Part 14

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.