Soon after, Frederick was in the barbershop getting a shave.
"Wretched weather," observed the barber, wielding the razor with a sure
hand, despite the dreadful tossing of the vessel. He seemed to be an
intelligent man. Frederick had to listen to a second account of the
_Nordmania_, of how the waterspout had plunged through the ladies'
parlour and carried the piano down into the hold.
An ordinary German servant-girl of the peasant class entered. She looked
healthy to the core and none too intelligent. The barber called her Rosa
and gave her a bottle of eau de Cologne.
"That's the fifth bottle of eau de Cologne that I've given her for her
mistress since we left Cuxhaven," the barber explained after she had
left. "Her mistress is a divorced woman with two children. Her name is
Mrs. Liebling. She is very nervous. Rosa hasn't a very easy time of it.
For five dollars a month she has to be at Mrs. Liebling's beck and call
morning, noon and night. She takes entire charge of the children. Soon
after we left Cuxhaven, Mrs. Liebling came to have her hair dressed. You
should have heard how she went on about that girl. The things she said
against her. Not a spark of gratitude. She said the stupid, lazy thing
wasn't worth the price of her second-class cabin."
Several times Frederick had heard the sound of quarrelling mingled with
children's crying in the cabin opposite his. Once he had even distinctly
caught the slapping sound of what must have been a box over somebody's
ear.
"Does she hit Rosa?" he asked the barber.
"Yes."
Clearly, then, it was his neighbour of the opposite cabin in whose
service the girl was.
Frederick enjoyed listening to the lively barber retail gossip, while
he lay stretched out in his patented chair. It diverted his mind from
troublesome thoughts. The barber, who had been sailing the seas for many
years, was by no means of the ordinary type of his class. He delivered a
short discourse on modern shipbuilding, the moral of which was, not to
construct light steamers for speed.
"Altogether," he observed, "it's a pity to lay so much stress on
record-making. How is a great big body with walls like a wafer to resist
heavy seas for any length of time? And see what tremendous engines it
has to carry and what an enormous amount of coal it consumes. But the
_Roland's_ a good boat. It was built in Glasgow in the yards of John
Elder and Company. It has been running since June, 1881. The engines are
compound steam-engines with three cylinders and 5800 horse power. They
require one hundred and fifteen tons of coal every day. The boat makes
sixteen knots an hour, and has a tonnage of 4510. There are one hundred
and sixty-eight men in the crew."
The barber had all these details at his fingers' ends. In a tone of
annoyance, as if the thing caused him personally a lot of trouble, he
told that the _Roland_ on each trip to or from New York dragged one
thousand and three hundred tons of anthracite coal in its coal-bunkers.
A slow trip, he insisted, was safe and comfortable, while a quick trip
was dangerous and expensive.
The little saloon with its electric lighting would have been a very
comfortable place to be in, had it only stood at rest. But unfortunately
its walls were quivering to the pulse of the engines and the floor was
rising and sagging to the swell and fall of the waves, which every now
and then leapt against the port-hole with tiger-like fury. The flasks in
the closets rattled.
"A heavier ship," said the barber, "built to go more slowly, wouldn't be
pitching like this."
Next he spoke of a little person, who dyed her hair, a dancer. She had
spent more than an hour in his chair, having him show her rouge and face
powders, until finally he had displayed his entire stock of Pinaud and
Roger et Gallet. The barber chuckled.
"On sea trips," he said, "a man has a chance of getting to know the
queerest women." And he proceeded to recount a number of incidents,
which, on his own word, he himself had witnessed. The heroine in each
case was an erotomanic woman.
"Just ask our doctor," he said. He was of the old-fashioned sort of
barber-surgeon, and in the capacity of surgeon had gathered the most
scandalous portion of his experiences. "One of the worst cases," he went
on, "was that of an American girl, who was found lying unconscious in one
of the life-boats swinging from the davits. She was hideously abused by
all the crew, one at a time, but they fixed it so that the whole blame
could be laid on her."
Frederick knew that none other than Ingigerd Hahlström was responsible
for the direction the barber's thoughts had taken. She had been sitting
in the very chair in which he was now reclining. A current streamed from
its upholstery into his body. His heart began to beat irregularly,
ceasing for an instant, then leaping wildly. To his horror, he observed
that Mara's power over him was not yet broken.
He jumped up and shook himself. He felt as if he must plunge into a hot
and cold bath and let stinging douches run down his spine to wash him
outwardly and inwardly clean and expel that foul poison from his blood.