She waited.
‘Are you a virgin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that explains a little.’ He paused. ‘I’m leaving now. I’m sorry for both of us. No hard feelings. See you at smorgåsbord.’
She heard the door slam, held back, then peered out, and saw that the cabin was empty.
Emotionally spent, she turned off the shower and then dried herself. After tidying the bathroom, she went into the cabin and mechanically dressed in the garments that she had recently discarded. Closing the zip of her skirt, she felt dizzy. She lowered herself to the bed, and finally fell back on the pillow, hands covering her eyes from the overhead light.
Twenty minutes later, passing to his room, Max Stratman thought that he heard her sobbing. He placed his ear to her door, confirmed his suspicion, and hastily opened it and went inside.
‘Emily, um Himmels willen, what is the matter?’
‘Nothing, Uncle Max, nothing-I swear.’
‘Why are you crying like this?’
She tried to contain her sobs, and finally reduced them to a soft whimper. ‘I’m not crying-see?’
He pulled the chair up beside her bed, and perched forward on it, like a kindly country doctor. ‘Something has happened. We have no secrets.’
She rolled on her right side, studying the hedge of hair on his oversized bald head, the worried eyes behind the steel-rimmed bifocals, the concern in his wise old red face. Here was one of the great minds of the world, a genius cherished and honoured, and she, a neurotic nobody, was troubling him with her petty problems.
‘It’s nothing,’ she repeated without conviction.
‘Please tell me. I will not go until you tell me.’
She tried to visualize her father, and could not, and suddenly there was only Uncle Max, and she wanted to tell him. Haltingly, avoiding his eyes, she related the events of the past hour or more, from the time Mark had escorted her to the door to the time he had left her nude on the bathroom floor to dress and leave.
‘That is all?’ asked Stratman, when she had finished. ‘You are not leaving out anything?’
‘He didn’t touch me, I swear-’
‘No-no assault?’
‘Uncle Max, I’d know.’
Stratman rose, agitated. ‘It is terrible, anyway. No one is safe. I will go to the Captain at once-’
‘Oh, no!’ She sat up and swung her legs off the bed. ‘I don’t want him in trouble-’
‘You care for him that much? Is that it?’
‘I don’t care for him at all,’ she said vehemently. ‘He means nothing to me. But I’m just not sure he’s all to blame.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Only-I had too much to drink-I invited him-he misunderstood. It is something that happens every day.’ She softened her tone. ‘Let’s not make a fuss, Uncle Max. I don’t want to go through that. It would embarrass me. It would be easier to forget it. We’re almost there. We’ll leave the boat soon and not think of it.’
‘You are sure it is that simple?’
‘Oh, yes. I was upset, naturally. But I’m all right, you can see. I don’t want an incident, that’s all.’
He looked at her. ‘Maybe I can get the ship’s doctor. To give you a shot, calm your nerves-’
‘Not, not even that. Just let me rest, and an hour before we get in, come and get me. I’ll be ready.’ She tried to change the subject. ‘Do you think there will be a reception when you get to Göteborg?’
‘I doubt it. Everything is in Stockholm.’
She feigned enthusiasm. ‘I can’t wait. It’s really been a marvellous trip.’
She dropped back on the pillow. He waited until she was comfortable. ‘I’ll be next door if you need me.’
‘What about dinner?’
‘I’m not hungry. I’ll have the steward bring a sandwich. I’ll come back soon. You rest.’
He went to his cabin, disturbed. In a way that he could not define, he felt that he had failed Walther. What had happened to Emily must never happen again. He had over estimated her. In Stockholm, he would not leave her alone. Pacing past his bed, he heard his heart. In all the years before, he had never heard it, had ignored it as he had his inhaling and exhaling. But now, too often, it demanded to be heard. There was a heaviness in the right side of his chest, not pain but pressure. He opened the overnight case located the bottle of pills that Dr. Ilman had given him, and took two with half a glass of water.
He rang for the room steward, ordered a cheese-and-ham sandwich. Presently, when it came, he gave the steward two envelopes, each with a fifteen-dollar tip in it, and requested that the second envelope be given to the stewardess. Stratman knew that the tips were generous for his budget, but he also knew that the serving people depended on these tips for their livelihood, especially on the run from New York to Göteborg. Too, since the Nobel Prize included a highly advertised sum of money, more would be expected of him, as one of the winners. He allowed the steward to remove his suitcases. After the man had gone, Stratman settled down and nibbled at his sandwich.
Presently, because his mind was on Emily, he returned to her cabin. She was still on the bed, as he had left her, eyes closed, dozing. He sat in the chair beside her, extracted a pocket-sized German edition of a biography of Immanuel Kant from his coat, and resumed reading. When he reached Heine’s description of Kant, he reread it: ‘The life of Immanual Kant is hard to describe; he has indeed neither life nor history in the proper sense of the words. He lived an abstract, mechanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet remote street in Königsberg…’
Stratman considered this. There, he thought, but for the grace of Emily, go I. By her sharing of his life, she had infused her guardian’s ‘old-bachelor existence’ with an element of normality, yet, ironically, had been unable to retain an element of normality for herself. The terrible incident of the evening underlined for him, in a way he had found impossible to explain to Dr. Ilman, Emily’s dependence on him. Without his support, after he was gone, she would have been forced into the turmoil of the working world. Any notion that this necessity would have given her strength had been dissipated by the night’s events. As he had long ago guessed, she would not have survived. One cannot expect a person without arms to feed himself. How fortuitous had been the Nobel award. Once he had the cheque in hand, Emily would have her buffer against the future.
He read more about his beloved Kant, drifted off into numerous speculations, even nodded off several times, hardly aware of the passage of time or of the fact that the ship had ceased pitching and was now rolling less.
The rapping on the door brought him up sharply, and awakened Emily, too.
The steward put his head in. ‘I’ll need the rest of the luggage, sir. We’re just outside Göteborg. It’ll be less than an hour now.’
No sooner had the steward gone with the suitcases, than a young boy in white uniform, wearing the telegraph-office arm band, appeared. There were four long-distance calls from Stockholm. Stratman asked if he might take them here in Emily’s room. The boy went to the telephone and contacted the officer’s room. In a few moments, he handed the receiver to Stratman, gratefully accepted his tip, and rushed off.
The first call, and the two after that, were from Swedish newspapers. There was static on the wire, and Stratman had difficulty in hearing. He answered the questions that he understood, briefly, precisely, and promised each correspondent that he would give lengthier interviews in Stockholm.
The fourth call was from Dr. Carl Adolf Krantz. Stratman recognized the name and was friendly. He thanked Krantz for his effusive congratulations and welcome. Yes, the voyage had been pleasant and restful. Yes, he and his niece would arrive at eight in the morning. Yes, they looked forward to meeting the reception committee and to participating in the programmes and ceremonies.
During all these calls, Emily, having washed and applied light make-up, stood at the porthole, half listening, staring out into the rain-crossed night. Spotlights on the water had picked out the pilot boat, and the launch that followed shortly after. The ship was progressing slowly, among what seemed to be dozens of islands, and growing larger in sight was the framework of lights that must be the wharves and the city of Göteborg.