“Poor fellow,” Frederick said aloud.  “Poor, stupid Achleitner!” He felt genuine, almost tender sympathy; and over him came all the woe of the deceived lover, as we can trace it from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer down to Buddha Gotama, whose pupil, Ananda, asks:  “Master, how shall we comport ourselves toward a woman?” Quoth the master:  “Avoid the sight of her, Ananda, because a woman’s being is hidden.  It is unfathomable as the way of the fish in the water.  To her, lying is as truth, and truth as lying.”

“Sst!  What are you doing here?” said Doctor Wilhelm, stepping up softly.  He was carrying something in his hands carefully wrapped up.

“Do you know who is lying here?” said Frederick.  “It is Achleitner.”

“He wanted to keep his eye on that cabin,” Wilhelm remarked cynically, “to limit the attendance.”

“We must wake him up.”

“Why?” said Wilhelm.  “Later, when we go to bed.”

“I am going to bed now.”

“Come to my cabin first for a moment.”

In his cabin the physician laid a human embryo on the table.

“She has attained her end,” he said, meaning the girl travelling second class, who in his opinion had taken the trip for no other purpose than to rid herself of her burden and avoid disgrace.  At the sight of the little object, Frederick did not know whether to be born or never to awaken to life was preferable.

He went out on deck again, aroused Achleitner, and led him to his cabin, resisting and mumbling incomprehensible words, though half asleep.  Then, in dread of the agonies of insomnia, he went to his own cabin.

XXXII

He fell asleep immediately, but when he awoke, it was only two o’clock.  The ship was still moving easily, and he could hear the screw working regularly under the water.  Life in times of great physical crises is a fever, which travelling and sleeplessness enhance.  Frederick well knew his own nature, and was alarmed when he saw himself robbed of the peace of sleep after so short a time.

But had his sleep actually meant peace?  Lying on his back with wide, staring eyes, he saw vast nocturnal spaces of his soul opened up, where in bottomless depths another chaotic life had been born—­a multitude of tormenting visions, in which things and persons most familiar had arisen in combination with things and persons entirely strange.  He tried to recall his dreams.

He had dreamed he was wandering hand in hand with Achleitner among the dark smoke widows trailing backward over the ocean from the funnels of the Roland, far, far away.  He and the Russian Jewess together with great difficulty dragged the dead stoker, Zickelmann, up into the blue ladies’ parlour; and by means of a serum, which he himself had discovered, he brought him back to life.  He smoothed over a quarrel between the Russian Jewess and Ingigerd Hahlstroem, who fought and called each other abusive names.  He was sitting with Doctor Wilhelm in his cabin, and, as Wagner once had done, was observing a homunculus still undergoing embryonic development in a glass sphere on which light was shining.  At the same time Ingigerd’s cockatoo was squawking in Arthur Stoss’s voice and continually asseverating: