The _Hamburg_ had left behind the vast solitude of the ocean, broken only
at long intervals by single far-off ships, and was already making its way
through waters lively with a large number of steamers and sailing craft,
leaving, and making for, the port. Now the lighthouse at Sandy Hook was
visible.
Though Ingigerd as well as Frederick could not still the fluttering of
their shaken souls, they were fascinated by the changing pictures of the
entrance to the harbour. It was an amazing spectacle. Surprise followed
surprise. Each second brought a new sensation.
A gigantic White Star liner came gliding toward them slowly, to the
accompaniment of its brass band. It was starting out on the passage that
the _Hamburg_ was just concluding. Passengers swarmed like ants on the
majestic vessel's decks, giving an impression of gaiety and festivity.
What knew they of the thing awaiting them, perhaps, out there on the
ocean? When they looked down upon the little _Hamburg_, with its few
passengers on deck, they had not the least inkling of the greatness,
the fearfulness of the event of which those few puny persons were the
sole surviving witnesses.
The emotion that filled the _Roland's_ passengers with restlessness and
excited them as with fire and tears when the _Hamburg_ entered New York
Harbour and steamed up through the Lower Bay toward the Narrows, was
both a farewell to home and to the dangers of the sea and a greeting to
solid land, to a stable human civilisation. This was the known, the
usual, the mother's lap from which they had sprung and in which they had
grown until the time came for them to start out upon their spiritual
life's journey. It was also that without which the individual even to-day
is helpless against the powers of nature.
Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar
dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after
having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out
there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of
solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains
unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his
heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must forget the murderous in
those watery transitional realms--man, that insect-like being whose sense
organs and intellect are capacitated for the knowledge of his vast
isolation in the world, but for nothing beyond that knowledge.
Sailing vessels passed one another, steamers blew their whistles,
flocks of gulls swooped down on the water for fish, or darted hither
and thither in the fresh breeze. Another great ocean greyhound, of the
Hamburg-American line, neared them at Norton Point. The huge structure
was propelled forward quietly and surely, as by some mysterious force.
The gong summoning the passengers from the promenade deck to the
dining-room could be distinctly heard.
"At this moment," said Frederick, drawing his watch from his pocket, "it
is quarter of six in Europe, and still dark."
Captain Butor exchanged flag signals with the quarantine station. The
_Hamburg_ came to a standstill to receive health officers on board. After
prolonged negotiations, in the course of which the physicians were
called upon to give detailed information, the sick woman from the
steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling's consent, Siegfried's corpse were taken
from the _Hamburg_. Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in
her cabin and was spared the too painful scene. Within half an hour, the
gallant _Hamburg_ was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the
magnificent Upper Bay.
Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with
spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation.
Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water
on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts. From the
distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic. She seemed
to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the
present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the
strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.
"Liberty!" The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic
or promise.