CHAPTER XVII
We are born between two states of consciousness; we spend our lives between the darkness and the light, and to climb in the mountains of another country, phrase our thoughts in another language or admire the color of another sky draws us deeper into the mystery of our condition. Travel has lost the attributes of privilege and fashion. We are no longer dealing with midnight sailings on three-stacked liners, twelve-day crossings, Vuitton trunks and the glittering lobbies of Grand Hotels. The travelers who board the jet at Orly carry paper bags and sleeping babies, and might be going home from a hard day’s work at the mill. We can have supper in Paris and, God willing, breakfast at home, and here is a whole new creation of self-knowledge, new images for love and death and the insubstantiality and the importance of our affairs. Most of us travel to improve on the knowledge we have of ourselves, but none of this was true for Cousin Honora. She went to Europe as a fugitive.
She had developed, over the years, a conviction that St. Botolphs was the fairest creation on the face of the earth. Oh, it was not magnificent, she well knew; it was nothing like the postcards of Karnak and Athens that her Uncle Lorenzo had sent her when she was a child. But she had no taste for magnificence. Where else in the world were there such stands of lilac, such lambent winds and brilliant skies, such fresh fish? She had lived out her life there, and each act was a variation on some other act, each sensation she experienced was linked to a similar sensation, reaching in a chain back through the years of her long life to when she had been a fair and intractable child, unlacing her skates, long after dark, at the edge of Parson’s Pond, when all the other skaters had gone home and the barking of Peter Howland’s collies sounded menacing and clear as the bitter cold gave to the dark sky the acoustics of a shell. The fragrant smoke from her fire mingled with the smoke from all the fires of her life. Some of the roses she pruned had been planted before she was born. Her dear uncle had lectured her on the ties that bound her world to Renaissance Europe, but she had always disbelieved him. What person who had seen the cataracts in the New Hampshire mountains could care about the waterworks of kings? What person who had smelled the rich brew of the North Atlantic could care about the dirty Bay of Naples? She did not want to leave her home and move on into an element where her sensations would seem rootless, where roses and the smell of smoke would only remind her of the horrible distances that stood between herself and her own garden.
She went alone to New York on a train, slept restlessly in a hotel bedroom, and one morning she boarded a ship for Europe. In her cabin she found that the old judge had sent her an orchid. She detested orchids, and she detested improvidence, and the gaudy flower was both. Her first impulse was to fire it out of the porthole, but the porthole wouldn’t open, and on second thought it seemed to her that perhaps a flower was a necessary part of a traveler’s costume, a sign of parting, a proof that one was leaving friends behind. There was loud laughter, and talk, and the noise of drinking. Only she, it seemed, was alone.
Removed from the scrutiny of the world, she could seem a little foolish—she spent some time trying to find a place to hide the canvas money belt in which she kept her cash and documents. Under the sofa? Behind the picture? In the empty flower vase or the medicine cabinet? A corner of the carpet was loose and she hid her money belt there. Then she stepped out into the corridor. She wore black clothes and a tricorne hat, and looked a little as George Washington might have looked had he lived to be so old.
The festivities in the crowded staterooms had moved out into the corridor, where men and women stood drinking and talking. She couldn’t deny that it would have been pleasanter if a few friends had come down to put a social blessing on her departure. Without the orchid on her shoulder, how could these strangers guess that in her own home she was a celebrated woman, known to everyone and famous for her good works? Mightn’t they, glancing at her as she passed, mistake her for one of those cussed old women who wander over the face of the earth trying to conceal or palliate that bitter loneliness that is the fitting reward for their contrary and selfish ways? She felt painfully disarmed and seemed to have only the fewest proofs of her identity. What she wanted then was some common room, where she could sit down and watch things.
She found a common room, but it was crowded and all the seats were taken. People were drinking and talking and crying, and in one corner a grown man stood saying good-bye to a little girl. His face was wet with tears. Honora had never seen or dreamed of such mortal turmoil. The go-ashore was being sounded, and while many of the farewells were cheerful and lighthearted, many of them were not. The sight of a man parting from his little daughter—it must be his little daughter, separated from him by some evil turn of events—upset Honora terribly. Suddenly the man got to his knees and took the child in his arms. He concealed his face in her thin shoulder, but his back could be seen shaking with sobs, while the public-address system kept repeating that the hour, the moment, had come. She felt the tears form in her own eyes, but the only way she could think of to cheer the little girl was to give her the orchid, and by now the corridors were to crowded for Honora to make her way back to her stateroom. She stepped over the high brass sill onto a deck.
