“Ah, so did I,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “and I will confess something. I had drunk a whole bottle of wine that evening. Out of boredom, out of stupor, out of indifference …”
“You are worse than a treacherous friend,” he said suddenly, harshly. “You are worse than a worst enemy. Out of your boredom! What right have you to be bored? Indifference—what right have you to live in this world and care nothing for the human beings around you? You did a mean treacherous thing to someone who trusted you and never harmed you, and then you don’t even care—oh you don’t even know, what you have done.”
Mrs. Treadwell felt anger flashing all through her. She would not be bullied any longer about this absurd episode.
“You betrayed yourself first,” she told him, with a light, glib inflection, “and you are carrying all this very much too far and you are quite wrong. I do really, with all my heart,” she said, wondering at herself for the phrase, “care about what has happened to you—”
“About what you did,” he persisted, maddeningly. “Remember, it was you, it was what you did that …”
“I have been amazed enough at myself,” she said, “and perhaps you are right, and you may blame me as much as you please; but you make it easy for me to be frank with you now and tell you that, yes, you are right again—I simply do not want to be annoyed with this business, I do not intend to worry about it at all, and I shall not talk about it any more.”
She rose and turned away a few steps, then faced about again, waiting for whatever he might want to say. Surely in such a case, the last word was his privilege. She was trembling deeply with resentment; the face before her was repulsive in its hardened expression of self-absorbed, accusing, utter righteousness.
“With all your heart,” he said, “you have no heart. And you do not understand what is happening. It is not just this one thing—no no, it is a lifetime of it, it is a world full of it—it’s not being able ever to hope for an end to it—It is seeing the one you love best in the world treated like dirt by people not fit to breathe the same air with her! If you could see her, you would know what I am talking about. Mrs. Treadwell, she is a little golden thin nervous thing, most beautiful and gay in the morning, she is innocent, innocent, she makes life charming where she is, when she talks it is like a bird singing in a tree!”
He came very near to her and spoke urgently, so near that she could feel his breath again, his face strained in anxiety, his eyes bright with tears. Mrs. Treadwell, taken terribly by surprise, without in the least intending to and with no warning from her own feelings, gave way and consented to see him in his own light, understood his sufferings as real and terrible, admitted her fault, and took on as a penance her share not only of this pain but whatever other shapeless, nameless endless human anguish chose to search her out and accuse her. She dropped her hands to her sides and retreated a step. Of course it was her fault.
“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t say any more. Listen to me. Listen to me for just a moment.” She drew a deep breath. “I want to be forgiven. You must try to forgive me.”
It was his turn to be surprised, to be reversed with a jolt, rather unpleasantly. He had been enjoying the scene, easing the pressure of his baffled fury on her; he had meant to insult her enough to satisfy his desire for revenge, and to leave her well cut up without letting her say a word. And now almost instantly, in spite of himself, a generous warmth of feeling came over him, and he said, “Oh, no, please not,” almost in embarrassment, “don’t say it. I am sorry, too. We will have to forgive each other if we go on like this—”
“The thing that is so frightening,” said Mrs. Treadwell, her voice shaking a little, “is this. Here we are talking about this as if it were real, and I expect it is, but it seems to me like a horrid dream, I cannot believe it—”
“It’s real, though,” he said, and now he wished to console her. “Oh no, surely you are not going to cry?”
“How absurd,” said Mrs. Treadwell, quite in her usual manner. “I never cry.” She gave a bubbling little laugh and burst into enormous, helpless tears. Freytag, with the presence of mind of a married man used to feminine emergencies, glanced round to see if any witness had entered the writing room, moved between her and the door to provide a screen, and offered her a large white linen handkerchief. “Now, now,” he said soothingly while she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Oh that’s better. Do you know what I think? What do you say we have a good drink, a big cocktail?”
