Atlantis

Doctor Wilhelm was summoned away, and after a while Frederick succeeded in taking leave of Toussaint and his wife. He remained alone. The clear heavens, the deep blue sea, smooth as glass, calmed as if by a miracle, the music, the dancing, the sunlight, and the dear, sweet, pacifying, all-forgiving letter of his mother—it was in his pocket—awakened in him a fresh, pleasant sense of vitality.

"Life," he said to himself, "is always this way or that, a moment filled with pain or pleasure, with darkness or brightness, with sunlight or heavy, black clouds; and according to the moment in which we view our past and future, these will darken or brighten. Should existence in the shining light possess lesser reality than existence in the dark?" "No, it should not," was the answer that came from everything within and about him, filling him with youthful, almost childlike joy.

Frederick had pushed back his slouched hat, had unbuttoned his light overcoat, and was standing with his arms crooked over the railing. He looked out upon the sea. He felt the pulse beats of the engines, his ears were filled with the pliant, melodious chords of the Viennese waltz; the whole world had turned into a brilliant, lively, sparkling ballroom. He had suffered and caused others to suffer. Now he embraced all those through whom he had suffered and who had suffered through him, and seemed to wed them in blissful intoxication.

At this point Ingigerd Hahlström passed by with the giant Von Halm. Frederick heard her say she did not dance, that dancing was an insipid pleasure. With that, he started away from the railing, went up to the Canadian, and in a peculiar, fiery German manner ruthlessly drew her away from the young American, who was completely taken aback. It was evident that the delicate, exotic woman, whose breast rose and fell convulsively, took pleasure in that strong conqueror's arm as they circled about in the dance.

At the conclusion of the dance, he found himself under the necessity of murdering French and English with her for a time and was very glad when he could gracefully deliver her over again to the jealous young American.

Stoss was being transported across the deck by his valet, who, as always, held him by his coat collar.

"My private overland and oversea express," he called to Frederick.

Frederick pulled up a steamer chair for him in a sudden impulse to chat with Stoss.

"If the weather remains like this," said Stoss, after his valet had carefully and skilfully seated him in the chair, "we can reach Hoboken some time on Tuesday. But only if the weather does remain like this. The captain tells me that when we are running under full steam, as now, we make sixteen knots an hour."

Frederick started. So Tuesday this life under the same roof with Ingigerd was to end.

Frederick had been profoundly humiliated by the coarse insult offered him in the smoking-room. He knew of no other way to escape the impression of it except by a sort of ostrich policy. For that reason he had passed over the incident lightly when speaking to Doctor Wilhelm. Once his feeling of delicacy, smarting like a sensitive nerve, had ceased to ache so intensely, he looked upon the scandal much as a somnambulist would look upon the thing that has awakened him and guarded him against a humiliating fall. For more than half an hour his passion for the little devil of a dancer had turned into disgust and repugnance, until now he suddenly had to admit once again that separation from her was inconceivable.

"That little dancer is a piquant wench," said Stoss, as if he had divined Frederick's thoughts. "It would not seem at all strange to me if an inexperienced man were to fall into her toils. I think she resembles one of the younger Barrison sisters, who sing 'Linger Longer Lucy, Linger Longer Loo.' A man must certainly don armour in dealing with her."

"I am completely at a loss to understand," lied Frederick, "how I ever came to fall under suspicion with that creature. She is of absolutely no interest to me."

"Good Lord, Doctor von Kammacher! Who doesn't fall under suspicion with her?" He laughed unblushingly. "I myself did."

Frederick suffered. He looked sidewise at the armless trunk, and his soul writhed in humiliation at the thought of his own ridiculousness.

Stoss went on to philosophise on erotics in general. He, the Don Juan without arms, read Frederick a lecture on the art of handling women. This led to his boasting, which detracted markedly from his quality of fineness. His intellect also shrank in direct proportion to the increase of his vanity. Something seemed to be working in him impelling him to impress people at all costs with his successes as a man.

A servant-girl led two children by. Frederick drew a breath of relief, for she diverted Stoss from his unsavoury theme.

