Dr. Schumann gripped her hands and held her off, searching her face shrewdly, hoping to be able to refuse her; but what he saw decided him at once. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
She turned at once, dropping her hands at her side, and they walked together through the ship towards her cabin. “Ah,” she said, and raised to him under the mottled light of the passage a ravaged and desolate face, unbelievably changed, “ah, you are so good. Oh, never believe I am not grateful … and now I can keep my promise not to take any more ether!”
“Ether,” said the Doctor, on a rising note of diciplinary severity. “You still have ether? You did keep back a flask, then?”
“Of course,” she said, responding instantly to his tone of voice with a faintly contemptuous impatience. “When will you learn not to trust me in anything?”
Dr. Schumann stopped short and turned to face her. “Even now?” he asked.
“Even now,” she said boldly. Before the expression in his face as he studied hers for the space of a breath, she lowered her eyelids and glanced aside.
“Well,” he said at last, in a dry distant voice, “you shall have your piqûre just the same. Go on by yourself,” he said, turning off towards his own cabin. “I will join you in a few minutes. You may trust me, as you know well enough,” he said, and was amazed at his own bitterness. She turned and went her way as if she had already forgotten him, as if his given word could be so taken for granted she could treat it lightly—which was true, he admitted to himself with a wry little grimace of humor, or had been true until now. As he was selecting and arranging the ampules for the piqûre, the doctor began to think fairly clearly and in a more or less straight line, with the reasonable, cooler part of his mind. He had not failed, he thought, in his responsibility to her as her physician. Yet he could not deny that his personal feelings for her had intervened and helped to create a situation very unbecoming to him—to her, also, he admitted with reluctance. But all these shocks and upsets—her constant turning of every meeting between them into scenes which left them both prostrated; the constant danger of his having another heart attack; her reckless disregard for appearances, which could so easily make the kind of scandal the Doctor shuddered even to think about—ah, well, it all must end. He called upon not only the reserves of his authority as ship’s physician, but, if she resisted, upon the Captain’s final word, and resolved that this unruly relationship should be put in order at once. She must be treated like a hysterical woman with no control over her own acts. She could have been the death of him with her silly melodramas. Nonsense, and there was to be no more of it. Yet, he intended to be merciful and consign her to a narcotic limbo, which was, after all, her notion of Paradise.
“Oh,” said La Condesa, sitting up at sight of him, her face shining with relief from anxiety, “I am so happy to see you again! I was so afraid you would not come!”
“What?” said Dr. Schumann, amazed. “When I had just assured you that I would not fail you?”
“Ah,” she said, “it is just then one should begin to doubt! The eternal vow—ah, that is the one that is always broken!”
“I did not make any such vow, remember,” said Dr. Schumann, “it was only a little promise for this very evening.” He resisted the slow ripple of apprehension that ruffled his own nervous system and disturbed the marrow of his bones; here at any moment, if he did not act with speed and decision, was the beginning of another scene.
“I am keeping here and now the promise I made you,” he told her, “and the only one I did make.” As he approached the side of her bed, needle poised, she dropped back on her pillows and gave him a melting glance of confidence. They smiled at each other lovingly as he took hold of her upper arm.
Mrs. Treadwell sat in the middle of her narrow bunk as if it were an island, and played an intricate game of solitaire with miniature cards on a folding chessboard. She drank wine in slow occasional sips from a small glass; when it was half empty she would pour a little more from a bottle of Burgundy standing on the floor beside her.
She wore a nightgown of smooth white satin, with a buttoned-up collar and full bishop sleeves. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead and bound with a white ribbon, in the Alice in Wonderland style she had worn in bed since she was four or five. Yet viewed from without by an impartial eye, the scene, she decided, would be completely disreputable. The lack of a table and tray for the bottle and glass, the bottle itself even, in the circumstances; Lizzi’s clothes lying about in heaps just as she had stepped out of them; the rank smell of Lizzi’s stale mingled scents all based on musk; perhaps above all her own occupation, or pastime, contributed to an effect, oppressive to the last degree, of female disorder, hysterical solitude and general forlornness.
Mrs. Treadwell had been in a pleasantly self-sufficient mood when she left the boredom of the upper deck for what had then seemed a reasonable prospect of silence, seclusion, an evening with her own thoughts, such as they were, and early sleep. Lizzi’s habits were fairly dependable. She stayed out usually until after midnight with that wretched little fat man; they were to be seen dodging about from one shadowy recess to another, with a great deal of giggling and squealing and not too furtive fumbling. Then Lizzi would come in, steaming hot, knocking against objects, her awkward stride accommodating itself too late to the confined space, clicking on the light and revealing herself with her hair like electrified strings, and her pupils excited as a cat’s in the small mean-looking irises. She would step out of her shoes and kick them into a corner, step out of her flimsy frock and expose her long bony legs in their short pink pants and flesh-colored stockings. Dropping her brush and picking it up, without fail she would say in her insolent imitation of courtesy, “So sorry. I hope I didn’t wake you,” in that voice which affected Mrs. Treadwell’s nerves like the sound of a file on metal. It was absurd to pretend to go on sleeping after that.
The woman was, Mrs. Treadwell decided, the most entirely unattractive animal she had ever seen. Undressed, her ugliness was shocking. Yet she was possessed by the mysterious illusion that she was a beauty, as she sat before the spotty little looking glass of the washhand stand, looking deeply into her own eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching. She painted and powdered her face half a dozen times a day, putting on her mask as carefully and deliberately as an actress preparing to face her audience. Upon her head as if in baptism she poured her musky cologne out of a large square bottle, drenched her underarms until the liquid ran down her lean ribs, a flickering, self-absorbed smile on her face, her nostrils working like a rabbit’s. All her talk ran on about perfume, about clothes, about her shops, and men. “Friends,” she called them. “A man I know in Hamburg, a real gentleman, very rich—a friend,” she would say coyly, and rear the undersized head on the long neck with the cords in it. “I almost married him, but now I am glad I did not,” because it turned out he had lost his money.
These friends however were not all so unfortunate, and they paid her at all times the most expensive attentions, the most overwhelming compliments; she had them at her beck and call. Only the difficulty had been that there were so many of them. “One must choose somewhere, nicht wahr? One can’t marry them all, that’s a pity!” Little by little though the truth leaked out; most of them were married already, but that was a detail of no consequence; they were all of them prepared to break up their domestic arrangements at any moment if she said the word. But she loved her freedom too well, that was her trouble. “When I left my husband, he accused me of going away to another man. ‘Ha,’ I told him, ‘what do you take me for? There are five of them.’” She would writhe with laughter at passages like this, flapping her hands. “Well of course, you know that was not quite true, there were only three or four, and none of them serious. But believe me, I am finished with marriage. I mean to amuse myself, but no more marriage!”
Mrs. Treadwell gathered up her playing cards and fitted them into their case. She folded the chessboard and set it aside, smoothed the slightly rumpled sheet a
nd light blanket. There was a new chill in the air; she shivered and closed her eyes. Why could she not remember what traveling was like in these out of the way places and on horrid little boats? Why hadn’t she sense enough to stay in Paris the whole year round, yes even August—Paris was delicious in August—where she was always so safe from the sort of people she seemed to meet up with almost anywhere else? The faces and figures of her fellow passengers, if they could be called that, were all in a muddle with the wrong names attached, and the very thought of them confused and oppressed her mind. Lizzi gossiped about them perpetually, her dreadful voice grating along, with an affected superior little air.
“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 kil
led 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.