Part 13

"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.