Ship of Fools (50 page)

“Generally,” continued the Professor, “I have found that even the most unenlightened obstinate man may be approached, persuaded, won over to right feeling and irreproachable conduct if only you first demonstrate to him your own intention of dealing honorably with him in every smallest particular.… As for children,” he went on, his spirits rising with the pleasant thoughts flooding his brain, driving out imaginary ills, his ample face beaming with the virtues he extolled, “they respond most remarkably to the steady hand, the unwavering point of view, the firm but reasonable methods of dedicated teachers, who can nevertheless, when discipline demands it, wield the rod without mercy, for true justice is stern and must be administered sternly. We do better in the long run to leave mercy to God, who alone is powerful and wise enough to use it rightly. Yet I say still, from one day to the next, yes, even from hour to hour, moment to moment, we must lead our little charges in the hard path of virtue and learning.”

Frau Hutten flattened her hands at the edge of the table on either side of her plate and twiddled her fingers ever so slightly; her husband's tricks with his hands while talking made her nervous—they always had. Everybody looked as if he were listening to a sermon—a dull one. He was boring them to death again, she could feel it like vinegar in her veins. All in one vast drowning movement she remembered those many years when she had interposed herself, literally, bodily, between her husband and the seamy, grimy, mean, sordid, tiresome side of life that he simply could not endure. All those stupid details, all those endless errands, all that long war with the trickeries and the cheats and the slacknesses of the dishonest, the unscrupulous, the lazy and insolent, the ignorant, the wayward, the greedy people of whom the entire workingclass from top to bottom seemed to consist; she had dealt with them all, with that endless parade of them through the days of her life, without once disturbing her husband or asking for his help. The superiority of his mind, the importance of his profession, required that his energies and dignity be saved for the higher things of life, and so she had saved them. No one had ever seen the professor carry even the smallest parcel in his hand—not even a book to and from the school. She carried everything, his books, paper parcels, suitcases, string bags, and even pushed a market cart before her like a baby carriage. She had done it with pride and love, for everybody who saw her knew that her husband was a distinguished professor and that she was a good devoted wife who did everything well. “The ideal German wife,” she had been called by persons she had reason to trust and respect.

Yet—more had been required of her. How often there had been brought in and turned over to her for final discipline the most irreconcilable of the younger students, embittered, tenacious, rebellious beyond their years; and their strength as well, as Frau Hutten had been more than once able to prove to them.

It was her pride—and her weariness—to remember in spite of her resentment at the extra task put upon her, how, once a rebel was in her hands, how entirely she was able to convince him, sooner or later, that his punishment was to be unremitting, tireless, and daily increasing until at last—no matter when, that was his business!—he arrived at a willing, complete, even eager submission. She had never failed to subdue even the most recalcitrant spirit, and she knew well that not one of her initiates ever set eyes on her again without a shudder. Why had this sacrifice been demanded of her? She who had asked God only for children of her own to love and bring up tenderly as birds in a nest? She who would never have beaten or starved or terrorized with threats a child of her own, no more than she could have laid an unkind hand on her poor Bébé. Even as a little puppy he had taken training like an angel, needing nothing but a few simple words and tones of voice, a touch of the fingers, a morsel of biscuit, to guide him in the right direction. So would her children have been loving, intelligent, obedient children—why not? Consider her own character, and her husband's; why should not their children have been noble examples to others?

She knew that her husband was a saint, too good for this world, and she loved him for it. If these stupid people could only listen to him, they would hear something for their good. Ah well—even if through her fault some small crudity got through to him from time to time, he blamed no one, least of all herself, and never remembered anything about it. He even, and this was so sweet the tears almost came to her eyes, seemed honestly to believe they had never had a quarrel. She encouraged him in this. If he had forgotten their first five years, well and good, let him. For herself, she could never forget, for the many lessons taught her then had gone into her blood and bones, and changed her almost beyond her own recognition. By now she remembered these hard lessons dimly and without that secret fury against her bridegroom which even at its hottest she had known for what it was—treachery to her marriage vow. She knew well that upon the woman depends the whole crushing weight of responsibility for happiness in marriage. At times this had seemed to be just one more unbearable burden which fell to the lot of wives. Other moments brief and delightful, such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries of friends, Christmas, Easter, or even simply days of bright weather, of fine health, or good news, indeed, whenever her husband's face shone with domestic content and enjoyment, she could feel her very soul growing wings. Her constancy would revive, flourish, grow strong, her faith could almost match her husband's, who was unwavering, even stern, in his doctrine of their perfect marriage. Never had he admitted a shadow or a flaw, but always spoke, and taught her to speak, of their past together and their daily life through the endless years with unfailing, lying tenderness.

