Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must forget the murderous in those watery transitional realms—man, that insect-like being whose sense organs and intellect are capacitated for the knowledge of his vast isolation in the world, but for nothing beyond that knowledge.
Sailing vessels passed one another, steamers blew their whistles, flocks of gulls swooped down on the water for fish, or darted hither and thither in the fresh breeze. Another great ocean greyhound, of the Hamburg-American line, neared them at Norton Point. The huge structure was propelled forward quietly and surely, as by some mysterious force. The gong summoning the passengers from the promenade deck to the dining-room could be distinctly heard.
"At this moment," said Frederick, drawing his watch from his pocket, "it is quarter of six in Europe, and still dark."
Captain Butor exchanged flag signals with the quarantine station. The Hamburt came to a standstill to receive health officers on board. After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which the physicians were called upon to give detailed information, the sick woman from the steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling's consent, Siegfried's corpse were taken from the Hamburt. Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in her cabin and was spared the too painful scene. Within half an hour, the gallant Hamburt was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the magnificent Upper Bay.
Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation. Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts. From the distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic. She seemed to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.
"Liberty!" The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic or promise.
LX
And now, suddenly, the world seemed to Frederick to have gone mad. The Hamburt was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless grotesquely shaped ferry-boats. The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic. In that crater of life civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes and whirls. Here is a colony of white ants, whose activity is staggering, bewildering, stupefying. It seemed inconceivable that in that intricate, raging chaos, a single minute could pass without a collision, or a collapse, or a killing. How could one possibly pursue one's own affairs quietly amid that shrieking, that hammering, that clanging, that mad uproar?
During these last moments together, the involuntary passengers of the Hamburt had become as one in heart and soul. Frederick had not lost his cash in the disaster, and he persuaded Ingigerd Hahlström not to reject his services during her first days on land. All agreed not to lose sight of one another in New York. Naturally enough, there had been much lively, genuinely heartfelt leave-taking and well-wishing for more than an hour before the Hamburt was secured to the dock.