"I should be very glad if you were to, Doctor von Kammacher."
The stately couple attracted much attention from passers-by. Frederick was tall and rather broad and carried himself well, and his hair and beard may have gone rather too long without the application of the shears. Eva Burns was almost as tall. She was a brunette, suggesting in her face and figure, which bore no resemblance to the wasp-like figures of the American women, a race and type more in accordance with the Titian ideal of feminine beauty.
"Would you mind waiting here a minute?" Frederick asked. "You see those people over there getting into the car? Some of them God in his inscrutable ways destined to be fellow-passengers of mine on the Roland, the others my rescuers. I should not like to meet them again." When the little company was safely aboard the car on the way to Brooklyn, he said: "I am profoundly grateful—" and stopped.
"Because you were rescued from those men in the car?" Miss Burns laughed.
"No. Because I met you, and you rescued me from them. I admit I am ungrateful. There's that captain—when I saw his ship come steaming toward us from across the waters and saw him standing on the bridge, he seemed to me to be an instrument of God, if not an archangel. Awe-inspiring repose, solemn, awe-inspiring grandeur rested upon him. He was not a man, he was the man, the saviour man, and beside him there was none. My soul, all of our souls, clamoured for him, worshipped him. But here he has dwindled into nothing but a good, commonplace little workman. On the trip, Stoss's liveliness was a relief. Now, in the treadmill of his daily occupation, he has turned from the finer thoughts of his leisure moments. Duty, while deepening Captain Butor and temporarily converting him into a useful, even an important personage, acts as a leveller on Stoss. Stoss merely seemed to partake in the life on the sea, while in actuality concerned with nothing but himself. And there's my colleague, the ship's surgeon. I was completely upset to find what an empty vessel he is. I really thought he was more interesting." As if sluices in his being had been opened wide, Frederick began to speak freely of the shipwreck, to which he had never before more than merely alluded.
"What particularly frightened me to-day was the fact that a man can, as it were, digest an oak-tree twice within less than forty-eight hours. I keep discovering myself in the act of doubting the wreck of that giant steamer, every corner of which was familiar to me. I saw something, but I am so infinitely remote from it that I still cannot grasp it. I am only just beginning to feel the ship coming to life in my soul. Four or five times within the past twenty-four hours, I experienced the whole accident over again. Last night I started up actually bathed in cold sweat, and did not know where I was. The confusion on board, the tooting of the distress signals, the bloody, distorted faces, the floating human limbs, all was so frightfully appalling. If I keep on seeing such visions, I'll go down with the Roland again.
"It may be morbid to feel as I do. A man in my condition may say to himself, 'Go down and stay down, if once you have sunk.' But those people who got into the car do not even say that, Miss Burns. The whole thing has gone down for them once for all. They have digested the whole of the Roland and everything that happened to the hundreds of human beings it was carrying. They have digested the whole affair and almost forgotten it. That ability of theirs, enviable though it may be, insults my general humanitarian instincts. It is loathsome to me. And their clumsy phrases revealing the indifference, the obtuseness of their souls make me shudder. In their eyes I see that calm selfish sense of their own security to the damage of another person's security which is at the bottom of a murderous madness that I myself experienced. Those men are cold men, they are murderous men. And a brutal state of self-defence but slightly veiled and suppressed is their permanent state."
"Your friends, it seems to me, must have behaved very badly," Miss Burns said, laughing.
To this Frederick could not truthfully assent. He merely repeated:
"The way I feel about it is that they have taken the ship between their teeth, the ship with all its timber and iron and its immense human cargo, and chewed it to a pulp, and swallowed it down without leaving a trace behind." He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.