Atlantis — Section 9

XXI

Frederick, holding on to his hat with one hand and clinging to the railing with the other, descended from the windy heights of the captain's cabin to the promenade deck.

When he passed the cabin of the first mate, the door opened, and Von Halm appeared in conversation with Achleitner.

Achleitner was pale, and there was an anxious look in his face.

"I have rented the lieutenant's cabin for Miss Hahlström. I could not bear to see her suffering so in her own cabin," he called to Frederick.

The gale had increased.

Not a passenger was to be seen on deck.

Sailors were inspecting the life-boats.

Huge masses of water seethed against the ship's side, cutting into its course obliquely.

The waves made a mad leap into the air, hung there for an instant in the form of white corals, and fell like a thousand lashes on the deck, which was all awash.

The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled.

Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck.

In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke.

But the fore-deck was so swept by the seas that nobody could keep his footing there, except the lookout men, who were holding watch at the beak of the vessel, not far from the cat-head.

Between the door leading to the main companionway and the companionway itself was a square level space, about which a railing ran and in which a few people could stay and enjoy the fresh air without being drenched.

When Frederick, on his way below deck, passed through the open door, he found a quiet assemblage of pale-faced passengers.

One chair was still unoccupied.

He seated himself in it, with the fanciful notion that he was joining a gathering of condemned men.

"That poor sinner there must be Professor Toussaint, the famous sculptor in need," Frederick thought, judging so from the man's slouched hat and great cape.

Now and then the man exchanged a few words with a person sitting next to him, who might be _Geheimrat_ Lars.

Frederick had once met the _Geheimrat_ at a dinner at the mayor's house, but he had only a faded recollection of his appearance.

The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse.

Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other tall and thin.

The tall one was showing the other a section of a submarine cable and letting the hard piece, intricately braided of hemp, metal and gutta-percha, pass from hand to hand.

From his choppy, whispered sentences, the company learned that in 1877 he had worked as electrical engineer on a steamer laying a cable between Europe and the United States.

The work on the high seas had lasted without interruption for many months.

He had spent several months supervising the construction of the steamer itself in the yards, especially the riveting of its metal plates.

He spoke of what is called the cable plateau at the bottom of the ocean, stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland, a strip of grey sand so named because it supports the main transatlantic cable.

The copper wires in the centre of the cable, he said, were called its soul, the rest of the mass, almost as thick as a man's fist and resembling a great hawser, served merely as a sheath to protect the soul.

Frederick had a mental vision of the fearful solitudes of the ocean depths, with the monstrous metal serpent, apparently without beginning and without end, creeping over the sandy bottom peopled by the enigmatic creatures of the deep.

It seemed to him as if such profound isolation must be gruesome even for the dead mass of cable.

Then he wondered why it was that mankind at each end of the cable had burst into jubilation upon the transmission of the first messages.

Perhaps there was some mystic cause for rejoicing.

The real cause could not possibly be that one was now able to telegraph "Good morning, Mr. Smith," or "Good morning, Mr. Brown," twenty times a minute around the earth's circumference, or that one could adulterate humanity's mind with newspaper gossip from the four quarters of the globe.

In the midst of these meditations, his chair slipped, and Frederick, in company with the electrical engineer, the dozing manufacturer, a lady physician, and a lady artist, was hurled against the banister, while the opposite row of passengers, including the _Geheimrat_ and the professor, was hurled on top of them.

It was a ridiculous incident, but Frederick observed that no one seemed to find it so.

They tried to arrange themselves in order again.

One of the ever-industrious stewards appeared, and, as if to comfort them for their overthrow, passed about Malaga grapes from the ship's inexhaustible store.

"When shall we reach New York?"

somebody asked.

The eyes of all the others instantly turned upon the questioner in amazement and alarm.

The steward, usually so polite merely smiled an embarrassed smile and gave no reply.

In his opinion an answer, one way or the other, would have been to challenge fate.

The passengers felt much the same.

Indeed, the idea that their feet would actually ever tread solid land again seemed in their present condition almost like an extravagant fairy tale.

The short, stout man, to whom the electrical engineer was chiefly directing his discourse, was conducting himself peculiarly.

At short intervals he would look out anxiously into the uproar, turning his small, watchful eyes searchingly up to the tops of the masts, which never ceased to describe great arcs in the air (starboard to port, port to starboard!

), and out into the monotonous rolling of the waves, swelling into ever higher and larger masses.

His face was full of concern.

Frederick was on the point of inwardly ridiculing the pitiful landlubber's cowardice, when he heard him say that scarcely three weeks before he had brought his schooner safely to New York from a three years' trip around the world, and intended to start out from New York on the same trip to last the same length of time.

The little gentleman was the experienced captain of a sailing vessel.

In the course of his fifty years, he had spent more than thirty on all the waters of the globe.

XXII

Frederick reflected upon the timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling.

He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life.

Then he arose to wander about the _Roland_ vaguely.

The enforced idleness of a sea trip, especially in bad weather, induces passengers, when they have made the complete round of the vessel, to begin over again and go through the same circle.

Thus, Frederick, after descending the companionway, ascending it, and descending again, found himself on the leather-seated bench in the smoking-room avoided by most of the smokers, in which the armless man had taken his meal the day before.

Hans Füllenberg entered, asked whether he was not permitted to smoke a cigarette in the room, and began to grumble about the weather.

"Who knows how this thing is going to end?"

he complained dismally.

"Perhaps, instead of reaching New York, we'll have to be towed into port somewhere in Newfoundland."

Frederick was indifferent to the prospect.

