Chapter 1

I

The German fast mail steamer, _Roland_, one of the older vessels of the North German Steamship Company, plying between Bremen and New York, left Bremen on the twenty-third of January, 1892.

It had been built in English yards with none of those profuse, gorgeous gold decorations in a riotous rococo style which are so unpleasant in the saloons and cabins of ships more recently built in German yards.

The crew of the vessel included the captain, four officers, two engineers of the first rank, assistant engineers, firemen, coal-passers, oilers, a purser, the head-steward and the second steward, the chef, the second cook, and a doctor. In addition to these men with their assistants, to whom the well-being of that tremendous floating household was entrusted, there were, of course, a number of sailors, stewards, stewardesses, workers in the kitchen, and so on, besides two cabin-boys and a nurse. There was also an officer in charge of the mail on board. The vessel was carrying only a hundred cabin passengers from Bremen; but in the steerage there were four hundred human beings.

Frederick von Kammacher, to whom, the day before, the _Roland_ had been non-existent, telegraphed from Paris to have a cabin on it reserved for him. Haste was imperative. After receiving notification from the company that the cabin was being held, he had only an hour and a half in which to catch the express that would bring him to Havre at about twelve o'clock. From Havre he crossed to Southampton, spending the night in a bunk in one of those wretched saloons in which a number of persons are herded together. But he managed to sleep the whole time, and the crossing went without incident.

At dawn he was on deck watching England's ghostly coast-line draw nearer and nearer, until finally the steamer entered the port of Southampton, where he was to await the _Roland_.

At the steamship office, he was told that the _Roland_ would scarcely make Southampton before evening, and at seven o'clock a tender would be at the pier to convey the passengers to the ship as soon as it was sighted. That meant twelve idle hours in a dreary foreign town, with the thermometer at ten degrees below freezing-point. Frederick decided to take a room in a hotel, and, if possible, pass some of the time in sleep.

In a shop window he saw a display of cigarettes of the brand of Simon Arzt of Port Said. He entered the shop, which a maid was sweeping, and bought several hundred. It was an act dictated by sentiment rather than by a desire for enjoyment. The cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port Said were excellent, the best he had ever smoked; but the significance they had acquired for him was not due to any intrinsic virtue of theirs.

He carried an alligator portfolio in his waistcoat pocket. In that portfolio, among other things, was a letter he had received the very day he left Paris:

* * * * *

Dear Frederick,

It's no use. I left the sanatorium in the Harz and returned to my parents' home a lost man. That cursed winter in the Heuscheuer Mountains! After a stay in tropical countries, I should not have thrown myself into the fangs of such a winter. Of course, the worst thing was my predecessor's fur coat. To my predecessor's fur coat I owe my sweet fate. May the devil in hell take special delight in burning it. I need scarcely tell you that I gave myself copious injections of tuberculin and spat a considerable number of bacilli. But enough remained behind to provide me with a speedy _exitus letalis_.

Now for the essential. I must settle my bequests. I find I owe you three thousand marks. You made it possible for me to complete my medical studies. To be sure, they have failed me miserably. But that, of course, you cannot help, and, curiously enough, now that all's lost, the thing that most bothers me is the horrid thought that I cannot repay you.

My father, you know, is principal of a public school and actually managed to save some money. But he has five children beside myself, all of whom are unprovided for. He looked upon me as his capital which would bring more than the usual rate of interest. Being a practical man, he now realises he has lost both principal and interest.

In brief, he is afraid of responsibilities which unfortunately I cannot shoulder in the better world to come--faugh, faugh, faugh!--I spit three times. What shall I do? Would you be able to forego the payment of my debt?

Several times, old boy, I have been two thirds of the way over already, and I have left for you some notes on the states I have passed through, which may not be lacking in scientific interest. Should it be possible for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond, you will hear from me again.

Where are you? Good-bye. In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend to go on an ocean trip?

It is January. Isn't there a certain advantage in not needing to dread April weather any longer? I shake hands with you, Frederick von Kammacher.

Yours, George Rasmussen.

* * * * *

Frederick, of course, had immediately sent a telegram from Paris, which relieved the son, dying a heroic death, from solicitude for his hale father.

Though Frederick von Kammacher had profound troubles of his own to occupy his mind, his thoughts kept recurring to the letter in his pocket and his dying friend. To an imaginative person of thirty, his life of the past few years is in an eminent degree present to his mind. There had been a tragic turn in Frederick's own life, and now tragedy had also entered his friend's life, a tragedy far more awful.

The two young men had been separated for a number of years. They had met again and passed a number of happy weeks together, enriched by a liberal exchange of ideas. Those weeks were the beginning of similar epochs in the career of each. It was at little winter festivities in Frederick von Kammacher's comfortable home that the cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port Said, which Rasmussen had brought from the place of their manufacture, had played their rôle.

Now, in the reading-room of Hofmann's Hotel, near the harbour, he wrote him a letter.

* * * * *

Dear old George,

My fingers are clammy. I am constantly dipping a broken pen in mouldy ink; but if I don't write to you now, you won't get any news of me for three weeks. This evening I board the _Roland_ of the North German Steamship Company.

There seems to be something in your dreams. Nobody could have told you of my trip. Two hours before I started, I myself knew nothing of it.

Day after to-morrow it will be a year since you came to us direct from Bremen, after your second journey, with a trunk full of stories, photographs, and the cigarettes of Simon Arzt. I had scarcely set foot in England when twenty paces from the landing-place, I beheld our beloved brand in a shop window. Of course, I bought some, by wholesale, in fact, and am smoking one while writing, for the sake of auld lang syne. Unfortunately, this horrible reading-room in which I am writing doesn't get any the warmer, no matter how many cigarettes I light.

You were with us two weeks when fate came and knocked at the door. We both rushed to the door and caught a cold, it seems. As for me, I have sold my house, given up my practice, and put my three children in a boarding school. And as for my wife, you know what has befallen her.

The devil! Sometimes it makes one creepy to think of the past. To both of us it seemed a splendid thing for you to take over our sick colleague's practice. I can see you dashing about to visit your patients in his sleigh and fur coat. And when he died, I had not the slightest objection to your settling down as a country physician in the immediate vicinity, although we had always poked a lot of fun at a country physician's starvation practice.

Now things have turned out very differently.

Do you remember with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of gold. In the evening we dined on goldfinches, because the hunters who went out on Sundays sold them in great quantities and my tippling cook cooked them deliciously. At that time you swore you would not remain a physician. You were not to live from the pockets of poor patients; the State was to salary you and put at your disposal a huge store of provisions, so that you could supply your impoverished patients with flour, wine, meat and necessities. And now, in token of its gratitude, the evil demon of the medical guild has dealt you this blow. But you must get well again.

I am off for America. When we see each other again, you will learn why. I can be of no use to my wife. With Binswanger, she is in excellent hands. Three weeks ago, when I visited her, she did not even recognise me.

I have finished forever with my profession and my medical and bacteriological studies. I have had ill luck, you know. My scientific reputation has been torn to shreds. They say it was fuzz instead of the exciting organism of anthrax that I examined in a dye and wrote about. Perhaps, but I don't think so. At any rate, the thing is a matter of indifference to me.

Sometimes I am thoroughly disgusted with the clownish tricks the world plays upon us, and I feel an approach to English spleen. Nearly the whole world, or, at least Europe, has turned into a cold dish on a station lunch-counter, and I have no appetite for it.

* * * * *

He wound up with cordial lines to his dying friend, and handed the letter to a German porter to mail.

In his room, the temperature was icy, the window-panes frozen over. Without undressing he lay down in one of two vast, chilly beds.

At best, the frame of mind of a traveller with a night's journey behind him and an ocean crossing ahead of him, is not enviable. Frederick's condition was aggravated by a whirl of painful, partially warring recollections, which crowded into his mind, jostling and pushing one another aside in a ceaseless chase. For the sake of storing up strength for the events to come, he would gladly have gone to sleep, but as he lay there, whether with open or closed eyes, he saw past events with vivid clearness.

The young man's career from his twentieth to his thirtieth year had not departed from the conventional lines of his class. Ambition and great aptitude in his specialty had won him the protection of eminent scientists. He had been Professor Koch's assistant, and, without a rupture of their friendly relations, had also studied several semesters under Koch's opponent, Pettenkofer, in Munich. When he went to Rome for the purpose of investigating malaria, he met Mrs. Thorn and her daughter, who later became his wife and whose mind was now deranged. Angèle Thorn brought him a considerable addition to his own small fortune. The delicacy of her constitution caused him, eventually, to move with her and the three children that had come to them to a healthy mountain district; but the change did not interfere with his scientific work or professional connections.

Thus it was that in Munich, Berlin, and other scientific centres, he had been considered one of the most competent bacteriologists, a man whose career had passed the stage of the problematical. The worst against him--and that only in the opinion of the cut-and-dried among his fellow-scientists, who shook their heads doubtfully--had been a certain belletristic tendency. Now, however, that his abortive work had appeared and he had suffered his great defeat, all serious scientists said it was the cultivation of side interests that had weakened his strength and led the promising young intellect along the path of self-destruction.

In his icy room in the English hotel, Frederick meditated on his past.

"I see three threads which the Parcæ have woven into my life. The snapping of the thread that represents my scientific career leaves me utterly indifferent. The bloody tearing of the other thread"--he had in mind his love for his wife--"makes the first event insignificant. But even though I should still hold a place among the most hopeful of the younger generation of scientists, the third thread, which is still whole, which pierces my soul like a live wire, would have nullified my ambitions and all my endeavours in science."

The third thread was a passion.

Frederick von Kammacher had gone to Paris to rid himself of this passion; but the object of it, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Swedish teacher of stage dancing, held him in bondage against his will. His love had turned into a disease, which had reached an acute stage, probably because the gloomy events of so recent occurrence had induced in him a state in which men are peculiarly susceptible to love's poison.

It was a friend of his, a physician, who had introduced him in Berlin to the girl and her father, and who later, when sufficiently acquainted with Frederick's secret, raging love, had to take it upon himself to inform the enamoured man of every change in the couple's address.

Doctor von Kammacher's scanty luggage did not indicate careful preparation for a long trip. In a fit of desperation, or, rather, in an outburst of passion, he had made the hasty decision to catch the _Roland_ at Southampton when he learned that the Swede and his daughter had embarked on it at Bremen on the twenty-third of January.

II

After lying in bed about an hour, Frederick arose, knocked a hole in the ice crust in the pitcher, washed himself, and in a fever of restlessness descended again to the lower rooms of the little hotel. In the reading-room sat a pretty young Englishwoman and a German Jewish merchant, not so pretty and not so young. The dreariness of waiting produced sociability. Frederick and the German entered into a conversation. The German informed Frederick that he had lived in the United States and was returning by the _Roland_.

The air was grey, the room cold, the young lady impatiently paced up and down in front of the fireplace, where there was no fire, and the conversation of the new acquaintances dwindled into monosyllables.

The condition of the unhappy lover, as a rule, is concealed from the persons he meets, or unintelligible to them. In either case it is ridiculous. A man in love is alternately transported and tormented by brilliant and gloomy illusions. In spite of the cold, cutting wind, the young fool of love was driven restlessly out to roam the streets and alleys of the port. He thought of what an embarrassing position he had been in when the Jewish merchant had insinuatingly inquired for the purpose of his journey. In his effort not to reveal the secret motive of his ocean crossing, Frederick had stammered and stuttered and given some sort of a vague reply. He decided that from now on, in answer to intrusive questioners, he would say he was going to America to see Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park, and visit an old collegemate of his, also a physician.

During the silent meal in the hotel, the news came that the _Roland_ probably would reach the Needles at five o'clock, two hours earlier than was expected. Frederick took his coffee and smoked some Simon Arzt cigarettes with the German, who at the same time tried to do some business in his trade, which was ready-made clothing. The two men, carrying their luggage, then went to the tender together.

Here they had an uncomfortable hour's wait, while the low smoke-stack belched black vapours into the dirty drab mist that lay oppressively upon everything about the harbour. From time to time the sound of the shovelling of coal arose from the engine-room. One at a time five or six passengers came on board, porters carrying their luggage. The saloon was nothing more than a glass case on deck, inside of which, below the windows, a bench upholstered in red plush ran around the sides. At irregular intervals the bench was heaped with disorderly piles of luggage.

Everybody was taciturn. No one felt reposeful enough to settle in any one place for a length of time. What conversation there was, was conducted in a subdued, frightened sort of whisper. Three young ladies, one of whom was the Englishwoman of the reading-room, unwearyingly paced up and down the full length of the saloon. Their faces were unnaturally pale.

"This is the eighteenth time I have made the round trip," suddenly declared the clothing manufacturer, unsolicited.

"Do you suffer from seasickness?" somebody asked in reply.

"I scarcely set foot on the steamer when I turn into a corpse. That happens each time. I don't come back to life until shortly before we reach Hoboken or, at the other end, Bremerhaven or Cuxhaven."

Finally, after a long, apparently vain wait, something seemed to be preparing in the bowels of the tender and at the wheel. The three ladies embraced and kissed, and an abundance of tears were shed. The prettiest one, the lady of the reading-room, remained on the tender; the others returned to the pier.

Still the little boat refused to move. Finally, however, at nightfall, amid pitch-black darkness, the hawsers were loosened from the iron rings of the dock, a piercing whistle burst from the tender, and the screw began to churn the water slowly, as if merely to test itself.

At the last moment three telegrams were handed to Frederick, one from his old parents and his brother, who wished him a happy voyage, one from his banker, and one from his attorney.

Though Frederick had left neither friend nor relative nor even an acquaintance on the quay, yet, the instant he perceived the tender in motion, a storm assailed him, whether a storm of woe, misery, despair, or a storm of hope in endless happiness, he could not tell. All he felt was that something burst convulsively from his breast and throat, and seethed up, boiling hot, into his eyes.

The lives of unusual men from decade to decade, it seems, enter dangerous crises, in which one of two things takes place; either the morbid matter that has been accumulating is thrown off, or the organism succumbs to it in actual material death, or in spiritual death. One of the most important and, to the observer, most remarkable of these crises occurs in the early thirties or forties, rarely before thirty; in fact, more frequently not until thirty-five and later. It is the great trial balance of life, which one would rather defer as long as is expedient than make prematurely.

It was in such a crisis that Goethe went on his Italian journey, that Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, that Ignatius Loyola hung his weapons in front of an image of the Virgin, never to take them down again, and that Jesus was nailed to the cross. As for the young physician, Frederick von Kammacher, he was neither a Goethe nor a Luther nor a Loyola; but he was akin to them not only in culture, but also in many a trait of genius.

It is impossible to express in words the extent in which his whole previous existence passed in review before Frederick's mental vision as the little tender sped beyond the harbour lights of Southampton, carrying him away from Europe and his home. He seemed to be parting with a whole continent in his soul, upon which he would never set foot again. It was a farewell forever. No wonder if in that moment his whole being was shaken and could not regain its balance.

Loyola had not been a good soldier. Else, how could he have discarded his arms? Luther had not been a good Dominican. Else, how could he have discarded his monk's robes? Goethe had not been a good barrister or bureaucrat. A mighty, irresistible wave had swept over those three men and also, for all the disparity between them, over Frederick von Kammacher, washing the uniform away from their souls.

Frederick was not one of those who enter this crisis unconsciously. He had been feeling its approach for years, and it was characteristic of him that he reflected upon its nature. Sometimes he was of the opinion that it marked the termination of youth and the beginning, therefore, of real maturity. It seemed to him as if hitherto he had worked with other people's hands, according to other people's will, guided rather than guiding. His thinking appeared to him to have been no thinking, but an operating with transmitted ideas. He put it to himself that he had been standing in a hothouse, and his head, like the top of a young tree reaching upward to the light, had broken through the glass roof and made its way into the open.

"Now I will walk with my own feet, look with my own eyes, think my own thoughts, and act from the plenary power of my own will."

In his valise, Frederick carried Stirner's "The Individual and his Own."

Man living in society is never wholly independent. There is no intellect that does not look about for other intellects, if for no other object than to seek confirmation, that is, reinforcement or guidance, at all events, companionship. That Frederick von Kammacher's new intellectual companion was Max Stirner, was the result of a profound disillusionment. He had been disillusioned in his deep-seated altruism, which until now had completely dominated him.

III

Dense darkness closed in around the tender. The lights of the harbour disappeared completely, and the little cockle-shell with the glass pavilion began to roll considerably. The wind whistled and howled. Sometimes it blew so hard that it seemed to be bringing the tender to a standstill. The screw actually did rise out of the water. Suddenly the whistle screeched several times, and again the steamer made its way through the darkness.

The rattling of the windows, the quivering of the ship's body, the gurgling whirr-whirr of the propeller, the whistling, squalling and howling of the wind, which laid the vessel on her side, all this combined to produce extreme discomfort in the travellers. Again and again, as if uncertain what course to pursue, the boat stopped and emitted its shrill whistle, which was so stifled in the wild commotion of the waters that it seemed nothing but the helpless breathing of a hoarse throat--stopped and went backwards--stopped and went forwards, until again it came to an uncertain halt, twisting and turning in the whirling waters, carried aloft, plunged down, apparently lost and submerged in the darkness.

To be exposed to impressions of this sort for only an hour and a half is enough gradually to reduce a traveller's nerves to a state of torture. The proximity of that awful element the surface of which marks the limits of the one element in which man is capable of living, forces upon the mind thoughts of death and destruction; all the more so since the water's tricks seem so incalculable to the landman that he sees danger where there actually is none. Another thing hard for the man accustomed to unhampered movement to bear is the close confinement. All at once he loses his illusion of freedom of will. Activity, the thing that in the eyes of the European endows life with its sublimest charm, cannot in the twinkling of an eye turn into absolute passivity. Nevertheless, despite these novel, distressing experiences, despite throbbing pulses, over-stimulated senses, and nerves tautened to the snapping point, the situation is by no means lacking in fascination.

Thus, Frederick von Kammacher felt a flush of exaltation. Life was straining him to her breast more closely, wildly, passionately than she had for a long time.

"Either life has again become the one tremendous adventure, or life is nothing," a voice within him said.

Again the tender lay still. Suddenly it groaned, churned the water, sent out huge puffs of hissing steam, whistled as if in great fear, once, twice--Frederick counted seven times--and started off at its utmost speed, as if to escape Satan's clutches. And now, all at once, it turned, swept into a region of light, and faced a mighty vision.

The _Roland_ had reached the Needles and was lying tide rode. In the protection of its vast broadside the little tender seemed to be in a brilliantly lighted harbour. The impression that the surprising presence of the ocean greyhound made upon Frederick was in a fortissimo scale. He had always belonged to that class of men--a class which is not small--whose senses are open to life's varied abundance. Only on the rarest occasions he found a thing commonplace or ordinary, and was never blasé in meeting a novelty. But, after all, there are very few persons who would be dull to the impressions of an embarkation by night, outside a harbour in the open waters.

Never before had Frederick been inspired with equal respect for the might of human ingenuity, for the genuine spirit of his times, as at the sight of that gigantic black wall rising from the black waters, that tremendous façade, with its endless rows of round port-holes streaming out light upon a foaming field of waves protected from the wind. In comparison with this product, this creation, this triumph of the divine intellect in man, what were undertakings like the Tower of Babel, allowing that they were not isolated instances and had actually been completed.

Sailors were busy letting the gangway-ladder down the flank of the _Roland_. Frederick could see that up on deck, at the point where the ladder was being suspended, a rather numerous group of uniformed men had gathered, probably to receive the new passengers. His state of exaltation continued, even while everybody in the tender's saloon, including himself, suddenly seized with haste, grasped his or her hand luggage and stood in readiness. In the presence of that improbability, that Titan of venturesomeness, that floating fairy palace, it was impossible to cling to the conviction that modern civilisation is all prose. The most prosaic of mortals here had forced upon him a piece of foolhardy romance compared with which the dreams of the poets lose colour and turn pale.

While the tender, dancing coquettishly on the swelling foam, was warping to the gangway-ladder, high overhead, on the deck of the _Roland_, the band struck up a lively, resolute march in a martial yet resigned strain, such as leads soldiers to battle--to victory or to death. An orchestra like this, of wind instruments, drums and cymbals was all that lacked to set the young physician's nerves a-quiver, as in a dance of fire and flame.

The music ringing from aloft out into the night and descending to the little tender manoeuvring in the water, was designed to inspire timid souls with courage and tide them over certain horrors attendant upon the moment. Beyond lay the infinite ocean. In the situation, one could not help representing it to oneself as black, gloomy, forbidding, a fearful, demoniac power, hostile to man and the works of man.

Now, from the breast of the _Roland_, tore a cry rising higher and louder, upward from a deep bass, a monstrous call, a roar, a thunder, of a fearfulness and strength that congealed the blood in one's heart.

"Well, my dear friend _Roland_," flashed through Frederick's mind, "you're a fellow that's a match for the ocean." With that he set foot on the gangway-ladder. He completely forgot his previous identity and the reason of his being here.

When, to the wild tune of the brass band, he stepped from the upper rung upon the roomy deck, and stood in the garish sheen of an arc-light, he found himself between two rows of men, the officers and some of the ship's crew. It was the group of uniformed men he had noticed from below. He was astonished and delighted to behold so many confidence-inspiring masculine figures. It was an assemblage of magnificent specimens of manhood, all, from the first mate down to the stewards, tall, picked men, with bold, simple, intelligent, honest features. Moved by a sense at once of pride and of complete trust and security, Frederick said to himself that after all there was still a German nation left; and the singular thought flashed through his mind that God would never decide to take such a selection of noble, faithful men and drown them in the sea like blind puppies.

A steward picked up his luggage and led the way to a cabin with two berths, which he was to have to himself. Soon after, he was sitting at one end of a horseshoe-shaped table in the dining-room. The service was excellent, and the few passengers from the tender ate and drank; but it was not very lively. The main dinner was over, and the little company from the tender in the great, low-ceiled, empty saloon, were each too tired and too engrossed in self to talk.

During the meal Frederick was not aware whether the mammoth body was moving or standing still. The faint, scarcely perceptible quiver seemed too slight to be a sign of the motion of so huge a mass. Frederick had made his first sea voyage when a lad of eighteen as the only passenger on a merchantman going from Hamburg to Naples. The thirteen years since had considerably weakened the impressions of that trip. Moreover, the luxury of this ocean liner into which he had strayed was something so new to him, that all he could do at first was scrutinize everything in astonishment.

When he had drunk his customary few glasses of wine, a sense of peace and comfort stole over him. After their long irritation and tension his nerves succumbed to a pleasant tiredness, which pressed upon him so healthily and imperatively that he felt almost sure of a refreshing night's sleep. He even made the firm resolution--in his condition scarcely necessary--that for this night bygones should be bygones, the future the future, and the present, without regard for past or future, should belong unqualifiedly to rest and sleep.

When he went to bed, he actually did sleep for ten hours, heavily, without stirring. At breakfast in the dining-room, he asked for the passenger list, and with a wild leap of his heart read the names for which he had been looking, Eugen Hahlström and Miss Ingigerd Hahlström.

IV

He folded up the list and glanced about. There were about fifteen to twenty men and women in the saloon, all engaged in breakfasting or giving their orders to the stewards. To Frederick it seemed they were there for no other purpose than to spy upon his emotions.

The steamer had already been travelling for an hour on the ocean. The dining-room took up the full width of the vessel, and from time to time its port-holes were darkened by the waves dashing against them. Opposite Frederick sat a gentleman in uniform, who introduced himself as Doctor Wilhelm, the ship's physician. Straightway a very lively medical discussion began, though Frederick's thoughts were far away. He was debating with himself how he should act at his first meeting with the Hahlströms.

He tried to find support in self-deception, telling himself he had boarded the _Roland_, not for the sake of little Ingigerd Hahlström, but because he wanted to see New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Yellowstone Park, and Niagara Falls. That is what he would tell the Hahlströms--that a mere chance had brought them together on the _Roland_.

He observed that he was gaining in poise. Sometimes, when the adorer is at a distance from the object of his devotion, the idolatry of love assumes fateful proportions. During his stay in Paris, Frederick had lived in a state of constant fever, and his yearning for his idol had risen to an unendurable degree. About the image of little Ingigerd Hahlström, a heavenly aureole had laid itself, so compelling in its attraction that Frederick's mental vision was literally blinded to everything else. That illusion had suddenly vanished. He felt ashamed of himself. "I'm a ridiculous fool," he thought, and when he arose to go on deck, he felt as if he had shaken off oppressive fetters. The salt sea air blowing vigorously across the deck heightened his sense of emancipation and convalescence and refreshed him to his inner being.

Men and women lay stretched out on steamer chairs with that green expression of profound indifference which marks the dreaded seasickness. To Frederick's astonishment, he himself felt not the least trace of nausea, and only the sight of his fellow-passengers' misery caused him to realise that the _Roland_ was not gliding through smooth waters, but was distinctly pitching and rolling.

He walked around the ladies' parlour, past the entrance of an extra cabin, and took his stand under the bridge, breasting the steely, salt sea wind. On the deck below, the steerage passengers had settled themselves as far as the bow. Though the _Roland_ was running under full steam, it was not making its maximum speed, prevented by the long, heavy swells that the wind raised and hurled against the bow. Across the forward lower deck there was a second bridge, probably for emergency. Frederick felt strongly tempted to stand up there on that empty bridge.

It aroused some attention, of course, when he descended down among the steerage passengers and then crawled up the iron rungs of the ladder to the windy height. But that did not trouble him. All at once such a madcap spirit had come over him, he felt so happy and refreshed; as if he had never had to suffer dull cares, or put up with the whims of a hysterical wife, or practise medicine in a musty, out-of-the-way corner of the country. Never, it seemed to him, had he studied bacteriology, still less, suffered a fiasco. Never had he been so in love as he appeared to have been only a short time before.

He laughed, bending his head before the gale, filled his lungs with the salty air, and felt better and stronger.

A burst of laughter from the steerage passengers mounted to his ears. At the same instant something lashed him in the face, something that he had seen rearing, white and tremendous, before the bow. It almost blinded him, and he felt the wet penetrate to his skin. The first wave had swept overboard.

Who would not find it humiliating to have his sublime meditations interrupted in such a tricky, brutal way? A moment before, he felt as if to be a Viking were his real calling, and now, inwardly shaking and shivering, amid general ridicule, he crawled ignominiously down the iron ladder.

He was wearing a round grey hat. His overcoat was padded and lined with silk. His gloves were of dressed kid, his buttoned boots of thin leather. All these garments were now drenched with a cold, salty wash. Leaving a damp trail behind, he made his way, not exactly a glorious way, through the steerage passengers, who rolled with laughter. In the midst of his annoyance Frederick heard a voice calling his name. He looked up and scarcely trusted his eyes on seeing a large fellow in whom he thought he recognised a peasant from the Heuscheuer Mountains, a peasant with an evil reputation for drunkenness and all sorts of misdeeds.

"Wilke, is that you?"

"Yes, Doctor, I'm Wilke."

The little town in which Frederick had practised was called Plassenberg an der Heuscheuer, that is, Plassenberg by the Heuscheuer Mountains, a range in the county of Glatz where excellent sandstone is quarried. The people of the district loved Frederick both as a man and a physician. He was the wonder-worker who had performed a number of splendid cures and he was the human being, without pride of caste, whose heart beat warmly for the good of the lowliest of his fellow-men. They loved his natural way with them, always cordial, always outspoken, and sometimes harsh.

Wilke was bound for New England to join his brother.

"The people in the Heuscheuer," he said, "are mean and ungrateful."

Shy and distrustful at home, even toward Frederick, who had treated him for his last knife wound on his neck, his manner here, with the other passengers crossing the great waters, was frank and trustful. He was like a well-behaved child chattering freely.

"You didn't get the thanks you deserved, either, Doctor von Kammacher," he said in his broad dialect, rich in vowel sounds, and recounted a number of cases, of which Frederick had not known, in which good had been repaid by evil tattle. "The people around Plassenberg are not fit for men like you and me. Men like you and me belong in America, the land of liberty."

Elsewhere, Frederick would have resented being placed in the same category as this rowdy, for whom, he recalled, the police were searching. But here he felt no indignation. On the contrary, he was pleasantly surprised, as if by an unexpected meeting with a good friend.

"The world's a small place," said Frederick, passing over the theme of ingratitude and the land of liberty, "the world's a small place. Yet I am surprised to see you here. But I'm wet to the skin, and have to go change my clothes."

On his way to the cabin, on the promenade deck, he encountered the blond captain of the _Roland_, Von Kessel, who presented himself to Frederick.

"The weather is not quite up to mark," he said by way of excuse for the little mishap on the lower bridge. "If you enjoy standing in front there, you'd better put on one of our oilskins."

Now that the vessel's movement was more accentuated, the cabin, in which Frederick changed his clothes, was a problematical place of abode. The light came from a round port-hole of heavy glass. When the wall with the port-hole in it rose and turned inward like a slanting roof, the sunlight from a rift between the clouds in the sky fell upon the mahogany berth opposite. Sitting on the edge of the lower berth, Frederick tried to steady himself, holding his head bent to keep from striking against his upper berth, and frantically endeavouring not to follow the receding movement of the wall behind. The cabin was rolling in unison with the vessel's movement. Sometimes it seemed to Frederick as if the port-hole wall were the ceiling, and the ceiling the right wall; then again as if the right wall were the ceiling, and the ceiling the port-hole wall, while the actual port-hole wall, as if inviting him to jump, shoved itself at right angles under his feet--during which the port-hole was wholly under water and the cabin in darkness.

It is no easy matter to dress and undress in an oscillating room. That the vessel's motion could have changed so markedly within the one hour since he left the cabin, astonished Frederick. The simple operation of drawing off his boots and trousers, finding others in his trunk, and putting them on again became a gymnastic feat. He had to laugh, and comparisons occurred to him, which made him laugh still more. But his laughter was not heartfelt. Each time he received a knock, or had to jump to regain his balance, he muttered exclamations and instinctively contrasted all this with the comfortable waking up from sleep in his own house. Groaning and labouring, he said to himself:

"My whole personality is being shaken through and through. I was mistaken when I supposed that I had already got my shaking up these last two years. I thought fate was shaking me. Now, both my fate and I are being shaken. I thought there was tragedy in me. Now, I and my tragedy are bowling about in this creaking cage, and are being disgraced in our own eyes.

"I have a habit of pondering over everything. I think about the beak of the ship, which buries itself in each new wave. I think about the laughter of the steerage passengers, those poor, poor people, who, I am sure, scarcely have a gay time of it. My sousing was a treat to them. I think of the rapscallion, Wilke, who married a humpbacked seamstress, ran through her savings, and abused her daily--and I almost embraced him. I think of the blond Teuton, Captain von Kessel, that handsome man, somewhat too insipid-looking and too thick-set, who is our absolute lord and whom we trust at first glance. And, finally, I think about my constant laughing and admit to myself that laughing is a sensible thing only in the rarest circumstances."

Frederick continued a conversation with himself in a similar strain for a while, and cast bitter, ironical reflections upon the passion that had brought him on this trip. He had actually been robbed of his will; and in this condition, in that narrow cabin, surrounded by the ocean, it seemed to him as if his life, and his foolish impotence, were being held up to the rudest ridicule.

When Frederick went up again, there were still a number of persons on deck. The stewards had fastened the steamer chairs to the walls, some of them having slipped and left the occupants, ladies and gentlemen, with the blue marks of their fall. Refreshments were being served. It was interesting to see how the stewards, carrying six or eight full cups, balanced themselves over the heaving deck.

Frederick looked about in vain for Hahlström and his daughter.

In walking the full length of the deck several times, examining all the passengers with the utmost care and circumspection, he noticed the pretty young Englishwoman, whom he had seen for the first time in the reading-room of the hotel in Southampton. She was wrapped in rugs and furs and snugly settled in a spot shielded from the wind and warmed by the two huge smoke-stacks. She was receiving the attention of a very lively young man sitting beside her. Each time Frederick passed, the young man scrutinised him sharply. Suddenly he jumped up, held out his hand, and introduced himself as Hans Füllenberg of Berlin. Though Frederick could not recall ever having met him before, the good-looking, dashing young fellow succeeded in convincing him that they had both been present at a certain evening affair in Berlin. He told Frederick he was going to the United States to take a position in a mining region near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a wide-awake young man and, what is more, a Berlinese, and had great notions of his own importance. Frederick's reputation in Berlin society inspired him with tremendous respect. Frederick responded to his advances courteously, and allowed him to recount all the latest Berlin news, as if he himself had not left the German capital only a week before. He realised he could depend upon Füllenberg's garrulousness for every item of interest.

It quickly became evident that Hans Füllenberg was an amiable, giddy-headed young buck, knowing well how to deal with the ladies. When Frederick called his attention to the fact that the Englishwoman was casting impatient glances toward him, visibly eager for his return, he complacently winked his eye as if to say:

"She won't run away. And if she does, there are plenty more."

V

"Do you know, Doctor von Kammacher," Füllenberg said suddenly, "that little Hahlström is on board?"

"What little Hahlström do you mean?" asked Frederick coolly.

Hans Füllenberg could not contain his surprise that Frederick should have forgotten little Hahlström. He was sure of having seen him in the Künstlerhaus in Berlin when Ingigerd danced her dance there for the first time, the dance that then aroused admiration only in the artist world, but later became the sensation of all Berlin. He described the affair.

"The pick of the Berlin artists were standing around the room and on the stairs in informal groups, leaving the centre of the floor clear. Even Menzel and Begas were there. A special exhibition was to open soon, and the walls were hung with a collection of Böcklin pictures. The name of the dance was 'Mara, or the Spider's Victim.'

"I tell you, Doctor von Kammacher," the young man went on, "if you didn't see that dance, you missed something. In the first place, little Ingigerd's costume was very scanty, and then her performance was really wonderful. There are no two opinions about it. A huge artificial flower was set in the middle of the room, and the little thing ran up and smelt of it. She felt all about the flower with closed eyes, vibrating as if with the gauzy wings of a bee. Suddenly she opened her eyes and turned to a rigid statue of stone. On the flower was squatting a huge spider! She darted like an arrow to the farthest corner of the room. Even in the first part of the dance she had seemed to float without weight in the air; but the way sheer horror blew her across that room made her seem like nothing but a vision."

Frederick von Kammacher had seen her dance the dreadful dance, not only at the matinée in the Künstlerhaus, but eighteen times again. While Füllenberg was trying to express his impression with "great," "tremendous," "glorious," and similarly strong epithets, Frederick saw the whole dance over again with his mind's eye. He saw how the childlike body, after cowering and trembling a while in the corner of the room, approached the flower again to the accompaniment of music played by a tom-tom, a cymbal, and a flute. Something which was not pleasure drew her to it. The first time she had traced her way to the source of the perfume by sniffing fragrance in the air. Her mouth had been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Füllenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in dread of seeing something hideous.

But when she came quite close to the flower, all fear suddenly seemed to drop away from her. She hopped for joy and laughed--she had been needlessly alarmed. How could a fat, immobile spider squatting on a flower be dangerous to a creature with wings? This part of her dance was so graceful, so full of droll, bubbling, childlike merriment, that the audience laughed tears of delight.

Now, however, a new phase of the dance began, introduced in a thoughtful strain. Having danced herself to satiety and intoxicated herself with the flower's perfume, Mara, with movements of agreeable fatigue, made as if to lay herself to rest, but delayed here and there to brush from her body something like the threads of a spider's web, at first serenely and pensively, then with growing disquiet, which communicated itself to the onlookers. The child paused, reflected an instant, and apparently was about to laugh at herself because of the fears that had arisen in her soul; but the next minute she paled with fright, and made a dexterous leap, as if to free herself from a trap. Her blond hair tossed back in Mænadic waves turned into a flaming stream. Her whole appearance evoked involuntary cries of admiration.

The flight began. And now the theme of the dance was Mara's entanglement in the threads the spider wove about her, which gradually choked her to death. No dancer has ever executed such an idea with equal skill and fidelity.

