Chapter V: Part I: I (5)

Suddenly she answered: "I don't know." And in that instant the hard, hateful expression of her face melted, turning into complete submission, a change that went irresistibly to the heart of a man like Frederick. He forgot himself. He was no longer master of his feelings.

XXXI

This strange incident of meeting, seeing, loving, and parting forever had passed swiftly as in a dream. Since Wilhelm had not yet returned, Frederick, long after his visitor had fled, went out on deck, where the exalted impression of the starry heavens shining over the infinite expanse of the ocean, purified him, as it were. He was neither by nature nor by habit a Don Juan, and it astonished him that the unusual, surprising adventure seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The deck was empty. Another boy was on guard in Pander's place. The temperature had sunk to below freezing-point, and a thick coating of hoar-frost lay on the rigging.

As he stood leaning over the railing, he had a painful vision of the sum total of life and death within the eons of life on earth. His innermost being smarted with the pain of it. Death must have existed before the beginning. Death and death! That was the limit, he thought, of vast sums of trouble, hope, desire, enjoyment--enjoyment which forthwith consumed itself to make way for renewed desire, for illusions of possession, for realities of loss, for anguish, for conflicts, for meetings and partings; all uncontrollable processes bound up with suffering and fresh suffering and suffering again. It gave him some satisfaction to assume that now that the passage was so smooth, his Deborah and all her companions in suffering were probably lying wrapt in unconscious sleep, for a time relieved of the great madness of life.

While waiting for Doctor Wilhelm, absorbed in these reflections, Frederick involuntarily turned away from the edge of the deck, and became aware of a dark mass not far from the smoke-stack, cowering in a corner against the wall. The thing looked strange to him. On stepping closer he saw it was a man on the floor asleep, wrapped in his overcoat with his cap drawn over his eyes, his bearded head resting on a low camp-chair. Frederick was convinced it was Achleitner. Why was he lying there in the freezing cold instead of in bed? Frederick found the right answer. Not more than three paces away was the door of Ingigerd's cabin; and he was the faithful dog in three senses, the watchdog, the Cerberus, the dog crazed with the rabies of jealousy.

"Poor fellow," Frederick said aloud. "Poor, stupid Achleitner!" He felt genuine, almost tender sympathy; and over him came all the woe of the deceived lover, as we can trace it from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer down to Buddha Gotama, whose pupil, Ananda, asks: "Master, how shall we comport ourselves toward a woman?" Quoth the master: "Avoid the sight of her, Ananda, because a woman's being is hidden. It is unfathomable as the way of the fish in the water. To her, lying is as truth, and truth as lying."

"Sst! What are you doing here?" said Doctor Wilhelm, stepping up softly. He was carrying something in his hands carefully wrapped up.

"Do you know who is lying here?" said Frederick. "It is Achleitner."

"He wanted to keep his eye on that cabin," Wilhelm remarked cynically, "to limit the attendance."

"We must wake him up."

"Why?" said Wilhelm. "Later, when we go to bed."

"I am going to bed now."

"Come to my cabin first for a moment."

In his cabin the physician laid a human embryo on the table.

"She has attained her end," he said, meaning the girl travelling second class, who in his opinion had taken the trip for no other purpose than to rid herself of her burden and avoid disgrace. At the sight of the little object, Frederick did not know whether to be born or never to awaken to life was preferable.

He went out on deck again, aroused Achleitner, and led him to his cabin, resisting and mumbling incomprehensible words, though half asleep. Then, in dread of the agonies of insomnia, he went to his own cabin.

XXXII

He fell asleep immediately, but when he awoke, it was only two o'clock. The ship was still moving easily, and he could hear the screw working regularly under the water. Life in times of great physical crises is a fever, which travelling and sleeplessness enhance. Frederick well knew his own nature, and was alarmed when he saw himself robbed of the peace of sleep after so short a time.

But had his sleep actually meant peace? Lying on his back with wide, staring eyes, he saw vast nocturnal spaces of his soul opened up, where in bottomless depths another chaotic life had been born--a multitude of tormenting visions, in which things and persons most familiar had arisen in combination with things and persons entirely strange. He tried to recall his dreams.

He had dreamed he was wandering hand in hand with Achleitner among the dark smoke widows trailing backward over the ocean from the funnels of the _Roland_, far, far away. He and the Russian Jewess together with great difficulty dragged the dead stoker, Zickelmann, up into the blue ladies' parlour; and by means of a serum, which he himself had discovered, he brought him back to life. He smoothed over a quarrel between the Russian Jewess and Ingigerd Hahlström, who fought and called each other abusive names. He was sitting with Doctor Wilhelm in his cabin, and, as Wagner once had done, was observing a homunculus still undergoing embryonic development in a glass sphere on which light was shining. At the same time Ingigerd's cockatoo was squawking in Arthur Stoss's voice and continually asseverating:

"I am already a man of absolutely independent fortune. I am touring simply to bring my fortune up to a certain amount."