Mrs. Treadwell said, “Wait a minute.” She took a little looking glass and powder puff and lipstick out of her handbag, and for the first time in her life applied make-up in public. One witness was as damning as a crowd. She did not care. She was exhausted, serene, unnerved, all at once, this melodrama was the kind of thing she abhorred—oh, the dowdiness of making scenes, and she did not trust Freytag for a moment, he was obviously a born scene-maker—yet, no matter how it came about, she felt just for a moment, knowing even then it could not possibly last, an airy lightness of heart. In recklessness, or something like it, she said, “I’d love a cocktail, a huge one,” and they emerged into the passageway together like two amiable well-disposed persons apparently on the best of terms.
Freytag said, “I don’t know if I am going to be able to sleep tonight, thinking about what fun it would be to throw the Captain overboard, drown the little rat off his own bridge. But I’ll resist temptation now, thanks to you.”
“Why? I shouldn’t mind what you do to the Captain.”
“You’ve cooled my mind, somehow. I have got to go to Germany and leave again with my wife and her mother, and that’s all I have to think about, and I must do it without attracting any attention. Drowning the Captain indeed,” he said, “a pleasant daydream, but I mustn’t give way to it. I must work things out.”
When they were seated, he asked, “Is it really your birthday? Is that what you said when you came in?”
She nodded. “The forty-sixth, imagine!” He was obscurely offended at her unfeminine frankness, and to hide it, he said, “How charming! Many, many more.”
“Not too many, please. I’ll let you know if I want another.”
He surveyed the bar, now beginning to be crowded. Jenny Brown and David Scott, climbing on stools, greeted him Mexican fashion, right hands raised face-high, palms out, fingers fluttering. He responded with the same gesture, and Mrs. Treadwell said, “I think it’s pretty.” Freytag said, “They say it means ‘Come nearer,’” and continued to move his look from face to face, as if he expected each one to notice his presence, though he had never thought of such a thing before. The Lutzes and Baumgartners in turn caught his glance, and nodded to him: the dullest of all the dull people on board, of course—they probably wouldn’t have worldly sense enough to understand what had happened. Everybody from the Captain’s table was there, apparently unconscious of his existence. Those appalling Spaniards, not even they turned an eye towards him, though one of the girls, the little young Concha, had been following him about lately, as if she had something on her mind. Even the young Cuban pair ignored him, though he had played games with their small children, tootling on paper flutes, letting them shoot at him with water pistols, walking around the deck with one straddled on each shoulder; even the hunchback, even that ridiculous fellow from Texas, Denny, somehow failed to see him; it did not occur to him to speak to anybody first, nor did he remember that ordinarily he hoped that his fellow passengers so-called would keep away from him.
“I forgot,” he said, his frown deepening, “but do you want to be seen with me? I’m a pariah here, remember.”
“Are you sure? Have you counted your friends?”
“I hadn’t got any to begin with that I know of,” he said, quickly irritable. “It was rather more than enough to be on speaking terms.”
“Then why do you care now whether anyone speaks to you or not?” she asked, and her feelings were slowly very surely retreating to their hiding place. “I have done it again,” she reminded herself, and th
ought quite coldly, holding the stern of her cocktail glass and fixing her eyes at a point just under the knot of Herr Freytag’s necktie, that this man was as impossible in his way as that tiresome Denny was in his. Still, she added at once, for fear he would suspect her change of mind and heart, that she had found several pleasant persons on board—she did not name them—yet it was quite true, she would be as happy if not a soul even looked at her for the rest of the voyage.
“I don’t care at all either,” he said, “certainly not. But remember, it can be a very different thing when people, and especially people you despise, suddenly feel themselves capable of snubbing you.”
“Quite,” she said, and finished her drink and ate the olive.
“Another?” he asked, and without waiting, “Do please. I’d like another.”
