"One has to keep going," said the barber. "If you don't work, you're lost."
He spoke and suddenly stopped, removed the razor from Frederick's throat and turned pale, if his dirty grey colour could turn a shade lighter. Frederick's face, too, still partly covered with lather, showed signs of surprise and alarm. In the engine-room the signal bell had rung loud, as a sign that the captain was sending an order down from the bridge through the speaking-tube. Thereupon the revolution of the engines had slowed down and within a few moments had ceased entirely. This event, simple enough in itself, had in this weather, about fifteen hundred miles from land, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the effect of a catastrophe, not only on Frederick and the barber, but on every passenger still capable of reasoning, and even on the whole crew. One instantly observed the excitement that seized upon all at the cessation of the engines, which seemed to turn the vessel into a torpid, powerless thing. Voices cried, women shrieked, steps hurried up and down the gangways. A man tore the door open and indignantly cried, as if imputing to the poor barber the responsibility of a captain:
"Why are we standing still?"
Frederick wiped the lather from his face and, along with a multitude of questioning, groping, staggering persons, thrown now against one wall of the gangway, now against the other, hastened to make his way on deck.
"We are drifting," everybody said.
"The screw is broken."
"Cyclone!"
"Oh," said a young girl, who had dragged herself up in a dressing-gown, to Frederick, "I don't care about myself, not a bit, but my poor mother, my poor mother in Stuttgart."
"What's the matter? What's the matter?" twenty voices at the same time demanded of a steward, who was attending to his duties. He ran away, shrugging his shoulders.
Since the passengers, huddled like sheep, blocked the way to the deck at the head of the companionway, Frederick tried to get out by another way, leading a long distance through the after part of the vessel and then through a narrow corridor forward again. He walked rapidly and seemed outwardly composed, though in a state of unusual tensity, even fear.