Under the impression that he was recalling these things to his memory, Frederick was really dreaming again. Suddenly he started up, cuffing Hans Füllenberg furiously and saying: "I'll box your ears." Shortly afterward he was in the smoking-room delivering a crushing sermon for the third or fourth time, morally felling to the ground the man who had desecrated his sacred relation to Ingigerd. But the captain came in, and said they had to bury the stoker. There was a dead man on board. When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angèle, his suffering, neglected wife, in one of her hysterical attacks in which she lay in a trance. And it was not at the entrance to the smoking-room, but in Plassenberg in the Heuscheuer, in front of his comfortable house. Captain von Kessel was standing in the garden clipping a privet hedge. It was at night, but a full moon was shining bright as day over the lonely valley meadows in front of his house. Angèle arose and Frederick went to lead her into the house. She resisted. Now the consciousness of his spiritual separation from her filled him with infinite sadness, a sadness more bitter and profound than any that had ever inspired him in his waking moments.

"I am a mother," said Angèle, "but not by you."

He embraced her, weeping, and wanted to draw her into his house. She resisted gently, but firmly, and declared she was forbidden to enter. He saw her wandering across the meadows in the moonshine, slowly and wearily.

"Angèle!" he cried. He ran after her.

"It is so hard for me," she said, "because life and not death has robbed me of you."

Frederick groaned aloud. A great stone seemed to be lying on his breast. He heard the rushing of waters. He saw the flood come leaping through all the valleys, over the tops of all the hills, wave upon wave, from all sides. The moon was shining. He saw Angèle climb to a little skiff lying moored somewhere; and the tide carried away the skiff with her in it. The waters overwhelmed his house.

Again the wandering began, hand in hand with Achleitner and the smoke widows across the ocean desert. Again began that difficult dragging up-stairs and down-stairs of the naked, dead stoker, with the help of the young admirer of Kropotkin. The dispute between Ingigerd and Deborah, his sermonising of Füllenberg and the man in the smoking-room repeated themselves, each repetition intensifying his torment. The homunculus in the glass sphere in Doctor Wilhelm's cabin appeared again. It developed with light thrown on it. In his anguish, in his impotence against that martyrising chase of visions, Frederick's persecuted soul, gasping for peace, suddenly rose in revolt, and he said aloud:

"Kindle the light of reason, kindle the light of reason, O God in heaven!"

He rose in his berth, and saw that Rosa, the servant-girl, was in reality holding a burning candle over him. She bent down slightly, and said:

"You are dreaming hard. Aren't you feeling well, Doctor von Kammacher?"

The door creaked. The servant-girl Rosa had left. The ship was moving quietly. Or was he mistaken? Was the _Roland_ no longer proceeding so calmly and steadily as before? He listened intently, and heard the screw whirring regularly under the water. Monotonous calls penetrated from the deck. Then came the loud rattling of the cinders pouring overboard. Frederick looked at his watch. It was five o'clock. So three hours had passed since he had first awakened! Again, with a clatter and a thunder, a load of ashes slid into the Atlantic Ocean. Was it not the mates of the dead stoker, Zickelmann, who were throwing it overboard? Frederick heard the crying of children, thereupon the sobbing and whimpering of his hysterical neighbour, and finally Rosa's voice, trying to quiet Siegfried and Ella, who was a talkative little girl. Siegfried was fretfully begging to be taken back to his grandmother in Luckenwalde. Mrs. Liebling was scolding Rosa, telling her she was responsible for the children's behaviour. Frederick heard her say:

"You all trample about on my nerves. I wish the three of you were at the bottom of the sea. For heaven's sake, let me sleep!"

XXXIII

Notwithstanding all these impressions, Frederick fell asleep again. He dreamed that he and Rosa, the maid, and little Siegfried Liebling were in a life-boat, rocking on a calm, shimmering green sea. Strangely enough, there was a mass of gold ingots in the bottom of the boat, probably the gold ingots that the _Roland_ was supposed to be carrying to the mint in Washington. Frederick was at the helm, and after cruising about a while, they reached a bright, cheery port. It may have been a port in the Azores, or the Madeira Islands, or the Canary Islands. At a short distance from the quay, Rosa jumped overboard and reached land holding Siegfried clear of the water. People received them, and they disappeared in one of the snowy white buildings at the harbour front. When Frederick landed, to his joy he was greeted on the marble steps of the quay by his old friend, Peter Schmidt, the physician he intended to visit in America. In response to curious questions, he always said that this was his main purpose in crossing the ocean. His delight at seeing him in a dream, in the setting of the white tropical town, after a separation of eight or nine years, was a surprise to himself. How was it possible that he had only occasionally and superficially remembered so magnificent a man, so dear a youthful companion?

Peter Schmidt was a Friesian. He and Frederick had sat together on the same school bench; later, they had spent two years together in the gymnasium at St. Magdalene at Breslau and several semesters in the universities of Greifswald, Breslau, and Zürich. Owing to a combination of common sense, many-sided knowledge, and humanitarian enthusiasm, Peter Schmidt had exerted great influence on his friends. There was also an adventurous streak in his nature, inherited from his father, a Friesian colonist, who lay buried in a churchyard in Meriden, Connecticut.

"It is good that you have come," said Peter Schmidt. Frederick felt as if he had been long expecting him. "Your wife, Angèle, just arrived in a skiff."

His friend silently led him to an inn near the harbour. A sense of security such as he had never before felt came over him. While he took a little luncheon in the dining-room, where the host, a German, stood opposite, twirling his thumbs, Peter Schmidt explained:

"The town is not large, but it will give you an idea of the country. You will find people here that are contented and have made their last landing."

