“I am already a man of absolutely independent fortune.  I am touring simply to bring my fortune up to a certain amount.”

Under the impression that he was recalling these things to his memory, Frederick was really dreaming again.  Suddenly he started up, cuffing Hans Fuellenberg furiously and saying:  “I’ll box your ears.”  Shortly afterward he was in the smoking-room delivering a crushing sermon for the third or fourth time, morally felling to the ground the man who had desecrated his sacred relation to Ingigerd.  But the captain came in, and said they had to bury the stoker.  There was a dead man on board.  When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin.  It was not Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angele, his suffering, neglected wife, in one of her hysterical attacks in which she lay in a trance.  And it was not at the entrance to the smoking-room, but in Plassenberg in the Heuscheuer, in front of his comfortable house.  Captain von Kessel was standing in the garden clipping a privet hedge.  It was at night, but a full moon was shining bright as day over the lonely valley meadows in front of his house.  Angele arose and Frederick went to lead her into the house.  She resisted.  Now the consciousness of his spiritual separation from her filled him with infinite sadness, a sadness more bitter and profound than any that had ever inspired him in his waking moments.

“I am a mother,” said Angele, “but not by you.”

He embraced her, weeping, and wanted to draw her into his house.  She resisted gently, but firmly, and declared she was forbidden to enter.  He saw her wandering across the meadows in the moonshine, slowly and wearily.

“Angele!” he cried.  He ran after her.

“It is so hard for me,” she said, “because life and not death has robbed me of you.”

Frederick groaned aloud.  A great stone seemed to be lying on his breast.  He heard the rushing of waters.  He saw the flood come leaping through all the valleys, over the tops of all the hills, wave upon wave, from all sides.  The moon was shining.  He saw Angele climb to a little skiff lying moored somewhere; and the tide carried away the skiff with her in it.  The waters overwhelmed his house.

Again the wandering began, hand in hand with Achleitner and the smoke widows across the ocean desert.  Again began that difficult dragging up-stairs and down-stairs of the naked, dead stoker, with the help of the young admirer of Kropotkin.  The dispute between Ingigerd and Deborah, his sermonising of Fuellenberg and the man in the smoking-room repeated themselves, each repetition intensifying his torment.  The homunculus in the glass sphere in Doctor Wilhelm’s cabin appeared again.  It developed with light thrown on it.  In his anguish, in his impotence against that martyrising chase of visions, Frederick’s persecuted soul, gasping for peace, suddenly rose in revolt, and he said aloud: