Atlantis — Section 16

XLII

The hours passed.

The grey day went down into still greyer twilight.

The ear-splitting tumult of the sea never ceased.

Frederick, like everybody else, had in vain awaited the moment when the engines would be working again, and the helpless ship would resume its course.

Everybody, with the anxiety of despair, watched whether the intervals between the great swells would lengthen or shorten.

Sometimes a superstitious illusion that he was being persecuted would take hold of Frederick.

Particularly awful were the cries of the emigrants penned in the steerage, which at short intervals penetrated above on deck.

They wept and wailed and shrieked to heaven for help.

They were like men driven mad by fear, fury and physical pain.

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

Frederick wondered who would have the phlegm or the courage or the desire to go to dinner.

But Wilhelm cried, "Come, gentlemen," and since Rosa appeared, wet and courageous, to attend to the children, it was out of place for him to remain in the cabin, and there was nothing for him to do but join Doctor Wilhelm and Hahlström. The cockatoo was screeching and Ella was crying.

The child was refractory.

Ingigerd was trying to console her, while Rosa reprimanded her rather energetically.

"Would you like me to stay near here?"

Frederick asked before leaving.

"It would mean a great deal to me if you would let me be entirely at your disposal, Miss Ingigerd."

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

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

Now an unexpected change set in, which allayed everybody's excitement and went through Frederick's muscles and nerves like a soothing stream.

The walls and floors of the _Roland_ began to quiver faintly, a sign that her heart and pulse were beating again.

It was the rhythm of its strength, the rhythm of its race to its goal.

Ingigerd shouted with joy, like a child, and Frederick set his teeth.

Renewed life, renewed prospects and hopes, the reassumption of system, the relaxation of his nerves made him so weak that the tears almost started to his eyes.

Choking down his emotion, he stepped out on deck.

Here the scene had changed.

Blithely, in all its might, the _Roland_ was leaping forward again into the roaring darkness.

That monstrous, seething witch's cauldron of the boiling waters was now welcome to him.

Again the _Roland_ was tearing breaches in dark mountains, was rising to mountain heights, and madly plunging into deep valleys; during which, for many seconds at a time, the screw would whirl wildly in the turbulent air.

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

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

"Why?"

said Rinck phlegmatically.

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

"Why?"

said Mr. Rinck again.

In the gangways below, even though the ship was pitching, the atmosphere was fairly pleasant and lively.

Everybody seemed to have forgotten his fear.

The passengers, cracking jokes and clinging to the nearest stationary thing, reeled and stumbled into the dining-room.

The rattle of china near the kitchen was deafening, especially when, as frequently happened, some of the plates broke.

Frederick's clothes were pretty well soaked, and he mustered up the courage to go to his cabin to dress.

Adolph, his steward, came to help him, and told Frederick of a panic that had broken out in the steerage when the engines stopped.

Some of the women with their babies on their arms had wanted to jump right into the water.

It was with difficulty that the other emigrants had restrained them.

One of the stewards and a sailor had clutched a Polish woman by her feet just as she was taking the downward plunge.

"You can't blame these people for acting like cowards in this situation," said Frederick.

"It would be strange if they didn't. Who will insist that he can stand upright when the ground beneath his feet is giving away?

If a man were to say so, either he would be lying, or his lack of feeling would be so great as to degrade him below an animal."

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

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

"With you it is different," he said.

"You are upheld, and at the same time rewarded, by the feeling that you are doing your duty.

While we passengers are living in terror, the cooks have been boiling soup, cleaning fish, preparing vegetables, roasting and carving, larding venison and so on."

The steward laughed!

"But I assure you, at times it is easier to roast a roast than to eat it."

And Frederick continued in a solemn, but for that very reason, roguish manner to philosophise on courage and cowardice.

XLIII

Dinner began, and, though the weather had by no means improved, a comparatively large number of passengers had gathered in the dining-room.

Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, with his white hair curled and arranged by the barber, if not in a braid at the back of his head, yet like a wig of the rococo period, stood, as usual, in majestic pose, before the false mantelpiece between the two entrance doors.

It was the place from which he could best supervise the waiters and keep his eye on the whole dining-room.

The band was playing _Le Père la Victoire_ by Ganne.

This was followed by Gillet's _Loin du Bal_.

At Suppé's overture from _Banditenstreiche_, the eternal skat players came tramping into the saloon, having delayed, as usual, to finish their game.

At all the tables much wine was being drunk, because it strengthened one's courage and dulled one's nerves.

The passengers toasted the _Roland_.

It amused them.

They were all conscious of the pleasant rhythm of the great engine, to which no music in the world was comparable.

Over Vollstedt's waltz, _Lustige Brüder_, the company with a sense of relief was still discussing the danger they had safely escaped.