It was taken as a matter of course that there, in that strange, silent city in the dazzling sunlight, the fewest possible words were to be spoken. Some new, mute inner sense appeared to make meanings clear. Nevertheless, Frederick said:

"I've always taken you for the mentor in unknown depths of our predestination." By which he meant to express his awe at his friend's mysterious being.

"Yes," said Peter Schmidt, "but this is only a small beginning, though enough to indicate what is hidden under the surface here."

Peter Schmidt, born in Tondern, now led Frederick out to the harbour. It was a very small harbour. There were a number of ancient vessels lying half-sunk in the water.

"Fourteen-ninety-two," said Peter Schmidt. That was the year the four hundredth anniversary of which was being much discussed by the Americans on board the _Roland_. The Friesian pointed to both the half-submerged caravels and explained that one of them was the _Santa Maria_, Christopher Columbus's flag-ship. "I came over with Christopher Columbus," he said.

All this was unqualifiedly enlightening to Frederick. Nor was there anything enigmatic in Peter Schmidt's explanation that the wood of those slowly decaying caravels was called _legno santo_ and was used for fuel, because it contained the spirit of knowledge. Farther out to sea lay a third vessel, with a great, black breach forward on the port side.

"It sank," said the Friesian. "It brought in a great lot of people."

Frederick looked at the vessel. He was dissatisfied. He would have liked to ask questions about the unfamiliar, yet curiously familiar ship out there at sea; but the Friesian left the harbour and turned into a narrow, crooked street with a steep flight of stairs.

Here an old uncle of Frederick, who had been dead more than fifteen years, came toward him comfortably puffing at a pipe. He had just arisen, it seemed, from a bench by the open entrance to his house.

"How do you do?" he said. "We are all here, my boy." Frederick knew whom the old man meant when he said, "We are all here." "We fare very well," the old man, who in his lifetime had not been exactly favoured by fortune, continued, grinning. "I didn't get along so well when I was up with you in the dismal air. In the first place, my boy, we have the _legno santo_." With his pipe he pointed to the dark interior of his house, where blue tongues of flame were leaping on the hearth. "And besides, we have the Toilers of the Light. But I am detaining you. _We_ have time, but _you_ must hurry." Frederick said good-bye. "Fiddlesticks!" exclaimed his uncle. "Do you people down there still keep up that tiresome business of 'how-do-you-do' and 'good-bye'?"

Climbing higher up the street, Peter Schmidt led Frederick through a number of houses and inside courtyards. In one of the courtyards with many corners, reminding Frederick of certain ancient sections of Hamburg and Nuremberg, was a ship-chandlery bearing the sign, "The Seagoing Ship."

"Everything here looks quite ordinary," said Peter Schmidt, "but here we have all the ancient models." He pointed to the small model of an ancient vessel standing in the little window of the chandlery, among packages of chewing tobacco and leather whips.

Ships, ships, nothing but ships! The sight of this last vessel seemed to produce the beginning of a slight gnawing resistance in Frederick's brain. He knew he was looking upon an all-embracing symbol, which he had never before seen. With a new sense organ, with centralised clarity of thought, he realised that here, in this little model, was comprehended all the wandering and adventuring of the human soul.

"Oh," said the chandler, opening the glass door of the little shop, at which all sorts of wares hanging on the door swung to and fro with a clatter, "Oh, you here, Frederick? I thought you were still at sea."

Frederick recognised the chandler as George Rasmussen, whose farewell letter he had received in Southampton. He was dressed in a shabby cap and dressing-gown belonging to a confectioner long dead, whom he had known when a boy. Mysterious as it all was, there was yet something natural in this meeting with his friend. The little shop was alive with goldfinches. "They are the goldfinches," Rasmussen explained, "that settled in the Heuscheuer Mountains last winter, you know, and were fatal to me."

"Yes, I remember," said Frederick. "We would approach a bare branch or tree, and suddenly it would seem to shake itself and scatter thousands of gold leaves. We interpreted it as auguring mountains of money."

"Well," said the chandler, "it was precisely thirteen minutes past one on the twenty-fourth of January when I drew my last breath. I had just received your telegram from Paris absolving me from my debt. Back there in the shop, among other things, is my predecessor's fur coat, which--I am by no means complaining--infected me. I wrote you that if I could, I would make myself noticeable from the Beyond. Well, here I am. But even here everything isn't perfectly clear and plain, though I am feeling better, and we all rest in a pleasant sense of basic security. I'm glad you and Peter Schmidt have met. He counts for a lot here in this country. You will meet each other above again, in New York, at the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of 1492. Good Lord! Of what significance after all, is that little discovery of America?" Rasmussen in his strange disguise removed the miniature vessel from the show window. It, too, was called the _Santa Maria_. "Now, please be careful," he said. Frederick noticed that the old confectioner took one vessel after another of the same sort, but diminishing in size, from the first one. "Patience," he said, while still pulling more and more vessels from the entrails of the _Santa Maria_. The procedure caused Frederick no slight astonishment. "Patience. The smaller are always the better ones. If I had time, we should reach the smallest, the final, the most glorious work of Providence. Each one of these ships carries us not only beyond the boundaries of our planet, but even beyond the limited barriers of our senses. Each of them is adapted to carry us across the border. If you are interested," he continued, "I have other wares in my shop. Here are the captain's hedge-scissors, here is a plummet with which one can sound the lowest depths of the firmament and the Milky Way. Here are the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. But you have no time, and I won't detain you."

