Atlantis — Section 12

XXVIII

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.

XXIX

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.

XXX

"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.