Frau Hutten leaped innerly as if she had been struck by lightning. Lying? Where in God's name had her thoughts got to? She glanced about her tingling with shock, with the helpless feeling she had known too often, not only in sleep, but in all too waking moments like this, the fear that her thoughts had been exposed in their misshapen nakedness, their puerile infamy, and that public disgrace must follow—her own disgrace and her husband's with her, for how often had he not charged her to remember that any discreditable act of a wife, even the slightest indiscretion, redounded to the discredit of her husband, thereby exposed as a man unable to control his household. “You are responsible to me, my dear,” he used to lecture her in those early days when she showed signs of childish rebellion against him, “unless of course in an unimaginable situation you might find yourself in direct conflict with the law itself; but I am responsible to God for you, as well as for myself, and, in many particulars, to the secular law also, founded as it is on divine decree. Ah, my dear child,” he would say in those faraway times, tenderly, his voice beginning to thicken and shake, his hands to tremble, “how important it is for you to accept life as it truly is, to understand it, with my help and my love,” he would say, with a rush of feeling that broke them down and carried them both away; and where did they end, always, these little scenes, these forever unfinished homilies? In bed, always in bed, melting together in long loves so delicious and shameless it felt sinful, not like marriage at all. She had never dared to confess this to her husband, who in their daylight life never mentioned their dreamlike life of the night, as if they were changed by day into different persons, or that making love was a secret they must keep even from each other.…

Frau Hutten began blushing all over, but not with shame, with guilt, with repentance. Oh how could she even for a breath of time have thought the word “lie”? For how well she knew—how had she forgotten?—that this anxious preservative tenderness, this resolute casting out of the flaws and sediments of human nature, this striving for perfection, was the very thing, the only thing, they had made together, it was their child, that child of perfect goodness she dreamed of? In a round soft gesture she lifted her hands, covered her face, and put them down again beside her plate.

“Have you a headache, my dear?” asked her husband, interrupting himself, for he was still talking. “Oh, no,” she said, “please don't worry. I am perfectly well.”

He turned again, this time to Dr. Schumann. “The problem of good and evil is by definition insoluble. Do they really exist, except as concepts in the human mind? Even if so, how and why did they originate? Philosophically this is unanswerable. I ask it merely for the sake of the argument.”

“It is not for me a question of philosophy,” said Dr. Schumann, “and even if it were, I am not a philosopher. I rely on the teachings of the Church and I am sorry I cannot argue the matter. I am a poor sinner,” he said, good-temperedly and dryly, “who needs divine help every day. I agree with the Captain, it takes a strong character to be really evil. Most of us are too slack, halfhearted, or cowardly—luckily, I suppose. Our collusion with evil is only negative, consent by default, you might say. I suppose in our hearts our sympathies are with the criminal because he really commits the deeds we only dream of doing! Imagine if the human race were really divided into embattled angels and invading devils—no, it is bad enough as it is,” he said, crossing his knife and fork, “with nine-tenths of us half asleep and refusing to be waked up.” His tone had become slightly muted and apologetic, as he heard his voice drawing out and going on and on, like the Professor's. He drank the last of his wine in silence.

Frau Hutten had not listened particularly to her husband, for she knew his speeches by heart, but for years she had brooded on his theories of human nature, so far removed, so infinitely above and beyond the actual she had never dared to hint to him her conclusions on the subject, after her life's daily battle with evil incarnate in its working clothes.

