XXI

Frederick, holding on to his hat with one hand and clinging to the railing with the other, descended from the windy heights of the captain’s cabin to the promenade deck.  When he passed the cabin of the first mate, the door opened, and Von Halm appeared in conversation with Achleitner.  Achleitner was pale, and there was an anxious look in his face.

“I have rented the lieutenant’s cabin for Miss Hahlstroem.  I could not bear to see her suffering so in her own cabin,” he called to Frederick.

The gale had increased.  Not a passenger was to be seen on deck.  Sailors were inspecting the life-boats.  Huge masses of water seethed against the ship’s side, cutting into its course obliquely.  The waves made a mad leap into the air, hung there for an instant in the form of white corals, and fell like a thousand lashes on the deck, which was all awash.  The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled.  Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck.  In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke.  But the fore-deck was so swept by the seas that nobody could keep his footing there, except the lookout men, who were holding watch at the beak of the vessel, not far from the cat-head.

Between the door leading to the main companionway and the companionway itself was a square level space, about which a railing ran and in which a few people could stay and enjoy the fresh air without being drenched.  When Frederick, on his way below deck, passed through the open door, he found a quiet assemblage of pale-faced passengers.  One chair was still unoccupied.  He seated himself in it, with the fanciful notion that he was joining a gathering of condemned men.

“That poor sinner there must be Professor Toussaint, the famous sculptor in need,” Frederick thought, judging so from the man’s slouched hat and great cape.  Now and then the man exchanged a few words with a person sitting next to him, who might be Geheimrat Lars.  Frederick had once met the Geheimrat at a dinner at the mayor’s house, but he had only a faded recollection of his appearance.  The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse.  Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other tall and thin.

The tall one was showing the other a section of a submarine cable and letting the hard piece, intricately braided of hemp, metal and gutta-percha, pass from hand to hand.  From his choppy, whispered sentences, the company learned that in 1877 he had worked as electrical engineer on a steamer laying a cable between Europe and the United States.  The work on the high seas had lasted without interruption for many months.  He had spent several months supervising the construction of the steamer itself in the yards, especially the riveting of its metal plates.  He spoke of what is called the cable plateau at the bottom of the ocean, stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland, a strip of grey sand so named because it supports the main transatlantic cable.