The little creature freed her foot from the meshes, only to find her neck entwined; she clutched at the threads about her throat, only to find her hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound. During this last phase of the dance, her artist audience stood there rigid, breathless, suffocating with a sense of horror.

It was not until nearly the end that Frederick von Kammacher felt that his fate was forever linked with this girl. The feeling grew stronger during the few moments that remained before the conclusion of the performance. The poison of infatuation came from the expression of her face. He noted precisely how it forced its way into him and how his whole being suddenly grew sick. When little Ingigerd Hahlström once more opened her eyes with a look of abysmal dismay, and fastened them in helpless inquiry upon the spider, calmly drinking her blood away, an inner voice seemed to command Frederick to become her compassionate knight, saviour, and protector.

VI

Since, in Füllenberg's opinion, Frederick von Kammacher was not sufficiently interested in the dancer, Ingigerd Hahlström, he mentioned several other recent Berlin celebrities also on the _Roland_ on their way to the United States. There was _Geheimrat_ Lars, a man well-known in art circles, who often cast the deciding vote in purchases of works of art by the government. He was going to America to visit museums, private and public, and study the art situation in general. There was Professor Toussaint, an eminent sculptor, some of whose monuments had been erected in several German cities, chiefly Berlin, works done in a wishy-washy Bernini style.

"Toussaint," Füllenberg, who seemed to be fairly loaded with Berlin gossip, explained, "needs money. He needs the money that his wife spends and the social season in Berlin swallows up. He and his wife and his wife's maid are all travelling free on his reputation. When he lands in New York, he won't have enough in his pocket even to pay his hotel bill for three days."

Füllenberg pointed out the sculptor, Toussaint. He was lying in a steamer chair, rising and falling in unison with the _Roland_. As Frederick turned to look at him, he noticed an odd man without arms being led across the deck by his attendant, who grasped him by his collar and carefully dragged him through a small door close by into the smoking-room.

"That man's a vaudeville star," Füllenberg continued with his descriptive catalogue. "He will appear in New York with Webster and Forster."

Some stewards came oscillating across the deck to serve the chilly passengers with bowls of hot bouillon. After Füllenberg had seen to it that his lady was duly served, he deserted her and went with Frederick to the smoking-room. Here, of course, loud talking and tobacco smoke prevailed. The two gentlemen lit their cigars. In one corner of the small room, some men were playing skat, and at several tables, German and English politics were being thrashed out. The main theme of discussion was the rivalry between America and Europe. Wilhelm, the ship's doctor, with whom Frederick had become acquainted at breakfast, came in from his morning inspection of the steerage, and seated himself beside Frederick.

"There are two hundred Russian Jews emigrating to the United States or Canada," he told him, "thirty Polish families, and about the same number of German families from the south, north, and east of Germany. Altogether there are nearly four hundred steerage passengers, among them five babies at the breast and fifty children between the ages of one and fifteen."

Doctor Wilhelm invited Frederick to accompany him the next day on his tour of inspection. He was a man of not more than twenty-six. He had a fair complexion and wore glasses. His manner was somewhat stiff. Ever since he had passed his examinations, two years before, he had been a physician on a vessel. Once he had taken the trip to Japan, once to South America, and several times to the United States. Frederick, of course, immediately thought of his dying friend, George Rasmussen, put his hand in his pocket, and presented his new colleague with Simon Arzt cigarettes.

The cigarettes furnished a starting-point to tell all about George Rasmussen; and when Doctor Wilhelm had learned everything about him, except his name, and then learned his name, too, the world again turned out to be a very small place. Doctor Wilhelm was a friend of George Rasmussen's. They had studied together, one semester in Bonn and one semester in Jena, and had belonged to the same club in Jena. The last few years they had even corresponded. Naturally, the discovery instantly brought the two physicians closer.

The tone in the smoking-room was that of jolly carousals in German _Bierstuben_. The men let themselves go, talked in loud voices, and gave rein to that coarse humour and noisy gaiety in which time flies for them and which to many of them is a sort of narcotic, giving them rest and ease for a while from the mad chase of existence. Neither Frederick nor Doctor Wilhelm was averse to this tone, which revived old memories of their student days, when they had become accustomed to it. Though to the average student the carousals, now taboo, may be an evil, physically and intellectually, they are the time and place, nevertheless, at which the phoenix of German idealism soars up from tobacco smoke and beer froth to wing its flight to the sun.

Hans Füllenberg soon felt bored in the company of the two physicians who, in fact, had completely forgotten him; and he slipped away, back to his lady.

"When Germans meet," he said to her, "they must scream and drink _Brüderschaft_ until they get tipsy."

Doctor Wilhelm seemed to be proud of the smoking-room.

"The captain," he said, "is very strict about not having the gentlemen disturbed. He has given absolute orders that women under no circumstances, not even if they smoke, are to be permitted here."

The room had two metal doors, one on the starboard and one on the port side. The person entering or leaving had to contend violently with the wind and the motion of the vessel. The stewards had mastered the art perfectly. Shortly before eleven o'clock, Captain von Kessel appeared. It was his custom to visit the room at about this time every day. After giving friendly or curt answers, as the case might be, to the usual questions regarding the weather and the prospects for a good or bad crossing, he seated himself at the same table as the physicians.

"A seaman was lost in you," he said to Frederick.

"I think you must be mistaken," Frederick rejoined. "I have had quite enough of a salt water sousing. I assure you, I am not longing for another."

A few hours before, a pilot-boat from the French coast had brought the latest news, which the captain proceeded to recount in a calm, quiet manner.

"A vessel of the Hamburg-American line, a twin-screw steamer, the _Nordmania_, running for only a year, had a mishap about six hundred miles out from New York. It turned back and reached Hoboken safely. The sea was comparatively calm, but all of a sudden a waterspout arose close to the ship, and a great mass of water burst over the ladies' saloon, crushing through its roof and the roof of the deck below and hurling a piano down into the very hold."

The other piece of news he told was that Schweninger was in Friedrichsruh with Bismarck and that Bismarck's death was being expected hourly. Though both Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick von Kammacher disapproved of Bismarck's exceptional anti-Socialist law and its consequences, they were filled with hero worship of the man, Doctor Wilhelm the more so, since the home of his childhood stood on the edge of Sachsenwald, scarcely an hour's ride from Friedrichsruh. He was choke-full, of course, of local Bismarck anecdotes and began to reel them off.

"Are you annoyed?" Bismarck asked his barber, when he came in one day with his moustache twirled upward in the new fashion of the race tracks. "A moustache trimmed and twisted like that to me looks as if it were terribly annoyed and for no reason."

VII

The international gong had not been introduced on the _Roland_. The trumpeter of the band sent two blasts across the promenade deck and through the corridors of the first cabin as a signal for the midday meal. The first blast entered with the howling of the wind into the close, noisy, crowded smoking saloon. The attendant of the man without arms came to conduct his master across the deck again. Frederick watched the armless man with great interest. He seemed to be extraordinarily brisk and quick-witted. He spoke English, French and German with equal fluency, and to everybody's delight parried the impertinences of a saucy young American, whose disrespectfulness did not yield even before the sacred person of the captain; for which the dignified skipper sometimes rewarded him by staring over his head like a lion over a yapping terrier.

The table in the dining-room was in the form of a trident, with the closed end at the rear and the three prongs pointing to the prow. Opposite the centre prong was a false mantel with a mirror, where was posted the elegant figure in blue livery of Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward. He was a man of between forty and fifty. With his white, artificially curled hair, which gave the impression of being powdered, he resembled a major-domo of Louis XIV's time. As he stood there, head erect, looking over the swaying hall, he seemed to be the special squire of Captain von Kessel, who sat at the end of the middle prong, in the capacity both of host and most honoured guest. Next to the captain sat Doctor Wilhelm and the first mate. Frederick, having found favour in the captain's eyes, was assigned a place next to Doctor Wilhelm. The ship was no longer tossing so violently, and the dining-room, in consequence, was fairly well filled. The last ones to enter were the card players of the smoking-room, who came storming in. At the closed end of the trident, Frederick saw Mr. Hahlström, but without his daughter.

Many stewards very quickly and deftly served a vast quantity of dishes. Wine was also placed on the table. Within a short while the corks were popping from champagne bottles in the vicinity of the card players. In a gallery the band played without interruption. There were seven numbers on the printed music programme, which bore the name of the vessel, the date, and a picture of negroes in evening dress and high hats plucking at banjos.

VIII

Still the forward part of the vessel and, along with it, the dining-room with all its dishes, plates, and bottles, with its gentlemen guests and lady guests and the steward-waiters, with its fish and vegetables and meats and drinks and brass band, were lifted high on the mountain top of one wave and plunged deep in the trough of the next. The mighty working of the engines quivered through the ship. The dining-room walls had to cope with the onslaught of the opposing element.

The electric lights were turned on full. The grey of the cloudy winter day did not suffice to illuminate the room, especially since what brightness there was outside was every instant shut off by the water splashing against the port-holes.

Frederick enjoyed the daring of it--to be dining in festivity to the accompaniment of frivolous music in the illuminated bowels of this monster, this _Roland_. From time to time the mighty ship seemed on the point of encountering invincible resistance. A combination of opposing forces would rise up against the stem, producing the effect of a solid body, a veritable mountainside. At such moments the noise of the talking would die down, and many pale faces would exchange glances and turn to the captain or to the prow of the vessel. But Captain von Kessel and his officers were absorbed in their meal and paid no attention to the phenomenon, which for moments at a time brought the _Roland_ to a quivering standstill. They never looked up, but kept to their eating and talking, even when, as often happened, tremendous masses of water hurled themselves against the walls, threatening to crash through what seemed like pitifully thin partitions for excluding that mighty, wrathful element, thundering and roaring with suppressed hate and fury.

During the meal Frederick's eyes were constantly drawn to Hahlström's tall figure. Though his hair was touched with grey, he was certainly still to be counted a handsome man. Next to him sat a man of about thirty-five, with a bushy beard, dark, bushy eyebrows, and dark, deep-set eyes, which sometimes darted a sharp, piercing glance at Frederick--at least so it seemed to Frederick. The man troubled him. He noticed that Hahlström graciously permitted the stranger to entertain him and pay him court.

"Do you know that tall, fair-haired man, Doctor von Kammacher?" the physician asked. In his confusion Frederick failed to answer, looking helplessly at Doctor Wilhelm. "He is a Swede. His name is Hahlström," Doctor Wilhelm continued. "A peculiar fellow. Earlier in his life he made a mess of your and my profession. He is travelling with his daughter, not an uninteresting little miss. She's been dreadfully seasick, and hasn't left the horizontal in her berth since we set sail from Bremen. That dark fellow sitting next to Hahlström seems to be something like, well, let us say, her fiancé."

"By the way, what do you do for seasickness?" Frederick asked hastily, to conceal his dismay and turn the conversation.

IX

"You here, Doctor von Kammacher? I can scarcely trust my eyes." At the bottom of the companionway Frederick felt Hahlström tackle him, just as he was about to mount to deck.

"Why, Mr. Hahlström, what a peculiar coincidence! It's as if the whole of Berlin had agreed to emigrate to America!" Frederick exclaimed, simulating surprise with somewhat forced liveliness.

"May I present Mr. Achleitner? Mr. Achleitner is an architect from Vienna."

The man with the piercing eyes smiled with an air of interest, holding fast to the brass balustrade to keep from being hurled against the wall.

The door of a rather gloomy saloon opened on the first landing. It bore the misleading sign "smoking-room," misleading because the smokers never used it, far preferring the cosey little saloon on deck. A brown upholstered bench ran around the brown, wainscoted walls. Kneeling on the bench one could look out through three or four port-holes upon the seething and boiling of the waves. The entire floor space between the benches was taken up by a table finished in a dark stain.

"This room is a horrid hole," said Hahlström. "It positively makes me creepy."

A loud, trumpet-like, laughing voice called out from inside the room:

"I say, Hahlström, if this sort of weather holds out, neither your daughter nor I will keep the first day of our engagement with Webster and Forster. We're not even making eight knots. Perhaps I'll be able to manage. A big dose of salt water doesn't hurt me. To-day is the twenty-fifth. If we reach Hoboken at eight o'clock the evening of the first of February, I can appear for my act in perfect serenity at nine o'clock; but that frail blossom of yours can't. She will certainly need a few days to recover from the hardships of this trip."

The three men entered the smoking-room. Frederick had already recognised the voice as belonging to the man without arms, who, he learned later, from Hahlström, was a world-renowned celebrity. For more than ten years the bill-boards of every great city in the world had been displaying simply his name, Arthur Stoss, which alone sufficed to draw throngs to the theatres. His special art consisted in doing with his feet whatever other people do with their hands.

The first sight of him, of course, was repellent; but in the smoking-room on deck Frederick had got over his first repulsion and had become interested in his personality. Yet the situation in which he now beheld him was so novel, so remarkable, almost to the point of improbability, that he had difficulty in concealing his amazement. Arthur Stoss was eating lunch. Since this room was so little used and since a man forced to handle his knife and fork with his feet could not be permitted to eat in the public dining-room, they served Arthur Stoss with his meals here. To the three onlookers it had the value of an artistic performance to see how the actor managed to manipulate his instruments with his clean, bare toes--and that despite the pitching of the vessel--meanwhile, in the best of humour, uttering the wittiest remarks as bite after bite disappeared down his throat. He began to banter Hahlström and Achleitner, sometimes in rather caustic fashion, while exchanging glances with Frederick, as if he thought vastly more of him than of the other two men, who soon withdrew from his attacks to go on deck.

"My name is Stoss."

"Mine, Von Kammacher."

"It's very good of you to keep me company. That Hahlström and his henchman are disgusting. Though I have been an actor for twenty years, I can't stand the sight of such weedy weaklings, who don't do anything themselves and exploit their daughters. They have the effect of an emetic on me. For all that, he plays the great man. He has no talent, so he is going to boil soup from his daughter's bones. Yet he goes about nose up in the air. If he sees a dollar in the dirt and somebody of distinction is looking, he will let it lie. He won't pick it up. There is no denying he has an attractive appearance. He has the stuff in him for a very clever, fashionable swindler. But he would rather take it easy and live off his daughter and his daughter's admirers. It's astonishing how many people are willing to make asses of themselves. There's that Achleitner--look at the condescension with which Hahlström treats him and the lofty way Hahlström plays the rôle of benefactor! He used to be a riding-master. Then he got mixed up in some quack cure, a combination of Swedish gymnastics and hydrotherapeutics, and his wife left him, a fine, hard-working woman, now doing splendidly as head of a department at Worth's in Paris."

Frederick felt drawn up-stairs to Hahlström. The man's past as Stoss described it was at that moment a matter of indifference to him. But Stoss's remark about the asses some people are willing to make of themselves sent a fleeting red to his face.

Arthur Stoss grew more and more communicative. He sat like an ape, a resemblance impossible to avoid when a man uses his feet instead of his hands. When he had finished his meal, he stuck a cigar in his mouth, like any other gentleman. In him the likeness to an ape was accentuated by the breadth and flatness of his nose and the formation of his heavy jaws. He looked like a fair-skinned orang-outang. However, his high, broad forehead gave him the mark of the human intellect. He had no beard, that is, he had never in his life, probably, had to remove a hair from his parchmenty, freckled, yellow skin. His cheek bones were prominent, and his head unusually large. Though his general appearance made a most energetic, by no means effeminate impression, there still was something eunuch-like about it, the high pitch of his voice adding to this impression. While casting about for an opportunity to escape the monster's spell, Frederick was nevertheless deeply interested in him from a medical and anthropological standpoint. The man, without doubt, was an extremely instructive specimen of abnormality. His facies was that of an intermediate sexual stage.

"People like Hahlström," he continued, "are actually not worthy of the healthy limbs with which God endowed them. Of course, even if one has a figure like a statue by Myron, it is awkward if there is too little up here"--he tapped his forehead. "That is what is the trouble with Hahlström. There is too little up here. Look at me. I don't say everybody, but at least nine out of ten, in my position would have succumbed as a child. Instead of that, I have a wife, I own a villa in the Kahlenberg Mountains, I support three children of my step-brother and an older sister of my wife, who was a singer and lost her voice. I am absolutely independent. I remain on the stage because I want to bring my wealth up to a certain point. If the _Roland_ were to sink to-day, I could go down with perfect equanimity. I have done my work. I have invested my money at a high rate of interest. My wife, my wife's sister, and my step-brother's children are all provided for."

The actor's attendant appeared, to help his master to his cabin for his afternoon nap.

"My days are mapped out like a time-table," Stoss explained. "My attendant here, Bulke, served his four years in the German navy. With all the ocean crossings I have to make, I couldn't get along with a man who wasn't used to the water. I need a perfect water rat."

X

A little spell of dizziness came over Frederick when he went to his cabin to fetch his heavy overcoat. On deck it was very quiet as compared with the morning. Hahlström was nowhere to be seen, and Frederick seated himself on a bench near the entrance to the main companionway. With his collar turned up and his hat drawn over his forehead, he succumbed to the state of drowsiness characteristic of sea trips, in which, despite the heaviness of one's eyelids, one feels and perceives with a restless lucidity of the inner vision. Images chase through one's mind, a kaleidoscopic stream, shifting incessantly, going and coming, and finally reducing the soul to a state of torture. The sybaritic meal with its clatter of plates, its talking and music, was still whirling through Frederick's brain. He heard the vaudeville actor declaiming. The half-ape was holding Mara in his arms. Hahlström in all his height was looking on, smiling. The waves were rolling heavily against the tiny dining-room and pressing hard on the creaking hull. Bismarck, a huge figure in armour, and Roland, the valiant warrior in armour, were laughing grimly and conversing. Frederick saw both wading through the sea. Roland was holding Mara, the tiny dancer, on his right palm. Every now and then Frederick shivered. The ship careened, a stiff southeaster heeling her to starboard. The waves hissed and foamed. The rhythm produced by the rise and fall of the pistons finally seemed to turn into the rhythm of Frederick's own body. The working of the screw was distinctly audible. At regular intervals the stern would rise out of the water, carrying with it the screw, which would then buzz in the air, and Frederick would hear Wilke from the Heuscheuer saying:

"Doctor, if only the screw doesn't snap."

Finally, all the machinery of the vessel seemed to be turning in his brain. Sometimes one engineer in the engine-room would call out to another, and the clang of the metal shovels when the stokers fed the furnace penetrated to the deck.

All of a sudden Frederick jumped to his feet; he thought he saw a ghost, or a dead-alive corpse, reeling up the companionway and making for him. It was the clothing manufacturer whom he had met at Southampton, looking more like a man in his death throes than one already dead. He gave Frederick a ghastly glance of unconsciousness and let a steward support him to the nearest steamer chair.

"If that man," Frederick thought, "is not to be reckoned among the heroes, then there never have been any heroes in the world."

"Each time I cross," the clothing manufacturer had said, "I suffer from seasickness, from the moment I set foot on the ship until I leave it."

And what horrible extremes of suffering he had to go through!

Opposite Frederick, at the entrance to the companionway, stood a cabin-boy. From time to time at the signal of a whistle from the bridge, he would disappear to receive orders from the first or second mate, or whatever officer happened to be on duty. Often an hour and more would pass without the summons, and the handsome lad had plenty of time to meditate upon himself and his lot in life. Frederick felt sorry for him as he stood there on guard, bored and chilly; so he spoke to him.

He learned that his name was Max Pander and that he came from near the Black Forest. The next logical question to put to him was whether he liked his work. The boy answered with a resigned smile, which heightened the charm of his handsome head, but showed he had none too much passion for the seaman's calling.

"There is not much in travelling on steamers," he observed. "A real sailor belongs on board a sailing vessel. There is a mate of mine here on the _Roland_," he added in a tone of great admiration, "who is only eighteen years old and has already been on two long, dangerous trips on a schooner."

To Frederick, it seemed as if lasting passion for the sea--the sea, which was already making him miserable--must be a conventional myth. It was three o'clock. He had been on board only nineteen or twenty hours, and already found it a petty hardship. "If the _Roland_ doesn't make better time," he calculated, "I shall have to go through the same difficulties of existence eight or nine times twenty-four hours. But I will get back to land and remain there, while Pander, the cabin-boy, will have to return across the ocean a few days after landing."

"If someone were to find you a good position on land," Frederick asked, "would you give up your position here?"

"Yes, indeed," said Pander, emphasising his reply with a decided nod of his head.

"A nasty southeaster," said Doctor Wilhelm, passing by beside the tall figure of the first mate. "How would you like to come to my room? We can smoke and have some coffee there without being disturbed."

XI

Walking along the deck below the promenade deck, one passed a covered gangway on both the starboard and port sides, into which opened various official rooms, including the officers' cabins, among them Doctor Wilhelm's, a comparatively spacious room, containing a bed, a table, chairs, and a well-equipped medicine closet.

The gentlemen had scarcely seated themselves when a Red Cross sister, who worked under Doctor Wilhelm's direction, appeared and gave a report, smiling as she did so, of a woman patient in the second cabin.

"In my two years of practice on a steamer, this is the fifth time I have had a case like this," Doctor Wilhelm said after the sister had left. "Girls who can no longer conceal the consequences of their mistake and are at loss what to do, take passage on a ship, when it is almost certain that the event they expect will occur. Such girls, of course, never suspect that they are typical on all sea trips, and are surprised when our stewards and stewardesses sometimes treat them with corresponding respect. I myself, of course, always do all I can for the poor creatures, and I usually succeed in inducing the captains not to make an announcement of the birth, in case there is one. Once a girl about whom we could not help giving notice was found hanging to the window sash in her lodgings near the harbour."

Over their coffee and Simon Arzt cigarettes, the whole woman question was unrolled.

"So far," said Frederick, "the woman question is nothing but the old-maid question, at least in the way women conceive it. The sterility of old maids sterilizes the whole movement."

Frederick developed his ideas. But tormenting visions of Mara and her admirer pursued him, and he discoursed mechanically, his reasoning on the woman question having become a matter of rote to him.

"The vital germinal spot of each reform in women's rights," he argued with apparent liveliness, blowing clouds of smoke, "must be the maternal instinct. The cells of the future cell-state, which will be a healthier social body, is the woman with the maternal instinct. The great women reformers are not those who would have women act just like men in all externals, but those who are conscious that all men, even the greatest, were born of women. They are the conscious mothers of the race of men and gods. A woman's natural right is her right to the child, and it is a most inglorious page in the history of woman that she has allowed herself to be deprived of that right. The birth of the child, in so far as it is not sanctioned by a man, is subject to the fire and brimstone of public scorn. And this scorn is the most pitiful page in man's history. The devil knows how it ever came to possess such awful, absolute dominion. Form a league of mothers, I should counsel women. Each member shall give token of her motherhood by having children without the sanction of a man, that is, without regard for so-called honour. In this lies woman's strength, but only if she takes pride in her child, instead of bearing it with a troubled conscience, in cowardice, concealment, and fear. Reacquire your proud, instinctive consciousness, which you are fully justified in having, of being the mothers of humanity; and having that consciousness, you will be invincible."

Doctor Wilhelm, who kept in touch with professional circles, was acquainted with Frederick's name and the outcome of his scientific career. His unfortunate bacteriological work was on his book shelf. Nevertheless, the name of Frederick von Kammacher had an authoritative ring, and association with the great man flattered him. He listened to Frederick's exposition intently.

The Red Cross sister entered again to summon Doctor Wilhelm to a first-class woman patient. The physician's small, close hermitage, in which Frederick was now left alone, gave him opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of his remarkable journey. The _Roland_ was proceeding more smoothly, and while he sat there smoking cigarettes, a sense of comfort came over him, partly attributable, however, to the general effect of a sea trip on one's nerves. It seemed wonderful to him to be on this great transport of human cargo, to be driven onward to a new continent along with so many fellow-men, subject to the same weal and woe. And the cause of his presence on the ship was so curious! Never before had he had so strange a sense of being a will-less puppet in the hands of destiny. Again dark and light illusions mingled in his brain. He thought of Ingigerd, whom he had not yet seen; and when he touched the quivering wall of the low room, he was penetrated by happiness, that the same walls were protecting him as the little dancer and that the same bottom was holding them up.

"It's not true. It's a lie," he repeated half aloud, referring to the statement of the armless man, that Hahlström was exposing his daughter to dishonour and was exploiting her.

Doctor Wilhelm's return aroused Frederick from his dreams with a painful shock. Doctor Wilhelm laughed and continued to laugh, as he threw his cap on the bed and said:

"I've just dragged our little Hahlström and her pet dog on deck. The little imp has been giving a regular performance, in which her faithful poodle, Achleitner, plays the part, one moment of the beaten cur, the next moment of the spoiled darling."

Doctor Wilhelm's report made Frederick uneasy. The first time he had seen Mara, she seemed to him the incarnation of childish purity and innocence. But since then, rumours had reached his ears which shook his faith in her chastity and caused him many agonised hours and sleepless nights. He had even had an excellent opinion of her father, and that, too, was shaken.

Doctor Wilhelm, who also seemed to be extremely interested in Ingigerd, began to speak of Achleitner.

"He told me in confidence, he's engaged to her."

Frederick remained silent. That was his only way of concealing his profound dismay, now that the ship's doctor confirmed the supposition he had expressed at the dinner-table.

"Achleitner is a faithful dog," Doctor Wilhelm continued. "He is one of those men who have a canine sort of patience. He sits up on his hind legs and begs for a lump of sugar. He fetches and carries and lies down and plays dead. She could do whatever she wanted, and he would still, I think, be her patient, faithful poodle. If you'd like to, Doctor von Kammacher, we might go on deck and visit her. She's lots of fun. Besides we can watch the sun set."

XII

Little Mara lay stretched out in a steamer chair. Achleitner was most uncomfortably perched on a small camp-stool directly in front of her, so that he could look straight into her face. He had wrapped her up to her shoulders in rugs. The setting sun, casting its rays across the mighty heavings of the sea, glorified a lovely face. The ship was no longer tossing so violently, and the deck was lively with people sitting in chairs or promenading up and down. Some of the passengers had got over their seasickness, and there was a general air of revived animation and talkativeness.

Mara's appearance was somewhat conspicuous. She wore her very long, light hair flowing, and was playing with a small doll, a fact of which every passerby turned about to assure himself.

When Frederick saw this girl, who for weeks had been hovering in his soul, in his dreams, in his waking hours, who, as it were, had covered the rest of the world from his sight, or, at least, had cast a veil over it, his excitement was so intense and his heart beat so violently against his ribs that he had to turn away to keep his countenance. Even after the lapse of several seconds, it was difficult for him to believe that the enthralled, enslaved condition of his being was not noticeable to the people about him. But his excitement was by no means due solely to the fear of self-betrayal. It sprang from his passion, which, he suddenly realised, dominated him with undiminished strength.

"Papa told me you were here," the little miss said to him, adjusting the blue silk cap on her doll's head. "Won't you sit down with us? Mr. Achleitner, please go and get a chair for Doctor von Kammacher." She turned to Doctor Wilhelm. "Your treatment was summary, but I am grateful to you. I feel very well sitting here, watching the sun set. You're fond of nature, aren't you, Doctor von Kammacher?"

"_Nur für Natur hegte sie Sympathie_," trolled Doctor Wilhelm, swaying on tip-toe.

"Oh, you are impudent," Ingigerd reproved him. "Doctor Wilhelm _is_ impudent, you know," she added to Frederick. "I saw he was the very instant he looked at me and the way he took hold of me."

"But, my dear young lady, so far as I know, I never took hold of you."

"If you please, you did--going up the stairs. I have blue marks as the result."

The chatter ran on for a while in a similar strain. Frederick, without betraying it, was on the alert for every word she uttered, noted every play of feature, watched for her glances, for the rise and fall of her lashes. He jealously studied the others, too, and caught every expression, every movement, every glance that was meant for her. He even noticed how Max Pander, the handsome cabin-boy, still standing at his post, held his eyes fixed upon her, a broad smile on his lips.

Ingigerd's pleasure in receiving the homage of three men and being the centre of general interest was evident. She plucked at her little doll and her odd, checked jacket, and gave herself up to coquettish whimsies. Her affected voice filled Frederick with the delight of a long, cool drink to a thirsty man. At the same time, his whole being was inflamed with jealousy. The first mate, Von Halm, a magnificent young man of twenty-eight, a perfect tower of a man, joined the group and was favoured by Ingigerd with looks and pointed remarks, which indicated to her admirers that this weather-tanned officer was not an object of indifference to her.

"How many miles, Lieutenant, since we left the Needles?" asked Achleitner, who was pale and evidently chilly.

"We're making better time now," Von Halm replied; "but for the last twenty-two or twenty-three hours, we haven't made more than two hundred miles."

"At that rate it will take two weeks to reach New York," cried Hans Füllenberg, somewhat too forwardly, from where he was sitting a little distance away. He was still flirting with the English lady from Southampton; but now, irresistibly drawn to Mara's sphere, he jumped up and left her, bringing the tone that was agreeable to Mara and all her admirers, except Frederick von Kammacher. The jolliness of the little group communicated itself to the rest of the promenade deck.

Disgusted with the orgy of banality, Frederick moved off to be alone with his thoughts. The deck, which in the middle of the day had been dripping with water, was now quite dry. He walked to the stern and looked out over the broad, foaming wake. He heaved a deep breath of joy at the thought that he was no longer in the narrow spell of the little female demon. Suddenly the long tension of his soul relaxed. Though he might have suffered a profound disenchantment, yet he felt as if he had taken a sobering bath, which left him a free agent, alone with his own soul. He felt ashamed of his instability. His passion for that little person seemed ridiculous, and he covertly beat his breast and rapped his forehead with his knuckles as if to awaken himself from a dream.

But, finally, the great cosmic moment of the slowly setting sun cast its spell over the young German adventurer.

A fresh wind was still blowing from the southeast, slanting the vessel slightly to the side where the sun hung over the horizon, turning the heavens in the west into a great, dusky conflagration. That sun, beneath which a slate-coloured sea was rolling in waves gently tossing foam--that sea, slate-coloured in the east and a cold, darkening blue in the west and south--that sky above, with great masses of clouds--these were to Frederick like the three mighty motives of a world symphony.

"Any one who is susceptible to them," he thought, "has no real cause to feel small, for all their awful majesty."

He was standing near the log, the long line of which was trailing in the ocean. The great ship was quivering under his feet. From the two smoke-stacks the wind was pressing the smoke down over the waves, and a melancholy procession of figures, widows in long crêpe veils, wringing their hands in mute grief, drifted away backward, as if into the twilight gloom of eternal damnation. He heard the talking of the passengers, and represented to himself all that was united within the walls of that immense house, hurrying forward restlessly--how much hunting, fleeing, hoping, fearing. And in his soul, responding to the universal miracle, arose the great unanswered questions that seek to penetrate to the dark meaning of existence: "Why?" "What for?"

XIII

He began to pace the deck again without noticing that he drew near Ingigerd Hahlström.

"You are wanted," a voice behind him suddenly announced. Seeing how he started, Doctor Wilhelm excused himself.

"You were dreaming; you are a dreamer," Mara called. "Come over here. I don't like these stupid men."

The six or eight gentlemen in attendance, with the exception of Achleitner, laughed and withdrew with a humorous show of great obedience.

"Why do you stay here, Achleitner?" Thus the faithful canine received his dismissal.

Frederick saw how the men withdrew together in groups at a little distance, whispering as they usually do when having sport with a pretty woman who is not exactly a prude; and it was with some shame, at any rate, with expressed repugnance that he took the stool still warm from Achleitner's body. Mara began to rhapsodise about nature.

"Isn't everything prettiest when the sun goes down? I think it's fun--at least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face at the remark. She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like," or "I despise," or "I do detest." In the face of that vast cosmic drama unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child. Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking expression. Mara noticed it, and was visibly upset by this unusual form of homage.

Frederick had one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers. The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist, director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in a strong interest in science. Frederick's mother was a well-read woman, passionately fond of the theatre and an enthusiastic lover of Goethe and the poets of the romantic school. Her father, who had been prime minister of Wittenberg, as a student and even later in his career, composed poetry, which her adoring love for him had caused her to publish and several times revise and reprint.

Though Frederick had never been ill, there were times when he showed symptoms of a peculiar passionateness. His friends knew that when all went well, he was a dormant volcano; that when things did not go so well, he was a volcano spitting fire and smoke. To all appearances equally removed from effeminateness and brutality, he was subject, nevertheless, to accesses of both. Now and then a dithyrambic rapture came over him, especially when there was wine in his blood. He would pace about, and if it was daytime, might address a pathetic, sonorous invocation to the sun, or at night, to the constellations, particularly to the chaste Cassiopeia.

Since she had known him, Mara felt that his proximity was by no means lacking in danger; but being what she was, it piqued her to play with fire.

"I don't like people that think themselves better than others," she said.

"Being a Pharisee, I do," Frederick drily rejoined, and went on cruelly: "I think for your years you are extremely forward and cock-sure. Your dance pleases me better than your conversation." He felt much like a man berating his sister.

Mara silently studied him for a moment, a suggestive smile on her lips.

"According to your notions," she finally said, "a girl mustn't speak unless she's spoken to, and she mustn't have any opinions of her own. You look as if the only sort of girl you could love would be one that was always saying, 'I am a poor, ignorant thing. I don't understand what he sees in me.' I hate such nincompoops!"

Conversation came to a halt. Frederick half rose to leave, but she restrained him with a self-willed, pouting, "No." There was something childlike and honest in that pouting "no" which touched his soul and drew him down on the stool again.

"In Berlin, while I danced, I always had to look at you," she continued, holding her doll against her lips so that her little nose was a bit flattened. "The very first time I saw you, I felt something like a bond between us; I knew we should meet again."

Frederick started, though not for an instant deceived, knowing this must be an oft-used formula for establishing a relationship, and in essence a lie.

"Are you married?" he heard before he had fully recovered his balance. He turned pale. His answer was hard and repellent.

"It would be well, Miss Hahlström, if you were to examine me more closely before you treat me as one among many. So far, I don't believe in the bond that unites us. During your dance you looked not only at me, but at everybody else." He spoke with increasing coldness. "At any rate, it doesn't in the least concern you whether I am, or am not, married--just as little as it concerns me what repulsive personages, whom nothing but a depraved instinct can enjoy, you keep company with." He meant Achleitner.

Ingigerd gave a short laugh. "Do you take me for Joan of Arc?"

"Not exactly that," rejoined Frederick, "but if you would allow me, I should like to regard you as still a girl, a distinguished little lady, whose reputation cannot be too carefully guarded against the faintest blemish."

"Reputation!" sneered the girl. "You are very much mistaken if you think I ever cared for anything of the sort. I'd rather be disreputable ten times over and live as I please, than have a good reputation and die of boredom. I must enjoy my life, Doctor von Kammacher."

Frederick's teeth clenched. Outwardly composed, he was suffering the pangs of torture.

Ingigerd proceeded to reveal her life in a series of confidences of such shocking content as to be worthy of a Laïs or a Phryne. Doctor von Kammacher, she said, might be sorry for her if he wanted to, but nobody was to make a mistake about her. Everybody associating with her was to know exactly who she was. In this she betrayed a certain dread, as one who would absolutely guard others as well as herself against the catastrophe of disillusionment.

When the sun had set, and Ingigerd, still with that suggestive, sensual, evil smile on her lips, had finished her hideous confession, Frederick found himself confronting the knowledge of a childhood so outrageous as to be worse than anything he had met with in all his experience as a physician.

Several times in the course of her narrative, Achleitner and her father had come to take her inside, but she had angrily driven them away. It was Frederick who finally helped her back to her cabin.

In his own cabin, without even removing his overcoat, he threw himself on his berth to think over the inconceivable story. He sighed, he gnashed his teeth, he wanted to doubt it. Several times he said aloud, "No!" or "Impossible!" and beat his fists against the mattress of the berth above. He could have sworn an oath that this time there had not been a single lie in Mara's whole shameless narrative. "Mara, or the Spider's Victim." Now, of a sudden, he understood her dance! She had danced the thing she had lived in her own life!

XIV

"I have set my all on nothing."