The chandler closed the glass door on them; but they saw him with his nose flattened against the pane, mysteriously, as if he still had something to sell, holding his finger to his mouth, shaped like a carp's. His lips seemed to be framing certain words. Frederick understood _legno santo_, Toilers of the Light, and even what his uncle had said about "up with you in the dismal air." But Peter Schmidt thrust his fist through the glass door, pulled Rasmussen's embroidered cap off his head, took from it a little key, and beckoned Frederick to come away with him. They left the houses behind and stepped out into the open rolling country.

"The thing is," said Peter, "it will mean a lot of trouble."

And they ran and climbed for hours. Evening fell. They lit a fire, and slept in a tree rocking in the wind. Morning came. They took to wandering again, until the sun lay low on the horizon. Finally, Peter opened a small gate in a low wall. On the other side of the wall was a garden. A gardener was tying vines.

"How do you do, Doctor?" he said. "The sun is setting, but we know why we die."

On looking at him more closely, Frederick recognised the dead stoker in the man, whose face was illuminated by the rosy flush of the setting sun and wore a friendly smile, as he stood there in what was a strange garden, or vineyard, or fairy-land.

"I'd rather be doing this than shovelling coal," said the stoker, pointing to the cords hanging in his hands, with which he had been tying up the vines.

The three of them together now walked a rather long distance to a wild section of the garden, where it had turned completely dark. The wind began to rush, and the shrubs, trees and bushes of the garden swished like breakers on the shore. The stoker beckoned to them, and they squatted on the ground in a circle. It seemed as if the stoker with his bare hand had taken a bit of burning wood from his pocket. He held it close to the ground, to illuminate a round opening, something like the burrow of a marmot or a rabbit.

"_Legno santo_," said Peter Schmidt, pointing to the glowing piece of charcoal. "Now, Frederick, you will get to see those ant-like little elves that are called _noctiluci_ or night-lights. They pompously call themselves Toilers of the Light. But whatever their name, it must be admitted that they are the ones that take the light hidden in the entrails of the earth, store it up, and sow it in fields, the soil of which has been especially prepared; and when it has grown to its full size and has borne fruit a hundredfold in the shape of gold sheaves or nuggets, they harvest it and save it for the darkest of dark times."

And, actually, looking through a crevice, Frederick saw something like another world, with a subterranean sun shining on it. A multitude of little elves, the Toilers of the Light, were mowing with scythes, cutting stalks, binding sheaves, loading carts, and storing in barns. Many cut the light out of the ground, like nuggets of gold. Undoubtedly it was the gold meant for the mint in Washington that was haunting Frederick's dreams.

"These Toilers of the Light," said the Friesian, Peter Schmidt, "are the most stimulating to my ideas."

At this point Frederick awoke, while the voice of the stoker close beside him was saying:

"Many will soon be following me."

XXXIV

The first thing Frederick did on waking was to look at his watch. He had a dull feeling that he must have slept through the whole night and even the following day. He peered at the hands incredulously and held the watch to his ear to convince himself it had not stopped. No, it was still running. Consequently, since his last waking, only six or, at the utmost, eight minutes had passed.

This fact as well as the peculiarity and the vividness of his dream set him to marvelling. He could not recall ever having dreamed so coherently and logically. Are there dreams that are more than dreams? Was Rasmussen dead? Had his friend, keeping his promise, chosen this way to make himself noticeable from the Beyond? A strange shudder went through Frederick. In his excitement it seemed to him that he had been honoured with a revelation. He took his memorandum book from the net bag over his berth and jotted down the date and hour that the remarkable chandler had mentioned as the time of his death. "Thirteen minutes past one," he distinctly heard Rasmussen's voice saying, "thirteen minutes past one, on the twenty-fourth of January."

The _Roland_ was tossing slightly again, and the great siren was bellowing. Its repeated thunderous cries, which indicated fog, the lurching of the vessel, the sign, perhaps, of fresh storms and hardships to be gone through, vexed and fretted Frederick. From the adventurous doings in his brain, he was transported to the no less adventurous doings in reality. Awakening from his dreams, he found himself locked into a narrow cabin, plowing through the high seas, on a vessel heavily freighted with the fearful dreams of many souls, and yet not sinking from the load of that cargo.

Frederick was already on deck before half past five. The fog had lifted, and from over the edge of a leaden sea of moderate-sized waves rose the dawn of a gloomy morning. The deck was empty, producing the impression of dreary loneliness. The passengers were all lying in their berths. None of the crew even were visible. It looked as if the mighty ship were pursuing its course wholly without human agency.

XXXV

Frederick was standing near the log-line, which dragged in the broad, churning wake. Even in the ghostly dawn, hungry gulls were following the ship, sometimes flying near, sometimes dropping back, ever and anon swooping down into the foamy wake with a mournful cry, as of condemned souls. This was no vision, and yet Frederick scarcely distinguished it from a dream. With his nerves unstrung, with his being still penetrated by the marvels of his sleeping life, which remained partially present to him, the strange heaving waste of the ocean seemed no less miraculous than his dreams. Thus the ocean had been tossing its mountains of waves beneath the blind eyes of millions of years, itself no less blind than those eons. Thus and not otherwise had it been since the first day of creation: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Frederick shivered. Had he ever lived with anything else than a spirit and spirits, that is, with ghosts? And at this moment was he not farther removed than ever from what is considered immovable solid ground, from what is called reality? In his state of mind, did he not believe in fairy tales, sailors' superstitions, the Flying Dutchman, and hobgoblins? What was that ocean hiding in its infinite waves rolling under the low, grey sky? Had not everything arisen from the ocean? Had not everything gone down into its depths again? Had some power disclosed the submerged Atlantis to Frederick's mental vision? Why not?

