Part 15

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.