Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was
fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries
at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage
more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer
than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless
unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.
At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the
word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.
Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward
opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one
word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught
with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light.
Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from
the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as
the vessel lurched. At first he was uncertain whether the word he had
heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his
unstrung nerves. Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves
from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive
fall or a delusive cry. But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards
rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the
word, "Danger," repeated several times, a sensation came over him that
produced a most remarkable change in his condition.
"Very well," he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game
that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and
stepped out into the gangway.
Here there was not a soul.
"Very well," he had been thinking, "the invisible powers, whose
playthings we human beings are, will now completely expose their supreme
brutality."
He had not been awakened from sleep; he had been awakened and brought to
his sober reason from beneath a hundred strata of dreams and sleep. Now,
in that empty corridor, it again seemed to him to be a fantastic illusion
of his disordered brain; and he was about to return to his cabin, when he
noticed for the first time that the rhythm of the engines and the
churning of the screw were neither to be heard nor felt. Suddenly he
thought the great vessel was drifting in the ocean abandoned by
passengers and crew, and he alone had been left behind from the general
rescue. But a passenger in a silk dressing-gown reeled by, whom Frederick
could question.
"What's the matter, do you know?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," said the man. "I've only been looking for my steward. I'm
thirsty. I want a glass of lemonade." He staggered past Frederick into
his cabin.
"Ass!" Frederick mentally exclaimed, disgusted with himself for what
he again believed was his illusion. Yet the silence weighed upon him
dreadfully. Seized by a wild instinct, he could not help but suddenly
rush forward, merely to be on deck.
Somebody came toward him from the opposite direction, and asked him where
he was going.
"Get out of my way," said Frederick. "It's none of your business."
But the hideous, half-dressed, corpse-like creature, besmirched by the
traces of seasickness, would not make way.
"Are the stewards here all crazy?" he cried.
Hard by Frederick's ear an electric bell began to hammer noisily, and the
next moment the tottering phantom that barred his way was multiplied by
ten, twenty, a host of similar phantoms.
"What's the matter! What's the matter! We're sinking!"
"Steward! Steward!" a voice commanded; and another, "Captain! Captain!"
"Wretched service!" a man scolded in a voice that broke. "No stewards
about. What do they mean by it?" The call bells began to rage.
Frederick turned, and ran down the endless corridor to the after part
of the vessel. Nobody intercepted him. He passed the windows of the
engine-room. The cylinders and pistons were not stirring. From the depths
of the ship, from the boilers and furnaces, a sound of rushing, splashing
water penetrated above the creaking and grinding of the walls.
"Did a boiler burst?" Frederick thought, forgetting that there would have
been the report of an explosion and the hiss of escaping steam.
But he hastened on without stopping, past the post office, on his way
through the second cabin to the stern. In his flight it occurred to him
how happy he had been in Paris when at Cook's office they had told him
that by great haste he could still make the _Roland_ at Southampton. Why
had he been in such a fever of impatience, in such dread of missing the
boat and rushing into the open arms of doom? For there was no veiling the
fact that something fearful had happened to the _Roland_.
At the door of the second cabin, he encountered the barber.
"The fires are out," said the barber. "A collision. The water is pouring
into the hold below my shop."
The hammering of the bells never ceased. The barber was dragging two
life-preservers.
"What do you need two for?" Frederick asked, and took one and sped on.