"We hoisted distress signals."

"Rockets were shot off."

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

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

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

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

Suddenly the port-holes were illuminated from outside.

Everybody, with an "Oh!"

of astonishment, let his knife and fork fall and jumped up from his seat.

"A ship!"

"A steamer!"

all exclaimed, and crowded on deck.

There, in overawing majesty, in the gleam of its thousand lights, one of the mightiest ocean liners of the time was rolling and pounding at a distance of not more than fifty yards.

"The _Prince Bismarck_, the _Prince Bismarck_!"

the people cried, having heard the name from the officers and crew, who had recognised the vessel.

"Hurrah!"

went up the full-throated cry.

"Hurrah!"

Frederick shouted, and so did Wilhelm and so did Professor Toussaint.

Everybody who could shouted "Hurrah!"

--Ingigerd and the woman physician and the woman artist.

They all waved their napkins or handkerchiefs.

The same shout of joy went up from the steerage, and by way of greeting the two vessels let their steam whistles thunder.

They could see the passengers on the various decks of the _Prince Bismarck_ waving to them, and, in spite of the noise of the tempest, could hear their faint hurrah.

The _Prince Bismarck_, a twin-screw steamer, one of the first models of its kind, had just made its record-breaking trip, in which it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in six days, eleven hours, and twenty-four minutes.

About two thousand people were now making the trip from New York to Europe.

Two thousand people!

That means twice as many as can fill a Berlin theatre from the orchestra to the top gallery.

The _Roland_ and the _Bismarck_ exchanged lively flag signals.

Yet the whole grandiose vision, from the moment of its appearance to its disappearance, lasted only three minutes.

In that time the seething ocean was flooded with light.

It was not until nothing remained of the _Bismarck_ but a dancing mist of light that its band came on deck and played.

On the _Roland_ they caught two or three trembling, fading measures of the national hymn, _Heil dir im Siegerkranz_.

Within a few moments the _Roland_ was again alone on the ocean, in the night, the tempest, and the snowstorm.

With twice as much fire, the band now played a quadrille by Karl, _Festklänge_, and a galop by Kiesler, _Jahrmarktskandal_; and with twice as much appetite and twice as much liveliness the passengers seated themselves at dinner again.

"Fairylike!"

they cried.

"Glorious!"

"Tremendous!"

"Colossal!"

--this last a favourite expression of the Germans.

Even Frederick had a sense of pride and tranquillisation.

He felt a vital breath of that atmosphere which is no less necessary to the mind of the modern man than air is to his lungs.

"No matter how much we resist the thought," he said to Wilhelm, "and no matter how much I railed yesterday evening against modern culture, a sight like that must impress a man.

It must go to the very marrow of his bones.

It is simply absurd that such a marvellous product of secret natural forces, joined together by man's brains and hands, such a creation over creation, such a miracle has become even possible."

They touched glasses.

The sound of clinking glasses could be heard all over the room.

"And what courage, what boldness has been built into that great living organism, what a degree of fearlessness in opposing those natural forces which man has been standing in awe of for thousands of years!

What an audacious world of genius, from its keel to the top of its mast, from its bowsprit to its screw!"

"And all this," responded Wilhelm, "has been attained in scarcely a hundred years.

So it signifies only the beginning of a development.

Object as much as you will, science, or rather technical progress, is eternal revolution and the only genuine reform of human conditions.

Nothing can hinder this development that has begun.

It is constant, eternal progress, yes, progress itself."

"It is the human intellect," said Frederick, "which throughout the centuries has been lying passive and has suddenly turned active.

Undoubtedly man's brains and, at the same time, social industry have entered a new phase."

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

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

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

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

At the skat table, the players were sitting, smoking, drinking whisky and coffee, and tossing the cards on the table.

Everything else seemed to be a matter of indifference to them.

Frederick ordered wine and continued to goad his mind into activity.

His head ached.

He could scarcely hold it upright on his aching neck.

His eyelids ached with weariness; but when they drooped, his eyes seemed to radiate a painful light shining from within.

Every nerve, every muscle, every cell in him was alert.

He could not hope for sleep.

How weeks in his life, months, years had passed as in the twinkling of an eye!

And this evening only three and a half days had elapsed since he boarded the _Roland_ at Southampton, a period with the content of years, in which seconds were eternities.

Its beginning lay in the remote distance, at the conclusion of a life lived long before, on an earth from which he had parted long before.

"You're tired, Doctor von Kammacher," said Wilhelm.

"So I won't invite you to the stoker's funeral on the after-deck."

"Oh, I'll come," said Frederick.

He was obsessed by a stinging rage not to spare himself anything, but to taste to the dregs even the bitterest impressions of this detached, jogged and jolted fragment of a human world.

