Atlantis

Soon after, Frederick was in the barbershop getting a shave.

"Wretched weather," observed the barber, wielding the razor with a sure hand, despite the dreadful tossing of the vessel. He seemed to be an intelligent man. Frederick had to listen to a second account of the Nordmania, of how the waterspout had plunged through the ladies' parlour and carried the piano down into the hold.

An ordinary German servant-girl of the peasant class entered. She looked healthy to the core and none too intelligent. The barber called her Rosa and gave her a bottle of eau de Cologne.

"That's the fifth bottle of eau de Cologne that I've given her for her mistress since we left Cuxhaven," the barber explained after she had left. "Her mistress is a divorced woman with two children. Her name is Mrs. Liebling. She is very nervous. Rosa hasn't a very easy time of it. For five dollars a month she has to be at Mrs. Liebling's beck and call morning, noon and night. She takes entire charge of the children. Soon after we left Cuxhaven, Mrs. Liebling came to have her hair dressed. You should have heard how she went on about that girl. The things she said against her. Not a spark of gratitude. She said the stupid, lazy thing wasn't worth the price of her second-class cabin."

Several times Frederick had heard the sound of quarrelling mingled with children's crying in the cabin opposite his. Once he had even distinctly caught the slapping sound of what must have been a box over somebody's ear.

"Does she hit Rosa?" he asked the barber.

"Yes."

Clearly, then, it was his neighbour of the opposite cabin in whose service the girl was.

Frederick enjoyed listening to the lively barber retail gossip, while he lay stretched out in his patented chair. It diverted his mind from troublesome thoughts. The barber, who had been sailing the seas for many years, was by no means of the ordinary type of his class. He delivered a short discourse on modern shipbuilding, the moral of which was, not to construct light steamers for speed.

"Altogether," he observed, "it's a pity to lay so much stress on record-making. How is a great big body with walls like a wafer to resist heavy seas for any length of time? And see what tremendous engines it has to carry and what an enormous amount of coal it consumes. But the Roland's a good boat. It was built in Glasgow in the yards of John Elder and Company. It has been running since June, 1881. The engines are compound steam-engines with three cylinders and 5800 horse power. They require one hundred and fifteen tons of coal every day. The boat makes sixteen knots an hour, and has a tonnage of 4510. There are one hundred and sixty-eight men in the crew."

The barber had all these details at his fingers' ends. In a tone of annoyance, as if the thing caused him personally a lot of trouble, he told that the Roland on each trip to or from New York dragged one thousand and three hundred tons of anthracite coal in its coal-bunkers. A slow trip, he insisted, was safe and comfortable, while a quick trip was dangerous and expensive.

The little saloon with its electric lighting would have been a very comfortable place to be in, had it only stood at rest. But unfortunately its walls were quivering to the pulse of the engines and the floor was rising and sagging to the swell and fall of the waves, which every now and then leapt against the port-hole with tiger-like fury. The flasks in the closets rattled.

"A heavier ship," said the barber, "built to go more slowly, wouldn't be pitching like this."

Next he spoke of a little person, who dyed her hair, a dancer. She had spent more than an hour in his chair, having him show her rouge and face powders, until finally he had displayed his entire stock of Pinaud and Roger et Gallet. The barber chuckled.

"On sea trips," he said, "a man has a chance of getting to know the queerest women." And he proceeded to recount a number of incidents, which, on his own word, he himself had witnessed. The heroine in each case was an erotomanic woman.

"Just ask our doctor," he said. He was of the old-fashioned sort of barber-surgeon, and in the capacity of surgeon had gathered the most scandalous portion of his experiences. "One of the worst cases," he went on, "was that of an American girl, who was found lying unconscious in one of the life-boats swinging from the davits. She was hideously abused by all the crew, one at a time, but they fixed it so that the whole blame could be laid on her."

Frederick knew that none other than Ingigerd Hahlström was responsible for the direction the barber's thoughts had taken. She had been sitting in the very chair in which he was now reclining. A current streamed from its upholstery into his body. His heart began to beat irregularly, ceasing for an instant, then leaping wildly. To his horror, he observed that Mara's power over him was not yet broken.

He jumped up and shook himself. He felt as if he must plunge into a hot and cold bath and let stinging douches run down his spine to wash him outwardly and inwardly clean and expel that foul poison from his blood.

The barbershop lay aft, and nearby one could look through glass panes upon the working of the cylinders and pistons. Frederick toilsomely clambered up to the promenade deck and crept into the overcrowded smoking-room. Though it disgusted him to be wedged into a small space with a lot of noisy men, he had come here in the desire to escape the wild orgy of his thoughts. Doctor Wilhelm had kept a place for him.

"The doctor tells me you were in the steerage, and a beautiful Deborah made a dangerous impression upon you," the captain said, smiling roguishly.

Frederick laughed. He ordered beer, and the conversation was jolly from the start.

In their corner the skat players were sitting over their cards. They were business men, all of apoplectic constitution. They had been drinking beer and playing skat ever since breakfast, in fact, except when they slept, ever since boarding the steamer. The conversation in the room was of no interest to them. Even the weather failed to elicit any questions from them. They seemed to be insensible to the tossing of the great vessel, or the dismal howling of the wind. The force of the roll was so tremendous that Frederick involuntarily clutched at the thing nearest to him. Up went the port side, down went the starboard. Up went the starboard, down went the port side. Sometimes Frederick felt as if port and starboard might plunge one over the other; in which case the Roland's keel would float above water, while the bridge, masts, and smoke-stacks would be submerged at a distance below the surface. And in that case all would be lost; but those skat players, it seemed to him, would go on playing undisturbed.

Hahlström's tall figure came creeping with bent head into the tobacco smoke. His clear, cold, critical eyes roved about looking for a seat. He paid no attention to the armless man, who jestingly shouted an ironic remark to him. With cool politeness he seated himself at the greatest possible distance from Stoss, drew a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and filled a short Dutch pipe. Frederick's immediate thought was, "Where is Achleitner?"