"Well, Rosa," he called, "how is Mrs. Liebling?" It was his habit to obtrude himself upon everybody. From the gossip of Bulke, his valet, he had learned of Rosa and her cross. The difficult lady she served was the excitable person of whom the barber had told Frederick and with whom he was acquainted from certain impressions of his hearing. Rosa, who was carrying Ella Liebling, a girl of five years, on her crimson arm, looked pleased and laughed.

"She is not coming on deck. She's taken up with fortune-telling and table-turning."

Bulke, in whose eyes Rosa seemed to have found unqualified favour, took Siegfried Liebling, a boy of seven, from her hand and helped her place both children safely in steamer chairs.

"There is nothing to beat a crazy woman," Stoss declared. "That Mrs. Liebling actually called in Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, to help her with Rosa"—the very Rosa, who unwearyingly and self-sacrificingly worked for her day and night, in good weather and bad. The worst to be said against her was that at utmost she was a little too ready with her tongue.

The music was still playing, the sun was still shining from a slightly clouded sky. On the dry deck the travelling city, in the gayest, most superficial mood, was still dancing in the face of the infiniteness of heaven and sea. A steward came up to Frederick and presented the second engineer, who brought a message from Doctor Wilhelm asking Frederick to come to him immediately. The engineer led Frederick to the engine-room and down a perpendicular iron ladder. The warm, heavy smell of oil almost robbed Frederick of his breath. The downward climb seemed endless.

On all sides the engines were working. Frederick glanced at the gigantic cylinders, in which the compressed steam was moving pistons up and down like pump handles. The pistons communicated their motion to the big shaft running aft along the keel to the stern, and the revolutions of the shaft in turn produced the revolutions of the screw propelling the vessel across the Atlantic.

Oilers holding oil cans and waste clambered in and out of the rotating masses of iron with astounding sureness and boldness. To graze one of the fly-wheels, or to step one inch within the unguarded circle of their revolution, was to receive a deadly blow. Here was the heart and soul of the vessel, the real modern miracle of strength, the like of which no age in the past has been able to produce. An iron soul, a steely heart. It was as if one were descending below earth into the glowing workshop of Vulcan of old, the lame god, who did not demonstrate the full skill of his divinity until our times.

Still deeper down went the descent, to where, from numerous shovels handled by almost naked helots, coal was flying into the white heat under the boilers, into a row of gaping jaws of fire. Frederick felt as if he had reached the heart of a crater. It was a black shaft smelling of coal, slag, and burning things. Apparently it was lighted only by the constant opening of the furnace doors, spitting white heat. How was it possible for such a conflagration to be contained in the Roland's interior without reducing the whole to ashes? What a conquest to fight such a sea of fire, to keep it in check, and carry it through sea and storm; to manage that it should carry itself three or six thousand miles in the ocean in fair weather or foul, hidden away and absolutely innocuous.

Frederick panted for breath. The glowing heat of the abyss instantly brought the perspiration pouring out on his face and neck. He was so absorbed in the novelty of the impressions that he completely forgot he was surrounded by water about twenty feet under the surface of the sea. Suddenly, he became aware of Doctor Wilhelm's presence, and in the same instant saw a man entirely naked stretched out like a corpse, a white body on the black coal dust. The man had ceased to breathe.

In a second Frederick, now wholly the physician, had Doctor Wilhelm's stethoscope in his hand and was listening to the man's heart. His mates, blackened with coal from head to foot, were ceaselessly at work in the engine's unremitting service, shovelling coal, opening the furnace doors, and slamming them shut. They scarcely cast a glance at their fallen comrade, and that only when they stopped to gulp a glass of beer or water.

"It was hardly three minutes ago," said Doctor Wilhelm, "that he broke down. That man over there, the one who has just washed himself, is his successor."

"He was just about to throw coal into the furnace," explained the engineer who had called for Frederick, shouting at the top of his voice to make himself heard above the clanging of the shovels and the banging of the iron doors, "when his shovel flew out of his hand about twelve feet away and almost struck a coal-trimmer. He was hired in Hamburg. The moment he set foot on board, I thought, 'If only you pull through, my boy.' He joked about himself. He said, 'If my heart is good.' I was sorry for him. He wanted to cross the great pond, and that was his only way of getting over. He wanted, no matter how, to see his brother again, his only living relative, or somebody else. They hadn't seen each other for fourteen years."

