"That was bad," said Wilhelm, slamming the door shut in the nick of time. Frederick's nerves were in a state of tension, not in a mere metaphoric sense. They produced a purely physical sensation, as of violin strings too tightly drawn.

"Is it making you nervous?" asked Hahlstroem.

"Somewhat," said Frederick. "I don't deny it. A man has strength and intelligence, but can't exercise either, even when danger is imminent."

"Immediate danger?" asked Wilhelm. "No, we are not there yet. In the first place, the engines will be working again pretty soon; and secondly, even if we should really have to drift and had to resort to the sails, we could count on being perfectly easy in our minds a week from now."

"What do you mean by being easy in our minds?" demanded Hahlstroem.

"The storm is blowing from north-northwest. A ship like this never capsizes. So, in all probability, we should be carried to the Azores, where a steamer would tow us into port. Or, perhaps, we should be driven even further south, and in a week we should be anchoring in view of the glorious Peak of Teneriffe."

"Many thanks for your Peak of Teneriffe. I have to be in New York. My daughter has an engagement there. We are under obligations to be there."

"A week of uncertainty would be ruin to my nervous system," said Frederick. "I am not suited for this passive heroism. I might do more if I could be active."

"You've read the 'Leather-stocking Tales,'" said Wilhelm, ironically. "You know that the American Indians have greater respect for passive heroism. Think of the stakes on which they burn their captives to death."

"Never mind," said Frederick. "No martyr stakes for me. Were I to hear that the screw is broken and we should have to drift, my nerves couldn't stand it. I would jump into the water. That is why I am against life-preservers. I wouldn't accept one if it were offered to me ten times over. Why prolong the death agony?"



XLII

The hours passed. The grey day went down into still greyer twilight. The ear-splitting tumult of the sea never ceased. Frederick, like everybody else, had in vain awaited the moment when the engines would be working again, and the helpless ship would resume its course. Everybody, with the anxiety of despair, watched whether the intervals between the great swells would lengthen or shorten. Sometimes a superstitious illusion that he was being persecuted would take hold of Frederick. Particularly awful were the cries of the emigrants penned in the steerage, which at short intervals penetrated above on deck. They wept and wailed and shrieked to heaven for help. They were like men driven mad by fear, fury and physical pain.

Yet, as if nothing had happened, the call for dinner was trumpeted at the regular time through the gangways of the drifting vessel, through that majestic, helpless ark, lighted by electricity, which, shining through the port-holes, turned the Roland with its crust of ice into a fairy palace, a mournful plaything of the waves.

Frederick wondered who would have the phlegm or the courage or the desire to go to dinner. But Wilhelm cried, "Come, gentlemen," and since Rosa appeared, wet and courageous, to attend to the children, it was out of place for him to remain in the cabin, and there was nothing for him to do but join Doctor Wilhelm and Hahlstroem. The cockatoo was screeching and Ella was crying. The child was refractory. Ingigerd was trying to console her, while Rosa reprimanded her rather energetically.

"Would you like me to stay near here?" Frederick asked before leaving. "It would mean a great deal to me if you would let me be entirely at your disposal, Miss Ingigerd."

"Thank you, Doctor von Kammacher, you will be coming again."

Frederick marvelled at the naturalness with which he had made the offer and she had accepted.

Now an unexpected change set in, which allayed everybody's excitement and went through Frederick's muscles and nerves like a soothing stream. The walls and floors of the Roland began to quiver faintly, a sign that her heart and pulse were beating again. It was the rhythm of its strength, the rhythm of its race to its goal. Ingigerd shouted with joy, like a child, and Frederick set his teeth. Renewed life, renewed prospects and hopes, the reassumption of system, the relaxation of his nerves made him so weak that the tears almost started to his eyes. Choking down his emotion, he stepped out on deck.

Here the scene had changed. Blithely, in all its might, the Roland was leaping forward again into the roaring darkness. That monstrous, seething witch's cauldron of the boiling waters was now welcome to him. Again the Roland was tearing breaches in dark mountains, was rising to mountain heights, and madly plunging into deep valleys; during which, for many seconds at a time, the screw would whirl wildly in the turbulent air.

Mr. Rinck was sitting on the threshold of his cabin, which was brightly lighted, smoking and petting his spotted cat.

"It's good we're under way again," Frederick could not refrain from saying as he walked past.

"Why?" said Rinck phlegmatically.

"I for one," said Frederick, "would rather be running under full steam than drifting helplessly."

"Why?" said Mr. Rinck again.

In the gangways below, even though the ship was pitching, the atmosphere was fairly pleasant and lively. Everybody seemed to have forgotten his fear. The passengers, cracking jokes and clinging to the nearest stationary thing, reeled and stumbled into the dining-room. The rattle of china near the kitchen was deafening, especially when, as frequently happened, some of the plates broke.

Frederick's clothes were pretty well soaked, and he mustered up the courage to go to his cabin to dress. Adolph, his steward, came to help him, and told Frederick of a panic that had broken out in the steerage when the engines stopped. Some of the women with their babies on their arms had wanted to jump right into the water. It was with difficulty that the other emigrants had restrained them. One of the stewards and a sailor had clutched a Polish woman by her feet just as she was taking the downward plunge.

"You can't blame these people for acting like cowards in this situation," said Frederick. "It would be strange if they didn't. Who will insist that he can stand upright when the ground beneath his feet is giving away? If a man were to say so, either he would be lying, or his lack of feeling would be so great as to degrade him below an animal."

"Yes," said the steward, "but what would we do if we were so cowardly?"

Frederick now began to deliver one of those fiery dissertations that had won him a number of youthful auditors when he was a Privatdozent.

"With you it is different," he said. "You are upheld, and at the same time rewarded, by the feeling that you are doing your duty. While we passengers are living in terror, the cooks have been boiling soup, cleaning fish, preparing vegetables, roasting and carving, larding venison and so on." The steward laughed! "But I assure you, at times it is easier to roast a roast than to eat it." And Frederick continued in a solemn, but for that very reason, roguish manner to philosophise on courage and cowardice.



XLIII

Dinner began, and, though the weather had by no means improved, a comparatively large number of passengers had gathered in the dining-room. Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, with his white hair curled and arranged by the barber, if not in a braid at the back of his head, yet like a wig of the rococo period, stood, as usual, in majestic pose, before the false mantelpiece between the two entrance doors. It was the place from which he could best supervise the waiters and keep his eye on the whole dining-room.

The band was playing Le Pere la Victoire by Ganne. This was followed by Gillet's Loin du Bal. At Suppe's overture from Banditenstreiche, the eternal skat players came tramping into the saloon, having delayed, as usual, to finish their game. At all the tables much wine was being drunk, because it strengthened one's courage and dulled one's nerves. The passengers toasted the Roland. It amused them. They were all conscious of the pleasant rhythm of the great engine, to which no music in the world was comparable. Over Vollstedt's waltz, Lustige Brueder, the company with a sense of relief was still discussing the danger they had safely escaped.

"We hoisted distress signals."

"Rockets were shot off."

"They were already getting the life-belts and life-boats ready."

"Why, they were even dripping oil on the water."

The remarks flew about with the less restraint as neither the captain nor any of his officers were at table.

"The captain," they said, "has never left the bridge since morning."

Suddenly the port-holes were illuminated from outside. Everybody, with an "Oh!" of astonishment, let his knife and fork fall and jumped up from his seat. "A ship!" "A steamer!" all exclaimed, and crowded on deck. There, in overawing majesty, in the gleam of its thousand lights, one of the mightiest ocean liners of the time was rolling and pounding at a distance of not more than fifty yards. "The Prince Bismarck, the Prince Bismarck!" the people cried, having heard the name from the officers and crew, who had recognised the vessel. "Hurrah!" went up the full-throated cry. "Hurrah!" Frederick shouted, and so did Wilhelm and so did Professor Toussaint. Everybody who could shouted "Hurrah!"—Ingigerd and the woman physician and the woman artist. They all waved their napkins or handkerchiefs. The same shout of joy went up from the steerage, and by way of greeting the two vessels let their steam whistles thunder. They could see the passengers on the various decks of the Prince Bismarck waving to them, and, in spite of the noise of the tempest, could hear their faint hurrah.

The Prince Bismarck, a twin-screw steamer, one of the first models of its kind, had just made its record-breaking trip, in which it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in six days, eleven hours, and twenty-four minutes. About two thousand people were now making the trip from New York to Europe. Two thousand people! That means twice as many as can fill a Berlin theatre from the orchestra to the top gallery.

The Roland and the Bismarck exchanged lively flag signals. Yet the whole grandiose vision, from the moment of its appearance to its disappearance, lasted only three minutes. In that time the seething ocean was flooded with light. It was not until nothing remained of the Bismarck but a dancing mist of light that its band came on deck and played. On the Roland they caught two or three trembling, fading measures of the national hymn, Heil dir im Siegerkranz. Within a few moments the Roland was again alone on the ocean, in the night, the tempest, and the snowstorm.

With twice as much fire, the band now played a quadrille by Karl, Festklaenge, and a galop by Kiesler, Jahrmarktskandal; and with twice as much appetite and twice as much liveliness the passengers seated themselves at dinner again. "Fairylike!" they cried. "Glorious!" "Tremendous!" "Colossal!"—this last a favourite expression of the Germans.

Even Frederick had a sense of pride and tranquillisation. He felt a vital breath of that atmosphere which is no less necessary to the mind of the modern man than air is to his lungs.