"How is your daughter feeling?" Doctor Wilhelm asked.

"Oh, she's just a little upset now. The weather will be getting better, I suppose."

The whole company, which, of course consisted of the men either by nature or from frequent exposure proof against seasickness, now entered into the usual discussion of the weather.

"Is it true, Captain," somebody asked, "that last night we nearly collided with a derelict?"

The captain smiled, raised his brows, and made no reply.

"Where are we now, Captain? Was there fog last night? I saw some snow fall. And for at least an hour I heard the siren blow every two minutes."

But Captain von Kessel remained highly monosyllabic in everything pertaining to the management of the vessel and the prospects for a good or bad crossing.

"Is it true that there is gold bullion on board for the treasury in Washington?"

Von Kessel smiled and sent a thin wreath of cigarette smoke curling through his moustache.

"That would be carrying coals to Newcastle," remarked Wilhelm.

And now the great theme, the theme of themes, became the general topic of conversation. Each of the travellers, of course, straightway had a picture of his own fortune in mind, every cent of it, or else tried to make an accurate mental calculation. They all turned into calculating machines, while aloud comparing the capitals of the great American banking firms, the Bank of England, the Crédit Lyonnais and the wealth of all the American millionaires. Even the skat players gave their attention for a few moments at a time.

America was then suffering from a business depression, a crisis, as the political economists dub it. The causes of the depression came up for discussion. Most of the Americans present happened to be Democrats, and they threw the blame on the Republicans. The Tammany Tiger was the subject of especial execration. It not only controlled New York City, the mayor of which was a creature of Tammany, but had also put its men into the most influential positions throughout the land. And every Tammany man knew how to shear his sheep. As a result, the American people were thoroughly bled. The corruption in the highest offices was said to be on a tremendous scale. Millions of dollars were appropriated to the navy, but if a man-of-war actually happened to be built, the thing was a great achievement, since the money, long before it was applied to its proper purpose, sifted down into the pockets of peaceful Americans, whose interest in the navy was of the slightest.

"I shouldn't care to be buried in America," cried Stoss, in his sharp voice. "It would be too dreary and boresome for me in my grave. I hate their spitting and their ice-water." The burst of laughter that greeted his remark encouraged him to further sallies. "Americans are parrots, incessantly chattering two words, dollar and business, dollar and business, dollar and business. Those two words have been death to culture in America. An American doesn't even know what it is to have the Englishman's spleen. Think of the fearfulness of living in a country called the land of dollars. We have human beings living in Europe. The Americans regard everything, even their fellow-men, from the point of view of the number of dollars they represent. If a thing can't be reckoned in dollars, they have no eyes for it. And then Carnegie and Company come and want to astonish us with their disgusting shopkeeper's philosophy. Do you think they're helping the world on by slicing off some of the world's dollars and then returning some of the sliced off dollars with a great flourish of trumpets? Do you think that if they do us the favour to give us some of their money, we'll throw overboard our Mozart and Beethoven, our Kant and Schopenhauer, our Schiller and Goethe, our Rembrandts, Leonardos, Michael Angelos, in short, all our wealth of art and intellect? What is a miserable cur of an American millionaire, a dollar maniac, as compared with all those great men? Let him come and ask us for alms."

The captain invited Frederick to his cabin and asked him to write a few words in his album. On the way, he showed him the chart-room and the wheel-house, where a sailor was turning the great wheel at the directions of the first mate, whose voice came from the bridge through a speaking-tube. Frederick read the compass in front of the wheel and saw that the Roland lay west-southwest. The captain was in hopes of striking better weather by taking a more southerly route. The helmsman did not allow his attention to be diverted for the fraction of a second. He kept his bronzed, weather-beaten face with its corn-coloured beard turned unwaveringly toward the compass, and his sea-blue eyes fastened upon the west-southwest line. And the face of the compass, in its round copper case, notwithstanding the vessel's elephantine leaps and bounds, never deviated from the horizontal.

When they reached his cabin, the handsome blond German, whose eyes came of the same stock as the mariner's at the wheel, became more expansive. He insisted on Frederick's taking a comfortable seat and offered him a cigar. He spoke of his own life. Frederick learned that he was unmarried, had two unmarried sisters and a brother with a wife and children. The pictures of his sisters, his brother, his brother's wife, his brother's children, and his parents were hung symmetrically on the wall over a red plush sofa. They were sacred objects.

Frederick did not fail to ask his stereotyped question:

"Do you follow your calling because you have a decided preference for it?"

"Tell me of a position on land where I could command the same salary, and I'd exchange without an instant's hesitation. Seafaring begins to lose its charms when a man gets on in years."

The captain's guttural voice was extremely agreeable. It suggested to Frederick the sound of colliding billiard balls. His enunciation was perfect, absolutely free of a dialectic tinge.

"My brother has a wife and children," he said. Though there was, of course, not the slightest trace of sentimentality in his tone, it was evident from the gleam in his eyes how he idolised his nieces and nephews. He pointed out each one's picture and at the end said frankly, "My brother is an enviable man." Then he asked Frederick whether he was the son of General von Kammacher. He had taken part in the campaign of 1870 and 1871 as lieutenant of the regiment of artillery of which Frederick's father had been chief. He spoke of him with great admiration and reverence.

Frederick remained in the captain's cabin over half an hour. His presence seemed to give the skipper special pleasure. It was astonishing what a gentle, tender soul was hidden beneath the commanding exterior. Before disclosing a bit of that soul, he always puffed harder at his cigar and gave Frederick a long, searching look. By degrees Frederick discovered what magnet was tugging strongly at the blond giant's heart. He kept recurring alternately to the Black Forest and the Thüringian Forest, and Frederick had a mental picture of the magnificent man clipping his privet hedge in front of his cosey cottage, or walking among his rose bushes with a pruning knife in his hand. He could detect that the captain would far rather be living secluded in a sea of green leaves and green pine needles; and he felt convinced that it would have been delicious to him to submerge himself forever in the soft rushing of endless forests and dispense forever with the rushing and roaring of all the oceans in the world.

