To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer.  Yet there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the Roland reached New York.

XLVI

Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest.  It was fearful.  Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed.  The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds.  Monday night was one prolonged agony.  Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.

At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, “Danger!” quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.

Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one word, “Danger.”  At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light.  Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as the vessel lurched.  At first he was uncertain whether the word he had heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his unstrung nerves.  Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive fall or a delusive cry.  But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the word, “Danger,” repeated several times, a sensation came over him that produced a most remarkable change in his condition.

“Very well,” he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and stepped out into the gangway.

Here there was not a soul.

“Very well,” he had been thinking, “the invisible powers, whose playthings we human beings are, will now completely expose their supreme brutality.”

He had not been awakened from sleep; he had been awakened and brought to his sober reason from beneath a hundred strata of dreams and sleep.  Now, in that empty corridor, it again seemed to him to be a fantastic illusion of his disordered brain; and he was about to return to his cabin, when he noticed for the first time that the rhythm of the engines and the churning of the screw were neither to be heard nor felt.  Suddenly he thought the great vessel was drifting in the ocean abandoned by passengers and crew, and he alone had been left behind from the general rescue.  But a passenger in a silk dressing-gown reeled by, whom Frederick could question.

“What’s the matter, do you know?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” said the man.  “I’ve only been looking for my steward.  I’m thirsty.  I want a glass of lemonade.”  He staggered past Frederick into his cabin.