Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.
At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.
Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught with large significance as it was laconic, turned on the electric light. Frederick jumped to a sitting posture, and was annoyed by the water from the leaky pipe, which ran now from one side of the room to the other, as the vessel lurched. At first he was uncertain whether the word he had heard had really been pronounced, or whether it was an illusion of his unstrung nerves. Every night he had been torn with a jerk of his nerves from his restless dozing, only to find that the cause had been a delusive fall or a delusive cry. But now, when he distinctly heard the stewards rapping at the other cabin doors, heard the doors open, and heard the word, "Danger," repeated several times, a sensation came over him that produced a most remarkable change in his condition.
"Very well," he said softly; and, as if he had been summoned to a game that did not concern him, he carefully put on his heavy overcoat, and stepped out into the gangway.
Here there was not a soul.
"Very well," he had been thinking, "the invisible powers, whose playthings we human beings are, will now completely expose their supreme brutality."
He had not been awakened from sleep; he had been awakened and brought to his sober reason from beneath a hundred strata of dreams and sleep. Now, in that empty corridor, it again seemed to him to be a fantastic illusion of his disordered brain; and he was about to return to his cabin, when he noticed for the first time that the rhythm of the engines and the churning of the screw were neither to be heard nor felt. Suddenly he thought the great vessel was drifting in the ocean abandoned by passengers and crew, and he alone had been left behind from the general rescue. But a passenger in a silk dressing-gown reeled by, whom Frederick could question.
"What's the matter, do you know?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," said the man. "I've only been looking for my steward. I'm thirsty. I want a glass of lemonade." He staggered past Frederick into his cabin.
"Ass!" Frederick mentally exclaimed, disgusted with himself for what he again believed was his illusion. Yet the silence weighed upon him dreadfully. Seized by a wild instinct, he could not help but suddenly rush forward, merely to be on deck.
Somebody came toward him from the opposite direction, and asked him where he was going.
"Get out of my way," said Frederick. "It's none of your business."
But the hideous, half-dressed, corpse-like creature, besmirched by the traces of seasickness, would not make way.
"Are the stewards here all crazy?" he cried.
Hard by Frederick's ear an electric bell began to hammer noisily, and the next moment the tottering phantom that barred his way was multiplied by ten, twenty, a host of similar phantoms.
"What's the matter! What's the matter! We're sinking!"
"Steward! Steward!" a voice commanded; and another, "Captain! Captain!"
"Wretched service!" a man scolded in a voice that broke. "No stewards about. What do they mean by it?" The call bells began to rage.
Frederick turned, and ran down the endless corridor to the after part of the vessel. Nobody intercepted him. He passed the windows of the engine-room. The cylinders and pistons were not stirring. From the depths of the ship, from the boilers and furnaces, a sound of rushing, splashing water penetrated above the creaking and grinding of the walls.
"Did a boiler burst?" Frederick thought, forgetting that there would have been the report of an explosion and the hiss of escaping steam.
But he hastened on without stopping, past the post office, on his way through the second cabin to the stern. In his flight it occurred to him how happy he had been in Paris when at Cook's office they had told him that by great haste he could still make the Roland at Southampton. Why had he been in such a fever of impatience, in such dread of missing the boat and rushing into the open arms of doom? For there was no veiling the fact that something fearful had happened to the Roland.
At the door of the second cabin, he encountered the barber.
"The fires are out," said the barber. "A collision. The water is pouring into the hold below my shop."
The hammering of the bells never ceased. The barber was dragging two life-preservers.
"What do you need two for?" Frederick asked, and took one and sped on.