It was still long before daylight, and he fell asleep again. This time
on awaking he found himself in the corridor speaking to some stewards,
already at work. It slowly dawned upon him that he was clad in nothing
but his night-shirt and must have been walking in his sleep. What, had he
turned into a somnambulist! He was utterly disconcerted and ashamed and
had to let one of the stewards help him back to his cabin.
He found his cabin covered with about three inches of water, from a leaky
pipe. Crawling into bed, he squeezed himself, to keep from being tossed
out, into a hollow between the boards, a method he himself had devised.
Shortly after six, he was on deck sitting on his bench, warming his hands
on his hot tea-cup. The weather was frightful. The morning was of an icy
dreariness unsurpassed. The fury of the sea had waxed. The falling
twilight was a new sort of darkness. The roaring of the waters and the
raging of the winds were deafening. Frederick's ear-drums ached. But the
ship struggled on, managing to pursue its course, though slowly.
And suddenly--Frederick did not know whether to trust his hearing--above
the noise of the sea rose Ariel strains, beginning solemnly and swelling
serenely. It was the chords and melodies of a church choral. He was moved
almost to tears. He recollected that this dreary morning was a Sunday
morning, and the orchestra, even in the midst of the cyclone, was
carrying out its instructions to begin the day with devotional music.
It was playing in the unused smoking-room half way up the companionway,
whence the strains ascended faintly to the deck. Everything lying heavily
upon Frederick's soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the
seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music. It brought
back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence,
expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his
father's and his mother's birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song
woke him up in the morning. What was to-day compared with that past? What
lay in between! What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition
bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost,
love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard
partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in
particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much
striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent,
blind imprisonment.
Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited
him with such bitter, refined chastisements?
"I'm wild!" screamed Hans Füllenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the
companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane."
Nevertheless, Hans Füllenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers,
though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting
each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from
hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning
again.
To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet
there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the
_Roland_ reached New York.