As they arose from table and were ascending the companionway to the deck,
Hahlström suddenly said to Frederick:
"My daughter is expecting you. We have a friend on board, Mr. Achleitner,
a soft creature, but the possessor of much money, which he doesn't know
the best way to get rid of. So he made it worth while for one of the
officers to give up his luxurious cabin opening on deck to my daughter.
Unfortunately, that gives him the right to make an unmitigated nuisance
of himself sometimes."
When the men entered the comparatively roomy cabin on deck, they found
Achleitner sitting on a rather unsteady chair, while Mara, carefully
wrapped up, was lying stretched out on a couch. She instantly called
to her father, please to remove Mr. Achleitner, who was boring her, and
signified to Frederick that she had a special favour to ask of him.
Hahlström and Achleitner obediently withdrew, and Frederick _nolens
volens_ had to seat himself on the camp-chair.
"How can I be of service?" he asked.
She put one of those inconsequential requests with which she liked to
busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many
people were not doing something for her, she felt neglected.
"But if you don't want to do it," she added--it was to get her a bottle
of perfume, or something of the sort, for which a stewardess would have
been the right person to ask--"but if you don't want to do it, then
please don't. I should prefer it if you didn't. In fact, if I bore you,
I would just as soon sit alone."
Frederick realised that this beginning was a foolish expression of
embarrassment.
"I should like to be of service to you in anything I can, and you don't
in the least bore me."
That was the truth. Alone with Ingigerd in her cabin, where the vessel's
motion was less perceptible, he was sensitive to the full fascination of
her presence. The pangs of the ocean crossing had given her sweet girlish
face a waxen transparency. At her request the stewardess had loosened her
hair, and it lay spread in a golden flood over her white pillow, a golden
flood, the sight of which was highly disturbing to Frederick. Where was
there an adornment for the head, a queen's diadem, which could exercise
so powerful, so divine a charm? It seemed to Frederick as if that
tremendous vessel, with its hundreds of human ants, were nothing more
than the cocoon of this tiny silkworm, this delicately coloured,
delicious little butterfly; as if the sixty naked helots down at the
ship's bottom shovelling coal into the white heat under the boilers, were
toiling and sweating merely to be of service to this childish Venus; as
if the captain and officers were the paladins of the queen, and the rest
of the crew her following; as if the steerage were rilled with blindly
devoted slaves, and as if the _Roland_ were proudly carrying a fairy tale
from "A Thousand and One Nights" across the salt desert.
"Did I hurt your feelings yesterday by telling you my story?" she asked
suddenly.
"Mine? No! You are the injured one in the life you have unfortunately
led."
She looked at him with a sardonic smile, plucking a pink wad from the lid
of a box of sweetmeats beside her. In her looks and smiles, Frederick
felt her cold, wicked enjoyment. And since he was a man and knew he was
impotent in the face of such fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury
mounted in him, driving the blood into his eyes and causing him
involuntarily to clench his fists. His full-blooded nature occasionally
had need of such frenzy. It was a phenomenon with which his friends were
familiar.
"What is the matter with you?" whispered Ingigerd, plucking at the pink
wad. "I am not afraid of a monk like you."
Her remark was not calculated to calm Frederick's passionate surge.
However, he mastered his feelings with evident, redoubled exertion of his
will power. Had he not succeeded in controlling himself, he might have
more resembled a Papuan negro than a European. He might have turned into
a beast in human form, and might have thrown overboard, as he himself
clearly felt, more than was good of what both self-acquired and imposed
culture had formed in him. He had no desire to turn into another animal
in Circe's stables.
It was as if Ingigerd were the very incarnation of the evil Psyche, so
few of a man's feelings were concealed from her. She knew what fight
Frederick had just fought and she knew he had conquered.
"Oh, I wanted to become a nun once myself," she said, and began in a
mixture of truth and fiction to prattle of a year she had spent in a
convent. "I wanted to turn good, but didn't get very far. I am religious.
Really I am. I can say so with a clear conscience. Anybody with whom I
don't feel I could pray to God, is disgusting to me. Perhaps, after all,
I shall end by being a nun, but not because I am pious." She did not
realise how egregiously she was contradicting herself. "Oh, no! It
wouldn't occur to me to be pious. I don't believe in anything but myself.