"Perhaps the night of all days has not yet come," said the captain, with a humorous expression. He rose and placed the large album in front of Frederick. "Now I am going to lock you in here with this pen and this ink, and when I return, I want to find something clever on this page."

Frederick von Kammacher turned the leaves of the mariner's album. It was unmistakable that the hope for a vegetable garden, gooseberry bushes, the chirping of birds, and the buzzing of bees was most intimately connected with this book. Under the pressure of dreariness and the grave responsibility for many a sea trip, it must expand the captain's soul to look over it, Frederick thought. It seemed to point to a time when, in the peace and security of his simple home, it would serve its turn by testifying to all the dangers its possessor had gone through, all his past struggles and hardships. In a sheltered haven it would afford pleasant retrospect, full of content.

Frederick's own quietistic ideal in the form of a farm and a solitary log hut occurred to him. But he was not living in it alone. The little devil Mara was sharing it with him. In embitterment he mentally climbed to still lonelier regions, and saw himself a hermit, who prayed, drank nothing but water, and lived on roots, nuts, and sometimes a fish of his own catching.

When the captain returned and he and Frederick had taken leave of each other, this is what he found in his book:

The signature was

"Frederick von Kammacher, Globetrotter."

Frederick, holding on to his hat with one hand and clinging to the railing with the other, descended from the windy heights of the captain's cabin to the promenade deck. When he passed the cabin of the first mate, the door opened, and Von Halm appeared in conversation with Achleitner. Achleitner was pale, and there was an anxious look in his face.

"I have rented the lieutenant's cabin for Miss Hahlström. I could not bear to see her suffering so in her own cabin," he called to Frederick.

The gale had increased. Not a passenger was to be seen on deck. Sailors were inspecting the life-boats. Huge masses of water seethed against the ship's side, cutting into its course obliquely. The waves made a mad leap into the air, hung there for an instant in the form of white corals, and fell like a thousand lashes on the deck, which was all awash. The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled. Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck. In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke. But the fore-deck was so swept by the seas that nobody could keep his footing there, except the lookout men, who were holding watch at the beak of the vessel, not far from the cat-head.

Between the door leading to the main companionway and the companionway itself was a square level space, about which a railing ran and in which a few people could stay and enjoy the fresh air without being drenched. When Frederick, on his way below deck, passed through the open door, he found a quiet assemblage of pale-faced passengers. One chair was still unoccupied. He seated himself in it, with the fanciful notion that he was joining a gathering of condemned men.

"That poor sinner there must be Professor Toussaint, the famous sculptor in need," Frederick thought, judging so from the man's slouched hat and great cape. Now and then the man exchanged a few words with a person sitting next to him, who might be Geheimrat Lars. Frederick had once met the Geheimrat at a dinner at the mayor's house, but he had only a faded recollection of his appearance. The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse. Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other tall and thin.

The tall one was showing the other a section of a submarine cable and letting the hard piece, intricately braided of hemp, metal and gutta-percha, pass from hand to hand. From his choppy, whispered sentences, the company learned that in 1877 he had worked as electrical engineer on a steamer laying a cable between Europe and the United States. The work on the high seas had lasted without interruption for many months. He had spent several months supervising the construction of the steamer itself in the yards, especially the riveting of its metal plates. He spoke of what is called the cable plateau at the bottom of the ocean, stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland, a strip of grey sand so named because it supports the main transatlantic cable.

The copper wires in the centre of the cable, he said, were called its soul, the rest of the mass, almost as thick as a man's fist and resembling a great hawser, served merely as a sheath to protect the soul. Frederick had a mental vision of the fearful solitudes of the ocean depths, with the monstrous metal serpent, apparently without beginning and without end, creeping over the sandy bottom peopled by the enigmatic creatures of the deep. It seemed to him as if such profound isolation must be gruesome even for the dead mass of cable.

Then he wondered why it was that mankind at each end of the cable had burst into jubilation upon the transmission of the first messages. Perhaps there was some mystic cause for rejoicing. The real cause could not possibly be that one was now able to telegraph "Good morning, Mr. Smith," or "Good morning, Mr. Brown," twenty times a minute around the earth's circumference, or that one could adulterate humanity's mind with newspaper gossip from the four quarters of the globe.

In the midst of these meditations, his chair slipped, and Frederick, in company with the electrical engineer, the dozing manufacturer, a lady physician, and a lady artist, was hurled against the banister, while the opposite row of passengers, including the Geheimrat and the professor, was hurled on top of them. It was a ridiculous incident, but Frederick observed that no one seemed to find it so.

They tried to arrange themselves in order again. One of the ever-industrious stewards appeared, and, as if to comfort them for their overthrow, passed about Malaga grapes from the ship's inexhaustible store.

"When shall we reach New York?" somebody asked. The eyes of all the others instantly turned upon the questioner in amazement and alarm. The steward, usually so polite merely smiled an embarrassed smile and gave no reply. In his opinion an answer, one way or the other, would have been to challenge fate. The passengers felt much the same. Indeed, the idea that their feet would actually ever tread solid land again seemed in their present condition almost like an extravagant fairy tale.

