Chapter IV: Part I: I (4)

"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.