Atlantis — Section 5

"You here, Doctor von Kammacher?

I can scarcely trust my eyes."

At the bottom of the companionway Frederick felt Hahlström tackle him, just as he was about to mount to deck.

"Why, Mr. Hahlström, what a peculiar coincidence!

It's as if the whole of Berlin had agreed to emigrate to America!"

Frederick exclaimed, simulating surprise with somewhat forced liveliness.

"May I present Mr. Achleitner?

Mr. Achleitner is an architect from Vienna."

The man with the piercing eyes smiled with an air of interest, holding fast to the brass balustrade to keep from being hurled against the wall.

The door of a rather gloomy saloon opened on the first landing.

It bore the misleading sign "smoking-room," misleading because the smokers never used it, far preferring the cosey little saloon on deck.

A brown upholstered bench ran around the brown, wainscoted walls.

Kneeling on the bench one could look out through three or four port-holes upon the seething and boiling of the waves.

The entire floor space between the benches was taken up by a table finished in a dark stain.

"This room is a horrid hole," said Hahlström. "It positively makes me creepy."

A loud, trumpet-like, laughing voice called out from inside the room: "I say, Hahlström, if this sort of weather holds out, neither your daughter nor I will keep the first day of our engagement with Webster and Forster.

We're not even making eight knots.

Perhaps I'll be able to manage.

A big dose of salt water doesn't hurt me.

To-day is the twenty-fifth.

If we reach Hoboken at eight o'clock the evening of the first of February, I can appear for my act in perfect serenity at nine o'clock; but that frail blossom of yours can't. She will certainly need a few days to recover from the hardships of this trip."

The three men entered the smoking-room.

Frederick had already recognised the voice as belonging to the man without arms, who, he learned later, from Hahlström, was a world-renowned celebrity.

For more than ten years the bill-boards of every great city in the world had been displaying simply his name, Arthur Stoss, which alone sufficed to draw throngs to the theatres.

His special art consisted in doing with his feet whatever other people do with their hands.

The first sight of him, of course, was repellent; but in the smoking-room on deck Frederick had got over his first repulsion and had become interested in his personality.

Yet the situation in which he now beheld him was so novel, so remarkable, almost to the point of improbability, that he had difficulty in concealing his amazement.

Arthur Stoss was eating lunch.

Since this room was so little used and since a man forced to handle his knife and fork with his feet could not be permitted to eat in the public dining-room, they served Arthur Stoss with his meals here.

To the three onlookers it had the value of an artistic performance to see how the actor managed to manipulate his instruments with his clean, bare toes--and that despite the pitching of the vessel--meanwhile, in the best of humour, uttering the wittiest remarks as bite after bite disappeared down his throat.

He began to banter Hahlström and Achleitner, sometimes in rather caustic fashion, while exchanging glances with Frederick, as if he thought vastly more of him than of the other two men, who soon withdrew from his attacks to go on deck.

"My name is Stoss."

"Mine, Von Kammacher."

"It's very good of you to keep me company.

That Hahlström and his henchman are disgusting.

Though I have been an actor for twenty years, I can't stand the sight of such weedy weaklings, who don't do anything themselves and exploit their daughters.

They have the effect of an emetic on me.

For all that, he plays the great man.

He has no talent, so he is going to boil soup from his daughter's bones.

Yet he goes about nose up in the air.

If he sees a dollar in the dirt and somebody of distinction is looking, he will let it lie.

He won't pick it up.

There is no denying he has an attractive appearance.

He has the stuff in him for a very clever, fashionable swindler.

But he would rather take it easy and live off his daughter and his daughter's admirers.

It's astonishing how many people are willing to make asses of themselves.

There's that Achleitner--look at the condescension with which Hahlström treats him and the lofty way Hahlström plays the rôle of benefactor!

He used to be a riding-master.

Then he got mixed up in some quack cure, a combination of Swedish gymnastics and hydrotherapeutics, and his wife left him, a fine, hard-working woman, now doing splendidly as head of a department at Worth's in Paris."