The short, stout man, to whom the electrical engineer was chiefly directing his discourse, was conducting himself peculiarly. At short intervals he would look out anxiously into the uproar, turning his small, watchful eyes searchingly up to the tops of the masts, which never ceased to describe great arcs in the air (starboard to port, port to starboard!), and out into the monotonous rolling of the waves, swelling into ever higher and larger masses. His face was full of concern. Frederick was on the point of inwardly ridiculing the pitiful landlubber's cowardice, when he heard him say that scarcely three weeks before he had brought his schooner safely to New York from a three years' trip around the world, and intended to start out from New York on the same trip to last the same length of time. The little gentleman was the experienced captain of a sailing vessel. In the course of his fifty years, he had spent more than thirty on all the waters of the globe.

Frederick reflected upon the timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander about the Roland vaguely.

The enforced idleness of a sea trip, especially in bad weather, induces passengers, when they have made the complete round of the vessel, to begin over again and go through the same circle. Thus, Frederick, after descending the companionway, ascending it, and descending again, found himself on the leather-seated bench in the smoking-room avoided by most of the smokers, in which the armless man had taken his meal the day before.

Hans Füllenberg entered, asked whether he was not permitted to smoke a cigarette in the room, and began to grumble about the weather.

"Who knows how this thing is going to end?" he complained dismally. "Perhaps, instead of reaching New York, we'll have to be towed into port somewhere in Newfoundland."

Frederick was indifferent to the prospect. He noticed that young Füllenberg cared for nothing except to produce an impression; and young Füllenberg noticed that Frederick von Kammacher was not susceptible to the impression he tried to produce. He cast about for another theme of conversation.

"Do you know there are two priests on board? You should have been at Cuxhaven when they got on. The sailors were beside themselves. I hunted up the fellows, the sailors I mean, in the forecastle. How they did curse! It was fearful. The stoker told all the men of the engine-room. They said you could not get genuine seamen to think any differently—with priests on board something is bound to go wrong."

"How is your lady?" asked Frederick.

"My lady is retching her soul away, if she has such a thing as a soul. Two hours ago I helped her to bed. That Englishwoman is already a full-blooded American. Shameless, I tell you! Something tremendous. I rubbed her forehead with brandy. She partook of a goodly quantity, and then I unbuttoned her waist. She seems to take me for a masseur chartered extra by her munificent husband. The thing became boresome. And besides, in that pitching boudoir, my own soul began to rise up through my stomach, and the poetry went to the devil. She showed me the photograph of her devoted husband in New York. I think she has another in London." He was interrupted by the first call for dinner, which the trumpeter announced at the bottom of the companionway. The trumpet blast was lost without resonance in the heavy air and the bluster of the waves. "What's more," he concluded, "she sent for Doctor Wilhelm."

The dining-room presented a very dreary appearance. Neither the captain nor any of the officers of the Roland were present, the demands upon them in such bad weather being too severe to permit them to leave their posts. The tables had been provided with a wooden apparatus dividing them into small compartments, which prevented the plates, glasses and bottles from slipping any distance. Nevertheless, there was much breaking of crockery, and it required all the skill of the stewards to serve the dishes, especially the soup. From the kitchen and the china room every now and then came the sound of a tremendous crash. There were scarcely twelve people at table, among them Hahlström and Doctor Wilhelm. After a time the skat players, as usual, came bursting in, talking noisily and red of face. Their winnings were immediately transmuted into Pommery. Notwithstanding the fearful weather, the band was playing. There seemed to be something frivolous, almost challenging, in the playing of music when, at short intervals, the Roland would come to a quivering standstill, as if it had run upon a reef. Once the illusion was so strong that a panic arose in the steerage. Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, brought this explanation of the horrified shrieks that had penetrated the dining-room above the noise of the raging waters, the rattling of the plates and the blare of the band.

At dessert Hahlström left his place at the other end of the room and, balancing himself with difficulty, came over to Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm, and asked permission to seat himself beside them. He seemed to have been drinking whisky, as he had dropped his natural shell of reticence. He spoke of hydrotherapy and gymnastic exercises, and called himself a quack. It was the gymnastics, he said, that had given his daughter the idea of taking up dancing. As if to challenge the others, he elaborated bold philosophic theories, dealing out one wild statement after the other, each of which would have been a trump sufficient to end the game for ten German Philistines. To believe his own word, he was a terroristic Anarchist, a white-slave trafficker, an adventurer always. At any rate, he espoused the cause of all who were Anarchists, procurers, or adventurers. He argued in all superiority, upon egotistic grounds, calling these the intellectuals, and all others, creatures without brains; in which his philosophy showed some similarity to Frederick von Kammacher's new philosophy, now that Frederick had entered upon a new phase of his life.

"America," said Hahlström, "is known to have been settled by rogues. Were you to spread a tent over America, you would have the most beautiful, the most comfortable penitentiary in the world. The natural form that survives and triumphs in America is the great rascal, the great Renaissance idiot. In fact, it is the one form that will triumph throughout the world. You'll see some day how the great American rascal will get the whole of Europe, including England, into his clutches. Europe is also dabbling a little in Renaissance ideals and Renaissance beasts. It is busily working away, so to speak, on its own rascalization. But America is in advance by ten horse lengths. Europe's Cesare Borgias sit in the cafes with Glockenröcken à la Biedermaier and give voice to their criminal genius in fairly innocent verses. They all look sickly, as if a barber had cupped all the blood out of their veins. If Europe wants to save herself, she has only one hope—to make a law by which it will be a crime to surrender an adventurer, an embezzler, a fraudulent bankrupt, the keeper of a disorderly house, a thief, or a murderer to America. On German, English and French vessels in American ports, such people have already been placed under the special protection of Europe. Then you will see how soon Europe will outdistance Uncle Sam."

The physicians burst out laughing.

"When did geniuses ever do anything morally? Even the creator of heaven and earth did not know how to. He produced an immoral world. Every high form of human intellectual activity has thrown ethics overboard. What would a historian be who, instead of making researches, would moralise? What would a physician be who would stop to moralise? Or a great statesman, who would toe the chalk-line of your middle-class ten commandments? As for an artist, when he moralises, he is a fool and a knave. And please tell me, what sort of a business would the church do if all of us were moral? There would be no church."