He noticed that young Füllenberg cared for nothing except to produce an impression; and young Füllenberg noticed that Frederick von Kammacher was not susceptible to the impression he tried to produce.

He cast about for another theme of conversation.

"Do you know there are two priests on board?

You should have been at Cuxhaven when they got on.

The sailors were beside themselves.

I hunted up the fellows, the sailors I mean, in the forecastle.

How they did curse!

It was fearful.

The stoker told all the men of the engine-room.

They said you could not get genuine seamen to think any differently--with priests on board something is bound to go wrong."

"How is your lady?"

asked Frederick.

"My lady is retching her soul away, if she has such a thing as a soul.

Two hours ago I helped her to bed.

That Englishwoman is already a full-blooded American.

Shameless, I tell you!

Something tremendous.

I

rubbed her forehead with brandy.

She partook of a goodly quantity, and then I unbuttoned her waist.

She seems to take me for a masseur chartered extra by her munificent husband.

The thing became boresome.

And besides, in that pitching boudoir, my own soul began to rise up through my stomach, and the poetry went to the devil.

She showed me the photograph of her devoted husband in New York.

I think she has another in London."

He was interrupted by the first call for dinner, which the trumpeter announced at the bottom of the companionway.

The trumpet blast was lost without resonance in the heavy air and the bluster of the waves.

"What's more," he concluded, "she sent for Doctor Wilhelm."

The dining-room presented a very dreary appearance.

Neither the captain nor any of the officers of the _Roland_ were present, the demands upon them in such bad weather being too severe to permit them to leave their posts.

The tables had been provided with a wooden apparatus dividing them into small compartments, which prevented the plates, glasses and bottles from slipping any distance.

Nevertheless, there was much breaking of crockery, and it required all the skill of the stewards to serve the dishes, especially the soup.

From the kitchen and the china room every now and then came the sound of a tremendous crash.

There were scarcely twelve people at table, among them Hahlström and Doctor Wilhelm.

After a time the skat players, as usual, came bursting in, talking noisily and red of face.

Their winnings were immediately transmuted into Pommery.

Notwithstanding the fearful weather, the band was playing.

There seemed to be something frivolous, almost challenging, in the playing of music when, at short intervals, the _Roland_ would come to a quivering standstill, as if it had run upon a reef.

Once the illusion was so strong that a panic arose in the steerage.

Mr. Pfundner, the head-steward, brought this explanation of the horrified shrieks that had penetrated the dining-room above the noise of the raging waters, the rattling of the plates and the blare of the band.

At dessert Hahlström left his place at the other end of the room and, balancing himself with difficulty, came over to Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm, and asked permission to seat himself beside them.

He seemed to have been drinking whisky, as he had dropped his natural shell of reticence.

He spoke of hydrotherapy and gymnastic exercises, and called himself a quack.

It was the gymnastics, he said, that had given his daughter the idea of taking up dancing.

As if to challenge the others, he elaborated bold philosophic theories, dealing out one wild statement after the other, each of which would have been a trump sufficient to end the game for ten German Philistines.

To believe his own word, he was a terroristic Anarchist, a white-slave trafficker, an adventurer always.

At any rate, he espoused the cause of all who were Anarchists, procurers, or adventurers.

He argued in all superiority, upon egotistic grounds, calling these the intellectuals, and all others, creatures without brains; in which his philosophy showed some similarity to Frederick von Kammacher's new philosophy, now that Frederick had entered upon a new phase of his life.

"America," said Hahlström, "is known to have been settled by rogues.

Were you to spread a tent over America, you would have the most beautiful, the most comfortable penitentiary in the world.

The natural form that survives and triumphs in America is the great rascal, the great Renaissance idiot.

In fact, it is the one form that will triumph throughout the world.

You'll see some day how the great American rascal will get the whole of Europe, including England, into his clutches.

Europe is also dabbling a little in Renaissance ideals and Renaissance beasts.

It is busily working away, so to speak, on its own rascalization.

But America is in advance by ten horse lengths.

Europe's Cesare Borgias sit in the cafes with _Glockenröcken à la Biedermaier_ and give voice to their criminal genius in fairly innocent verses.

They all look sickly, as if a barber had cupped all the blood out of their veins.

If Europe wants to save herself, she has only one hope--to make a law by which it will be a crime to surrender an adventurer, an embezzler, a fraudulent bankrupt, the keeper of a disorderly house, a thief, or a murderer to America.

On German, English and French vessels in American ports, such people have already been placed under the special protection of Europe.

Then you will see how soon Europe will outdistance Uncle Sam."

The physicians burst out laughing.

"When did geniuses ever do anything morally?

Even the creator of heaven and earth did not know how to.

He produced an immoral world.

Every high form of human intellectual activity has thrown ethics overboard.

What would a historian be who, instead of making researches, would moralise?

What would a physician be who would stop to moralise?

Or a great statesman, who would toe the chalk-line of your middle-class ten commandments?

As for an artist, when he moralises, he is a fool and a knave.

And please tell me, what sort of a business would the church do if all of us were moral?

There would be no church."

There was a cold gleam of audaciousness in the Swede's eyes.

His utterances produced a strange impression.

Even if he had pronounced fewer wild paradoxes, Frederick von Kammacher would have succumbed to his spell.

He eagerly sought for resemblances between father and daughter, or, more accurately, he observed them without seeking.

They were very evident to one who, alas, to his own torture, was carrying the daughter's picture alive in his soul.

As long as the Swede spoke, he could not help wavering between repugnance and admiration, and he kept asking himself whether this man was really the sort of person that Arthur Stoss had described him to be, no gentleman, a weakling, an idle ragamuffin.