Atlantis — Section 6

XII

Little Mara lay stretched out in a steamer chair.

Achleitner was most uncomfortably perched on a small camp-stool directly in front of her, so that he could look straight into her face.

He had wrapped her up to her shoulders in rugs.

The setting sun, casting its rays across the mighty heavings of the sea, glorified a lovely face.

The ship was no longer tossing so violently, and the deck was lively with people sitting in chairs or promenading up and down.

Some of the passengers had got over their seasickness, and there was a general air of revived animation and talkativeness.

Mara's appearance was somewhat conspicuous.

She wore her very long, light hair flowing, and was playing with a small doll, a fact of which every passerby turned about to assure himself.

When Frederick saw this girl, who for weeks had been hovering in his soul, in his dreams, in his waking hours, who, as it were, had covered the rest of the world from his sight, or, at least, had cast a veil over it, his excitement was so intense and his heart beat so violently against his ribs that he had to turn away to keep his countenance.

Even after the lapse of several seconds, it was difficult for him to believe that the enthralled, enslaved condition of his being was not noticeable to the people about him.

But his excitement was by no means due solely to the fear of self-betrayal.

It sprang from his passion, which, he suddenly realised, dominated him with undiminished strength.

"Papa told me you were here," the little miss said to him, adjusting the blue silk cap on her doll's head.

"Won't you sit down with us?

Mr. Achleitner, please go and get a chair for Doctor von Kammacher."

She turned to Doctor Wilhelm.

"Your treatment was summary, but I am grateful to you.

I feel very well sitting here, watching the sun set.

You're fond of nature, aren't you, Doctor von Kammacher?"

"_Nur für Natur hegte sie Sympathie_," trolled Doctor Wilhelm, swaying on tip-toe.

"Oh, you are impudent," Ingigerd reproved him.

"Doctor Wilhelm _is_ impudent, you know," she added to Frederick.

"I saw he was the very instant he looked at me and the way he took hold of me."

"But, my dear young lady, so far as I know, I never took hold of you."

"If you please, you did--going up the stairs.

I have blue marks as the result."

The chatter ran on for a while in a similar strain.

Frederick, without betraying it, was on the alert for every word she uttered, noted every play of feature, watched for her glances, for the rise and fall of her lashes.

He jealously studied the others, too, and caught every expression, every movement, every glance that was meant for her.

He even noticed how Max Pander, the handsome cabin-boy, still standing at his post, held his eyes fixed upon her, a broad smile on his lips.

Ingigerd's pleasure in receiving the homage of three men and being the centre of general interest was evident.

She plucked at her little doll and her odd, checked jacket, and gave herself up to coquettish whimsies.

Her affected voice filled Frederick with the delight of a long, cool drink to a thirsty man.

At the same time, his whole being was inflamed with jealousy.

The first mate, Von Halm, a magnificent young man of twenty-eight, a perfect tower of a man, joined the group and was favoured by Ingigerd with looks and pointed remarks, which indicated to her admirers that this weather-tanned officer was not an object of indifference to her.

"How many miles, Lieutenant, since we left the Needles?"

asked Achleitner, who was pale and evidently chilly.

"We're making better time now," Von Halm replied; "but for the last twenty-two or twenty-three hours, we haven't made more than two hundred miles."

"At that rate it will take two weeks to reach New York," cried Hans Füllenberg, somewhat too forwardly, from where he was sitting a little distance away.

He was still flirting with the English lady from Southampton; but now, irresistibly drawn to Mara's sphere, he jumped up and left her, bringing the tone that was agreeable to Mara and all her admirers, except Frederick von Kammacher.

The jolliness of the little group communicated itself to the rest of the promenade deck.

Disgusted with the orgy of banality, Frederick moved off to be alone with his thoughts.

The deck, which in the middle of the day had been dripping with water, was now quite dry.

He walked to the stern and looked out over the broad, foaming wake.

He heaved a deep breath of joy at the thought that he was no longer in the narrow spell of the little female demon.

Suddenly the long tension of his soul relaxed.

Though he might have suffered a profound disenchantment, yet he felt as if he had taken a sobering bath, which left him a free agent, alone with his own soul.

He felt ashamed of his instability.

His passion for that little person seemed ridiculous, and he covertly beat his breast and rapped his forehead with his knuckles as if to awaken himself from a dream.

But, finally, the great cosmic moment of the slowly setting sun cast its spell over the young German adventurer.

A fresh wind was still blowing from the southeast, slanting the vessel slightly to the side where the sun hung over the horizon, turning the heavens in the west into a great, dusky conflagration.

That sun, beneath which a slate-coloured sea was rolling in waves gently tossing foam--that sea, slate-coloured in the east and a cold, darkening blue in the west and south--that sky above, with great masses of clouds--these were to Frederick like the three mighty motives of a world symphony.

"Any one who is susceptible to them," he thought, "has no real cause to feel small, for all their awful majesty."

He was standing near the log, the long line of which was trailing in the ocean.

The great ship was quivering under his feet.

