At the conclusion of the audience, Frederick felt a great need to be alone for a while. "It was like on Judgment Day," followed him. Yes, it was like on Judgment Day! The horrors of the cruellest judgment could not exceed those amid which the victims of the shipwreck had perished. Strange, the evening before, Frederick had still been able to laugh; to-day he felt as if the gravity of his being were turned to brass and had laid itself about him, not like an iron mask, not like a leaden cloak, but rather like a heavy metal sarcophagus.
He knew a man, an architect verging on middle age, who had been on the island of Ischia during the last great earthquake there. The architect and some very dear friends were sitting together over a bottle of wine when the calamity was ushered in by the roll of subterranean thunder. A moment later the ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life. He himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed. Though years intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head and crushing him. Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror would seize him. Open places made him dizzy, and not infrequently a passerby seeing his helplessness would lead him like a blind man across the city square.
Frederick felt that the sinking of the Roland had left him with a gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the spaces of his soul. With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.
Why had the powers revealed Judgment Day to him, not as a vision, but as an actuality? Why had they showed such partiality as to let him and a few others escape perdition? Was he, the tiny ant, which was susceptible of such titanic terrors, important enough to assume the guidance of things for himself, to fulfil a loftier purpose for good or evil? Had he transgressed? Was he deserving of punishment? But that wholesale massacre was too fearful, too vast a thing! It was ridiculous to attribute to it a pedagogic purpose for the discipline of one minute human existence. Indeed, he felt how the large generalness of the event had almost entirely dislodged everything personal. No! Nothing but blind, deaf and dumb powers of destruction had been at work.
Yet, in facing the elemental tragedy of the human race, the inexorable gruesomeness of the powers, in looking into the eyes of death, he had acquired knowledge that turned something in his being into the hardness of the hardest rock. What was the sense of such a disaster if the eternal goodness ordained it? And where was the power of eternal goodness, if it was incapable of hindering it? Nothing remained but to strip oneself bare of all pride and dignity and grovel in the dust before the great unknown, a humble, will-less slave, completely at its mercy.
LIII
While on the Roland, time had crawled at a snail's pace, the hour hand of the clock on the Hamburt travelled twice around its face with surprising rapidity. During that interval, the two ladies remained in bed, though the weather, which was clear and moderate, permitted being on deck. In Mrs. Liebling the consequences of the strain manifested themselves in periodic attacks of great excitement and fear accompanied by violent palpitation; in Ingigerd Hahlström, in healthy sleepiness, which made the administration of morphine in her case unnecessary. Neither of the women developed fever. But the sailor whose feet were frozen and the woman from the steerage had a high temperature. The immigrant in her delirium wanted to jump from bed, and, at the physicians' request, Captain Butor appointed one of the well sailors from the Roland and a sailor from the Hamburt to relieve each other in keeping constant watch over her.
Each time Frederick went to look after the poor creature, he felt himself assailed by the temptation to save her forever from the moment of awakening. From her own lips, while she had still been conscious, he had heard of all the relatives she had probably lost on the Roland, her husband, three sons, and a daughter-ranging from seven to eighteen years of age—a sister and her mother. At first her fevered fancy occupied itself with the shipwreck, her husband, children, and sisters. Later she seemed to become a child again, reliving her life in her parents' home. Swallows' nests, a cow, a goat, a meadow, in which there was a haystack roofed to keep off the rain, figured as important things.
"Would that she passed away in those illusions!" thought Frederick.