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.

LIII

While on the Roland, time had crawled at a snail’s pace, the hour hand of the clock on the Hamburg travelled twice around its face with surprising rapidity.  During that interval, the two ladies remained in bed, though the weather, which was clear and moderate, permitted being on deck.  In Mrs. Liebling the consequences of the strain manifested themselves in periodic attacks of great excitement and fear accompanied by violent palpitation; in Ingigerd Hahlstroem, in healthy sleepiness, which made the administration of morphine in her case unnecessary.  Neither of the women developed fever.  But the sailor whose feet were frozen and the woman from the steerage had a high temperature.  The immigrant in her delirium wanted to jump from bed, and, at the physicians’ request, Captain Butor appointed one of the well sailors from the Roland and a sailor from the Hamburg to relieve each other in keeping constant watch over her.

Each time Frederick went to look after the poor creature, he felt himself assailed by the temptation to save her forever from the moment of awakening.  From her own lips, while she had still been conscious, he had heard of all the relatives she had probably lost on the Roland, her husband, three sons, and a daughter-ranging from seven to eighteen years of age—­a sister and her mother.  At first her fevered fancy occupied itself with the shipwreck, her husband, children, and sisters.  Later she seemed to become a child again, reliving her life in her parents’ home.  Swallows’ nests, a cow, a goat, a meadow, in which there was a haystack roofed to keep off the rain, figured as important things.