From the two smoke-stacks the wind was pressing the smoke down over the waves, and a melancholy procession of figures, widows in long crêpe veils, wringing their hands in mute grief, drifted away backward, as if into the twilight gloom of eternal damnation.

He heard the talking of the passengers, and represented to himself all that was united within the walls of that immense house, hurrying forward restlessly--how much hunting, fleeing, hoping, fearing.

And in his soul, responding to the universal miracle, arose the great unanswered questions that seek to penetrate to the dark meaning of existence: "Why?"

"What for?"

XIII

He began to pace the deck again without noticing that he drew near Ingigerd Hahlström. "You are wanted," a voice behind him suddenly announced.

Seeing how he started, Doctor Wilhelm excused himself.

"You were dreaming; you are a dreamer," Mara called.

"Come over here.

I don't like these stupid men."

The six or eight gentlemen in attendance, with the exception of Achleitner, laughed and withdrew with a humorous show of great obedience.

"Why do you stay here, Achleitner?"

Thus the faithful canine received his dismissal.

Frederick saw how the men withdrew together in groups at a little distance, whispering as they usually do when having sport with a pretty woman who is not exactly a prude; and it was with some shame, at any rate, with expressed repugnance that he took the stool still warm from Achleitner's body.

Mara began to rhapsodise about nature.

"Isn't everything prettiest when the sun goes down?

I think it's fun--at least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face at the remark.

She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like," or "I despise," or "I do detest."

In the face of that vast cosmic drama unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child.

Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking expression.

Mara noticed it, and was visibly upset by this unusual form of homage.

Frederick had one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and philosophers."

His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers.

The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist, director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in a strong interest in science.

Frederick's mother was a well-read woman, passionately fond of the theatre and an enthusiastic lover of Goethe and the poets of the romantic school.

Her father, who had been prime minister of Wittenberg, as a student and even later in his career, composed poetry, which her adoring love for him had caused her to publish and several times revise and reprint.

Though Frederick had never been ill, there were times when he showed symptoms of a peculiar passionateness.

His friends knew that when all went well, he was a dormant volcano; that when things did not go so well, he was a volcano spitting fire and smoke.

To all appearances equally removed from effeminateness and brutality, he was subject, nevertheless, to accesses of both.

Now and then a dithyrambic rapture came over him, especially when there was wine in his blood.

He would pace about, and if it was daytime, might address a pathetic, sonorous invocation to the sun, or at night, to the constellations, particularly to the chaste Cassiopeia.

Since she had known him, Mara felt that his proximity was by no means lacking in danger; but being what she was, it piqued her to play with fire.

"I don't like people that think themselves better than others," she said.

"Being a Pharisee, I do," Frederick drily rejoined, and went on cruelly: "I think for your years you are extremely forward and cock-sure.

Your dance pleases me better than your conversation."

He felt much like a man berating his sister.

Mara silently studied him for a moment, a suggestive smile on her lips.

"According to your notions," she finally said, "a girl mustn't speak unless she's spoken to, and she mustn't have any opinions of her own.

You look as if the only sort of girl you could love would be one that was always saying, 'I am a poor, ignorant thing.

I don't understand what he sees in me.'

I hate such nincompoops!"

Conversation came to a halt.

Frederick half rose to leave, but she restrained him with a self-willed, pouting, "No." There was something childlike and honest in that pouting "no" which touched his soul and drew him down on the stool again.

"In Berlin, while I danced, I always had to look at you," she continued, holding her doll against her lips so that her little nose was a bit flattened.

"The very first time I saw you, I felt something like a bond between us; I knew we should meet again."

Frederick started, though not for an instant deceived, knowing this must be an oft-used formula for establishing a relationship, and in essence a lie.

"Are you married?"

he heard before he had fully recovered his balance.

He turned pale.

His answer was hard and repellent.

"It would be well, Miss Hahlström, if you were to examine me more closely before you treat me as one among many.

So far, I don't believe in the bond that unites us.

During your dance you looked not only at me, but at everybody else."

He spoke with increasing coldness.

"At any rate, it doesn't in the least concern you whether I am, or am not, married--just as little as it concerns me what repulsive personages, whom nothing but a depraved instinct can enjoy, you keep company with."

He meant Achleitner.

Ingigerd gave a short laugh.

"Do you take me for Joan of Arc?"

"Not exactly that," rejoined Frederick, "but if you would allow me, I should like to regard you as still a girl, a distinguished little lady, whose reputation cannot be too carefully guarded against the faintest blemish."

"Reputation!"

sneered the girl.

"You are very much mistaken if you think I ever cared for anything of the sort.

I'd rather be disreputable ten times over and live as I please, than have a good reputation and die of boredom.

I must enjoy my life, Doctor von Kammacher."

Frederick's teeth clenched.

Outwardly composed, he was suffering the pangs of torture.

Ingigerd proceeded to reveal her life in a series of confidences of such shocking content as to be worthy of a Laïs or a Phryne.

