Part 16
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."