The gangways were thronged with visitors leaving the ship. The stir was tremendous. Below her she could see a strip of dirty harbor water, and overhead there were gulls. People were calling to one another over this short distance, this still unaccomplished separation, and now all but one of the gangways were up, and the band began to play what seemed to her to be circus music. The loosening of gigantic hemp lines was followed by the stunning thunder of the whistle, so loud it must ruffle the angels in Heaven. Everyone was calling, everyone was waving—everyone but her. Of all the people standing on the deck, only she had no one to part with, only her going was lonely and meaningless. In simple pride, she took a handkerchief out of her pocketbook and began to wave it to the faces that were so swiftly losing their outline and their appeal. “Good-bye, good-bye, my dear, dear friend,” she called to no one. “Thank you. . . . Thank you for everything. . . . Good-bye and thank you. . . . Thank you and good-bye.”
At seven o’clock she put on her best clothes and went up to dinner. She shared a table with a Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield from Rochester, who were going abroad for the second time. They were traveling with orlon wardrobes. During dinner they told Honora about their earlier trip to Europe. They went first to Paris, where they had nice weather—nice drying weather, that is. Each night, they took turns washing their clothes in the bathtub and hanging them out to dry. Going down the Loire they ran into rain and were not able to do any wash for nearly a week, but once they reached the sea the weather was sunny and dry, and they washed everything. They flew to Munich on a sunny day and did their wash in the Regina Palast, but in the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and all their clothing, hung out on a balcony, got soaked. They had to pack their wardrobes wet for the trip to Innsbruck, but they reached Innsbruck on a clear and starry night and hung everything out to dry again. There was another thunderstorm in Innsbruck, and they had to spend a day in their hotel room, waiting for their clothes to dry. Venice was a wonderful place for laundry. They had very little trouble in Italy, and during their Papal audience Mrs. Sheffield convinced herself that the Pope’s vestments were made of orlon. They remembered Geneva for its rainy weather, and London was very disappointing. They had theater tickets, but nothing would dry, and they had to spend two days in their room. Edinburgh was even worse, but in Skye the clouds lifted and the sun shone, and they took a plane home from Prestwick with everything clean and dry. The sum of their experience was to warn Honora against planning to do much wash in Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland and the British Isles.
Toward the end of this account, Honora’s face got very red, and suddenly she leaned across the table and said, “Why don’t you stay home and do your wash? Why do you travel halfway around the world, making a spectacle of yourself in front of the waiters and chambermaids of Austria and France? I’ve never owned a stitch of orlon, or whatever you call it, but I expect I’ll find laundries and dry cleaners in Europe just as at home, and I’m sure I’d never travel for the pleasure of hanging out a clothesline.”
The Sheffields were shocked and embarrassed. Honora’s voice carried, and passengers at the nearby tables had turned to stare at her. She tried to extricate herself by calling a waiter. “Check,” she called. “Check. Will you please bring me my check?”
“There is no check, madam,” the waiter said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I forgot,” and limped out of the room.
She was too angry at the Sheffields to be remorseful, but she was faced again with the fact that her short temper was one of her worst qualities. She wandered around the decks to cool off, admiring the yellowish shroud lights and thinking how like a second set of stars they were. She was standing on the stern deck, watching the wake, when a young man in a pinstriped suit joined her. They had a pleasant conversation about the stars, and then she went to bed and slept soundly.
