A moment later he was on deck, over the railing, and in the boat. The men
wanted to put off. Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the
third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the
tiller.
He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had
so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared. But
now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the
railing.
"Wilke! Wilke!" he shouted. "Jump into the boat!"
"Right away, right away," Wilke answered several times. Then he did
something that Frederick tried to scold him out of doing, because it
seemed so senseless and useless to everybody in the boat. He had
discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various
points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be
struggling desperately for their lives.
The boat did not wait for him. Under the third mate's command, the
sailors began to row. The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than
thirty yards from the _Roland's_ side.
Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict,
had bored the flank of the _Roland_, making a great gash near the
engine-room. Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they
could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold. Frederick thought he
could hear its greedy gulping. At the sight, for all the horror about
him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior
_Roland_, and with difficulty restrained an outcry. The fog closed in
and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.
When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some
incomprehensible way turned. The twenty persons in the boat looked down
from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level
with the water. They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next
instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in
there, swarming like ants.
Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the
catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception.
All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were
tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their
way. Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots. Some of the
life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark,
swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape
dropped off and fell into the sea.
Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view. But a sound, which
Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the
deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the
metallic clanging of the hurricane. For several seconds Frederick's
thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy
meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in
their passage. But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached
his ears through the fog. It was the outcry of those human beings, who
were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conception, that no
human crime, he felt, could be great enough to justify such atonement. He
distinctly felt how, through the excess of the hideous impression, the
bridge carrying the message of his senses to his innermost soul snapped.
But suddenly the fever of the visible death struggle of eight or nine
hundred innocent men after all did penetrate to his innermost soul, and
wrung a cry from him, in which the whole boat load joined as by command.
In that cry were fear, anguish, fury, protest, supplication, horror,
wailing, cursing, and despair.
And the horror was increased by the consciousness that there was no
merciful ear to listen, but only a deaf heaven. Wherever Frederick turned
his eyes, he saw death. Indifferently the bottle-green, mountainous waves
came rolling. In their march there was a murderous regularity, with which
nothing interfered and which recognised no obstacles. He closed his eyes
ready to die. Several times he felt for his parents' letters in his
breast pocket, as if he needed them for passports to the land of
darkness, where he was soon going. He dared not open his eyes again,
because he could no longer bear to see the convulsions of the women in
the boat or the hideous massacre on the stern of the _Roland_.
The sea raged. It was icy cold. The water froze on the edge of the boat.
Rosa, the maid, was the only one that constantly bestirred herself to
help others, the children, Mrs. Liebling, Ingigerd, and Arthur Stoss.
Bulke and she vied with each other in bailing out the water in which
Stoss and Mrs. Liebling were lying and which reached to the knees of the
others.
What was in the meantime happening on the deck of the _Roland_, so far
as Frederick caught momentary glimpses of it, did not fit in with his
conception of human nature. The things he thought he saw in detail had
nothing in common with those civilised, decorous ladies and gentlemen
whom he had seen in the dining-room and on deck, promenading, conversing,
smiling, exchanging greetings, and daintily dissecting the fish on their
plates with forks. He could have sworn that he distinguished the white
figure of a cook cutting his way, with a long knife, through the
honourable person of a first-class passenger for whom he had cooked.
Frederick was convinced he saw a stoker, a black fellow, strike a woman
who was clinging to him--perhaps she was the beautiful Canadian--pick her
up and throw her overboard. Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised,
were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in
fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting,
helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and
disappeared.
"Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath
blown away by the raging elements. She pointed, and Frederick looked
where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes. Again the fog lifted and
opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in
all its length. Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white
handkerchief. It was impossible to tell who it was. But a man whom
Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a
spy-glass was Hans Füllenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with
the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.
The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone
with the electric lights inside. Now and then a stifled shot could be
heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light. But
soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished. As if the sea
in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it
swept over the deck from the other side. That instant the waters on the
near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.
Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the _Roland_
again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it. A
hideous, bestial conflict began.
Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it. Although it went on under
his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance. He
struck at something. It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the
deep, shrieking in a voice not human. Suddenly, pulled backwards by the
merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared. Frederick saw
how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs.
Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of
the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat. The
sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.
None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke
took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a
long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.
The servant, Bulke, took command. For the sake of something to do and to
delay the inevitable capsizing, Frederick and Wilhelm each seized an oar
and rowed with the sailors.
Minutes passed. The fog lifted. Many eternally moving mountains and
valleys of water had rolled between the little boat and the wreck. Of the
_Roland_, the mighty fast mail steamer of the North German Steamship
Company, nothing was to be seen.