“Of course,” she said. While they were waiting, Mrs. Treadwell rested her cheeks in the palms of her hands, elbows on table, and said in her usual voice of one making conversation to scatter silence, and of which one need not bother to remember a word: “Imagine, I used to think you were a man without a single trouble in the world—perhaps the only one; and if only I had not said that silly thing to that awful Lizzi, I should still like to be able to believe it. It would amuse me, and I shouldn’t have to think of you. And now, I suppose, we have a kind of bond, we must be friends in a way, and speak to each other carefully whether we are in the mood or not, just so all these strangers that we shall never see again, or I hope not, will see that we are not at each other’s throats in spite of Lizzi and Rieber and the Captain and all the rest …”
Freytag was listening, and her words dismayed him to a degree. It had already crossed his mind that a scene so intimate as that in the writing room might lead in her mind to notions of further intimacy. She must have been a very pretty girl, she was not bad-looking now in a discreet, rather too delicate style, but the very thought of going to bed with a woman forty-six years old gave him such horror he was afraid it would show in his face. The one sure way to bring upon yourself the inescapable devotion of a dog was to beat him regularly. Certain kinds of women were not so different. This one had taken a good thrashing in the proper spirit—she had earned it—but was he now going to be, as the Americans say, “stuck” with her? He must find out if he could.
“But we are friends, are we not?” he asked, warily.
He was to find later that he need not have feared her persecutions, and was to be surprised at his own annoyance about it; but her answer to his question did nothing to quiet his present uneasiness. Mrs. Treadwell, however, was herself again, wearing her way smilingly through the second cocktail, waiting for the moment of escape.
“Naturally,” she said in a tone of such reassurance he could not dream that she meant just the opposite.
He decided that he needed only to be reasonably discreet, a little watchful, to keep out of her way. He finished his drink in a gulp and set the glass down and pushed it away from him. Mrs. Treadwell set hers down unfinished. When they parted he was again in doubt: he did not want her at all, and he was not willing to let her get away altogether. “This has been delightful,” he said, “after all the unpleasantness. I feel we know each other a great deal better?”
She smiled in his direction, looking through him as through a pane of glass. “Oh, much better, I’m sure,” she said, and drifted away. Anger against her rose in him again, but a different kind, not fury, but still a lively resentment. He had so many reasons for anger in all directions he could hardly fix upon the real, the main reasons. One of them, though, was the way his hand had been forced by the Captain, and that woman—whose flat hips and slender legs, he noticed, as she retreated from him, moved almost invisibly within her perfectly fitted, expensive-looking linen frock—had been to blame for the whole thing. In spite of her brief tears he did not believe she felt any true remorse; in spite of what he had said, a fervent desire rankled in him to humiliate her further, to put her to shame in some public way, to teach her a good lesson.… At this point, Herr Löwenthal came in by himself as usual and stood at the bar and beer was brought to him. Freytag felt his throat closing as if he might choke on his sense of injury; one thing certain, he would not sit at the table with that Jew.… No, he explained to himself as if arguing with a disapproving stranger, No, it is not because he is a Jew. It is because of what has been done to both of us. But he will never acknowledge that any wrong has been done to anyone but himself. The thought was like a flash of light in his mind—I have no prejudice against Jews—how could I? Mary is one, Mary—but why must he worry about this wretched little man, with his comic trade—he would just be a laughingstock anywhere: “Has he got any fragments of the True Cross, I wonder?” Jenny had asked, and Freytag had been maliciously cheerful to be able to answer, “I’ve been told he has, in tiny hand-carved ivory reliquaries, set with a piece of magnifying glass—and a sliver of wood no bigger than a hair!”
“I can’t quite say why, but I find that revolting,” said Jenny. “Just suppose a Christian tried to sell him a sliver of the Ark of the Covenant, or a fragment of the Wailing Wall, or Abraham’s toenail cuttings?”
“He’d know better,” said Freytag. “He’d say, ‘I’m overstocked with that line myself!’” They had laughed easily, but now Freytag felt corroded with guilt, heaping ridicule on one of Mary’s people with this shallow girl. But that had happened before he had been kicked away from the Captain’s table. He reminded himself fiercely that he must put up with Löwenthal, must treat him decently no matter what he said or did—if for no other reasons, he owed it to Mary. He also owed it to his own self-respect … I will have meals sent to the cabin, he decided; I will eat on deck sometimes. I will speak to him when I have to.