To the accompaniment of this refrain beating in his soul Frederick maintained an outer show of hilarity. He and the ship's doctor were drinking champagne. He had ordered the first bottle with the soup and had immediately drunk several glasses.

The more he drank the less he felt the smart of a certain burning wound, and the more wonderful the world appeared, full of miracles and riddles, surrounding and penetrating him with the intoxication of an adventurer's life. He was a brilliant entertainer, with an easy, happy way in conversation of popularising his rich store of knowledge, and with a light humour, which stood at his command even when, as now, grim humour crawled in the depths of his being, like evil reptiles. Thus it was that the captain's corner that evening fell under his spell, both of his jocular self and serious self.

Though he had lost his belief that science and modern progress alone possess the power to convey happiness, he extolled their virtues. As a matter of fact, in the festive gleam of the countless electric lights, excited by the wine, the music, and the rhythmic pulse beat of the moving vessel, it seemed to him at times as if humanity in a festal procession with music playing were sailing to the Isles of the Blessed. Perhaps, he said, science may some day teach man the secret of immortality. Ways and means would be found to keep the cells of the body young. Dead animals had been brought back to life by pumping a salt solution into them. He spoke of the wonders of surgery, always the theme of conversation when a man of the present, over his champagne and pâté de foie gras, triumphs in the superiority of his age over all other ages. In a short while, he declared, chemistry would solve the social question, and man would forget what it is to worry about food. Why, chemistry was on the verge of discovering how to make bread of stones, a thing that hitherto only plants could do. Frederick continued in a similar strain, speaking by rote, and scarcely looking up, yet fascinating his listeners.

But in the midst of the whirl of self-intoxication, he thought with a shudder of bedtime, knowing he should not close his eyes the whole night. And what recompense was the brightest height of the clearest day for the hell of a single sleepless night, such as he had often spent within the last years.

After dinner, he went with Doctor Wilhelm to the ladies' parlour, from there to the smoking-room. Soon after, he went on deck, where it was dark and gloomy and the wind was again whining dismally through the rigging of the four masts. It was bitter cold, and snowflakes, it seemed to him, swept his cheeks. Finally, there was nothing for him to do but go to bed.

For two hours, between eleven and one, he lay writhing in his berth, sometimes for a short while falling into a troubled state between waking and sleeping. In both states he saw visions, now a wild dance of faces, now a single stark face, which tormented him and would not budge. Yet an irresistible impulse gathered in him to keep his mental eye open for the devilish play of supernatural powers.

He had turned out the electric lights, and in the dark, when the eye is unoccupied, one is doubly sensitive to the messages of hearing and feeling. He caught every sound, felt every movement, of the mighty ship, steadily pursuing its course through the midnight. He heard the churning of the propeller, like the labouring of a great demon condemned to slave for mankind. He heard shouts and calls and the walking of men when the coal-passers threw overboard the cinders from the huge boiler furnaces. On the trip to New York those furnaces consumed over a thousand tons of coal, and the casting away of the slag and ashes was left for the nighttime. Thus, to the relief of the man wrestling with sleep, his attention was drawn to the present and the things taking place in the ship's body.

Yet, when there was no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself. Now that Ingigerd Hahlström had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote him all the more. His whole mentality seemed to have entered a state of reaction against the poison of his passion. A high fever raged in his veins. The thing that in this condition represented his "I" was engaged in a wild chase after the "you" of Mara. He picked her up in the streets of Prague and dragged her back to her mother. He discovered her in houses of ill repute. He saw her standing before the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window. Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth. The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.

Shortly after one o'clock, Frederick was tossed out of his berth. This time it was not one of those dream-like visions that had roused him with a start from a doze. The next instant he was thrown against the frame of the berth. It was evident that the weather had grown worse and the _Roland_ was travelling in heavier waters of the Atlantic.

XV

A few minutes after five o'clock Frederick was already on deck. He seated himself on the same bench as yesterday, opposite the companionway leading down to the dining-room. His steward, a sympathetic, indefatigable young man from the province of Magdeburg, brought him tea and toast. It was a boon to Frederick.

Every few minutes the water dashed over the railing and washed the deck. From the penthouse over the door of the companionway, streams would suddenly come raining down, completely drenching Max Pander's little mate, who was now standing on guard. The masts and rigging were decorated with icicles, and rain and snow were falling alternately. It seemed as if the dreary grey dawn, with its uproar, with the whining, whistling, and howling of the furious wind in the masts and rigging, with the swishing and seething of the waters, wanted to prolong its existence infinitely, while the day refused to enter.

Warming his hands on his big tea-cup, he looked out over the ship's side, which every now and then seemed to sink perpendicularly. His eyes glowed. He felt as if they had sunk deep into their sockets. After the hardships of the last few days, especially the past night, it was natural that he should feel bruised, bodily and spiritually. He had a sense of vacancy and dull-mindedness, a welcome feeling, to be sure, compared with his sensations of the night, when the procession of images passed through his brain. Nevertheless, the strong, moist, tonic wind, the taste of salt on his lips refreshed him. He shivered a little, and sat with his head sunk in the upturned collar of his overcoat. Presently he began to feel pleasantly drowsy.

But he did not fail to perceive the full majesty in the turmoil of the waves and the struggle of the floating palace. There was beauty and strength in the steamer's fixed course, in the way it clove the rolling crests of the bottle-green waves, steady, tranquil, fearless. He admired the _Roland_, praised it, and was grateful to it as to a living being.

Next after him to appear on deck were three children, two girls and a boy, of from five to eleven. One of the helpful stewards fastened their chairs and most solicitously guided them to their seats, one at a time. Children are spoiled on steamers. There they sat, rocked to and fro, fearlessly looking out upon the solemn, awful rolling of the long waves, upon the horror of the tempest.

Shortly after seven o'clock, a slim man wearing the ship's uniform slowly approached Frederick. Frederick had noticed him the day before and been interested by his air of cool impassibility. He was smoking a cigarette and inhaling, as when Frederick had first seen him. Wearing an expression of profound apathy, he seemed to be completely absorbed in this occupation of smoking and inhaling. As if casually, he drew near Frederick's bench, touched his cap, and said:

"Doctor von Kammacher?"

"Yes."

"Here is a letter for you," he said, drawing it from his waistcoat pocket. "It came by the French pilot-boat yesterday. The reason I did not deliver it is, that I could not find your name on the passenger list. My name is Rinck. I am in charge of the mail on board."

Frederick thanked him. He was moved to see his father's handwriting. Rather for the sake of being friendly than from genuine interest at that moment, he asked Mr. Rinck what prospect there was of better weather. The sole answer was an unintelligible English word, a shrug of the shoulders, and a puff of cigarette smoke blown with gusto.

Frederick put the letter in his breast pocket, and he felt his heart beneath beat more warmly, less turbulently. He had to close his eyes to prevent a hot gush of tears. Doctor Wilhelm found him in this soft mood, and it occurred to him that perhaps after all Frederick had been tragically affected by the bitter close of his professional career.

"I slept like a bear," he said. And it was evident from the healthy colour of his face and his comfortable way of stretching and yawning that his night's sleep had thoroughly refreshed him. "But the weather is fiendish," he added, seating himself close beside Frederick.

"Congratulate you," said Frederick. "I didn't sleep a wink."

"Take some veronal. But whatever you do, come down now to breakfast with me. The best thing for you is to keep moving. So I advise you, after breakfast to come with me on my visit to the steerage. It will take your mind off things and may interest you. There are interesting types there, women, too. But before we go, we must make ourselves insect-proof. We'll puff powder on our clothes in my room."

XVI

The gentlemen had breakfasted--baked potatoes and cutlets, ham and eggs, broiled flounder and other fish, beside tea and coffee--and were entering the steerage.

Here, to keep from falling, they had to hold fast to the iron posts supporting the ceiling. After their eyes had grown accustomed to the twilight always reigning in the steerage, they saw a swarm of human beings rolling on the floor, groaning, whimpering, wailing, shrieking. The weather did not permit of the opening of the port-holes, and the exhalations of about twenty Russian-Jewish families, with bag and baggage and babies, polluted the air to such an extent, that Frederick could scarcely breathe. Mothers lying on their backs with open mouths and closed eyes, more dead than alive, had infants at their breasts; and it was fearful to see how the retching convulsed them.

"Come," said Doctor Wilhelm, observing something like a tendency to faint in Frederick's face. "Come, let us show how superfluous we are."

But Doctor Wilhelm and the Red Cross nurse, who accompanied him, had a chance, here and there, to do some good. He ordered grapes and a tonic for those who were suffering most. These things were obtained from the store-rooms of the first and second cabin.

With great difficulty they made their way from section to section. Everywhere the same misery, the same flight from want and infuriated persecution. Even the pale faces of those who were able to keep on their feet and had found a place to stand in that swaying shelf of misery, were marked by a hopeless, brooding expression of anguish and bitterness.

Among the hundreds of immigrants, there were some pretty girlish faces. To a few the fever produced by the unusual circumstances had imparted a bold, passionate charm. The glances of the physicians and these girls met. Such circumstances overstimulate the feelings and make them highly susceptible. Great stress, great danger cause the life of the moment to flare up more alluringly and also create a sense of profound equality among human beings. In the very midst of fear and tension, a boldness develops ready at any moment to make a leap.

Doctor Wilhelm pointed out to Frederick a Russian-Jewish girl of about seventeen. The expression of her face was sombre. Her features were most delicately chiselled, and she was as transparent as an image of wax. Doctor Wilhelm, observing the defiant air with which she glowered at Frederick, remarked that he must have conquered at first sight.

On passing farther, Frederick heard a voice bawl his name. It was Wilke, but a very different Wilke from the one he had met on deck the morning before. He was cursing and scolding at everybody and everything, while trying to raise himself from his mattress; a feat rather difficult for him to accomplish, because, in the first place, the rolling of the vessel in the steerage was fearful, and in the second place, he had evidently been trying to counteract the wretchedness of his condition by the imbibing of whisky. Doctor Wilhelm gave him a sharp berating. Wilke, very clearly, was a nuisance, perhaps even a danger, to everybody about him. In his intoxication he fancied he was being pursued. The rags from his open bundle lay spread on his mattress mixed with cheese and bread-crumbs, and in his right hand he held open a large pocket-knife.

Doctor Wilhelm had not been aware that he was dealing with a particular acquaintance of Frederick's. His admonitions were of no effect. Wilke shouted that his neighbours had robbed him, and so had the stewards, and the sailors and the captain. Frederick took his knife away from him, spoke to him in a military tone, and unceremoniously touched a scar on the rough fellow's hairy neck to recall to him the fact that he had already sewed one knife wound, from which he had barely escaped with his life. That worked, and Wilke seemed to be repentant. Frederick gave him some money, but not for whisky, as he told him, and added he would try his best for him, but only if he heard that he had been behaving like a decent human being.

XVII

The physicians ascended on deck again. On breathing in the ocean's pure breath after the foul odours of the steerage, Frederick felt as if he had escaped from a hideous, suffocating hell.

With difficulty they made their way across the wet, empty deck, ever and again washed by waves sweeping overboard. To keep their footing they had to cling to the railing. Not a soul was on deck. The ship, restlessly rolling and pounding, seemed to have been left to fight its fight alone. But this was an awful scene that relieved and refreshed Frederick.

He went to the ladies' parlour, there to read the letter from home, which he had nearly forgotten. A few women, who were not seasick, were scattered through the room, lolling in their chairs in a state of limp exhaustion. The saloon smelled of plush and varnish. It was decorated with a number of mirrors in gold frames, there was a grand piano, and the sound of footsteps was muffled by the soft carpet covering the floor. The prevailing colour was blue.

Frederick made himself comfortable in one of the blue arm-chairs, and opened the envelope. He found a letter from his mother also. But he was more anxious to learn his father's feelings and opinion of the step he had taken, and he read his letter first.

* * * * *

Dear Frederick,

I do not know whether this letter will find you, or where it will find you. Perhaps not until you reach New York, where it may arrive later than you. I should really like you to have your old father's and mother's greetings on your trip, which is something of a surprise to us. But we are used to surprises from you, since we have not had your unreserved confidence for a long time. I am a fatalist, and far from wishing to bore you with reproaches; but it is a pity that ever since you have been of age, so many differences have arisen in our ways of thinking and acting. A great pity, God knows. If only you had sometimes listened to me--but, as I said, there's no use to come limping after with "if only's" and the like.

My dear boy, now that fate has afflicted you so sorely--I told you from the very first that Angèle comes of a diseased family--at least hold your head up. If you do, then nothing's lost. And I especially beseech you--don't take that nonsense of your failure with bacilli too much to heart. You know, I've already told you I think all the noise they make about bacilli is a hoax. Why, Pettenkofer himself swallowed the whole culture of a typhus bacillus without its hurting him.

For all I care, go to America. It may not be a bad idea and need not be a failure, I know persons whose lives were wrecked here and who went to America and returned millionaires, to be envied and fawned upon. I don't doubt that after all you have gone through, you have carefully weighed and considered the step you are taking. Dear Frederick, I beg of you, concentrate. The man who wants too much wants nothing. Above all, get rid of your philanthropic notions. You would never believe me when I told you that you uselessly sacrificed your money, your time, and your career to your philanthropic notions. And don't take up with Utopias, such as, for example, Socialism is, even at best. Bismarck is gone. The exceptional law against the Socialists has been repealed. Now we'll be seeing wonders from that pack of red internationals without a country. Did you read that some Anarchist dogs have again been throwing bombs--in Paris in a café not far from the Gare St. Lazare, right among a lot of innocent people, and seven or eight were killed. My dear boy, you were in Paris. For God's sake, in the discontented mood you are in, don't throw yourself in with such desperate elements.

Forgive me. It was a slip of my pen. But here in Görlitz, far from the firing line, even a rational man, when he is troubled, begins to imagine things. With your talents you might have been an officer on a general's staff long ago.

God be with you. Write to us. I am convinced that with your great talents, you will strike root over there and make your fortune. Be on your guard against art and against side interests, from which a man cannot make a living. Do you know that the Grand Duke has made Botho his adjutant? It looks as if the boy might rise pretty high.

Have a good trip and sometimes think of your devoted father.

* * * * *

With a sigh and a short, almost inaudible laugh of great compassion and great bitterness, Frederick folded up the letter.

"'I don't know whether this letter will find you, or where it will find you,'" he repeated, and added mentally, "or how it will find you."

Then he sat still for a while, staring into space.

After a time he became observant of the American jackanapes, who had annoyed him in the smoking-room the day before. He was flirting with a young lady apathetically lounging in an easy-chair, a Canadian, Frederick had been told. He did not trust his eyes when he saw the American, who had been toying with a small box of matches, pile them up carelessly, and set fire to them in that inflammable room. A steward came up and modestly explained that it was his duty to ask him to refrain from what he was doing. At which the jackanapes dismissed him with "Get out of here, you idiot."

Frederick drew out his mother's letter, but before reading it, he had to meditate briefly upon the matter that took the place of brains in the young American's skull.

* * * * *

My Dear Son,

Your mother's prayers accompany you. You have gone through a great deal and suffered very much for one of your years. To let you hear something pleasant at the very start, I will tell you of the children. They are very well. This week I convinced myself with my own eyes that they have a good home with Pastor Mohaupt. Albrecht is splendid. Bernhard, you know, is more like his mother and always has been a quiet child. But he seemed more alert and more talkative. The life in the pastor's house and on the farm seems to please him. Pastor Mohaupt thinks both boys are by no means untalented. He has already begun to give them lessons in Latin. Little Annemarie asked me very timidly about her mother, but especially about you. She spoke of you often. I told the children there was a medical congress in New York or Washington, where they would at last make an end of that dreadful disease, consumption. My dear child, do come back soon to this dear old Europe.

I had a long talk with Doctor Binswanger. He told me your wife's trouble is hereditary. It was in her all the time and would certainly have cropped out, sooner or later. He spoke of your work, too, dear child, and thought you ought not allow yourself to be crushed. Four or five years of hard work, he said, would make up for your set-back.

Dear Dietrich, listen to your old mother and put your trust in our loving Father in heaven. I think you are an atheist. Just laugh at your old mother. But believe me, we are nothing without God's help and mercy. Pray sometimes. It won't do any harm. I know how you reproach yourself on Angèle's account. Binswanger says you may have a perfectly easy conscience. And if you pray, believe me, God will remove every thought of guilt from your harassed soul. You are only thirty. I am seventy. From the experience of the forty years more that I have, I tell you, your life can still turn out so that some day you will scarcely have a recollection of all you are now suffering. You will remember the facts; but you will try in vain to recall the feelings of anguish with which they are now connected in your mind. I am a woman. I was fond of Angèle. And yet I could observe you two together perfectly objectively. Believe me, there were times when she would have driven any man desperate.

* * * * *

The end of the letter was all motherly tenderness. Frederick saw himself at his mother's sewing-table by the window, and in his thoughts kissed her hair, her forehead, her hands.

When he looked up, he heard the steward remonstrating with the American and heard the American say in good German:

"The captain's a donkey."

The word had the effect of an electric shock. The next instant another pile of matches sent up a wavering flare in the gloomy, terrifying twilight.

Frederick mentally cut out the young man's cerebrum and cerebellum for an anatomical examination, proceeding strictly according to the rules of dissection, as he had so frequently done in actuality. He hunted for the centre of stupidity, which undoubtedly composed the American's whole soul, though his impudence, which he possessed in a rare degree, may also have had its seat in the brain. Frederick had to laugh. In his amusement he realised that little Ingigerd Hahlström no longer had any power over him, less, perhaps than, for example, the dark Jewess from Odessa, whom he had seen for the first time only a quarter of an hour before.

Captain von Kessel entered. He greeted Frederick with a slight nod of his head and seated himself at a table beside a lady, with whom he was acquainted, apparently. The American coxcomb and the pretty Canadian exchanged glances. She was languishing in her easy-chair, pale but coquettish. Frederick set her down as a woman of unusual southern beauty--straight nose, quivering nostrils, heavy, nobly arched eyebrows, black as her hair and the shadowy down over her fine, expressive, twitching lips. Her gestures had the weary grace of a Spaniard. She was laughing, and her long, slim form stretched on the chair shook. Her admirer, with a comic expression of seriousness, was again building a little pile of matches. In her weak condition she was unable to resist the impulse to laugh, and every now and then hid her face behind a black lace shawl.

It was an exciting moment when the American, in defiance of the Captain's presence, again made ready for his dangerous play.

Von Kessel, broad and ponderous and somewhat too short-legged, seemed out of proportion in the dainty parlour. He was speaking quietly with his lady. From the expression of his face it was evident that the weather was giving him cause to be serious. Suddenly the matches flared up. Now the captain's calm St. Bernard head turned slightly, and a voice said in a tone not to be misunderstood:

"Put that fire out!"

Frederick had never heard an order from a man's lips so incisive, so truly commanding, so fearful. The American turned pale and in the twinkling of an eye smothered the flame. The beautiful Canadian closed her eyes. But the captain, as if nothing had occurred, continued to converse with his lady.

XVIII

Soon after, Frederick was in the barbershop getting a shave.

"Wretched weather," observed the barber, wielding the razor with a sure hand, despite the dreadful tossing of the vessel. He seemed to be an intelligent man. Frederick had to listen to a second account of the _Nordmania_, of how the waterspout had plunged through the ladies' parlour and carried the piano down into the hold.

An ordinary German servant-girl of the peasant class entered. She looked healthy to the core and none too intelligent. The barber called her Rosa and gave her a bottle of eau de Cologne.

"That's the fifth bottle of eau de Cologne that I've given her for her mistress since we left Cuxhaven," the barber explained after she had left. "Her mistress is a divorced woman with two children. Her name is Mrs. Liebling. She is very nervous. Rosa hasn't a very easy time of it. For five dollars a month she has to be at Mrs. Liebling's beck and call morning, noon and night. She takes entire charge of the children. Soon after we left Cuxhaven, Mrs. Liebling came to have her hair dressed. You should have heard how she went on about that girl. The things she said against her. Not a spark of gratitude. She said the stupid, lazy thing wasn't worth the price of her second-class cabin."

Several times Frederick had heard the sound of quarrelling mingled with children's crying in the cabin opposite his. Once he had even distinctly caught the slapping sound of what must have been a box over somebody's ear.

"Does she hit Rosa?" he asked the barber.

"Yes."

Clearly, then, it was his neighbour of the opposite cabin in whose service the girl was.

Frederick enjoyed listening to the lively barber retail gossip, while he lay stretched out in his patented chair. It diverted his mind from troublesome thoughts. The barber, who had been sailing the seas for many years, was by no means of the ordinary type of his class. He delivered a short discourse on modern shipbuilding, the moral of which was, not to construct light steamers for speed.

"Altogether," he observed, "it's a pity to lay so much stress on record-making. How is a great big body with walls like a wafer to resist heavy seas for any length of time? And see what tremendous engines it has to carry and what an enormous amount of coal it consumes. But the _Roland's_ a good boat. It was built in Glasgow in the yards of John Elder and Company. It has been running since June, 1881. The engines are compound steam-engines with three cylinders and 5800 horse power. They require one hundred and fifteen tons of coal every day. The boat makes sixteen knots an hour, and has a tonnage of 4510. There are one hundred and sixty-eight men in the crew."

The barber had all these details at his fingers' ends. In a tone of annoyance, as if the thing caused him personally a lot of trouble, he told that the _Roland_ on each trip to or from New York dragged one thousand and three hundred tons of anthracite coal in its coal-bunkers. A slow trip, he insisted, was safe and comfortable, while a quick trip was dangerous and expensive.

The little saloon with its electric lighting would have been a very comfortable place to be in, had it only stood at rest. But unfortunately its walls were quivering to the pulse of the engines and the floor was rising and sagging to the swell and fall of the waves, which every now and then leapt against the port-hole with tiger-like fury. The flasks in the closets rattled.

"A heavier ship," said the barber, "built to go more slowly, wouldn't be pitching like this."

Next he spoke of a little person, who dyed her hair, a dancer. She had spent more than an hour in his chair, having him show her rouge and face powders, until finally he had displayed his entire stock of Pinaud and Roger et Gallet. The barber chuckled.

"On sea trips," he said, "a man has a chance of getting to know the queerest women." And he proceeded to recount a number of incidents, which, on his own word, he himself had witnessed. The heroine in each case was an erotomanic woman.

"Just ask our doctor," he said. He was of the old-fashioned sort of barber-surgeon, and in the capacity of surgeon had gathered the most scandalous portion of his experiences. "One of the worst cases," he went on, "was that of an American girl, who was found lying unconscious in one of the life-boats swinging from the davits. She was hideously abused by all the crew, one at a time, but they fixed it so that the whole blame could be laid on her."

Frederick knew that none other than Ingigerd Hahlström was responsible for the direction the barber's thoughts had taken. She had been sitting in the very chair in which he was now reclining. A current streamed from its upholstery into his body. His heart began to beat irregularly, ceasing for an instant, then leaping wildly. To his horror, he observed that Mara's power over him was not yet broken.

He jumped up and shook himself. He felt as if he must plunge into a hot and cold bath and let stinging douches run down his spine to wash him outwardly and inwardly clean and expel that foul poison from his blood.

XIX

The barbershop lay aft, and nearby one could look through glass panes upon the working of the cylinders and pistons. Frederick toilsomely clambered up to the promenade deck and crept into the overcrowded smoking-room. Though it disgusted him to be wedged into a small space with a lot of noisy men, he had come here in the desire to escape the wild orgy of his thoughts. Doctor Wilhelm had kept a place for him.

"The doctor tells me you were in the steerage, and a beautiful Deborah made a dangerous impression upon you," the captain said, smiling roguishly.

Frederick laughed. He ordered beer, and the conversation was jolly from the start.

In their corner the skat players were sitting over their cards. They were business men, all of apoplectic constitution. They had been drinking beer and playing skat ever since breakfast, in fact, except when they slept, ever since boarding the steamer. The conversation in the room was of no interest to them. Even the weather failed to elicit any questions from them. They seemed to be insensible to the tossing of the great vessel, or the dismal howling of the wind. The force of the roll was so tremendous that Frederick involuntarily clutched at the thing nearest to him. Up went the port side, down went the starboard. Up went the starboard, down went the port side. Sometimes Frederick felt as if port and starboard might plunge one over the other; in which case the _Roland's_ keel would float above water, while the bridge, masts, and smoke-stacks would be submerged at a distance below the surface. And in that case all would be lost; but those skat players, it seemed to him, would go on playing undisturbed.

Hahlström's tall figure came creeping with bent head into the tobacco smoke. His clear, cold, critical eyes roved about looking for a seat. He paid no attention to the armless man, who jestingly shouted an ironic remark to him. With cool politeness he seated himself at the greatest possible distance from Stoss, drew a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and filled a short Dutch pipe. Frederick's immediate thought was, "Where is Achleitner?"

"How is your daughter feeling?" Doctor Wilhelm asked.

"Oh, she's just a little upset now. The weather will be getting better, I suppose."

The whole company, which, of course consisted of the men either by nature or from frequent exposure proof against seasickness, now entered into the usual discussion of the weather.

"Is it true, Captain," somebody asked, "that last night we nearly collided with a derelict?"

The captain smiled, raised his brows, and made no reply.

"Where are we now, Captain? Was there fog last night? I saw some snow fall. And for at least an hour I heard the siren blow every two minutes."

But Captain von Kessel remained highly monosyllabic in everything pertaining to the management of the vessel and the prospects for a good or bad crossing.

"Is it true that there is gold bullion on board for the treasury in Washington?"

Von Kessel smiled and sent a thin wreath of cigarette smoke curling through his moustache.

"That would be carrying coals to Newcastle," remarked Wilhelm.

And now the great theme, the theme of themes, became the general topic of conversation. Each of the travellers, of course, straightway had a picture of his own fortune in mind, every cent of it, or else tried to make an accurate mental calculation. They all turned into calculating machines, while aloud comparing the capitals of the great American banking firms, the Bank of England, the Crédit Lyonnais and the wealth of all the American millionaires. Even the skat players gave their attention for a few moments at a time.

America was then suffering from a business depression, a crisis, as the political economists dub it. The causes of the depression came up for discussion. Most of the Americans present happened to be Democrats, and they threw the blame on the Republicans. The Tammany Tiger was the subject of especial execration. It not only controlled New York City, the mayor of which was a creature of Tammany, but had also put its men into the most influential positions throughout the land. And every Tammany man knew how to shear his sheep. As a result, the American people were thoroughly bled. The corruption in the highest offices was said to be on a tremendous scale. Millions of dollars were appropriated to the navy, but if a man-of-war actually happened to be built, the thing was a great achievement, since the money, long before it was applied to its proper purpose, sifted down into the pockets of peaceful Americans, whose interest in the navy was of the slightest.

"I shouldn't care to be buried in America," cried Stoss, in his sharp voice. "It would be too dreary and boresome for me in my grave. I hate their spitting and their ice-water." The burst of laughter that greeted his remark encouraged him to further sallies. "Americans are parrots, incessantly chattering two words, dollar and business, dollar and business, dollar and business. Those two words have been death to culture in America. An American doesn't even know what it is to have the Englishman's spleen. Think of the fearfulness of living in a country called the land of dollars. We have human beings living in Europe. The Americans regard everything, even their fellow-men, from the point of view of the number of dollars they represent. If a thing can't be reckoned in dollars, they have no eyes for it. And then Carnegie and Company come and want to astonish us with their disgusting shopkeeper's philosophy. Do you think they're helping the world on by slicing off some of the world's dollars and then returning some of the sliced off dollars with a great flourish of trumpets? Do you think that if they do us the favour to give us some of their money, we'll throw overboard our Mozart and Beethoven, our Kant and Schopenhauer, our Schiller and Goethe, our Rembrandts, Leonardos, Michael Angelos, in short, all our wealth of art and intellect? What is a miserable cur of an American millionaire, a dollar maniac, as compared with all those great men? Let him come and ask us for alms."

XX

The captain invited Frederick to his cabin and asked him to write a few words in his album. On the way, he showed him the chart-room and the wheel-house, where a sailor was turning the great wheel at the directions of the first mate, whose voice came from the bridge through a speaking-tube. Frederick read the compass in front of the wheel and saw that the _Roland_ lay west-southwest. The captain was in hopes of striking better weather by taking a more southerly route. The helmsman did not allow his attention to be diverted for the fraction of a second. He kept his bronzed, weather-beaten face with its corn-coloured beard turned unwaveringly toward the compass, and his sea-blue eyes fastened upon the west-southwest line. And the face of the compass, in its round copper case, notwithstanding the vessel's elephantine leaps and bounds, never deviated from the horizontal.

When they reached his cabin, the handsome blond German, whose eyes came of the same stock as the mariner's at the wheel, became more expansive. He insisted on Frederick's taking a comfortable seat and offered him a cigar. He spoke of his own life. Frederick learned that he was unmarried, had two unmarried sisters and a brother with a wife and children. The pictures of his sisters, his brother, his brother's wife, his brother's children, and his parents were hung symmetrically on the wall over a red plush sofa. They were sacred objects.

Frederick did not fail to ask his stereotyped question:

"Do you follow your calling because you have a decided preference for it?"

"Tell me of a position on land where I could command the same salary, and I'd exchange without an instant's hesitation. Seafaring begins to lose its charms when a man gets on in years."

The captain's guttural voice was extremely agreeable. It suggested to Frederick the sound of colliding billiard balls. His enunciation was perfect, absolutely free of a dialectic tinge.

"My brother has a wife and children," he said. Though there was, of course, not the slightest trace of sentimentality in his tone, it was evident from the gleam in his eyes how he idolised his nieces and nephews. He pointed out each one's picture and at the end said frankly, "My brother is an enviable man." Then he asked Frederick whether he was the son of General von Kammacher. He had taken part in the campaign of 1870 and 1871 as lieutenant of the regiment of artillery of which Frederick's father had been chief. He spoke of him with great admiration and reverence.

Frederick remained in the captain's cabin over half an hour. His presence seemed to give the skipper special pleasure. It was astonishing what a gentle, tender soul was hidden beneath the commanding exterior. Before disclosing a bit of that soul, he always puffed harder at his cigar and gave Frederick a long, searching look. By degrees Frederick discovered what magnet was tugging strongly at the blond giant's heart. He kept recurring alternately to the Black Forest and the Thüringian Forest, and Frederick had a mental picture of the magnificent man clipping his privet hedge in front of his cosey cottage, or walking among his rose bushes with a pruning knife in his hand. He could detect that the captain would far rather be living secluded in a sea of green leaves and green pine needles; and he felt convinced that it would have been delicious to him to submerge himself forever in the soft rushing of endless forests and dispense forever with the rushing and roaring of all the oceans in the world.

"Perhaps the night of all days has not yet come," said the captain, with a humorous expression. He rose and placed the large album in front of Frederick. "Now I am going to lock you in here with this pen and this ink, and when I return, I want to find something clever on this page."

Frederick von Kammacher turned the leaves of the mariner's album. It was unmistakable that the hope for a vegetable garden, gooseberry bushes, the chirping of birds, and the buzzing of bees was most intimately connected with this book. Under the pressure of dreariness and the grave responsibility for many a sea trip, it must expand the captain's soul to look over it, Frederick thought. It seemed to point to a time when, in the peace and security of his simple home, it would serve its turn by testifying to all the dangers its possessor had gone through, all his past struggles and hardships. In a sheltered haven it would afford pleasant retrospect, full of content.

Frederick's own quietistic ideal in the form of a farm and a solitary log hut occurred to him. But he was not living in it alone. The little devil Mara was sharing it with him. In embitterment he mentally climbed to still lonelier regions, and saw himself a hermit, who prayed, drank nothing but water, and lived on roots, nuts, and sometimes a fish of his own catching.

When the captain returned and he and Frederick had taken leave of each other, this is what he found in his book:

Borne aloft on wave and ocean, Of thy master's course partaking, Some day thou wilt cease thy motion, Of thy master's rest partaking. In the garden of his stillness, To his manly deeds inspiring, Thou wilt faithfully bear witness. Thou art language well becoming Him who daily danger faces, Gratitude of souls proclaiming, Whom he bore through cosmic spaces.

The signature was

"Frederick von Kammacher, Globetrotter."

XXI

Frederick, holding on to his hat with one hand and clinging to the railing with the other, descended from the windy heights of the captain's cabin to the promenade deck. When he passed the cabin of the first mate, the door opened, and Von Halm appeared in conversation with Achleitner. Achleitner was pale, and there was an anxious look in his face.

"I have rented the lieutenant's cabin for Miss Hahlström. I could not bear to see her suffering so in her own cabin," he called to Frederick.

The gale had increased. Not a passenger was to be seen on deck. Sailors were inspecting the life-boats. Huge masses of water seethed against the ship's side, cutting into its course obliquely. The waves made a mad leap into the air, hung there for an instant in the form of white corals, and fell like a thousand lashes on the deck, which was all awash. The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled. Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck. In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke. But the fore-deck was so swept by the seas that nobody could keep his footing there, except the lookout men, who were holding watch at the beak of the vessel, not far from the cat-head.

Between the door leading to the main companionway and the companionway itself was a square level space, about which a railing ran and in which a few people could stay and enjoy the fresh air without being drenched. When Frederick, on his way below deck, passed through the open door, he found a quiet assemblage of pale-faced passengers. One chair was still unoccupied. He seated himself in it, with the fanciful notion that he was joining a gathering of condemned men.

"That poor sinner there must be Professor Toussaint, the famous sculptor in need," Frederick thought, judging so from the man's slouched hat and great cape. Now and then the man exchanged a few words with a person sitting next to him, who might be _Geheimrat_ Lars. Frederick had once met the _Geheimrat_ at a dinner at the mayor's house, but he had only a faded recollection of his appearance. The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse. Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other tall and thin.

The tall one was showing the other a section of a submarine cable and letting the hard piece, intricately braided of hemp, metal and gutta-percha, pass from hand to hand. From his choppy, whispered sentences, the company learned that in 1877 he had worked as electrical engineer on a steamer laying a cable between Europe and the United States. The work on the high seas had lasted without interruption for many months. He had spent several months supervising the construction of the steamer itself in the yards, especially the riveting of its metal plates. He spoke of what is called the cable plateau at the bottom of the ocean, stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland, a strip of grey sand so named because it supports the main transatlantic cable.

The copper wires in the centre of the cable, he said, were called its soul, the rest of the mass, almost as thick as a man's fist and resembling a great hawser, served merely as a sheath to protect the soul. Frederick had a mental vision of the fearful solitudes of the ocean depths, with the monstrous metal serpent, apparently without beginning and without end, creeping over the sandy bottom peopled by the enigmatic creatures of the deep. It seemed to him as if such profound isolation must be gruesome even for the dead mass of cable.

Then he wondered why it was that mankind at each end of the cable had burst into jubilation upon the transmission of the first messages. Perhaps there was some mystic cause for rejoicing. The real cause could not possibly be that one was now able to telegraph "Good morning, Mr. Smith," or "Good morning, Mr. Brown," twenty times a minute around the earth's circumference, or that one could adulterate humanity's mind with newspaper gossip from the four quarters of the globe.

In the midst of these meditations, his chair slipped, and Frederick, in company with the electrical engineer, the dozing manufacturer, a lady physician, and a lady artist, was hurled against the banister, while the opposite row of passengers, including the _Geheimrat_ and the professor, was hurled on top of them. It was a ridiculous incident, but Frederick observed that no one seemed to find it so.

They tried to arrange themselves in order again. One of the ever-industrious stewards appeared, and, as if to comfort them for their overthrow, passed about Malaga grapes from the ship's inexhaustible store.

"When shall we reach New York?" somebody asked. The eyes of all the others instantly turned upon the questioner in amazement and alarm. The steward, usually so polite merely smiled an embarrassed smile and gave no reply. In his opinion an answer, one way or the other, would have been to challenge fate. The passengers felt much the same. Indeed, the idea that their feet would actually ever tread solid land again seemed in their present condition almost like an extravagant fairy tale.

