The close companionship with his fellow-passengers on the small steamer, the compulsion he was under to listen to their jokes and to the superficial, reiterated tale of the disaster made Frederick inwardly impatient.  Unlike the others, he had not yet recovered his old relation to life.  His soul was numbed.  He had lost his feeling for the past, his feeling for the future, even his passion for Ingigerd.  The moment of the catastrophe seemed to have snapped all the threads that bound him to the events, men, and things of his former life.  Whenever he looked upon Ingigerd, he felt an oppressive consciousness of responsibility.  In these days it almost seemed as if the girl in her predominatingly soft, serious mood were awaiting the declaration of his love.

“You all want to have fun with me,” she once said, “but nobody wants anything serious of me.”

Frederick did not understand himself.  Hahlstroem was no longer living, Achleitner had had to pay the penalty of his undignified, dog-like love, and the girl, shaken and refined to the depths of her being, was wax in his hands.  Often he would look at her to find that her eyes had been fixed upon him in a long, grave, meditative gaze.  Then he would seem to himself a very sorry sort of person, and was compelled to admit that he who had once wished to overwhelm the girl with the infinite riches of a passionately loving soul, was a bankrupt, groping with empty hands in empty pockets.  He ought to speak, ought to open the sluices on the other side of which the flood of his passionate love must have gathered and risen high; but all the waters had trickled away, all the sources had dried up.  To mask the aridity of his soul, he adopted his old method of a curt, dictatorial manner.

LVIII

It was the fifth of February, about thirteen days after the Roland had left Bremen, and twelve after Frederick had boarded the Roland at the Needles in the Channel, when the pilot took the guidance of the Hamburg.  Compared with the length of the Fuerst Bismarck’s record-making passage, this was an extremely long time.  But how inconceivably brief it seemed to him when he recalled all he had experienced in that period, both in his waking and sleeping hours.  On the Hamburg, he no longer dreamed at night.  A mighty blast had swept his soul clean and denuded it of all images.

Shortly before ten o’clock in the morning of the sixth of February, Captain Butor, standing back of Ella Liebling, who was sitting under the telescope merrily kicking her thin legs, spied land.  It was a tremendously stirring moment when the news was carried to the passengers.  The steward that called it into Frederick’s cabin and the next instant disappeared little realised how his brief announcement, “Land!” affected the stranger.  Frederick closed the door, shaken by great, hollow, toneless sobs coming from the depths of his being.