Doctor von Kammacher, she said, might be sorry for her if he wanted to, but nobody was to make a mistake about her.

Everybody associating with her was to know exactly who she was.

In this she betrayed a certain dread, as one who would absolutely guard others as well as herself against the catastrophe of disillusionment.

When the sun had set, and Ingigerd, still with that suggestive, sensual, evil smile on her lips, had finished her hideous confession, Frederick found himself confronting the knowledge of a childhood so outrageous as to be worse than anything he had met with in all his experience as a physician.

Several times in the course of her narrative, Achleitner and her father had come to take her inside, but she had angrily driven them away.

It was Frederick who finally helped her back to her cabin.

In his own cabin, without even removing his overcoat, he threw himself on his berth to think over the inconceivable story.

He sighed, he gnashed his teeth, he wanted to doubt it.

Several times he said aloud, "No!"

or "Impossible!"

and beat his fists against the mattress of the berth above.

He could have sworn an oath that this time there had not been a single lie in Mara's whole shameless narrative.

"Mara, or the Spider's Victim."

Now, of a sudden, he understood her dance!

She had danced the thing she had lived in her own life!

XIV

"I have set my all on nothing."

To the accompaniment of this refrain beating in his soul Frederick maintained an outer show of hilarity.

He and the ship's doctor were drinking champagne.

He had ordered the first bottle with the soup and had immediately drunk several glasses.

The more he drank the less he felt the smart of a certain burning wound, and the more wonderful the world appeared, full of miracles and riddles, surrounding and penetrating him with the intoxication of an adventurer's life.

He was a brilliant entertainer, with an easy, happy way in conversation of popularising his rich store of knowledge, and with a light humour, which stood at his command even when, as now, grim humour crawled in the depths of his being, like evil reptiles.

Thus it was that the captain's corner that evening fell under his spell, both of his jocular self and serious self.

Though he had lost his belief that science and modern progress alone possess the power to convey happiness, he extolled their virtues.

As a matter of fact, in the festive gleam of the countless electric lights, excited by the wine, the music, and the rhythmic pulse beat of the moving vessel, it seemed to him at times as if humanity in a festal procession with music playing were sailing to the Isles of the Blessed.

Perhaps, he said, science may some day teach man the secret of immortality.

Ways and means would be found to keep the cells of the body young.

Dead animals had been brought back to life by pumping a salt solution into them.

He spoke of the wonders of surgery, always the theme of conversation when a man of the present, over his champagne and pâté de foie gras, triumphs in the superiority of his age over all other ages.

In a short while, he declared, chemistry would solve the social question, and man would forget what it is to worry about food.

Why, chemistry was on the verge of discovering how to make bread of stones, a thing that hitherto only plants could do.

Frederick continued in a similar strain, speaking by rote, and scarcely looking up, yet fascinating his listeners.

But in the midst of the whirl of self-intoxication, he thought with a shudder of bedtime, knowing he should not close his eyes the whole night.

And what recompense was the brightest height of the clearest day for the hell of a single sleepless night, such as he had often spent within the last years.

After dinner, he went with Doctor Wilhelm to the ladies' parlour, from there to the smoking-room.

Soon after, he went on deck, where it was dark and gloomy and the wind was again whining dismally through the rigging of the four masts.

It was bitter cold, and snowflakes, it seemed to him, swept his cheeks.

Finally, there was nothing for him to do but go to bed.

For two hours, between eleven and one, he lay writhing in his berth, sometimes for a short while falling into a troubled state between waking and sleeping.

In both states he saw visions, now a wild dance of faces, now a single stark face, which tormented him and would not budge.

Yet an irresistible impulse gathered in him to keep his mental eye open for the devilish play of supernatural powers.

He had turned out the electric lights, and in the dark, when the eye is unoccupied, one is doubly sensitive to the messages of hearing and feeling.

He caught every sound, felt every movement, of the mighty ship, steadily pursuing its course through the midnight.

He heard the churning of the propeller, like the labouring of a great demon condemned to slave for mankind.

He heard shouts and calls and the walking of men when the coal-passers threw overboard the cinders from the huge boiler furnaces.

On the trip to New York those furnaces consumed over a thousand tons of coal, and the casting away of the slag and ashes was left for the nighttime.

Thus, to the relief of the man wrestling with sleep, his attention was drawn to the present and the things taking place in the ship's body.

Yet, when there was no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself.

Now that Ingigerd Hahlström had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote him all the more.

His whole mentality seemed to have entered a state of reaction against the poison of his passion.

A high fever raged in his veins.

The thing that in this condition represented his "I" was engaged in a wild chase after the "you" of Mara.

He picked her up in the streets of Prague and dragged her back to her mother.

He discovered her in houses of ill repute.

He saw her standing before the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window.

Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth.

The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.

Shortly after one o'clock, Frederick was tossed out of his berth.

This time it was not one of those dream-like visions that had roused him with a start from a doze.

The next instant he was thrown against the frame of the berth.

It was evident that the weather had grown worse and the _Roland_ was travelling in heavier waters of the Atlantic.