Uncertain Voyage Read online

  “I’m sorry,” she said with feeling, and suddenly she wanted to reach out and touch his hand lying very near hers on the table. It was a square, brown hand with compact creative fingers and she stared at it, willing herself to touch it. She even forced the muscles of her hand to tighten, and feeling the muscles obey, she urged them toward Adam’s hand. Yet they could not move, they dared not. Her lips tightened. This hand at which she stared had held hers, this hand of Adam’s had made love to her, yet still she could not spontaneously reach out to express what she felt in a simple gesture of friendship. She remained locked up, contained, acted upon, but unacting.

  She lay in his arms, replete with laughter and tenderness and sated desire so that she was liquid, almost without flesh, like someone who had melted into the night. Yet she was at the same time deeply aware of her body and of his as they lay side by side, touching only a little for companionship and out of memory of what they had created together. “My body is wiser than I,” she thought, but still at this moment she was glad that he left in a few hours because another day, another night, and she might lose the sense of separateness that she so desperately tried to maintain, like a child learning a new language. And losing it, she might also lose control and become a beggar, asking too much.

  Adam stirred and sat up. “I feel very sad,” he said abruptly. He turned and looked down at her with sadness etched into the lines of his face. He said huskily, “You have to be someone very special to affect me like this.”

  “Are you sorry?” she asked curiously.

  He smiled faintly. “Will you have breakfast with me at eight?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll leave and let you sleep a few hours in that lamentably narrow bed of yours.” Still he hesitated and then he said almost unwillingly, as if the words were wrenched from his being, “With you I know I have come nearer to loving than with any woman in my life.”

  At his words she felt all of her defenses rise in her, felt herself stiffen to ward off this blow, this assault of tenderness, and then to her astonishment something turned over in her like a child wanting to be born and with tears in her eyes she reached out without restraint and took his hand and held it. His glance dropped and she saw that he remembered and understood, and they remained like this, transfixed by gratitude and tenderness, a quality almost of reverence between them, as if they exchanged benedictions.

  * * *

  —

  Time lay between them now like a wedge. They sat in the lounge of the air terminal and the hours behind them were like a weight that could neither be picked up nor put down. Behind the huge glass window lay a Copenhagen that had been theirs; people still walked its streets, passing that window, yet already for them the town lay behind glass—it no longer belonged to them—for something was ending. She felt it in her throat.

  “I loathe good-bys,” Adam said huskily.

  “Yes.” Her voice broke a little.

  “I did some arithmetic this morning when I shaved. We met at four o’clock on Tuesday and now it is ten o’clock on Friday morning. We have known each other for sixty-six hours.”

  “Only that long,” she said. “It feels—”

  He reached out and grasped her hand. “I know. Don’t say it.”

  But there were now so many things they couldn’t say; it was better to resurrect old lovers’ jokes and lighten the moment. “We never did see the Tuborg beer factory,” she reminded him.

  “Or rent a boat.”

  “Or dance.”

  “Or swim.”

  “Or see the Palace, and the Changing of the Guard.”

  He said impulsively, “Wait here a moment,” and got up and walked away and out of sight. When he returned a moment later he was carrying a single long-stemmed red rose. “For you,” he said. “Just one to keep you company until you leave Copenhagen, too, tomorrow.”

  “You think I will remember you only that long?” she asked tremulously.

  The loudspeaker burst into excited sound and Adam said in a stifled voice, “They’re announcing my bus to the airport.”

  She nodded and stood up like someone facing sentence of death. She had never seen a man cry, but Adam’s eyes were wet with tears. He said unsteadily, “Good-by my love—I’ll never forget you. Not ever.”

  She thought suddenly, “But this is for a lifetime, how can I bear it?” “Oh Adam,” she whispered, and flinging her arms about his neck she pressed her cheek to his, feeling the wetness of his tears. Drawing back she looked deeply into his face. “Adam,” she said. “Adam, have a wonderful life,” and she knew in this moment that what she felt was very near to the generosity that is real love.

  “God bless you, my darling,” he whispered.

  A little sob escaped her and she turned and plunged away from him, hurrying desperately now to end it. But with a hand on the door to the street she remembered that this was forever, and she dared to turn and look again. Briefly, wordlessly, they gazed at each other for that last time across the air terminal.

  “Good-by,” she thought, tears streaming down her cheeks. Tenderly, sadly, she lifted the rose he had given her in a final salute and then she walked out, sheltering the rose before her like a candle.

  * * *

  —

  The hotel room was empty and silent. She had forgotten how empty a hotel room could be. She took only a few steps inside it and stopped: the emptiness was an affront, it was a slap across her cheek, it was a vacuum into which she must enter at the cost of losing herself. In the mirror as she closed the door she saw reflected a strange woman with flushed cheeks and wet eyes and she thought, “But I felt so beautiful,” and then, peering closer, “What could he have seen in me?” But the reflection held no meaning for her because the room was untenanted, she was not really here.

  “Adam,” she whispered tentatively, and then, despairingly, “Adam, where have you gone?” But he had vanished into silence, into another void, and was bleakly, utterly lost to her. Forever—it was a word that echoed through whole caverns of endless time, and if an exalted feeling lingered, to what use could it be put, could she really fashion from it a painting or a new life? In this moment there was nothing but herself—herself alone again, and tomorrow she must fly away into still another unknown and go stubbornly on and on, every step taking her farther from Adam.

  Was it to fade so soon? She sat down and tried to recall him, repeating like incantations the words he had said, remembering that she had reached out to touch him only a few hours ago, and in this very room. But he was no longer here, no longer possessable, and what was the use of it all if she was alone again?

  He had said, “You must be someone very special to affect me like this.” And then, “With you I have come nearer to loving than with any other woman in my life.”

  She thought, “I’m doing exactly what I shouldn’t do, I’m mourning him, I’m trying to cling, except now I’m clinging to a memory, and this is all wrong because we were real together.” She said aloud, fiercely, “Adam, I will not put your memory into a coffin and surround you with flowers and lighted candles, damn it. I will only be proud.”

  She realized that someone was knocking on her door and she thought with a wild, irrational hope, “Adam has come back?” She opened the door but it was not Adam. A man in uniform stood patiently in the hall. Seeing her he removed his cap. “Madame Melissa Aubrey?”

  She nodded blankly. “Yes.”

  He held out a card to her. “Bojesen of the Copenhagen Police. May I speak to you a moment?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said uncertainly, and was suddenly aware of the tears in her eyes and the sodden handkerchief in her hand. As he walked inside she said, “You must excuse me, I have just said good-by to a very dear friend. Did you come to check my passport?”

  “Partings can be sad, yes,” he agreed politely. “No, I do not need your passport, there are a few qu
estions I must ask you.” He gestured to the desk and chair. “May I?”

  “Of course, but if it’s not about my passport—”

  He sat down and drew out a small notebook and a pencil. He moistened the stub of the pencil with his tongue, tested it, and peered at words inside the notebook. Melissa leaned against the bureau and then said impatiently, “Yes?” She wanted him gone so that she could go on remembering Adam, and what was this man doing here, anyway?

  Reading from his notebook he said, “You are the Melissa Aubrey who entered Denmark on Monday, arriving on the Alpen Express from Hamburg, is this correct?”

  “Yes, yes, quite correct.”

  He nodded. “Yes, that is where your passport was stamped. It has taken us several days to trace you, you see.”

  “Oh?” she said in surprise.

  “It is also correct that you are the Madame Aubrey who arrived in Europe aboard the Bremen, which docked Sunday at Bremerhaven?”

  Her heart had begun to beat very quickly. “Yes.”

  “Then you are listed as having”—he peered short-sightedly at his notes—“as having sat at table 43 aboard ship?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “You knew then a man named Stearns…Mr. J. J. Stearns.”

  A man named Stearns…The name was incongruous in this hotel room so far removed from the ship and yet now that the man had spoken Stearns’ name she knew that she had been expecting it. “Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Why?”

  “Did you know him well?” asked the policeman with a smile.

  She had grown rigid and very still; a part of her had moved off at a distance to watch and record the scene and make comments, but she was not certain which Melissa was real. “No,” she heard herself say. “None of us knew him well.”

  “None of us?”

  “The others at table 43. There were four college students traveling together from the same midwestern university,” she explained. “Do you want their names?”

  “Please,” he said. “As verification.”

  She gave him their names and he wrote them down.

  “But surely Mr. Stearns conversed with you at meals?”

  She shook her head. “No, not at all. That is, except for the usual Good Mornings and Good Evenings, and once in a while a comment or a smile.” Staring at the policeman she said suddenly, “I know he is dead, I saw his picture in the newspaper.”

  “Yes,” the man said patiently, almost soothingly. “Now to whom did the man speak?”

  “Why are you asking?” pleaded Melissa.

  “The French police have asked us to make inquiries,” he told her. “We are cooperating with them. Doubtless they are asking these same questions of the others who sat at table 43. Now if you would be so kind—”

  “But I never saw him speak to anyone,” she told him. “He was not like the others. He never mingled, he was always alone. Sometimes I would see him reading a book in the lounge, or smoking his pipe on deck, but always alone.”

  “He never spoke to you personally, that is to you individually, alone?”

  “No,” she said quickly, making it true, forcing it to be true. “But why?”

  He held up his hand, saying, “Only two more questions, please. Just when did you last see Mr. Stearns aboard ship, if you remember?”

  She said with a trace of irritation, “Since I saw him only at meal times then I suppose it would have been at the last meal he shared with us.”