In the morning, after a hearty breakfast, Honora arranged for a deck chair on the leeward side. She then settled herself with a novel (Middlemarch) and prepared to relax and enjoy the healthfulness of the sea air. Nine quiet days would conserve her strength and perhaps even lengthen her life. It was the first time that she had ever planned a rest. Sometimes after lunch on a hot day she would shut her eyes for five minutes but never for longer. In the mountain hotels where she went for a change of air she had always been an early riser, a marathon chair rocker and a tireless bridge player. Up until now there had always been things to do, there had always been demands on her time, but now her old heart was weary and she should rest. She pressed her head against the chair cushion and drew the blanket over her legs. She had seen thousands of travel advertisements in which people her age stretched out in deck chairs, watching the sea. She had always wondered what pleasant reveries passed through their minds. Now she waited for this enviable tranquillity to steal over her. She shut her eyes, but she shut them emphatically; she drummed her fingers on the wooden armrest and wriggled her feet. She counseled herself to wait, to wait, to wait for repose to overtake her. She waited perhaps ten minutes before she sat up impatiently and angrily. She had never learned to sit still, and, as with so much else in life, it seemed too late now for her to learn.
Her sense of life was a sense of motion and embroilments, and even if to move gave her a keen pain in the heart, she had no choice but to move. To be stretched out in a deck chair that early in the day made her feel idle, immoral, worthless and—what was most painful of all—like a ghost, neither living nor dead; like some bitterly unwilling bystander. To tramp around the decks might tire her, but to be stretched out under a blanket like a corpse was a hundred times worse. Life seemed like a chain of brilliant reflections on water, unrelated perhaps to the motion of the water itself but completely absorbing in their color and shine. Might she kill herself with her love of things? Were the forces of life and death identical? And would the thrill of rising on a fine day be the violence that ruptured the vessels of her heart? The need to move, to talk, to make friends and enemies, to involve herself was irresistible, and she struggled to get to her feet, but her lameness, her heaviness, the age of her body and the shape of the deck chair made this impossible. She was stuck. She grasped the armrests and struggled to raise herself, but she fell back helplessly. Again she struggled to get up. She fell back again. There was a sudden sharp pain in her heart, and her face was flushed. Then she thought that she would die in another few minutes—die on her first day at sea, be sewn into an American flag and dropped overboard, her soul descending into Hell.
But why should she go to Hell? She knew well enough. It was because she had been all her life a food thief. As a child, she had waited and watched until the kitchen was empty and had then opened the massive icebox doors, grabbed a drumstick off the cold chicken and dipped her fingers into the hard sauce. Left alone in the house, she had climbed to the top pantry shelf on an arrangement of chairs and stools and eaten all the lump sugar in the silver bowl. She had stolen candy from the highboy, where it was saved for Sunday. She had, when the cook’s back was turned, ripped a piece of skin off the Thanksgiving turkey before grace was said. She had stolen cold roast potatoes, doughnuts set out to cool, beef bones, lobster claws and wedges of pie. Her vice had not been cured by her maturity, and when, as a young woman, she invited the altar guild to tea, she ate half the sandwiches before they arrived. Even as an old woman leaning on a stick, she had gone down to the pantry in the middle of the night and stuffed herself with cheese and apples. Now the time had come to answer for her gluttony. She turned desperately to the man in the deck chair on her left. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I wonder if . . .” He seemed to be asleep. The deck chair on her right was empty. She shut her eyes and called on the angels. A second later, the moment after her prayers had gone up, a young officer stopped to wish her good morning and to extend an invitation from the captain to join him on the bridge. He pulled her out of her chair.
On the bridge she shot the sun with a hand sextant and reminisced. “When I was nine years old, my Uncle Lorenzo bought me a twelve-foot sloop,” she said, “and for the next three years there wasn’t a fisherman at Travertine I couldn’t outsail.” The captain asked her for cocktails. At lunch the steward seated her with a twelve-year-old Italian boy who spoke no English. They got along by smiling at one another and making signs. In the afternoon she played cards until it was time to go down and get ready for the captain’s cocktail party. She went to her stateroom and took out of her suitcase a rusty curling iron that had served her faithfully for thirty-five years or more. She plugged this into an outlet in the bathroom. All the lights in the cabin went off, and she yanked out the plug.
A moment later, there were sounds of running in the corridors, and people called confusedly to one another in Italian and English. She hid her curling iron in the bottom of her suitcase and drank a glass of port. She was an honest woman, but she was too stunned, at the moment, to confess to the captain that she had blown a fuse.
