Though Frederick's and Doctor Wilhelm's spirits rose visibly, they never referred to the sinking of the Roland. It was too tremendous a thing, too dreadful, too near for any of the survivors, except the sailors, to speak of it without intense emotion. It was like a dull weight on their souls. Whatever Wilhelm and Frederick said related merely to their difficulties in the life-boat, or to the trip on the Roland before it overstepped that moment in eternity which determined its awful fate.
"Captain," said Frederick, "you don't know how astonishing it is to be raised from the dead. Conceive a man who has taken definite leave of everything that was dear to him in life, who has felt the rattle in his throat, and received extreme unction, and death, death itself, has settled on his flesh and limbs. I still feel death in my joints. And yet I am sitting here in safety, in the pleasant lamplight, almost as in a circle of friends and relatives. I am sitting in the cosiest home, with the difference that I still cannot get myself to look upon you"—they were the captain, the engineer, the boatswain, and the first mate—"as something so insignificant as mere men."
"When we sighted the Hamburt", said Wilhelm, "I had just made my last will and testament. You see I don't give myself up for lost as quickly as my friend, Doctor von Kammacher. When your ship gradually grew from the size of a pinhead to the size of a full-grown pea, all of us who could, screamed at the top of our voices. We nearly burst our throats screaming. And when your Hamburt attained the size of a walnut, and we realised we had been sighted, your ship flamed in my eyes like a huge diamond or ruby, and to me the east from which you came shone more brilliantly than the west, where the sun was still shining above the horizon. All of us howled like watch-dogs."
"It will always be a miracle to me," Frederick resumed, "that such an evening as this could follow such a morning. I have let days slip past, by the hundreds, holding no more in them than minutes. But in this one day, a whole summer has passed, and a whole winter. I feel as if the first violet had followed directly upon the first snow."
Wilhelm told of how excited the sailors had been in Cuxhaven because Catholic priests had boarded the Roland. Then he mentioned a dream his old mother had had the night before he was to sail. A child of hers that had been born many years before and had lived only a day, appeared to her as a grown-up man and warned her not to let him make the trip.
"She begged me not to go," he said, "but, as I am an enlightened man, I simply laughed at her for her fears."
Once launched upon the boundless sea of superstition, beloved by sailors, the men went on to recite cases they knew of prophetic dreams, of forebodings fulfilled, and the appearance of dying or dead men. This suggested his friend's last letter to Frederick. He drew his portfolio from his waistcoat pocket, where it had remained throughout his perilous trip, and passed the letter around.
They read the passage, "In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend to make an ocean trip?" Of course, it excited not a little astonishment, and it was with some thrills that they read: "Should it be possible for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond, you will hear from me again."
Captain Butor asked with an incredulous smile, yet eagerly, whether his friend had indeed made himself noticeable from the Beyond.
"This is what happened to me in a dream. Judge for yourselves. I don't know," said Frederick, in a voice still hoarse and barking. It was unlike him to go on and relate, as he did, the dream that had been greatly occupying his thoughts, which began with the landing in a mystic port and ended with the Toilers of the Light. He described his friend, Peter Schmidt, and declared that Peter had sent his astral self half way across the Atlantic to greet him. He spoke of 1492, of Columbus's flag-ship, the Santa Maria, but chiefly of his meeting with Rasmussen in the form of an old chandler, giving a detailed description of the remarkable ship in the shop window, the shop itself, and the chirping of the goldfinches. He drew out his note-book and read aloud what the mysterious chandler had said to him: