"You are a doctor?" asked the Russian Jewess.
"Yes," said Frederick.
Without wasting many words, he made her lie prone on the couch, inserted
a tampon in her nose, and used other means to stanch the flow of blood.
He had kept the door to the deck open to let the cigarette smoke out
and the fresh, healing salt air in. The girl lay quietly on the couch;
and Frederick thought it advisable to look through one of Wilhelm's
medical books.
"So far as I am concerned, you may smoke," she said after a while, having
noticed that Frederick absent-mindedly started to light a cigarette
several times and then, recollecting himself, desisted.
"No," he said curtly, "I won't smoke now."
"You might at least offer me a cigarette," she said. "I am bored."
"That's proper," he said. "A patient should be bored."
"Oh, I am not a patient."
"_Patientia_ is the Latin for 'patience,' my dear young lady. You are not
a patient in so far as you are very impatient."
"If you let me have a cigarette, then I will say 'Yes, you are right.'"
"I know I am right, and there can be no question of your smoking now."
"But I want to smoke. You are impolite," she said, obstinately kicking up
her heel.
Frederick ordered her to be quiet, and she let her foot drop again on the
leather upholstery. He looked at her with an intentionally exaggerated
expression of sternness.
"I am not your slave, do you understand? Do you think I left Odessa,
where there is enough ordering about, to be ordered about by every
stranger I meet?" she grumbled. "I am cold. Please shut the door."
"If you want, I will shut the door," said Frederick, getting up to do so
with an air of resignation not altogether genuine.
In the morning in the steerage, Frederick and this Deborah had exchanged
a glowing look of understanding. Now, although, or perhaps because, the
wine was in his veins, he was eager for Doctor Wilhelm's return. His
absence seemed to be unduly prolonged. For a time the girl lay silent.
Frederick found it necessary to examine the tampon in her nostril. As he
was doing so, he noticed tears in her eyes.
"What is the matter?" he asked. "Why are you crying?"
She suddenly began to beat him with her arms and fists, called him a
sleek, heartless bourgeois, and wanted to jump up; but she had to succumb
to Frederick's superior, gentle strength and return to her reclining
posture. Frederick seated himself as before on an upholstered chair
opposite the couch.
"My dear child," he said, very gently, "you are behaving queerly,
slinging about those honourable epithets. But we won't discuss that. You
are nervous. You are excited. You have no blood in your veins, and even
if you had a stronger constitution, the condition of your nerves after
the hardships of this trip, especially in the steerage, could scarcely be
different."
"I'll never travel first class, never!"
"Why not?"
"Because, considering the misery in which the majority of human beings
are languishing, it is a mean low thing to do to travel first class. Read
Dostoievsky, read Tolstoy, read Kropotkin! We are being chased like
animals. We are being persecuted. It doesn't matter where we die."
"It may interest you to know that I have read them all, Kropotkin,
Tolstoy, Dostoievsky. But don't suppose you are the only persecuted
person on earth. I am persecuted, too. We are all persecuted."
"Oh, you are travelling first class and you are not a Jew. I am a Jew.
Have you the faintest idea of what it means to be a Jew in Russia?"
"That is why you and I are now travelling to a new world," said
Frederick, "to America, the land of liberty."
"Indeed!" she sneered, "I and liberty! I know my fate. Don't you know
into what hands I have fallen? I am the victim of vile exploiters!"
The girl cried, and since she was young and of the same delicacy of
figure as Ingigerd, only of a very different race, a dark-haired,
dark-eyed race, Frederick felt himself perceptibly weakening. His
compassion grew; and he was well aware that openly expressed sympathy
is the surest approach to love. So he again forced himself into a hard,
repellent attitude of opposition.
"Now I am nothing but a physician representing another physician. What
does it concern me, and how can I help it, if you have fallen into the
hands of exploiters? Besides, all of you intellectual Russians are
hysterical--a trait utterly repugnant to me."
She jumped to her feet and wanted to run away. To restrain her he caught
first her right, then her left wrist. She looked at him with such an
expression of hate and contempt that he could not but be sensitive of the
girl's passionate beauty. Her face was of the colour that greensickness
imparts. Her features were exquisitely delicate. In contrast, Ingigerd's
face, with which Frederick fleetingly compared hers, seemed unrefined,
even coarse. Here was the aristocracy of a too highly bred race, somewhat
faded, to be sure, but at that moment all the more seductive.
"Ugh! Let me go, let me go, I say!"
"What have I done to you?" Frederick asked. For a moment he was genuinely
alarmed, scarcely knowing whether he had not been actually guilty of a
wrong against her. He had been drinking champagne and was excited. If
someone were to enter now, what would he think of him? Even centuries
before, had not Potiphar's wife, from whom Joseph fled, resorted to
certain successful slanderous means? "What have I done?" he repeated.
"Nothing," she said, "except what you are in the habit of doing. You have
insulted an unprotected girl."
"Are you crazy?" he asked.
Suddenly she answered: "I don't know." And in that instant the hard,
hateful expression of her face melted, turning into complete submission,
a change that went irresistibly to the heart of a man like Frederick. He
forgot himself. He was no longer master of his feelings.