After dinner the two physicians went to Doctor Wilhelm's cabin, where they sat together discussing the resultant of modern civilisation.
"I very much fear, very much, indeed," said Frederick, "that our world-wide means of communication, which mankind is supposed to own, really own mankind. At least so far, I see no signs that the tremendous working capacity of machines has lessened human labour. Nobody will deny that our modern machine slavery, on so tremendous a scale, is the most imposing slavery that has ever existed. And there is no denying that it is slavery. Has this age of machinery subtracted from the sum of human misery? No, most emphatically, no! Has it enhanced happiness and increased the chances for happiness? No, again."
"That is why every three or four men of culture," said Doctor Wilhelm, "are disciples of Schopenhauer. Modern Buddhism is making rapid strides."
"Yes," said Frederick, "because we are living in a world all the time making a tremendous impression upon itself. As a result, it is getting to be more and more fearfully bored. The man of the intellectual middle class is gaining in prominence, while he is more mediocre than he has been in any previous age. At the same time he is glutted and more blasé. No form of idealism, no sort of genuinely great belief can hold its ground any longer."
"I admit," said Wilhelm, "that the great industrial corporation, civilisation, is parsimonious of everything except human lives and the best that is in the human being. It places no value upon them. It lets them rot. But I think there is one comfort. I think civilisation possesses this one good, that it breaks us away once for all with the worst savageries of the past. No inquisition, for instance, can ever be possible again."
"Are you sure of it?" asked Frederick. "Don't you think it is strange that alongside the greatest achievements of science, alongside Galileo, Kepler, Laplace; alongside the spectrum analysis and the law of the conservation of energy; alongside Kirchoff and Bunsen; alongside steam, gas, electricity, the blindest and most antiquated superstitions still survive, powerful as ever? I am not so certain that backsliding into the most horrible times of the Malleus maleficarum is impossible."
Doctor Wilhelm had rung for a steward, who now entered. Max Pander appeared at the same time.
"Doctor von Kammacher, I feel as if we must have some champagne. Adolph," turning to the steward, "a bottle of Pommery."
"They're making a big hole in the champagne cellar," said Adolph.
"Of course. The people are all celebrating their escape from drowning yesterday and day before yesterday."
Pander had come at the captain's order for the stoker's death certificate. The document was lying ready in the medicine closet. After Pander had left, Wilhelm told Frederick some remarkable incidents of the dead man.
"His name was Zickelmann. There was the beginning of a letter in his pocket. It was something like this: 'Dear mother, I have not seen you for sixteen years. I have forgotten how you look, dear mother. I am not doing well, but I must go to America to see you once again. It is very sad when a man has no relatives in the whole world. Dear mother, I just want to look at you, and I really won't be a burden to you.'"
The champagne appeared. Before long, the first bottle was replaced by the second.
"Don't be surprised if I am immoderate," said Frederick. "My nerves are in need of it to-day. I have to stupefy myself. Perhaps, with the help of this glorious medicine, I shall be able to sleep a few hours."
It was half past ten, and the physicians were still sitting together. The wine naturally produced a greater degree of intimacy between these two men, who were of the same profession and had already become fairly well acquainted with each other. It was very pleasant to Frederick to unbosom himself.
He said he had entered the world with too favourable a preconceived notion. In a spirit of idealism he had refused the military career for which his father had intended him, and had taken up the study of medicine, in the belief that he would thus be of most service to humanity. He had been deceived.
"The genuine gardener works for the garden full of healthy plants; but our work is devoted to a decaying vegetation sprung from diseased germs. That is why I took up the fight against mankind's awfullest enemy, the bacteria. I admit that the dreary, patient, laborious work, which bacteriology requires, did not satisfy me, either. I didn't possess the capacity to petrify, which is absolutely indispensable in an academic man. When I was sixteen years old, I wanted to become a painter. Over the dissecting table, I composed verses. The thing that I should now most like to be is a freelance writer. From all of which you can see," he concluded, laughing ironically, "that I have made rather a mess of my life."
Wilhelm refused to admit it.
"But I have," Frederick declared. "I am a genuine child of the times, and I am not ashamed of it. The greatest intellects of the day are all in a state of inner ferment. Every individual of significance is just as divided against himself as humanity on the whole. I refer, of course, only to the leading European races. I embody the Pope and Luther, William II and Robespierre, Bismarck and Bebel, the spirit of the American millionaire and the enthusiasm for poverty that was the glory of St. Francis of Assisi. I am the maddest progressive of my time and the maddest reactionary. I despise Americanism, and yet I see in the great American world-invasion, the dominion of the exploiter, something similar to one of the biggest works that Hercules performed in the Augean stables."
"Here's to chaos!" cried Wilhelm.
They touched glasses.
"Yes," said Frederick, "but only if it gives birth to a dancing heaven, or, at least, a dancing star."
"Beware of dancing stars," said Wilhelm, laughing and looking at Frederick significantly.
"What can a man do if his blood is on fire with that cursed poison?"
Under the influence of the champagne, the sudden confession seemed as natural to Wilhelm as to Frederick.
"'There once was a rat in a cellar hole,'" Wilhelm quoted.
"Of course, of course," said Frederick, "but what is to be done against it?" Then he turned the conversation to general questions again. "Why should a man keep himself intact when he has lost his ideals? I have made tabula rasa of my past. I have drowned Germany in the ocean. Is Germany really the great, strong, united Empire? Is it not rather the booty over which God and the devil—I was about to say the Kaiser and the Pope—are still wrangling? You will admit that for more than a thousand years, the unifying principle was the imperial principle. People talk of the Thirty Years' War as having disintegrated Germany. I should say it was the thousand years' war, of which the Thirty Years' War was only the worst excess, the worst paroxysm of that plague of religious dissension with which the Germans are inoculated. And without unity, Germany is a very queer structure. Its owners, or its inhabitants, don't possess it, except in a slight degree. And the believer with the tiara at Rome tugs and tugs at it, levying extortion under the threat of destroying the entire structure; until he is actually able to buy it back with the compound interest that has been accumulating. In that case nothing will be left but a heap of ruins. One could shriek and tear one's hair because the German does not see that in his basement there is an awful Bluebeard's chamber. And not for women alone. He has no inkling of what an arsenal of clerical instruments of torture lie there ready for use—clerical, because they lie ready for the infliction of horrible corporal martyrdom in the service of a bloody, fanatical, papistical belief. Woe, when the door to the Bluebeard chamber opens. They are continually picking at the lock. Then we shall witness all the sanguinary horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the degenerate slaughter-house cruelty of an inquisition."
"That's something we won't drink a toast to. Rather let us toast the healthy, cynically outspoken ideal of the American, the exploiter ideal, with its tolerance and levelling down."
"Yes, a thousand times rather," said Frederick.
So they drank a toast to America.
A second-cabin stewardess led in the Russian Jewess. The girl was holding a handkerchief to her nose and mouth. Her nose had been bleeding for an hour without cease.
"Oh," she said, retreating a step from the threshold back to the deck, "I am in the way." But Doctor Wilhelm insisted on her coming in.
It turned out that this was not the real mission on which the stewardess had come to see Doctor Wilhelm. She whispered a few words, unintelligible to the others, into his ear. He excused himself to Frederick, asked him to look after the Jewess, and left the cabin with the stewardess.