She seemed to have done much more. Opening the door to her stateroom, she found the corridor dark. A steward ran by, carrying a lamp. She closed the door again and looked out of her porthole. Slowly, slowly, the ship was losing way. The high white crest at the bow slacked off.
In the corridors and on the decks there were more calls and sounds of running. Honora sat miserably on the edge of her berth, having, through her own clumsiness, her own stupidity, halted this great ship in its passage across the sea. What would they do next? Take to the boats and row to some deserted island, rationing their biscuits and water? It was all her fault. The children would suffer. She would give them her water ration and share her biscuits, but she did not think she had the strength to confess. They might put her in the brig or drop her overboard.
The sea was calm. The ship drifted with the swell, and had begun to roll a little. The voices of men, women and children echoed off the corridors and over the water. “It’s the generators,” she heard someone say. “Both generators have blown.” She began to cry.
She dried her tears and stood by the porthole, watching the sunset. She could hear the orchestra playing in the ballroom, and she wondered if people were dancing in the dark. Way below her, in the crew’s quarters, someone had put out a fishing line. They must be fishing for cod. She wished she had a line herself, but she didn’t dare ask for one, because they might then discover that she had stopped the ship.
A few minutes before dark, all the lights went on, there was a cheer from the deck, and the ship took up its course. Honora watched the white crest at the bow form and rise as they headed once more for Europe. She didn’t dare go up to the dining room, and made a supper of Saltines and port wine. Later she took a turn around the decks, and the young man in the pin-striped suit asked if he could join her. She was happy to have his company and the support of his arm. He said that he was traveling to get away from things, and she guessed that he was a successful young businessman who wanted, quite naturally, to see the world before he settled down with a wife and children. She wished, fleetingly, that she had a daughter he could marry. Then she could find him a nice position in St. Botolphs, and they could live in one of the new houses in the east end of the village and come and visit her, with their children, on Sundays. When she tired, she was quite lame. He helped her down to her cabin and said good night. He had excellent manners.
She looked for him in the dining room the next day, and she wondered if he was traveling in some other class, or belonged to the fast set that didn’t come down for lunch but instead ate sandwiches in the bar. He joined her on deck at dusk that night, when she was waiting for the dinner chimes to ring.
“I don’t see you in the dining room,” she said.
“I spend most of my time in my cabin,” he said.
“But you shouldn’t be so unsociable,” she said. “You ought to make friends—an attractive young man like you.”
“I don’t think you’d like me,” he said, “if you knew the truth.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “If you’re a member of the working class or something like that, it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I went up to Jaffrey last summer for a rest, you know, and I met this very nice lady and befriended her, and she said the same thing to me. ‘I don’t think you’d like me,’ she said, ‘if you knew who I was.’ So then I asked her who she was, and she said she was a cook. Well, she was a very nice woman, and I continued to play cards with her, and it didn’t make any difference to me that she was a cook. I’m not stuck-up. Mr. Haworth, the ashman, is one of my best friends, and often comes into the house for a cup of tea.”
“I’m a stowaway,” the young man said.
She took a deep breath of sea air. The news was a blow. Oh, why should life appear to be a series of mysteries? She had imagined him to be prosperous and successful, and he was merely a lawless outcast. “Where do you sleep?” she asked. “Where do you eat?”
“I sleep mostly in the heads,” he said. “I haven’t eaten for two days.”
“But you must eat.”
“I know,” he said wistfully. “I know. You see, what I thought I might do is to confide in someone—a passenger—and then, if they were friendly, they could order dinner in their stateroom and I could share it.”
For a second she was wary. He seemed importunate. He had moved too swiftly. Then his stomach gave a loud rumble, and the thought of the hunger pangs he must be suffering annihilated her suspicions. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Gus.”
“Well, I’m in Cabin 12 on B Deck,” she said. “You come down there in a few minutes, and I’ll see that you get some supper.”
When she got to her cabin, she rang for the waiter and ordered a six-course meal. The young man arrived and hid in the bathroom. When the table was set with covered dishes, he came out of hiding, and it did her heart good to see him eat.
