Herr Rieber went at once to the point. The purser, he was sure, would see the situation at once and clearly. “I have felt the honor of being seated at the Captain’s table,” he said. “The Captain is a man very particular in his choice of company. If he will not allow a Jew to sit there in his presence, why then must I share my cabin with one? I must ask you to regulate this mistake at once.”
“He is not a Jew,” said the purser mildly. “It’s his wife. I have heard about it.” He pretended to be, if not exactly sympathetic, at least willing to fulfill his duties as purser, part of which consisted of listening to the complaints of fellows like this one. He must not give the little nuisance any cause for thinking he was being neglected. “You are right. I shall see what can be done. There is only one proper place for Freytag, of course; with Löwenthal. If I had known, I would gladly have made that arrangement. But I think now,” said the purser, “in the present case, we shall have to ask Herr Arne Hansen to change into the cabin with you, since he is now quartered with Freytag.”
Herr Rieber heard a dim roaring in his ears at these words. “Hansen no!” he almost shouted, then lowered his voice. “No, that would be almost as bad.”
“Why?” asked the purser, who knew why. Hansen and Rieber had disliked and avoided each other ever since the first day on deck, when they had some sort of silly argument over deck chairs. The purser took no interest in this kind of nonsense—it was merely part of his job to know such things. Herr Rieber said, “That is a fellow I would not want to have around me, that’s all.”
“Well, leave it to me,” said the purser, “I will see what can be done. Come back in an hour, please.”
Promptly Herr Rieber returned and the purser, looking very cheerful, had only bad news. Merely for the sake of leaving nothing undone, he had spoken to Herr Hansen about Herr Rieber’s predicament. “After all,” said the purser, soothingly, “a Swede is at least a human being.” “Not that one,” said Herr Rieber, gloomily. However, Herr Hansen was not uncomfortable, in fact he expressed very friendly feelings for Herr Freytag, and would remain where he was—so that part was settled. But if Herr Rieber would be willing to move into a cabin with three occupants, no doubt Mister Denny or Mister Scott would be willing to go with Löwenthal, and Herr Rieber could then share the cabin with one or the other and Herr Glocken the hunchback. Herr Rieber objected violently. “No, I could never do that!”
Very well. Then let Herr Glocken move in with Herr Hansen, who would never refuse, the purser was certain. Then Freytag could move in with Löwenthal, and Herr Rieber could move in with Mister Scott and Mister Denny. Herr Rieber thought this over for a while, and at last with deep reluctance decided that such an arrangement might be the least objectionable of the whole series of painful choices. Considering the change as good as made, he went to pack his belongings. Löwenthal was not there; he had got in the habit of spending all but his sleeping hours on deck. When Herr Rieber returned once more to the purser’s office, he received a brutal setback.
Under no circumstances whatever, said the purser, evidently repeating verbatim, would Mister Denny or Mister Scott consent to any change at all. Herr Glocken, they said, was a very small man who took up almost no room, they were used to him and he to them, they were nicely shaken down and doing fine and saw no reason to disturb themselves.
The purser then leaned towards Herr Rieber and said in an insinuating manner: “Let me tell you they were really anything but agreeable, oh, I don’t mean angry, or anything of that sort—no, just the opposite. You must have heard Americans make fun of people—you know, they always laugh. That makes it worse. Well, that Scott fellow said something in American slang, I think, I couldn’t understand it, but at any rate they both laughed—a jeer it is, you know, not really a laugh, and it freezes the blood. I should try to kill anyone who laughed at me like that!—well, at any rate, you don’t want to get in there with them. God knows what would happen. I do not trust Americans—they all have Indian, or Negro, or Jewish blood—mongrels and savages. They kidnap little children for money, and then murder them,” said the purser, on the verge suddenly of tears. “Imagine, even if you give the money, they murder them just the same!”
Herr Rieber, who had been listening with his whole head on fire, watching the purser’s face with intent blinking eyes, was outraged by this sudden detour from the subject. He suspected the purser of all evil. It was no time to be sniveling over kidnapped children—Americans at that! No doubt he was in collusion with Freytag, who was determined with the effrontery of his race to push himself in among his betters whether they wanted him or not; for though Herr Rieber knew the facts, he would not admit that Freytag was a Christian. He had married a Jew and he was a Jew, that settled it … or maybe he was in criminal conspiracy with those foul Americans, who were probably part Jewish themselves. As for Arne Hansen, that big nose of his was not Nordic, let him call himself a Swede if he liked. The purser, at any rate, was clearly a traitor with Jewish sympathies himself; perhaps that Löwenthal had bribed him in the first place for the privilege of sharing a cabin with a German. Herr Rieber fumed himself into a fury, his face swelled and grew scarlet, and he shouted at the purser, “So I am to be called names and laughed at by those guttersnipes and you do not say one word to them?”
“What shall I say?” asked the purser. “I am not responsible for their manners.”
“You let them insult Germans on a German boat, do you? Well, the Captain shall hear of this, we’ll see what he has to say to such goings-on on his ship.”
