The tone in the smoking-room was that of jolly carousals in German Bierstuben.  The men let themselves go, talked in loud voices, and gave rein to that coarse humour and noisy gaiety in which time flies for them and which to many of them is a sort of narcotic, giving them rest and ease for a while from the mad chase of existence.  Neither Frederick nor Doctor Wilhelm was averse to this tone, which revived old memories of their student days, when they had become accustomed to it.  Though to the average student the carousals, now taboo, may be an evil, physically and intellectually, they are the time and place, nevertheless, at which the phoenix of German idealism soars up from tobacco smoke and beer froth to wing its flight to the sun.

Hans Fuellenberg soon felt bored in the company of the two physicians who, in fact, had completely forgotten him; and he slipped away, back to his lady.

“When Germans meet,” he said to her, “they must scream and drink Bruederschaft until they get tipsy.”

Doctor Wilhelm seemed to be proud of the smoking-room.

“The captain,” he said, “is very strict about not having the gentlemen disturbed.  He has given absolute orders that women under no circumstances, not even if they smoke, are to be permitted here.”

The room had two metal doors, one on the starboard and one on the port side.  The person entering or leaving had to contend violently with the wind and the motion of the vessel.  The stewards had mastered the art perfectly.  Shortly before eleven o’clock, Captain von Kessel appeared.  It was his custom to visit the room at about this time every day.  After giving friendly or curt answers, as the case might be, to the usual questions regarding the weather and the prospects for a good or bad crossing, he seated himself at the same table as the physicians.

“A seaman was lost in you,” he said to Frederick.

“I think you must be mistaken,” Frederick rejoined.  “I have had quite enough of a salt water sousing.  I assure you, I am not longing for another.”

A few hours before, a pilot-boat from the French coast had brought the latest news, which the captain proceeded to recount in a calm, quiet manner.

“A vessel of the Hamburg-American line, a twin-screw steamer, the Nordmania, running for only a year, had a mishap about six hundred miles out from New York.  It turned back and reached Hoboken safely.  The sea was comparatively calm, but all of a sudden a waterspout arose close to the ship, and a great mass of water burst over the ladies’ saloon, crushing through its roof and the roof of the deck below and hurling a piano down into the very hold.”

The other piece of news he told was that Schweninger was in Friedrichsruh with Bismarck and that Bismarck’s death was being expected hourly.  Though both Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick von Kammacher disapproved of Bismarck’s exceptional anti-Socialist law and its consequences, they were filled with hero worship of the man, Doctor Wilhelm the more so, since the home of his childhood stood on the edge of Sachsenwald, scarcely an hour’s ride from Friedrichsruh.  He was choke-full, of course, of local Bismarck anecdotes and began to reel them off.