“Ugh!  Let me go, let me go, I say!”

“What have I done to you?” Frederick asked.  For a moment he was genuinely alarmed, scarcely knowing whether he had not been actually guilty of a wrong against her.  He had been drinking champagne and was excited.  If someone were to enter now, what would he think of him?  Even centuries before, had not Potiphar’s wife, from whom Joseph fled, resorted to certain successful slanderous means?  “What have I done?” he repeated.

“Nothing,” she said, “except what you are in the habit of doing.  You have insulted an unprotected girl.”

“Are you crazy?” he asked.

Suddenly she answered:  “I don’t know.”  And in that instant the hard, hateful expression of her face melted, turning into complete submission, a change that went irresistibly to the heart of a man like Frederick.  He forgot himself.  He was no longer master of his feelings.

XXXI

This strange incident of meeting, seeing, loving, and parting forever had passed swiftly as in a dream.  Since Wilhelm had not yet returned, Frederick, long after his visitor had fled, went out on deck, where the exalted impression of the starry heavens shining over the infinite expanse of the ocean, purified him, as it were.  He was neither by nature nor by habit a Don Juan, and it astonished him that the unusual, surprising adventure seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The deck was empty.  Another boy was on guard in Pander’s place.  The temperature had sunk to below freezing-point, and a thick coating of hoar-frost lay on the rigging.

As he stood leaning over the railing, he had a painful vision of the sum total of life and death within the eons of life on earth.  His innermost being smarted with the pain of it.  Death must have existed before the beginning.  Death and death!  That was the limit, he thought, of vast sums of trouble, hope, desire, enjoyment—­enjoyment which forthwith consumed itself to make way for renewed desire, for illusions of possession, for realities of loss, for anguish, for conflicts, for meetings and partings; all uncontrollable processes bound up with suffering and fresh suffering and suffering again.  It gave him some satisfaction to assume that now that the passage was so smooth, his Deborah and all her companions in suffering were probably lying wrapt in unconscious sleep, for a time relieved of the great madness of life.

While waiting for Doctor Wilhelm, absorbed in these reflections, Frederick involuntarily turned away from the edge of the deck, and became aware of a dark mass not far from the smoke-stack, cowering in a corner against the wall.  The thing looked strange to him.  On stepping closer he saw it was a man on the floor asleep, wrapped in his overcoat with his cap drawn over his eyes, his bearded head resting on a low camp-chair.  Frederick was convinced it was Achleitner.  Why was he lying there in the freezing cold instead of in bed?  Frederick found the right answer.  Not more than three paces away was the door of Ingigerd’s cabin; and he was the faithful dog in three senses, the watchdog, the Cerberus, the dog crazed with the rabies of jealousy.