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?"