Herr Löwenthal was in better spirits and a calmer frame of mind since his encounter with Herr Freytag. He always felt safer, indeed at times there came over him a simmer of elation, when at last, and always sooner or later, no matter where, the lurking enmities, the evil designs, the formless miasmas of hatred took on shape, color, direction, language; and Persecution by the heathen world, his unescapable destiny as Jew, the one unanswerable argument for his chosenness, was once more under way, with no more doubts, no more waiting and watching. It always turned out not to be so bad as he had feared; even though he was never able to imagine the actual form the persecution would take, yet he found he was never really surprised by anything—never twice alike and always the same, yet no real danger, nothing that could not be handled after all—words, what are they? Insults, threats, names, low jokes—what of it? They couldn’t touch him; he wanted only one thing from them, and that he had already—their trade. Why not sell graven images to the heathen if that’s what they want? And get good prices for it too. He was making money, and he would make more; he knew well how many desirable places he could buy with money. It would be a positive pleasure someday just to see how far he could buy his way into places where they wouldn’t dare to throw him out! His mood grew almost festive; he gulped down his beer and asked for another; he looked forward to seeing Herr Freytag at his table that evening, and he would make him feel that it was his, Löwenthal’s, table, and that Freytag was there on sufferance.… Herr Löwenthal lighted a good cigar and settled down over his stein. He had heard about how that pig Rieber had tried to get him thrown out of the cabin, and had failed, because nobody wanted Herr Rieber either! That would be something to tell Cousin Sarah when he finally thank God got to Düsseldorf. When later at dinner Herr Freytag did not appear, and he had to eat his dull tinned fish alone, he was a little let down, disappointed. He must persuade him back, if only for the look of the thing. He would say to him sometime on deck, before a lot of people, loud enough for them to hear: “You mustn’t take wrong what I said, Herr Freytag. You’re more than welcome to sit at my table, if you haven’t got any place else.” He’d like to hear his answer to that!
He was considerably put out and disgruntled when the steward, answering his question, said simply, “Herr Fr
eytag prefers to dine alone, later.”
Lizzi giggled and trilled at sight of Mrs. Treadwell, who was sitting on the side of her berth fastening her sandals, dressing for the evening. Mrs. Treadwell glanced up, without inquiry, and Lizzi said rashly, “Oh, I must hear what Herr Freytag had to say when you asked him your question!”
“Nothing much,” said Mrs. Treadwell easily. She stood up and shook out her silvery pleated gown, slipped into it, and moved towards the door, fastening her belt as she went. “He seemed to feel, on the whole, that it was a great change for the better—the company, he seemed to mean …” She gathered up her skirts and closed the door after her gently.
“David,” said Jenny, as they touched their cocktail glasses together, “Salud, David darling! Don’t you find that business about Freytag being put away from the Captain’s table—do you know, imagine all the things he has told me, and he never told me such an important thing as that about his wife! But he thinks she hung the moon!—don’t you find it is the most utterly disgraceful episode you ever heard of?”
“No, I’ve heard of worse,” said David, “and so have you. But it’s pretty nasty.”
“I think we ought to speak to Freytag and let him know how we feel!”
“Go ahead,” said David darling, with blazing eyes and an icy voice. “Since when do you need an excuse?”
“You are getting simply intolerable on this subject, David,” she said, in a low distressed voice. “You know perfectly well he is a married man crazy about his wife, he is sociable and lonesome, there aren’t too many people on this ship to talk to—oh, the whole thing is so silly I’m ashamed to be talking about it! I can’t understand. You were never jealous before …”
“Wasn’t I?” asked David, cutting in like a razor blade. “Are you sure?”
“Well, you were wrong,” said Jenny, “and you’re wrong again—but I don’t care, if only—”