Life is short, and nothing is coming afterward. A person ought to enjoy
life. A person who deprives himself of a single enjoyment sins against
himself, beside practising self-deception."
She was led to speak of her mother. Frederick was startled by the hatred,
the vulgarity with which she referred to her.
"I could kill her," she said, "although, or just because she is my
mother." Her face lost its purity of expression and assumed an ugly,
repulsive look. "With papa it is different. But it gets to be an awful
nuisance always to be dragging him about with me."
The stewardess came in. She spoke to Ingigerd in a loud, cheery way.
"Better here than down below, isn't it, Miss?"
She bolstered up her cushions, rearranged her coverings, and left again.
"The silly thing has already fallen in love with me, too," said Ingigerd.
"Why am I sitting here?" Frederick thought, and was about to attempt in
all kindness to remove the cataract from the eyes of the foolish little
creature. Why did great waves of pity keep sweeping over him? Pity for
which she did not ask. Why could he not rid himself of the idea of
innocence, of chastity, of the uncontaminated while in the presence of
this child fiend? She seemed pure and unsullied, and each capricious
movement, each remark of hers only heightened the impression of touching
helplessness.
"All love is pity." This sentence of Schopenhauer's, which he held to be
both true and paradoxical, flashed into his mind. He took one of her
dolls in his hand, and tried in the kindly way that he had acquired with
his patients to make Ingigerd Hahlström understand that one does not go
through life unpunished in the belief that life is mere doll's play.
"Your dolls," he said, "are actually beasts of prey. Woe to you, if you
don't realise they are beasts before they bury their claws in your flesh
and rend you with their fangs."
She gave a short laugh without answering. She complained of a pain in her
breast.
"You're a physician. Won't you examine me?"
"That's Doctor Wilhelm's business," Frederick answered brusquely.
"Well," she said, "if I am in pain and you as a physician can stop the
pain, but don't want to, your friendship cannot amount to much."
Frederick did not turn a deaf ear to this correct reasoning. He had long
before realised that her delicate constitution was with difficulty
holding the balance between debit and credit. Each instant it was in
danger of losing its balance.
"If I were your physician," he said, "I should send you to live for three
years with a German country pastor, or an American farmer. I should not
let you see anybody but the old pastor or the old farmer and his wife and
their daughters. I should not let you go to see a play, let alone appear
on the stage yourself. It is those cursed variety shows that have sent
you to the dogs, physically and morally."
"I am a ruffian," he thought, "and there's medicine for her."
"Do you want to become a farmer?"
"Why?"
"Because you are already a pastor," she laughed.
The conversation was interrupted by the screeching of a cockatoo on a
stand in the back of the cabin. Until then Frederick had not noticed it.
"What else will be turning up? Where did you get that beast?"
She laughed again.
"Please give me the beast. Koko! Koko!" Frederick arose and let the
great, rosy-white seafarer clamber on his hand. "I like animals better
than I do most people I meet," she said.
The bird kept screaming "Cockatoo!" until Frederick felt it fairly
applied to him.
In the meantime the _Roland_, sinking into deep troughs and climbing over
watery mountain crests in an ocean that was like a great machine
regularly at work, had plowed its way into fog. The siren was bellowing.
"Fog?" exclaimed Ingigerd. Every bit of blood vanished from her face,
which was already too pale. "But I am never afraid," she added
immediately, took a bonbon in her mouth, and let the cockatoo nibble at
it. The bird unfeelingly trod on the girl's beautifully heaving breast.
She made it sing _Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_ and some well-known
music-hall airs, and told stories of her menagerie.
Every instant Frederick had to perform some small service, and while she
was giving an enthusiastic description of a little monkey from Java that
she had once owned, he asked himself whether he was a physician, a nurse,
a hairdresser, a chambermaid, or a steward, and whether Ingigerd
Hahlström would not in the end reduce him to a messenger boy.
He yearned to be on deck in the open air.
Soon after, Achleitner entered with an anxious, questioning expression in
his eyes, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a
look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the
fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as
if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him
back to the girl's couch.