Frederick felt drawn up-stairs to Hahlström. The man's past as Stoss described it was at that moment a matter of indifference to him.

But Stoss's remark about the asses some people are willing to make of themselves sent a fleeting red to his face.

Arthur Stoss grew more and more communicative.

He sat like an ape, a resemblance impossible to avoid when a man uses his feet instead of his hands.

When he had finished his meal, he stuck a cigar in his mouth, like any other gentleman.

In him the likeness to an ape was accentuated by the breadth and flatness of his nose and the formation of his heavy jaws.

He looked like a fair-skinned orang-outang.

However, his high, broad forehead gave him the mark of the human intellect.

He had no beard, that is, he had never in his life, probably, had to remove a hair from his parchmenty, freckled, yellow skin.

His cheek bones were prominent, and his head unusually large.

Though his general appearance made a most energetic, by no means effeminate impression, there still was something eunuch-like about it, the high pitch of his voice adding to this impression.

While casting about for an opportunity to escape the monster's spell, Frederick was nevertheless deeply interested in him from a medical and anthropological standpoint.

The man, without doubt, was an extremely instructive specimen of abnormality.

His facies was that of an intermediate sexual stage.

"People like Hahlström," he continued, "are actually not worthy of the healthy limbs with which God endowed them.

Of course, even if one has a figure like a statue by Myron, it is awkward if there is too little up here"--he tapped his forehead.

"That is what is the trouble with Hahlström. There is too little up here.

Look at me.

I don't say everybody, but at least nine out of ten, in my position would have succumbed as a child.

Instead of that, I have a wife, I own a villa in the Kahlenberg Mountains, I support three children of my step-brother and an older sister of my wife, who was a singer and lost her voice.

I am absolutely independent.

I remain on the stage because I want to bring my wealth up to a certain point.

If the _Roland_ were to sink to-day, I could go down with perfect equanimity.

I have done my work.

I have invested my money at a high rate of interest.

My wife, my wife's sister, and my step-brother's children are all provided for."

The actor's attendant appeared, to help his master to his cabin for his afternoon nap.

"My days are mapped out like a time-table," Stoss explained.

"My attendant here, Bulke, served his four years in the German navy.

With all the ocean crossings I have to make, I couldn't get along with a man who wasn't used to the water.

I need a perfect water rat."

X

A little spell of dizziness came over Frederick when he went to his cabin to fetch his heavy overcoat.

On deck it was very quiet as compared with the morning.

Hahlström was nowhere to be seen, and Frederick seated himself on a bench near the entrance to the main companionway.

With his collar turned up and his hat drawn over his forehead, he succumbed to the state of drowsiness characteristic of sea trips, in which, despite the heaviness of one's eyelids, one feels and perceives with a restless lucidity of the inner vision.

Images chase through one's mind, a kaleidoscopic stream, shifting incessantly, going and coming, and finally reducing the soul to a state of torture.

The sybaritic meal with its clatter of plates, its talking and music, was still whirling through Frederick's brain.

He heard the vaudeville actor declaiming.

The half-ape was holding Mara in his arms.

Hahlström in all his height was looking on, smiling.

The waves were rolling heavily against the tiny dining-room and pressing hard on the creaking hull.

Bismarck, a huge figure in armour, and Roland, the valiant warrior in armour, were laughing grimly and conversing.

Frederick saw both wading through the sea.

Roland was holding Mara, the tiny dancer, on his right palm.

Every now and then Frederick shivered.

The ship careened, a stiff southeaster heeling her to starboard.

The waves hissed and foamed.

The rhythm produced by the rise and fall of the pistons finally seemed to turn into the rhythm of Frederick's own body.

The working of the screw was distinctly audible.

At regular intervals the stern would rise out of the water, carrying with it the screw, which would then buzz in the air, and Frederick would hear Wilke from the Heuscheuer saying: "Doctor, if only the screw doesn't snap."

