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.