  He wrote this down slowly and carefully. “Now if you please, your addresses while you are in Europe.” He added with an apologetic smile, “It really has been difficult, this finding you. There are so many hotels in Copenhagen!” She nodded and gave him dates and the names of hotels.

  “Thank you. You understand this is routine,” he told her, putting away his notebook and pencil. “I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “But you’ve not told me why,” she said impatiently. “He died of a heart attack, didn’t he?” The man stood up. “Didn’t he?” she repeated.

  He said primly, “The police do not customarily investigate the deaths of men who die of heart attacks.”

  “You mean—not a heart attack,” she whispered.

  With a hand on the door he removed his notebook and flipped it open. Peering at words inside he said, “The autopsy uncovered traces of a poison that simulates a heart attack—but of course that means he had been murdered.” Putting on his hat he went out, closing the door behind him.

  “Murdered,” she echoed, staring at the closed door, and the word had a sour taste to her tongue and an unreal sound in this quiet hotel room. It was a word—no matter how grotesque—that she could no longer escape, and she felt shattered by its finality.

  She walked to the closet and brought out her suitcase and resolutely removed from it the book that had belonged to Stearns. She stared at it for several minutes, holding it, weighing it in one hand and pondering its title: Basic Selections from Emerson: Essays, Poems and Apothegms. It still seemed a joke to her. He should never have given it to her—never, she thought fiercely—but still it was here, a gift from a dead man. A madman as well as a dead one, she thought, because really it was difficult to fit Stearns into any conceivable frame of reality. Her encounter with him had been too bizarre, too sudden and brief to be real. He had spoken to her for only a few minutes and then he had left and she had never seen him again. Had he really happened to her? He must have existed because now he was dead—they said he was dead—but for her the only proof lay in this book he had given her. Now she opened it, trying to remember Stearns and to make him real. Turning the pages slowly she tapped and poked at the binding but still there was nothing concealed in it, there were no dummy pages or hollow spaces. It remained, quite absurdly, a book.

  If it was only a book, she thought bleakly, then Adam was wrong.

  Stearns, on the other hand, had said it was a book—a book with something of value on page 191.

  She turned to page 191. The page contained—she counted them—ten apothegms, each with numbers at the end of the quotations. The first apothegm read, “One who wishes to refresh himself by contact with the bone and sinew of society must avoid what is called the respectable portion of his city or neighborhood with as much care as in Europe a good traveler avoids American and English people. (’45–42–VII–66)”

  There were nine other quotations, each with numbers at their conclusion. She turned to the first page of the apothegms and learned that the numbers following each quotation indicated the year in the 1800’s in which the item was entered in Emerson’s journal, his age at the time, the number of the volume in which it appeared, and the page number.

  She thought, “I should have told Adam about this from the very beginning. I went about it all wrong because I was afraid. Afraid to make it real even to myself.” It had been the security of Adam’s presence that had distracted her from the seriousness of it, but now Adam was gone and she was frightened.

  She looked at the book again, and her own earlier conclusions returned but now they swept back to take root with force and conviction. She thought, “If this really is a code?” and then, “If Stearns really was an agent—”

  The room felt suddenly suffocating to her. She picked up her coat and went out again, walking very quickly but whether to escape her thoughts or to find Adam she didn’t know. It was raining but she scarcely noticed as she turned blindly up one street and then another. She found herself in front of Adam’s hotel and stopped—if she went inside would his ghost still be there, would there be traces of him left that she could talk to?—and then she reached the intersection where they had met that first morning and she stood on the corner with her hand at her throat, remembering. She realized that she ought not to have left her hotel. “This city is dead now—he’s gone,” she thought. “Everything has ended. There has even been a policeman questioning me
since Adam left. I’m being hurled back into a world I don’t understand.” She shivered. “I wish I could talk to Adam, he would know what to do.” She turned to hurry back to the hotel and, in turning, bumped into a man behind her. She stared at him incredulously—at the pale bespectacled face, the woolly, brown tweed suit, the silk tie—and was almost bewildered by the impact of seeing him again. This man had been a lovers’ joke between her and Adam yet on another level, from the very first, she had been aware of this fear in her, this flaw of doubt, this consternation when they met. Now Adam was gone, Stearns was not only dead but poisoned, and the man was still here.

  The Pale One bowed quickly, an instinctive gesture of apology, and hurried past with his head down. She stood and watched until he vanished from sight. She remembered that it was Adam who had pointed the man out to her. Adam had noticed him first—at the State Museum, wasn’t it?—and then The Pale One had been at Tivoli and she too had seen him—standing, as if he waited for them—and again that night he had been a shadow behind them when they left The Seven Nations and walked up the Frederiksbergg.

  But, perversely, he had not been seen at all yesterday, and so he had remained a coincidence, someone glimpsed a number of times in the space of one day and then not again. She thought desperately, “If only we had seen him once more while we were together—” But even now she was not sure that she would have dared name her fears to Adam.