"Exitus," said Frederick, after a prolonged investigation of the man's heart. Even a few moments after the stethoscope had been removed, one could see the ring it made on his bluish, waxen skin. His chin dropped. They put it back in place, and Frederick bound his jaws with his white handkerchief. "He had a bad fall," Frederick remarked. It may actually have been the unfortunate fall to which the helot owed his death. There was a deep bleeding gash in his temple from the edge of a large nut. "Probably a heart stroke," Frederick added, "the result of the heat and over-exertion." He looked at the dead man, then at his mates, naked, blackened, illuminated by the jaws of the glowing furnaces, and thought of the fifth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." If we were to take the commandment literally, how far should we get?

The physicians mounted on deck, and several of the men picked up the victim of civilisation, the modern galley-slave, still covered with the sweat of his fearful occupation. With the handkerchief about his head, he looked as if he were suffering from toothache. They carried him up out of the glowing pit to the cabin set aside for dead bodies.

Doctor Wilhelm had to notify the captain. Nobody on deck, where the band was playing the last measures, was to suspect that a stoker had died. With the help of the Red Cross sister, they stretched him on a mattress, and within a short time a circle of the higher officials of the vessel, at their head the captain, and among them the purser and the physicians, were gathered about the corpse.

Captain von Kessel ordered the stoker's death to be kept secret, particularly requesting the two physicians not to mention it. Formalities had to be gone through, documents had to be drawn up and signed. This kept them busy until dark, when the first call for dinner was trumpeted across the deck and through the gangways of the first-class section.

Frederick went to his cabin and removed the grey suit he had worn in the purgatory of the stoke-hole. He put on striped trousers, a black waistcoat, and black frock coat. By the time he appeared in the dining-room, a lively procession of brilliant toilettes was already making its way there. Almost all the ladies of the first class came rustling in. Frederick from his seat observed that many of them had to stop for an instant at the doorway to pluck up their courage. Then, with a charmingly humorous smile, they would conquer their dread of seasickness, particularly threatening in the dining-room, and step over the threshold.

Save for the slight quiver that ran through the walls and ceilings of the whole vessel, its motion was scarcely perceptible. The music began, and the swarm of stewards in livery, who came hurrying in, could serve each guest with a full plate of soup without need of balancing.

"A full-dress dinner," said the captain with a contented glance about the room as he seated himself.

Fish was already being served when Ingigerd entered on the arm of the very ungainly and very ordinary looking Achleitner. At the sight of her absurd get-up, Frederick felt like sinking through the floor. The barber had piled her beautiful light hair into a fearful mountain of puffs, and about her narrow shoulders she wore a Spanish shawl, as if to represent Carmen—a very pitiful Carmen, who provoked jeers and jibes from one end of the table to the other.

"What deadly green stockings!" Frederick thought, as he choked down a piece of fish with the bones in it.

"Why in the name of sense does she wear those bronze slippers?"

"Some chalk, please, for the lady," said one man. "She is going to dance the tight rope for us."

Mischievous looks and remarks flew about the table. Both the ladies and the gentlemen choked over their fish or wine and had to hold their napkins to their lips. Not all of their remarks were pronounced sotto voce, and among the card players, who were again drinking champagne, the jokes aimed at Ingigerd and Achleitner were particularly loud and coarse.

Could Frederick believe his eyes? Terror shot to his heart. That sad little monstrosity was walking toward him—stood next to him in compromising intimacy—was saying poutingly:

"When are you going to pay me a visit again?"

Frederick made some inconsequential reply.

Necks in standing collars, bare throats encircled with gold chains and pearls turned toward the captain's table. Frederick could not recall ever having had an experience so painfully humiliating. Ingigerd saw nothing and felt nothing. Achleitner, however, seemed to be rather ill at ease under the perceptible cross-fire of the animated company, and tried to lead her away. Finally, she left the tortured man, saying:

"My, you're dull and stupid! I don't like you." At which the captain's corner burst into a prolonged laugh, which was a relief to everybody's but Frederick's feelings.

"I assure you," said Frederick, with a tolerable attempt at dry irony, "I don't know what I have done to deserve this distinction, or what I shall do to deserve it in the future."

Then they spoke of other things.