There was a cold gleam of audaciousness in the Swede's eyes. His utterances produced a strange impression. Even if he had pronounced fewer wild paradoxes, Frederick von Kammacher would have succumbed to his spell. He eagerly sought for resemblances between father and daughter, or, more accurately, he observed them without seeking. They were very evident to one who, alas, to his own torture, was carrying the daughter's picture alive in his soul. As long as the Swede spoke, he could not help wavering between repugnance and admiration, and he kept asking himself whether this man was really the sort of person that Arthur Stoss had described him to be, no gentleman, a weakling, an idle ragamuffin.

As they arose from table and were ascending the companionway to the deck, Hahlström suddenly said to Frederick:

"My daughter is expecting you. We have a friend on board, Mr. Achleitner, a soft creature, but the possessor of much money, which he doesn't know the best way to get rid of. So he made it worth while for one of the officers to give up his luxurious cabin opening on deck to my daughter. Unfortunately, that gives him the right to make an unmitigated nuisance of himself sometimes."

When the men entered the comparatively roomy cabin on deck, they found Achleitner sitting on a rather unsteady chair, while Mara, carefully wrapped up, was lying stretched out on a couch. She instantly called to her father, please to remove Mr. Achleitner, who was boring her, and signified to Frederick that she had a special favour to ask of him. Hahlström and Achleitner obediently withdrew, and Frederick nolens volens had to seat himself on the camp-chair.

"How can I be of service?" he asked.

She put one of those inconsequential requests with which she liked to busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many people were not doing something for her, she felt neglected.

"But if you don't want to do it," she added—it was to get her a bottle of perfume, or something of the sort, for which a stewardess would have been the right person to ask—"but if you don't want to do it, then please don't. I should prefer it if you didn't. In fact, if I bore you, I would just as soon sit alone."

Frederick realised that this beginning was a foolish expression of embarrassment.

"I should like to be of service to you in anything I can, and you don't in the least bore me."

That was the truth. Alone with Ingigerd in her cabin, where the vessel's motion was less perceptible, he was sensitive to the full fascination of her presence. The pangs of the ocean crossing had given her sweet girlish face a waxen transparency. At her request the stewardess had loosened her hair, and it lay spread in a golden flood over her white pillow, a golden flood, the sight of which was highly disturbing to Frederick. Where was there an adornment for the head, a queen's diadem, which could exercise so powerful, so divine a charm? It seemed to Frederick as if that tremendous vessel, with its hundreds of human ants, were nothing more than the cocoon of this tiny silkworm, this delicately coloured, delicious little butterfly; as if the sixty naked helots down at the ship's bottom shovelling coal into the white heat under the boilers, were toiling and sweating merely to be of service to this childish Venus; as if the captain and officers were the paladins of the queen, and the rest of the crew her following; as if the steerage were rilled with blindly devoted slaves, and as if the Roland were proudly carrying a fairy tale from "A Thousand and One Nights" across the salt desert.

"Did I hurt your feelings yesterday by telling you my story?" she asked suddenly.

"Mine? No! You are the injured one in the life you have unfortunately led."

She looked at him with a sardonic smile, plucking a pink wad from the lid of a box of sweetmeats beside her. In her looks and smiles, Frederick felt her cold, wicked enjoyment. And since he was a man and knew he was impotent in the face of such fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury mounted in him, driving the blood into his eyes and causing him involuntarily to clench his fists. His full-blooded nature occasionally had need of such frenzy. It was a phenomenon with which his friends were familiar.

"What is the matter with you?" whispered Ingigerd, plucking at the pink wad. "I am not afraid of a monk like you."

Her remark was not calculated to calm Frederick's passionate surge. However, he mastered his feelings with evident, redoubled exertion of his will power. Had he not succeeded in controlling himself, he might have more resembled a Papuan negro than a European. He might have turned into a beast in human form, and might have thrown overboard, as he himself clearly felt, more than was good of what both self-acquired and imposed culture had formed in him. He had no desire to turn into another animal in Circe's stables.

It was as if Ingigerd were the very incarnation of the evil Psyche, so few of a man's feelings were concealed from her. She knew what fight Frederick had just fought and she knew he had conquered.

"Oh, I wanted to become a nun once myself," she said, and began in a mixture of truth and fiction to prattle of a year she had spent in a convent. "I wanted to turn good, but didn't get very far. I am religious. Really I am. I can say so with a clear conscience. Anybody with whom I don't feel I could pray to God, is disgusting to me. Perhaps, after all, I shall end by being a nun, but not because I am pious." She did not realise how egregiously she was contradicting herself. "Oh, no! It wouldn't occur to me to be pious. I don't believe in anything but myself. Life is short, and nothing is coming afterward. A person ought to enjoy life. A person who deprives himself of a single enjoyment sins against himself, beside practising self-deception."

She was led to speak of her mother. Frederick was startled by the hatred, the vulgarity with which she referred to her.

"I could kill her," she said, "although, or just because she is my mother." Her face lost its purity of expression and assumed an ugly, repulsive look. "With papa it is different. But it gets to be an awful nuisance always to be dragging him about with me."

The stewardess came in. She spoke to Ingigerd in a loud, cheery way.

"Better here than down below, isn't it, Miss?"

She bolstered up her cushions, rearranged her coverings, and left again.

"The silly thing has already fallen in love with me, too," said Ingigerd.

"Why am I sitting here?" Frederick thought, and was about to attempt in all kindness to remove the cataract from the eyes of the foolish little creature. Why did great waves of pity keep sweeping over him? Pity for which she did not ask. Why could he not rid himself of the idea of innocence, of chastity, of the uncontaminated while in the presence of this child fiend? She seemed pure and unsullied, and each capricious movement, each remark of hers only heightened the impression of touching helplessness.