He was passing through profound, enigmatic moments of a fearful yet pleasurable dread. There was the ocean, on which an apparently abandoned vessel, a small spot in infinity, was staggering forward with no visible goal ahead and no visible starting-point behind. There were the heavens lying heavily upon it, grey and dismal. There was Frederick himself, alone. Every animate creature in that solitude was transformed in his soul into visions, phantoms and apparitions. Man is always facing the unfathomable alone. That gives him a sense of greatness along with a sense of desertion. There was a man standing at the stern of a vessel, while the darkness of night was yielding to the dawn, bound by the invisible, glowing threads of his fate to two continents of the globe, and awaiting the new, less tormenting form of life that comes from the sun, a strange star millions of miles removed from the planet earth. All this was a miracle to Frederick, almost overwhelming him, as if he were imprisoned in marvels. In a sudden seizure of hopelessness that he would ever throw off the suffocating oppression of riddles and miracles, the temptation came upon him to leap over the railing. Close upon this feeling followed the timidity of a man with a bad conscience. He glanced about, as if in fear of discovery. He wiped his eyes and forehead with his hands, because it seemed to him that the dead stoker with the bloody wound had for a long time been sitting nearby on a coil of rope. His chest felt heavy, as if a load were dragging it down. He heard voices. He saw his wife, Angèle, wringing her hands. Suddenly he thought he was to blame for her illness, that he was a criminal; and all his thoughts of Ingigerd Hahlström made him doubly despicable in his own eyes. His ideas grew confused. In a wave of absolute credulity, he thought the voice of his conscience was condemning him to death. He thought that his life was being demanded as an atonement, that he must sacrifice himself, or else the _Roland_, with all it carried, would sink.

At that moment Frederick heard a strong voice saying:

"Good morning, Doctor von Kammacher."

It was the first mate, Von Halm, on his way to the bridge. Before the healthy beauty of the human voice, the haunting visions instantly fled, and Frederick's soul was restored to sanity.

"Were you making deep-sea researches?" Von Halm asked.

"Yes," said Frederick with a laugh, "I was about to make a sounding for the submerged Atlantis. What do you think of the weather?"

The giant was wearing his sou'wester and oilskin. He pointed to the barometer. Frederick saw it had dropped considerably. Adolph, the steward, came in search of Frederick. Having failed to find him in his cabin, he was bringing him his zwieback and large peasant cup of tea on deck. Frederick seated himself on the same bench as the day before, opposite the companionway. He sipped the cordial drink and warmed his hands on the cup.

Before he had finished, the wind was again beginning to boom in the rigging of the four masts, and a stiff, obstinate wind was heeling the vessel to starboard. Frederick set to bargaining inwardly, as if he had to reckon with the powers on account of the new hardships to be gone through. He suddenly longed to be with Peter Schmidt in America. Since his dream, it seemed more and more important for him to see, and associate with, his old comrade again. He thought he was rid of Ingigerd, the more surely as she had played no part at all in the momentous Atlantis dream. The sooner the voyage with her ended the better.

XXXVI

By the time Frederick was taking his real breakfast with Doctor Wilhelm in the dining-room, at about eight o'clock, the whole mass of the vessel was again quivering and at short intervals again seemed to be running hard against walls of rock. The low-ceiled room in dismal gloom, dotted here and there by electric lights, was leaping in a mad dance, one moment riding high on the crest of a wave, the next moment plunging deep into an eddying trough. The few men that had ventured to table tried to laugh and joke away the situation, which by no means offered a rosy outlook.

"In the pit of my stomach I have the feeling I used to get as a child when I swung too high."

"Kammacher, we're in the devil's cauldron. There'll be things doing compared with which the things we've gone through aren't a circumstance," said Wilhelm.

From somewhere came the word, "Cyclone," a dreadful word, though it seemed to make no impression upon the steamer _Roland_, a model of determination, steadfastly cleaving the waves and tearing breaches in the mountains of water. New York was its goal, and it was hastening onward.

Frederick wanted to go on deck, but it looked bad there, and he remained on the upper step under the protection of the companionway penthouse. The level of the sea seemed to have risen, so that the warrior _Roland_ appeared to be making his obstinate way through a deep defile. One could not help succumbing to the impression that each instant the defile would close overhead and settle the faithful vessel's fate forever. Sailors in oilskins were climbing about to make fast every loose thing. Great waves had already swept overboard. The salt water was trickling and flowing over the deck. As if that were not enough, the heavens were driving down rain and snow. The rigging was howling, groaning, booming, and whistling in every pitch and key. That severity, that awfulness of the elements, that eternal rushing and roaring and seething of great masses of water, through which the steamer was staggering forward as if in mad, blind intoxication, that mournful, raging tumult kept up hour after hour. By noon it had even grown worse.

Very few responded to the trumpet-call for luncheon. There were about ten men beside the woman physician and the woman painter. Hahlström seated himself at Frederick's and Wilhelm's empty table. The ladies' places were not far away.

