Atlantis — Section 18

XLVIII

A moment later he was on deck, over the railing, and in the boat.

The men wanted to put off.

Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the tiller.

He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared.

But now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the railing.

"Wilke!

Wilke!"

he shouted.

"Jump into the boat!"

"Right away, right away," Wilke answered several times.

Then he did something that Frederick tried to scold him out of doing, because it seemed so senseless and useless to everybody in the boat.

He had discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be struggling desperately for their lives.

The boat did not wait for him.

Under the third mate's command, the sailors began to row.

The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than thirty yards from the _Roland's_ side.

Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict, had bored the flank of the _Roland_, making a great gash near the engine-room.

Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold.

Frederick thought he could hear its greedy gulping.

At the sight, for all the horror about him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior _Roland_, and with difficulty restrained an outcry.

The fog closed in and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.

When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some incomprehensible way turned.

The twenty persons in the boat looked down from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level with the water.

They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in there, swarming like ants.

Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception.

All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their way.

Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots.

Some of the life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark, swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape dropped off and fell into the sea.

Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view.

But a sound, which Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the metallic clanging of the hurricane.

For several seconds Frederick's thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in their passage.

But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached his ears through the fog.

It was the outcry of those human beings, who were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conception, that no human crime, he felt, could be great enough to justify such atonement.

He distinctly felt how, through the excess of the hideous impression, the bridge carrying the message of his senses to his innermost soul snapped.

But suddenly the fever of the visible death struggle of eight or nine hundred innocent men after all did penetrate to his innermost soul, and wrung a cry from him, in which the whole boat load joined as by command.

In that cry were fear, anguish, fury, protest, supplication, horror, wailing, cursing, and despair.

And the horror was increased by the consciousness that there was no merciful ear to listen, but only a deaf heaven.

Wherever Frederick turned his eyes, he saw death.

Indifferently the bottle-green, mountainous waves came rolling.

In their march there was a murderous regularity, with which nothing interfered and which recognised no obstacles.

He closed his eyes ready to die.

Several times he felt for his parents' letters in his breast pocket, as if he needed them for passports to the land of darkness, where he was soon going.

He dared not open his eyes again, because he could no longer bear to see the convulsions of the women in the boat or the hideous massacre on the stern of the _Roland_.

The sea raged.

It was icy cold.

The water froze on the edge of the boat.

Rosa, the maid, was the only one that constantly bestirred herself to help others, the children, Mrs. Liebling, Ingigerd, and Arthur Stoss.

Bulke and she vied with each other in bailing out the water in which Stoss and Mrs. Liebling were lying and which reached to the knees of the others.

What was in the meantime happening on the deck of the _Roland_, so far as Frederick caught momentary glimpses of it, did not fit in with his conception of human nature.

The things he thought he saw in detail had nothing in common with those civilised, decorous ladies and gentlemen whom he had seen in the dining-room and on deck, promenading, conversing, smiling, exchanging greetings, and daintily dissecting the fish on their plates with forks.

He could have sworn that he distinguished the white figure of a cook cutting his way, with a long knife, through the honourable person of a first-class passenger for whom he had cooked.

Frederick was convinced he saw a stoker, a black fellow, strike a woman who was clinging to him--perhaps she was the beautiful Canadian--pick her up and throw her overboard.

Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised, were still heroically executing orders.

But they got entangled in fighting groups.

One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting, helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and disappeared.

"Father!

My father!"

Ingigerd suddenly cried.

It was only a faint breath blown away by the raging elements.

She pointed, and Frederick looked where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes.

Again the fog lifted and opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in all its length.

Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white handkerchief.

It was impossible to tell who it was.

But a man whom Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a spy-glass was Hans Füllenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.

The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone with the electric lights inside.

Now and then a stifled shot could be heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light.

But soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished.

As if the sea in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it swept over the deck from the other side.

That instant the waters on the near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.

Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the _Roland_ again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it.

A

hideous, bestial conflict began.

Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it.

Although it went on under his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance.

He struck at something.

It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the deep, shrieking in a voice not human.