The short, stout man, to whom the electrical engineer was chiefly directing his discourse, was conducting himself peculiarly. At short intervals he would look out anxiously into the uproar, turning his small, watchful eyes searchingly up to the tops of the masts, which never ceased to describe great arcs in the air (starboard to port, port to starboard!), and out into the monotonous rolling of the waves, swelling into ever higher and larger masses. His face was full of concern. Frederick was on the point of inwardly ridiculing the pitiful landlubber's cowardice, when he heard him say that scarcely three weeks before he had brought his schooner safely to New York from a three years' trip around the world, and intended to start out from New York on the same trip to last the same length of time. The little gentleman was the experienced captain of a sailing vessel. In the course of his fifty years, he had spent more than thirty on all the waters of the globe.

XXII

Frederick reflected upon the timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander about the _Roland_ vaguely.

The enforced idleness of a sea trip, especially in bad weather, induces passengers, when they have made the complete round of the vessel, to begin over again and go through the same circle. Thus, Frederick, after descending the companionway, ascending it, and descending again, found himself on the leather-seated bench in the smoking-room avoided by most of the smokers, in which the armless man had taken his meal the day before.

Hans Füllenberg entered, asked whether he was not permitted to smoke a cigarette in the room, and began to grumble about the weather.

"Who knows how this thing is going to end?" he complained dismally. "Perhaps, instead of reaching New York, we'll have to be towed into port somewhere in Newfoundland."

Frederick was indifferent to the prospect. He noticed that young Füllenberg cared for nothing except to produce an impression; and young Füllenberg noticed that Frederick von Kammacher was not susceptible to the impression he tried to produce. He cast about for another theme of conversation.

"Do you know there are two priests on board? You should have been at Cuxhaven when they got on. The sailors were beside themselves. I hunted up the fellows, the sailors I mean, in the forecastle. How they did curse! It was fearful. The stoker told all the men of the engine-room. They said you could not get genuine seamen to think any differently--with priests on board something is bound to go wrong."

"How is your lady?" asked Frederick.

"My lady is retching her soul away, if she has such a thing as a soul. Two hours ago I helped her to bed. That Englishwoman is already a full-blooded American. Shameless, I tell you! Something tremendous. I rubbed her forehead with brandy. She partook of a goodly quantity, and then I unbuttoned her waist. She seems to take me for a masseur chartered extra by her munificent husband. The thing became boresome. And besides, in that pitching boudoir, my own soul began to rise up through my stomach, and the poetry went to the devil. She showed me the photograph of her devoted husband in New York. I think she has another in London." He was interrupted by the first call for dinner, which the trumpeter announced at the bottom of the companionway. The trumpet blast was lost without resonance in the heavy air and the bluster of the waves. "What's more," he concluded, "she sent for Doctor Wilhelm."

The dining-room presented a very dreary appearance. Neither the captain nor any of the officers of the _Roland_ were present, the demands upon them in such bad weather being too severe to permit them to leave their posts. The tables had been provided with a wooden apparatus dividing them into small compartments, which prevented the plates, glasses and bottles from slipping any distance. Nevertheless, there was much breaking of crockery, and it required all the skill of the stewards to serve the dishes, especially the soup. From the kitchen and the china room every now and then came the sound of a tremendous crash. There were scarcely twelve people at table, among them Hahlström and Doctor Wilhelm. After a time the skat players, as usual, came bursting in, talking noisily and red of face. Their winnings were immediately transmuted into Pommery. Notwithstanding the fearful weather, the band was playing. There seemed to be something frivolous, almost challenging, in the playing of music when, at short intervals, the _Roland_ would come to a quivering standstill, as if it had run upon a reef. Once the illusion was so strong that a panic arose in the steerage. Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, brought this explanation of the horrified shrieks that had penetrated the dining-room above the noise of the raging waters, the rattling of the plates and the blare of the band.

At dessert Hahlström left his place at the other end of the room and, balancing himself with difficulty, came over to Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm, and asked permission to seat himself beside them. He seemed to have been drinking whisky, as he had dropped his natural shell of reticence. He spoke of hydrotherapy and gymnastic exercises, and called himself a quack. It was the gymnastics, he said, that had given his daughter the idea of taking up dancing. As if to challenge the others, he elaborated bold philosophic theories, dealing out one wild statement after the other, each of which would have been a trump sufficient to end the game for ten German Philistines. To believe his own word, he was a terroristic Anarchist, a white-slave trafficker, an adventurer always. At any rate, he espoused the cause of all who were Anarchists, procurers, or adventurers. He argued in all superiority, upon egotistic grounds, calling these the intellectuals, and all others, creatures without brains; in which his philosophy showed some similarity to Frederick von Kammacher's new philosophy, now that Frederick had entered upon a new phase of his life.

"America," said Hahlström, "is known to have been settled by rogues. Were you to spread a tent over America, you would have the most beautiful, the most comfortable penitentiary in the world. The natural form that survives and triumphs in America is the great rascal, the great Renaissance idiot. In fact, it is the one form that will triumph throughout the world. You'll see some day how the great American rascal will get the whole of Europe, including England, into his clutches. Europe is also dabbling a little in Renaissance ideals and Renaissance beasts. It is busily working away, so to speak, on its own rascalization. But America is in advance by ten horse lengths. Europe's Cesare Borgias sit in the cafes with _Glockenröcken à la Biedermaier_ and give voice to their criminal genius in fairly innocent verses. They all look sickly, as if a barber had cupped all the blood out of their veins. If Europe wants to save herself, she has only one hope--to make a law by which it will be a crime to surrender an adventurer, an embezzler, a fraudulent bankrupt, the keeper of a disorderly house, a thief, or a murderer to America. On German, English and French vessels in American ports, such people have already been placed under the special protection of Europe. Then you will see how soon Europe will outdistance Uncle Sam."

The physicians burst out laughing.

"When did geniuses ever do anything morally? Even the creator of heaven and earth did not know how to. He produced an immoral world. Every high form of human intellectual activity has thrown ethics overboard. What would a historian be who, instead of making researches, would moralise? What would a physician be who would stop to moralise? Or a great statesman, who would toe the chalk-line of your middle-class ten commandments? As for an artist, when he moralises, he is a fool and a knave. And please tell me, what sort of a business would the church do if all of us were moral? There would be no church."

There was a cold gleam of audaciousness in the Swede's eyes. His utterances produced a strange impression. Even if he had pronounced fewer wild paradoxes, Frederick von Kammacher would have succumbed to his spell. He eagerly sought for resemblances between father and daughter, or, more accurately, he observed them without seeking. They were very evident to one who, alas, to his own torture, was carrying the daughter's picture alive in his soul. As long as the Swede spoke, he could not help wavering between repugnance and admiration, and he kept asking himself whether this man was really the sort of person that Arthur Stoss had described him to be, no gentleman, a weakling, an idle ragamuffin.

XXIII

As they arose from table and were ascending the companionway to the deck, Hahlström suddenly said to Frederick:

"My daughter is expecting you. We have a friend on board, Mr. Achleitner, a soft creature, but the possessor of much money, which he doesn't know the best way to get rid of. So he made it worth while for one of the officers to give up his luxurious cabin opening on deck to my daughter. Unfortunately, that gives him the right to make an unmitigated nuisance of himself sometimes."

When the men entered the comparatively roomy cabin on deck, they found Achleitner sitting on a rather unsteady chair, while Mara, carefully wrapped up, was lying stretched out on a couch. She instantly called to her father, please to remove Mr. Achleitner, who was boring her, and signified to Frederick that she had a special favour to ask of him. Hahlström and Achleitner obediently withdrew, and Frederick _nolens volens_ had to seat himself on the camp-chair.

"How can I be of service?" he asked.

She put one of those inconsequential requests with which she liked to busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many people were not doing something for her, she felt neglected.

"But if you don't want to do it," she added--it was to get her a bottle of perfume, or something of the sort, for which a stewardess would have been the right person to ask--"but if you don't want to do it, then please don't. I should prefer it if you didn't. In fact, if I bore you, I would just as soon sit alone."

Frederick realised that this beginning was a foolish expression of embarrassment.

"I should like to be of service to you in anything I can, and you don't in the least bore me."

That was the truth. Alone with Ingigerd in her cabin, where the vessel's motion was less perceptible, he was sensitive to the full fascination of her presence. The pangs of the ocean crossing had given her sweet girlish face a waxen transparency. At her request the stewardess had loosened her hair, and it lay spread in a golden flood over her white pillow, a golden flood, the sight of which was highly disturbing to Frederick. Where was there an adornment for the head, a queen's diadem, which could exercise so powerful, so divine a charm? It seemed to Frederick as if that tremendous vessel, with its hundreds of human ants, were nothing more than the cocoon of this tiny silkworm, this delicately coloured, delicious little butterfly; as if the sixty naked helots down at the ship's bottom shovelling coal into the white heat under the boilers, were toiling and sweating merely to be of service to this childish Venus; as if the captain and officers were the paladins of the queen, and the rest of the crew her following; as if the steerage were rilled with blindly devoted slaves, and as if the _Roland_ were proudly carrying a fairy tale from "A Thousand and One Nights" across the salt desert.

"Did I hurt your feelings yesterday by telling you my story?" she asked suddenly.

"Mine? No! You are the injured one in the life you have unfortunately led."

She looked at him with a sardonic smile, plucking a pink wad from the lid of a box of sweetmeats beside her. In her looks and smiles, Frederick felt her cold, wicked enjoyment. And since he was a man and knew he was impotent in the face of such fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury mounted in him, driving the blood into his eyes and causing him involuntarily to clench his fists. His full-blooded nature occasionally had need of such frenzy. It was a phenomenon with which his friends were familiar.

"What is the matter with you?" whispered Ingigerd, plucking at the pink wad. "I am not afraid of a monk like you."

Her remark was not calculated to calm Frederick's passionate surge. However, he mastered his feelings with evident, redoubled exertion of his will power. Had he not succeeded in controlling himself, he might have more resembled a Papuan negro than a European. He might have turned into a beast in human form, and might have thrown overboard, as he himself clearly felt, more than was good of what both self-acquired and imposed culture had formed in him. He had no desire to turn into another animal in Circe's stables.

It was as if Ingigerd were the very incarnation of the evil Psyche, so few of a man's feelings were concealed from her. She knew what fight Frederick had just fought and she knew he had conquered.

"Oh, I wanted to become a nun once myself," she said, and began in a mixture of truth and fiction to prattle of a year she had spent in a convent. "I wanted to turn good, but didn't get very far. I am religious. Really I am. I can say so with a clear conscience. Anybody with whom I don't feel I could pray to God, is disgusting to me. Perhaps, after all, I shall end by being a nun, but not because I am pious." She did not realise how egregiously she was contradicting herself. "Oh, no! It wouldn't occur to me to be pious. I don't believe in anything but myself. Life is short, and nothing is coming afterward. A person ought to enjoy life. A person who deprives himself of a single enjoyment sins against himself, beside practising self-deception."

She was led to speak of her mother. Frederick was startled by the hatred, the vulgarity with which she referred to her.

"I could kill her," she said, "although, or just because she is my mother." Her face lost its purity of expression and assumed an ugly, repulsive look. "With papa it is different. But it gets to be an awful nuisance always to be dragging him about with me."

The stewardess came in. She spoke to Ingigerd in a loud, cheery way.

"Better here than down below, isn't it, Miss?"

She bolstered up her cushions, rearranged her coverings, and left again.

"The silly thing has already fallen in love with me, too," said Ingigerd.

"Why am I sitting here?" Frederick thought, and was about to attempt in all kindness to remove the cataract from the eyes of the foolish little creature. Why did great waves of pity keep sweeping over him? Pity for which she did not ask. Why could he not rid himself of the idea of innocence, of chastity, of the uncontaminated while in the presence of this child fiend? She seemed pure and unsullied, and each capricious movement, each remark of hers only heightened the impression of touching helplessness.

"All love is pity." This sentence of Schopenhauer's, which he held to be both true and paradoxical, flashed into his mind. He took one of her dolls in his hand, and tried in the kindly way that he had acquired with his patients to make Ingigerd Hahlström understand that one does not go through life unpunished in the belief that life is mere doll's play.

"Your dolls," he said, "are actually beasts of prey. Woe to you, if you don't realise they are beasts before they bury their claws in your flesh and rend you with their fangs."

She gave a short laugh without answering. She complained of a pain in her breast.

"You're a physician. Won't you examine me?"

"That's Doctor Wilhelm's business," Frederick answered brusquely.

"Well," she said, "if I am in pain and you as a physician can stop the pain, but don't want to, your friendship cannot amount to much."

Frederick did not turn a deaf ear to this correct reasoning. He had long before realised that her delicate constitution was with difficulty holding the balance between debit and credit. Each instant it was in danger of losing its balance.

"If I were your physician," he said, "I should send you to live for three years with a German country pastor, or an American farmer. I should not let you see anybody but the old pastor or the old farmer and his wife and their daughters. I should not let you go to see a play, let alone appear on the stage yourself. It is those cursed variety shows that have sent you to the dogs, physically and morally."

"I am a ruffian," he thought, "and there's medicine for her."

"Do you want to become a farmer?"

"Why?"

"Because you are already a pastor," she laughed.

The conversation was interrupted by the screeching of a cockatoo on a stand in the back of the cabin. Until then Frederick had not noticed it.

"What else will be turning up? Where did you get that beast?"

She laughed again.

"Please give me the beast. Koko! Koko!" Frederick arose and let the great, rosy-white seafarer clamber on his hand. "I like animals better than I do most people I meet," she said.

The bird kept screaming "Cockatoo!" until Frederick felt it fairly applied to him.

In the meantime the _Roland_, sinking into deep troughs and climbing over watery mountain crests in an ocean that was like a great machine regularly at work, had plowed its way into fog. The siren was bellowing.

"Fog?" exclaimed Ingigerd. Every bit of blood vanished from her face, which was already too pale. "But I am never afraid," she added immediately, took a bonbon in her mouth, and let the cockatoo nibble at it. The bird unfeelingly trod on the girl's beautifully heaving breast. She made it sing _Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_ and some well-known music-hall airs, and told stories of her menagerie.

Every instant Frederick had to perform some small service, and while she was giving an enthusiastic description of a little monkey from Java that she had once owned, he asked himself whether he was a physician, a nurse, a hairdresser, a chambermaid, or a steward, and whether Ingigerd Hahlström would not in the end reduce him to a messenger boy.

He yearned to be on deck in the open air.

Soon after, Achleitner entered with an anxious, questioning expression in his eyes, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him back to the girl's couch.

XXIV

"What is to become of me?" Frederick questioned himself. He scarcely heard Hans Füllenberg's jolly shout of greeting as the young man reeled past. Hans Füllenberg did not fail to observe whose door it was that Frederick von Kammacher had just closed behind him, nor that, as he stood there with the knob still in his hand, he seemed to be in a state of indecision and absorption.

The siren was sending up its deafening roar. It was that wild, fearful, ascending cry, as if torn from the breast of a monster bull, which he had first heard on the tender. There was something menacing in it, and at the same time something of an anxious warning. Frederick never heard it without applying menace and warning to himself. Likewise, the driving mist seemed to be a reflection of his soul; or his soul a reflection of the driving mist and also of the vessel, as it struggled onward into the unknown, unseeing and unseen. He stepped over to the railing and looked straight down the ship's side. There he could tell with what tremendous rapidity the _Roland_ was cleaving the water.

"Isn't man's courage utter madness?" he thought. Could any one, from captain to the lowest sailor, prevent the propeller-shaft from snapping at any moment? The screw was constantly rising and buzzing in the air. Who could sight a vessel in time to prevent the collision that would inevitably smash in the thin walls of the great hollow body? Who could hope to avoid one of the many derelicts drifting in the fog almost submerged? What would happen if the might of the waves were to hurl that great lumped mass of wood and iron against the _Roland's_ side? What would happen if the engines were to break down? If a boiler were to prove unequal to the uninterrupted strain put upon it? Then, too, icebergs were met with in those waters. And suppose the storm were to grow worse.

The things that European civilisation has accomplished are tremendous. The trouble is, the object to which the means are applied is not worthy of the means. The how is great. The wherefore receives only a stammering reply. So much is certain, that the life of the average man to-day is fuller of adventure and heroism than the life of a bold adventurer a hundred and fifty years ago.

Frederick went to the smoking-room on deck. He found the card players, Doctor Wilhelm, Arthur Stoss, Professor Toussaint and some more gentlemen gathered over their afternoon coffee.

"Hullo!" they shouted when he appeared in the doorway.

The room smelled strong of coffee and the pungent odour of tobacco. In the instant that Frederick held the door open, the wreaths of mist and heavy tobacco smoke met.

"What's the matter, gentlemen?" Frederick asked.

"Did you operate on the dancer," someone cried, "to remove that mole two inches from her backbone right over her left hip?"

Frederick turned pale, and said nothing. Had he uttered a single word, the result might have been a scandal, perhaps even a duel, out there on the high seas.

He seated himself beside Doctor Wilhelm and acted as if the shout of greeting and the unknown man's question had not referred to him. Doctor Wilhelm proposed a game of chess. Frederick accepted, and while playing, he had time to choke down his humiliation and resentment. He glanced about furtively to find the speaker.

"There are some people, Doctor von Kammacher," Arthur Stoss said in a raised voice, "who leave their decency in Europe when they travel to America, though that does not reduce the price of the passage."

The man at whom the remark was aimed left it unanswered.

"But, Mr. Stoss," said an elderly man from Hamburg, whose conscience in regard to the offence thrust upon Frederick was evidently clear, "we're not in a ladies' parlour, and we needn't take jokes amiss."

"I am not in favour of jokes," said Stoss, "that are made at the expense of persons who are near at hand, but not present, especially when a lady is concerned. I am still less in favour of them when they are coarse and indecent."

"Oh, Mr. Stoss," rejoined the man from Hamburg, "everything in its place. I have nothing against sermons, but we're having bad weather here on the ocean and this room is not a church."

"Besides, nobody mentioned names," another man said.

Here the American jackanapes joined in the cross talk.

"When Mr. Stoss is in New York," he said drily, "he will hold services every night at Webster and Forster's."

"Some American youngsters are celebrated for their cheek," Stoss countered.

"Directly after the celebrated Barrison sisters' appearance, after the song 'Linger Longer Loo,' Mr. Stoss will raise his hands to heaven and beg the audience to pray." The American spoke without moving a muscle of his face. He had the last word. The next instant the slim young fellow was outside the door.

Arthur Stoss had the pleasure of knowing he was a fool for his pains. But, like Frederick, he paid no attention to the thrust, or to the laughter it provoked.

"People are very much mistaken," he said, turning to Professor Toussaint, who was sitting beside him and to whom he had been introduced a few minutes before, "if they suppose that morality among vaudeville performers is laxer than among any other set of persons. It's an absolutely false assumption. A performer above the average, who must always be at the very height of his powers, has to practise moderation to the point of abstinence if he wants to remain on top. Does anybody suppose that a loose life is compatible with those startlingly bold feats that an acrobat does every day and tries to improve upon every day? Damn it! It's something to make your ordinary mortal marvel at. Why, to do any one of the many things we do, we have to practise asceticism and chastity, and patiently peg away day after day at hard, dangerous work. Your plain business man, who never omits his glass of beer, has no idea what it is like." He continued to sing the praises of vaudeville actors.

"May I ask what your specialty is, Mr. Stoss?" asked Hans Füllenberg.

"A very easy specialty, once you know how. But if it should ever come to a duel between you and me, young man, you'd have to choose what eye or ear or tooth you'd be ready to part with."

"He's as good a shot as Carver," someone said. "He can take the middle right out of an ace three or four times in succession."

"Just like any other display of skill. But don't for a moment suppose, gentlemen, that even if a man has arms and doesn't have to hold the gun with his feet and pull the trigger with his toes, that he learns how to do it without sweating and self-denial and endless patience."

"Somebody said you play the violin like Sarasate," said Hans Füllenberg.

"Not exactly. Nor need I, considering the way I was born. But I am fond of music and my audiences go wild over my playing."

Captain von Kessel entered. He was received with a general "Ah!" Through the door burst a great wave of sunlight.

"The barometer is rising, gentlemen."

The fog had lifted, and now the men in the smoking-room realised that the _Roland_ was rocking no more than easily and comfortably and was making its way with majestic speed.

This acted like a charm. The captain left the door open and had Pander hook it back. A man, who had been lying asleep in a corner--in that half sleep which is the mildest symptom of seasickness--rose to a sitting posture and rubbed his eyes. Hans Füllenberg and a number of other men hastened out on deck. Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, who had lost the game, followed.

XXV

The two physicians paced the full length of the promenade deck. The air was mild. The ship was moving quietly, as if its great body took delight in pushing onward through none but low waves. It was surprising to see how gay the life on deck was. They were constantly raising their hats and making way for somebody. The stewards had carried the news of the good weather down to the passengers in their stuffy cabins, and all the seasick travellers had come crawling on deck. There was much talking and laughing. Each moment brought fresh surprise over the galaxy of merry women that had kept themselves stowed away in the _Roland's_ interior. It was just an ordinary Saturday afternoon in January; yet suddenly an atmosphere of festivity prevailed not to be outdone by a Christmas eve.

Hans Füllenberg passed by. He was cracking jokes for everybody's benefit and flirting desperately with his Englishwoman, who had recovered from her seasickness. She had found a friend, a woman in a fur cap and coat, with a magnificent crown of light hair, like a Swedish woman's. She seemed to be greatly amused by Füllenberg's poor jokes and poor English. He had abstracted her muff and was alternately conveying it to his stomach, his heart, and--this very passionately--his mouth. The young American jackanapes was promenading with his Canadian, who looked very haughty and blasé, yet much fresher. The delicate creature seemed to be shivering with cold, though she was wearing an elegant coat of Canadian sable, which reached to her knees. Frederick greeted the clothing manufacturer, whom his steward had helped up on deck. He had been lying in his cabin more dead than alive, and his steward had been feeding him on nothing but Malaga grapes.

Ingigerd was holding court on the port side in front of her cabin, the door to which stood open, it flattering her vanity to have the many promenaders see and envy the privilege she was enjoying.

"If it is agreeable to you, Doctor Wilhelm, let us remain this side of the Rubicon. That little girl slightly bores me. By the way, can you tell me how I came to bring down on myself that shout when I entered the smoking-room and that man's vulgar remark? To be sure, as a physician and free-thinker it's a matter of indifference to me."

"Oh," said Wilhelm, trying by an air of lightness to appease Frederick, "this is all it was. Füllenberg probably saw you coming out of Miss Hahlström's cabin, and said something in the smoking-room. You know his mischievous way."

"I'll box his ears," said Frederick.

"The trouble is, the little girl is making herself generally conspicuous. The worst rumours are afloat about her. All men seem alike to her, whether stewards, firemen, sailors, or cabin-boys. And that greasy Achleitner! I assure you, all over the ship, in the forecastle, among the stewards when they polish the silver, and in the officers' cabins, they do nothing but titter and laugh at her and Achleitner and anybody falling under suspicion on her account."

"Don't you think that's slander?"

"Why, you and I are physicians. I don't care a fig one way or the other."

Frederick laughed. "I have set my all on nothing."

Suddenly he said:

"You're right. I'm of the same opinion. I must really throw overboard that old idealistic German Adam sticking in me like a Sunday afternoon preacher."

The two men laughed. Their mood turned merrier, chiming in with the general atmosphere of hilarity.

One reason for this predominating sense of happiness was the fact that all the passengers, after struggling with nausea and sleeplessness during those miserable, crawling, endless hours in the doleful grave of their cabins, had learned to appreciate the value of mere healthy existence. Merely to live, merely to live! That was the cry that rang in every step, every laugh, every word, drowning all care. None of those concerns which each of them had dragged on board, whether from Europe or America, now had the least might. Merely to live was to win in the great lottery. They knew sunshine follows rain, and they said to themselves, "If worse comes to worst, you will willingly put up with bread and salt and a hoe and a vegetable garden, and no one in the world will be a happier mortal than you."

Those promenading men and women were each glad of the other's existence. They loved one another and were ready without hesitation to commit all sorts of follies, deeming them mere bagatelles, which on solid land they would never have condoned in themselves. Their rejoicing was a crucible melting together all the barriers by which convention divides man from man. They experienced a sense of relief and liberation, and drew in deep breaths of this atmosphere of freedom.

At the captain's order, the band set up its music stands and instruments on deck amidships; and when the blithe strains resounded through the whole of the _Roland_, that was the climax of festivity. For half an hour it seemed as if the few clouds floating in the blue sky, the steamer, the people on the steamer, and the ocean had agreed to dance a quadrille.

For moments at a time the waves would form the droll, chubby-cheeked face of a jolly old man. All at once the dreadful old man of the sea had turned good-humoured. He even seemed to be in a jocular mood and displayed a certain clumsy vanity in letting his puppets, swarms of flying fish, dance their dance, too, in a circle about the _Roland_. Perhaps, at his bidding, a whale would soon be spouting. Indeed, within a few minutes, the immigrants on the fore-deck were shouting, "Dolphins!"

The gentlemen could not for any length of time avoid Ingigerd.

"Theridium triste, the gallows spider, you know," said Wilhelm, as they approached her.

"How so?" said Frederick, slightly startled.

"You know what a gallows spider does near an ant nest. It sits on the top of its blade of grass, and when a myrmidon passes below, it throws a little skein of cobweb at its head. The ant does the rest. It gets tangled up until it is absolutely helpless, and then the tiny little spider comfortably eats it up."

"If you had seen her dance," said Frederick, "you would be more inclined to assign her the rôle of the ant throttled by the spider."

"I don't know who," said Wilhelm, "but some poet says, the sex is strongest when it is weak."

Ingigerd was able to boast a new sensation, which she owed to Mr. Rinck, the officer in charge of the mail, a pretty little dog, a ball of white wool, scarcely larger than a man's two fists put together. The polar bear in miniature was barking wildly in its ridiculous thin falsetto at the great ship's cat, which Mr. Rinck was holding to its nose.

"With your permission, Mr. Rinck, we shall sleep well to-night," said Wilhelm.

"I always sleep well," replied the other phlegmatically. Close to the cat's soft, heavy, hanging body, his cigarette, as always, was burning between the fingers of his right hand.

The cat spat, the dog barked. The piping sound drilled Frederick's ears like needle pricks. Ingigerd laughed and kissed the little yelper.

Wilhelm began a conversation by telling of the tremendous amount of work Mr. Rinck had to do between Cuxhaven and New York.

"Just take a look here, Doctor von Kammacher," he said, opening a door nearby, through which one could look into a deep, square pit filled half way up to the top with thousands of packages of all sizes. "Mr. Rinck has to arrange all of these."

"Exclusive of the letters," Mr. Rinck supplemented phlegmatically.

"Theridium triste," thought Frederick. He seemed to himself like an ant trying head over heels to escape the spell of the little spider, whose golden cobweb in long, open strands was luring on its victims.

"That Rinck," said Wilhelm, as they resumed their promenading, "is a peculiar sort of chap. It is worth the while to get to know him. Twenty years ago he suffered hard luck from a woman of the same type as little Miss Hahlström. Men should never marry women of that type. Ever since, he has been indifferently facing every sort of death on all the waters of the globe, not to mention an attempt at suicide. You ought to hear him talk. It is very difficult to get him to do it, because he doesn't drink. You can't succeed until you have been on four or five trips with him. People speak a great deal of fatalism, but to most of them the idea is merely a paper idea. To Rinck it is not a paper idea."

The life on deck kept assuming a more and more unconcerned, mundane aspect. Frederick was astonished to see so many persons from Berlin whom he knew by sight. Professor Toussaint introduced himself, and led Frederick to his wife, who was lying stretched out in a steamer chair. Their attempt at what is called conversation resulted in a few sickly sprouts.

"I am making this trip at the invitation of an American friend," Toussaint explained somewhat condescendingly, and mentioned the name of a well-known millionaire. "Even if I receive orders over there, I will not allow myself to be persuaded into making America my home. Interest in art should be elevated--" The pale, aristocratic man with the care-worn expression went on to expatiate upon his hopes and troubles, while his wife, who was still beautiful, looked on with a blasé expression of irony. Probably without being conscious of it, Professor Toussaint too frequently referred to the United States as the dollar land.

On the after-deck the passengers in unrestrained jollity, had begun to dance. It was Hans Füllenberg, the ever vivacious Berlinese, who had taken the lead. Inspired by the Strauss waltz that the band was playing he had engaged the lady in the fur coat. A number of other couples followed their example, and there, under the bright sky, an informal ball was opened, which did not end until sundown.

When the musicians with their shining brass instruments were about to make their way inconspicuously below deck, the passengers detained them, and in the twinkling of an eye, a large collection was taken up. Thereupon the dance music began again, even blither than before.

XXVI

Doctor Wilhelm was summoned away, and after a while Frederick succeeded in taking leave of Toussaint and his wife. He remained alone. The clear heavens, the deep blue sea, smooth as glass, calmed as if by a miracle, the music, the dancing, the sunlight, and the dear, sweet, pacifying, all-forgiving letter of his mother--it was in his pocket--awakened in him a fresh, pleasant sense of vitality.

"Life," he said to himself, "is always this way or that, a moment filled with pain or pleasure, with darkness or brightness, with sunlight or heavy, black clouds; and according to the moment in which we view our past and future, these will darken or brighten. Should existence in the shining light possess lesser reality than existence in the dark?" "No, it should not," was the answer that came from everything within and about him, filling him with youthful, almost childlike joy.

Frederick had pushed back his slouched hat, had unbuttoned his light overcoat, and was standing with his arms crooked over the railing. He looked out upon the sea. He felt the pulse beats of the engines, his ears were filled with the pliant, melodious chords of the Viennese waltz; the whole world had turned into a brilliant, lively, sparkling ballroom. He had suffered and caused others to suffer. Now he embraced all those through whom he had suffered and who had suffered through him, and seemed to wed them in blissful intoxication.

At this point Ingigerd Hahlström passed by with the giant Von Halm. Frederick heard her say she did not dance, that dancing was an insipid pleasure. With that, he started away from the railing, went up to the Canadian, and in a peculiar, fiery German manner ruthlessly drew her away from the young American, who was completely taken aback. It was evident that the delicate, exotic woman, whose breast rose and fell convulsively, took pleasure in that strong conqueror's arm as they circled about in the dance.

At the conclusion of the dance, he found himself under the necessity of murdering French and English with her for a time and was very glad when he could gracefully deliver her over again to the jealous young American.

Stoss was being transported across the deck by his valet, who, as always, held him by his coat collar.

"My private overland and oversea express," he called to Frederick.

Frederick pulled up a steamer chair for him in a sudden impulse to chat with Stoss.

"If the weather remains like this," said Stoss, after his valet had carefully and skilfully seated him in the chair, "we can reach Hoboken some time on Tuesday. But only if the weather does remain like this. The captain tells me that when we are running under full steam, as now, we make sixteen knots an hour."

Frederick started. So Tuesday this life under the same roof with Ingigerd was to end.

Frederick had been profoundly humiliated by the coarse insult offered him in the smoking-room. He knew of no other way to escape the impression of it except by a sort of ostrich policy. For that reason he had passed over the incident lightly when speaking to Doctor Wilhelm. Once his feeling of delicacy, smarting like a sensitive nerve, had ceased to ache so intensely, he looked upon the scandal much as a somnambulist would look upon the thing that has awakened him and guarded him against a humiliating fall. For more than half an hour his passion for the little devil of a dancer had turned into disgust and repugnance, until now he suddenly had to admit once again that separation from her was inconceivable.

"That little dancer is a piquant wench," said Stoss, as if he had divined Frederick's thoughts. "It would not seem at all strange to me if an inexperienced man were to fall into her toils. I think she resembles one of the younger Barrison sisters, who sing 'Linger Longer Lucy, Linger Longer Loo.' A man must certainly don armour in dealing with her."

"I am completely at a loss to understand," lied Frederick, "how I ever came to fall under suspicion with that creature. She is of absolutely no interest to me."

"Good Lord, Doctor von Kammacher! Who doesn't fall under suspicion with her?" He laughed unblushingly. "I myself did."

Frederick suffered. He looked sidewise at the armless trunk, and his soul writhed in humiliation at the thought of his own ridiculousness.

Stoss went on to philosophise on erotics in general. He, the Don Juan without arms, read Frederick a lecture on the art of handling women. This led to his boasting, which detracted markedly from his quality of fineness. His intellect also shrank in direct proportion to the increase of his vanity. Something seemed to be working in him impelling him to impress people at all costs with his successes as a man.

A servant-girl led two children by. Frederick drew a breath of relief, for she diverted Stoss from his unsavoury theme.

"Well, Rosa," he called, "how is Mrs. Liebling?" It was his habit to obtrude himself upon everybody. From the gossip of Bulke, his valet, he had learned of Rosa and her cross. The difficult lady she served was the excitable person of whom the barber had told Frederick and with whom he was acquainted from certain impressions of his hearing. Rosa, who was carrying Ella Liebling, a girl of five years, on her crimson arm, looked pleased and laughed.

"She is not coming on deck. She's taken up with fortune-telling and table-turning."

Bulke, in whose eyes Rosa seemed to have found unqualified favour, took Siegfried Liebling, a boy of seven, from her hand and helped her place both children safely in steamer chairs.

"There is nothing to beat a crazy woman," Stoss declared. "That Mrs. Liebling actually called in Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, to help her with Rosa"--the very Rosa, who unwearyingly and self-sacrificingly worked for her day and night, in good weather and bad. The worst to be said against her was that at utmost she was a little too ready with her tongue.

XXVII

The music was still playing, the sun was still shining from a slightly clouded sky. On the dry deck the travelling city, in the gayest, most superficial mood, was still dancing in the face of the infiniteness of heaven and sea. A steward came up to Frederick and presented the second engineer, who brought a message from Doctor Wilhelm asking Frederick to come to him immediately. The engineer led Frederick to the engine-room and down a perpendicular iron ladder. The warm, heavy smell of oil almost robbed Frederick of his breath. The downward climb seemed endless.

On all sides the engines were working. Frederick glanced at the gigantic cylinders, in which the compressed steam was moving pistons up and down like pump handles. The pistons communicated their motion to the big shaft running aft along the keel to the stern, and the revolutions of the shaft in turn produced the revolutions of the screw propelling the vessel across the Atlantic.

Oilers holding oil cans and waste clambered in and out of the rotating masses of iron with astounding sureness and boldness. To graze one of the fly-wheels, or to step one inch within the unguarded circle of their revolution, was to receive a deadly blow. Here was the heart and soul of the vessel, the real modern miracle of strength, the like of which no age in the past has been able to produce. An iron soul, a steely heart. It was as if one were descending below earth into the glowing workshop of Vulcan of old, the lame god, who did not demonstrate the full skill of his divinity until our times.

Still deeper down went the descent, to where, from numerous shovels handled by almost naked helots, coal was flying into the white heat under the boilers, into a row of gaping jaws of fire. Frederick felt as if he had reached the heart of a crater. It was a black shaft smelling of coal, slag, and burning things. Apparently it was lighted only by the constant opening of the furnace doors, spitting white heat. How was it possible for such a conflagration to be contained in the _Roland's_ interior without reducing the whole to ashes? What a conquest to fight such a sea of fire, to keep it in check, and carry it through sea and storm; to manage that it should carry itself three or six thousand miles in the ocean in fair weather or foul, hidden away and absolutely innocuous.

Frederick panted for breath. The glowing heat of the abyss instantly brought the perspiration pouring out on his face and neck. He was so absorbed in the novelty of the impressions that he completely forgot he was surrounded by water about twenty feet under the surface of the sea. Suddenly, he became aware of Doctor Wilhelm's presence, and in the same instant saw a man entirely naked stretched out like a corpse, a white body on the black coal dust. The man had ceased to breathe.

In a second Frederick, now wholly the physician, had Doctor Wilhelm's stethoscope in his hand and was listening to the man's heart. His mates, blackened with coal from head to foot, were ceaselessly at work in the engine's unremitting service, shovelling coal, opening the furnace doors, and slamming them shut. They scarcely cast a glance at their fallen comrade, and that only when they stopped to gulp a glass of beer or water.

