The mess-room of the _Hamburg_ was a small square cabin with iron walls,
its only furniture a square table and a bench running around three sides.
Once a person was seated, it was impossible to pass him; and when the
officers gathered for meals, they shoved themselves into place in a
certain order, the captain first.
At seven o'clock Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick appeared for supper. They
found a soup tureen sending up clouds of steam and a well-constructed oil
lamp over the table shedding a cheerful light. The _Hamburg_ was not
lighted by electricity.
The two physicians, like all victims of accidents, the objects of really
touching solicitude, were assigned seats against the warmest wall,
dividing the cabin from the engine-room. Captain Butor served the strong
hot soup, and Mr. Wendler, chief engineer, a rotund little mariner, in an
attempt to enliven the shipwrecked men, cautiously ventured a joke or two
even before the roast was served. He came from Lindenau near Leipzig, and
the rest of the crew teased him for his Low German.
"Don't talk," said the captain to Wilhelm and Frederick. "Just eat,
drink, and sleep."
At first they were inclined to take his advice, but in the course of the
meal, after one of the sailors had served an immense cut of roast beef,
and the captain had carved it, and they had washed the meat down with red
wine, their spirits rose from moment to moment.
Bulke appeared at the door showing evidences of the royal banquet to
which he and the sailors of the _Roland_ had been treated by the sailors
of the _Hamburg_. Notwithstanding his condition, pardonable enough in
the circumstances, he would not go to sleep without first receiving
instructions from Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick, before whom he stood in
military attitude, hand to his cap, awaiting orders.
It was decided that the sailor-nurse and another sailor of the _Hamburg_
should go on night duty, since all the men from the _Roland_ needed rest
and sleep.
Though Frederick's and Doctor Wilhelm's spirits rose visibly, they never
referred to the sinking of the _Roland_. It was too tremendous a thing,
too dreadful, too near for any of the survivors, except the sailors, to
speak of it without intense emotion. It was like a dull weight on their
souls. Whatever Wilhelm and Frederick said related merely to their
difficulties in the life-boat, or to the trip on the _Roland_ before it
overstepped that moment in eternity which determined its awful fate.
"Captain," said Frederick, "you don't know how astonishing it is to be
raised from the dead. Conceive a man who has taken definite leave of
everything that was dear to him in life, who has felt the rattle in his
throat, and received extreme unction, and death, death itself, has
settled on his flesh and limbs. I still feel death in my joints. And yet
I am sitting here in safety, in the pleasant lamplight, almost as in a
circle of friends and relatives. I am sitting in the cosiest home, with
the difference that I still cannot get myself to look upon you"--they
were the captain, the engineer, the boatswain, and the first mate--"as
something so insignificant as mere men."
"When we sighted the _Hamburg_", said Wilhelm, "I had just made my last
will and testament. You see I don't give myself up for lost as quickly as
my friend, Doctor von Kammacher. When your ship gradually grew from the
size of a pinhead to the size of a full-grown pea, all of us who could,
screamed at the top of our voices. We nearly burst our throats screaming.
And when your _Hamburg_ attained the size of a walnut, and we realised we
had been sighted, your ship flamed in my eyes like a huge diamond or
ruby, and to me the east from which you came shone more brilliantly than
the west, where the sun was still shining above the horizon. All of us
howled like watch-dogs."
"It will always be a miracle to me," Frederick resumed, "that such an
evening as this could follow such a morning. I have let days slip past,
by the hundreds, holding no more in them than minutes. But in this one
day, a whole summer has passed, and a whole winter. I feel as if the
first violet had followed directly upon the first snow."
Wilhelm told of how excited the sailors had been in Cuxhaven because
Catholic priests had boarded the _Roland_. Then he mentioned a dream his
old mother had had the night before he was to sail. A child of hers that
had been born many years before and had lived only a day, appeared to her
as a grown-up man and warned her not to let him make the trip.
"She begged me not to go," he said, "but, as I am an enlightened man, I
simply laughed at her for her fears."
Once launched upon the boundless sea of superstition, beloved by sailors,
the men went on to recite cases they knew of prophetic dreams, of
forebodings fulfilled, and the appearance of dying or dead men. This
suggested his friend's last letter to Frederick. He drew his portfolio
from his waistcoat pocket, where it had remained throughout his perilous
trip, and passed the letter around.
They read the passage, "In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal
dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend
to make an ocean trip?" Of course, it excited not a little astonishment,
and it was with some thrills that they read: "Should it be possible for
me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond,
you will hear from me again."
Captain Butor asked with an incredulous smile, yet eagerly, whether his
friend had indeed made himself noticeable from the Beyond.
"This is what happened to me in a dream. Judge for yourselves. I don't
know," said Frederick, in a voice still hoarse and barking. It was unlike
him to go on and relate, as he did, the dream that had been greatly
occupying his thoughts, which began with the landing in a mystic port and
ended with the Toilers of the Light. He described his friend, Peter
Schmidt, and declared that Peter had sent his astral self half way across
the Atlantic to greet him. He spoke of 1492, of Columbus's flag-ship, the
_Santa Maria_, but chiefly of his meeting with Rasmussen in the form of
an old chandler, giving a detailed description of the remarkable ship in
the shop window, the shop itself, and the chirping of the goldfinches. He
drew out his note-book and read aloud what the mysterious chandler had
said to him:
"It was precisely thirteen minutes past one on the twenty-fourth of
January when I drew my last breath."
"Whether that is true," Frederick concluded, "remains to be proved. So
much is certain--if there is anything about this dream that isn't the
illusory work of my imagination--my soul grazed the boundaries of the
world beyond, and I received a hint of the catastrophe to come. As to the
_Roland_, my friend, Peter Schmidt, showed me a ship in the harbour with
a tremendous hole in its side and said it had brought in a great many
people,--which would mean, it had transferred them to the world beyond.
In regard to my rescue, my disguised friend, Rasmussen, said I should
soon celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of 1492 with Peter Schmidt
in New York. But dreams are froth and foam. I fancy it would not be
difficult to explain all this rationalistically, from psycho-physiologic
causes."
Before the little family circle of the _Hamburg_ broke up for the night,
they touched glasses again with great gravity, even solemnity.