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.