The clear weather and the prospect of a peaceful night filled the festive diners with undimmed gaiety. They ate, they drank, they laughed, they flirted, all in the delightful consciousness that they were citizens of the departing nineteenth century, with the probability of being citizens of the even grander twentieth century.

After dinner the two physicians went to Doctor Wilhelm's cabin, where they sat together discussing the resultant of modern civilisation.

"I very much fear, very much, indeed," said Frederick, "that our world-wide means of communication, which mankind is supposed to own, really own mankind. At least so far, I see no signs that the tremendous working capacity of machines has lessened human labour. Nobody will deny that our modern machine slavery, on so tremendous a scale, is the most imposing slavery that has ever existed. And there is no denying that it is slavery. Has this age of machinery subtracted from the sum of human misery? No, most emphatically, no! Has it enhanced happiness and increased the chances for happiness? No, again."

"That is why every three or four men of culture," said Doctor Wilhelm, "are disciples of Schopenhauer. Modern Buddhism is making rapid strides."

"Yes," said Frederick, "because we are living in a world all the time making a tremendous impression upon itself. As a result, it is getting to be more and more fearfully bored. The man of the intellectual middle class is gaining in prominence, while he is more mediocre than he has been in any previous age. At the same time he is glutted and more blasé. No form of idealism, no sort of genuinely great belief can hold its ground any longer."

"I admit," said Wilhelm, "that the great industrial corporation, civilisation, is parsimonious of everything except human lives and the best that is in the human being. It places no value upon them. It lets them rot. But I think there is one comfort. I think civilisation possesses this one good, that it breaks us away once for all with the worst savageries of the past. No inquisition, for instance, can ever be possible again."

"Are you sure of it?" asked Frederick. "Don't you think it is strange that alongside the greatest achievements of science, alongside Galileo, Kepler, Laplace; alongside the spectrum analysis and the law of the conservation of energy; alongside Kirchoff and Bunsen; alongside steam, gas, electricity, the blindest and most antiquated superstitions still survive, powerful as ever? I am not so certain that backsliding into the most horrible times of the Malleus maleficarum is impossible."

Doctor Wilhelm had rung for a steward, who now entered. Max Pander appeared at the same time.

"Doctor von Kammacher, I feel as if we must have some champagne. Adolph," turning to the steward, "a bottle of Pommery."

"They're making a big hole in the champagne cellar," said Adolph.

"Of course. The people are all celebrating their escape from drowning yesterday and day before yesterday."

Pander had come at the captain's order for the stoker's death certificate. The document was lying ready in the medicine closet. After Pander had left, Wilhelm told Frederick some remarkable incidents of the dead man.

"His name was Zickelmann. There was the beginning of a letter in his pocket. It was something like this: 'Dear mother, I have not seen you for sixteen years. I have forgotten how you look, dear mother. I am not doing well, but I must go to America to see you once again. It is very sad when a man has no relatives in the whole world. Dear mother, I just want to look at you, and I really won't be a burden to you.'"

The champagne appeared. Before long, the first bottle was replaced by the second.

"Don't be surprised if I am immoderate," said Frederick. "My nerves are in need of it to-day. I have to stupefy myself. Perhaps, with the help of this glorious medicine, I shall be able to sleep a few hours."

It was half past ten, and the physicians were still sitting together. The wine naturally produced a greater degree of intimacy between these two men, who were of the same profession and had already become fairly well acquainted with each other. It was very pleasant to Frederick to unbosom himself.

He said he had entered the world with too favourable a preconceived notion. In a spirit of idealism he had refused the military career for which his father had intended him, and had taken up the study of medicine, in the belief that he would thus be of most service to humanity. He had been deceived.

"The genuine gardener works for the garden full of healthy plants; but our work is devoted to a decaying vegetation sprung from diseased germs. That is why I took up the fight against mankind's awfullest enemy, the bacteria. I admit that the dreary, patient, laborious work, which bacteriology requires, did not satisfy me, either. I didn't possess the capacity to petrify, which is absolutely indispensable in an academic man. When I was sixteen years old, I wanted to become a painter. Over the dissecting table, I composed verses. The thing that I should now most like to be is a freelance writer. From all of which you can see," he concluded, laughing ironically, "that I have made rather a mess of my life."

Wilhelm refused to admit it.