"No matter how much we resist the thought," he said to Wilhelm, "and no matter how much I railed yesterday evening against modern culture, a sight like that must impress a man. It must go to the very marrow of his bones. It is simply absurd that such a marvellous product of secret natural forces, joined together by man's brains and hands, such a creation over creation, such a miracle has become even possible." They touched glasses. The sound of clinking glasses could be heard all over the room. "And what courage, what boldness has been built into that great living organism, what a degree of fearlessness in opposing those natural forces which man has been standing in awe of for thousands of years! What an audacious world of genius, from its keel to the top of its mast, from its bowsprit to its screw!"

"And all this," responded Wilhelm, "has been attained in scarcely a hundred years. So it signifies only the beginning of a development. Object as much as you will, science, or rather technical progress, is eternal revolution and the only genuine reform of human conditions. Nothing can hinder this development that has begun. It is constant, eternal progress, yes, progress itself."

"It is the human intellect," said Frederick, "which throughout the centuries has been lying passive and has suddenly turned active. Undoubtedly man's brains and, at the same time, social industry have entered a new phase."

"Yes," said Wilhelm, "in a certain way the human intellect was already active in ancient times, but it fought too long with the man in the mirror."

"Then, let us hope," said Frederick in confirmation, "that the last hour of the men that fight images, the swindlers, the South Sea Island medicine-men and magicians, is not far off; that all filibusters and cynical freebooters, who for thousands of years have been living by the capture of souls, will strike sail before the fast, safe ocean-going steamer of civilisation, whose captain is intellect and whose sole steward is humanity."

After dinner, Frederick and Wilhelm climbed up to the smoking-room on deck.

"It is difficult to comprehend," said Frederick, when they reached the smoky little saloon, "how a vessel can keep its course in such a stormy, pitch-black night."

At the skat table, the players were sitting, smoking, drinking whisky and coffee, and tossing the cards on the table. Everything else seemed to be a matter of indifference to them. Frederick ordered wine and continued to goad his mind into activity. His head ached. He could scarcely hold it upright on his aching neck. His eyelids ached with weariness; but when they drooped, his eyes seemed to radiate a painful light shining from within. Every nerve, every muscle, every cell in him was alert. He could not hope for sleep. How weeks in his life, months, years had passed as in the twinkling of an eye! And this evening only three and a half days had elapsed since he boarded the Roland at Southampton, a period with the content of years, in which seconds were eternities. Its beginning lay in the remote distance, at the conclusion of a life lived long before, on an earth from which he had parted long before.

"You're tired, Doctor von Kammacher," said Wilhelm. "So I won't invite you to the stoker's funeral on the after-deck."

"Oh, I'll come," said Frederick. He was obsessed by a stinging rage not to spare himself anything, but to taste to the dregs even the bitterest impressions of this detached, jogged and jolted fragment of a human world.



XLIV

The physicians arrived when they were sewing the stoker, Zickelmann, into sail-cloth. The bare cabin was not very brilliantly lighted by a single electric bulb. Frederick recalled his dream—how the dead stoker had been standing under the vines with the cords in his hand and had then led Peter Schmidt and himself to the Toilers of the Light. A great change had taken place in his appearance. His face was no longer of flesh, but seemed to be chiselled out of yellow wax, to which his hair, his eyebrows and beard were pasted. A faint, cunning smile seemed to be curving his mouth; and when Frederick with odd interest and curiosity scrutinised him closely, it seemed to him he was saying, "Legno santo! Toilers of the Light!"

When the dead man's face was covered up and his whole body had been sewed into the cloth in coarse stitches, the sailors bound the puppet, with difficulty keeping it in position, on a smoothly planed board, weighted with iron.

"Will such a chrysalis ever really turn into a butterfly?" Frederick wondered.

The procedure, a piece of reeling, staggering acrobatics, was less gruesome than ridiculous. Yet, though this long package might be only the mortal shell of an immortal soul, one had a sense of infinite sadness in entrusting it to the fearful solitudes of the ocean.

Since in the stormy weather it was no easy matter to throw the corpse overboard and since it was impossible to conduct ceremonies on a rolling deck constantly washed by the waves, the purser asked the few persons present—Captain von Kessel could not leave the bridge—to say a silent prayer for the soul of the dead man. They did so, and four of the stoker's mates, staggering, stopping, lurching and panting, carried the long package on deck to the railing, where at the word of command they let it slide into the sea.

When Doctor Wilhelm bade Frederick good-night, he added:

"You ought to try to go to sleep."

They parted, and Frederick hunted for a sheltered spot on deck, where he could spend the night. He wanted to look the wind and weather straight in the face, there in the glacial air, in the gloom under the pale sheen of the arc-lights fastened to the mast. He shuddered at the thought of a night in the oppressive confines of his cabin, with the closed port-hole and the hot, stale air. But that alone was not the reason which kept him chained to the deck. It was the urge, in case of danger, to be near Ingigerd Hahlstroem. And when he seated himself near the smoke-stack, with his back against the heated wall, his hat drawn low over his face, his chin in his coat collar, he suddenly laughed to himself bitterly. It was in the same position and on the selfsame spot that he had found Achleitner the night before.

There was a rushing in Frederick's ears. He observed the huge arcs that the lights on the mast described. He observed the regular onslaught of the waves, and above the seething and foaming of the water, he heard the miauing of the wind in the rigging, a wicked obstinate miauing, accompanied by the sudden spitting and leaping of a tiger. Then the sounds seemed to Frederick to be more like the pitiful whimpering of strayed children, a troop of children whom he could now distinctly discern weeping over the bier of the dead stoker. And there were the Toilers of the Light again. He immediately snatched for one to carry it to Ingigerd Hahlstroem in her cabin; but Ingigerd was dressing for her famous dance. The great spider was already hanging on the flower, weaving the cobweb in which Mara was later to entangle herself. Frederick asked for a broom. He wanted to prevent the dance by sweeping the spider away. A broom came, but in the form of a serving man, who was carrying water and pouring it out. Another man followed and a third and a fourth, until everything was flooded with rushing waters. Frederick awoke from a dream in which he was learning sorcery. The momentous word that chains the floods was still on his lips. The waves rushed. He fell asleep again. Now it was the rushing of a stream at his feet. The sun was shining. It was a clear morning. From the other shore came his wife, young, beautiful, in a dress of flowered goods, rowing her skiff. Her full, gentle figure had the charm of the vestal virgin and the wife. From woods nearby, Ingigerd appeared in the delicacy and the adornment of her light hair and naked body. The sunny landscape, of which her pure nudity was a part, seemed to belong to the time before Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise. Frederick took his wife's hand—she was smiling on him graciously—took Ingigerd Hahlstroem's hand—she seemed to be gentle and pure and obedient—and joined them. He said to Ingigerd:

"And thou shalt walk in brightness; I'll purge thee clean of all thy dross."

But the heavens darkened, the woods blackened, and the light of a ghostly moon rose over the trees, rushing fearfully like great waters. Frederick ran along the edge of gloomy fields, when suddenly the cry "Moira! Moira!" resounded, and a piece of the darkness severed itself from the edge of the woods and soared heavily, as if borne by mighty black pinions. It was a gigantic bird, crying, "Moira, Moira!" Frederick fled. He was struck by hideous fear, as if the fearful roc were after him. "Moira, Moira!" He drew his penknife to defend himself.

He awoke to find himself lying undressed in his berth. Someone had discovered him, as he had discovered Achleitner the night before, and had led him down to his cabin. But the cry "Moira!" which reminded him of the Moerae, the ancient goddesses of fate, still rang fearfully in his ears.



XLV

It was still long before daylight, and he fell asleep again. This time on awaking he found himself in the corridor speaking to some stewards, already at work. It slowly dawned upon him that he was clad in nothing but his night-shirt and must have been walking in his sleep. What, had he turned into a somnambulist! He was utterly disconcerted and ashamed and had to let one of the stewards help him back to his cabin.

He found his cabin covered with about three inches of water, from a leaky pipe. Crawling into bed, he squeezed himself, to keep from being tossed out, into a hollow between the boards, a method he himself had devised.

Shortly after six, he was on deck sitting on his bench, warming his hands on his hot tea-cup. The weather was frightful. The morning was of an icy dreariness unsurpassed. The fury of the sea had waxed. The falling twilight was a new sort of darkness. The roaring of the waters and the raging of the winds were deafening. Frederick's ear-drums ached. But the ship struggled on, managing to pursue its course, though slowly.

And suddenly—Frederick did not know whether to trust his hearing—above the noise of the sea rose Ariel strains, beginning solemnly and swelling serenely. It was the chords and melodies of a church choral. He was moved almost to tears. He recollected that this dreary morning was a Sunday morning, and the orchestra, even in the midst of the cyclone, was carrying out its instructions to begin the day with devotional music. It was playing in the unused smoking-room half way up the companionway, whence the strains ascended faintly to the deck. Everything lying heavily upon Frederick's soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music. It brought back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence, expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his father's and his mother's birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song woke him up in the morning. What was to-day compared with that past? What lay in between! What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost, love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent, blind imprisonment.

Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited him with such bitter, refined chastisements?

"I'm wild!" screamed Hans Fuellenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane."

Nevertheless, Hans Fuellenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers, though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning again.

To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the Roland reached New York.



XLVI

Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.

At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.

Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light. Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as the vessel lurched. At first he was uncertain whether the word he had heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his unstrung nerves. Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive fall or a delusive cry. But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the word, "Danger," repeated several times, a sensation came over him that produced a most remarkable change in his condition.

"Very well," he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and stepped out into the gangway.

Here there was not a soul.

"Very well," he had been thinking, "the invisible powers, whose playthings we human beings are, will now completely expose their supreme brutality."

He had not been awakened from sleep; he had been awakened and brought to his sober reason from beneath a hundred strata of dreams and sleep. Now, in that empty corridor, it again seemed to him to be a fantastic illusion of his disordered brain; and he was about to return to his cabin, when he noticed for the first time that the rhythm of the engines and the churning of the screw were neither to be heard nor felt. Suddenly he thought the great vessel was drifting in the ocean abandoned by passengers and crew, and he alone had been left behind from the general rescue. But a passenger in a silk dressing-gown reeled by, whom Frederick could question.

"What's the matter, do you know?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing," said the man. "I've only been looking for my steward. I'm thirsty. I want a glass of lemonade." He staggered past Frederick into his cabin.

"Ass!" Frederick mentally exclaimed, disgusted with himself for what he again believed was his illusion. Yet the silence weighed upon him dreadfully. Seized by a wild instinct, he could not help but suddenly rush forward, merely to be on deck.

Somebody came toward him from the opposite direction, and asked him where he was going.

"Get out of my way," said Frederick. "It's none of your business."

But the hideous, half-dressed, corpse-like creature, besmirched by the traces of seasickness, would not make way.

"Are the stewards here all crazy?" he cried.

Hard by Frederick's ear an electric bell began to hammer noisily, and the next moment the tottering phantom that barred his way was multiplied by ten, twenty, a host of similar phantoms.

"What's the matter! What's the matter! We're sinking!"

"Steward! Steward!" a voice commanded; and another, "Captain! Captain!"

"Wretched service!" a man scolded in a voice that broke. "No stewards about. What do they mean by it?" The call bells began to rage.

Frederick turned, and ran down the endless corridor to the after part of the vessel. Nobody intercepted him. He passed the windows of the engine-room. The cylinders and pistons were not stirring. From the depths of the ship, from the boilers and furnaces, a sound of rushing, splashing water penetrated above the creaking and grinding of the walls.

"Did a boiler burst?" Frederick thought, forgetting that there would have been the report of an explosion and the hiss of escaping steam.

But he hastened on without stopping, past the post office, on his way through the second cabin to the stern. In his flight it occurred to him how happy he had been in Paris when at Cook's office they had told him that by great haste he could still make the Roland at Southampton. Why had he been in such a fever of impatience, in such dread of missing the boat and rushing into the open arms of doom? For there was no veiling the fact that something fearful had happened to the Roland.

At the door of the second cabin, he encountered the barber.

"The fires are out," said the barber. "A collision. The water is pouring into the hold below my shop."

The hammering of the bells never ceased. The barber was dragging two life-preservers.

"What do you need two for?" Frederick asked, and took one and sped on.



XLVII

He reached the door leading to the after deck, but could not open it. From the position of the ship, he realized that something irretrievable had happened. On the port side, the steamer was lying high, on the starboard side, it was only ten or twelve feet above the level. As the stern was also much lower than the bow, it would have been a practically hopeless venture to clamber forward across the deck, especially with the heavy seas that were constantly sweeping it.

Willy-nilly, he must return through the mole's gallery he had traversed to the forward part of the boat.

Scarcely fifteen seconds later, when he had reached the forward entrance to the deck, at the head of the companionway leading up from the dining-room, he could not have told how he succeeded in making his way through the corridor jammed with panicky passengers without having been beaten to death, strangled, or trodden underfoot. His hands and forehead were bruised, and he was clinging to the door-post with all his might, parleying violently with Doctor Wilhelm. Doctor Wilhelm clutched him, and the two physicians, in defiance of death, climbed up to the bridge, where they huddled in the shelter of the deck-house on the port side. They saw something huge rise high up in the morning twilight and fly madly above their heads. The next instant they were drenched up to their waists, and would have been washed overboard, had they not clung to the railing with all their strength.

On the bridge it looked pretty much as usual. Captain von Kessel, apparently quite composed, was leaning forward, and the giant Von Halm was searching the ever-thickening fog with spy-glasses. The siren was howling, and rockets were being shot off from the bow. On the captain's right stood the second mate. The third mate had just received the order:

"Cut the falls. Get the boats away."

"Cut the falls. Get the boats away," he repeated and disappeared to execute the order.

To Frederick, it all seemed unreal. Moments such as this, to be sure, had entered his imagination as within the realm of the possible; but now he realised that he had never reckoned with them seriously. He knew the fact confronting him stood there inexorable; nevertheless, he was unable to grasp it in convincing reality. He was telling himself he ought to try to get into a boat, when the captain's blue eyes glanced at him, but apparently with no recognition in them. The captain's commands were uttered in his beautiful voice, remotely suggesting the clinking sound of colliding billiard balls.

"Women and children starboard."

"Women and children starboard," came like a near, word-for-word echo.

Now Max Pander stepped up to the captain. He had the noble idea of proffering him a life-belt. Von Kessel's hand found its way for an instant to his cap.

"No, thank you, my boy, I don't need it. But here—" he took a pencil from his pocket, wrote a hasty line on a piece of paper, and handed it to Pander. "Jump in a boat and, if you can, bring this greeting to my sisters."

A heavy sea swept over the port side, and a tremendous swell raised and turned and twisted the colossal vessel. Frederick in vain tried to rouse himself from the leaden indifference that had come upon him in view of the incomprehensible drama. Suddenly, he was seized with horror, but he fought it down. At no cost was he to show cowardice either to himself or to others. Nevertheless, he followed Doctor Wilhelm, who stuck close to Max Pander's heels.

"We must get into one of the boats," said Doctor Wilhelm. "There's no doubt we are sinking."

The next moment Frederick found himself in Ingigerd's cabin.

"Hurry!" he cried. "The people are already jumping into the boats."

He had left the cabin door open, and close by they could see Pander and two sailors hacking away with axes at the frozen tackles by which a life-boat was suspended.

Ingigerd asked for her father. She asked for Achleitner.

"There's no time now for you to think of anybody but yourself. It's impossible to go below deck. It would mean sure death," Frederick explained. "Get dressed! Get dressed!"

Ingigerd mutely hastened to carry out his orders. It was not until then that one of the stewards passing her cabin called in his brief message, "Danger!"

"Danger! What's the matter? Are we sinking?" she cried.

But Frederick had already picked her up and carried her over to the boat, which the next instant gave way under the axe and fell into the misty turmoil below.

"Women and children on the other side!" the third mate shouted commandingly.

His order referred not only to Ingigerd, but also to the maid Rosa, who, fiery-red with her exertions, appeared on deck dragging her mistress and both the children, with the air of a housewife loaded with purchases, afraid of missing a street car.

"Women and children on the other side!" the third mate repeated in somewhat too Prussian a manner. Fortunately his presence was now required for the next boat, over which the struggles were already commencing.

There was no time to be lost, and despite the determined resistance of two sailors, Frederick, Pander, and Doctor Wilhelm let Ingigerd safely down into the boat. In doing so, Frederick also turned somewhat too loud-voiced and Prussian. Through his iron energy, which hewed down resistance as the sailors had hewed at the life-boat tackles, he succeeded in having the children, Mrs. Liebling, and finally Rosa lowered into the boat. It was no easy matter. Frederick heard himself shouted at, roared at, and commanded, and he, in turn, shouted at the sailors, commanded, and roared. He fought, he worked, though without a gleam of hope and with the positive consciousness that the situation was beyond salvation. All was over, all was lost. If he had not thought so before, the next occurrence would have convinced him.

A second boat had been lowered, and three sailors had jumped in. It rolled from side to side and rose on a wave. About eight or nine other persons leapt for it—Frederick thought he recognised familiar figures. It filled and disappeared. As if by sleight-of-hand, the spot where the boat with the dozen people in it had been dancing turned into empty sea with mist and spray driving over it.

Slowly the dark grey of the early dawn turned into the lighter grey of the day, approaching coldly and indifferently. When the fog lifted a little, Frederick for seconds at a time had a dismaying illusion that he was in a green valley with glorious, flowery meadows, through which a snowstorm of blossoms was sweeping. But then the mountains came, driven by the ferocious spirits of the hurricane, and closed down on the valley. The heavy, glassy heights broke, and with the weight of their fluid masses, snapped away two of the Roland's masts like reeds.

With its boilers quenched, the poor wreck could no longer send up a cry for help. Its sad body was still towering upward at the bow in colossal majesty. Rockets flew, signals of distress fluttered briskly from the foremast; a futile language in that merciless raging of the elements.

In the steerage it had grown still. But from the port side came a peculiar, persistent, unbroken sound, resembling the shouting and screaming of a crowd on toboggan-slides and merry-go-rounds at a village fair. A buzzing as of swarming bees pierced distinctly through the roaring of the tempest, while above it rose the shrieking of infuriated, frenzied women. Frederick thought of his dark-eyed Deborah. She, too, was doomed. He thought of Wilke.

Bulke, the faithful valet, appeared, leading Arthur Stoss by his coat collar. Within the next few moments, Wilke also appeared. He had been drinking, and was shouting as if the whole thing were a frolic; but he was half dragging, half carrying on deck an old, wheezing working woman. Thrusting Stoss and Bulke aside, he landed her safely in the boat.

