Frederick awoke the next morning from an eleven hours' sleep, for which
he was indebted chiefly to a dose of veronal. Doctor Wilhelm had
undertaken to do whatever was necessary during the night for the sick
passengers of the _Roland_ and had persuaded Frederick, whose more
delicate constitution was in the utmost need of rest, to take the drug.
The sun was shining brightly into his tiny cabin. Through the slat door,
he heard the sound of voices speaking calmly and the cheerful clatter of
plates and dishes. At first he recalled nothing of the previous day's
events, and thought he was on the fast mail steamer, _Roland_. But he
could not reconcile the change in his cabin with the idea he had formed
of his room on the _Roland_. In his bewilderment he reached out from bed
and knocked on the mahogany slats of the door. The next moment Doctor
Wilhelm's face, lively and refreshed, was bending over him.
"With the exception of the woman from the steerage, all our patients had
a good night," the _Roland's_ doctor said, and went on to give a report
of each case. It was not until he had nearly ended his account that he
noticed the difficulty Frederick was having to explain his surroundings.
Wilhelm laughed and recalled some incidents. Frederick started up and
clapped his hands to his temples.
"A void," he exclaimed. "A whirl of impossible things is going round in
my brain."
Shortly after, he was sitting at breakfast with Doctor Wilhelm, eating
and drinking. And yet not a word was said of the sinking of the _Roland_.
Ingigerd Hahlström had awakened and fallen asleep again. The barber and
sailor-nurse, Flitte by name, had locked her door. Arthur Stoss was still
lying abed with his door open and was cracking jokes in the best of
spirits, while his trusty valet, Bulke, fed him or handed him food to
take with his feet. From the ring of his falsetto voice one would have
judged that the horrors he had survived were nothing but a series of
comic situations.
"This business," he said, leaving his original subject and dropping a few
highly flavoured oaths, "is going to cost me one thousand American
dollars. I shall not be able to keep the first days of my engagement in
New York." In good English he cursed the whole German Hansa, especially
the _Hamburg_. "The wretched little herring keg! At the utmost it doesn't
make more than ten knots an hour."
Fourteen hours of peaceful sleep brought the painter, Jacob Fleischmann
of Fürth to his senses. He had his breakfast served in bed, rang the
call-bell, gave orders, and kept the steward dancing attendance on him.
The others could hear him loudly reiterate again and again that though
the loss of his oil-paintings, sketches, and etchings, which he had
intended to sell in America, was irreparable and beyond compensation, yet
the steamship company was unquestionably liable, and as soon as he
reached New York, he would take to haunting the company's office, until
they paid him full damages. They were to find out who and what he was.
Rosa, happy and eager, though with eyes red from crying, passed to and
fro between her mistress's cabin and the dining-room table, carrying now
one thing, now another, to Mrs. Liebling, who was still whining
reproachfully. It had been agreed to keep Siegfried Liebling's death a
secret from her, an easy thing to do since she had declared she was not
yet strong enough to see the children. Yet it was remarkable how the dead
woman had revived. When Frederick after breakfast paid her a professional
visit, he found she had only a dim recollection of having been
unconscious. She had had glorious dreams, she said, and when she realised
she was to be awakened, had felt so regretful that she tried to resist
the summons back to earthly life, back from the wondrous isle, the
veritable paradise, in which she had been.
Mrs. Liebling was beautiful. She complained of pains, and at Frederick's
bidding bared her body. He found it marked with blue spots, the result of
the rough tossings in the life-boat, which had left him, too, bruised and
wounded in various places and with frozen toes and fingers.
"My dear Mrs. Liebling," he said, "put up with your slight discomfort. We
were all dead, and we have undeservedly been granted a second life."
Shortly before ten o'clock, Captain Butor entered the dining-room, shook
hands with the gentlemen, asked how they had slept, and told them that
all night the men on the bridge had redoubled their vigilance on the
chance of discovering more survivors of the _Roland_. Since the wind was
still from the northwest, it was possible that the _Hamburg_ might chance
on the wreck, in case it had not sunk.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "we did sight a derelict at one o'clock,
but there were absolutely no persons aboard. It was an older wreck and a
sailing vessel, not a steamer."
"Perhaps it was the _Roland's_ murderer," said Doctor Wilhelm.
The captain asked the two physicians to come to the chart-room where they
and the sailors of the _Roland_, who were already awaiting him, were to
give him the vouchers he needed for his brief report to be submitted to
his company's agent in New York in regard to the picking up of the
castaways. A sort of audience was held, during which nothing new
concerning the tremendous disaster was revealed.
Pander showed the scrap of paper with the pencilled message that
Captain von Kessel had asked him to take to his sisters. All were greatly
moved on reading the few hastily scrawled words. The incident revealed
what a wrench the hearts and nerves of even the seamen had undergone. At
the mention of this or that person or incident, Pander and the three
sailors burst into hysterical tears. When asked whether they thought the
_Roland_ would remain above water over the day, all said "No." One of the
sailors, who from the first warning of danger to the boarding of the
_Hamburg_, had gone about his heavy duty with the same grit, the same
matter-of-course manner, scarcely uttering a word, concluded each of his
statements with: "Captain, it was like on Judgment Day."
At the conclusion of the audience, Frederick felt a great need to be
alone for a while. "It was like on Judgment Day," followed him. Yes, it
was like on Judgment Day! The horrors of the cruellest judgment could not
exceed those amid which the victims of the shipwreck had perished.
Strange, the evening before, Frederick had still been able to laugh;
to-day he felt as if the gravity of his being were turned to brass and
had laid itself about him, not like an iron mask, not like a leaden
cloak, but rather like a heavy metal sarcophagus.
He knew a man, an architect verging on middle age, who had been on the
island of Ischia during the last great earthquake there. The architect
and some very dear friends were sitting together over a bottle of wine
when the calamity was ushered in by the roll of subterranean thunder. A
moment later the ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up
five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life. He
himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed. Though years
intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter
how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there
was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head
and crushing him. Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror
would seize him. Open places made him dizzy, and not infrequently a
passerby seeing his helplessness would lead him like a blind man across
the city square.
Frederick felt that the sinking of the _Roland_ had left him with a
gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the
spaces of his soul. With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when
something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated
the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.
Why had the powers revealed Judgment Day to him, not as a vision, but as
an actuality? Why had they showed such partiality as to let him and a few
others escape perdition? Was he, the tiny ant, which was susceptible of
such titanic terrors, important enough to assume the guidance of things
for himself, to fulfil a loftier purpose for good or evil? Had he
transgressed? Was he deserving of punishment? But that wholesale massacre
was too fearful, too vast a thing! It was ridiculous to attribute to it a
pedagogic purpose for the discipline of one minute human existence.
Indeed, he felt how the large generalness of the event had almost
entirely dislodged everything personal. No! Nothing but blind, deaf
and dumb powers of destruction had been at work.
Yet, in facing the elemental tragedy of the human race, the inexorable
gruesomeness of the powers, in looking into the eyes of death, he had
acquired knowledge that turned something in his being into the hardness
of the hardest rock. What was the sense of such a disaster if the eternal
goodness ordained it? And where was the power of eternal goodness, if it
was incapable of hindering it? Nothing remained but to strip oneself bare
of all pride and dignity and grovel in the dust before the great unknown,
a humble, will-less slave, completely at its mercy.