"But I have," Frederick declared. "I am a genuine child of the times, and I am not ashamed of it. The greatest intellects of the day are all in a state of inner ferment. Every individual of significance is just as divided against himself as humanity on the whole. I refer, of course, only to the leading European races. I embody the Pope and Luther, William II and Robespierre, Bismarck and Bebel, the spirit of the American millionaire and the enthusiasm for poverty that was the glory of St. Francis of Assisi. I am the maddest progressive of my time and the maddest reactionary. I despise Americanism, and yet I see in the great American world-invasion, the dominion of the exploiter, something similar to one of the biggest works that Hercules performed in the Augean stables."

"Here's to chaos!" cried Wilhelm.

They touched glasses.

"Yes," said Frederick, "but only if it gives birth to a dancing heaven, or, at least, a dancing star."

"Beware of dancing stars," said Wilhelm, laughing and looking at Frederick significantly.

"What can a man do if his blood is on fire with that cursed poison?"

Under the influence of the champagne, the sudden confession seemed as natural to Wilhelm as to Frederick.

"'There once was a rat in a cellar hole,'" Wilhelm quoted.

"Of course, of course," said Frederick, "but what is to be done against it?" Then he turned the conversation to general questions again. "Why should a man keep himself intact when he has lost his ideals? I have made tabula rasa of my past. I have drowned Germany in the ocean. Is Germany really the great, strong, united Empire? Is it not rather the booty over which God and the devil—I was about to say the Kaiser and the Pope—are still wrangling? You will admit that for more than a thousand years, the unifying principle was the imperial principle. People talk of the Thirty Years' War as having disintegrated Germany. I should say it was the thousand years' war, of which the Thirty Years' War was only the worst excess, the worst paroxysm of that plague of religious dissension with which the Germans are inoculated. And without unity, Germany is a very queer structure. Its owners, or its inhabitants, don't possess it, except in a slight degree. And the believer with the tiara at Rome tugs and tugs at it, levying extortion under the threat of destroying the entire structure; until he is actually able to buy it back with the compound interest that has been accumulating. In that case nothing will be left but a heap of ruins. One could shriek and tear one's hair because the German does not see that in his basement there is an awful Bluebeard's chamber. And not for women alone. He has no inkling of what an arsenal of clerical instruments of torture lie there ready for use—clerical, because they lie ready for the infliction of horrible corporal martyrdom in the service of a bloody, fanatical, papistical belief. Woe, when the door to the Bluebeard chamber opens. They are continually picking at the lock. Then we shall witness all the sanguinary horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the degenerate slaughter-house cruelty of an inquisition."

"That's something we won't drink a toast to. Rather let us toast the healthy, cynically outspoken ideal of the American, the exploiter ideal, with its tolerance and levelling down."

"Yes, a thousand times rather," said Frederick.

So they drank a toast to America.

A second-cabin stewardess led in the Russian Jewess. The girl was holding a handkerchief to her nose and mouth. Her nose had been bleeding for an hour without cease.

"Oh," she said, retreating a step from the threshold back to the deck, "I am in the way." But Doctor Wilhelm insisted on her coming in.

It turned out that this was not the real mission on which the stewardess had come to see Doctor Wilhelm. She whispered a few words, unintelligible to the others, into his ear. He excused himself to Frederick, asked him to look after the Jewess, and left the cabin with the stewardess.

"You are a doctor?" asked the Russian Jewess.

"Yes," said Frederick.

Without wasting many words, he made her lie prone on the couch, inserted a tampon in her nose, and used other means to stanch the flow of blood. He had kept the door to the deck open to let the cigarette smoke out and the fresh, healing salt air in. The girl lay quietly on the couch; and Frederick thought it advisable to look through one of Wilhelm's medical books.

"So far as I am concerned, you may smoke," she said after a while, having noticed that Frederick absent-mindedly started to light a cigarette several times and then, recollecting himself, desisted.

"No," he said curtly, "I won't smoke now."

"You might at least offer me a cigarette," she said. "I am bored."

"That's proper," he said. "A patient should be bored."

"Oh, I am not a patient."

"Patientia is the Latin for 'patience,' my dear young lady. You are not a patient in so far as you are very impatient."

"If you let me have a cigarette, then I will say 'Yes, you are right.'"

