Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

The girl who sat opposite him at dinner was charming. Who was it she reminded him of? Why, of course, the girl at the hospital, the girl with the freckles. Her hair was beautiful, not quite red, not quite gold, nor had it been bobbed; arranged with a sort of graceful untidiness, it made him think of a Melozzo da Forli angel. Her face was freckled, she had a mouth which was both humorous and voluptuous. And she seemed to be alone.

He frowned at the bill of fare and ordered the thick soup.

“No hors d’ceuvres?” asked the steward.

“I think not,” said Mr. Arcularis. “They might kill me.”

The steward permitted himself to be amused and deposited the menu card on the table against the water-bottle. His eyebrows were lifted. As he moved away, the girl followed him with her eyes and smiled.

“I’m afraid you shocked him,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Mr. Arcularis. “These stewards, they’re dead souls. How could they be stewards otherwise? And they think they’ve seen and known everything. They suffer terribly from the déjà vu. Personally, I don’t blame them.”

“It must be a dreadful sort of life.”

“It’s because they’re dead that they accept it.”

“Do you think so?”

“I’m sure of it. I’m enough of a dead soul myself to know the signs!”

“Well, I don’t know what you mean by that!”

“But nothing mysterious! I’m just out of hospital, after an operation. I was given up for dead. For six months I had given myself up for dead. If you’ve ever been seriously ill you know the feeling. You have a posthumous feeling — a mild, cynical tolerance for everything and everyone. What is there you haven’t seen or done or understood? Nothing.”

Mr. Arcularis waved his hands and smiled.

“I wish I could understand you,” said the girl, “but I’ve never been ill in my life.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Good God!”

The torrent of the unexpressed and inexpressible paralyzed him and rendered him speechless. He stared at the girl, wondering who she was and then, realizing that he had perhaps stared too fixedly, averted his gaze, gave a little laugh, rolled a pill of bread between his fingers. After a second or two he allowed himself to look at her again and found her smiling.

“Never pay any attention to invalids,” he said, “or they’ll drag you to the hospital.”

She examined him critically, with her head tilted a little to one side, but with friendliness.

“You don’t look like an invalid,” she said.

Mr. Arcularis thought her charming. His pain ceased to bother him, the disagreeable humming disappeared, or rather, it was dissociated from himself and became merely, as it should be, the sound of the ship’s engines, and he began to think the voyage was going to be really delightful. The parson on his right passed him the salt.

“I fear you will need this in your soup,” he said.

“Thank you. Is it as bad as that?”

The steward, overhearing, was immediately apologetic and solicitous. He explained that on the first day everything was at sixes and sevens. The girl looked up at him and asked him a question.

“Do you think we’ll have a good voyage?” she said.

He was passing the hot rolls to the parson, removing the napkins from them with a deprecatory finger.

“Well, madam, I don’t like to be a Jeremiah, but—”

“Oh, come,” said, the parson, “I hope we have no Jeremiahs;”

“What do you mean?” said the girl.

Mr. Arcularis ate his soup with gusto — it was nice and hot.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it, but there’s a corpse on board, going to Ireland; and I never yet knew a voyage with a corpse on board that we didn’t have bad weather.”

“Why, steward, you’re just superstitious! What nonsense.”

“That’s a very ancient superstition,” said Mr. Arcularis. “I’ve heard it many times. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we’ll be wrecked. And what does it matter, after all?” He was very bland.

“Then let’s be wrecked,” said the parson coldly.

Nevertheless, Mr. Arcularis felt a shudder go through him on hearing the steward’s remark. A corpse in the hold — a coffin? Perhaps it was true. Perhaps some disaster would befall them. There might be fogs. There might be icebergs. He thought of all the wrecks of which he had read. There was the Titanic, which he had read about in the warm newspaper room at the Harvard Club — it had seemed dreadfully real, even there. That band, playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the after-deck while the ship sank! It was one of the darkest of his memories. And the Empress of Ireland — all those poor people trapped in the smoking-room, with only one door between them and life, and that door locked for the night by the deck-steward, and the deck- steward nowhere to be found! He shivered, feeling a draft, and turned to the parson.

“How do these strange delusions arise?” he said.

The parson looked at him searchingly, appraisingly — from chin to forehead, from forehead to chin — and Mr. Arcularis, feeling uncomfortable, straightened his tie.

“From nothing but fear,” said the parson, “Nothing on earth but fear.”

“How strange!” said the girl.