“Why are we standing still?”

Frederick wiped the lather from his face and, along with a multitude of questioning, groping, staggering persons, thrown now against one wall of the gangway, now against the other, hastened to make his way on deck.

“We are drifting,” everybody said.

“The screw is broken.”

“Cyclone!”

“Oh,” said a young girl, who had dragged herself up in a dressing-gown, to Frederick, “I don’t care about myself, not a bit, but my poor mother, my poor mother in Stuttgart.”

“What’s the matter?  What’s the matter?” twenty voices at the same time demanded of a steward, who was attending to his duties.  He ran away, shrugging his shoulders.

Since the passengers, huddled like sheep, blocked the way to the deck at the head of the companionway, Frederick tried to get out by another way, leading a long distance through the after part of the vessel and then through a narrow corridor forward again.  He walked rapidly and seemed outwardly composed, though in a state of unusual tensity, even fear.

In the second cabin Frederick’s way was barred by a good-looking young man standing in front of his cabin barefoot, in his shirt sleeves and trousers.  He was attempting to button his collar; but in his excitement was not succeeding.

“What’s the matter?” he shouted to Frederick.  “Is everybody in this cursed hole crazy?  The first thing you know a stoker dies, and now there is a leak, or the screw is broken.  What’s the matter with the captain?  I am an officer.  I must be in San Francisco on the twenty-fifth of February, without fail.  If it keeps on this way, I’ll be in a fix.”

Frederick wanted to hurry by, but the man got in his way.

“I am an officer,” he said.  “My name is Von Klinkhammer.”  Frederick also gave his name.  “That’s what comes of having priests on board,” the young man continued, twirling the end of his moustache upward, Prussian fashion.  “If there’s no help for it, then the fellows ought simply to be chucked overboard.  What is the captain thinking of?” he kept shouting, while an unexpected lurch of the vessel sent him plunging against the wall almost back into his cabin.  “I didn’t leave the service and give up a career and board this damned—­”

But Frederick had run away.  Now deep, intense silence prevailed throughout the vessel, which was like a dead thing; a silence, in which every now and then a step or a hasty tread on the heavy carpet in the gangway was audible.  Through the thin walls came the dull, confused murmur of many voices.  Doors banged, and when they opened, brief, broken sounds penetrated from the cabins, evidence of the bewilderment and alarm of their tenants.  The thing that was particularly weird to Frederick in that swaying corridor, creaking like a new boot and lighted by electricity, was the incessant ringing of electric bells.  In a hundred cabins at the same time, frightened persons, who had paid dear for their passage and were entitled to excellent service, were pressing the buttons.  None of them was inclined to recognise the force majeure of the Atlantic Ocean, the cyclone, the breaking of the screw, or any other possible accident.  They thought that by ringing the bells they would be giving expression to the irresistible demand for a responsible rescuer to bring them safely to dry land.