Long after Stoss had been led away by his valet and tucked in bed for his afternoon nap, Frederick still remained in the unfrequented smoking-room.  The place made an uncanny impression.  Yet its very gloominess insured privacy; and in the gravity of the situation he had need to be by himself.  He began, perhaps prematurely, to consider the worst eventuality.  He thought it might be well to stand in readiness.  Around the walls ran a bench upholstered in leather.  Kneeling on it, he could look through the port-holes out upon the mighty uproar of the waters.  In that position, watching the waves beat with inconceivable persistency against the desperately struggling vessel, he let his life pass in review before his mind’s eye.

Grey gloom was closing down on him.  After all, he felt that he yearned for life and was far from being as ready to die as he had occasionally supposed.  Something akin to regret came over him.  “Why am I here?  Why did I not stop to consider and summon all my rational will power to keep me from this senseless trip?  For all I care, let me die; but not here, not in a desert of water far from mother earth, immeasurably far from the great community of men.  This seems to me a particularly awful curse.  Men on solid land, in their own homes, men among men, have not the least notion of it.”  What was Ingigerd to him now?  A matter of indifference.  Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern for himself.  What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on some shore!  Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness.  How extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street!  He gnashed his teeth.  Of what avail a cry for help here?  How could a man find God’s ear here?  If the extreme thing were to happen, and the Roland with its mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being happy again.

“I would not witness it,” thought Frederick.  “I would jump overboard to avoid the sight of it.  And while that would be happening, none of my friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all.  ’The steamship Roland sunk’ appears as a head-line in the newspapers.  ‘Oh!’ says the reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam.  He takes a sip of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated.  What a hurrah for the newspaper publishers!  A sensation!  More readers!  That is the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine value of a cargo of human lives is in the world.”