When he had finished his dinner, he took out a package of cigarettes and offered it to her as if she was not an old lady but a dear friend and companion. She wondered if, under the beneficial influence of the sea air, her appearance had grown more youthful. She accepted a cigarette and blew out four matches trying to get it lighted. When it was finally ignited, the smoke cut her throat like a rusty razor. She had a paroxysm of coughing, and scattered embers down the front of her dress. He did not seem to notice this loss of dignity—he was telling her the story of his life—and she held the cigarette elegantly between her fingers until the fire died. Smoking a cigarette definitely made her feel younger. He was married, he told her. He had two little children—Heidi and Peter —but his wife ran away with a sailor and took the children to Canada. He didn’t know where they were. He worked as a file clerk for an insurance office and led a life that was so lonely and empty that he had boarded the ship one day during his lunch hour and stayed aboard when she sailed. What was there to lose? He would at least see a little of the world, even if he was sent home in the brig. “I miss the kiddies,” he said. “That’s the main thing. You know what I did last Christmas? I bought one of those little trees you get in the five-and-ten, and I decorated it, in this room where I live, and I bought presents for the kiddies, and then on Christmas Day I just pretended that they came to see me. Of course, it was all make-believe, but I opened the presents and everything, just as if they were there.”
After dinner Honora taught him to play backgammon. He picked up the game very quickly, she thought, and was a remarkably intelligent young man. It seemed a great shame to her that he should waste his youth and his intelligence in loneliness, sorrow and boredom. He was not handsome; his face was too changeable, and his grin was a little foolish. But he was really just a boy, she thought, and with experience and kindness his face would change. They played backgammon until eleven, and, to tell the truth, she had not felt so happy, or at least at ease, since she had begun her travels. When they said good night, he lingered at the door, and seemed, with his inward and foolish—or was it sly?—grin, to be implying that she might let him sleep in the spare berth in her cabin. Enough was enough, and she closed the door in his face.
He did not appear the next day, and she wondered where in the great ship he was hidden, hungry and alone. The bouillon and sandwiches that were passed on the promenade deck only reminded her of the cruel inequalities of life, and she did not enjoy her lunch. She spent most of the afternoon in her cabin, in case he should need her help. Just before the dinner chimes rang, there was a soft knock at the door, and he came in. After dinner she got out the backgammon board, but he seemed restless, and she won every game. She pointed out that he needed a haircut, and when he said that he didn’t have any money, she gave him five dollars. He said good night at ten, and she invited him to return the next evening for his dinner.
He didn’t come. When the dinner chimes rang at seven, she called a waiter and ordered dinner so that it would be ready for him, but he didn’t come. She was sure then that he had been caught and thrown into the brig, and she thought of going to the captain, as the young man’s advocate, and explaining the loneliness and the emptiness of his life. She decided, however, not to act until morning, and she went to bed. In the morning, as she was admiring the ocean, she saw him on the main deck, laughing and talking with Mrs. Sheffield.
She was indignant. She was jealous, although she tried to rationalize this weakening of her position as a sensible fear that if he confided in Mrs. Sheffield, Mrs. Sheffield would betray him. He saw Honora, clearly enough—he waved to her—but he went on talking gaily with Mrs. Sheffield. Honora was angry. She even seemed to be in pain, stripped as she was of that sense of ease and comfort she had enjoyed while they played backgammon in her cabin, stripped of a sense of her unique usefulness, her indispensability. She went around the bow to the leeward side of the ship, to admire the waves from there. She noticed that, with her feelings unsettled, the massive, agate-colored seas, veined with white, seemed mightier. She heard footsteps on the deck and wondered was it he? Had he come at last, to apologize for talking with Mrs. Sheffield and to thank her for her generosity? She was sure of one thing: Mrs. Sheffield wouldn’t take a stowaway into her cabin and give him supper. The footsteps passed, and so did some others, but the intenseness of her anticipation did not. Would he never come? Then someone stopped at her back and said, “Good morning, darling.”
“Don’t call me ‘darling,’” she said, turning around.
“But you are ‘darling’ to me.”
“You haven’t got your hair cut.”
“I lost your money on the horse races.”
“Where were you last night?”
“A nice man in the bar treated me to sandwiches and drinks.”
“What were you telling Mrs. Sheffield?”
“I wasn’t telling her anything. She was telling me about her orlon wardrobe, but she’s asked me to have drinks with them before lunch.”