The purser raised one hand mildly. “I advise you earnestly not to mention any business of mine to the Captain,” he said. “Take my word, you will find he does not take kindly to any passenger mingling in the affairs of the ship. I say this to spare you embarrassment,” he added, kindly. And indeed, Herr Rieber seemed to be subsiding into something like despair. “They talk, they do stupid things, what do we care?” asked the purser, largely, and somewhat vaguely. “Try to control yourself, Herr Rieber, this is not such a bad situation, it will all end in a few days! Things can’t be settled in a day!” he reminded him, with an air of discovery. “We may yet think of something. Now come,” he said, with fatherly cordiality, “let’s have a good glass of beer, and ideas may occur to us.” Herr Rieber revived a little at this, and seemed willing to cultivate patience for a time.
The purser heaved himself up and stood, breathing heavily. It was the hour for his nap, and yet he must be humoring this fool. He said politely, “Let us go,” and restrained, no doubt to his own permanent moral injury, a very pure, laudable impulse to spread his huge fat hand over Herr Rieber’s red, sweating face and push, hard.
It was Mrs. Treadwell’s birthday, not the first she had spent alone on a train or a ship; she was feeling her age, forty-six, as a downright affront to her aesthetic sense. All the forties were dull-sounding numbers, but forty-six was so hopelessly middle-aged, so much too late to die young, so much too early to think of death at all. The last day of August was a nondescript time to be born, anyway—the coarsened, sprawling sunburnt afternoon of summer, not becoming to her at all; and yet, here she was arrived at that age in human life supposed most to resemble this insect-riddled month … when nothing blooms but weeds in earth, and the soul puts out rank growths, too, according to dreary popular opinion. The lower instincts take alarm for fear they have missed something, are hot for marginal enjoyments. Hearts grow hard and cold, they say, or go overripe and pulpy; women especially, one is told, so often lose their modesty, their grace. They become shrill, or run to fat, or turn to beanpoles, take to secret drinking or nagging their husbands; they get tangled up in disreputable love affairs; they marry men too young for them and get just what they deserve; if they have a little money, they attract every species of parasite, and Lesbians lurk in the offing, waiting for loneliness and fear to do their work; oh, it is all enough to scare anybody, said Mrs. Treadwell, shaking her head and taking up her magazine again.
She was half
reclining in her deck chair, partly reading an old copy of L’Illustration in a comfortable drowse, partly thinking about her age, which had never really worried her before, when without any warning at all she felt Time itself as a great spider spinning a thick dusty web around her life, winding and winding until it covered all—the light is shut out and the pulse shrivels and the breath is slowly smothered off—Death, death! she said, and her fright was as simple and overwhelming as her fear of the dark when a child. Oh how absurd, she told herself, and stood up, throwing aside the magazine, remembering how her elders talked long ago some pleasant nonsense about growing old gracefully; she had told them firmly then and there that she was never going to grow old at all, no matter how gracefully. And she had believed it—that was what being a child meant. But had she grown up at all, then? Had she simply gone without knowing it from childhood to age, without ever becoming—unattractive word—“mature”? Well, everybody knows that melancholy brooding and a tendency to dwell in the past are most certain signs of growing old. She left her chair and walked to the rail—such a little ship, like a prison almost, so few places to go—and leaned there breathing in the sweet cool wind, assuring herself that this late-summer day in mid-Atlantic was not going so badly—she could easily remember worse birthdays. The heat was lessening gradually, the sunshine was paler; for the past two evenings great motionless columns of cloud had reared up and shone red over the far waters, full of muttering thunder and broad slow lightnings; they were beginning to form again, on a sky-filling scale. “I wish I knew somebody to watch clouds with,” she said, and decided that she did not want a cocktail before dinner.
The thought of dinner reminded her of her tiresome cabin mate Lizzi Spöckenkieker, who had gone on excitedly making great mystification about something that had happened in the dining salon, something about a most significant change in seating arrangements. “But it happened yesterday!” cried Lizzi. “I was waiting for you to speak!”
“What about, though?” asked Mrs. Treadwell, idly, not caring.
“What, you really did not see anything?” demanded Lizzi. “And something so much before your very eyes?”
“I didn’t look,” said Mrs. Treadwell.
“I am dying to tell you, but no, you must find out for yourself.”
“Does it really concern me, or am I supposed to be peeping?” asked Mrs. Treadwell.
“It concerns all of us,” said Lizzi in an exalted lilting voice. “It is something so wonderful it makes me happy and I want to laugh.” She did laugh and Mrs. Treadwell heard it wondering, thinking that if a hyena suffered from hysteria it would laugh like that. This was the moment she had left the cabin and decided on fresh air and the French magazine for the rest of the afternoon. What had Lizzi called out to her as she closed the door after her? “Ask Herr Freytag—he’ll know.” In remembering it, Mrs. Treadwell heard an insinuation in the tone she had not noticed before. Why not then look for Herr Freytag, who had been quite pleasant during their hour in Havana over the planter’s punch, hear the newest scandal over cocktails, ask the band to play “Ich bin die fesche Lola,” and maybe even dance a little after dinner? She began a search which ended in one of the writing rooms, with Freytag just getting up from a desk with a sealed envelope in his hand. He stood stock-still at sight of her, but she spoke too quickly, before she had got a clear sight of his face.
“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?” r />
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.”