"It was hardly three minutes ago," said Doctor Wilhelm, "that he broke down. That man over there, the one who has just washed himself, is his successor."

"He was just about to throw coal into the furnace," explained the engineer who had called for Frederick, shouting at the top of his voice to make himself heard above the clanging of the shovels and the banging of the iron doors, "when his shovel flew out of his hand about twelve feet away and almost struck a coal-trimmer. He was hired in Hamburg. The moment he set foot on board, I thought, 'If only you pull through, my boy.' He joked about himself. He said, 'If my heart is good.' I was sorry for him. He wanted to cross the great pond, and that was his only way of getting over. He wanted, no matter how, to see his brother again, his only living relative, or somebody else. They hadn't seen each other for fourteen years."

"_Exitus_," said Frederick, after a prolonged investigation of the man's heart. Even a few moments after the stethoscope had been removed, one could see the ring it made on his bluish, waxen skin. His chin dropped. They put it back in place, and Frederick bound his jaws with his white handkerchief. "He had a bad fall," Frederick remarked. It may actually have been the unfortunate fall to which the helot owed his death. There was a deep bleeding gash in his temple from the edge of a large nut. "Probably a heart stroke," Frederick added, "the result of the heat and over-exertion." He looked at the dead man, then at his mates, naked, blackened, illuminated by the jaws of the glowing furnaces, and thought of the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." If we were to take the commandment literally, how far should we get?

The physicians mounted on deck, and several of the men picked up the victim of civilisation, the modern galley-slave, still covered with the sweat of his fearful occupation. With the handkerchief about his head, he looked as if he were suffering from toothache. They carried him up out of the glowing pit to the cabin set aside for dead bodies.

Doctor Wilhelm had to notify the captain. Nobody on deck, where the band was playing the last measures, was to suspect that a stoker had died. With the help of the Red Cross sister, they stretched him on a mattress, and within a short time a circle of the higher officials of the vessel, at their head the captain, and among them the purser and the physicians, were gathered about the corpse.

Captain von Kessel ordered the stoker's death to be kept secret, particularly requesting the two physicians not to mention it. Formalities had to be gone through, documents had to be drawn up and signed. This kept them busy until dark, when the first call for dinner was trumpeted across the deck and through the gangways of the first-class section.

XXVIII

Frederick went to his cabin and removed the grey suit he had worn in the purgatory of the stoke-hole. He put on striped trousers, a black waistcoat, and black frock coat. By the time he appeared in the dining-room, a lively procession of brilliant toilettes was already making its way there. Almost all the ladies of the first class came rustling in. Frederick from his seat observed that many of them had to stop for an instant at the doorway to pluck up their courage. Then, with a charmingly humorous smile, they would conquer their dread of seasickness, particularly threatening in the dining-room, and step over the threshold.

Save for the slight quiver that ran through the walls and ceilings of the whole vessel, its motion was scarcely perceptible. The music began, and the swarm of stewards in livery, who came hurrying in, could serve each guest with a full plate of soup without need of balancing.

"A full-dress dinner," said the captain with a contented glance about the room as he seated himself.

Fish was already being served when Ingigerd entered on the arm of the very ungainly and very ordinary looking Achleitner. At the sight of her absurd get-up, Frederick felt like sinking through the floor. The barber had piled her beautiful light hair into a fearful mountain of puffs, and about her narrow shoulders she wore a Spanish shawl, as if to represent Carmen--a very pitiful Carmen, who provoked jeers and jibes from one end of the table to the other.

"What deadly green stockings!" Frederick thought, as he choked down a piece of fish with the bones in it.

"Why in the name of sense does she wear those bronze slippers?"

"Some chalk, please, for the lady," said one man. "She is going to dance the tight rope for us."

Mischievous looks and remarks flew about the table. Both the ladies and the gentlemen choked over their fish or wine and had to hold their napkins to their lips. Not all of their remarks were pronounced _sotto voce_, and among the card players, who were again drinking champagne, the jokes aimed at Ingigerd and Achleitner were particularly loud and coarse.

Could Frederick believe his eyes? Terror shot to his heart. That sad little monstrosity was walking toward him--stood next to him in compromising intimacy--was saying poutingly:

"When are you going to pay me a visit again?"

Frederick made some inconsequential reply.

Necks in standing collars, bare throats encircled with gold chains and pearls turned toward the captain's table. Frederick could not recall ever having had an experience so painfully humiliating. Ingigerd saw nothing and felt nothing. Achleitner, however, seemed to be rather ill at ease under the perceptible cross-fire of the animated company, and tried to lead her away. Finally, she left the tortured man, saying:

"My, you're dull and stupid! I don't like you." At which the captain's corner burst into a prolonged laugh, which was a relief to everybody's but Frederick's feelings.

"I assure you," said Frederick, with a tolerable attempt at dry irony, "I don't know what I have done to deserve this distinction, or what I shall do to deserve it in the future."

Then they spoke of other things.

The clear weather and the prospect of a peaceful night filled the festive diners with undimmed gaiety. They ate, they drank, they laughed, they flirted, all in the delightful consciousness that they were citizens of the departing nineteenth century, with the probability of being citizens of the even grander twentieth century.

XXIX

After dinner the two physicians went to Doctor Wilhelm's cabin, where they sat together discussing the resultant of modern civilisation.

"I very much fear, very much, indeed," said Frederick, "that our world-wide means of communication, which mankind is supposed to own, really own mankind. At least so far, I see no signs that the tremendous working capacity of machines has lessened human labour. Nobody will deny that our modern machine slavery, on so tremendous a scale, is the most imposing slavery that has ever existed. And there is no denying that it is slavery. Has this age of machinery subtracted from the sum of human misery? No, most emphatically, no! Has it enhanced happiness and increased the chances for happiness? No, again."

"That is why every three or four men of culture," said Doctor Wilhelm, "are disciples of Schopenhauer. Modern Buddhism is making rapid strides."

"Yes," said Frederick, "because we are living in a world all the time making a tremendous impression upon itself. As a result, it is getting to be more and more fearfully bored. The man of the intellectual middle class is gaining in prominence, while he is more mediocre than he has been in any previous age. At the same time he is glutted and more blasé. No form of idealism, no sort of genuinely great belief can hold its ground any longer."

"I admit," said Wilhelm, "that the great industrial corporation, civilisation, is parsimonious of everything except human lives and the best that is in the human being. It places no value upon them. It lets them rot. But I think there is one comfort. I think civilisation possesses this one good, that it breaks us away once for all with the worst savageries of the past. No inquisition, for instance, can ever be possible again."

"Are you sure of it?" asked Frederick. "Don't you think it is strange that alongside the greatest achievements of science, alongside Galileo, Kepler, Laplace; alongside the spectrum analysis and the law of the conservation of energy; alongside Kirchoff and Bunsen; alongside steam, gas, electricity, the blindest and most antiquated superstitions still survive, powerful as ever? I am not so certain that backsliding into the most horrible times of the _Malleus maleficarum_ is impossible."

Doctor Wilhelm had rung for a steward, who now entered. Max Pander appeared at the same time.

"Doctor von Kammacher, I feel as if we must have some champagne. Adolph," turning to the steward, "a bottle of Pommery."

"They're making a big hole in the champagne cellar," said Adolph.

"Of course. The people are all celebrating their escape from drowning yesterday and day before yesterday."

Pander had come at the captain's order for the stoker's death certificate. The document was lying ready in the medicine closet. After Pander had left, Wilhelm told Frederick some remarkable incidents of the dead man.

"His name was Zickelmann. There was the beginning of a letter in his pocket. It was something like this: 'Dear mother, I have not seen you for sixteen years. I have forgotten how you look, dear mother. I am not doing well, but I must go to America to see you once again. It is very sad when a man has no relatives in the whole world. Dear mother, I just want to look at you, and I really won't be a burden to you.'"

The champagne appeared. Before long, the first bottle was replaced by the second.

"Don't be surprised if I am immoderate," said Frederick. "My nerves are in need of it to-day. I have to stupefy myself. Perhaps, with the help of this glorious medicine, I shall be able to sleep a few hours."

It was half past ten, and the physicians were still sitting together. The wine naturally produced a greater degree of intimacy between these two men, who were of the same profession and had already become fairly well acquainted with each other. It was very pleasant to Frederick to unbosom himself.

He said he had entered the world with too favourable a preconceived notion. In a spirit of idealism he had refused the military career for which his father had intended him, and had taken up the study of medicine, in the belief that he would thus be of most service to humanity. He had been deceived.

"The genuine gardener works for the garden full of healthy plants; but our work is devoted to a decaying vegetation sprung from diseased germs. That is why I took up the fight against mankind's awfullest enemy, the bacteria. I admit that the dreary, patient, laborious work, which bacteriology requires, did not satisfy me, either. I didn't possess the capacity to petrify, which is absolutely indispensable in an academic man. When I was sixteen years old, I wanted to become a painter. Over the dissecting table, I composed verses. The thing that I should now most like to be is a freelance writer. From all of which you can see," he concluded, laughing ironically, "that I have made rather a mess of my life."

Wilhelm refused to admit it.

"But I have," Frederick declared. "I am a genuine child of the times, and I am not ashamed of it. The greatest intellects of the day are all in a state of inner ferment. Every individual of significance is just as divided against himself as humanity on the whole. I refer, of course, only to the leading European races. I embody the Pope and Luther, William II and Robespierre, Bismarck and Bebel, the spirit of the American millionaire and the enthusiasm for poverty that was the glory of St. Francis of Assisi. I am the maddest progressive of my time and the maddest reactionary. I despise Americanism, and yet I see in the great American world-invasion, the dominion of the exploiter, something similar to one of the biggest works that Hercules performed in the Augean stables."

"Here's to chaos!" cried Wilhelm.

They touched glasses.

"Yes," said Frederick, "but only if it gives birth to a dancing heaven, or, at least, a dancing star."

"Beware of dancing stars," said Wilhelm, laughing and looking at Frederick significantly.

"What can a man do if his blood is on fire with that cursed poison?"

Under the influence of the champagne, the sudden confession seemed as natural to Wilhelm as to Frederick.

"'There once was a rat in a cellar hole,'" Wilhelm quoted.

"Of course, of course," said Frederick, "but what is to be done against it?" Then he turned the conversation to general questions again. "Why should a man keep himself intact when he has lost his ideals? I have made _tabula rasa_ of my past. I have drowned Germany in the ocean. Is Germany really the great, strong, united Empire? Is it not rather the booty over which God and the devil--I was about to say the Kaiser and the Pope--are still wrangling? You will admit that for more than a thousand years, the unifying principle was the imperial principle. People talk of the Thirty Years' War as having disintegrated Germany. I should say it was the thousand years' war, of which the Thirty Years' War was only the worst excess, the worst paroxysm of that plague of religious dissension with which the Germans are inoculated. And without unity, Germany is a very queer structure. Its owners, or its inhabitants, don't possess it, except in a slight degree. And the believer with the tiara at Rome tugs and tugs at it, levying extortion under the threat of destroying the entire structure; until he is actually able to buy it back with the compound interest that has been accumulating. In that case nothing will be left but a heap of ruins. One could shriek and tear one's hair because the German does not see that in his basement there is an awful Bluebeard's chamber. And not for women alone. He has no inkling of what an arsenal of clerical instruments of torture lie there ready for use--clerical, because they lie ready for the infliction of horrible corporal martyrdom in the service of a bloody, fanatical, papistical belief. Woe, when the door to the Bluebeard chamber opens. They are continually picking at the lock. Then we shall witness all the sanguinary horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the degenerate slaughter-house cruelty of an inquisition."

"That's something we won't drink a toast to. Rather let us toast the healthy, cynically outspoken ideal of the American, the exploiter ideal, with its tolerance and levelling down."

"Yes, a thousand times rather," said Frederick.

So they drank a toast to America.

A second-cabin stewardess led in the Russian Jewess. The girl was holding a handkerchief to her nose and mouth. Her nose had been bleeding for an hour without cease.

"Oh," she said, retreating a step from the threshold back to the deck, "I am in the way." But Doctor Wilhelm insisted on her coming in.

It turned out that this was not the real mission on which the stewardess had come to see Doctor Wilhelm. She whispered a few words, unintelligible to the others, into his ear. He excused himself to Frederick, asked him to look after the Jewess, and left the cabin with the stewardess.

XXX

"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.

XXXI

This strange incident of meeting, seeing, loving, and parting forever had passed swiftly as in a dream. Since Wilhelm had not yet returned, Frederick, long after his visitor had fled, went out on deck, where the exalted impression of the starry heavens shining over the infinite expanse of the ocean, purified him, as it were. He was neither by nature nor by habit a Don Juan, and it astonished him that the unusual, surprising adventure seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The deck was empty. Another boy was on guard in Pander's place. The temperature had sunk to below freezing-point, and a thick coating of hoar-frost lay on the rigging.

As he stood leaning over the railing, he had a painful vision of the sum total of life and death within the eons of life on earth. His innermost being smarted with the pain of it. Death must have existed before the beginning. Death and death! That was the limit, he thought, of vast sums of trouble, hope, desire, enjoyment--enjoyment which forthwith consumed itself to make way for renewed desire, for illusions of possession, for realities of loss, for anguish, for conflicts, for meetings and partings; all uncontrollable processes bound up with suffering and fresh suffering and suffering again. It gave him some satisfaction to assume that now that the passage was so smooth, his Deborah and all her companions in suffering were probably lying wrapt in unconscious sleep, for a time relieved of the great madness of life.

While waiting for Doctor Wilhelm, absorbed in these reflections, Frederick involuntarily turned away from the edge of the deck, and became aware of a dark mass not far from the smoke-stack, cowering in a corner against the wall. The thing looked strange to him. On stepping closer he saw it was a man on the floor asleep, wrapped in his overcoat with his cap drawn over his eyes, his bearded head resting on a low camp-chair. Frederick was convinced it was Achleitner. Why was he lying there in the freezing cold instead of in bed? Frederick found the right answer. Not more than three paces away was the door of Ingigerd's cabin; and he was the faithful dog in three senses, the watchdog, the Cerberus, the dog crazed with the rabies of jealousy.

"Poor fellow," Frederick said aloud. "Poor, stupid Achleitner!" He felt genuine, almost tender sympathy; and over him came all the woe of the deceived lover, as we can trace it from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer down to Buddha Gotama, whose pupil, Ananda, asks: "Master, how shall we comport ourselves toward a woman?" Quoth the master: "Avoid the sight of her, Ananda, because a woman's being is hidden. It is unfathomable as the way of the fish in the water. To her, lying is as truth, and truth as lying."

"Sst! What are you doing here?" said Doctor Wilhelm, stepping up softly. He was carrying something in his hands carefully wrapped up.

"Do you know who is lying here?" said Frederick. "It is Achleitner."

"He wanted to keep his eye on that cabin," Wilhelm remarked cynically, "to limit the attendance."

"We must wake him up."

"Why?" said Wilhelm. "Later, when we go to bed."

"I am going to bed now."

"Come to my cabin first for a moment."

In his cabin the physician laid a human embryo on the table.

"She has attained her end," he said, meaning the girl travelling second class, who in his opinion had taken the trip for no other purpose than to rid herself of her burden and avoid disgrace. At the sight of the little object, Frederick did not know whether to be born or never to awaken to life was preferable.

He went out on deck again, aroused Achleitner, and led him to his cabin, resisting and mumbling incomprehensible words, though half asleep. Then, in dread of the agonies of insomnia, he went to his own cabin.

XXXII

He fell asleep immediately, but when he awoke, it was only two o'clock. The ship was still moving easily, and he could hear the screw working regularly under the water. Life in times of great physical crises is a fever, which travelling and sleeplessness enhance. Frederick well knew his own nature, and was alarmed when he saw himself robbed of the peace of sleep after so short a time.

But had his sleep actually meant peace? Lying on his back with wide, staring eyes, he saw vast nocturnal spaces of his soul opened up, where in bottomless depths another chaotic life had been born--a multitude of tormenting visions, in which things and persons most familiar had arisen in combination with things and persons entirely strange. He tried to recall his dreams.

He had dreamed he was wandering hand in hand with Achleitner among the dark smoke widows trailing backward over the ocean from the funnels of the _Roland_, far, far away. He and the Russian Jewess together with great difficulty dragged the dead stoker, Zickelmann, up into the blue ladies' parlour; and by means of a serum, which he himself had discovered, he brought him back to life. He smoothed over a quarrel between the Russian Jewess and Ingigerd Hahlström, who fought and called each other abusive names. He was sitting with Doctor Wilhelm in his cabin, and, as Wagner once had done, was observing a homunculus still undergoing embryonic development in a glass sphere on which light was shining. At the same time Ingigerd's cockatoo was squawking in Arthur Stoss's voice and continually asseverating:

"I am already a man of absolutely independent fortune. I am touring simply to bring my fortune up to a certain amount."

Under the impression that he was recalling these things to his memory, Frederick was really dreaming again. Suddenly he started up, cuffing Hans Füllenberg furiously and saying: "I'll box your ears." Shortly afterward he was in the smoking-room delivering a crushing sermon for the third or fourth time, morally felling to the ground the man who had desecrated his sacred relation to Ingigerd. But the captain came in, and said they had to bury the stoker. There was a dead man on board. When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angèle, his suffering, neglected wife, in one of her hysterical attacks in which she lay in a trance. And it was not at the entrance to the smoking-room, but in Plassenberg in the Heuscheuer, in front of his comfortable house. Captain von Kessel was standing in the garden clipping a privet hedge. It was at night, but a full moon was shining bright as day over the lonely valley meadows in front of his house. Angèle arose and Frederick went to lead her into the house. She resisted. Now the consciousness of his spiritual separation from her filled him with infinite sadness, a sadness more bitter and profound than any that had ever inspired him in his waking moments.

"I am a mother," said Angèle, "but not by you."

He embraced her, weeping, and wanted to draw her into his house. She resisted gently, but firmly, and declared she was forbidden to enter. He saw her wandering across the meadows in the moonshine, slowly and wearily.

"Angèle!" he cried. He ran after her.

"It is so hard for me," she said, "because life and not death has robbed me of you."

Frederick groaned aloud. A great stone seemed to be lying on his breast. He heard the rushing of waters. He saw the flood come leaping through all the valleys, over the tops of all the hills, wave upon wave, from all sides. The moon was shining. He saw Angèle climb to a little skiff lying moored somewhere; and the tide carried away the skiff with her in it. The waters overwhelmed his house.

Again the wandering began, hand in hand with Achleitner and the smoke widows across the ocean desert. Again began that difficult dragging up-stairs and down-stairs of the naked, dead stoker, with the help of the young admirer of Kropotkin. The dispute between Ingigerd and Deborah, his sermonising of Füllenberg and the man in the smoking-room repeated themselves, each repetition intensifying his torment. The homunculus in the glass sphere in Doctor Wilhelm's cabin appeared again. It developed with light thrown on it. In his anguish, in his impotence against that martyrising chase of visions, Frederick's persecuted soul, gasping for peace, suddenly rose in revolt, and he said aloud:

"Kindle the light of reason, kindle the light of reason, O God in heaven!"

He rose in his berth, and saw that Rosa, the servant-girl, was in reality holding a burning candle over him. She bent down slightly, and said:

"You are dreaming hard. Aren't you feeling well, Doctor von Kammacher?"

The door creaked. The servant-girl Rosa had left. The ship was moving quietly. Or was he mistaken? Was the _Roland_ no longer proceeding so calmly and steadily as before? He listened intently, and heard the screw whirring regularly under the water. Monotonous calls penetrated from the deck. Then came the loud rattling of the cinders pouring overboard. Frederick looked at his watch. It was five o'clock. So three hours had passed since he had first awakened! Again, with a clatter and a thunder, a load of ashes slid into the Atlantic Ocean. Was it not the mates of the dead stoker, Zickelmann, who were throwing it overboard? Frederick heard the crying of children, thereupon the sobbing and whimpering of his hysterical neighbour, and finally Rosa's voice, trying to quiet Siegfried and Ella, who was a talkative little girl. Siegfried was fretfully begging to be taken back to his grandmother in Luckenwalde. Mrs. Liebling was scolding Rosa, telling her she was responsible for the children's behaviour. Frederick heard her say:

"You all trample about on my nerves. I wish the three of you were at the bottom of the sea. For heaven's sake, let me sleep!"

XXXIII

Notwithstanding all these impressions, Frederick fell asleep again. He dreamed that he and Rosa, the maid, and little Siegfried Liebling were in a life-boat, rocking on a calm, shimmering green sea. Strangely enough, there was a mass of gold ingots in the bottom of the boat, probably the gold ingots that the _Roland_ was supposed to be carrying to the mint in Washington. Frederick was at the helm, and after cruising about a while, they reached a bright, cheery port. It may have been a port in the Azores, or the Madeira Islands, or the Canary Islands. At a short distance from the quay, Rosa jumped overboard and reached land holding Siegfried clear of the water. People received them, and they disappeared in one of the snowy white buildings at the harbour front. When Frederick landed, to his joy he was greeted on the marble steps of the quay by his old friend, Peter Schmidt, the physician he intended to visit in America. In response to curious questions, he always said that this was his main purpose in crossing the ocean. His delight at seeing him in a dream, in the setting of the white tropical town, after a separation of eight or nine years, was a surprise to himself. How was it possible that he had only occasionally and superficially remembered so magnificent a man, so dear a youthful companion?

Peter Schmidt was a Friesian. He and Frederick had sat together on the same school bench; later, they had spent two years together in the gymnasium at St. Magdalene at Breslau and several semesters in the universities of Greifswald, Breslau, and Zürich. Owing to a combination of common sense, many-sided knowledge, and humanitarian enthusiasm, Peter Schmidt had exerted great influence on his friends. There was also an adventurous streak in his nature, inherited from his father, a Friesian colonist, who lay buried in a churchyard in Meriden, Connecticut.

"It is good that you have come," said Peter Schmidt. Frederick felt as if he had been long expecting him. "Your wife, Angèle, just arrived in a skiff."

His friend silently led him to an inn near the harbour. A sense of security such as he had never before felt came over him. While he took a little luncheon in the dining-room, where the host, a German, stood opposite, twirling his thumbs, Peter Schmidt explained:

"The town is not large, but it will give you an idea of the country. You will find people here that are contented and have made their last landing."

It was taken as a matter of course that there, in that strange, silent city in the dazzling sunlight, the fewest possible words were to be spoken. Some new, mute inner sense appeared to make meanings clear. Nevertheless, Frederick said:

"I've always taken you for the mentor in unknown depths of our predestination." By which he meant to express his awe at his friend's mysterious being.

"Yes," said Peter Schmidt, "but this is only a small beginning, though enough to indicate what is hidden under the surface here."

Peter Schmidt, born in Tondern, now led Frederick out to the harbour. It was a very small harbour. There were a number of ancient vessels lying half-sunk in the water.

"Fourteen-ninety-two," said Peter Schmidt. That was the year the four hundredth anniversary of which was being much discussed by the Americans on board the _Roland_. The Friesian pointed to both the half-submerged caravels and explained that one of them was the _Santa Maria_, Christopher Columbus's flag-ship. "I came over with Christopher Columbus," he said.

All this was unqualifiedly enlightening to Frederick. Nor was there anything enigmatic in Peter Schmidt's explanation that the wood of those slowly decaying caravels was called _legno santo_ and was used for fuel, because it contained the spirit of knowledge. Farther out to sea lay a third vessel, with a great, black breach forward on the port side.

"It sank," said the Friesian. "It brought in a great lot of people."

Frederick looked at the vessel. He was dissatisfied. He would have liked to ask questions about the unfamiliar, yet curiously familiar ship out there at sea; but the Friesian left the harbour and turned into a narrow, crooked street with a steep flight of stairs.

Here an old uncle of Frederick, who had been dead more than fifteen years, came toward him comfortably puffing at a pipe. He had just arisen, it seemed, from a bench by the open entrance to his house.

"How do you do?" he said. "We are all here, my boy." Frederick knew whom the old man meant when he said, "We are all here." "We fare very well," the old man, who in his lifetime had not been exactly favoured by fortune, continued, grinning. "I didn't get along so well when I was up with you in the dismal air. In the first place, my boy, we have the _legno santo_." With his pipe he pointed to the dark interior of his house, where blue tongues of flame were leaping on the hearth. "And besides, we have the Toilers of the Light. But I am detaining you. _We_ have time, but _you_ must hurry." Frederick said good-bye. "Fiddlesticks!" exclaimed his uncle. "Do you people down there still keep up that tiresome business of 'how-do-you-do' and 'good-bye'?"

Climbing higher up the street, Peter Schmidt led Frederick through a number of houses and inside courtyards. In one of the courtyards with many corners, reminding Frederick of certain ancient sections of Hamburg and Nuremberg, was a ship-chandlery bearing the sign, "The Seagoing Ship."

"Everything here looks quite ordinary," said Peter Schmidt, "but here we have all the ancient models." He pointed to the small model of an ancient vessel standing in the little window of the chandlery, among packages of chewing tobacco and leather whips.

Ships, ships, nothing but ships! The sight of this last vessel seemed to produce the beginning of a slight gnawing resistance in Frederick's brain. He knew he was looking upon an all-embracing symbol, which he had never before seen. With a new sense organ, with centralised clarity of thought, he realised that here, in this little model, was comprehended all the wandering and adventuring of the human soul.

"Oh," said the chandler, opening the glass door of the little shop, at which all sorts of wares hanging on the door swung to and fro with a clatter, "Oh, you here, Frederick? I thought you were still at sea."

Frederick recognised the chandler as George Rasmussen, whose farewell letter he had received in Southampton. He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy. Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend. The little shop was alive with goldfinches. "They are the goldfinches," Rasmussen explained, "that settled in the Heuscheuer Mountains last winter, you know, and were fatal to me."

"Yes, I remember," said Frederick. "We would approach a bare branch or tree, and suddenly it would seem to shake itself and scatter thousands of gold leaves. We interpreted it as auguring mountains of money."

"Well," said the chandler, "it was precisely thirteen minutes past one on the twenty-fourth of January when I drew my last breath. I had just received your telegram from Paris absolving me from my debt. Back there in the shop, among other things, is my predecessor's fur coat, which--I am by no means complaining--infected me. I wrote you that if I could, I would make myself noticeable from the Beyond. Well, here I am. But even here everything isn't perfectly clear and plain, though I am feeling better, and we all rest in a pleasant sense of basic security. I'm glad you and Peter Schmidt have met. He counts for a lot here in this country. You will meet each other above again, in New York, at the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of 1492. Good Lord! Of what significance after all, is that little discovery of America?" Rasmussen in his strange disguise removed the miniature vessel from the show window. It, too, was called the _Santa Maria_. "Now, please be careful," he said. Frederick noticed that the old confectioner took one vessel after another of the same sort, but diminishing in size, from the first one. "Patience," he said, while still pulling more and more vessels from the entrails of the _Santa Maria_. The procedure caused Frederick no slight astonishment. "Patience. The smaller are always the better ones. If I had time, we should reach the smallest, the final, the most glorious work of Providence. Each one of these ships carries us not only beyond the boundaries of our planet, but even beyond the limited barriers of our senses. Each of them is adapted to carry us across the border. If you are interested," he continued, "I have other wares in my shop. Here are the captain's hedge-scissors, here is a plummet with which one can sound the lowest depths of the firmament and the Milky Way. Here are the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. But you have no time, and I won't detain you."

The chandler closed the glass door on them; but they saw him with his nose flattened against the pane, mysteriously, as if he still had something to sell, holding his finger to his mouth, shaped like a carp's. His lips seemed to be framing certain words. Frederick understood _legno santo_, Toilers of the Light, and even what his uncle had said about "up with you in the dismal air." But Peter Schmidt thrust his fist through the glass door, pulled Rasmussen's embroidered cap off his head, took from it a little key, and beckoned Frederick to come away with him. They left the houses behind and stepped out into the open rolling country.

"The thing is," said Peter, "it will mean a lot of trouble."

And they ran and climbed for hours. Evening fell. They lit a fire, and slept in a tree rocking in the wind. Morning came. They took to wandering again, until the sun lay low on the horizon. Finally, Peter opened a small gate in a low wall. On the other side of the wall was a garden. A gardener was tying vines.

"How do you do, Doctor?" he said. "The sun is setting, but we know why we die."

On looking at him more closely, Frederick recognised the dead stoker in the man, whose face was illuminated by the rosy flush of the setting sun and wore a friendly smile, as he stood there in what was a strange garden, or vineyard, or fairy-land.

"I'd rather be doing this than shovelling coal," said the stoker, pointing to the cords hanging in his hands, with which he had been tying up the vines.

The three of them together now walked a rather long distance to a wild section of the garden, where it had turned completely dark. The wind began to rush, and the shrubs, trees and bushes of the garden swished like breakers on the shore. The stoker beckoned to them, and they squatted on the ground in a circle. It seemed as if the stoker with his bare hand had taken a bit of burning wood from his pocket. He held it close to the ground, to illuminate a round opening, something like the burrow of a marmot or a rabbit.

"_Legno santo_," said Peter Schmidt, pointing to the glowing piece of charcoal. "Now, Frederick, you will get to see those ant-like little elves that are called _noctiluci_ or night-lights. They pompously call themselves Toilers of the Light. But whatever their name, it must be admitted that they are the ones that take the light hidden in the entrails of the earth, store it up, and sow it in fields, the soil of which has been especially prepared; and when it has grown to its full size and has borne fruit a hundredfold in the shape of gold sheaves or nuggets, they harvest it and save it for the darkest of dark times."

And, actually, looking through a crevice, Frederick saw something like another world, with a subterranean sun shining on it. A multitude of little elves, the Toilers of the Light, were mowing with scythes, cutting stalks, binding sheaves, loading carts, and storing in barns. Many cut the light out of the ground, like nuggets of gold. Undoubtedly it was the gold meant for the mint in Washington that was haunting Frederick's dreams.

"These Toilers of the Light," said the Friesian, Peter Schmidt, "are the most stimulating to my ideas."

At this point Frederick awoke, while the voice of the stoker close beside him was saying:

"Many will soon be following me."

XXXIV

The first thing Frederick did on waking was to look at his watch. He had a dull feeling that he must have slept through the whole night and even the following day. He peered at the hands incredulously and held the watch to his ear to convince himself it had not stopped. No, it was still running. Consequently, since his last waking, only six or, at the utmost, eight minutes had passed.

This fact as well as the peculiarity and the vividness of his dream set him to marvelling. He could not recall ever having dreamed so coherently and logically. Are there dreams that are more than dreams? Was Rasmussen dead? Had his friend, keeping his promise, chosen this way to make himself noticeable from the Beyond? A strange shudder went through Frederick. In his excitement it seemed to him that he had been honoured with a revelation. He took his memorandum book from the net bag over his berth and jotted down the date and hour that the remarkable chandler had mentioned as the time of his death. "Thirteen minutes past one," he distinctly heard Rasmussen's voice saying, "thirteen minutes past one, on the twenty-fourth of January."

The _Roland_ was tossing slightly again, and the great siren was bellowing. Its repeated thunderous cries, which indicated fog, the lurching of the vessel, the sign, perhaps, of fresh storms and hardships to be gone through, vexed and fretted Frederick. From the adventurous doings in his brain, he was transported to the no less adventurous doings in reality. Awakening from his dreams, he found himself locked into a narrow cabin, plowing through the high seas, on a vessel heavily freighted with the fearful dreams of many souls, and yet not sinking from the load of that cargo.

Frederick was already on deck before half past five. The fog had lifted, and from over the edge of a leaden sea of moderate-sized waves rose the dawn of a gloomy morning. The deck was empty, producing the impression of dreary loneliness. The passengers were all lying in their berths. None of the crew even were visible. It looked as if the mighty ship were pursuing its course wholly without human agency.

XXXV

Frederick was standing near the log-line, which dragged in the broad, churning wake. Even in the ghostly dawn, hungry gulls were following the ship, sometimes flying near, sometimes dropping back, ever and anon swooping down into the foamy wake with a mournful cry, as of condemned souls. This was no vision, and yet Frederick scarcely distinguished it from a dream. With his nerves unstrung, with his being still penetrated by the marvels of his sleeping life, which remained partially present to him, the strange heaving waste of the ocean seemed no less miraculous than his dreams. Thus the ocean had been tossing its mountains of waves beneath the blind eyes of millions of years, itself no less blind than those eons. Thus and not otherwise had it been since the first day of creation: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Frederick shivered. Had he ever lived with anything else than a spirit and spirits, that is, with ghosts? And at this moment was he not farther removed than ever from what is considered immovable solid ground, from what is called reality? In his state of mind, did he not believe in fairy tales, sailors' superstitions, the Flying Dutchman, and hobgoblins? What was that ocean hiding in its infinite waves rolling under the low, grey sky? Had not everything arisen from the ocean? Had not everything gone down into its depths again? Had some power disclosed the submerged Atlantis to Frederick's mental vision? Why not?

He was passing through profound, enigmatic moments of a fearful yet pleasurable dread. There was the ocean, on which an apparently abandoned vessel, a small spot in infinity, was staggering forward with no visible goal ahead and no visible starting-point behind. There were the heavens lying heavily upon it, grey and dismal. There was Frederick himself, alone. Every animate creature in that solitude was transformed in his soul into visions, phantoms and apparitions. Man is always facing the unfathomable alone. That gives him a sense of greatness along with a sense of desertion. There was a man standing at the stern of a vessel, while the darkness of night was yielding to the dawn, bound by the invisible, glowing threads of his fate to two continents of the globe, and awaiting the new, less tormenting form of life that comes from the sun, a strange star millions of miles removed from the planet earth. All this was a miracle to Frederick, almost overwhelming him, as if he were imprisoned in marvels. In a sudden seizure of hopelessness that he would ever throw off the suffocating oppression of riddles and miracles, the temptation came upon him to leap over the railing. Close upon this feeling followed the timidity of a man with a bad conscience. He glanced about, as if in fear of discovery. He wiped his eyes and forehead with his hands, because it seemed to him that the dead stoker with the bloody wound had for a long time been sitting nearby on a coil of rope. His chest felt heavy, as if a load were dragging it down. He heard voices. He saw his wife, Angèle, wringing her hands. Suddenly he thought he was to blame for her illness, that he was a criminal; and all his thoughts of Ingigerd Hahlström made him doubly despicable in his own eyes. His ideas grew confused. In a wave of absolute credulity, he thought the voice of his conscience was condemning him to death. He thought that his life was being demanded as an atonement, that he must sacrifice himself, or else the _Roland_, with all it carried, would sink.

At that moment Frederick heard a strong voice saying:

"Good morning, Doctor von Kammacher."

It was the first mate, Von Halm, on his way to the bridge. Before the healthy beauty of the human voice, the haunting visions instantly fled, and Frederick's soul was restored to sanity.

"Were you making deep-sea researches?" Von Halm asked.

"Yes," said Frederick with a laugh, "I was about to make a sounding for the submerged Atlantis. What do you think of the weather?"

The giant was wearing his sou'wester and oilskin. He pointed to the barometer. Frederick saw it had dropped considerably. Adolph, the steward, came in search of Frederick. Having failed to find him in his cabin, he was bringing him his zwieback and large peasant cup of tea on deck. Frederick seated himself on the same bench as the day before, opposite the companionway. He sipped the cordial drink and warmed his hands on the cup.

Before he had finished, the wind was again beginning to boom in the rigging of the four masts, and a stiff, obstinate wind was heeling the vessel to starboard. Frederick set to bargaining inwardly, as if he had to reckon with the powers on account of the new hardships to be gone through. He suddenly longed to be with Peter Schmidt in America. Since his dream, it seemed more and more important for him to see, and associate with, his old comrade again. He thought he was rid of Ingigerd, the more surely as she had played no part at all in the momentous Atlantis dream. The sooner the voyage with her ended the better.