"No wonder," said Frederick, "that sailors are superstitious. The way this awful weather dropped out of a clear sky is enough to make a man believe in magic."

"It may even grow worse," Wilhelm observed.

The women heard his remark, looked up, and made horrified eyes.

"Do you think there is danger?" one of them asked.

"Danger is always imminent in life," he replied, and added with a smile: "It is merely a question of not being frightened."

Incredible to relate, the band began to play as usual, and, what is more, played a piece entitled _Marche triomphale_. The effect on all was at first a slight shudder; then nobody could resist a smile at the apparent irony of it.

"The musicians are heroes," said Frederick.

"In general," remarked Hahlström, "our grim humour nowadays is a great asset. If those musicians were to receive the order, they would play 'A Country Girl,' and 'My Hannah Lady,' in the jaws or the belly of a whale. If they didn't, they'd fare just as badly."

"O Lord, anything for a steady table, a steady seat, a steady berth! The man possessing these things seldom knows how rich he is," said Frederick, in a voice raised to a shout to make himself heard above the noise of the sea without and the music within. The men laughed, and the ocean, to add to their amusement, raised them up in the fog, the tempest, and the snow to the top of a wave ninety feet high. Everybody was instantly silenced. Even the orchestra played a frightened pause not indicated in the score.

On ascending the companionway after lunch, Frederick saw Arthur Stoss in the unfrequented smoking-room eating his meal in perfect equanimity and cheerfulness undisturbed by the weather. Frederick went in for a chat with the original, witty monstrosity. He was cutting his fish with a knife and fork held between the great toe and the second toe.

"Our old omnibus is jolting a bit," he said. "If our boilers are good, there is nothing to fear. But there's this much about it. If it is not a cyclone yet, it may still turn into one. I don't care. It looks more discouraging than it really is. What a man will do! To show the people in Cape Town, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, San Francisco and Mexico what a man with a firm, energetic will can accomplish, even if nature has not favoured him, he will plow through all the cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons of all the waters of the globe. Your business man sitting in the Winter Garden in Berlin, or the Alhambra in London, never dreams of all the things the performer giving his number must go through before he can merely stand where he is standing. He can't ever take it easy and let himself get rusty."

Frederick was feeling miserable. Although his dreams were still haunting his brain, and Ingigerd, or his sick wife, or the Russian Jewess was still present in his soul, he nevertheless felt that all sensations were becoming more and more submerged in the one sensation, that on all sides there was distinct menace of a brutal danger.

Hans Füllenberg entered. His face was lifeless.

"There is a corpse on board," he said, in a tone implying a causal relation between the dead stoker and the raging storm. It was very evident that the spice had been taken out of Hans Füllenberg's life.

"I heard the same thing," Stoss said. "My man, Bulke, told me a stoker died."

Frederick simulated ignorance of the event. Accustomed to observe himself honestly, he realized that though the fact was not new to him, Füllenberg's statement of it had made him shudder.

"The dead man is dead," said Stoss, now attacking his roast with appetite. "We won't be wrecked on the dead stoker's corpse. But last night a derelict was sighted. Those corpses, the corpses of vessels, are dangerous. When the sea is rough, they can't be sighted."

Frederick asked for more information about derelicts.

"About nine hundred and seventy-five drifting derelicts," Stoss explained, "have been sighted in five years here in the northern part of the Atlantic. It is certain that the actual number is twice as great. One of the most dangerous of such tramps is the iron four-masted schooner, _Houresfeld_. On its way from Liverpool to San Francisco, fire broke out in its hold, and the crew abandoned it. If we were to collide with anything of that sort, there wouldn't be a soul left to tell the tale."

"You can't pass through the gangways," said Füllenberg, "the bulkheads are closed down."

The siren began to roar again. Frederick still heard defiance and triumph in the cry, and yet something recalling the broken horn of the hero Roland in Roncesvalles.

"There is no danger yet," said Stoss to calm him.

XXXVII

Long after Stoss had been led away by his valet and tucked in bed for his afternoon nap, Frederick still remained in the unfrequented smoking-room. The place made an uncanny impression. Yet its very gloominess insured privacy; and in the gravity of the situation he had need to be by himself. He began, perhaps prematurely, to consider the worst eventuality. He thought it might be well to stand in readiness. Around the walls ran a bench upholstered in leather. Kneeling on it, he could look through the port-holes out upon the mighty uproar of the waters. In that position, watching the waves beat with inconceivable persistency against the desperately struggling vessel, he let his life pass in review before his mind's eye.

Grey gloom was closing down on him. After all, he felt that he yearned for life and was far from being as ready to die as he had occasionally supposed. Something akin to regret came over him. "Why am I here? Why did I not stop to consider and summon all my rational will power to keep me from this senseless trip? For all I care, let me die; but not here, not in a desert of water far from mother earth, immeasurably far from the great community of men. This seems to me a particularly awful curse. Men on solid land, in their own homes, men among men, have not the least notion of it." What was Ingigerd to him now? A matter of indifference. Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern for himself. What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on some shore! Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness. How extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street! He gnashed his teeth. Of what avail a cry for help here? How could a man find God's ear here? If the extreme thing were to happen, and the _Roland_ with its mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being happy again.

"I would not witness it," thought Frederick. "I would jump overboard to avoid the sight of it. And while that would be happening, none of my friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all. 'The steamship _Roland_ sunk' appears as a head-line in the newspapers. 'Oh!' says the reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine value of a cargo of human lives is in the world."