"I know I am right, and there can be no question of your smoking now."

"But I want to smoke. You are impolite," she said, obstinately kicking up her heel.

Frederick ordered her to be quiet, and she let her foot drop again on the leather upholstery. He looked at her with an intentionally exaggerated expression of sternness.

"I am not your slave, do you understand? Do you think I left Odessa, where there is enough ordering about, to be ordered about by every stranger I meet?" she grumbled. "I am cold. Please shut the door."

"If you want, I will shut the door," said Frederick, getting up to do so with an air of resignation not altogether genuine.

In the morning in the steerage, Frederick and this Deborah had exchanged a glowing look of understanding. Now, although, or perhaps because, the wine was in his veins, he was eager for Doctor Wilhelm's return. His absence seemed to be unduly prolonged. For a time the girl lay silent. Frederick found it necessary to examine the tampon in her nostril. As he was doing so, he noticed tears in her eyes.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "Why are you crying?"

She suddenly began to beat him with her arms and fists, called him a sleek, heartless bourgeois, and wanted to jump up; but she had to succumb to Frederick's superior, gentle strength and return to her reclining posture. Frederick seated himself as before on an upholstered chair opposite the couch.

"My dear child," he said, very gently, "you are behaving queerly, slinging about those honourable epithets. But we won't discuss that. You are nervous. You are excited. You have no blood in your veins, and even if you had a stronger constitution, the condition of your nerves after the hardships of this trip, especially in the steerage, could scarcely be different."

"I'll never travel first class, never!"

"Why not?"

"Because, considering the misery in which the majority of human beings are languishing, it is a mean low thing to do to travel first class. Read Dostoievsky, read Tolstoy, read Kropotkin! We are being chased like animals. We are being persecuted. It doesn't matter where we die."

"It may interest you to know that I have read them all, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky. But don't suppose you are the only persecuted person on earth. I am persecuted, too. We are all persecuted."

"Oh, you are travelling first class and you are not a Jew. I am a Jew. Have you the faintest idea of what it means to be a Jew in Russia?"

"That is why you and I are now travelling to a new world," said Frederick, "to America, the land of liberty."

"Indeed!" she sneered, "I and liberty! I know my fate. Don't you know into what hands I have fallen? I am the victim of vile exploiters!"

The girl cried, and since she was young and of the same delicacy of figure as Ingigerd, only of a very different race, a dark-haired, dark-eyed race, Frederick felt himself perceptibly weakening. His compassion grew; and he was well aware that openly expressed sympathy is the surest approach to love. So he again forced himself into a hard, repellent attitude of opposition.

"Now I am nothing but a physician representing another physician. What does it concern me, and how can I help it, if you have fallen into the hands of exploiters? Besides, all of you intellectual Russians are hysterical—a trait utterly repugnant to me."

She jumped to her feet and wanted to run away. To restrain her he caught first her right, then her left wrist. She looked at him with such an expression of hate and contempt that he could not but be sensitive of the girl's passionate beauty. Her face was of the colour that greensickness imparts. Her features were exquisitely delicate. In contrast, Ingigerd's face, with which Frederick fleetingly compared hers, seemed unrefined, even coarse. Here was the aristocracy of a too highly bred race, somewhat faded, to be sure, but at that moment all the more seductive.

"Ugh! Let me go, let me go, I say!"

"What have I done to you?" Frederick asked. For a moment he was genuinely alarmed, scarcely knowing whether he had not been actually guilty of a wrong against her. He had been drinking champagne and was excited. If someone were to enter now, what would he think of him? Even centuries before, had not Potiphar's wife, from whom Joseph fled, resorted to certain successful slanderous means? "What have I done?" he repeated.

"Nothing," she said, "except what you are in the habit of doing. You have insulted an unprotected girl."

"Are you crazy?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We must wake him up."

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

"I am going to bed now."

"Come to my cabin first for a moment."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Angèle!" he cried. He ran after her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Many will soon be following me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At that moment Frederick heard a strong voice saying:

"Good morning, Doctor von Kammacher."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It may even grow worse," Wilhelm observed.

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

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

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

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

"The musicians are heroes," said Frederick.

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Füllenberg entered. His face was lifeless.

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

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

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

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

Frederick asked for more information about derelicts.

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

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

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

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