XLIV

The physicians arrived when they were sewing the stoker, Zickelmann, into sail-cloth.

The bare cabin was not very brilliantly lighted by a single electric bulb.

Frederick recalled his dream--how the dead stoker had been standing under the vines with the cords in his hand and had then led Peter Schmidt and himself to the Toilers of the Light.

A great change had taken place in his appearance.

His face was no longer of flesh, but seemed to be chiselled out of yellow wax, to which his hair, his eyebrows and beard were pasted.

A faint, cunning smile seemed to be curving his mouth; and when Frederick with odd interest and curiosity scrutinised him closely, it seemed to him he was saying, "_Legno santo!

_ Toilers of the Light!"

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

"Will such a chrysalis ever really turn into a butterfly?"

Frederick wondered.

The procedure, a piece of reeling, staggering acrobatics, was less gruesome than ridiculous.

Yet, though this long package might be only the mortal shell of an immortal soul, one had a sense of infinite sadness in entrusting it to the fearful solitudes of the ocean.

Since in the stormy weather it was no easy matter to throw the corpse overboard and since it was impossible to conduct ceremonies on a rolling deck constantly washed by the waves, the purser asked the few persons present--Captain von Kessel could not leave the bridge--to say a silent prayer for the soul of the dead man.

They did so, and four of the stoker's mates, staggering, stopping, lurching and panting, carried the long package on deck to the railing, where at the word of command they let it slide into the sea.

When Doctor Wilhelm bade Frederick good-night, he added: "You ought to try to go to sleep."

They parted, and Frederick hunted for a sheltered spot on deck, where he could spend the night.

He wanted to look the wind and weather straight in the face, there in the glacial air, in the gloom under the pale sheen of the arc-lights fastened to the mast.

He shuddered at the thought of a night in the oppressive confines of his cabin, with the closed port-hole and the hot, stale air.

But that alone was not the reason which kept him chained to the deck.

It was the urge, in case of danger, to be near Ingigerd Hahlström. And when he seated himself near the smoke-stack, with his back against the heated wall, his hat drawn low over his face, his chin in his coat collar, he suddenly laughed to himself bitterly.

It was in the same position and on the selfsame spot that he had found Achleitner the night before.

There was a rushing in Frederick's ears.

He observed the huge arcs that the lights on the mast described.

He observed the regular onslaught of the waves, and above the seething and foaming of the water, he heard the miauing of the wind in the rigging, a wicked obstinate miauing, accompanied by the sudden spitting and leaping of a tiger.

Then the sounds seemed to Frederick to be more like the pitiful whimpering of strayed children, a troop of children whom he could now distinctly discern weeping over the bier of the dead stoker.

And there were the Toilers of the Light again.

He immediately snatched for one to carry it to Ingigerd Hahlström in her cabin; but Ingigerd was dressing for her famous dance.

The great spider was already hanging on the flower, weaving the cobweb in which Mara was later to entangle herself.

Frederick asked for a broom.

He wanted to prevent the dance by sweeping the spider away.

A broom came, but in the form of a serving man, who was carrying water and pouring it out.

Another man followed and a third and a fourth, until everything was flooded with rushing waters.

Frederick awoke from a dream in which he was learning sorcery.

The momentous word that chains the floods was still on his lips.

The waves rushed.

He fell asleep again.

Now it was the rushing of a stream at his feet.

The sun was shining.

It was a clear morning.

From the other shore came his wife, young, beautiful, in a dress of flowered goods, rowing her skiff.

Her full, gentle figure had the charm of the vestal virgin and the wife.

From woods nearby, Ingigerd appeared in the delicacy and the adornment of her light hair and naked body.

The sunny landscape, of which her pure nudity was a part, seemed to belong to the time before Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise.

Frederick took his wife's hand--she was smiling on him graciously--took Ingigerd Hahlström's hand--she seemed to be gentle and pure and obedient--and joined them.

He said to Ingigerd: "And thou shalt walk in brightness;

I'll purge thee clean of all thy dross."

But the heavens darkened, the woods blackened, and the light of a ghostly moon rose over the trees, rushing fearfully like great waters.

Frederick ran along the edge of gloomy fields, when suddenly the cry "Moira!

Moira!"

resounded, and a piece of the darkness severed itself from the edge of the woods and soared heavily, as if borne by mighty black pinions.

It was a gigantic bird, crying, "Moira, Moira!"

Frederick fled.

He was struck by hideous fear, as if the fearful roc were after him.

"Moira, Moira!"

He drew his penknife to defend himself.

He awoke to find himself lying undressed in his berth.

Someone had discovered him, as he had discovered Achleitner the night before, and had led him down to his cabin.

But the cry "Moira!"

which reminded him of the Moeræ, the ancient goddesses of fate, still rang fearfully in his ears.