He had turned out the electric lights, and in the dark, when the eye is unoccupied, one is doubly sensitive to the messages of hearing and feeling.  He caught every sound, felt every movement, of the mighty ship, steadily pursuing its course through the midnight.  He heard the churning of the propeller, like the labouring of a great demon condemned to slave for mankind.  He heard shouts and calls and the walking of men when the coal-passers threw overboard the cinders from the huge boiler furnaces.  On the trip to New York those furnaces consumed over a thousand tons of coal, and the casting away of the slag and ashes was left for the nighttime.  Thus, to the relief of the man wrestling with sleep, his attention was drawn to the present and the things taking place in the ship’s body.

Yet, when there was no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself.  Now that Ingigerd Hahlstroem had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote him all the more.  His whole mentality seemed to have entered a state of reaction against the poison of his passion.  A high fever raged in his veins.  The thing that in this condition represented his “I” was engaged in a wild chase after the “you” of Mara.  He picked her up in the streets of Prague and dragged her back to her mother.  He discovered her in houses of ill repute.  He saw her standing before the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window.  Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth.  The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.

Shortly after one o’clock, Frederick was tossed out of his berth.  This time it was not one of those dream-like visions that had roused him with a start from a doze.  The next instant he was thrown against the frame of the berth.  It was evident that the weather had grown worse and the Roland was travelling in heavier waters of the Atlantic.

XV

A few minutes after five o’clock Frederick was already on deck.  He seated himself on the same bench as yesterday, opposite the companionway leading down to the dining-room.  His steward, a sympathetic, indefatigable young man from the province of Magdeburg, brought him tea and toast.  It was a boon to Frederick.