XXXVI

By the time Frederick was taking his real breakfast with Doctor Wilhelm in the dining-room, at about eight o'clock, the whole mass of the vessel was again quivering and at short intervals again seemed to be running hard against walls of rock. The low-ceiled room in dismal gloom, dotted here and there by electric lights, was leaping in a mad dance, one moment riding high on the crest of a wave, the next moment plunging deep into an eddying trough. The few men that had ventured to table tried to laugh and joke away the situation, which by no means offered a rosy outlook.

"In the pit of my stomach I have the feeling I used to get as a child when I swung too high."

"Kammacher, we're in the devil's cauldron. There'll be things doing compared with which the things we've gone through aren't a circumstance," said Wilhelm.

From somewhere came the word, "Cyclone," a dreadful word, though it seemed to make no impression upon the steamer _Roland_, a model of determination, steadfastly cleaving the waves and tearing breaches in the mountains of water. New York was its goal, and it was hastening onward.

Frederick wanted to go on deck, but it looked bad there, and he remained on the upper step under the protection of the companionway penthouse. The level of the sea seemed to have risen, so that the warrior _Roland_ appeared to be making his obstinate way through a deep defile. One could not help succumbing to the impression that each instant the defile would close overhead and settle the faithful vessel's fate forever. Sailors in oilskins were climbing about to make fast every loose thing. Great waves had already swept overboard. The salt water was trickling and flowing over the deck. As if that were not enough, the heavens were driving down rain and snow. The rigging was howling, groaning, booming, and whistling in every pitch and key. That severity, that awfulness of the elements, that eternal rushing and roaring and seething of great masses of water, through which the steamer was staggering forward as if in mad, blind intoxication, that mournful, raging tumult kept up hour after hour. By noon it had even grown worse.

Very few responded to the trumpet-call for luncheon. There were about ten men beside the woman physician and the woman painter. Hahlström seated himself at Frederick's and Wilhelm's empty table. The ladies' places were not far away.

"No wonder," said Frederick, "that sailors are superstitious. The way this awful weather dropped out of a clear sky is enough to make a man believe in magic."

"It may even grow worse," Wilhelm observed.

The women heard his remark, looked up, and made horrified eyes.

"Do you think there is danger?" one of them asked.

"Danger is always imminent in life," he replied, and added with a smile: "It is merely a question of not being frightened."

Incredible to relate, the band began to play as usual, and, what is more, played a piece entitled _Marche triomphale_. The effect on all was at first a slight shudder; then nobody could resist a smile at the apparent irony of it.

"The musicians are heroes," said Frederick.

"In general," remarked Hahlström, "our grim humour nowadays is a great asset. If those musicians were to receive the order, they would play 'A Country Girl,' and 'My Hannah Lady,' in the jaws or the belly of a whale. If they didn't, they'd fare just as badly."

"O Lord, anything for a steady table, a steady seat, a steady berth! The man possessing these things seldom knows how rich he is," said Frederick, in a voice raised to a shout to make himself heard above the noise of the sea without and the music within. The men laughed, and the ocean, to add to their amusement, raised them up in the fog, the tempest, and the snow to the top of a wave ninety feet high. Everybody was instantly silenced. Even the orchestra played a frightened pause not indicated in the score.

On ascending the companionway after lunch, Frederick saw Arthur Stoss in the unfrequented smoking-room eating his meal in perfect equanimity and cheerfulness undisturbed by the weather. Frederick went in for a chat with the original, witty monstrosity. He was cutting his fish with a knife and fork held between the great toe and the second toe.

"Our old omnibus is jolting a bit," he said. "If our boilers are good, there is nothing to fear. But there's this much about it. If it is not a cyclone yet, it may still turn into one. I don't care. It looks more discouraging than it really is. What a man will do! To show the people in Cape Town, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, San Francisco and Mexico what a man with a firm, energetic will can accomplish, even if nature has not favoured him, he will plow through all the cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons of all the waters of the globe. Your business man sitting in the Winter Garden in Berlin, or the Alhambra in London, never dreams of all the things the performer giving his number must go through before he can merely stand where he is standing. He can't ever take it easy and let himself get rusty."

Frederick was feeling miserable. Although his dreams were still haunting his brain, and Ingigerd, or his sick wife, or the Russian Jewess was still present in his soul, he nevertheless felt that all sensations were becoming more and more submerged in the one sensation, that on all sides there was distinct menace of a brutal danger.

Hans Füllenberg entered. His face was lifeless.

"There is a corpse on board," he said, in a tone implying a causal relation between the dead stoker and the raging storm. It was very evident that the spice had been taken out of Hans Füllenberg's life.

"I heard the same thing," Stoss said. "My man, Bulke, told me a stoker died."

Frederick simulated ignorance of the event. Accustomed to observe himself honestly, he realized that though the fact was not new to him, Füllenberg's statement of it had made him shudder.

"The dead man is dead," said Stoss, now attacking his roast with appetite. "We won't be wrecked on the dead stoker's corpse. But last night a derelict was sighted. Those corpses, the corpses of vessels, are dangerous. When the sea is rough, they can't be sighted."

Frederick asked for more information about derelicts.

"About nine hundred and seventy-five drifting derelicts," Stoss explained, "have been sighted in five years here in the northern part of the Atlantic. It is certain that the actual number is twice as great. One of the most dangerous of such tramps is the iron four-masted schooner, _Houresfeld_. On its way from Liverpool to San Francisco, fire broke out in its hold, and the crew abandoned it. If we were to collide with anything of that sort, there wouldn't be a soul left to tell the tale."

"You can't pass through the gangways," said Füllenberg, "the bulkheads are closed down."

The siren began to roar again. Frederick still heard defiance and triumph in the cry, and yet something recalling the broken horn of the hero Roland in Roncesvalles.

"There is no danger yet," said Stoss to calm him.

XXXVII

Long after Stoss had been led away by his valet and tucked in bed for his afternoon nap, Frederick still remained in the unfrequented smoking-room. The place made an uncanny impression. Yet its very gloominess insured privacy; and in the gravity of the situation he had need to be by himself. He began, perhaps prematurely, to consider the worst eventuality. He thought it might be well to stand in readiness. Around the walls ran a bench upholstered in leather. Kneeling on it, he could look through the port-holes out upon the mighty uproar of the waters. In that position, watching the waves beat with inconceivable persistency against the desperately struggling vessel, he let his life pass in review before his mind's eye.

Grey gloom was closing down on him. After all, he felt that he yearned for life and was far from being as ready to die as he had occasionally supposed. Something akin to regret came over him. "Why am I here? Why did I not stop to consider and summon all my rational will power to keep me from this senseless trip? For all I care, let me die; but not here, not in a desert of water far from mother earth, immeasurably far from the great community of men. This seems to me a particularly awful curse. Men on solid land, in their own homes, men among men, have not the least notion of it." What was Ingigerd to him now? A matter of indifference. Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern for himself. What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on some shore! Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness. How extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street! He gnashed his teeth. Of what avail a cry for help here? How could a man find God's ear here? If the extreme thing were to happen, and the _Roland_ with its mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being happy again.

"I would not witness it," thought Frederick. "I would jump overboard to avoid the sight of it. And while that would be happening, none of my friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all. 'The steamship _Roland_ sunk' appears as a head-line in the newspapers. 'Oh!' says the reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine value of a cargo of human lives is in the world."

Frederick attempted in vain to battle against a still-life picture, which the _Roland_, valiantly struggling onward, with its siren almost stifled in the storm, showed him at the bottom of the sea. He saw the majestic vessel in a coffin of glass. Across its decks swarms of fish swam hither and thither. Its cabins were all filled with water. The large dining-room, with its panels of walnut, its tables, and leather-upholstered revolving chairs, was filled with water. A big polyp, jelly-fish, and red, mushroom-like sea-anemones had penetrated into the very gangways along which the passengers were now walking. And to Frederick's horror, the liveried corpses of Pfundner, the head-steward, and his assistant stewards were slowly floating about in a circle. The picture would have been almost ridiculous, had it not been so gruesome and had it not so certainly lain in the realm of the possible. Think of all the things divers report! All the things they have seen in the cabins and gangways of submerged steamers; inextricably knotted masses of human beings, passengers or sailors coming toward them with outstretched arms, upright, as if alive and as if awaiting them. A closer examination of the clothes of those guardians and administrators of a lost estate at the bottom of the sea, those strange ship-owners, business men, captains, pursers, those fortune-seekers, money-seekers, embezzlers, adventurers, or whatever they might be, showed that they were filled with polyps, crustaceans, and all sorts of ocean worms, enjoying their stay there as long as something remained beneath their shredded garments except gnawed-off bones.

Frederick beheld himself down there, too, one of those decaying phantoms, months old, wandering about in the ghastly abode of the sunken _Roland_, in that horrible Vineta, where each man passed his neighbour mutely with a frightened gesture, each seeming to carry in his breast a congealed cry of anguish, which he expressed with bowed head and outstretched arms, or head thrown back and open mouth. Or else he was hideously crawling on his hands, or wringing his hands, or folding them, or spreading out his fingers. The engineers in the boiler-room seemed still slowly, slowly to be controlling the cylinder and driving-wheel; yet differently than before, since the law of gravity seemed no longer to be in force. One of the engineers was doing his work in a peculiarly twisted way, like a man asleep caught between the rim of the wheel and the piston-rod covered with verdigris. Frederick descended on his ghastly tour down to the stokers, whom the catastrophe had surprised in the midst of their occupation. Some were still holding their shovels in their hands, though unable to lift them. They themselves were floating, while the shovels to which they clung did not stir from the bottom. All was over. They could not kindle the fire into a white glow, and so could not keep the mighty steamer in its course. In the steerage the sight was so horrible to behold, with men, women and children of all nationalities huddled and tossed in thick, dark heaps, that even a cat-shark, which had made its way through the chimney of the stoke-hole and then through the engine, did not feel sufficiently courageous or hungry to mingle in the gathering. _Noli turbare circulos meos_, these people, too, seemed to be saying. All were thinking strenuously, absorbed in the profoundest meditation--they had plenty of time for profound meditation--upon the riddle of life.

In fact, they seemed to be placed there merely for the purpose of reflecting. Those men and women wringing their hands or spreading their fingers, or walking on their hands, or even standing on the tip of a single finger, while grazing the ceiling with their feet, were all thinking. Professor Toussaint alone, who came floating toward Frederick in the gangway, seemed to be acting differently. With his right hand raised, he seemed to be saying: "An artist may not rust. He must air himself. He must seek new conditions of life. If he doesn't receive the honour he should in Italy, he should simply go to France, like Leonardo da Vinci, or even emigrate to the land of liberty."

"I want to live, live, nothing else," thought Frederick. "In the future, like Cato the Elder, I would rather walk a year on foot along a way that I could cover in three days on a steamer."

To avoid the hideous companionship of the blue, swollen thinkers, he left the gloomy, funereal smoking-room, and, with aching head and leaden limbs, dragged himself on deck, where the wild scurrying of the storm and the chaos of snow, rain and salty clouds of foam tore the weight away from his soul.

XXXVIII

In the space at the head of the companionway Frederick came upon the same company as the day before, sitting close together in steamer chairs--Toussaint, the timid skipper of the sailing vessel, the woman artist, the woman physician, the tall electrical engineer, and a man who had not been there the day before, an American colonel. He was a handsome specimen of the highest type of his widely spread species. He was engaged in a conversation on the number of miles covered by all the railroads in the United States, and his statements concerning their extent set fire to the European chauvinism of the electrical engineer. They forgot the weather in their debate. Each party to the dispute named an incredible number of miles and vaunted the advantages of the railroads in his native country.

"We are running at only half speed," said Toussaint to Frederick. "Isn't it strange how suddenly the weather changed?"

"Very," answered Frederick.

"Of course," Toussaint continued with a pale grimace intended for a smile, "I don't understand anything about cyclones, but the seamen say this storm is cyclonic."

"It may be called a cyclone," said the timid little skipper of the sailing vessel. "If it were striking us astern instead of ahead, it would not be so bad. As it is, the _Roland_ at the utmost cannot make more than three miles an hour. Were I on my schooner and had the same storm blown up so suddenly, we should not have had time to furl a sail. We should have been lost. Thank the Lord, it is better on modern steamers. Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable on my four-master, and the devil knows, I'd like to be on it now."

Frederick could not help laughing.

"As for the _Roland_," he said, "I would rather be, let us say, in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Your four-master has no greater charms for me than a cabin on the _Roland_."

Hans Füllenberg came lounging in and told them a wave had swept away one of the life-boats on the after quarter. At the very same instant an arched mass of water came flying slantwise over the port bow.

"Oh!" everybody cried.

"Magnificent, beautiful," said Frederick.

"That's cyclonic," the woman artist repeated.

"Believe me," they heard the colonel say again, "the stretch from New York to Chicago alone"--

"That was a Niagara Falls," said Toussaint.

The wave, dropping into the ventilators and chimneys, had fairly bathed the vessel. It was cold, too, and the _Roland_ was continuing its obstinate, praiseworthy trip under a crust of ice and snow. Icicles were hanging from the rigging. Glassy stalactites formed about the chart-room and everywhere on the railings and edges of things. The deck was slippery, and it was a perilous venture to attempt to make one's way forward. But when Ingigerd's cabin door opened and her long light hair rumpled by the wind appeared in the slit, Frederick instantly made the venture. She drew him into her cabin, where he found two children keeping her company.

"I invited them to stay with me because it's fairly comfortable in this cabin."

The seriousness of the situation had extinguished in the girl all coquetry and capriciousness. Frederick almost forgot what he had suffered on her account and in what fatal dependence he had been upon this creature only a short time before.

"Tell me, is there danger, Doctor von Kammacher?" she asked.

His evasive answer seemed to make no impression upon her. He was astonished to see how energetic and resolute she was, in contrast with her behaviour of yesterday, when she played the spoiled, suffering, helpless child. She begged him to go try to find her father.

"In case anything happens, you know, it would be well not to be so far away from him."

"What do you suppose will happen?"

Without answering this, she asked him to stop at cabin 49 on the way and tell Rosa to come up.

"My little guests keep clamouring for her. If she doesn't come up for a while, I can't keep them quiet. Then she can serenely go back again to her silly, sentimental mistress. What do you think of a man like Achleitner?" she continued. "He is lying on all fours in his cabin, crying and groaning, 'Oh, my poor mother! Oh, my poor sister! Why didn't I obey you, mamma!' and so on. Just fancy, a man! Poor fellow!" she added, her tone changing. "It's enough to move a heart of stone." She held fast to the bedstead, not to be thrown into a corner like a splinter, and shook with laughter.

The mountain of stones under which Frederick had buried the little sinner, Ingigerd, was at that moment removed, and love stood there with unparalleled might. Such genuine bravery and genuine humour, combined with so much tenderness, he had never credited her with. Nervous and tired as he was, he felt irresistibly drawn to her, felt his will slipping from him. But a little, and he would have thrown himself to the floor and kissed the small feet in slippers.

Frederick's amazement waxed when all of a sudden she wanted to cross the deck and go below to comfort that donkey Achleitner. Frederick would not allow her. He was ashamed of his previous attack of fright, called himself a miserable coward, and got himself under perfect control. In this attitude he played the rôle of a severe mentor, Ingigerd's responsible guardian and protector, strict, but fatherly and good-natured. Though she laughed at him, it by no means displeased her to let him have his way.

XXXIX

Frederick's kindliness to Ingigerd's little wards made it unnecessary to summon Rosa. He asked the children their names, and they were soon chattering confidingly with their new uncle. Ella Liebling, a girl of five, to whom Ingigerd had given her doll, was sitting at one end of the couch, a cover wrapped about her legs, while Siegfried had established himself comfortably on the bed. With a spiritless expression for a child, he was playing a rather monotonous game of cards with an imaginary partner.

"Mamma is divorced," Ella explained. "Papa was always quarrelling with her."

"Yes," said Siegfried, pushing his cards aside, as if waking up from a trance, and bending over to Frederick, who was sitting beside Ella, "mamma once threw a boot at papa."

"But papa is strong," said Ella. "He once picked up a chair and knocked it down and smashed it to pieces."

Though Ingigerd was suffering from nausea, she had to laugh.

"Those children are great sport," she said.

"Papa once threw a bottle against the wall," Siegfried went on, "because Uncle Bolle was always coming to see us."

And so the children continued, like little wiseacres, to discuss in detail the theme of "happy marriages."

"Rosa says mamma is to blame because papa left us," observed Siegfried.

"I think so, too," said Ella. "I think mamma's to blame."

"Rosa said mamma doesn't do anything but read novels."

"Rosa says," Ella chimed in, "that if mamma were not always lying in bed, she would feel much better."

And "Rosa says," "Rosa says," went on for a long while. The former non-commissioned officer and lackey of the vaudeville star, Bulke, came towing Rosa across the deck in the same way as he did his master. Both looked red and contented. Frederick asked what the prospects were for the _Roland_.

"Oh, everything's all right," Bulke laughed, "if only something else doesn't turn up."

"Bulke," said Rosa, "take Siegfried on your back."

Bulke proceeded to do so, while Rosa lifted Ella to her crimson arm.

Now the children begged to remain where they were, although before they had been annoying Ingigerd by constantly crying for Rosa.

"Let them stay," said Ingigerd.

Rosa thanked her. "They are really best off here," she said. "All they take for supper is some milk and a roll. I will bring it right away."

"What is that on your arm?" asked Frederick. It looked as if a beast had been clawing at her.

"Oh, nothing," she said. "My mistress doesn't know what she is doing. She's out of her senses from seasickness and fright."

XL

For five hours the cyclone raged unmercifully. At ever shorter intervals, gust on gust in increasing fury hurled itself against the vessel.

With great difficulty Frederick made his way down to the barber, who, though the ship's movement was a fearful combination of rolling and pitching, actually performed the miracle of shaving him.

"One has to keep going," said the barber. "If you don't work, you're lost."

He spoke and suddenly stopped, removed the razor from Frederick's throat and turned pale, if his dirty grey colour could turn a shade lighter. Frederick's face, too, still partly covered with lather, showed signs of surprise and alarm. In the engine-room the signal bell had rung loud, as a sign that the captain was sending an order down from the bridge through the speaking-tube. Thereupon the revolution of the engines had slowed down and within a few moments had ceased entirely. This event, simple enough in itself, had in this weather, about fifteen hundred miles from land, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the effect of a catastrophe, not only on Frederick and the barber, but on every passenger still capable of reasoning, and even on the whole crew. One instantly observed the excitement that seized upon all at the cessation of the engines, which seemed to turn the vessel into a torpid, powerless thing. Voices cried, women shrieked, steps hurried up and down the gangways. A man tore the door open and indignantly cried, as if imputing to the poor barber the responsibility of a captain:

"Why are we standing still?"

Frederick wiped the lather from his face and, along with a multitude of questioning, groping, staggering persons, thrown now against one wall of the gangway, now against the other, hastened to make his way on deck.

"We are drifting," everybody said.

"The screw is broken."

"Cyclone!"

"Oh," said a young girl, who had dragged herself up in a dressing-gown, to Frederick, "I don't care about myself, not a bit, but my poor mother, my poor mother in Stuttgart."

"What's the matter? What's the matter?" twenty voices at the same time demanded of a steward, who was attending to his duties. He ran away, shrugging his shoulders.

Since the passengers, huddled like sheep, blocked the way to the deck at the head of the companionway, Frederick tried to get out by another way, leading a long distance through the after part of the vessel and then through a narrow corridor forward again. He walked rapidly and seemed outwardly composed, though in a state of unusual tensity, even fear.

In the second cabin Frederick's way was barred by a good-looking young man standing in front of his cabin barefoot, in his shirt sleeves and trousers. He was attempting to button his collar; but in his excitement was not succeeding.

"What's the matter?" he shouted to Frederick. "Is everybody in this cursed hole crazy? The first thing you know a stoker dies, and now there is a leak, or the screw is broken. What's the matter with the captain? I am an officer. I must be in San Francisco on the twenty-fifth of February, without fail. If it keeps on this way, I'll be in a fix."

Frederick wanted to hurry by, but the man got in his way.

"I am an officer," he said. "My name is Von Klinkhammer." Frederick also gave his name. "That's what comes of having priests on board," the young man continued, twirling the end of his moustache upward, Prussian fashion. "If there's no help for it, then the fellows ought simply to be chucked overboard. What is the captain thinking of?" he kept shouting, while an unexpected lurch of the vessel sent him plunging against the wall almost back into his cabin. "I didn't leave the service and give up a career and board this damned--"

But Frederick had run away. Now deep, intense silence prevailed throughout the vessel, which was like a dead thing; a silence, in which every now and then a step or a hasty tread on the heavy carpet in the gangway was audible. Through the thin walls came the dull, confused murmur of many voices. Doors banged, and when they opened, brief, broken sounds penetrated from the cabins, evidence of the bewilderment and alarm of their tenants. The thing that was particularly weird to Frederick in that swaying corridor, creaking like a new boot and lighted by electricity, was the incessant ringing of electric bells. In a hundred cabins at the same time, frightened persons, who had paid dear for their passage and were entitled to excellent service, were pressing the buttons. None of them was inclined to recognise the _force majeure_ of the Atlantic Ocean, the cyclone, the breaking of the screw, or any other possible accident. They thought that by ringing the bells they would be giving expression to the irresistible demand for a responsible rescuer to bring them safely to dry land.

"Who knows," thought Frederick, "while they are ringing the bells down here, perhaps the life-belts are being handed out on deck, the boats are being swung out on the water and over-loaded with passengers to the sinking point."

XLI

But, thank the Lord, by the time he had finally fought his way to Ingigerd's cabin on deck, it had not yet reached that point. It was to Ingigerd Hahlström that an impulse had been driving him. Beside the children, for whom in a motherly way she was trying constantly to devise a new occupation, he found her father and Doctor Wilhelm.

"People's cowardice is something fearful," said Doctor Wilhelm.

"Easily said; but what's the matter?" asked Frederick.

"One of the bearings got too hot. It takes time for it to cool off."

The passengers crowded on the companionway kept calling for the captain.

"The captain has other things to do than answer silly questions," said Wilhelm.

"I think the people should be quieted and given an explanation," Frederick declared. "To me a certain amount of fear seems justifiable in the landlubber, who doesn't know anything of nautical matters and hasn't the least notion of what is happening."

"Why should they be told anything?" rejoined Wilhelm. "Even if matters are very bad, it is advisable to deceive them."

"Well, then," said Hahlström, "deceive them. Send stewards around to tell them everything is all right and we'll have to drown."

Shortly afterward, the captain actually did send the little army of stewards through the vessel to inform the passengers that, as Doctor Wilhelm had said, one of the bearings had got too hot, and in a short while the engines would be working again.

"Is there danger?" the stewards were asked a thousand times.

"No," was the decided answer.

To keep the air in her cabin pure, Ingigerd left the door slightly ajar; and the sight of the colossal _Roland_, as seen from her cabin, helplessly drifting in the ocean, by no means seemed to bear out the stewards' declaration.

"There is no use concealing the fact that we are scudding under bare poles," said Hahlström.

"We are dripping oil on the water," said Wilhelm, pointing through the opening of the door to where Pander and a sailor were lowering a bag of sail-cloth filled with oil. With the heavy seas that kept sweeping down like great mountains in motion and the fearfully boiling waves accompanying the swells, the measure seemed almost ridiculous. Each instant the dead _Roland_, constantly sending out its long-drawn signal, which sounded more like a call for help than a warning, was raised up on a plunging mountain of water, where there seemed as little prospect of safety as when it sank into the valleys. The great steamer seemed not to know where to turn. The raging waters twisted it over now on its starboard side, now on its port side. Of its herculean might, nothing remained but its unwieldy, helpless bulk. It turned about slowly, and turned back again, and all of a sudden a fearful sea, like a thousand hissing white panthers leaping from a dark green mountain ridge, dashed over the railing.

"That was bad," said Wilhelm, slamming the door shut in the nick of time. Frederick's nerves were in a state of tension, not in a mere metaphoric sense. They produced a purely physical sensation, as of violin strings too tightly drawn.

"Is it making you nervous?" asked Hahlström.

"Somewhat," said Frederick. "I don't deny it. A man has strength and intelligence, but can't exercise either, even when danger is imminent."

"Immediate danger?" asked Wilhelm. "No, we are not there yet. In the first place, the engines will be working again pretty soon; and secondly, even if we should really have to drift and had to resort to the sails, we could count on being perfectly easy in our minds a week from now."

"What do you mean by being easy in our minds?" demanded Hahlström.

"The storm is blowing from north-northwest. A ship like this never capsizes. So, in all probability, we should be carried to the Azores, where a steamer would tow us into port. Or, perhaps, we should be driven even further south, and in a week we should be anchoring in view of the glorious Peak of Teneriffe."

"Many thanks for your Peak of Teneriffe. I have to be in New York. My daughter has an engagement there. We are under obligations to be there."

"A week of uncertainty would be ruin to my nervous system," said Frederick. "I am not suited for this passive heroism. I might do more if I could be active."

"You've read the 'Leather-stocking Tales,'" said Wilhelm, ironically. "You know that the American Indians have greater respect for passive heroism. Think of the stakes on which they burn their captives to death."

"Never mind," said Frederick. "No martyr stakes for me. Were I to hear that the screw is broken and we should have to drift, my nerves couldn't stand it. I would jump into the water. That is why I am against life-preservers. I wouldn't accept one if it were offered to me ten times over. Why prolong the death agony?"

XLII

The hours passed. The grey day went down into still greyer twilight. The ear-splitting tumult of the sea never ceased. Frederick, like everybody else, had in vain awaited the moment when the engines would be working again, and the helpless ship would resume its course. Everybody, with the anxiety of despair, watched whether the intervals between the great swells would lengthen or shorten. Sometimes a superstitious illusion that he was being persecuted would take hold of Frederick. Particularly awful were the cries of the emigrants penned in the steerage, which at short intervals penetrated above on deck. They wept and wailed and shrieked to heaven for help. They were like men driven mad by fear, fury and physical pain.

Yet, as if nothing had happened, the call for dinner was trumpeted at the regular time through the gangways of the drifting vessel, through that majestic, helpless ark, lighted by electricity, which, shining through the port-holes, turned the _Roland_ with its crust of ice into a fairy palace, a mournful plaything of the waves.

Frederick wondered who would have the phlegm or the courage or the desire to go to dinner. But Wilhelm cried, "Come, gentlemen," and since Rosa appeared, wet and courageous, to attend to the children, it was out of place for him to remain in the cabin, and there was nothing for him to do but join Doctor Wilhelm and Hahlström. The cockatoo was screeching and Ella was crying. The child was refractory. Ingigerd was trying to console her, while Rosa reprimanded her rather energetically.

"Would you like me to stay near here?" Frederick asked before leaving. "It would mean a great deal to me if you would let me be entirely at your disposal, Miss Ingigerd."

"Thank you, Doctor von Kammacher, you will be coming again."

Frederick marvelled at the naturalness with which he had made the offer and she had accepted.

Now an unexpected change set in, which allayed everybody's excitement and went through Frederick's muscles and nerves like a soothing stream. The walls and floors of the _Roland_ began to quiver faintly, a sign that her heart and pulse were beating again. It was the rhythm of its strength, the rhythm of its race to its goal. Ingigerd shouted with joy, like a child, and Frederick set his teeth. Renewed life, renewed prospects and hopes, the reassumption of system, the relaxation of his nerves made him so weak that the tears almost started to his eyes. Choking down his emotion, he stepped out on deck.

Here the scene had changed. Blithely, in all its might, the _Roland_ was leaping forward again into the roaring darkness. That monstrous, seething witch's cauldron of the boiling waters was now welcome to him. Again the _Roland_ was tearing breaches in dark mountains, was rising to mountain heights, and madly plunging into deep valleys; during which, for many seconds at a time, the screw would whirl wildly in the turbulent air.

Mr. Rinck was sitting on the threshold of his cabin, which was brightly lighted, smoking and petting his spotted cat.

"It's good we're under way again," Frederick could not refrain from saying as he walked past.

"Why?" said Rinck phlegmatically.

"I for one," said Frederick, "would rather be running under full steam than drifting helplessly."

"Why?" said Mr. Rinck again.

In the gangways below, even though the ship was pitching, the atmosphere was fairly pleasant and lively. Everybody seemed to have forgotten his fear. The passengers, cracking jokes and clinging to the nearest stationary thing, reeled and stumbled into the dining-room. The rattle of china near the kitchen was deafening, especially when, as frequently happened, some of the plates broke.

Frederick's clothes were pretty well soaked, and he mustered up the courage to go to his cabin to dress. Adolph, his steward, came to help him, and told Frederick of a panic that had broken out in the steerage when the engines stopped. Some of the women with their babies on their arms had wanted to jump right into the water. It was with difficulty that the other emigrants had restrained them. One of the stewards and a sailor had clutched a Polish woman by her feet just as she was taking the downward plunge.

"You can't blame these people for acting like cowards in this situation," said Frederick. "It would be strange if they didn't. Who will insist that he can stand upright when the ground beneath his feet is giving away? If a man were to say so, either he would be lying, or his lack of feeling would be so great as to degrade him below an animal."

"Yes," said the steward, "but what would _we_ do if _we_ were so cowardly?"

Frederick now began to deliver one of those fiery dissertations that had won him a number of youthful auditors when he was a _Privatdozent_.

"With you it is different," he said. "You are upheld, and at the same time rewarded, by the feeling that you are doing your duty. While we passengers are living in terror, the cooks have been boiling soup, cleaning fish, preparing vegetables, roasting and carving, larding venison and so on." The steward laughed! "But I assure you, at times it is easier to roast a roast than to eat it." And Frederick continued in a solemn, but for that very reason, roguish manner to philosophise on courage and cowardice.

XLIII

Dinner began, and, though the weather had by no means improved, a comparatively large number of passengers had gathered in the dining-room. Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, with his white hair curled and arranged by the barber, if not in a braid at the back of his head, yet like a wig of the rococo period, stood, as usual, in majestic pose, before the false mantelpiece between the two entrance doors. It was the place from which he could best supervise the waiters and keep his eye on the whole dining-room.

The band was playing _Le Père la Victoire_ by Ganne. This was followed by Gillet's _Loin du Bal_. At Suppé's overture from _Banditenstreiche_, the eternal skat players came tramping into the saloon, having delayed, as usual, to finish their game. At all the tables much wine was being drunk, because it strengthened one's courage and dulled one's nerves. The passengers toasted the _Roland_. It amused them. They were all conscious of the pleasant rhythm of the great engine, to which no music in the world was comparable. Over Vollstedt's waltz, _Lustige Brüder_, the company with a sense of relief was still discussing the danger they had safely escaped.

"We hoisted distress signals."

"Rockets were shot off."

"They were already getting the life-belts and life-boats ready."

"Why, they were even dripping oil on the water."

The remarks flew about with the less restraint as neither the captain nor any of his officers were at table.

"The captain," they said, "has never left the bridge since morning."

Suddenly the port-holes were illuminated from outside. Everybody, with an "Oh!" of astonishment, let his knife and fork fall and jumped up from his seat. "A ship!" "A steamer!" all exclaimed, and crowded on deck. There, in overawing majesty, in the gleam of its thousand lights, one of the mightiest ocean liners of the time was rolling and pounding at a distance of not more than fifty yards. "The _Prince Bismarck_, the _Prince Bismarck_!" the people cried, having heard the name from the officers and crew, who had recognised the vessel. "Hurrah!" went up the full-throated cry. "Hurrah!" Frederick shouted, and so did Wilhelm and so did Professor Toussaint. Everybody who could shouted "Hurrah!"--Ingigerd and the woman physician and the woman artist. They all waved their napkins or handkerchiefs. The same shout of joy went up from the steerage, and by way of greeting the two vessels let their steam whistles thunder. They could see the passengers on the various decks of the _Prince Bismarck_ waving to them, and, in spite of the noise of the tempest, could hear their faint hurrah.

The _Prince Bismarck_, a twin-screw steamer, one of the first models of its kind, had just made its record-breaking trip, in which it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in six days, eleven hours, and twenty-four minutes. About two thousand people were now making the trip from New York to Europe. Two thousand people! That means twice as many as can fill a Berlin theatre from the orchestra to the top gallery.

The _Roland_ and the _Bismarck_ exchanged lively flag signals. Yet the whole grandiose vision, from the moment of its appearance to its disappearance, lasted only three minutes. In that time the seething ocean was flooded with light. It was not until nothing remained of the _Bismarck_ but a dancing mist of light that its band came on deck and played. On the _Roland_ they caught two or three trembling, fading measures of the national hymn, _Heil dir im Siegerkranz_. Within a few moments the _Roland_ was again alone on the ocean, in the night, the tempest, and the snowstorm.

With twice as much fire, the band now played a quadrille by Karl, _Festklänge_, and a galop by Kiesler, _Jahrmarktskandal_; and with twice as much appetite and twice as much liveliness the passengers seated themselves at dinner again. "Fairylike!" they cried. "Glorious!" "Tremendous!" "Colossal!"--this last a favourite expression of the Germans.

Even Frederick had a sense of pride and tranquillisation. He felt a vital breath of that atmosphere which is no less necessary to the mind of the modern man than air is to his lungs.

"No matter how much we resist the thought," he said to Wilhelm, "and no matter how much I railed yesterday evening against modern culture, a sight like that must impress a man. It must go to the very marrow of his bones. It is simply absurd that such a marvellous product of secret natural forces, joined together by man's brains and hands, such a creation over creation, such a miracle has become even possible." They touched glasses. The sound of clinking glasses could be heard all over the room. "And what courage, what boldness has been built into that great living organism, what a degree of fearlessness in opposing those natural forces which man has been standing in awe of for thousands of years! What an audacious world of genius, from its keel to the top of its mast, from its bowsprit to its screw!"

"And all this," responded Wilhelm, "has been attained in scarcely a hundred years. So it signifies only the beginning of a development. Object as much as you will, science, or rather technical progress, is eternal revolution and the only genuine reform of human conditions. Nothing can hinder this development that has begun. It is constant, eternal progress, yes, progress itself."

"It is the human intellect," said Frederick, "which throughout the centuries has been lying passive and has suddenly turned active. Undoubtedly man's brains and, at the same time, social industry have entered a new phase."

"Yes," said Wilhelm, "in a certain way the human intellect was already active in ancient times, but it fought too long with the man in the mirror."

"Then, let us hope," said Frederick in confirmation, "that the last hour of the men that fight images, the swindlers, the South Sea Island medicine-men and magicians, is not far off; that all filibusters and cynical freebooters, who for thousands of years have been living by the capture of souls, will strike sail before the fast, safe ocean-going steamer of civilisation, whose captain is intellect and whose sole steward is humanity."

After dinner, Frederick and Wilhelm climbed up to the smoking-room on deck.

"It is difficult to comprehend," said Frederick, when they reached the smoky little saloon, "how a vessel can keep its course in such a stormy, pitch-black night."

At the skat table, the players were sitting, smoking, drinking whisky and coffee, and tossing the cards on the table. Everything else seemed to be a matter of indifference to them. Frederick ordered wine and continued to goad his mind into activity. His head ached. He could scarcely hold it upright on his aching neck. His eyelids ached with weariness; but when they drooped, his eyes seemed to radiate a painful light shining from within. Every nerve, every muscle, every cell in him was alert. He could not hope for sleep. How weeks in his life, months, years had passed as in the twinkling of an eye! And this evening only three and a half days had elapsed since he boarded the _Roland_ at Southampton, a period with the content of years, in which seconds were eternities. Its beginning lay in the remote distance, at the conclusion of a life lived long before, on an earth from which he had parted long before.

"You're tired, Doctor von Kammacher," said Wilhelm. "So I won't invite you to the stoker's funeral on the after-deck."

"Oh, I'll come," said Frederick. He was obsessed by a stinging rage not to spare himself anything, but to taste to the dregs even the bitterest impressions of this detached, jogged and jolted fragment of a human world.