Ingigerd was clamouring incessantly for her father and Achleitner. Instead of either of these, Stoss, whom Bulke and Wilke had lowered by a rope, dropped down beside her.

About thirty feet from Frederick, a man was standing in a cabin door, carefully hooked back. With incredible calm he was smoking a cigarette and inhaling, and stroking a yellow cat on his arm.

"It looks pretty bad, doesn't it, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick said, going up to him.

"Why?"

"Well, don't you think we're lost?"

Mr. Rinck shrugged his shoulders without answering.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?" somebody bellowed in his ear.

"Nothing," he said, stroking his cat.

In the meantime Bulke and Wilke had lowered Doctor Wilhelm into the boat.

"That girl down there is giving herself a sore throat screaming for her father," said Bulke.

Frederick decided, cost what it might, to take a look around below deck. Perhaps fortune might favour him; he might discover Hahlstroem and perhaps Achleitner, too, and help one or both into the boat. There was danger, to be sure, that the boat would put off before he returned.

He had worked his way as far as the unused smoking-room. It was empty. Suddenly Wilke was standing beside him.

"If you're looking for somebody, I'll help," the peasant declared.

The two together descended the rest of the companionway. The space in front of the dining-room was empty and so was the dining-room. It was tilted at an acute angle. A heap of dishes and silverware blocked the doorway.

"Hahlstroem! Achleitner!" Frederick shouted again and again.

Wilke pushed a short way down the long corridor, on which the cabins gave. But the spot closed off by the rising waters was only too clearly distinguishable.

"Come away, come away!" Frederick cried, and ran. He ran for his life. He ran in wild fear of missing the boat.



XLVIII

A moment later he was on deck, over the railing, and in the boat. The men wanted to put off. Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the tiller.

He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared. But now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the railing.

"Wilke! Wilke!" he shouted. "Jump into the boat!"

"Right away, right away," Wilke answered several times. Then he did something that Frederick tried to scold him out of doing, because it seemed so senseless and useless to everybody in the boat. He had discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be struggling desperately for their lives.

The boat did not wait for him. Under the third mate's command, the sailors began to row. The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than thirty yards from the Roland's side.

Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict, had bored the flank of the Roland, making a great gash near the engine-room. Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold. Frederick thought he could hear its greedy gulping. At the sight, for all the horror about him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior Roland, and with difficulty restrained an outcry. The fog closed in and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.

When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some incomprehensible way turned. The twenty persons in the boat looked down from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level with the water. They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in there, swarming like ants.

Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception. All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their way. Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots. Some of the life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark, swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape dropped off and fell into the sea.

Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view. But a sound, which Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the metallic clanging of the hurricane. For several seconds Frederick's thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in their passage. But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached his ears through the fog. It was the outcry of those human beings, who were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conception, that no human crime, he felt, could be great enough to justify such atonement. He distinctly felt how, through the excess of the hideous impression, the bridge carrying the message of his senses to his innermost soul snapped.

But suddenly the fever of the visible death struggle of eight or nine hundred innocent men after all did penetrate to his innermost soul, and wrung a cry from him, in which the whole boat load joined as by command. In that cry were fear, anguish, fury, protest, supplication, horror, wailing, cursing, and despair.

And the horror was increased by the consciousness that there was no merciful ear to listen, but only a deaf heaven. Wherever Frederick turned his eyes, he saw death. Indifferently the bottle-green, mountainous waves came rolling. In their march there was a murderous regularity, with which nothing interfered and which recognised no obstacles. He closed his eyes ready to die. Several times he felt for his parents' letters in his breast pocket, as if he needed them for passports to the land of darkness, where he was soon going. He dared not open his eyes again, because he could no longer bear to see the convulsions of the women in the boat or the hideous massacre on the stern of the Roland.

The sea raged. It was icy cold. The water froze on the edge of the boat. Rosa, the maid, was the only one that constantly bestirred herself to help others, the children, Mrs. Liebling, Ingigerd, and Arthur Stoss. Bulke and she vied with each other in bailing out the water in which Stoss and Mrs. Liebling were lying and which reached to the knees of the others.

What was in the meantime happening on the deck of the Roland, so far as Frederick caught momentary glimpses of it, did not fit in with his conception of human nature. The things he thought he saw in detail had nothing in common with those civilised, decorous ladies and gentlemen whom he had seen in the dining-room and on deck, promenading, conversing, smiling, exchanging greetings, and daintily dissecting the fish on their plates with forks. He could have sworn that he distinguished the white figure of a cook cutting his way, with a long knife, through the honourable person of a first-class passenger for whom he had cooked. Frederick was convinced he saw a stoker, a black fellow, strike a woman who was clinging to him—perhaps she was the beautiful Canadian—pick her up and throw her overboard. Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised, were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting, helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and disappeared.

"Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath blown away by the raging elements. She pointed, and Frederick looked where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes. Again the fog lifted and opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in all its length. Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white handkerchief. It was impossible to tell who it was. But a man whom Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a spy-glass was Hans Fuellenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.

The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone with the electric lights inside. Now and then a stifled shot could be heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light. But soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished. As if the sea in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it swept over the deck from the other side. That instant the waters on the near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.

Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the Roland again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it. A hideous, bestial conflict began.

Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it. Although it went on under his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance. He struck at something. It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the deep, shrieking in a voice not human. Suddenly, pulled backwards by the merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared. Frederick saw how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs. Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat. The sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.

None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.

The servant, Bulke, took command. For the sake of something to do and to delay the inevitable capsizing, Frederick and Wilhelm each seized an oar and rowed with the sailors.

Minutes passed. The fog lifted. Many eternally moving mountains and valleys of water had rolled between the little boat and the wreck. Of the Roland, the mighty fast mail steamer of the North German Steamship Company, nothing was to be seen.



XLIX

Late in the afternoon of the same day, the captain of a sturdy little trading vessel from Hamburg sighted a boat drifting on the long, high swells. The weather was clear, and the captain made certain that the people in the boat were signalling with handkerchiefs. Within half an hour, the shipwrecked passengers of the Roland were with great difficulty hoisted on board the trader, one at a time.

There were fifteen persons in all, three sailors and a cabin-boy, with the well-known name of the Roland on their caps, two ladies, a woman evidently from the steerage, a maid, a long-haired man of about thirty in a velvet jacket, an armless man, the man who had been steering, two other men, and two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was dead.

The hardships and terrors to which the delicate child had succumbed had had almost equally dire effects upon the others. With the exception of the maid Rosa, they looked as if they had been drowned beyond hope of resuscitation. A very wet man—it was Frederick—attempted to drag an unconscious wet young woman up the gangway-ladder, but his strength failed him, and the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism. Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze. On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands. His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine. He seemed to want nothing so much as to be dried, warmed and cleaned.

He was followed by Rosa. Upon laying an unconscious little girl in the arms of the first mate, she turned back to descend to the boat again, but found the way barred by Bulke and one of the sailors of the trader, hauling up the armless actor, Arthur Stoss. He was dripping wet, his eyes were staring blankly, his nose was running, and his eyelids were red and inflamed, while the tip of his nose was waxen white. After several vain attempts to produce a sound through his chattering teeth, he finally succeeded in framing "Rum! Hot rum!"

A mutual inclination seemed to make Bulke and Rosa pull together in their rescue work like two old mates. Fairly raining water, they descended again for Mrs. Liebling, who was lying prone in the bottom of the boat in a serious condition.

"She's dead, and the boy is dead," said the sailors of the trader, and wanted first to carry up the other woman, the steerage passenger, who showed she was still alive by a rattle in her throat, fearful to hear. Rosa burst into a howl and swore Mrs. Liebling was not dead.

"She's blue," the sailors declared. "She swallowed too much water."

But Rosa would not desist, and the sailors were compelled to carry Mrs. Liebling up first.

As they were lifting on deck the unconscious woman from the steerage, still emitting the fearful rattle, one of the Roland sailors, whose feet were frozen and who, during the whole long, dreadful drifting about on the ocean had not uttered a sound, suddenly began to bellow in pain.

"Shut up!" said his mates. "Don't carry on like an old woman."

He was the next to be lifted on board, merely whimpering now in ineffable agony. After him came the man in the velvet jacket, who was maundering, Doctor Wilhelm, Max Pander, and the other two sailors. Lastly the little corpse of Siegfried Liebling was lifted from the boat.

When the absurdly dressed man with long hair reached deck, he performed the drollest antics. For a moment he would stand upright, chest out, like a recruit, the next instant bow profoundly, or take aim, as if hunting; and all the time he kept bawling:

"I'm an artist. I paid for my cabin. I am well known in Germany"—striking a conscious attitude—"I am Jacob Fleischmann. I am a painter, from Fuerth."

Every now and then he would writhe pitifully and vomit salt water. The water dripping from his clothes formed a pool where he stood.

Doctor Wilhelm had completely lost the faculty of speech. All he could do was to sneeze incessantly.

In the meantime, the steward of the vessel brought Frederick hot tea, and one of the sailors, who acted as barber and nurse on the vessel, attempted to restore Mrs. Liebling to life. Within less than two minutes, Frederick felt sufficiently revived to meet the demands of the occasion and assist the sailor-nurse with his Good Samaritan work.

After swallowing several glasses of brandy, Doctor Wilhelm with the help of the chief engineer, Mr. Wendler, attempted to revive Siegfried Liebling, though with small hope of success.

