The room had two metal doors, one on the starboard and one on the port side. The person entering or leaving had to contend violently with the wind and the motion of the vessel. The stewards had mastered the art perfectly. Shortly before eleven o'clock, Captain von Kessel appeared. It was his custom to visit the room at about this time every day. After giving friendly or curt answers, as the case might be, to the usual questions regarding the weather and the prospects for a good or bad crossing, he seated himself at the same table as the physicians.
"A seaman was lost in you," he said to Frederick.
"I think you must be mistaken," Frederick rejoined. "I have had quite enough of a salt water sousing. I assure you, I am not longing for another."
A few hours before, a pilot-boat from the French coast had brought the latest news, which the captain proceeded to recount in a calm, quiet manner.
"A vessel of the Hamburg-American line, a twin-screw steamer, the Nordmania, running for only a year, had a mishap about six hundred miles out from New York. It turned back and reached Hoboken safely. The sea was comparatively calm, but all of a sudden a waterspout arose close to the ship, and a great mass of water burst over the ladies' saloon, crushing through its roof and the roof of the deck below and hurling a piano down into the very hold."
The other piece of news he told was that Schweninger was in Friedrichsruh with Bismarck and that Bismarck's death was being expected hourly. Though both Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick von Kammacher disapproved of Bismarck's exceptional anti-Socialist law and its consequences, they were filled with hero worship of the man, Doctor Wilhelm the more so, since the home of his childhood stood on the edge of Sachsenwald, scarcely an hour's ride from Friedrichsruh. He was choke-full, of course, of local Bismarck anecdotes and began to reel them off.
"Are you annoyed?" Bismarck asked his barber, when he came in one day with his moustache twirled upward in the new fashion of the race tracks. "A moustache trimmed and twisted like that to me looks as if it were terribly annoyed and for no reason."
VII
The international gong had not been introduced on the Roland. The trumpeter of the band sent two blasts across the promenade deck and through the corridors of the first cabin as a signal for the midday meal. The first blast entered with the howling of the wind into the close, noisy, crowded smoking saloon. The attendant of the man without arms came to conduct his master across the deck again. Frederick watched the armless man with great interest. He seemed to be extraordinarily brisk and quick-witted. He spoke English, French and German with equal fluency, and to everybody's delight parried the impertinences of a saucy young American, whose disrespectfulness did not yield even before the sacred person of the captain; for which the dignified skipper sometimes rewarded him by staring over his head like a lion over a yapping terrier.