Finally, all the machinery of the vessel seemed to be turning in his brain.

Sometimes one engineer in the engine-room would call out to another, and the clang of the metal shovels when the stokers fed the furnace penetrated to the deck.

All of a sudden Frederick jumped to his feet; he thought he saw a ghost, or a dead-alive corpse, reeling up the companionway and making for him.

It was the clothing manufacturer whom he had met at Southampton, looking more like a man in his death throes than one already dead.

He gave Frederick a ghastly glance of unconsciousness and let a steward support him to the nearest steamer chair.

"If that man," Frederick thought, "is not to be reckoned among the heroes, then there never have been any heroes in the world."

"Each time I cross," the clothing manufacturer had said, "I suffer from seasickness, from the moment I set foot on the ship until I leave it."

And what horrible extremes of suffering he had to go through!

Opposite Frederick, at the entrance to the companionway, stood a cabin-boy.

From time to time at the signal of a whistle from the bridge, he would disappear to receive orders from the first or second mate, or whatever officer happened to be on duty.

Often an hour and more would pass without the summons, and the handsome lad had plenty of time to meditate upon himself and his lot in life.

Frederick felt sorry for him as he stood there on guard, bored and chilly; so he spoke to him.

He learned that his name was Max Pander and that he came from near the Black Forest.

The next logical question to put to him was whether he liked his work.

The boy answered with a resigned smile, which heightened the charm of his handsome head, but showed he had none too much passion for the seaman's calling.

"There is not much in travelling on steamers," he observed.

"A real sailor belongs on board a sailing vessel.

There is a mate of mine here on the _Roland_," he added in a tone of great admiration, "who is only eighteen years old and has already been on two long, dangerous trips on a schooner."

To Frederick, it seemed as if lasting passion for the sea--the sea, which was already making him miserable--must be a conventional myth.

It was three o'clock.

He had been on board only nineteen or twenty hours, and already found it a petty hardship.

"If the _Roland_ doesn't make better time," he calculated, "I shall have to go through the same difficulties of existence eight or nine times twenty-four hours.

But I will get back to land and remain there, while Pander, the cabin-boy, will have to return across the ocean a few days after landing."

"If someone were to find you a good position on land," Frederick asked, "would you give up your position here?"

"Yes, indeed," said Pander, emphasising his reply with a decided nod of his head.

"A nasty southeaster," said Doctor Wilhelm, passing by beside the tall figure of the first mate.

"How would you like to come to my room?

We can smoke and have some coffee there without being disturbed."

XI

Walking along the deck below the promenade deck, one passed a covered gangway on both the starboard and port sides, into which opened various official rooms, including the officers' cabins, among them Doctor Wilhelm's, a comparatively spacious room, containing a bed, a table, chairs, and a well-equipped medicine closet.

The gentlemen had scarcely seated themselves when a Red Cross sister, who worked under Doctor Wilhelm's direction, appeared and gave a report, smiling as she did so, of a woman patient in the second cabin.

"In my two years of practice on a steamer, this is the fifth time I have had a case like this," Doctor Wilhelm said after the sister had left.

"Girls who can no longer conceal the consequences of their mistake and are at loss what to do, take passage on a ship, when it is almost certain that the event they expect will occur.

Such girls, of course, never suspect that they are typical on all sea trips, and are surprised when our stewards and stewardesses sometimes treat them with corresponding respect.

I myself, of course, always do all I can for the poor creatures, and I usually succeed in inducing the captains not to make an announcement of the birth, in case there is one.

Once a girl about whom we could not help giving notice was found hanging to the window sash in her lodgings near the harbour."

Over their coffee and Simon Arzt cigarettes, the whole woman question was unrolled.

"So far," said Frederick, "the woman question is nothing but the old-maid question, at least in the way women conceive it.

The sterility of old maids sterilizes the whole movement."

Frederick developed his ideas.

But tormenting visions of Mara and her admirer pursued him, and he discoursed mechanically, his reasoning on the woman question having become a matter of rote to him.