Mrs. Liebling, in no wise differing from a corpse, had been laid on the long mahogany table in what would have been the dining-room, had the vessel been carrying passengers. Ugly, dark, purplish patches disfigured the forehead, cheeks, and throat of the woman, who was still young and who, before the shipwreck, had been beautiful. On baring her body, they found that it, too, was marked, though less closely, with the same gangrenous spots, somewhat duller in colour. Her body was swollen. Death might have resulted from choking in a moment when she fell into a faint unobserved by any of her companions. Toward the last, there had been several feet of water in the boat, and Rosa had for some time been entirely occupied with the dying boy.

When Frederick and the sailor-nurse laid Mrs. Liebling's body face downward on the table, water flowed from her nose and mouth. Her heart was no longer beating, and she gave no sign of life. As Frederick assumed, what had happened was, that she had sunk unconscious to the bottom of the boat and had lain for some time under water. He opened her mouth, forced her gold-filled teeth apart, put her tongue in the right position, and removed mucus, which had gathered at the opening of the air-passages. While the ship's cook rubbed her body with hot cloths, Frederick tried to induce artificial respiration by raising and lowering her arms and legs like a pump-handle.

The mahogany table took up the larger part of the low, creaking saloon, the only one the vessel possessed. It was on the quarter-deck and was lighted from above. The two walls running the length of the room were formed of the mahogany doors of the twelve staterooms, six on each side. In the twinkling of an eye the deserted saloon was converted into a medical laboratory.

A common sailor had peeled Ingigerd Hahlstroem out of her clothes, and without circumstance had laid her delicate body, shining like mother-of-pearl, on a couch against the wall taking up the full width of the room. At Frederick's instruction, he rubbed her body vigorously with woollen cloths. Rosa was doing the same for Ella Liebling, who was the first to be put to bed. The steward was working away in a glow of zeal to get each of the dozen beds freshly spread, and as soon as the second one was ready, Ingigerd was laid between the warmed covers. Thanks to his faithful valet, Arthur Stoss, his teeth still chattering, was the next to be ready for bed.

Jacob Fleischmann gave his rescuers much trouble. When a sailor spoke to him kindly and attempted to undress him, he struck about wildly, and shouted in a rage, "I'm an artist!"

The steward and Bulke had to hold him fast and use main force in putting him to bed. Doctor Wilhelm abandoned his vain efforts to revive Siegfried Liebling and came with his leather case of drugs, which he had managed to save, just in time to give the painter an injection of morphine.

The sailor whose agony of pain had overcome him before he was lifted on deck had such badly swollen, frostbitten feet that his boots had to be cut off bit by bit. He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming, and merely uttered low groans until they laid him in bed; when he called for chewing tobacco.

The woman from the steerage clad in rags was also put to bed. All she could tell was that she was bound for Chicago with her sister, her four children, her husband, and her mother. Nothing of what had in the meantime befallen her seemed to have penetrated, or remained in, her consciousness.

The whole while Frederick, his upper body bared, with only the barber to help him, kept working uninterruptedly over Mrs. Liebling. It was good for him, because it made him perspire. Finally, however, his strength gave out, and Doctor Wilhelm came to his relief. He tottered into the nearest cabin, the door of which stood open, and fell face downward into the unmade bed, utterly exhausted.



L

After a time Mr. Butor, the captain of the Hamburg, now speeding on its way, appeared in the saloon to welcome and congratulate the two physicians, who, notwithstanding their extreme exhaustion, were still working without cease over Mrs. Liebling's body.

The room, of course, was flooded and was reeking with the sweetish-sour smell of human exhalations. The captain sent a sailor to fetch dry clothes for Frederick.

While continuing their efforts and relieving each other at intervals, Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick gave a short account of the catastrophe on the Roland. Captain Butor was greatly astonished. Though the weather throughout his trip had not been especially good, yet it had not been the reverse. Most of the time, as at present, it had been clear, with a stiff wind and a moderately high sea. His vessel was bound for New York with a cargo of oranges, wine, oil, and cheese from Fayal in the Azores, to which it had carried a load of agricultural implements from Hamburg.

Frederick and Wilhelm could give little information concerning the cause of the accident. Wilhelm said that shortly before six in the morning, he had been awakened by a sound like the clang of a gong. In his half-waking state, he thought it was the signal to dinner, until he remembered that on the Roland a trumpet blast was used to announce meals.

Frederick thought the Roland had probably struck a wreck or a rock. But rocks, the captain said, were out of the question. There were none in those waters, and the Roland could not have been carried by strong currents into a region where there were rocks, since in that event the life-boat would not have entered the course of his own vessel within so short a time. The skipper, who knew Captain von Kessel personally and had met him in Hamburg only recently, spoke of him in the highest terms, as one of the most experienced, trustworthy captains in the German merchant marine. The catastrophe, he said, was possibly the worst that had occurred in decades, if the steamer had actually sunk and not been towed into a port.

Before leaving, Captain Butor invited the two men, as soon as their task was ended, to supper at the mess table.

An hour and a half passed. The physicians were about to give up their attempts to resuscitate Mrs. Liebling, when her heart began to stir and her breast to heave. Rosa's joy was boundless. With the greatest difficulty restraining an emotional outburst, she felt the warmth return even to Mrs. Liebling's soles, which she had been rubbing unwearyingly with her palms, hard as flat-irons. The rescued woman was carried to bed and packed in hot water bottles, like a premature baby.

This great success of the physicians' efforts—it was like a raising of the dead—produced profound emotion in all that witnessed it, including Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm, who were suddenly moved to shake hands with each other.

"We have been saved," said Wilhelm. "The most improbable, the most incredible thing has actually happened."

"Yes," rejoined Frederick. "It has actually happened. It is absolutely the most improbable thing that has ever occurred in my life. The question is, What were we saved for?"



LI

The mess-room of the Hamburg was a small square cabin with iron walls, its only furniture a square table and a bench running around three sides. Once a person was seated, it was impossible to pass him; and when the officers gathered for meals, they shoved themselves into place in a certain order, the captain first.

At seven o'clock Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick appeared for supper. They found a soup tureen sending up clouds of steam and a well-constructed oil lamp over the table shedding a cheerful light. The Hamburg was not lighted by electricity.

The two physicians, like all victims of accidents, the objects of really touching solicitude, were assigned seats against the warmest wall, dividing the cabin from the engine-room. Captain Butor served the strong hot soup, and Mr. Wendler, chief engineer, a rotund little mariner, in an attempt to enliven the shipwrecked men, cautiously ventured a joke or two even before the roast was served. He came from Lindenau near Leipzig, and the rest of the crew teased him for his Low German.

"Don't talk," said the captain to Wilhelm and Frederick. "Just eat, drink, and sleep."

At first they were inclined to take his advice, but in the course of the meal, after one of the sailors had served an immense cut of roast beef, and the captain had carved it, and they had washed the meat down with red wine, their spirits rose from moment to moment.

Bulke appeared at the door showing evidences of the royal banquet to which he and the sailors of the Roland had been treated by the sailors of the Hamburg. Notwithstanding his condition, pardonable enough in the circumstances, he would not go to sleep without first receiving instructions from Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, before whom he stood in military attitude, hand to his cap, awaiting orders.

It was decided that the sailor-nurse and another sailor of the Hamburg should go on night duty, since all the men from the Roland needed rest and sleep.

Though Frederick's and Doctor Wilhelm's spirits rose visibly, they never referred to the sinking of the Roland. It was too tremendous a thing, too dreadful, too near for any of the survivors, except the sailors, to speak of it without intense emotion. It was like a dull weight on their souls. Whatever Wilhelm and Frederick said related merely to their difficulties in the life-boat, or to the trip on the Roland before it overstepped that moment in eternity which determined its awful fate.

"Captain," said Frederick, "you don't know how astonishing it is to be raised from the dead. Conceive a man who has taken definite leave of everything that was dear to him in life, who has felt the rattle in his throat, and received extreme unction, and death, death itself, has settled on his flesh and limbs. I still feel death in my joints. And yet I am sitting here in safety, in the pleasant lamplight, almost as in a circle of friends and relatives. I am sitting in the cosiest home, with the difference that I still cannot get myself to look upon you"—they were the captain, the engineer, the boatswain, and the first mate—"as something so insignificant as mere men."

"When we sighted the Hamburg", said Wilhelm, "I had just made my last will and testament. You see I don't give myself up for lost as quickly as my friend, Doctor von Kammacher. When your ship gradually grew from the size of a pinhead to the size of a full-grown pea, all of us who could, screamed at the top of our voices. We nearly burst our throats screaming. And when your Hamburg attained the size of a walnut, and we realised we had been sighted, your ship flamed in my eyes like a huge diamond or ruby, and to me the east from which you came shone more brilliantly than the west, where the sun was still shining above the horizon. All of us howled like watch-dogs."

"It will always be a miracle to me," Frederick resumed, "that such an evening as this could follow such a morning. I have let days slip past, by the hundreds, holding no more in them than minutes. But in this one day, a whole summer has passed, and a whole winter. I feel as if the first violet had followed directly upon the first snow."

Wilhelm told of how excited the sailors had been in Cuxhaven because Catholic priests had boarded the Roland. Then he mentioned a dream his old mother had had the night before he was to sail. A child of hers that had been born many years before and had lived only a day, appeared to her as a grown-up man and warned her not to let him make the trip.

