he really married to that girl? How revolting.”
“There are many theories as to why old men marry young pretty girls,” Eden said. “Regressive tendencies, or a post-adolescent emotional fixation, something like that. The girl is a surrogate, a symbol, not a real person to the man, all the books say so. I have
my own theory about it, though. If I had the time and the talent I’d write a book. I’m sure I’m right.”
“What’s your theory?”
“Well, I say old men marry young pretty girls so as to sleep with them.” He said it with a straight, even dour face, looking at the dance floor.
Marjorie said, after a while, “Do you have lectures every Monday and Thursday at the Kiwanis Club on regressions and fixations?”
“I used to teach psychology,” Eden said, with the same straight face.
“I see. And now you’re in the chemical business.”
“That’s right.”
“And is any of this true, or are you taking some queer pleasure in filling me full of stories?”
“It’s true, all right. I gave up teaching after my accident. I wasn’t much good at it afterward.”
Marjorie took a less satiric tone. “You seem very strange to me. I’m not being especially stupid, am I?”
“You’re not being stupid at all, Marjorie, but I believe I am. I’m sorry.” He drank whiskey. “I guess I’ve been taking a sort of childish pleasure in mystifying you. I can’t say why. The booze, maybe, though I don’t think so. I’ve had a sort of shock today, nothing serious, but my nerves haven’t been very good lately. Everything I’ve told you is true, all the same, or true enough, anyway. Have you ever told the exact truth in your life? It’s an extremely hard thing to do. Every encyclopedia is full of lies.” He looked at her, and there seemed to be a faint tinge of appeal in his eyes, curiously contrasted with the dry tone and the mocking words. “Have I scared you off, or would you like to dance some more?”
Marjorie said, “Of course I’ll dance, if you like. But I think possibly it’s a bore for you to keep up a conversation with me. I won’t at all mind if you’d rather go back to your room and read, or go to sleep—”
“Good God, no,” Eden said. “Let’s dance, by all means. Let’s dance till Everyman’s fiddle drops from his hands. I’m having a wonderful time. I hope you are.”