"The vital germinal spot of each reform in women's rights," he argued with apparent liveliness, blowing clouds of smoke, "must be the maternal instinct.

The cells of the future cell-state, which will be a healthier social body, is the woman with the maternal instinct.

The great women reformers are not those who would have women act just like men in all externals, but those who are conscious that all men, even the greatest, were born of women.

They are the conscious mothers of the race of men and gods.

A woman's natural right is her right to the child, and it is a most inglorious page in the history of woman that she has allowed herself to be deprived of that right.

The birth of the child, in so far as it is not sanctioned by a man, is subject to the fire and brimstone of public scorn.

And this scorn is the most pitiful page in man's history.

The devil knows how it ever came to possess such awful, absolute dominion.

Form a league of mothers, I should counsel women.

Each member shall give token of her motherhood by having children without the sanction of a man, that is, without regard for so-called honour.

In this lies woman's strength, but only if she takes pride in her child, instead of bearing it with a troubled conscience, in cowardice, concealment, and fear.

Reacquire your proud, instinctive consciousness, which you are fully justified in having, of being the mothers of humanity; and having that consciousness, you will be invincible."

Doctor Wilhelm, who kept in touch with professional circles, was acquainted with Frederick's name and the outcome of his scientific career.

His unfortunate bacteriological work was on his book shelf.

Nevertheless, the name of Frederick von Kammacher had an authoritative ring, and association with the great man flattered him.

He listened to Frederick's exposition intently.

The Red Cross sister entered again to summon Doctor Wilhelm to a first-class woman patient.

The physician's small, close hermitage, in which Frederick was now left alone, gave him opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of his remarkable journey.

The _Roland_ was proceeding more smoothly, and while he sat there smoking cigarettes, a sense of comfort came over him, partly attributable, however, to the general effect of a sea trip on one's nerves.

It seemed wonderful to him to be on this great transport of human cargo, to be driven onward to a new continent along with so many fellow-men, subject to the same weal and woe.

And the cause of his presence on the ship was so curious!

Never before had he had so strange a sense of being a will-less puppet in the hands of destiny.

Again dark and light illusions mingled in his brain.

He thought of Ingigerd, whom he had not yet seen; and when he touched the quivering wall of the low room, he was penetrated by happiness, that the same walls were protecting him as the little dancer and that the same bottom was holding them up.

"It's not true.

It's a lie," he repeated half aloud, referring to the statement of the armless man, that Hahlström was exposing his daughter to dishonour and was exploiting her.

Doctor Wilhelm's return aroused Frederick from his dreams with a painful shock.

Doctor Wilhelm laughed and continued to laugh, as he threw his cap on the bed and said: "I've just dragged our little Hahlström and her pet dog on deck.

The little imp has been giving a regular performance, in which her faithful poodle, Achleitner, plays the part, one moment of the beaten cur, the next moment of the spoiled darling."

Doctor Wilhelm's report made Frederick uneasy.

The first time he had seen Mara, she seemed to him the incarnation of childish purity and innocence.

But since then, rumours had reached his ears which shook his faith in her chastity and caused him many agonised hours and sleepless nights.

He had even had an excellent opinion of her father, and that, too, was shaken.

Doctor Wilhelm, who also seemed to be extremely interested in Ingigerd, began to speak of Achleitner.

"He told me in confidence, he's engaged to her."

Frederick remained silent.

That was his only way of concealing his profound dismay, now that the ship's doctor confirmed the supposition he had expressed at the dinner-table.

"Achleitner is a faithful dog," Doctor Wilhelm continued.

"He is one of those men who have a canine sort of patience.

He sits up on his hind legs and begs for a lump of sugar.

He fetches and carries and lies down and plays dead.

She could do whatever she wanted, and he would still, I think, be her patient, faithful poodle.

If you'd like to, Doctor von Kammacher, we might go on deck and visit her.

She's lots of fun.

Besides we can watch the sun set."