"She begged me not to go," he said, "but, as I am an enlightened man, I simply laughed at her for her fears."

Once launched upon the boundless sea of superstition, beloved by sailors, the men went on to recite cases they knew of prophetic dreams, of forebodings fulfilled, and the appearance of dying or dead men. This suggested his friend's last letter to Frederick. He drew his portfolio from his waistcoat pocket, where it had remained throughout his perilous trip, and passed the letter around.

They read the passage, "In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend to make an ocean trip?" Of course, it excited not a little astonishment, and it was with some thrills that they read: "Should it be possible for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond, you will hear from me again."

Captain Butor asked with an incredulous smile, yet eagerly, whether his friend had indeed made himself noticeable from the Beyond.

"This is what happened to me in a dream. Judge for yourselves. I don't know," said Frederick, in a voice still hoarse and barking. It was unlike him to go on and relate, as he did, the dream that had been greatly occupying his thoughts, which began with the landing in a mystic port and ended with the Toilers of the Light. He described his friend, Peter Schmidt, and declared that Peter had sent his astral self half way across the Atlantic to greet him. He spoke of 1492, of Columbus's flag-ship, the Santa Maria, but chiefly of his meeting with Rasmussen in the form of an old chandler, giving a detailed description of the remarkable ship in the shop window, the shop itself, and the chirping of the goldfinches. He drew out his note-book and read aloud what the mysterious chandler had said to him:

"It was precisely thirteen minutes past one on the twenty-fourth of January when I drew my last breath."

"Whether that is true," Frederick concluded, "remains to be proved. So much is certain—if there is anything about this dream that isn't the illusory work of my imagination—my soul grazed the boundaries of the world beyond, and I received a hint of the catastrophe to come. As to the Roland, my friend, Peter Schmidt, showed me a ship in the harbour with a tremendous hole in its side and said it had brought in a great many people,—which would mean, it had transferred them to the world beyond. In regard to my rescue, my disguised friend, Rasmussen, said I should soon celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of 1492 with Peter Schmidt in New York. But dreams are froth and foam. I fancy it would not be difficult to explain all this rationalistically, from psycho-physiologic causes."

Before the little family circle of the Hamburg broke up for the night, they touched glasses again with great gravity, even solemnity.



LII

Frederick awoke the next morning from an eleven hours' sleep, for which he was indebted chiefly to a dose of veronal. Doctor Wilhelm had undertaken to do whatever was necessary during the night for the sick passengers of the Roland and had persuaded Frederick, whose more delicate constitution was in the utmost need of rest, to take the drug. The sun was shining brightly into his tiny cabin. Through the slat door, he heard the sound of voices speaking calmly and the cheerful clatter of plates and dishes. At first he recalled nothing of the previous day's events, and thought he was on the fast mail steamer, Roland. But he could not reconcile the change in his cabin with the idea he had formed of his room on the Roland. In his bewilderment he reached out from bed and knocked on the mahogany slats of the door. The next moment Doctor Wilhelm's face, lively and refreshed, was bending over him.

"With the exception of the woman from the steerage, all our patients had a good night," the Roland's doctor said, and went on to give a report of each case. It was not until he had nearly ended his account that he noticed the difficulty Frederick was having to explain his surroundings. Wilhelm laughed and recalled some incidents. Frederick started up and clapped his hands to his temples.

"A void," he exclaimed. "A whirl of impossible things is going round in my brain."

Shortly after, he was sitting at breakfast with Doctor Wilhelm, eating and drinking. And yet not a word was said of the sinking of the Roland.

Ingigerd Hahlstroem had awakened and fallen asleep again. The barber and sailor-nurse, Flitte by name, had locked her door. Arthur Stoss was still lying abed with his door open and was cracking jokes in the best of spirits, while his trusty valet, Bulke, fed him or handed him food to take with his feet. From the ring of his falsetto voice one would have judged that the horrors he had survived were nothing but a series of comic situations.

"This business," he said, leaving his original subject and dropping a few highly flavoured oaths, "is going to cost me one thousand American dollars. I shall not be able to keep the first days of my engagement in New York." In good English he cursed the whole German Hansa, especially the Hamburg. "The wretched little herring keg! At the utmost it doesn't make more than ten knots an hour."

Fourteen hours of peaceful sleep brought the painter, Jacob Fleischmann of Fuerth to his senses. He had his breakfast served in bed, rang the call-bell, gave orders, and kept the steward dancing attendance on him. The others could hear him loudly reiterate again and again that though the loss of his oil-paintings, sketches, and etchings, which he had intended to sell in America, was irreparable and beyond compensation, yet the steamship company was unquestionably liable, and as soon as he reached New York, he would take to haunting the company's office, until they paid him full damages. They were to find out who and what he was.

Rosa, happy and eager, though with eyes red from crying, passed to and fro between her mistress's cabin and the dining-room table, carrying now one thing, now another, to Mrs. Liebling, who was still whining reproachfully. It had been agreed to keep Siegfried Liebling's death a secret from her, an easy thing to do since she had declared she was not yet strong enough to see the children. Yet it was remarkable how the dead woman had revived. When Frederick after breakfast paid her a professional visit, he found she had only a dim recollection of having been unconscious. She had had glorious dreams, she said, and when she realised she was to be awakened, had felt so regretful that she tried to resist the summons back to earthly life, back from the wondrous isle, the veritable paradise, in which she had been.

Mrs. Liebling was beautiful. She complained of pains, and at Frederick's bidding bared her body. He found it marked with blue spots, the result of the rough tossings in the life-boat, which had left him, too, bruised and wounded in various places and with frozen toes and fingers.

"My dear Mrs. Liebling," he said, "put up with your slight discomfort. We were all dead, and we have undeservedly been granted a second life."

Shortly before ten o'clock, Captain Butor entered the dining-room, shook hands with the gentlemen, asked how they had slept, and told them that all night the men on the bridge had redoubled their vigilance on the chance of discovering more survivors of the Roland. Since the wind was still from the northwest, it was possible that the Hamburg might chance on the wreck, in case it had not sunk.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "we did sight a derelict at one o'clock, but there were absolutely no persons aboard. It was an older wreck and a sailing vessel, not a steamer."

"Perhaps it was the Roland's murderer," said Doctor Wilhelm.

The captain asked the two physicians to come to the chart-room where they and the sailors of the Roland, who were already awaiting him, were to give him the vouchers he needed for his brief report to be submitted to his company's agent in New York in regard to the picking up of the castaways. A sort of audience was held, during which nothing new concerning the tremendous disaster was revealed.

Pander showed the scrap of paper with the pencilled message that Captain von Kessel had asked him to take to his sisters. All were greatly moved on reading the few hastily scrawled words. The incident revealed what a wrench the hearts and nerves of even the seamen had undergone. At the mention of this or that person or incident, Pander and the three sailors burst into hysterical tears. When asked whether they thought the Roland would remain above water over the day, all said "No." One of the sailors, who from the first warning of danger to the boarding of the Hamburg, had gone about his heavy duty with the same grit, the same matter-of-course manner, scarcely uttering a word, concluded each of his statements with: "Captain, it was like on Judgment Day."

At the conclusion of the audience, Frederick felt a great need to be alone for a while. "It was like on Judgment Day," followed him. Yes, it was like on Judgment Day! The horrors of the cruellest judgment could not exceed those amid which the victims of the shipwreck had perished. Strange, the evening before, Frederick had still been able to laugh; to-day he felt as if the gravity of his being were turned to brass and had laid itself about him, not like an iron mask, not like a leaden cloak, but rather like a heavy metal sarcophagus.

He knew a man, an architect verging on middle age, who had been on the island of Ischia during the last great earthquake there. The architect and some very dear friends were sitting together over a bottle of wine when the calamity was ushered in by the roll of subterranean thunder. A moment later the ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life. He himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed. Though years intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head and crushing him. Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror would seize him. Open places made him dizzy, and not infrequently a passerby seeing his helplessness would lead him like a blind man across the city square.

Frederick felt that the sinking of the Roland had left him with a gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the spaces of his soul. With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.

Why had the powers revealed Judgment Day to him, not as a vision, but as an actuality? Why had they showed such partiality as to let him and a few others escape perdition? Was he, the tiny ant, which was susceptible of such titanic terrors, important enough to assume the guidance of things for himself, to fulfil a loftier purpose for good or evil? Had he transgressed? Was he deserving of punishment? But that wholesale massacre was too fearful, too vast a thing! It was ridiculous to attribute to it a pedagogic purpose for the discipline of one minute human existence. Indeed, he felt how the large generalness of the event had almost entirely dislodged everything personal. No! Nothing but blind, deaf and dumb powers of destruction had been at work.

Yet, in facing the elemental tragedy of the human race, the inexorable gruesomeness of the powers, in looking into the eyes of death, he had acquired knowledge that turned something in his being into the hardness of the hardest rock. What was the sense of such a disaster if the eternal goodness ordained it? And where was the power of eternal goodness, if it was incapable of hindering it? Nothing remained but to strip oneself bare of all pride and dignity and grovel in the dust before the great unknown, a humble, will-less slave, completely at its mercy.