"All love is pity." This sentence of Schopenhauer's, which he held to be both true and paradoxical, flashed into his mind. He took one of her dolls in his hand, and tried in the kindly way that he had acquired with his patients to make Ingigerd Hahlström understand that one does not go through life unpunished in the belief that life is mere doll's play.

"Your dolls," he said, "are actually beasts of prey. Woe to you, if you don't realise they are beasts before they bury their claws in your flesh and rend you with their fangs."

She gave a short laugh without answering. She complained of a pain in her breast.

"You're a physician. Won't you examine me?"

"That's Doctor Wilhelm's business," Frederick answered brusquely.

"Well," she said, "if I am in pain and you as a physician can stop the pain, but don't want to, your friendship cannot amount to much."

Frederick did not turn a deaf ear to this correct reasoning. He had long before realised that her delicate constitution was with difficulty holding the balance between debit and credit. Each instant it was in danger of losing its balance.

"If I were your physician," he said, "I should send you to live for three years with a German country pastor, or an American farmer. I should not let you see anybody but the old pastor or the old farmer and his wife and their daughters. I should not let you go to see a play, let alone appear on the stage yourself. It is those cursed variety shows that have sent you to the dogs, physically and morally."

"I am a ruffian," he thought, "and there's medicine for her."

"Do you want to become a farmer?"

"Why?"

"Because you are already a pastor," she laughed.

The conversation was interrupted by the screeching of a cockatoo on a stand in the back of the cabin. Until then Frederick had not noticed it.

"What else will be turning up? Where did you get that beast?"

She laughed again.

"Please give me the beast. Koko! Koko!" Frederick arose and let the great, rosy-white seafarer clamber on his hand. "I like animals better than I do most people I meet," she said.

The bird kept screaming "Cockatoo!" until Frederick felt it fairly applied to him.

In the meantime the Roland, sinking into deep troughs and climbing over watery mountain crests in an ocean that was like a great machine regularly at work, had plowed its way into fog. The siren was bellowing.

"Fog?" exclaimed Ingigerd. Every bit of blood vanished from her face, which was already too pale. "But I am never afraid," she added immediately, took a bonbon in her mouth, and let the cockatoo nibble at it. The bird unfeelingly trod on the girl's beautifully heaving breast. She made it sing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht and some well-known music-hall airs, and told stories of her menagerie.

Every instant Frederick had to perform some small service, and while she was giving an enthusiastic description of a little monkey from Java that she had once owned, he asked himself whether he was a physician, a nurse, a hairdresser, a chambermaid, or a steward, and whether Ingigerd Hahlström would not in the end reduce him to a messenger boy.

He yearned to be on deck in the open air.

Soon after, Achleitner entered with an anxious, questioning expression in his eyes, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him back to the girl's couch.

"What is to become of me?" Frederick questioned himself. He scarcely heard Hans Füllenberg's jolly shout of greeting as the young man reeled past. Hans Füllenberg did not fail to observe whose door it was that Frederick von Kammacher had just closed behind him, nor that, as he stood there with the knob still in his hand, he seemed to be in a state of indecision and absorption.

The siren was sending up its deafening roar. It was that wild, fearful, ascending cry, as if torn from the breast of a monster bull, which he had first heard on the tender. There was something menacing in it, and at the same time something of an anxious warning. Frederick never heard it without applying menace and warning to himself. Likewise, the driving mist seemed to be a reflection of his soul; or his soul a reflection of the driving mist and also of the vessel, as it struggled onward into the unknown, unseeing and unseen. He stepped over to the railing and looked straight down the ship's side. There he could tell with what tremendous rapidity the Roland was cleaving the water.

"Isn't man's courage utter madness?" he thought. Could any one, from captain to the lowest sailor, prevent the propeller-shaft from snapping at any moment? The screw was constantly rising and buzzing in the air. Who could sight a vessel in time to prevent the collision that would inevitably smash in the thin walls of the great hollow body? Who could hope to avoid one of the many derelicts drifting in the fog almost submerged? What would happen if the might of the waves were to hurl that great lumped mass of wood and iron against the Roland's side? What would happen if the engines were to break down? If a boiler were to prove unequal to the uninterrupted strain put upon it? Then, too, icebergs were met with in those waters. And suppose the storm were to grow worse.

The things that European civilisation has accomplished are tremendous. The trouble is, the object to which the means are applied is not worthy of the means. The how is great. The wherefore receives only a stammering reply. So much is certain, that the life of the average man to-day is fuller of adventure and heroism than the life of a bold adventurer a hundred and fifty years ago.

Frederick went to the smoking-room on deck. He found the card players, Doctor Wilhelm, Arthur Stoss, Professor Toussaint and some more gentlemen gathered over their afternoon coffee.

"Hullo!" they shouted when he appeared in the doorway.

The room smelled strong of coffee and the pungent odour of tobacco. In the instant that Frederick held the door open, the wreaths of mist and heavy tobacco smoke met.

"What's the matter, gentlemen?" Frederick asked.

"Did you operate on the dancer," someone cried, "to remove that mole two inches from her backbone right over her left hip?"

Frederick turned pale, and said nothing. Had he uttered a single word, the result might have been a scandal, perhaps even a duel, out there on the high seas.

He seated himself beside Doctor Wilhelm and acted as if the shout of greeting and the unknown man's question had not referred to him. Doctor Wilhelm proposed a game of chess. Frederick accepted, and while playing, he had time to choke down his humiliation and resentment. He glanced about furtively to find the speaker.

"There are some people, Doctor von Kammacher," Arthur Stoss said in a raised voice, "who leave their decency in Europe when they travel to America, though that does not reduce the price of the passage."

The man at whom the remark was aimed left it unanswered.