“Very well, then, they can give you lunch.”
“But they don’t know I’m a stowaway, darling. You’re the only one who knows. I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”
“Well, if you want some lunch,” she said, “I might be in my cabin at noon.”
“You’d better make it half-past one or two. I don’t know when I’ll get away from the Sheffields,” he said, and walked off.
At half-past twelve she went down to her cabin to wait for him—for, like many of the old, she traveled with her clocks fifteen or twenty minutes fast, and was a half-hour early for all her engagements, sitting empty-handed in waiting rooms and lobbies and corridors, feeling quite clearly that her time was running out. He blew in a little after two, and he refused at first to hide in the bathroom. “If you want me to go to the captain and tell him there’s a stowaway aboard, I’ll do it,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. There’s no point in having the news percolate up to him from the kitchens, and it will if the waiter sees you here.” In the end, he hid in the bathroom and she ordered lunch. After lunch he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. She sat in a chair, watching him, tapping her foot on the carpet and drumming her nails on the arm of her chair. He snored. He muttered in his sleep.
She saw then that he was not young. His face was lined and sallow; there was gray in his hair. She saw that his youthfulness was a ruse, an imposture calculated to appeal to some old fool like herself, although she was doubtless not the only dupe. Asleep, he looked aged, sinful and cunning, and she felt that his story of the two children and the lonely Christmas had been a lie. There was no innocence in him beyond the naïveness with which he would count upon preying on the lonely. He seemed a fraud, a shabby fraud, and yet she could not inform on him; she could not even bring herself to wake him. He slept until four, woke, pierced all of her skepticism with one of his most youthful and engaging grins, said that he was late and went out. The next time she saw him, it was three in the morning and he was taking her money belt out from under the carpet.
He had hit something, made some noise that waked her. She was terrified—not by him but by the possibilities of evil in the world; by the fear that her sense of reality, her saneness, was no more inviolable than the doors and windows that sheltered her. She was too angry to be afraid of him.
She had turned on the light switch nearest to the bed. This lit a single bulb in the ceiling, a feeble and sorry light that made this scene of robbery and treachery in the darkest hour and the vastness of the ocean seem like a nausea fantasy. He turned on her his sliest grin, his look of a long-lost loving son. “I’m sorry I woke you up, darling,” he said.
“You put that money back.”
“Now, now, darling,” he said.
“You put that money back this instant.”
“Now, now, darling, don’t get excited.”
“That’s my money,” she said, “and you put it back where you found it.” She pulled a wrapper over her shoulders and swung her feet onto the floor.
“Now, listen, darling,” he said, “stay where you are. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Oh, you don’t, do you?” she said, and she picked up a brass lamp and struck him full on the skull.
His eyes rolled upward and his smile faded. He weaved to the left and the right and then fell in a heap, striking his head on the arm of a chair. She seized the money belt and then spoke to him. She shook him by the shoulders. She felt his pulse. He seemed to have none. “He’s dead,” she said to herself. She didn’t know his last name, and since she didn’t believe what he had told her about himself, she knew nothing about the man she had killed. His name wasn’t on the passenger list, he had no legitimacy. Even the part he played in her life had been an imposture. If she shoved his body out the porthole into the sea, who would ever know? But this was the wrong thing to do. The right thing was to get the doctor, whatever the consequences, and she went into the bathroom and dressed hastily. Then she stepped into the deserted corridor. The purser’s and doctor’s offices were locked and dark. She climbed a flight of stairs to the main deck, but the ballroom and the bar and the lounges were all empty. An old man in his pajamas stepped out of the darkness and came toward her. “I can’t sleep either, sister,” he said. “Gin knits up the raveled sleeve of care. You know how old I am? I’m seven days younger than Herbert Hoover and one hundred and five days older than Winston Churchill. I don’t like young people. They make too much noise. I have three grandchildren and I can stand them for ten minutes. Not a second more. My daughter married a prince. Last year I gave them fifteen thousand. This year he must have twenty-five. It’s the way he asks me for money that burns me up. ‘It is very painful for me to ask you for twenty-five thousand,’ he says. ‘It is very painful and humiliating.’ My little grandchildren can’t speak English. They call me Nonno. . . . Take a load off your feet, sister. Sit down and talk with me and help to pass the time.”