LIII

While on the Roland, time had crawled at a snail's pace, the hour hand of the clock on the Hamburg travelled twice around its face with surprising rapidity. During that interval, the two ladies remained in bed, though the weather, which was clear and moderate, permitted being on deck. In Mrs. Liebling the consequences of the strain manifested themselves in periodic attacks of great excitement and fear accompanied by violent palpitation; in Ingigerd Hahlstroem, in healthy sleepiness, which made the administration of morphine in her case unnecessary. Neither of the women developed fever. But the sailor whose feet were frozen and the woman from the steerage had a high temperature. The immigrant in her delirium wanted to jump from bed, and, at the physicians' request, Captain Butor appointed one of the well sailors from the Roland and a sailor from the Hamburg to relieve each other in keeping constant watch over her.

Each time Frederick went to look after the poor creature, he felt himself assailed by the temptation to save her forever from the moment of awakening. From her own lips, while she had still been conscious, he had heard of all the relatives she had probably lost on the Roland, her husband, three sons, and a daughter-ranging from seven to eighteen years of age—a sister and her mother. At first her fevered fancy occupied itself with the shipwreck, her husband, children, and sisters. Later she seemed to become a child again, reliving her life in her parents' home. Swallows' nests, a cow, a goat, a meadow, in which there was a haystack roofed to keep off the rain, figured as important things.

"Would that she passed away in those illusions!" thought Frederick.

Arthur Stoss, transported up-stairs by his faithful Bulke, and Jacob Fleischmann strolled about on deck, or reclined in the steamer chairs, which even the trading vessel possessed. Stoss needed some massaging and patching up, and while the physicians were busy with him, he crowed and cawed in his most jovial manner:

"I always say you can't destroy weeds. Tanned leather is impervious to salt water. I am like an ant which can spend a week under water without dying."

Thanks to Rosa's unwearying care, Ella Liebling escaped with nothing but a bad cold. Looking very pretty and saucy in her own clothes, which had been cleaned and dried, the little maiden pried about in every nook and cranny of the vessel. The skipper granted her a free pass to his bridge, the engineers to the engine-room. She was even admitted into the great tube of the propeller-shaft. She was everybody's pet, and all soon became acquainted with her mother's position in the world and manner of life.

When Ingigerd, after about fifty hours of rest in bed, finally appeared on deck, wrapped in Frederick's overcoat, the passengers and crew fairly celebrated the event. The exquisite creature, who had lost her father, was regarded with the same masculine pity by all the men on board. Pander, the gallant cabin-boy, converted himself into her shadow. He made a stool for her feet from an empty box of smoked sprats, and while she sat talking to Frederick, he stood off at a short distance ready to receive her orders. Even Flitte, sailor and barber and nurse, who was supposed to give all who needed him equal attention, ran hither and thither for her sake with special zeal.

The call for Flitte was the one most frequently heard on the Hamburg. The undersized little man from Brandenburg, whom a love of adventure had changed from a barber-surgeon into a sailor, unexpectedly experienced a triumph of his personality. Now it was Mrs. Liebling who summoned him, now Ingigerd, now the sailor with the frozen feet, now Fleischmann, now Stoss, and even Bulke and Rosa—Rosa, who for several hours during the day made herself useful in the contracted little kitchen, which was ruled by a shrewd old cook. The physicians, too, had, of course, constant use for him; and it was the most natural thing that he should become a man of importance in the eyes of even his idolised captain, whom, in the ordinary course of things it was his duty to shave. He was well aware of this, and since, moreover, pity had fanned into a lively flame his old inclination for nursing, he outdid himself in self-sacrificing deeds for the sick, both by day and night. Frederick asked him the same question he had asked each member of the Roland's crew:

"Would you rather be a seaman than anything else?"

And Flitte was the first that without hesitation answered, "Yes."



LIV

The unexpected arrival of the little troupe of peculiar passengers on the Hamburg in mid-ocean produced a flutter of excitement in both captain and crew. It was a feeling of mingled solemnity and gaiety. For the benefit now of the captain, now of the boatswain, or the first mate, or the cook, or the engineer, the physicians had to repeat again and again the account of how they had been sighted and rescued. It was a story that never grew stale, and from the eagerness with which the Hamburg's crew listened to the oft-told tale, the physicians realised that even to those old sea-dogs the event was a miracle. None of them, in all the years they had been sailing the high seas, had ever fished up such booty.

"When Captain Butor had me look through the spy-glasses," Wendler would say, "his face was the colour of green cheese. And when I thought for a moment that I made out a boat and the next second heard the captain say, 'Look sharp, there are people in it,' I felt my knees getting weak."

In telling of his impressions when the boat entered, and immediately disappeared from, the field of his spy-glasses, the captain invariably declared that he had suddenly been beset by a paralysed feeling in his feet, and rubbed the glasses, and began to search again. He was on the point of leaving the bridge, since he could not get another view of that strange little flyspeck on the ocean and decided it was an allusion, when it occurred to him that for reasons of general security he had better scan the entire circle of the horizon. This time he looked backwards. Instantly he had the Hamburg stopped and turned, because he had sighted the boat a second time and it was now decidedly nearer. The first mate, too, on looking through the glasses saw it was a boat and that it contained passengers. Wendler was called on deck. When he peered through the glass, he distinguished white cloths waving.

"When my boys found out what was doing," said Captain Butor, "they began to carry on like lunatics. I had to use some of my sea-lingo on them. They wanted to dive over the railing into the sea, and swim to the boat."

* * * * *

Ingigerd was lying stretched out in her comfortable steamer chair, and Frederick was sitting on a camp-stool in front of her. On the Roland, when the sense of danger began to thicken, a feeling of ownership in regard to Ingigerd had taken hold of Frederick and never left him. Doctor Wilhelm and, as a result of his influence, everybody on the Hamburg looked upon Frederick as the romantic rescuer and lover of the little dancer. All were conscious of witnessing the development of a romance especially sanctioned by Divine Providence, and looked on with interest and respect. Ingigerd's attitude to Frederick was that of tacit docility, as if she, the obedient ward, recognised in him her natural guardian.

The air was fresh, the motion of the sea was easy. Suddenly, after a long spell of silence, which Frederick had imposed upon her, Ingigerd asked:

"Was it really nothing but chance that brought us together on the Roland?"

"There is no such thing as chance, or, rather, everything is chance, Ingigerd," was his evasive answer.

Ingigerd was not satisfied, and did not desist until she learned the causes and circumstances that had led Frederick to board the unfortunate Roland at Southampton.

"So for my sake," she said, "you came within a hair's breadth of losing your life. Instead, you saved my life."

This brief conversation cemented the bond between them more firmly.

In the survivors, with the exception of Frederick and Ingigerd, the consciousness of their newly acquired life soon assumed exuberant forms. Scarcely two days lay between them and the sinking of the Roland, yet these very people, who had undergone the brutal terrors of that awful event, abandoned themselves to the greatest gaiety. Arthur Stoss probably had never before shot off such an incessant fire of jokes and jibes, and probably never before had set such an audience a-laughing as the captain, the first mate, the boatswain, Wendler, the ship's cook, Fleischmann, Doctor Wilhelm, and even Mrs. Liebling, Rosa, Bulke, and the sailors of the Roland and the Hamburg.

Fleischmann involuntarily and unconsciously danced to the tune that Stoss in perfect good humour intentionally piped. It was most amusing when the man with black locks, dressed in a black velvet suit saturated with salt water, swaggeringly passed judgment upon Adolf Menzel, Boecklin, Liebermann, and other celebrated German masters. In expanding his theories of painting, he always used his lost treasures as examples. Stoss never wearied of getting the caddish genius to describe his paintings, the loss of which in Fleischmann's opinion was the worst disaster connected with the sinking of the Roland. The form that Doctor Wilhelm's teasing of Fleischmann took was, when Ingigerd was not present, to make him describe his rescue in detail. In the artist's brain, it was an event in an eminent degree glorifying to himself. All the sorry incidents had completely passed from his mind, including the fact that Rosa, Bulke and Ingigerd had pulled him out of the waves howling like a wet poodle.

The sum at which he estimated the loss of his pictures and which he intended to demand of the steamship company was a matter of general knowledge, like the price of stocks and bonds, within two and a half days jumping from eight hundred dollars to six thousand. There was no telling to what amount it might soar.

Fleischmann had contrived to get some writing paper on the Hamburg, and industriously set to work to caricature everybody on board. Thus, he often bestowed his company unbidden upon Frederick and Ingigerd, who had no need of anybody else in the world. That would ruffle Frederick's temper.

"I am surprised," he once said to him, by no means amiably, "that after so solemn an event, you are capable of such superficial trifling."

"A strong character!" said Fleischmann, laconically.

"Don't you think," Frederick continued, "that Miss Hahlstroem may be annoyed by your constantly looking at her?"

"No," said Fleischmann, "I don't think so."

Ingigerd took Fleischmann's part, thereby heightening Frederick's ill humour.



LV

Shortly after, just as Wendler, who was off duty, passed by with a chess-board under his arm, Frederick was summoned to Mrs. Liebling. Of the two physicians, he was the one that had inspired her special confidence, why, he did not know.

"Doctor von Kammacher," said Doctor Wilhelm, with a swift side glance at Ingigerd, "you've cut me out again."

At least once every twenty minutes Mrs. Liebling called for Flitte and at least once every hour Frederick von Kammacher had to sit beside her on the edge of her bed. Strangely enough, it did not occur to the young scientist to take amiss the jokes that Doctor Wilhelm and the others aimed at him on that account. He was really sorry for the poor woman and was unaffectedly ready to be of service to her.