"But, Mr. Stoss," said an elderly man from Hamburg, whose conscience in regard to the offence thrust upon Frederick was evidently clear, "we're not in a ladies' parlour, and we needn't take jokes amiss."

"I am not in favour of jokes," said Stoss, "that are made at the expense of persons who are near at hand, but not present, especially when a lady is concerned. I am still less in favour of them when they are coarse and indecent."

"Oh, Mr. Stoss," rejoined the man from Hamburg, "everything in its place. I have nothing against sermons, but we're having bad weather here on the ocean and this room is not a church."

"Besides, nobody mentioned names," another man said.

Here the American jackanapes joined in the cross talk.

"When Mr. Stoss is in New York," he said drily, "he will hold services every night at Webster and Forster's."

"Some American youngsters are celebrated for their cheek," Stoss countered.

"Directly after the celebrated Barrison sisters' appearance, after the song 'Linger Longer Loo,' Mr. Stoss will raise his hands to heaven and beg the audience to pray." The American spoke without moving a muscle of his face. He had the last word. The next instant the slim young fellow was outside the door.

Arthur Stoss had the pleasure of knowing he was a fool for his pains. But, like Frederick, he paid no attention to the thrust, or to the laughter it provoked.

"People are very much mistaken," he said, turning to Professor Toussaint, who was sitting beside him and to whom he had been introduced a few minutes before, "if they suppose that morality among vaudeville performers is laxer than among any other set of persons. It's an absolutely false assumption. A performer above the average, who must always be at the very height of his powers, has to practise moderation to the point of abstinence if he wants to remain on top. Does anybody suppose that a loose life is compatible with those startlingly bold feats that an acrobat does every day and tries to improve upon every day? Damn it! It's something to make your ordinary mortal marvel at. Why, to do any one of the many things we do, we have to practise asceticism and chastity, and patiently peg away day after day at hard, dangerous work. Your plain business man, who never omits his glass of beer, has no idea what it is like." He continued to sing the praises of vaudeville actors.

"May I ask what your specialty is, Mr. Stoss?" asked Hans Füllenberg.

"A very easy specialty, once you know how. But if it should ever come to a duel between you and me, young man, you'd have to choose what eye or ear or tooth you'd be ready to part with."

"He's as good a shot as Carver," someone said. "He can take the middle right out of an ace three or four times in succession."

"Just like any other display of skill. But don't for a moment suppose, gentlemen, that even if a man has arms and doesn't have to hold the gun with his feet and pull the trigger with his toes, that he learns how to do it without sweating and self-denial and endless patience."

"Somebody said you play the violin like Sarasate," said Hans Füllenberg.

"Not exactly. Nor need I, considering the way I was born. But I am fond of music and my audiences go wild over my playing."

Captain von Kessel entered. He was received with a general "Ah!" Through the door burst a great wave of sunlight.

"The barometer is rising, gentlemen."

The fog had lifted, and now the men in the smoking-room realised that the Roland was rocking no more than easily and comfortably and was making its way with majestic speed.

This acted like a charm. The captain left the door open and had Pander hook it back. A man, who had been lying asleep in a corner—in that half sleep which is the mildest symptom of seasickness—rose to a sitting posture and rubbed his eyes. Hans Füllenberg and a number of other men hastened out on deck. Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, who had lost the game, followed.

The two physicians paced the full length of the promenade deck. The air was mild. The ship was moving quietly, as if its great body took delight in pushing onward through none but low waves. It was surprising to see how gay the life on deck was. They were constantly raising their hats and making way for somebody. The stewards had carried the news of the good weather down to the passengers in their stuffy cabins, and all the seasick travellers had come crawling on deck. There was much talking and laughing. Each moment brought fresh surprise over the galaxy of merry women that had kept themselves stowed away in the Roland's interior. It was just an ordinary Saturday afternoon in January; yet suddenly an atmosphere of festivity prevailed not to be outdone by a Christmas eve.

Hans Füllenberg passed by. He was cracking jokes for everybody's benefit and flirting desperately with his Englishwoman, who had recovered from her seasickness. She had found a friend, a woman in a fur cap and coat, with a magnificent crown of light hair, like a Swedish woman's. She seemed to be greatly amused by Füllenberg's poor jokes and poor English. He had abstracted her muff and was alternately conveying it to his stomach, his heart, and—this very passionately—his mouth. The young American jackanapes was promenading with his Canadian, who looked very haughty and blasé, yet much fresher. The delicate creature seemed to be shivering with cold, though she was wearing an elegant coat of Canadian sable, which reached to her knees. Frederick greeted the clothing manufacturer, whom his steward had helped up on deck. He had been lying in his cabin more dead than alive, and his steward had been feeding him on nothing but Malaga grapes.

Ingigerd was holding court on the port side in front of her cabin, the door to which stood open, it flattering her vanity to have the many promenaders see and envy the privilege she was enjoying.

"If it is agreeable to you, Doctor Wilhelm, let us remain this side of the Rubicon. That little girl slightly bores me. By the way, can you tell me how I came to bring down on myself that shout when I entered the smoking-room and that man's vulgar remark? To be sure, as a physician and free-thinker it's a matter of indifference to me."

"Oh," said Wilhelm, trying by an air of lightness to appease Frederick, "this is all it was. Füllenberg probably saw you coming out of Miss Hahlström's cabin, and said something in the smoking-room. You know his mischievous way."

"I'll box his ears," said Frederick.

"The trouble is, the little girl is making herself generally conspicuous. The worst rumours are afloat about her. All men seem alike to her, whether stewards, firemen, sailors, or cabin-boys. And that greasy Achleitner! I assure you, all over the ship, in the forecastle, among the stewards when they polish the silver, and in the officers' cabins, they do nothing but titter and laugh at her and Achleitner and anybody falling under suspicion on her account."

"Don't you think that's slander?"

"Why, you and I are physicians. I don't care a fig one way or the other."