She spoke aloud, astonished to hear her own voice: “I do know well there are many evil people in this world, many more evil than good ones, even the lazy good ones; evil by nature, by choice, by deepest inclination, evil all through; we encourage these monsters by being charitable to them, by making excuses for them, or just by being slack, as Dr. Schumann says. Too indifferent to be bothered so long as they do not harm
us
. And sometimes even if they
do
harm us. They don't in the least care that we are being scrupulous to treat them fairly and honestly—no, they laugh up their sleeves at us, and call us fools, and go on cheating us even more, because they think we are too stupid to know what they are doing to us! And we do not punish them as they deserve, because we have lost our sense of justice, and we say, ‘If we put a thief in jail, or a murderer to death, we are as criminal as they!' Oh what injustice to innocent people and what sentimental dishonesty and we should be ashamed of it. Or we go on blindly saying, ‘If we behave well to them, they will end by behaving well to us!' That is one of the great lies of life. I have found that this makes them bolder, because they despise us instead of fearing us as they should—and it is all our own weakness, and yes, we do evil in letting them do evil without punishment. They think we are cowards and they are right. At least we are dupes and we deserve what we get from them.…”

She ran down slowly at this point, in despair and something like prostration, hearing herself with frightful clearness in the clammy silence. The others were thoughtfully arranging their plates and fiddling with their napkins. Dinner was over, they were ready to leave the table, and were waiting for her to finish her talk. Her husband sat like something molded in sand, his expression that of a strong innocent man gazing into a pit of cobras. After her instant glimpse of his face, she dared not look above his hands, folded across his stomach. She thought, Now, I have ruined his life; and it did not occur to her until later what she might have done to her own, which depended so entirely on her husband's well-being. She had offended not even recklessly, just thoughtlessly, so intent on giving out her own opinions she didn't care for anything else, against her husband's main conviction on which everything else in their marriage was based soundly: that a wife's first duty was to be in complete agreement with her husband at all times, no matter on what questions, from the greatest to the smallest; more especially, the faintest shade of public dissent was a most disloyal act. She need not hurry to support him positively—that would give the air of compulsion to her manner. No, hers was the amiable part of that silence which gives consent. In any case, it would never be her opinions that counted. The important thing is her unquestioning constancy to her husband, which often can be shown all the more eloquently without words.

Frau Hutten expelled an enormous charge of breath like the last exhalation of a dying person, straight up from the bottom of her very being. Resolutely then she faced her lifetime of expiation, and her soul seemed to take flight into a region beyond suffering, as if it had escaped the pains of punishment by consenting to them.

“I agree with you,” said little Frau Schmitt, unexpectedly, “we must not encourage people to behave badly to us. If we let them run over us, it's our own fault.…”

“Oh, I didn't say that!”

“Then what
did
you say?” asked Frau Schmitt, baffled.

Herr Professor Hutten stood up at this, reaching for his wife's arm, and Frau Hutten rose, grateful for being rescued from a foolish discussion with another woman. It was an article of faith with her husband that all associations between women, even of the most casual and passing kind, were unnatural, morbid by nature, hotbeds of complicity against men, leading to divisions between husband and wife. Married women “compared notes” on their husbands' marital practices and faults, and gave bad advice to young girls. A woman's loyalty must not, cannot ever be, to her own sex, but to her men—to father, to brother, to son, finally above all and before all, to her husband. They have no understanding of true friendship in the high noble sense as it exists so naturally between men; they are incapable of it, they are born rivals and not to be trusted with each other. There is always something tainted, hysterical, in the associations of women; nor can they be admitted to the great hermetic male society, for they have no reverence for the Truth, nor for sacred rites.… Oh, how often Frau Hutten had listened to her husband expounding these doctrines to a mixed company in her very parlor, while she sat silent under instruction, but with an almost wordless protest—“But there are so many other things about us he doesn't seem to know! This is not all there is to this—” helplessly inarticulate and strangely—this
was
strange, she could never explain it—fearfully lonely. Still, the other women seemed to agree, or submit, and most of the men she knew talked that way, and she had read it more or less in a number of books by respected writers; her father had said it, and so did some ministers of the Gospel. In the end, she was bound to admit that this bitter judgment was just another of those great truths she was by nature unfitted to grasp.