They had not yet informed her of Siegfried's death, but, now that only Ella kept coming to her, a suspicion had arisen in her mind. Flitte and Rosa, when she begged them to go fetch Siegfried, always returned without him, and when pressed, gave as the reason that the boy was sick.

"What is the matter with my dear, sweet Siegfried?" she cried, wringing her hands, when Frederick entered her cabin. The next moment she fell back on her pillow and lay rigid, pressing her hands to her eyes.

"O my God! O my God!" she exclaimed in impotent denial of the truth. Without waiting for what Frederick had to say, she began to cry quietly, in genuine grief.

On returning to the deck half an hour later, Frederick found the fat little engineer and Ingigerd playing chess together.

"The painter and I have made Miss Hahlstroem laugh three times already," cried the engineer.

"I know where you were, Doctor von Kammacher," Ingigerd said. "Does she know the truth now?"

"Yes," Frederick replied. "I hope she will be quieter now."

Ingigerd wanted to go down to Mrs. Liebling. Tears came to her eyes, and revealed, as with a ray of light shining inward, what she refrained from saying, that she who had lost her father was most fitted to share the grief of a mother who through the same misfortune had lost her son. Frederick was indignant that Ingigerd had been told, and used all his authority to prevail upon her not to visit Mrs. Liebling for the present.



LVI

The next day at about noon Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick helped Mrs. Liebling on deck. Her appearance there made a gruesome impression upon those who had not seen her since she had been dragged, a lifeless corpse, from the boat to the Hamburg. The sailors, though most solicitous to read Ingigerd Hahlstroem's wishes from her eyes, even before they were conceived, kept at a distance from Mrs. Liebling and cast shy glances at her, as if still in doubt whether she was a real human being. If the sea gives up its dead, why should not little Siegfried emerge from his death chamber?

Mrs. Liebling, wrapped in blankets and a coat belonging to the captain, was placed in a comfortable position on the other side of the deck from Ingigerd, because she wished to be alone. For a long while she looked across the expanse of the quiet sea. Then she said to Frederick, whose company she had requested:

"It's strange that I feel merely as if I had had a dreadful dream—just a dream—that is the strange thing. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fully convince myself, except when I think of Siegfried, that my dream reflects an actuality which I experienced."

"We mustn't indulge in vain broodings," said Frederick.

"I know," she continued without looking at him, "I know I didn't always do what is right, but if I deserved to be punished, Siegfried did not. Why did I escape?" After an interval of silence, she began to speak of her past, of conflicts with her husband, who had deceived her. Hers had been one of those loveless matches which are contracted in the customary business fashion. She told Frederick that she was an artist by nature, Rubinstein, for whom she had played when she was eleven years old, having prophesied a great future for her. "I don't know anything about cooking or children. I was always terribly nervous. Still, I love my children. If I didn't, would I have been so obstinate in trying to win them from my husband? I pledge you my word, Doctor, if I could change places with Siegfried, you would find me ready at any moment."

Frederick made all sorts of consolatory remarks, some of which were not wholly superficial; for instance, what he said of death and resurrection and the great atonement that every form of death, even mere sleep, involves.

"If you were a man, I should recommend Goethe. I should say to you, 'Read over and over the beginning of the second part of Faust:'

'Then the craft of elves propitious Hastes to help where help it can.'

or the passage beginning:

'The fierce convulsions of his heart compose; Remove the burning barbs of his remorses, And cleanse his being from the suffered woes!'

Doesn't what we went through give you a sense of expiation and purification?"

"I feel," said the woman who had arisen from the dead, "as if my former life were far, far away, as if, since the sinking of the Roland, an impassable mountain were lying between me and my past. But leave me now, Doctor. You are bored. Don't waste the precious time you owe your pretty friend on me."

As a matter of fact, Frederick preferred to talk to Mrs. Liebling rather than to Ingigerd. If he was bored, it was with Ingigerd, not with Mrs. Liebling.

"Oh," he said, "never mind. Ingigerd Hahlstroem always has company. She doesn't need me."

"My mother urged me," said Mrs. Liebling, "not to take the children, but to leave them with her. Had I obeyed, Siegfried would still have been alive. She has a perfect right to reproach me severely. And how can I face Siegfried's father? He did what he could to keep the children back. He wrote to me and sent friends and his attorneys."

"With 'if' and 'hadn't I,' you can't undo what has been done. The event is too general, too titanic, to be thought of in such a way. It is too fearful to be considered with reference to a single individual and his puny fate. What happened had to happen, whether or not we believe in predestination. We human beings must not have feelings so petty as to allow mere chance to play a role in this event."

Frederick could not make up his mind to speak of his dream, in which Rosa figured as jumping from the boat with Siegfried in her arms and escaping to the white marble quay of the wonderful Columbus port, where he had been received by Peter Schmidt and where the Santa Maria was slowly crumbling away. Since there were things in his dream that gave support to a belief in predestination relieving the mind of self-blame, his telling it might have soothed Mrs. Liebling's troubled conscience; but Rosa had remained alive, Siegfried alone was dead. Besides, though Frederick was constantly revolving the dream in his soul and kept recalling Hamlet's words, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he did not want to strengthen Mrs. Liebling's superstition, which showed itself in a predisposition for table-tipping and patience-playing.

On walking to the other side of the deck, after a rather prolonged absence, he was greeted with a shout.

"Hullo, father confessor!" they cried.

"Come be seated, my saviour," said Ingigerd, looking considerably better and brighter than the day before.

Frederick turned slightly pale, but did as he was bidden and said in a tone that did not harmonise with the good humour of the group:

"Mrs. Liebling was Rubinstein's pupil. I haven't met another woman on this trip to whom it is so well worth the while to talk."

"All due respect to you, a matter of taste," said Doctor Wilhelm.

"Let him alone. My saviour is displeased," said Ingigerd.

It was evident that occasionally she stood in awe of Frederick.



LVII

Aside from little tiffs between Ingigerd and Frederick, the spirit on board the Hamburg was generally good-humoured, even jolly. The weather remained clear, and the place of terror already lay eight hundred miles behind in the ocean. Each minute carried the passengers of the Roland farther along in their newly acquired lives. The ladies were feasted from the cargo of tropical fruit in the hold of the vessel, which had a carrying capacity of some two thousand register tons. Often the men for Ingigerd's amusement would use the oranges for playing ball. The Atlantic Ocean about the Hamburg seemed a very different thing from that awful, treacherous sea which had swallowed the Roland. It lay like a wave-tossing heaven under the steamer, and gave it a gentle rocking motion, by no means unpleasant. There was majesty in the course of even the plain little trader, painted black above the water-line and red below. Compared with that mechanical marvel, the Roland, it was like a comfortable old stage-coach, and could be depended upon to make its ten knots an hour with a great show of speed. Captain Butor in all seriousness declared the castaways had brought him good luck. The moment they appeared, the old man of the sea turned as peaceful and serene as an octogenarian English rector.

"Yes," said Stoss, "but your old English rector first filled his belly with a few hecatombs of human lives. Stop, look, listen! Don't be too quick to trust him. When he's done assimilating, he'll have a still better appetite."

Up to the very end of the trip, though there was a corpse on board and the woman from the steerage was still very sick, the atmosphere on the Hamburg lost none of its festal character. The bridge was free territory. Ingigerd was usually to be seen there in the daytime playing chess with Wendler, or looking on while Frederick won one game after the other from the engineer. Naturally enough, the entire crew, by no means exclusive of Captain Butor, felt profound satisfaction because of the booty they had recovered on the high seas, each wearing an air of evident pride in the catch. Had the exalted feelings that swelled the hearts of all on board the gallant freight coach, the Hamburg, been transferred into od-rays, the steamer would have sailed up New York Harbour surrounded, even at high noon, by an aureole of its own radiance.

There was betting as to the number of the pilot-boat that would come to meet the Hamburg, when suddenly it appeared hard by, with the number "25" decipherable on its sail. Arthur Stoss had won. Almost choking with laughter, he raked in a considerable sum, and Jacob Fleischmann envied him with comically obvious greed.

The close companionship with his fellow-passengers on the small steamer, the compulsion he was under to listen to their jokes and to the superficial, reiterated tale of the disaster made Frederick inwardly impatient. Unlike the others, he had not yet recovered his old relation to life. His soul was numbed. He had lost his feeling for the past, his feeling for the future, even his passion for Ingigerd. The moment of the catastrophe seemed to have snapped all the threads that bound him to the events, men, and things of his former life. Whenever he looked upon Ingigerd, he felt an oppressive consciousness of responsibility. In these days it almost seemed as if the girl in her predominatingly soft, serious mood were awaiting the declaration of his love.

"You all want to have fun with me," she once said, "but nobody wants anything serious of me."

Frederick did not understand himself. Hahlstroem was no longer living, Achleitner had had to pay the penalty of his undignified, dog-like love, and the girl, shaken and refined to the depths of her being, was wax in his hands. Often he would look at her to find that her eyes had been fixed upon him in a long, grave, meditative gaze. Then he would seem to himself a very sorry sort of person, and was compelled to admit that he who had once wished to overwhelm the girl with the infinite riches of a passionately loving soul, was a bankrupt, groping with empty hands in empty pockets. He ought to speak, ought to open the sluices on the other side of which the flood of his passionate love must have gathered and risen high; but all the waters had trickled away, all the sources had dried up. To mask the aridity of his soul, he adopted his old method of a curt, dictatorial manner.