Frederick laughed. "I have set my all on nothing."

Suddenly he said:

"You're right. I'm of the same opinion. I must really throw overboard that old idealistic German Adam sticking in me like a Sunday afternoon preacher."

The two men laughed. Their mood turned merrier, chiming in with the general atmosphere of hilarity.

One reason for this predominating sense of happiness was the fact that all the passengers, after struggling with nausea and sleeplessness during those miserable, crawling, endless hours in the doleful grave of their cabins, had learned to appreciate the value of mere healthy existence. Merely to live, merely to live! That was the cry that rang in every step, every laugh, every word, drowning all care. None of those concerns which each of them had dragged on board, whether from Europe or America, now had the least might. Merely to live was to win in the great lottery. They knew sunshine follows rain, and they said to themselves, "If worse comes to worst, you will willingly put up with bread and salt and a hoe and a vegetable garden, and no one in the world will be a happier mortal than you."

Those promenading men and women were each glad of the other's existence. They loved one another and were ready without hesitation to commit all sorts of follies, deeming them mere bagatelles, which on solid land they would never have condoned in themselves. Their rejoicing was a crucible melting together all the barriers by which convention divides man from man. They experienced a sense of relief and liberation, and drew in deep breaths of this atmosphere of freedom.

At the captain's order, the band set up its music stands and instruments on deck amidships; and when the blithe strains resounded through the whole of the Roland, that was the climax of festivity. For half an hour it seemed as if the few clouds floating in the blue sky, the steamer, the people on the steamer, and the ocean had agreed to dance a quadrille.

For moments at a time the waves would form the droll, chubby-cheeked face of a jolly old man. All at once the dreadful old man of the sea had turned good-humoured. He even seemed to be in a jocular mood and displayed a certain clumsy vanity in letting his puppets, swarms of flying fish, dance their dance, too, in a circle about the Roland. Perhaps, at his bidding, a whale would soon be spouting. Indeed, within a few minutes, the immigrants on the fore-deck were shouting, "Dolphins!"

The gentlemen could not for any length of time avoid Ingigerd.

"Theridium triste, the gallows spider, you know," said Wilhelm, as they approached her.

"How so?" said Frederick, slightly startled.

"You know what a gallows spider does near an ant nest. It sits on the top of its blade of grass, and when a myrmidon passes below, it throws a little skein of cobweb at its head. The ant does the rest. It gets tangled up until it is absolutely helpless, and then the tiny little spider comfortably eats it up."

"If you had seen her dance," said Frederick, "you would be more inclined to assign her the rôle of the ant throttled by the spider."

"I don't know who," said Wilhelm, "but some poet says, the sex is strongest when it is weak."

Ingigerd was able to boast a new sensation, which she owed to Mr. Rinck, the officer in charge of the mail, a pretty little dog, a ball of white wool, scarcely larger than a man's two fists put together. The polar bear in miniature was barking wildly in its ridiculous thin falsetto at the great ship's cat, which Mr. Rinck was holding to its nose.

"With your permission, Mr. Rinck, we shall sleep well to-night," said Wilhelm.

"I always sleep well," replied the other phlegmatically. Close to the cat's soft, heavy, hanging body, his cigarette, as always, was burning between the fingers of his right hand.

The cat spat, the dog barked. The piping sound drilled Frederick's ears like needle pricks. Ingigerd laughed and kissed the little yelper.

Wilhelm began a conversation by telling of the tremendous amount of work Mr. Rinck had to do between Cuxhaven and New York.

"Just take a look here, Doctor von Kammacher," he said, opening a door nearby, through which one could look into a deep, square pit filled half way up to the top with thousands of packages of all sizes. "Mr. Rinck has to arrange all of these."

"Exclusive of the letters," Mr. Rinck supplemented phlegmatically.

"Theridium triste," thought Frederick. He seemed to himself like an ant trying head over heels to escape the spell of the little spider, whose golden cobweb in long, open strands was luring on its victims.

"That Rinck," said Wilhelm, as they resumed their promenading, "is a peculiar sort of chap. It is worth the while to get to know him. Twenty years ago he suffered hard luck from a woman of the same type as little Miss Hahlström. Men should never marry women of that type. Ever since, he has been indifferently facing every sort of death on all the waters of the globe, not to mention an attempt at suicide. You ought to hear him talk. It is very difficult to get him to do it, because he doesn't drink. You can't succeed until you have been on four or five trips with him. People speak a great deal of fatalism, but to most of them the idea is merely a paper idea. To Rinck it is not a paper idea."

The life on deck kept assuming a more and more unconcerned, mundane aspect. Frederick was astonished to see so many persons from Berlin whom he knew by sight. Professor Toussaint introduced himself, and led Frederick to his wife, who was lying stretched out in a steamer chair. Their attempt at what is called conversation resulted in a few sickly sprouts.

"I am making this trip at the invitation of an American friend," Toussaint explained somewhat condescendingly, and mentioned the name of a well-known millionaire. "Even if I receive orders over there, I will not allow myself to be persuaded into making America my home. Interest in art should be elevated—" The pale, aristocratic man with the care-worn expression went on to expatiate upon his hopes and troubles, while his wife, who was still beautiful, looked on with a blasé expression of irony. Probably without being conscious of it, Professor Toussaint too frequently referred to the United States as the dollar land.

On the after-deck the passengers in unrestrained jollity, had begun to dance. It was Hans Füllenberg, the ever vivacious Berlinese, who had taken the lead. Inspired by the Strauss waltz that the band was playing he had engaged the lady in the fur coat. A number of other couples followed their example, and there, under the bright sky, an informal ball was opened, which did not end until sundown.

When the musicians with their shining brass instruments were about to make their way inconspicuously below deck, the passengers detained them, and in the twinkling of an eye, a large collection was taken up. Thereupon the dance music began again, even blither than before.