Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter Read Free Book Online Page B

with her grief as the only fact of any importance to be known about her. Her pale blue eyes asked frankly for pity.
    Mrs. Treadwell shuddered with a painful twinge of foreboding. “Even here,” she thought. “How inevitable. I shall spend this voyage listening to someone’s sorrows, I shall sit down and have a good cry with somebody, no doubt, before this trip is over. Well, this is a fine beginning.”
    â€œWhere are you going?” asked Frau Schmitt, after a sufficient pause in which the expected question leading to the story of her afflictions had not been asked.
    â€œTo Paris,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “back to Paris.”
    â€œAh, you were only visiting in Mexico?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou have friends there?”
    â€œNo.”
    Frau Schmitt’s water-blue gaze transferred itself to Mrs. Treadwell’s arm. “You have bruised yourself badly,” she said, with mild interest.
    Mrs. Treadwell said, “The astonishing fact is, a beggar woman pinched me.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause I would not give her an alms,” said Mrs. Treadwell, thinking for the first time how unusually selfish and stupid that refusal sounded, just told flatly. No decent person refused a beggar in Mexico; like everyone she knew, she carried by habit a handful of copper coins meant only for them. This was no beggar, but an impudent gypsy—the rap on the elbow! Still, the whole thing was somehow shameful to her; how could she have let a low creature like that stupefy her so? The thing was not to be explained, even to herself. “Naturally I don’t expect anyone to believe it,” she said, selecting a thin dry wafer with her tea.
    â€œWhy not?” asked Frau Schmitt, childishly.
    â€œWell, anything can happen, I know that,” said Mrs. Treadwell, “but I always find myself thinking, not to me .” Now why had she said that? It gave such an opening for more whys and why-nots. Uneasily she glanced about, and saw instantly that, on the other side of the bar, with cocktails before them, the American girl Jane Brown was already seated with the only presentable-looking man on the boat. She turned back to the dull little thing across from her, accepting this voyage and this society as a long boredom like any other, not to be denied, opposed or ignored, but to be fled from, lightly from point to point; moment by moment she would find a split second of relief from boredom in the very act of flight which gave her the fleeting illusion of invisibility.
    â€œAnything at all can happen to any of us at any time,” said Frau Schmitt with easy certainty. “My husband—how long has it been that we have hoped to go back to Nürnberg together? But now I am going alone, though his coffin is in the hold of this ship. Oh it smothers me to think of it! My husband died six weeks and two days ago today at seven o’clock this morning …”
    It is always death, thought Mrs. Treadwell, for this sentimental kind it can never be less than death. Nothing else could pierce through that fat to a living nerve. Still I must say something. “That is a very terrible thing,” she said, and was dismayed to find that in spite of her unfriendly thought, she really meant it, she pitied this woman’s sorrow; and that death, there beside them at the table, death was what they had in common.
    Frau Schmitt’s soft mouth turned down at the corners. She stirred her tea and said nothing. Her eyelids turned pink. She was quite alone all at once in her own private luxury of grief, once she had devoured the pink-iced teacake of sympathy. Mrs. Treadwell, leaving half her tea, quietly made her first escape of the voyage.
    On her way to her cabin she spoke and smiled, in the same tone and the same smile for each, to the ship’s doctor, noting his fine old Mensur scar; to the taffy-haired young officer whose name or rank she did not know and would never trouble