Suddenly, pulled backwards by the merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared.

Frederick saw how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs. Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat.

The sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.

None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.

The servant, Bulke, took command.

For the sake of something to do and to delay the inevitable capsizing, Frederick and Wilhelm each seized an oar and rowed with the sailors.

Minutes passed.

The fog lifted.

Many eternally moving mountains and valleys of water had rolled between the little boat and the wreck.

Of the _Roland_, the mighty fast mail steamer of the North German Steamship Company, nothing was to be seen.

XLIX

Late in the afternoon of the same day, the captain of a sturdy little trading vessel from Hamburg sighted a boat drifting on the long, high swells.

The weather was clear, and the captain made certain that the people in the boat were signalling with handkerchiefs.

Within half an hour, the shipwrecked passengers of the _Roland_ were with great difficulty hoisted on board the trader, one at a time.

There were fifteen persons in all, three sailors and a cabin-boy, with the well-known name of the _Roland_ on their caps, two ladies, a woman evidently from the steerage, a maid, a long-haired man of about thirty in a velvet jacket, an armless man, the man who had been steering, two other men, and two children, a boy and a girl.

The boy was dead.

The hardships and terrors to which the delicate child had succumbed had had almost equally dire effects upon the others.

With the exception of the maid Rosa, they looked as if they had been drowned beyond hope of resuscitation.

A very wet man--it was Frederick--attempted to drag an unconscious wet young woman up the gangway-ladder, but his strength failed him, and the sailors of the trader had to catch him as he tottered, take the young woman from his arms, and help him struggle up the ladder on deck, like a man whose every bone and muscle is racked by rheumatism.

Attempting to speak, he could produce only an asthmatic, sibilant wheeze.

On deck, he groaned, burst into a senseless, cackling laugh, and spread out his purple, frozen hands.

His lips, too, were purple, and his sunken eyes glowed feverishly from a face crusted with dirt and brine.

He seemed to want nothing so much as to be dried, warmed and cleaned.

He was followed by Rosa.

Upon laying an unconscious little girl in the arms of the first mate, she turned back to descend to the boat again, but found the way barred by Bulke and one of the sailors of the trader, hauling up the armless actor, Arthur Stoss.

He was dripping wet, his eyes were staring blankly, his nose was running, and his eyelids were red and inflamed, while the tip of his nose was waxen white.

After several vain attempts to produce a sound through his chattering teeth, he finally succeeded in framing "Rum!

Hot rum!"

A mutual inclination seemed to make Bulke and Rosa pull together in their rescue work like two old mates.

Fairly raining water, they descended again for Mrs. Liebling, who was lying prone in the bottom of the boat in a serious condition.

"She's dead, and the boy is dead," said the sailors of the trader, and wanted first to carry up the other woman, the steerage passenger, who showed she was still alive by a rattle in her throat, fearful to hear.

Rosa burst into a howl and swore Mrs. Liebling was not dead.

"She's blue," the sailors declared.

"She swallowed too much water."

But Rosa would not desist, and the sailors were compelled to carry Mrs. Liebling up first.

As they were lifting on deck the unconscious woman from the steerage, still emitting the fearful rattle, one of the _Roland_ sailors, whose feet were frozen and who, during the whole long, dreadful drifting about on the ocean had not uttered a sound, suddenly began to bellow in pain.

"Shut up!"

said his mates.

"Don't carry on like an old woman."

He was the next to be lifted on board, merely whimpering now in ineffable agony.

After him came the man in the velvet jacket, who was maundering, Doctor Wilhelm, Max Pander, and the other two sailors.

Lastly the little corpse of Siegfried Liebling was lifted from the boat.

When the absurdly dressed man with long hair reached deck, he performed the drollest antics.

For a moment he would stand upright, chest out, like a recruit, the next instant bow profoundly, or take aim, as if hunting;

and all the time he kept bawling: "I'm an artist.

I paid for my cabin.

I am well known in Germany"--striking a conscious attitude--"I am Jacob Fleischmann.

I am a painter, from Fürth."