XLIV

The physicians arrived when they were sewing the stoker, Zickelmann, into sail-cloth. The bare cabin was not very brilliantly lighted by a single electric bulb. Frederick recalled his dream--how the dead stoker had been standing under the vines with the cords in his hand and had then led Peter Schmidt and himself to the Toilers of the Light. A great change had taken place in his appearance. His face was no longer of flesh, but seemed to be chiselled out of yellow wax, to which his hair, his eyebrows and beard were pasted. A faint, cunning smile seemed to be curving his mouth; and when Frederick with odd interest and curiosity scrutinised him closely, it seemed to him he was saying, "_Legno santo!_ Toilers of the Light!"

When the dead man's face was covered up and his whole body had been sewed into the cloth in coarse stitches, the sailors bound the puppet, with difficulty keeping it in position, on a smoothly planed board, weighted with iron.

"Will such a chrysalis ever really turn into a butterfly?" Frederick wondered.

The procedure, a piece of reeling, staggering acrobatics, was less gruesome than ridiculous. Yet, though this long package might be only the mortal shell of an immortal soul, one had a sense of infinite sadness in entrusting it to the fearful solitudes of the ocean.

Since in the stormy weather it was no easy matter to throw the corpse overboard and since it was impossible to conduct ceremonies on a rolling deck constantly washed by the waves, the purser asked the few persons present--Captain von Kessel could not leave the bridge--to say a silent prayer for the soul of the dead man. They did so, and four of the stoker's mates, staggering, stopping, lurching and panting, carried the long package on deck to the railing, where at the word of command they let it slide into the sea.

When Doctor Wilhelm bade Frederick good-night, he added:

"You ought to try to go to sleep."

They parted, and Frederick hunted for a sheltered spot on deck, where he could spend the night. He wanted to look the wind and weather straight in the face, there in the glacial air, in the gloom under the pale sheen of the arc-lights fastened to the mast. He shuddered at the thought of a night in the oppressive confines of his cabin, with the closed port-hole and the hot, stale air. But that alone was not the reason which kept him chained to the deck. It was the urge, in case of danger, to be near Ingigerd Hahlström. And when he seated himself near the smoke-stack, with his back against the heated wall, his hat drawn low over his face, his chin in his coat collar, he suddenly laughed to himself bitterly. It was in the same position and on the selfsame spot that he had found Achleitner the night before.

There was a rushing in Frederick's ears. He observed the huge arcs that the lights on the mast described. He observed the regular onslaught of the waves, and above the seething and foaming of the water, he heard the miauing of the wind in the rigging, a wicked obstinate miauing, accompanied by the sudden spitting and leaping of a tiger. Then the sounds seemed to Frederick to be more like the pitiful whimpering of strayed children, a troop of children whom he could now distinctly discern weeping over the bier of the dead stoker. And there were the Toilers of the Light again. He immediately snatched for one to carry it to Ingigerd Hahlström in her cabin; but Ingigerd was dressing for her famous dance. The great spider was already hanging on the flower, weaving the cobweb in which Mara was later to entangle herself. Frederick asked for a broom. He wanted to prevent the dance by sweeping the spider away. A broom came, but in the form of a serving man, who was carrying water and pouring it out. Another man followed and a third and a fourth, until everything was flooded with rushing waters. Frederick awoke from a dream in which he was learning sorcery. The momentous word that chains the floods was still on his lips. The waves rushed. He fell asleep again. Now it was the rushing of a stream at his feet. The sun was shining. It was a clear morning. From the other shore came his wife, young, beautiful, in a dress of flowered goods, rowing her skiff. Her full, gentle figure had the charm of the vestal virgin and the wife. From woods nearby, Ingigerd appeared in the delicacy and the adornment of her light hair and naked body. The sunny landscape, of which her pure nudity was a part, seemed to belong to the time before Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise. Frederick took his wife's hand--she was smiling on him graciously--took Ingigerd Hahlström's hand--she seemed to be gentle and pure and obedient--and joined them. He said to Ingigerd:

"And thou shalt walk in brightness; I'll purge thee clean of all thy dross."

But the heavens darkened, the woods blackened, and the light of a ghostly moon rose over the trees, rushing fearfully like great waters. Frederick ran along the edge of gloomy fields, when suddenly the cry "Moira! Moira!" resounded, and a piece of the darkness severed itself from the edge of the woods and soared heavily, as if borne by mighty black pinions. It was a gigantic bird, crying, "Moira, Moira!" Frederick fled. He was struck by hideous fear, as if the fearful roc were after him. "Moira, Moira!" He drew his penknife to defend himself.

He awoke to find himself lying undressed in his berth. Someone had discovered him, as he had discovered Achleitner the night before, and had led him down to his cabin. But the cry "Moira!" which reminded him of the Moeræ, the ancient goddesses of fate, still rang fearfully in his ears.

XLV

It was still long before daylight, and he fell asleep again. This time on awaking he found himself in the corridor speaking to some stewards, already at work. It slowly dawned upon him that he was clad in nothing but his night-shirt and must have been walking in his sleep. What, had he turned into a somnambulist! He was utterly disconcerted and ashamed and had to let one of the stewards help him back to his cabin.

He found his cabin covered with about three inches of water, from a leaky pipe. Crawling into bed, he squeezed himself, to keep from being tossed out, into a hollow between the boards, a method he himself had devised.

Shortly after six, he was on deck sitting on his bench, warming his hands on his hot tea-cup. The weather was frightful. The morning was of an icy dreariness unsurpassed. The fury of the sea had waxed. The falling twilight was a new sort of darkness. The roaring of the waters and the raging of the winds were deafening. Frederick's ear-drums ached. But the ship struggled on, managing to pursue its course, though slowly.

And suddenly--Frederick did not know whether to trust his hearing--above the noise of the sea rose Ariel strains, beginning solemnly and swelling serenely. It was the chords and melodies of a church choral. He was moved almost to tears. He recollected that this dreary morning was a Sunday morning, and the orchestra, even in the midst of the cyclone, was carrying out its instructions to begin the day with devotional music. It was playing in the unused smoking-room half way up the companionway, whence the strains ascended faintly to the deck. Everything lying heavily upon Frederick's soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music. It brought back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence, expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his father's and his mother's birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song woke him up in the morning. What was to-day compared with that past? What lay in between! What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost, love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent, blind imprisonment.

Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited him with such bitter, refined chastisements?

"I'm wild!" screamed Hans Füllenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane."

Nevertheless, Hans Füllenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers, though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning again.

To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the _Roland_ reached New York.

XLVI

Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.

At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.

Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light. Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as the vessel lurched. At first he was uncertain whether the word he had heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his unstrung nerves. Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive fall or a delusive cry. But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the word, "Danger," repeated several times, a sensation came over him that produced a most remarkable change in his condition.

"Very well," he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and stepped out into the gangway.

Here there was not a soul.

"Very well," he had been thinking, "the invisible powers, whose playthings we human beings are, will now completely expose their supreme brutality."

He had not been awakened from sleep; he had been awakened and brought to his sober reason from beneath a hundred strata of dreams and sleep. Now, in that empty corridor, it again seemed to him to be a fantastic illusion of his disordered brain; and he was about to return to his cabin, when he noticed for the first time that the rhythm of the engines and the churning of the screw were neither to be heard nor felt. Suddenly he thought the great vessel was drifting in the ocean abandoned by passengers and crew, and he alone had been left behind from the general rescue. But a passenger in a silk dressing-gown reeled by, whom Frederick could question.

"What's the matter, do you know?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing," said the man. "I've only been looking for my steward. I'm thirsty. I want a glass of lemonade." He staggered past Frederick into his cabin.

"Ass!" Frederick mentally exclaimed, disgusted with himself for what he again believed was his illusion. Yet the silence weighed upon him dreadfully. Seized by a wild instinct, he could not help but suddenly rush forward, merely to be on deck.

Somebody came toward him from the opposite direction, and asked him where he was going.

"Get out of my way," said Frederick. "It's none of your business."

But the hideous, half-dressed, corpse-like creature, besmirched by the traces of seasickness, would not make way.

"Are the stewards here all crazy?" he cried.

Hard by Frederick's ear an electric bell began to hammer noisily, and the next moment the tottering phantom that barred his way was multiplied by ten, twenty, a host of similar phantoms.

"What's the matter! What's the matter! We're sinking!"

"Steward! Steward!" a voice commanded; and another, "Captain! Captain!"

"Wretched service!" a man scolded in a voice that broke. "No stewards about. What do they mean by it?" The call bells began to rage.

Frederick turned, and ran down the endless corridor to the after part of the vessel. Nobody intercepted him. He passed the windows of the engine-room. The cylinders and pistons were not stirring. From the depths of the ship, from the boilers and furnaces, a sound of rushing, splashing water penetrated above the creaking and grinding of the walls.

"Did a boiler burst?" Frederick thought, forgetting that there would have been the report of an explosion and the hiss of escaping steam.

But he hastened on without stopping, past the post office, on his way through the second cabin to the stern. In his flight it occurred to him how happy he had been in Paris when at Cook's office they had told him that by great haste he could still make the _Roland_ at Southampton. Why had he been in such a fever of impatience, in such dread of missing the boat and rushing into the open arms of doom? For there was no veiling the fact that something fearful had happened to the _Roland_.

At the door of the second cabin, he encountered the barber.

"The fires are out," said the barber. "A collision. The water is pouring into the hold below my shop."

The hammering of the bells never ceased. The barber was dragging two life-preservers.

"What do you need two for?" Frederick asked, and took one and sped on.

XLVII

He reached the door leading to the after deck, but could not open it. From the position of the ship, he realized that something irretrievable had happened. On the port side, the steamer was lying high, on the starboard side, it was only ten or twelve feet above the level. As the stern was also much lower than the bow, it would have been a practically hopeless venture to clamber forward across the deck, especially with the heavy seas that were constantly sweeping it.

Willy-nilly, he must return through the mole's gallery he had traversed to the forward part of the boat.

Scarcely fifteen seconds later, when he had reached the forward entrance to the deck, at the head of the companionway leading up from the dining-room, he could not have told how he succeeded in making his way through the corridor jammed with panicky passengers without having been beaten to death, strangled, or trodden underfoot. His hands and forehead were bruised, and he was clinging to the door-post with all his might, parleying violently with Doctor Wilhelm. Doctor Wilhelm clutched him, and the two physicians, in defiance of death, climbed up to the bridge, where they huddled in the shelter of the deck-house on the port side. They saw something huge rise high up in the morning twilight and fly madly above their heads. The next instant they were drenched up to their waists, and would have been washed overboard, had they not clung to the railing with all their strength.

On the bridge it looked pretty much as usual. Captain von Kessel, apparently quite composed, was leaning forward, and the giant Von Halm was searching the ever-thickening fog with spy-glasses. The siren was howling, and rockets were being shot off from the bow. On the captain's right stood the second mate. The third mate had just received the order:

"Cut the falls. Get the boats away."

"Cut the falls. Get the boats away," he repeated and disappeared to execute the order.

To Frederick, it all seemed unreal. Moments such as this, to be sure, had entered his imagination as within the realm of the possible; but now he realised that he had never reckoned with them seriously. He knew the fact confronting him stood there inexorable; nevertheless, he was unable to grasp it in convincing reality. He was telling himself he ought to try to get into a boat, when the captain's blue eyes glanced at him, but apparently with no recognition in them. The captain's commands were uttered in his beautiful voice, remotely suggesting the clinking sound of colliding billiard balls.

"Women and children starboard."

"Women and children starboard," came like a near, word-for-word echo.

Now Max Pander stepped up to the captain. He had the noble idea of proffering him a life-belt. Von Kessel's hand found its way for an instant to his cap.

"No, thank you, my boy, I don't need it. But here--" he took a pencil from his pocket, wrote a hasty line on a piece of paper, and handed it to Pander. "Jump in a boat and, if you can, bring this greeting to my sisters."

A heavy sea swept over the port side, and a tremendous swell raised and turned and twisted the colossal vessel. Frederick in vain tried to rouse himself from the leaden indifference that had come upon him in view of the incomprehensible drama. Suddenly, he was seized with horror, but he fought it down. At no cost was he to show cowardice either to himself or to others. Nevertheless, he followed Doctor Wilhelm, who stuck close to Max Pander's heels.

"We must get into one of the boats," said Doctor Wilhelm. "There's no doubt we are sinking."

The next moment Frederick found himself in Ingigerd's cabin.

"Hurry!" he cried. "The people are already jumping into the boats."

He had left the cabin door open, and close by they could see Pander and two sailors hacking away with axes at the frozen tackles by which a life-boat was suspended.

Ingigerd asked for her father. She asked for Achleitner.

"There's no time now for you to think of anybody but yourself. It's impossible to go below deck. It would mean sure death," Frederick explained. "Get dressed! Get dressed!"

Ingigerd mutely hastened to carry out his orders. It was not until then that one of the stewards passing her cabin called in his brief message, "Danger!"

"Danger! What's the matter? Are we sinking?" she cried.

But Frederick had already picked her up and carried her over to the boat, which the next instant gave way under the axe and fell into the misty turmoil below.

"Women and children on the other side!" the third mate shouted commandingly.

His order referred not only to Ingigerd, but also to the maid Rosa, who, fiery-red with her exertions, appeared on deck dragging her mistress and both the children, with the air of a housewife loaded with purchases, afraid of missing a street car.

"Women and children on the other side!" the third mate repeated in somewhat too Prussian a manner. Fortunately his presence was now required for the next boat, over which the struggles were already commencing.

There was no time to be lost, and despite the determined resistance of two sailors, Frederick, Pander, and Doctor Wilhelm let Ingigerd safely down into the boat. In doing so, Frederick also turned somewhat too loud-voiced and Prussian. Through his iron energy, which hewed down resistance as the sailors had hewed at the life-boat tackles, he succeeded in having the children, Mrs. Liebling, and finally Rosa lowered into the boat. It was no easy matter. Frederick heard himself shouted at, roared at, and commanded, and he, in turn, shouted at the sailors, commanded, and roared. He fought, he worked, though without a gleam of hope and with the positive consciousness that the situation was beyond salvation. All was over, all was lost. If he had not thought so before, the next occurrence would have convinced him.

A second boat had been lowered, and three sailors had jumped in. It rolled from side to side and rose on a wave. About eight or nine other persons leapt for it--Frederick thought he recognised familiar figures. It filled and disappeared. As if by sleight-of-hand, the spot where the boat with the dozen people in it had been dancing turned into empty sea with mist and spray driving over it.

Slowly the dark grey of the early dawn turned into the lighter grey of the day, approaching coldly and indifferently. When the fog lifted a little, Frederick for seconds at a time had a dismaying illusion that he was in a green valley with glorious, flowery meadows, through which a snowstorm of blossoms was sweeping. But then the mountains came, driven by the ferocious spirits of the hurricane, and closed down on the valley. The heavy, glassy heights broke, and with the weight of their fluid masses, snapped away two of the _Roland's_ masts like reeds.

With its boilers quenched, the poor wreck could no longer send up a cry for help. Its sad body was still towering upward at the bow in colossal majesty. Rockets flew, signals of distress fluttered briskly from the foremast; a futile language in that merciless raging of the elements.

In the steerage it had grown still. But from the port side came a peculiar, persistent, unbroken sound, resembling the shouting and screaming of a crowd on toboggan-slides and merry-go-rounds at a village fair. A buzzing as of swarming bees pierced distinctly through the roaring of the tempest, while above it rose the shrieking of infuriated, frenzied women. Frederick thought of his dark-eyed Deborah. She, too, was doomed. He thought of Wilke.

Bulke, the faithful valet, appeared, leading Arthur Stoss by his coat collar. Within the next few moments, Wilke also appeared. He had been drinking, and was shouting as if the whole thing were a frolic; but he was half dragging, half carrying on deck an old, wheezing working woman. Thrusting Stoss and Bulke aside, he landed her safely in the boat.

Ingigerd was clamouring incessantly for her father and Achleitner. Instead of either of these, Stoss, whom Bulke and Wilke had lowered by a rope, dropped down beside her.

About thirty feet from Frederick, a man was standing in a cabin door, carefully hooked back. With incredible calm he was smoking a cigarette and inhaling, and stroking a yellow cat on his arm.

"It looks pretty bad, doesn't it, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick said, going up to him.

"Why?"

"Well, don't you think we're lost?"

Mr. Rinck shrugged his shoulders without answering.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?" somebody bellowed in his ear.

"Nothing," he said, stroking his cat.

In the meantime Bulke and Wilke had lowered Doctor Wilhelm into the boat.

"That girl down there is giving herself a sore throat screaming for her father," said Bulke.

Frederick decided, cost what it might, to take a look around below deck. Perhaps fortune might favour him; he might discover Hahlström and perhaps Achleitner, too, and help one or both into the boat. There was danger, to be sure, that the boat would put off before he returned.

He had worked his way as far as the unused smoking-room. It was empty. Suddenly Wilke was standing beside him.

"If you're looking for somebody, I'll help," the peasant declared.

The two together descended the rest of the companionway. The space in front of the dining-room was empty and so was the dining-room. It was tilted at an acute angle. A heap of dishes and silverware blocked the doorway.

"Hahlström! Achleitner!" Frederick shouted again and again.

Wilke pushed a short way down the long corridor, on which the cabins gave. But the spot closed off by the rising waters was only too clearly distinguishable.

"Come away, come away!" Frederick cried, and ran. He ran for his life. He ran in wild fear of missing the boat.

XLVIII

A moment later he was on deck, over the railing, and in the boat. The men wanted to put off. Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the tiller.

He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared. But now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the railing.

"Wilke! Wilke!" he shouted. "Jump into the boat!"

"Right away, right away," Wilke answered several times. Then he did something that Frederick tried to scold him out of doing, because it seemed so senseless and useless to everybody in the boat. He had discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be struggling desperately for their lives.

The boat did not wait for him. Under the third mate's command, the sailors began to row. The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than thirty yards from the _Roland's_ side.

Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict, had bored the flank of the _Roland_, making a great gash near the engine-room. Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold. Frederick thought he could hear its greedy gulping. At the sight, for all the horror about him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior _Roland_, and with difficulty restrained an outcry. The fog closed in and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.

When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some incomprehensible way turned. The twenty persons in the boat looked down from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level with the water. They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in there, swarming like ants.

Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception. All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their way. Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots. Some of the life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark, swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape dropped off and fell into the sea.

Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view. But a sound, which Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the metallic clanging of the hurricane. For several seconds Frederick's thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in their passage. But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached his ears through the fog. It was the outcry of those human beings, who were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conception, that no human crime, he felt, could be great enough to justify such atonement. He distinctly felt how, through the excess of the hideous impression, the bridge carrying the message of his senses to his innermost soul snapped.

But suddenly the fever of the visible death struggle of eight or nine hundred innocent men after all did penetrate to his innermost soul, and wrung a cry from him, in which the whole boat load joined as by command. In that cry were fear, anguish, fury, protest, supplication, horror, wailing, cursing, and despair.

And the horror was increased by the consciousness that there was no merciful ear to listen, but only a deaf heaven. Wherever Frederick turned his eyes, he saw death. Indifferently the bottle-green, mountainous waves came rolling. In their march there was a murderous regularity, with which nothing interfered and which recognised no obstacles. He closed his eyes ready to die. Several times he felt for his parents' letters in his breast pocket, as if he needed them for passports to the land of darkness, where he was soon going. He dared not open his eyes again, because he could no longer bear to see the convulsions of the women in the boat or the hideous massacre on the stern of the _Roland_.

The sea raged. It was icy cold. The water froze on the edge of the boat. Rosa, the maid, was the only one that constantly bestirred herself to help others, the children, Mrs. Liebling, Ingigerd, and Arthur Stoss. Bulke and she vied with each other in bailing out the water in which Stoss and Mrs. Liebling were lying and which reached to the knees of the others.

What was in the meantime happening on the deck of the _Roland_, so far as Frederick caught momentary glimpses of it, did not fit in with his conception of human nature. The things he thought he saw in detail had nothing in common with those civilised, decorous ladies and gentlemen whom he had seen in the dining-room and on deck, promenading, conversing, smiling, exchanging greetings, and daintily dissecting the fish on their plates with forks. He could have sworn that he distinguished the white figure of a cook cutting his way, with a long knife, through the honourable person of a first-class passenger for whom he had cooked. Frederick was convinced he saw a stoker, a black fellow, strike a woman who was clinging to him--perhaps she was the beautiful Canadian--pick her up and throw her overboard. Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised, were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting, helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and disappeared.

"Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath blown away by the raging elements. She pointed, and Frederick looked where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes. Again the fog lifted and opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in all its length. Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white handkerchief. It was impossible to tell who it was. But a man whom Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a spy-glass was Hans Füllenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.

The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone with the electric lights inside. Now and then a stifled shot could be heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light. But soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished. As if the sea in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it swept over the deck from the other side. That instant the waters on the near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.

Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the _Roland_ again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it. A hideous, bestial conflict began.

Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it. Although it went on under his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance. He struck at something. It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the deep, shrieking in a voice not human. Suddenly, pulled backwards by the merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared. Frederick saw how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs. Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat. The sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.

None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.

The servant, Bulke, took command. For the sake of something to do and to delay the inevitable capsizing, Frederick and Wilhelm each seized an oar and rowed with the sailors.

Minutes passed. The fog lifted. Many eternally moving mountains and valleys of water had rolled between the little boat and the wreck. Of the _Roland_, the mighty fast mail steamer of the North German Steamship Company, nothing was to be seen.

XLIX

Late in the afternoon of the same day, the captain of a sturdy little trading vessel from Hamburg sighted a boat drifting on the long, high swells. The weather was clear, and the captain made certain that the people in the boat were signalling with handkerchiefs. Within half an hour, the shipwrecked passengers of the _Roland_ were with great difficulty hoisted on board the trader, one at a time.

There were fifteen persons in all, three sailors and a cabin-boy, with the well-known name of the _Roland_ on their caps, two ladies, a woman evidently from the steerage, a maid, a long-haired man of about thirty in a velvet jacket, an armless man, the man who had been steering, two other men, and two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was dead.

The hardships and terrors to which the delicate child had succumbed had had almost equally dire effects upon the others. With the exception of the maid Rosa, they looked as if they had been drowned beyond hope of resuscitation. A very wet man--it was Frederick--attempted to drag an unconscious wet young woman up the gangway-ladder, but his strength failed him, and the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism. Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze. On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands. His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine. He seemed to want nothing so much as to be dried, warmed and cleaned.

He was followed by Rosa. Upon laying an unconscious little girl in the arms of the first mate, she turned back to descend to the boat again, but found the way barred by Bulke and one of the sailors of the trader, hauling up the armless actor, Arthur Stoss. He was dripping wet, his eyes were staring blankly, his nose was running, and his eyelids were red and inflamed, while the tip of his nose was waxen white. After several vain attempts to produce a sound through his chattering teeth, he finally succeeded in framing "Rum! Hot rum!"

A mutual inclination seemed to make Bulke and Rosa pull together in their rescue work like two old mates. Fairly raining water, they descended again for Mrs. Liebling, who was lying prone in the bottom of the boat in a serious condition.

"She's dead, and the boy is dead," said the sailors of the trader, and wanted first to carry up the other woman, the steerage passenger, who showed she was still alive by a rattle in her throat, fearful to hear. Rosa burst into a howl and swore Mrs. Liebling was not dead.

"She's blue," the sailors declared. "She swallowed too much water."

But Rosa would not desist, and the sailors were compelled to carry Mrs. Liebling up first.

As they were lifting on deck the unconscious woman from the steerage, still emitting the fearful rattle, one of the _Roland_ sailors, whose feet were frozen and who, during the whole long, dreadful drifting about on the ocean had not uttered a sound, suddenly began to bellow in pain.

"Shut up!" said his mates. "Don't carry on like an old woman."

He was the next to be lifted on board, merely whimpering now in ineffable agony. After him came the man in the velvet jacket, who was maundering, Doctor Wilhelm, Max Pander, and the other two sailors. Lastly the little corpse of Siegfried Liebling was lifted from the boat.

When the absurdly dressed man with long hair reached deck, he performed the drollest antics. For a moment he would stand upright, chest out, like a recruit, the next instant bow profoundly, or take aim, as if hunting; and all the time he kept bawling:

"I'm an artist. I paid for my cabin. I am well known in Germany"--striking a conscious attitude--"I am Jacob Fleischmann. I am a painter, from Fürth."

Every now and then he would writhe pitifully and vomit salt water. The water dripping from his clothes formed a pool where he stood.

Doctor Wilhelm had completely lost the faculty of speech. All he could do was to sneeze incessantly.

In the meantime, the steward of the vessel brought Frederick hot tea, and one of the sailors, who acted as barber and nurse on the vessel, attempted to restore Mrs. Liebling to life. Within less than two minutes, Frederick felt sufficiently revived to meet the demands of the occasion and assist the sailor-nurse with his Good Samaritan work.

After swallowing several glasses of brandy, Doctor Wilhelm with the help of the chief engineer, Mr. Wendler, attempted to revive Siegfried Liebling, though with small hope of success.

Mrs. Liebling, in no wise differing from a corpse, had been laid on the long mahogany table in what would have been the dining-room, had the vessel been carrying passengers. Ugly, dark, purplish patches disfigured the forehead, cheeks, and throat of the woman, who was still young and who, before the shipwreck, had been beautiful. On baring her body, they found that it, too, was marked, though less closely, with the same gangrenous spots, somewhat duller in colour. Her body was swollen. Death might have resulted from choking in a moment when she fell into a faint unobserved by any of her companions. Toward the last, there had been several feet of water in the boat, and Rosa had for some time been entirely occupied with the dying boy.

When Frederick and the sailor-nurse laid Mrs. Liebling's body face downward on the table, water flowed from her nose and mouth. Her heart was no longer beating, and she gave no sign of life. As Frederick assumed, what had happened was, that she had sunk unconscious to the bottom of the boat and had lain for some time under water. He opened her mouth, forced her gold-filled teeth apart, put her tongue in the right position, and removed mucus, which had gathered at the opening of the air-passages. While the ship's cook rubbed her body with hot cloths, Frederick tried to induce artificial respiration by raising and lowering her arms and legs like a pump-handle.

The mahogany table took up the larger part of the low, creaking saloon, the only one the vessel possessed. It was on the quarter-deck and was lighted from above. The two walls running the length of the room were formed of the mahogany doors of the twelve staterooms, six on each side. In the twinkling of an eye the deserted saloon was converted into a medical laboratory.

A common sailor had peeled Ingigerd Hahlström out of her clothes, and without circumstance had laid her delicate body, shining like mother-of-pearl, on a couch against the wall taking up the full width of the room. At Frederick's instruction, he rubbed her body vigorously with woollen cloths. Rosa was doing the same for Ella Liebling, who was the first to be put to bed. The steward was working away in a glow of zeal to get each of the dozen beds freshly spread, and as soon as the second one was ready, Ingigerd was laid between the warmed covers. Thanks to his faithful valet, Arthur Stoss, his teeth still chattering, was the next to be ready for bed.

Jacob Fleischmann gave his rescuers much trouble. When a sailor spoke to him kindly and attempted to undress him, he struck about wildly, and shouted in a rage, "I'm an artist!"

The steward and Bulke had to hold him fast and use main force in putting him to bed. Doctor Wilhelm abandoned his vain efforts to revive Siegfried Liebling and came with his leather case of drugs, which he had managed to save, just in time to give the painter an injection of morphine.

The sailor whose agony of pain had overcome him before he was lifted on deck had such badly swollen, frostbitten feet that his boots had to be cut off bit by bit. He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming, and merely uttered low groans until they laid him in bed; when he called for chewing tobacco.

The woman from the steerage clad in rags was also put to bed. All she could tell was that she was bound for Chicago with her sister, her four children, her husband, and her mother. Nothing of what had in the meantime befallen her seemed to have penetrated, or remained in, her consciousness.

The whole while Frederick, his upper body bared, with only the barber to help him, kept working uninterruptedly over Mrs. Liebling. It was good for him, because it made him perspire. Finally, however, his strength gave out, and Doctor Wilhelm came to his relief. He tottered into the nearest cabin, the door of which stood open, and fell face downward into the unmade bed, utterly exhausted.

L

After a time Mr. Butor, the captain of the _Hamburg_, now speeding on its way, appeared in the saloon to welcome and congratulate the two physicians, who, notwithstanding their extreme exhaustion, were still working without cease over Mrs. Liebling's body.

The room, of course, was flooded and was reeking with the sweetish-sour smell of human exhalations. The captain sent a sailor to fetch dry clothes for Frederick.

While continuing their efforts and relieving each other at intervals, Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick gave a short account of the catastrophe on the _Roland_. Captain Butor was greatly astonished. Though the weather throughout his trip had not been especially good, yet it had not been the reverse. Most of the time, as at present, it had been clear, with a stiff wind and a moderately high sea. His vessel was bound for New York with a cargo of oranges, wine, oil, and cheese from Fayal in the Azores, to which it had carried a load of agricultural implements from Hamburg.

Frederick and Wilhelm could give little information concerning the cause of the accident. Wilhelm said that shortly before six in the morning, he had been awakened by a sound like the clang of a gong. In his half-waking state, he thought it was the signal to dinner, until he remembered that on the _Roland_ a trumpet blast was used to announce meals.

Frederick thought the _Roland_ had probably struck a wreck or a rock. But rocks, the captain said, were out of the question. There were none in those waters, and the _Roland_ could not have been carried by strong currents into a region where there were rocks, since in that event the life-boat would not have entered the course of his own vessel within so short a time. The skipper, who knew Captain von Kessel personally and had met him in Hamburg only recently, spoke of him in the highest terms, as one of the most experienced, trustworthy captains in the German merchant marine. The catastrophe, he said, was possibly the worst that had occurred in decades, if the steamer had actually sunk and not been towed into a port.

Before leaving, Captain Butor invited the two men, as soon as their task was ended, to supper at the mess table.

An hour and a half passed. The physicians were about to give up their attempts to resuscitate Mrs. Liebling, when her heart began to stir and her breast to heave. Rosa's joy was boundless. With the greatest difficulty restraining an emotional outburst, she felt the warmth return even to Mrs. Liebling's soles, which she had been rubbing unwearyingly with her palms, hard as flat-irons. The rescued woman was carried to bed and packed in hot water bottles, like a premature baby.

This great success of the physicians' efforts--it was like a raising of the dead--produced profound emotion in all that witnessed it, including Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm, who were suddenly moved to shake hands with each other.

"We have been saved," said Wilhelm. "The most improbable, the most incredible thing has actually happened."

"Yes," rejoined Frederick. "It has actually happened. It _is_ absolutely the most improbable thing that has ever occurred in my life. The question is, What were we saved for?"

LI

The mess-room of the _Hamburg_ was a small square cabin with iron walls, its only furniture a square table and a bench running around three sides. Once a person was seated, it was impossible to pass him; and when the officers gathered for meals, they shoved themselves into place in a certain order, the captain first.

At seven o'clock Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick appeared for supper. They found a soup tureen sending up clouds of steam and a well-constructed oil lamp over the table shedding a cheerful light. The _Hamburg_ was not lighted by electricity.

The two physicians, like all victims of accidents, the objects of really touching solicitude, were assigned seats against the warmest wall, dividing the cabin from the engine-room. Captain Butor served the strong hot soup, and Mr. Wendler, chief engineer, a rotund little mariner, in an attempt to enliven the shipwrecked men, cautiously ventured a joke or two even before the roast was served. He came from Lindenau near Leipzig, and the rest of the crew teased him for his Low German.

"Don't talk," said the captain to Wilhelm and Frederick. "Just eat, drink, and sleep."

At first they were inclined to take his advice, but in the course of the meal, after one of the sailors had served an immense cut of roast beef, and the captain had carved it, and they had washed the meat down with red wine, their spirits rose from moment to moment.

Bulke appeared at the door showing evidences of the royal banquet to which he and the sailors of the _Roland_ had been treated by the sailors of the _Hamburg_. Notwithstanding his condition, pardonable enough in the circumstances, he would not go to sleep without first receiving instructions from Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, before whom he stood in military attitude, hand to his cap, awaiting orders.

It was decided that the sailor-nurse and another sailor of the _Hamburg_ should go on night duty, since all the men from the _Roland_ needed rest and sleep.

Though Frederick's and Doctor Wilhelm's spirits rose visibly, they never referred to the sinking of the _Roland_. It was too tremendous a thing, too dreadful, too near for any of the survivors, except the sailors, to speak of it without intense emotion. It was like a dull weight on their souls. Whatever Wilhelm and Frederick said related merely to their difficulties in the life-boat, or to the trip on the _Roland_ before it overstepped that moment in eternity which determined its awful fate.

"Captain," said Frederick, "you don't know how astonishing it is to be raised from the dead. Conceive a man who has taken definite leave of everything that was dear to him in life, who has felt the rattle in his throat, and received extreme unction, and death, death itself, has settled on his flesh and limbs. I still feel death in my joints. And yet I am sitting here in safety, in the pleasant lamplight, almost as in a circle of friends and relatives. I am sitting in the cosiest home, with the difference that I still cannot get myself to look upon you"--they were the captain, the engineer, the boatswain, and the first mate--"as something so insignificant as mere men."

"When we sighted the _Hamburg_", said Wilhelm, "I had just made my last will and testament. You see I don't give myself up for lost as quickly as my friend, Doctor von Kammacher. When your ship gradually grew from the size of a pinhead to the size of a full-grown pea, all of us who could, screamed at the top of our voices. We nearly burst our throats screaming. And when your _Hamburg_ attained the size of a walnut, and we realised we had been sighted, your ship flamed in my eyes like a huge diamond or ruby, and to me the east from which you came shone more brilliantly than the west, where the sun was still shining above the horizon. All of us howled like watch-dogs."

"It will always be a miracle to me," Frederick resumed, "that such an evening as this could follow such a morning. I have let days slip past, by the hundreds, holding no more in them than minutes. But in this one day, a whole summer has passed, and a whole winter. I feel as if the first violet had followed directly upon the first snow."

Wilhelm told of how excited the sailors had been in Cuxhaven because Catholic priests had boarded the _Roland_. Then he mentioned a dream his old mother had had the night before he was to sail. A child of hers that had been born many years before and had lived only a day, appeared to her as a grown-up man and warned her not to let him make the trip.

"She begged me not to go," he said, "but, as I am an enlightened man, I simply laughed at her for her fears."

Once launched upon the boundless sea of superstition, beloved by sailors, the men went on to recite cases they knew of prophetic dreams, of forebodings fulfilled, and the appearance of dying or dead men. This suggested his friend's last letter to Frederick. He drew his portfolio from his waistcoat pocket, where it had remained throughout his perilous trip, and passed the letter around.

They read the passage, "In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend to make an ocean trip?" Of course, it excited not a little astonishment, and it was with some thrills that they read: "Should it be possible for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond, you will hear from me again."

Captain Butor asked with an incredulous smile, yet eagerly, whether his friend had indeed made himself noticeable from the Beyond.

"This is what happened to me in a dream. Judge for yourselves. I don't know," said Frederick, in a voice still hoarse and barking. It was unlike him to go on and relate, as he did, the dream that had been greatly occupying his thoughts, which began with the landing in a mystic port and ended with the Toilers of the Light. He described his friend, Peter Schmidt, and declared that Peter had sent his astral self half way across the Atlantic to greet him. He spoke of 1492, of Columbus's flag-ship, the _Santa Maria_, but chiefly of his meeting with Rasmussen in the form of an old chandler, giving a detailed description of the remarkable ship in the shop window, the shop itself, and the chirping of the goldfinches. He drew out his note-book and read aloud what the mysterious chandler had said to him:

"It was precisely thirteen minutes past one on the twenty-fourth of January when I drew my last breath."

"Whether that is true," Frederick concluded, "remains to be proved. So much is certain--if there is anything about this dream that isn't the illusory work of my imagination--my soul grazed the boundaries of the world beyond, and I received a hint of the catastrophe to come. As to the _Roland_, my friend, Peter Schmidt, showed me a ship in the harbour with a tremendous hole in its side and said it had brought in a great many people,--which would mean, it had transferred them to the world beyond. In regard to my rescue, my disguised friend, Rasmussen, said I should soon celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of 1492 with Peter Schmidt in New York. But dreams are froth and foam. I fancy it would not be difficult to explain all this rationalistically, from psycho-physiologic causes."

