Atlantis — Section 10
XXIII
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.
XXIV
"What is to become of me?"
Frederick questioned himself.
He scarcely heard Hans Füllenberg's jolly shout of greeting as the young man reeled past.
Hans Füllenberg did not fail to observe whose door it was that Frederick von Kammacher had just closed behind him, nor that, as he stood there with the knob still in his hand, he seemed to be in a state of indecision and absorption.
The siren was sending up its deafening roar.
It was that wild, fearful, ascending cry, as if torn from the breast of a monster bull, which he had first heard on the tender.
There was something menacing in it, and at the same time something of an anxious warning.
Frederick never heard it without applying menace and warning to himself.
Likewise, the driving mist seemed to be a reflection of his soul; or his soul a reflection of the driving mist and also of the vessel, as it struggled onward into the unknown, unseeing and unseen.
He stepped over to the railing and looked straight down the ship's side.
There he could tell with what tremendous rapidity the _Roland_ was cleaving the water.
"Isn't man's courage utter madness?"
he thought.
Could any one, from captain to the lowest sailor, prevent the propeller-shaft from snapping at any moment?
The screw was constantly rising and buzzing in the air.
Who could sight a vessel in time to prevent the collision that would inevitably smash in the thin walls of the great hollow body?
Who could hope to avoid one of the many derelicts drifting in the fog almost submerged?
What would happen if the might of the waves were to hurl that great lumped mass of wood and iron against the _Roland's_ side?
What would happen if the engines were to break down?
If a boiler were to prove unequal to the uninterrupted strain put upon it?
Then, too, icebergs were met with in those waters.
And suppose the storm were to grow worse.
The things that European civilisation has accomplished are tremendous.
The trouble is, the object to which the means are applied is not worthy of the means.
The how is great.
The wherefore receives only a stammering reply.
So much is certain, that the life of the average man to-day is fuller of adventure and heroism than the life of a bold adventurer a hundred and fifty years ago.
Frederick went to the smoking-room on deck.
He found the card players, Doctor Wilhelm, Arthur Stoss, Professor Toussaint and some more gentlemen gathered over their afternoon coffee.
"Hullo!"
they shouted when he appeared in the doorway.
The room smelled strong of coffee and the pungent odour of tobacco.
In the instant that Frederick held the door open, the wreaths of mist and heavy tobacco smoke met.
"What's the matter, gentlemen?"
Frederick asked.
"Did you operate on the dancer," someone cried, "to remove that mole two inches from her backbone right over her left hip?"
Frederick turned pale, and said nothing.
Had he uttered a single word, the result might have been a scandal, perhaps even a duel, out there on the high seas.
He seated himself beside Doctor Wilhelm and acted as if the shout of greeting and the unknown man's question had not referred to him.
Doctor Wilhelm proposed a game of chess.
Frederick accepted, and while playing, he had time to choke down his humiliation and resentment.
He glanced about furtively to find the speaker.
"There are some people, Doctor von Kammacher," Arthur Stoss said in a raised voice, "who leave their decency in Europe when they travel to America, though that does not reduce the price of the passage."
The man at whom the remark was aimed left it unanswered.
"But, Mr. Stoss," said an elderly man from Hamburg, whose conscience in regard to the offence thrust upon Frederick was evidently clear, "we're not in a ladies' parlour, and we needn't take jokes amiss."
"I am not in favour of jokes," said Stoss, "that are made at the expense of persons who are near at hand, but not present, especially when a lady is concerned.
I am still less in favour of them when they are coarse and indecent."
"Oh, Mr. Stoss," rejoined the man from Hamburg, "everything in its place.
I have nothing against sermons, but we're having bad weather here on the ocean and this room is not a church."
"Besides, nobody mentioned names," another man said.
Here the American jackanapes joined in the cross talk.
"When Mr. Stoss is in New York," he said drily, "he will hold services every night at Webster and Forster's." "Some American youngsters are celebrated for their cheek," Stoss countered.
"Directly after the celebrated Barrison sisters' appearance, after the song 'Linger Longer Loo,' Mr. Stoss will raise his hands to heaven and beg the audience to pray."
The American spoke without moving a muscle of his face.
He had the last word.
The next instant the slim young fellow was outside the door.
Arthur Stoss had the pleasure of knowing he was a fool for his pains.
But, like Frederick, he paid no attention to the thrust, or to the laughter it provoked.
"People are very much mistaken," he said, turning to Professor Toussaint, who was sitting beside him and to whom he had been introduced a few minutes before, "if they suppose that morality among vaudeville performers is laxer than among any other set of persons.
It's an absolutely false assumption.
A performer above the average, who must always be at the very height of his powers, has to practise moderation to the point of abstinence if he wants to remain on top.
Does anybody suppose that a loose life is compatible with those startlingly bold feats that an acrobat does every day and tries to improve upon every day?
Damn it!
It's something to make your ordinary mortal marvel at.
Why, to do any one of the many things we do, we have to practise asceticism and chastity, and patiently peg away day after day at hard, dangerous work.
Your plain business man, who never omits his glass of beer, has no idea what it is like."
He continued to sing the praises of vaudeville actors.
"May I ask what your specialty is, Mr. Stoss?"
asked Hans Füllenberg.
"A very easy specialty, once you know how.
But if it should ever come to a duel between you and me, young man, you'd have to choose what eye or ear or tooth you'd be ready to part with."
"He's as good a shot as Carver," someone said.
"He can take the middle right out of an ace three or four times in succession."
"Just like any other display of skill.
But don't for a moment suppose, gentlemen, that even if a man has arms and doesn't have to hold the gun with his feet and pull the trigger with his toes, that he learns how to do it without sweating and self-denial and endless patience."
"Somebody said you play the violin like Sarasate," said Hans Füllenberg.
"Not exactly.
Nor need I, considering the way I was born.
But I am fond of music and my audiences go wild over my playing."
Captain von Kessel entered.
He was received with a general "Ah!"
Through the door burst a great wave of sunlight.
"The barometer is rising, gentlemen."
The fog had lifted, and now the men in the smoking-room realised that the _Roland_ was rocking no more than easily and comfortably and was making its way with majestic speed.
This acted like a charm.
The captain left the door open and had Pander hook it back.
A man, who had been lying asleep in a corner--in that half sleep which is the mildest symptom of seasickness--rose to a sitting posture and rubbed his eyes.
Hans Füllenberg and a number of other men hastened out on deck.
Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, who had lost the game, followed.
