Long after Stoss had been led away by his valet and tucked in bed for his
afternoon nap, Frederick still remained in the unfrequented smoking-room.
The place made an uncanny impression. Yet its very gloominess insured
privacy; and in the gravity of the situation he had need to be by
himself. He began, perhaps prematurely, to consider the worst
eventuality. He thought it might be well to stand in readiness. Around
the walls ran a bench upholstered in leather. Kneeling on it, he could
look through the port-holes out upon the mighty uproar of the waters. In
that position, watching the waves beat with inconceivable persistency
against the desperately struggling vessel, he let his life pass in review
before his mind's eye.
Grey gloom was closing down on him. After all, he felt that he yearned
for life and was far from being as ready to die as he had occasionally
supposed. Something akin to regret came over him. "Why am I here? Why did
I not stop to consider and summon all my rational will power to keep me
from this senseless trip? For all I care, let me die; but not here, not
in a desert of water far from mother earth, immeasurably far from the
great community of men. This seems to me a particularly awful curse. Men
on solid land, in their own homes, men among men, have not the least
notion of it." What was Ingigerd to him now? A matter of indifference.
Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern
for himself. What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on
some shore! Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad
village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness. How
extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry
land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street! He gnashed
his teeth. Of what avail a cry for help here? How could a man find God's
ear here? If the extreme thing were to happen, and the _Roland_ with its
mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would
prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being
happy again.
"I would not witness it," thought Frederick. "I would jump overboard to
avoid the sight of it. And while that would be happening, none of my
friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all. 'The steamship
_Roland_ sunk' appears as a head-line in the newspapers. 'Oh!' says the
reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip
of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of
more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a
hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is
the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine
value of a cargo of human lives is in the world."
Frederick attempted in vain to battle against a still-life picture,
which the _Roland_, valiantly struggling onward, with its siren almost
stifled in the storm, showed him at the bottom of the sea. He saw the
majestic vessel in a coffin of glass. Across its decks swarms of fish
swam hither and thither. Its cabins were all filled with water. The
large dining-room, with its panels of walnut, its tables, and
leather-upholstered revolving chairs, was filled with water. A big polyp,
jelly-fish, and red, mushroom-like sea-anemones had penetrated into the
very gangways along which the passengers were now walking. And to
Frederick's horror, the liveried corpses of Pfundner, the head-steward,
and his assistant stewards were slowly floating about in a circle. The
picture would have been almost ridiculous, had it not been so gruesome
and had it not so certainly lain in the realm of the possible. Think of
all the things divers report! All the things they have seen in the cabins
and gangways of submerged steamers; inextricably knotted masses of human
beings, passengers or sailors coming toward them with outstretched arms,
upright, as if alive and as if awaiting them. A closer examination of the
clothes of those guardians and administrators of a lost estate at the
bottom of the sea, those strange ship-owners, business men, captains,
pursers, those fortune-seekers, money-seekers, embezzlers, adventurers,
or whatever they might be, showed that they were filled with polyps,
crustaceans, and all sorts of ocean worms, enjoying their stay there
as long as something remained beneath their shredded garments except
gnawed-off bones.
Frederick beheld himself down there, too, one of those decaying phantoms,
months old, wandering about in the ghastly abode of the sunken _Roland_,
in that horrible Vineta, where each man passed his neighbour mutely with
a frightened gesture, each seeming to carry in his breast a congealed cry
of anguish, which he expressed with bowed head and outstretched arms, or
head thrown back and open mouth. Or else he was hideously crawling on his
hands, or wringing his hands, or folding them, or spreading out his
fingers. The engineers in the boiler-room seemed still slowly, slowly
to be controlling the cylinder and driving-wheel; yet differently than
before, since the law of gravity seemed no longer to be in force. One of
the engineers was doing his work in a peculiarly twisted way, like a man
asleep caught between the rim of the wheel and the piston-rod covered
with verdigris. Frederick descended on his ghastly tour down to the
stokers, whom the catastrophe had surprised in the midst of their
occupation. Some were still holding their shovels in their hands, though
unable to lift them. They themselves were floating, while the shovels to
which they clung did not stir from the bottom. All was over. They could
not kindle the fire into a white glow, and so could not keep the mighty
steamer in its course. In the steerage the sight was so horrible to
behold, with men, women and children of all nationalities huddled and
tossed in thick, dark heaps, that even a cat-shark, which had made its
way through the chimney of the stoke-hole and then through the engine,
did not feel sufficiently courageous or hungry to mingle in the
gathering. _Noli turbare circulos meos_, these people, too, seemed to
be saying. All were thinking strenuously, absorbed in the profoundest
meditation--they had plenty of time for profound meditation--upon the
riddle of life.
In fact, they seemed to be placed there merely for the purpose of
reflecting. Those men and women wringing their hands or spreading their
fingers, or walking on their hands, or even standing on the tip of a
single finger, while grazing the ceiling with their feet, were all
thinking. Professor Toussaint alone, who came floating toward Frederick
in the gangway, seemed to be acting differently. With his right hand
raised, he seemed to be saying: "An artist may not rust. He must air
himself. He must seek new conditions of life. If he doesn't receive the
honour he should in Italy, he should simply go to France, like Leonardo
da Vinci, or even emigrate to the land of liberty."
"I want to live, live, nothing else," thought Frederick. "In the future,
like Cato the Elder, I would rather walk a year on foot along a way that
I could cover in three days on a steamer."
To avoid the hideous companionship of the blue, swollen thinkers, he left
the gloomy, funereal smoking-room, and, with aching head and leaden
limbs, dragged himself on deck, where the wild scurrying of the storm
and the chaos of snow, rain and salty clouds of foam tore the weight away
from his soul.