Before the little family circle of the _Hamburg_ broke up for the night, they touched glasses again with great gravity, even solemnity.

LII

Frederick awoke the next morning from an eleven hours' sleep, for which he was indebted chiefly to a dose of veronal. Doctor Wilhelm had undertaken to do whatever was necessary during the night for the sick passengers of the _Roland_ and had persuaded Frederick, whose more delicate constitution was in the utmost need of rest, to take the drug. The sun was shining brightly into his tiny cabin. Through the slat door, he heard the sound of voices speaking calmly and the cheerful clatter of plates and dishes. At first he recalled nothing of the previous day's events, and thought he was on the fast mail steamer, _Roland_. But he could not reconcile the change in his cabin with the idea he had formed of his room on the _Roland_. In his bewilderment he reached out from bed and knocked on the mahogany slats of the door. The next moment Doctor Wilhelm's face, lively and refreshed, was bending over him.

"With the exception of the woman from the steerage, all our patients had a good night," the _Roland's_ doctor said, and went on to give a report of each case. It was not until he had nearly ended his account that he noticed the difficulty Frederick was having to explain his surroundings. Wilhelm laughed and recalled some incidents. Frederick started up and clapped his hands to his temples.

"A void," he exclaimed. "A whirl of impossible things is going round in my brain."

Shortly after, he was sitting at breakfast with Doctor Wilhelm, eating and drinking. And yet not a word was said of the sinking of the _Roland_.

Ingigerd Hahlström had awakened and fallen asleep again. The barber and sailor-nurse, Flitte by name, had locked her door. Arthur Stoss was still lying abed with his door open and was cracking jokes in the best of spirits, while his trusty valet, Bulke, fed him or handed him food to take with his feet. From the ring of his falsetto voice one would have judged that the horrors he had survived were nothing but a series of comic situations.

"This business," he said, leaving his original subject and dropping a few highly flavoured oaths, "is going to cost me one thousand American dollars. I shall not be able to keep the first days of my engagement in New York." In good English he cursed the whole German Hansa, especially the _Hamburg_. "The wretched little herring keg! At the utmost it doesn't make more than ten knots an hour."

Fourteen hours of peaceful sleep brought the painter, Jacob Fleischmann of Fürth to his senses. He had his breakfast served in bed, rang the call-bell, gave orders, and kept the steward dancing attendance on him. The others could hear him loudly reiterate again and again that though the loss of his oil-paintings, sketches, and etchings, which he had intended to sell in America, was irreparable and beyond compensation, yet the steamship company was unquestionably liable, and as soon as he reached New York, he would take to haunting the company's office, until they paid him full damages. They were to find out who and what he was.

Rosa, happy and eager, though with eyes red from crying, passed to and fro between her mistress's cabin and the dining-room table, carrying now one thing, now another, to Mrs. Liebling, who was still whining reproachfully. It had been agreed to keep Siegfried Liebling's death a secret from her, an easy thing to do since she had declared she was not yet strong enough to see the children. Yet it was remarkable how the dead woman had revived. When Frederick after breakfast paid her a professional visit, he found she had only a dim recollection of having been unconscious. She had had glorious dreams, she said, and when she realised she was to be awakened, had felt so regretful that she tried to resist the summons back to earthly life, back from the wondrous isle, the veritable paradise, in which she had been.

Mrs. Liebling was beautiful. She complained of pains, and at Frederick's bidding bared her body. He found it marked with blue spots, the result of the rough tossings in the life-boat, which had left him, too, bruised and wounded in various places and with frozen toes and fingers.

"My dear Mrs. Liebling," he said, "put up with your slight discomfort. We were all dead, and we have undeservedly been granted a second life."

Shortly before ten o'clock, Captain Butor entered the dining-room, shook hands with the gentlemen, asked how they had slept, and told them that all night the men on the bridge had redoubled their vigilance on the chance of discovering more survivors of the _Roland_. Since the wind was still from the northwest, it was possible that the _Hamburg_ might chance on the wreck, in case it had not sunk.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "we did sight a derelict at one o'clock, but there were absolutely no persons aboard. It was an older wreck and a sailing vessel, not a steamer."

"Perhaps it was the _Roland's_ murderer," said Doctor Wilhelm.

The captain asked the two physicians to come to the chart-room where they and the sailors of the _Roland_, who were already awaiting him, were to give him the vouchers he needed for his brief report to be submitted to his company's agent in New York in regard to the picking up of the castaways. A sort of audience was held, during which nothing new concerning the tremendous disaster was revealed.

Pander showed the scrap of paper with the pencilled message that Captain von Kessel had asked him to take to his sisters. All were greatly moved on reading the few hastily scrawled words. The incident revealed what a wrench the hearts and nerves of even the seamen had undergone. At the mention of this or that person or incident, Pander and the three sailors burst into hysterical tears. When asked whether they thought the _Roland_ would remain above water over the day, all said "No." One of the sailors, who from the first warning of danger to the boarding of the _Hamburg_, had gone about his heavy duty with the same grit, the same matter-of-course manner, scarcely uttering a word, concluded each of his statements with: "Captain, it was like on Judgment Day."

At the conclusion of the audience, Frederick felt a great need to be alone for a while. "It was like on Judgment Day," followed him. Yes, it was like on Judgment Day! The horrors of the cruellest judgment could not exceed those amid which the victims of the shipwreck had perished. Strange, the evening before, Frederick had still been able to laugh; to-day he felt as if the gravity of his being were turned to brass and had laid itself about him, not like an iron mask, not like a leaden cloak, but rather like a heavy metal sarcophagus.

He knew a man, an architect verging on middle age, who had been on the island of Ischia during the last great earthquake there. The architect and some very dear friends were sitting together over a bottle of wine when the calamity was ushered in by the roll of subterranean thunder. A moment later the ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life. He himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed. Though years intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head and crushing him. Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror would seize him. Open places made him dizzy, and not infrequently a passerby seeing his helplessness would lead him like a blind man across the city square.

Frederick felt that the sinking of the _Roland_ had left him with a gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the spaces of his soul. With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.

Why had the powers revealed Judgment Day to him, not as a vision, but as an actuality? Why had they showed such partiality as to let him and a few others escape perdition? Was he, the tiny ant, which was susceptible of such titanic terrors, important enough to assume the guidance of things for himself, to fulfil a loftier purpose for good or evil? Had he transgressed? Was he deserving of punishment? But that wholesale massacre was too fearful, too vast a thing! It was ridiculous to attribute to it a pedagogic purpose for the discipline of one minute human existence. Indeed, he felt how the large generalness of the event had almost entirely dislodged everything personal. No! Nothing but blind, deaf and dumb powers of destruction had been at work.

Yet, in facing the elemental tragedy of the human race, the inexorable gruesomeness of the powers, in looking into the eyes of death, he had acquired knowledge that turned something in his being into the hardness of the hardest rock. What was the sense of such a disaster if the eternal goodness ordained it? And where was the power of eternal goodness, if it was incapable of hindering it? Nothing remained but to strip oneself bare of all pride and dignity and grovel in the dust before the great unknown, a humble, will-less slave, completely at its mercy.

LIII

While on the _Roland_, time had crawled at a snail's pace, the hour hand of the clock on the _Hamburg_ travelled twice around its face with surprising rapidity. During that interval, the two ladies remained in bed, though the weather, which was clear and moderate, permitted being on deck. In Mrs. Liebling the consequences of the strain manifested themselves in periodic attacks of great excitement and fear accompanied by violent palpitation; in Ingigerd Hahlström, in healthy sleepiness, which made the administration of morphine in her case unnecessary. Neither of the women developed fever. But the sailor whose feet were frozen and the woman from the steerage had a high temperature. The immigrant in her delirium wanted to jump from bed, and, at the physicians' request, Captain Butor appointed one of the well sailors from the _Roland_ and a sailor from the _Hamburg_ to relieve each other in keeping constant watch over her.

Each time Frederick went to look after the poor creature, he felt himself assailed by the temptation to save her forever from the moment of awakening. From her own lips, while she had still been conscious, he had heard of all the relatives she had probably lost on the _Roland_, her husband, three sons, and a daughter-ranging from seven to eighteen years of age--a sister and her mother. At first her fevered fancy occupied itself with the shipwreck, her husband, children, and sisters. Later she seemed to become a child again, reliving her life in her parents' home. Swallows' nests, a cow, a goat, a meadow, in which there was a haystack roofed to keep off the rain, figured as important things.

"Would that she passed away in those illusions!" thought Frederick.

Arthur Stoss, transported up-stairs by his faithful Bulke, and Jacob Fleischmann strolled about on deck, or reclined in the steamer chairs, which even the trading vessel possessed. Stoss needed some massaging and patching up, and while the physicians were busy with him, he crowed and cawed in his most jovial manner:

"I always say you can't destroy weeds. Tanned leather is impervious to salt water. I am like an ant which can spend a week under water without dying."

Thanks to Rosa's unwearying care, Ella Liebling escaped with nothing but a bad cold. Looking very pretty and saucy in her own clothes, which had been cleaned and dried, the little maiden pried about in every nook and cranny of the vessel. The skipper granted her a free pass to his bridge, the engineers to the engine-room. She was even admitted into the great tube of the propeller-shaft. She was everybody's pet, and all soon became acquainted with her mother's position in the world and manner of life.

When Ingigerd, after about fifty hours of rest in bed, finally appeared on deck, wrapped in Frederick's overcoat, the passengers and crew fairly celebrated the event. The exquisite creature, who had lost her father, was regarded with the same masculine pity by all the men on board. Pander, the gallant cabin-boy, converted himself into her shadow. He made a stool for her feet from an empty box of smoked sprats, and while she sat talking to Frederick, he stood off at a short distance ready to receive her orders. Even Flitte, sailor and barber and nurse, who was supposed to give all who needed him equal attention, ran hither and thither for her sake with special zeal.

The call for Flitte was the one most frequently heard on the _Hamburg_. The undersized little man from Brandenburg, whom a love of adventure had changed from a barber-surgeon into a sailor, unexpectedly experienced a triumph of his personality. Now it was Mrs. Liebling who summoned him, now Ingigerd, now the sailor with the frozen feet, now Fleischmann, now Stoss, and even Bulke and Rosa--Rosa, who for several hours during the day made herself useful in the contracted little kitchen, which was ruled by a shrewd old cook. The physicians, too, had, of course, constant use for him; and it was the most natural thing that he should become a man of importance in the eyes of even his idolised captain, whom, in the ordinary course of things it was his duty to shave. He was well aware of this, and since, moreover, pity had fanned into a lively flame his old inclination for nursing, he outdid himself in self-sacrificing deeds for the sick, both by day and night. Frederick asked him the same question he had asked each member of the _Roland's_ crew:

"Would you rather be a seaman than anything else?"

And Flitte was the first that without hesitation answered, "Yes."

LIV

The unexpected arrival of the little troupe of peculiar passengers on the _Hamburg_ in mid-ocean produced a flutter of excitement in both captain and crew. It was a feeling of mingled solemnity and gaiety. For the benefit now of the captain, now of the boatswain, or the first mate, or the cook, or the engineer, the physicians had to repeat again and again the account of how they had been sighted and rescued. It was a story that never grew stale, and from the eagerness with which the _Hamburg's_ crew listened to the oft-told tale, the physicians realised that even to those old sea-dogs the event was a miracle. None of them, in all the years they had been sailing the high seas, had ever fished up such booty.

"When Captain Butor had me look through the spy-glasses," Wendler would say, "his face was the colour of green cheese. And when I thought for a moment that I made out a boat and the next second heard the captain say, 'Look sharp, there are people in it,' I felt my knees getting weak."

In telling of his impressions when the boat entered, and immediately disappeared from, the field of his spy-glasses, the captain invariably declared that he had suddenly been beset by a paralysed feeling in his feet, and rubbed the glasses, and began to search again. He was on the point of leaving the bridge, since he could not get another view of that strange little flyspeck on the ocean and decided it was an allusion, when it occurred to him that for reasons of general security he had better scan the entire circle of the horizon. This time he looked backwards. Instantly he had the _Hamburg_ stopped and turned, because he had sighted the boat a second time and it was now decidedly nearer. The first mate, too, on looking through the glasses saw it was a boat and that it contained passengers. Wendler was called on deck. When he peered through the glass, he distinguished white cloths waving.

"When my boys found out what was doing," said Captain Butor, "they began to carry on like lunatics. I had to use some of my sea-lingo on them. They wanted to dive over the railing into the sea, and swim to the boat."

* * * * *

Ingigerd was lying stretched out in her comfortable steamer chair, and Frederick was sitting on a camp-stool in front of her. On the _Roland_, when the sense of danger began to thicken, a feeling of ownership in regard to Ingigerd had taken hold of Frederick and never left him. Doctor Wilhelm and, as a result of his influence, everybody on the _Hamburg_ looked upon Frederick as the romantic rescuer and lover of the little dancer. All were conscious of witnessing the development of a romance especially sanctioned by Divine Providence, and looked on with interest and respect. Ingigerd's attitude to Frederick was that of tacit docility, as if she, the obedient ward, recognised in him her natural guardian.

The air was fresh, the motion of the sea was easy. Suddenly, after a long spell of silence, which Frederick had imposed upon her, Ingigerd asked:

"Was it really nothing but chance that brought us together on the _Roland_?"

"There is no such thing as chance, or, rather, everything is chance, Ingigerd," was his evasive answer.

Ingigerd was not satisfied, and did not desist until she learned the causes and circumstances that had led Frederick to board the unfortunate _Roland_ at Southampton.

"So for my sake," she said, "you came within a hair's breadth of losing your life. Instead, you saved my life."

This brief conversation cemented the bond between them more firmly.

In the survivors, with the exception of Frederick and Ingigerd, the consciousness of their newly acquired life soon assumed exuberant forms. Scarcely two days lay between them and the sinking of the _Roland_, yet these very people, who had undergone the brutal terrors of that awful event, abandoned themselves to the greatest gaiety. Arthur Stoss probably had never before shot off such an incessant fire of jokes and jibes, and probably never before had set such an audience a-laughing as the captain, the first mate, the boatswain, Wendler, the ship's cook, Fleischmann, Doctor Wilhelm, and even Mrs. Liebling, Rosa, Bulke, and the sailors of the _Roland_ and the _Hamburg_.

Fleischmann involuntarily and unconsciously danced to the tune that Stoss in perfect good humour intentionally piped. It was most amusing when the man with black locks, dressed in a black velvet suit saturated with salt water, swaggeringly passed judgment upon Adolf Menzel, Böcklin, Liebermann, and other celebrated German masters. In expanding his theories of painting, he always used his lost treasures as examples. Stoss never wearied of getting the caddish genius to describe his paintings, the loss of which in Fleischmann's opinion was the worst disaster connected with the sinking of the _Roland_. The form that Doctor Wilhelm's teasing of Fleischmann took was, when Ingigerd was not present, to make him describe his rescue in detail. In the artist's brain, it was an event in an eminent degree glorifying to himself. All the sorry incidents had completely passed from his mind, including the fact that Rosa, Bulke and Ingigerd had pulled him out of the waves howling like a wet poodle.

The sum at which he estimated the loss of his pictures and which he intended to demand of the steamship company was a matter of general knowledge, like the price of stocks and bonds, within two and a half days jumping from eight hundred dollars to six thousand. There was no telling to what amount it might soar.

Fleischmann had contrived to get some writing paper on the _Hamburg_, and industriously set to work to caricature everybody on board. Thus, he often bestowed his company unbidden upon Frederick and Ingigerd, who had no need of anybody else in the world. That would ruffle Frederick's temper.

"I am surprised," he once said to him, by no means amiably, "that after so solemn an event, you are capable of such superficial trifling."

"A strong character!" said Fleischmann, laconically.

"Don't you think," Frederick continued, "that Miss Hahlström may be annoyed by your constantly looking at her?"

"No," said Fleischmann, "I don't think so."

Ingigerd took Fleischmann's part, thereby heightening Frederick's ill humour.

LV

Shortly after, just as Wendler, who was off duty, passed by with a chess-board under his arm, Frederick was summoned to Mrs. Liebling. Of the two physicians, he was the one that had inspired her special confidence, why, he did not know.

"Doctor von Kammacher," said Doctor Wilhelm, with a swift side glance at Ingigerd, "you've cut me out again."

At least once every twenty minutes Mrs. Liebling called for Flitte and at least once every hour Frederick von Kammacher had to sit beside her on the edge of her bed. Strangely enough, it did not occur to the young scientist to take amiss the jokes that Doctor Wilhelm and the others aimed at him on that account. He was really sorry for the poor woman and was unaffectedly ready to be of service to her.

They had not yet informed her of Siegfried's death, but, now that only Ella kept coming to her, a suspicion had arisen in her mind. Flitte and Rosa, when she begged them to go fetch Siegfried, always returned without him, and when pressed, gave as the reason that the boy was sick.

"What is the matter with my dear, sweet Siegfried?" she cried, wringing her hands, when Frederick entered her cabin. The next moment she fell back on her pillow and lay rigid, pressing her hands to her eyes.

"O my God! O my God!" she exclaimed in impotent denial of the truth. Without waiting for what Frederick had to say, she began to cry quietly, in genuine grief.

On returning to the deck half an hour later, Frederick found the fat little engineer and Ingigerd playing chess together.

"The painter and I have made Miss Hahlström laugh three times already," cried the engineer.

"I know where you were, Doctor von Kammacher," Ingigerd said. "Does she know the truth now?"

"Yes," Frederick replied. "I hope she will be quieter now."

Ingigerd wanted to go down to Mrs. Liebling. Tears came to her eyes, and revealed, as with a ray of light shining inward, what she refrained from saying, that she who had lost her father was most fitted to share the grief of a mother who through the same misfortune had lost her son. Frederick was indignant that Ingigerd had been told, and used all his authority to prevail upon her not to visit Mrs. Liebling for the present.

LVI

The next day at about noon Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick helped Mrs. Liebling on deck. Her appearance there made a gruesome impression upon those who had not seen her since she had been dragged, a lifeless corpse, from the boat to the _Hamburg_. The sailors, though most solicitous to read Ingigerd Hahlström's wishes from her eyes, even before they were conceived, kept at a distance from Mrs. Liebling and cast shy glances at her, as if still in doubt whether she was a real human being. If the sea gives up its dead, why should not little Siegfried emerge from his death chamber?

Mrs. Liebling, wrapped in blankets and a coat belonging to the captain, was placed in a comfortable position on the other side of the deck from Ingigerd, because she wished to be alone. For a long while she looked across the expanse of the quiet sea. Then she said to Frederick, whose company she had requested:

"It's strange that I feel merely as if I had had a dreadful dream--just a dream--that is the strange thing. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fully convince myself, except when I think of Siegfried, that my dream reflects an actuality which I experienced."

"We mustn't indulge in vain broodings," said Frederick.

"I know," she continued without looking at him, "I know I didn't always do what is right, but if _I_ deserved to be punished, Siegfried did not. Why did I escape?" After an interval of silence, she began to speak of her past, of conflicts with her husband, who had deceived her. Hers had been one of those loveless matches which are contracted in the customary business fashion. She told Frederick that she was an artist by nature, Rubinstein, for whom she had played when she was eleven years old, having prophesied a great future for her. "I don't know anything about cooking or children. I was always terribly nervous. Still, I love my children. If I didn't, would I have been so obstinate in trying to win them from my husband? I pledge you my word, Doctor, if I could change places with Siegfried, you would find me ready at any moment."

Frederick made all sorts of consolatory remarks, some of which were not wholly superficial; for instance, what he said of death and resurrection and the great atonement that every form of death, even mere sleep, involves.

"If you were a man, I should recommend Goethe. I should say to you, 'Read over and over the beginning of the second part of _Faust_:'

'Then the craft of elves propitious Hastes to help where help it can.'

or the passage beginning:

'The fierce convulsions of his heart compose; Remove the burning barbs of his remorses, And cleanse his being from the suffered woes!'

Doesn't what we went through give you a sense of expiation and purification?"

"I feel," said the woman who had arisen from the dead, "as if my former life were far, far away, as if, since the sinking of the _Roland_, an impassable mountain were lying between me and my past. But leave me now, Doctor. You are bored. Don't waste the precious time you owe your pretty friend on me."

As a matter of fact, Frederick preferred to talk to Mrs. Liebling rather than to Ingigerd. If he was bored, it was with Ingigerd, not with Mrs. Liebling.

"Oh," he said, "never mind. Ingigerd Hahlström always has company. She doesn't need me."

"My mother urged me," said Mrs. Liebling, "not to take the children, but to leave them with her. Had I obeyed, Siegfried would still have been alive. She has a perfect right to reproach me severely. And how can I face Siegfried's father? He did what he could to keep the children back. He wrote to me and sent friends and his attorneys."

"With 'if' and 'hadn't I,' you can't undo what has been done. The event is too general, too titanic, to be thought of in such a way. It is too fearful to be considered with reference to a single individual and his puny fate. What happened had to happen, whether or not we believe in predestination. We human beings must not have feelings so petty as to allow mere chance to play a rôle in this event."

Frederick could not make up his mind to speak of his dream, in which Rosa figured as jumping from the boat with Siegfried in her arms and escaping to the white marble quay of the wonderful Columbus port, where he had been received by Peter Schmidt and where the _Santa Maria_ was slowly crumbling away. Since there were things in his dream that gave support to a belief in predestination relieving the mind of self-blame, his telling it might have soothed Mrs. Liebling's troubled conscience; but Rosa had remained alive, Siegfried alone was dead. Besides, though Frederick was constantly revolving the dream in his soul and kept recalling Hamlet's words, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he did not want to strengthen Mrs. Liebling's superstition, which showed itself in a predisposition for table-tipping and patience-playing.

On walking to the other side of the deck, after a rather prolonged absence, he was greeted with a shout.

"Hullo, father confessor!" they cried.

"Come be seated, my saviour," said Ingigerd, looking considerably better and brighter than the day before.

Frederick turned slightly pale, but did as he was bidden and said in a tone that did not harmonise with the good humour of the group:

"Mrs. Liebling was Rubinstein's pupil. I haven't met another woman on this trip to whom it is so well worth the while to talk."

"All due respect to you, a matter of taste," said Doctor Wilhelm.

"Let him alone. My saviour is displeased," said Ingigerd.

It was evident that occasionally she stood in awe of Frederick.

LVII

Aside from little tiffs between Ingigerd and Frederick, the spirit on board the _Hamburg_ was generally good-humoured, even jolly. The weather remained clear, and the place of terror already lay eight hundred miles behind in the ocean. Each minute carried the passengers of the _Roland_ farther along in their newly acquired lives. The ladies were feasted from the cargo of tropical fruit in the hold of the vessel, which had a carrying capacity of some two thousand register tons. Often the men for Ingigerd's amusement would use the oranges for playing ball. The Atlantic Ocean about the _Hamburg_ seemed a very different thing from that awful, treacherous sea which had swallowed the _Roland_. It lay like a wave-tossing heaven under the steamer, and gave it a gentle rocking motion, by no means unpleasant. There was majesty in the course of even the plain little trader, painted black above the water-line and red below. Compared with that mechanical marvel, the _Roland_, it was like a comfortable old stage-coach, and could be depended upon to make its ten knots an hour with a great show of speed. Captain Butor in all seriousness declared the castaways had brought him good luck. The moment they appeared, the old man of the sea turned as peaceful and serene as an octogenarian English rector.

"Yes," said Stoss, "but your old English rector first filled his belly with a few hecatombs of human lives. Stop, look, listen! Don't be too quick to trust him. When he's done assimilating, he'll have a still better appetite."

Up to the very end of the trip, though there was a corpse on board and the woman from the steerage was still very sick, the atmosphere on the _Hamburg_ lost none of its festal character. The bridge was free territory. Ingigerd was usually to be seen there in the daytime playing chess with Wendler, or looking on while Frederick won one game after the other from the engineer. Naturally enough, the entire crew, by no means exclusive of Captain Butor, felt profound satisfaction because of the booty they had recovered on the high seas, each wearing an air of evident pride in the catch. Had the exalted feelings that swelled the hearts of all on board the gallant freight coach, the _Hamburg_, been transferred into od-rays, the steamer would have sailed up New York Harbour surrounded, even at high noon, by an aureole of its own radiance.

There was betting as to the number of the pilot-boat that would come to meet the _Hamburg_, when suddenly it appeared hard by, with the number "25" decipherable on its sail. Arthur Stoss had won. Almost choking with laughter, he raked in a considerable sum, and Jacob Fleischmann envied him with comically obvious greed.

The close companionship with his fellow-passengers on the small steamer, the compulsion he was under to listen to their jokes and to the superficial, reiterated tale of the disaster made Frederick inwardly impatient. Unlike the others, he had not yet recovered his old relation to life. His soul was numbed. He had lost his feeling for the past, his feeling for the future, even his passion for Ingigerd. The moment of the catastrophe seemed to have snapped all the threads that bound him to the events, men, and things of his former life. Whenever he looked upon Ingigerd, he felt an oppressive consciousness of responsibility. In these days it almost seemed as if the girl in her predominatingly soft, serious mood were awaiting the declaration of his love.

"You all want to have fun with me," she once said, "but nobody wants anything serious of me."

Frederick did not understand himself. Hahlström was no longer living, Achleitner had had to pay the penalty of his undignified, dog-like love, and the girl, shaken and refined to the depths of her being, was wax in his hands. Often he would look at her to find that her eyes had been fixed upon him in a long, grave, meditative gaze. Then he would seem to himself a very sorry sort of person, and was compelled to admit that he who had once wished to overwhelm the girl with the infinite riches of a passionately loving soul, was a bankrupt, groping with empty hands in empty pockets. He ought to speak, ought to open the sluices on the other side of which the flood of his passionate love must have gathered and risen high; but all the waters had trickled away, all the sources had dried up. To mask the aridity of his soul, he adopted his old method of a curt, dictatorial manner.

LVIII

It was the fifth of February, about thirteen days after the _Roland_ had left Bremen, and twelve after Frederick had boarded the _Roland_ at the Needles in the Channel, when the pilot took the guidance of the _Hamburg_. Compared with the length of the _Fürst Bismarck's_ record-making passage, this was an extremely long time. But how inconceivably brief it seemed to him when he recalled all he had experienced in that period, both in his waking and sleeping hours. On the _Hamburg_, he no longer dreamed at night. A mighty blast had swept his soul clean and denuded it of all images.

Shortly before ten o'clock in the morning of the sixth of February, Captain Butor, standing back of Ella Liebling, who was sitting under the telescope merrily kicking her thin legs, spied land. It was a tremendously stirring moment when the news was carried to the passengers. The steward that called it into Frederick's cabin and the next instant disappeared little realised how his brief announcement, "Land!" affected the stranger. Frederick closed the door, shaken by great, hollow, toneless sobs coming from the depths of his being.

"Such is life," went through his heart. "Did not a steward on a gloomy, horrid night call 'Danger!' into my cabin, like the shouting of a death sentence into the cell of a poor sinner by both the judge and the hangman? And now comes the peaceful piping of the shepherd's reed, while the thunder is still rolling." It was not until his sobbing ceased that he felt a thrill of bliss, as if life were again drawing near in triumph. A flash of feeling set him afire, as when a vast army approaches with music playing and banners flying, an army of invincible brethren, among whom he is safe at home again. Never before had life come rolling toward him in waves so strong or colours so shining. One must have been cast very, very deep down in darkness and confusion to learn that there is no more glorious sun in all God's heavens than the sun that shines upon our earth.

The other passengers from the _Roland_ were each in his own way affected by the call of "Land!" Mrs. Liebling was heard to cry for Rosa and Flitte.

"By Jove, you rascal," said Arthur Stoss to his faithful Bulke, "by Jove, we'll feel the land under our soles again after all."

Doctor Wilhelm peeped into Frederick's cabin.

"Congratulate you, Doctor von Kammacher," he said. "The land of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci has been sighted. We enjoy the advantage of having no trunks to pack."

Suddenly the fat little engineer, Mr. Wendler, was peering over Doctor Wilhelm's shoulder.

"Doctor," he cried, wringing his hands with a comic air of helplessness, "you must come right on deck. Your ward is crying her eyes out." He referred, of course, to Ingigerd.

She was still crying when Frederick reached deck. His attempts at consolation did not touch her. He had never before seen her cry, and the state she was in, so like the one from which he himself had scarcely emerged, aroused his pity and sympathy, which, however, were rather of a paternal sort, untinged by his former passion.

"I am not to blame," she suddenly said, "that my father lost his life. I am not even responsible for Mr. Achleitner. I did my best to dissuade him from making the trip."

Frederick stroked Ingigerd's hand.

"All due respect to Achleitner, but if I mourn single victims of that fearful night, I first think of the heroes of the _Roland_, Captain von Kessel, his mate, Von Halm, and all those picked braves who really died like great men fulfilling their duty. They are a loss to the world. At the first sight of them, I, in my innocence, actually believed the Lord would never permit their destruction."

LIX

The _Hamburg_ had left behind the vast solitude of the ocean, broken only at long intervals by single far-off ships, and was already making its way through waters lively with a large number of steamers and sailing craft, leaving, and making for, the port. Now the lighthouse at Sandy Hook was visible.

Though Ingigerd as well as Frederick could not still the fluttering of their shaken souls, they were fascinated by the changing pictures of the entrance to the harbour. It was an amazing spectacle. Surprise followed surprise. Each second brought a new sensation.

A gigantic White Star liner came gliding toward them slowly, to the accompaniment of its brass band. It was starting out on the passage that the _Hamburg_ was just concluding. Passengers swarmed like ants on the majestic vessel's decks, giving an impression of gaiety and festivity. What knew they of the thing awaiting them, perhaps, out there on the ocean? When they looked down upon the little _Hamburg_, with its few passengers on deck, they had not the least inkling of the greatness, the fearfulness of the event of which those few puny persons were the sole surviving witnesses.

The emotion that filled the _Roland's_ passengers with restlessness and excited them as with fire and tears when the _Hamburg_ entered New York Harbour and steamed up through the Lower Bay toward the Narrows, was both a farewell to home and to the dangers of the sea and a greeting to solid land, to a stable human civilisation. This was the known, the usual, the mother's lap from which they had sprung and in which they had grown until the time came for them to start out upon their spiritual life's journey. It was also that without which the individual even to-day is helpless against the powers of nature.

Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must forget the murderous in those watery transitional realms--man, that insect-like being whose sense organs and intellect are capacitated for the knowledge of his vast isolation in the world, but for nothing beyond that knowledge.

Sailing vessels passed one another, steamers blew their whistles, flocks of gulls swooped down on the water for fish, or darted hither and thither in the fresh breeze. Another great ocean greyhound, of the Hamburg-American line, neared them at Norton Point. The huge structure was propelled forward quietly and surely, as by some mysterious force. The gong summoning the passengers from the promenade deck to the dining-room could be distinctly heard.

"At this moment," said Frederick, drawing his watch from his pocket, "it is quarter of six in Europe, and still dark."

Captain Butor exchanged flag signals with the quarantine station. The _Hamburg_ came to a standstill to receive health officers on board. After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which the physicians were called upon to give detailed information, the sick woman from the steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling's consent, Siegfried's corpse were taken from the _Hamburg_. Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in her cabin and was spared the too painful scene. Within half an hour, the gallant _Hamburg_ was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the magnificent Upper Bay.

Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation. Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts. From the distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic. She seemed to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.

"Liberty!" The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic or promise.

LX

And now, suddenly, the world seemed to Frederick to have gone mad. The _Hamburg_ was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless grotesquely shaped ferry-boats. The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic. In that crater of life civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes and whirls. Here is a colony of white ants, whose activity is staggering, bewildering, stupefying. It seemed inconceivable that in that intricate, raging chaos, a single minute could pass without a collision, or a collapse, or a killing. How could one possibly pursue one's own affairs quietly amid that shrieking, that hammering, that clanging, that mad uproar?

During these last moments together, the involuntary passengers of the _Hamburg_ had become as one in heart and soul. Frederick had not lost his cash in the disaster, and he persuaded Ingigerd Hahlström not to reject his services during her first days on land. All agreed not to lose sight of one another in New York. Naturally enough, there had been much lively, genuinely heartfelt leave-taking and well-wishing for more than an hour before the _Hamburg_ was secured to the dock.

The dithyrambic noise of the mighty city, where millions of men were at work, exercised a renewing, transforming influence. It was a whirlpool into which one was drawn unresistingly. It suffered no pondering, no immersion in an unalterable past. Everything in it urged and impelled forward. Here was the present, nothing but the present.

Arthur Stoss seemed already to have one foot planted on Webster and Forster's stage. There was much parleying in regard to Ingigerd's appearance in theatre. She and Stoss had been engaged for the same time, which was already past. With the uncertainty in her heart as to her father's fate, she said she could not possibly dance; while Arthur Stoss declared if he got there in time, he would appear for his number that very evening.

"I've already lost two evenings," he said, "at a round five hundred dollars an evening. Besides, I must work, I must get among people."

He advised Ingigerd for her own advantage to do the same, and cited instances of persons who had not allowed the greatest griefs to keep them from the exercise of their calling. He knew of a scholar, he said, who delivered his lecture while his wife was dying, of a clown who cracked his jokes on the stage, though his wife had eloped with another man and his heart was bleeding.

"That's our profession," Stoss continued, "and not only our profession, but everybody's profession--to do his duty, whether with liking or disliking, whether with happiness or with anguish in his soul. Every man is a tragi-comic clown, although he doesn't pass for one, perhaps, as we do. To me it is a triumph, after what I have gone through, to stand on the stage this evening without trembling, among three thousand sensation-seeking spectators, and shoot the middle out of an ace."

By degrees Stoss fell more and more into a lively strain of boasting, which, though not disagreeable, utterly lacked wit. "If you haven't anything better to do," he said, turning to the physicians, "you might come to Webster and Forster's and see me cut my capers. Work! Work!"--this was meant for Ingigerd--"I very much wish you would make up your mind to dance. Work is medicine, work is everything. To lament the past is of no use. Besides," he said, turning serious, "don't forget, stocks in us are booming. Actors must not reject such an opportunity. Just wait and see how we'll be surrounded by reporters the moment we set foot on land."

"How so?" said Frederick. "Don't you suppose that all the details of the sinking of the _Roland_ have been telegraphed to New York from quarantine? Look at those great skyscrapers, that one with the cupola is the _World_ building. We have already gone to press, and millions of newspapers have spun us out, in the greatest detail. The next four or five days there won't be a man or woman in New York who can vie in celebrity with the survivors of the _Roland_."

Amid similar talk, the _Hamburg_ reached its pier, and leave-taking began in earnest. It was truly remarkable to see what emotion suddenly seized these people, who at bottom were strangers to one another. Mrs. Liebling wept, and Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm had to submit to her overflowing kisses of gratitude. Rosa kissed Bulke; she kissed Doctor Wilhelm's and Frederick's hands again and again, amid veritable howls. It goes without saying that the ladies also exchanged endearments. Praises were bestowed upon Flitte; and Captain Butor and Wendler, in fact the entire crew of the _Hamburg_, were extolled as brave, noble rescuers. The physicians and Stoss called the sailors of the _Roland_, "Our dear comrades! Our heroes!"

It was agreed that all should meet again, and Doctor Wilhelm made an appointment with Captain Butor, Wendler, and even the tattered painter, Fleischmann, for noon of the day after next. The place chosen for the meeting was the Hoffman House bar. From there, they would go together on a jaunt through the city.

Poor Jacob Fleischmann, the painter, was somewhat perplexed by the mad city, and turned rather mealy-mouthed. He could not speak English, he had little cash, and he had lost his only capital, his paintings. He tried delicately, though with evident anxiety, to attach himself to the men with whom fate had thrown him, and they did not withhold the support he sought. They agreed to look out for him. Even Arthur Stoss proffered his services and good advice.

"Should you have trouble with the company's agent," he said, "call on me, and I'll introduce you to my friend, the owner of the _Staats-Zeitung_."