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.