“I lost your money on the horse races.”
“Where were you last night?”
“A nice man in the bar treated me to sandwiches and drinks.”
“What were you telling Mrs. Sheffield?”
“I wasn’t telling her anything. She was telling me about her orlon wardrobe, but she’s asked me to have drinks with them before lunch.”
“Very well, then, they can give you lunch.”
“But they don’t know I’m a stowaway, darling. You’re the only one who knows. I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”
“Well, if you want some lunch,” she said, “I might be in my cabin at noon.”
“You’d better make it half-past one or two. I don’t know when I’ll get away from the Sheffields,” he said, and walked off.
At half-past twelve she went down to her cabin to wait for him—for, like many of the old, she traveled with her clocks fifteen or twenty minutes fast, and was a half-hour early for all her engagements, sitting empty-handed in waiting rooms and lobbies and corridors, feeling quite clearly that her time was running out. He blew in a little after two, and he refused at first to hide in the bathroom. “If you want me to go to the captain and tell him there’s a stowaway aboard, I’ll do it,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. There’s no point in having the news percolate up to him from the kitchens, and it will if the waiter sees you here.” In the end, he hid in the bathroom and she ordered lunch. After lunch he stretched out on the sofa and fell asleep. She sat in a chair, watching him, tapping her foot on the carpet and drumming her nails on the arm of her chair. He snored. He muttered in his sleep.
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.