Every now and then he would writhe pitifully and vomit salt water.

The water dripping from his clothes formed a pool where he stood.

Doctor Wilhelm had completely lost the faculty of speech.

All he could do was to sneeze incessantly.

In the meantime, the steward of the vessel brought Frederick hot tea, and one of the sailors, who acted as barber and nurse on the vessel, attempted to restore Mrs. Liebling to life.

Within less than two minutes, Frederick felt sufficiently revived to meet the demands of the occasion and assist the sailor-nurse with his Good Samaritan work.

After swallowing several glasses of brandy, Doctor Wilhelm with the help of the chief engineer, Mr. Wendler, attempted to revive Siegfried Liebling, though with small hope of success.

Mrs. Liebling, in no wise differing from a corpse, had been laid on the long mahogany table in what would have been the dining-room, had the vessel been carrying passengers.

Ugly, dark, purplish patches disfigured the forehead, cheeks, and throat of the woman, who was still young and who, before the shipwreck, had been beautiful.

On baring her body, they found that it, too, was marked, though less closely, with the same gangrenous spots, somewhat duller in colour.

Her body was swollen.

Death might have resulted from choking in a moment when she fell into a faint unobserved by any of her companions.

Toward the last, there had been several feet of water in the boat, and Rosa had for some time been entirely occupied with the dying boy.

When Frederick and the sailor-nurse laid Mrs. Liebling's body face downward on the table, water flowed from her nose and mouth.

Her heart was no longer beating, and she gave no sign of life.

As Frederick assumed, what had happened was, that she had sunk unconscious to the bottom of the boat and had lain for some time under water.

He opened her mouth, forced her gold-filled teeth apart, put her tongue in the right position, and removed mucus, which had gathered at the opening of the air-passages.

While the ship's cook rubbed her body with hot cloths, Frederick tried to induce artificial respiration by raising and lowering her arms and legs like a pump-handle.

The mahogany table took up the larger part of the low, creaking saloon, the only one the vessel possessed.

It was on the quarter-deck and was lighted from above.

The two walls running the length of the room were formed of the mahogany doors of the twelve staterooms, six on each side.

In the twinkling of an eye the deserted saloon was converted into a medical laboratory.

A common sailor had peeled Ingigerd Hahlström out of her clothes, and without circumstance had laid her delicate body, shining like mother-of-pearl, on a couch against the wall taking up the full width of the room.

At Frederick's instruction, he rubbed her body vigorously with woollen cloths.

Rosa was doing the same for Ella Liebling, who was the first to be put to bed.

The steward was working away in a glow of zeal to get each of the dozen beds freshly spread, and as soon as the second one was ready, Ingigerd was laid between the warmed covers.

Thanks to his faithful valet, Arthur Stoss, his teeth still chattering, was the next to be ready for bed.

Jacob Fleischmann gave his rescuers much trouble.

When a sailor spoke to him kindly and attempted to undress him, he struck about wildly, and shouted in a rage, "I'm an artist!"

The steward and Bulke had to hold him fast and use main force in putting him to bed.

Doctor Wilhelm abandoned his vain efforts to revive Siegfried Liebling and came with his leather case of drugs, which he had managed to save, just in time to give the painter an injection of morphine.

The sailor whose agony of pain had overcome him before he was lifted on deck had such badly swollen, frostbitten feet that his boots had to be cut off bit by bit.

He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming, and merely uttered low groans until they laid him in bed; when he called for chewing tobacco.

The woman from the steerage clad in rags was also put to bed.

All she could tell was that she was bound for Chicago with her sister, her four children, her husband, and her mother.

Nothing of what had in the meantime befallen her seemed to have penetrated, or remained in, her consciousness.

The whole while Frederick, his upper body bared, with only the barber to help him, kept working uninterruptedly over Mrs. Liebling.

It was good for him, because it made him perspire.

Finally, however, his strength gave out, and Doctor Wilhelm came to his relief.

He tottered into the nearest cabin, the door of which stood open, and fell face downward into the unmade bed, utterly exhausted.