Frederick attempted in vain to battle against a still-life picture, which the _Roland_, valiantly struggling onward, with its siren almost stifled in the storm, showed him at the bottom of the sea. He saw the majestic vessel in a coffin of glass. Across its decks swarms of fish swam hither and thither. Its cabins were all filled with water. The large dining-room, with its panels of walnut, its tables, and leather-upholstered revolving chairs, was filled with water. A big polyp, jelly-fish, and red, mushroom-like sea-anemones had penetrated into the very gangways along which the passengers were now walking. And to Frederick's horror, the liveried corpses of Pfundner, the head-steward, and his assistant stewards were slowly floating about in a circle. The picture would have been almost ridiculous, had it not been so gruesome and had it not so certainly lain in the realm of the possible. Think of all the things divers report! All the things they have seen in the cabins and gangways of submerged steamers; inextricably knotted masses of human beings, passengers or sailors coming toward them with outstretched arms, upright, as if alive and as if awaiting them. A closer examination of the clothes of those guardians and administrators of a lost estate at the bottom of the sea, those strange ship-owners, business men, captains, pursers, those fortune-seekers, money-seekers, embezzlers, adventurers, or whatever they might be, showed that they were filled with polyps, crustaceans, and all sorts of ocean worms, enjoying their stay there as long as something remained beneath their shredded garments except gnawed-off bones.

Frederick beheld himself down there, too, one of those decaying phantoms, months old, wandering about in the ghastly abode of the sunken _Roland_, in that horrible Vineta, where each man passed his neighbour mutely with a frightened gesture, each seeming to carry in his breast a congealed cry of anguish, which he expressed with bowed head and outstretched arms, or head thrown back and open mouth. Or else he was hideously crawling on his hands, or wringing his hands, or folding them, or spreading out his fingers. The engineers in the boiler-room seemed still slowly, slowly to be controlling the cylinder and driving-wheel; yet differently than before, since the law of gravity seemed no longer to be in force. One of the engineers was doing his work in a peculiarly twisted way, like a man asleep caught between the rim of the wheel and the piston-rod covered with verdigris. Frederick descended on his ghastly tour down to the stokers, whom the catastrophe had surprised in the midst of their occupation. Some were still holding their shovels in their hands, though unable to lift them. They themselves were floating, while the shovels to which they clung did not stir from the bottom. All was over. They could not kindle the fire into a white glow, and so could not keep the mighty steamer in its course. In the steerage the sight was so horrible to behold, with men, women and children of all nationalities huddled and tossed in thick, dark heaps, that even a cat-shark, which had made its way through the chimney of the stoke-hole and then through the engine, did not feel sufficiently courageous or hungry to mingle in the gathering. _Noli turbare circulos meos_, these people, too, seemed to be saying. All were thinking strenuously, absorbed in the profoundest meditation--they had plenty of time for profound meditation--upon the riddle of life.

In fact, they seemed to be placed there merely for the purpose of reflecting. Those men and women wringing their hands or spreading their fingers, or walking on their hands, or even standing on the tip of a single finger, while grazing the ceiling with their feet, were all thinking. Professor Toussaint alone, who came floating toward Frederick in the gangway, seemed to be acting differently. With his right hand raised, he seemed to be saying: "An artist may not rust. He must air himself. He must seek new conditions of life. If he doesn't receive the honour he should in Italy, he should simply go to France, like Leonardo da Vinci, or even emigrate to the land of liberty."

"I want to live, live, nothing else," thought Frederick. "In the future, like Cato the Elder, I would rather walk a year on foot along a way that I could cover in three days on a steamer."

To avoid the hideous companionship of the blue, swollen thinkers, he left the gloomy, funereal smoking-room, and, with aching head and leaden limbs, dragged himself on deck, where the wild scurrying of the storm and the chaos of snow, rain and salty clouds of foam tore the weight away from his soul.

XXXVIII

In the space at the head of the companionway Frederick came upon the same company as the day before, sitting close together in steamer chairs--Toussaint, the timid skipper of the sailing vessel, the woman artist, the woman physician, the tall electrical engineer, and a man who had not been there the day before, an American colonel. He was a handsome specimen of the highest type of his widely spread species. He was engaged in a conversation on the number of miles covered by all the railroads in the United States, and his statements concerning their extent set fire to the European chauvinism of the electrical engineer. They forgot the weather in their debate. Each party to the dispute named an incredible number of miles and vaunted the advantages of the railroads in his native country.

"We are running at only half speed," said Toussaint to Frederick. "Isn't it strange how suddenly the weather changed?"

"Very," answered Frederick.

"Of course," Toussaint continued with a pale grimace intended for a smile, "I don't understand anything about cyclones, but the seamen say this storm is cyclonic."

"It may be called a cyclone," said the timid little skipper of the sailing vessel. "If it were striking us astern instead of ahead, it would not be so bad. As it is, the _Roland_ at the utmost cannot make more than three miles an hour. Were I on my schooner and had the same storm blown up so suddenly, we should not have had time to furl a sail. We should have been lost. Thank the Lord, it is better on modern steamers. Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable on my four-master, and the devil knows, I'd like to be on it now."

Frederick could not help laughing.

"As for the _Roland_," he said, "I would rather be, let us say, in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Your four-master has no greater charms for me than a cabin on the _Roland_."