“I’m looking for the doctor,” Honora said.
“I have an unfortunate habit of quoting Shakespeare,” the old man said, “but I will spare you. I know a lot of Milton, too. Also Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy.’ How far away those streams and meadows seem! My conscience is uneasy. I’ve killed a man.”
“You did?” Honora asked.
“Yes. I had a fuel-oil business in Albany. That’s my home. I did a gross business of over two million a year. Fuel, oil and maintenance. One night a man called and said his burner was making a funny noise. I told him nothing could be done until morning. I could have got him a serviceman, or I could have gone there myself, but I was drinking with friends, and why should I go out on a cold night? Half an hour later, the house burned down, cause undetermined. . . . It was a man, his wife and three little children. Five coffins in all. I often think about them.”
Honora remembered then that she had left her cabin door open and that the corpse could be seen by anyone who passed. “Sit down. Sit down, sister,” the old man said, but she waved him away and limped back down the stairs. Her cabin door stood open, but the corpse was gone. What had happened? Had someone come and disposed of the body? Were they now searching the ship for her? She listened, but there was no sound of footsteps—nothing but the titanic, respiratory noise of the sea, and somewhere a door banging as the ship heeled a little. She closed and locked her door and poured herself some port. If they were going to come and get her, she wanted to be fully dressed, and anyhow she couldn’t sleep.
She stayed in her cabin until noon, when her telephone rang and the purser asked if she would come to his office. He only wanted to know if she wouldn’t like to have her bags shipped from Naples to Rome. Having prepared herself for an entirely different set of questions and answers, she seemed very absent-minded. But what had happened? Did she have some accomplice aboard who had pushed the stowaway’s body out the porthole? Almost everyone smiled at her, but how much did they know? Had he picked himself up off the floor of her cabin, and was he now nursing his wounds somewhere? The enormousness of the ship and its thousands of doors discouraged her from trying to find him. She looked for him in the bar and the ballroom, and she investigated the broom closet at the end of her corridor. Passing an open cabin door, she thought she heard him laughing, but when she stopped, the laughter stopped, and someone shut the door. She examined the lifeboats—a traditional sanctuary, she knew, for stowaways—but all the lifeboat covers were fast. She would have felt less miserable if she had had some familiar work to do, such as raking and burning leaves, and she even thought of asking the stewardess if she couldn’t sweep the corridor, but she perceived the impropriety of this.
She did not see the stowaway again until the day they were to dock in Naples. The sky and the sea were gray. The air was moist and dispiritingly humid. It was one of those timeless days, she thought, so unlike the stunning best of spring and autumn—one of those gloomy days of which the year, after all, is forged. He came swinging down the deck late in the afternoon with a woman on his arm. The woman was not young, and she had a bad complexion, but they were looking into one another’s eyes like lovers and laughing. As he passed Honora, he spoke to her. “Excuse me,” he said.
This final cheapness infuriated her. She went down to her cabin. Everything was packed—her book and her mending —and she had nothing to distract her. What she then did is hard to explain. She was not an absent-minded or a thoughtless woman, but she had been raised in gaslight and candlelight and had never made her peace with electrical appliances or other kinds of domestic machinery. They seemed to her mysterious and at times capricious, and because she came at them hastily and in total ignorance they often broke, backfired or exploded in her face. She could never imagine that she was to blame, and felt instead that an obscure veil hung between her and the world of machinery. This indifference to engines, along with her impetuousness and her anger at the stowaway, may have accounted for what she then did. She looked at herself in the mirror, found her appearance lacking, took her old curling iron out of the bottom of the suitcase, and plugged it in again.
They drifted into the Bay of Naples without a light showing. Powerless, helmless, they floated stern foremost on the ebb tide. Two tugs came out from the port to tow them in, and a portable generator on the dock was connected to the ship’s lines so that there was light enough to disembark. Honora was one of the first to go ashore. The noise of Neapolitan voices sounded to her like a wilderness, and, stepping onto the Old World, she felt in her bones the thrill of that voyage her forefathers had made how many hundreds of years ago, coming forth upon another continent to found a new nation.