Hans Füllenberg came lounging in and told them a wave had swept away one of the life-boats on the after quarter. At the very same instant an arched mass of water came flying slantwise over the port bow.

"Oh!" everybody cried.

"Magnificent, beautiful," said Frederick.

"That's cyclonic," the woman artist repeated.

"Believe me," they heard the colonel say again, "the stretch from New York to Chicago alone"--

"That was a Niagara Falls," said Toussaint.

The wave, dropping into the ventilators and chimneys, had fairly bathed the vessel. It was cold, too, and the _Roland_ was continuing its obstinate, praiseworthy trip under a crust of ice and snow. Icicles were hanging from the rigging. Glassy stalactites formed about the chart-room and everywhere on the railings and edges of things. The deck was slippery, and it was a perilous venture to attempt to make one's way forward. But when Ingigerd's cabin door opened and her long light hair rumpled by the wind appeared in the slit, Frederick instantly made the venture. She drew him into her cabin, where he found two children keeping her company.

"I invited them to stay with me because it's fairly comfortable in this cabin."

The seriousness of the situation had extinguished in the girl all coquetry and capriciousness. Frederick almost forgot what he had suffered on her account and in what fatal dependence he had been upon this creature only a short time before.

"Tell me, is there danger, Doctor von Kammacher?" she asked.

His evasive answer seemed to make no impression upon her. He was astonished to see how energetic and resolute she was, in contrast with her behaviour of yesterday, when she played the spoiled, suffering, helpless child. She begged him to go try to find her father.

"In case anything happens, you know, it would be well not to be so far away from him."

"What do you suppose will happen?"

Without answering this, she asked him to stop at cabin 49 on the way and tell Rosa to come up.

"My little guests keep clamouring for her. If she doesn't come up for a while, I can't keep them quiet. Then she can serenely go back again to her silly, sentimental mistress. What do you think of a man like Achleitner?" she continued. "He is lying on all fours in his cabin, crying and groaning, 'Oh, my poor mother! Oh, my poor sister! Why didn't I obey you, mamma!' and so on. Just fancy, a man! Poor fellow!" she added, her tone changing. "It's enough to move a heart of stone." She held fast to the bedstead, not to be thrown into a corner like a splinter, and shook with laughter.

The mountain of stones under which Frederick had buried the little sinner, Ingigerd, was at that moment removed, and love stood there with unparalleled might. Such genuine bravery and genuine humour, combined with so much tenderness, he had never credited her with. Nervous and tired as he was, he felt irresistibly drawn to her, felt his will slipping from him. But a little, and he would have thrown himself to the floor and kissed the small feet in slippers.

Frederick's amazement waxed when all of a sudden she wanted to cross the deck and go below to comfort that donkey Achleitner. Frederick would not allow her. He was ashamed of his previous attack of fright, called himself a miserable coward, and got himself under perfect control. In this attitude he played the rôle of a severe mentor, Ingigerd's responsible guardian and protector, strict, but fatherly and good-natured. Though she laughed at him, it by no means displeased her to let him have his way.

XXXIX

Frederick's kindliness to Ingigerd's little wards made it unnecessary to summon Rosa. He asked the children their names, and they were soon chattering confidingly with their new uncle. Ella Liebling, a girl of five, to whom Ingigerd had given her doll, was sitting at one end of the couch, a cover wrapped about her legs, while Siegfried had established himself comfortably on the bed. With a spiritless expression for a child, he was playing a rather monotonous game of cards with an imaginary partner.

"Mamma is divorced," Ella explained. "Papa was always quarrelling with her."

"Yes," said Siegfried, pushing his cards aside, as if waking up from a trance, and bending over to Frederick, who was sitting beside Ella, "mamma once threw a boot at papa."

"But papa is strong," said Ella. "He once picked up a chair and knocked it down and smashed it to pieces."

Though Ingigerd was suffering from nausea, she had to laugh.

"Those children are great sport," she said.

"Papa once threw a bottle against the wall," Siegfried went on, "because Uncle Bolle was always coming to see us."

And so the children continued, like little wiseacres, to discuss in detail the theme of "happy marriages."

"Rosa says mamma is to blame because papa left us," observed Siegfried.

"I think so, too," said Ella. "I think mamma's to blame."

"Rosa said mamma doesn't do anything but read novels."

"Rosa says," Ella chimed in, "that if mamma were not always lying in bed, she would feel much better."

And "Rosa says," "Rosa says," went on for a long while. The former non-commissioned officer and lackey of the vaudeville star, Bulke, came towing Rosa across the deck in the same way as he did his master. Both looked red and contented. Frederick asked what the prospects were for the _Roland_.

"Oh, everything's all right," Bulke laughed, "if only something else doesn't turn up."

"Bulke," said Rosa, "take Siegfried on your back."

Bulke proceeded to do so, while Rosa lifted Ella to her crimson arm.

Now the children begged to remain where they were, although before they had been annoying Ingigerd by constantly crying for Rosa.

"Let them stay," said Ingigerd.

Rosa thanked her. "They are really best off here," she said. "All they take for supper is some milk and a roll. I will bring it right away."

"What is that on your arm?" asked Frederick. It looked as if a beast had been clawing at her.

"Oh, nothing," she said. "My mistress doesn't know what she is doing. She's out of her senses from seasickness and fright."

XL