A moment later he was on deck, over the railing, and in the boat. The men wanted to put off. Frederick protested, and disputed loudly with the third mate, who in the meantime had entered the boat and was grasping the tiller.
He could not make up his mind to desert Wilke of the Heuscheuer, who had so courageously followed him below deck and had not yet reappeared. But now he saw him, literally sliding from the companionway entrance to the railing.
"Wilke! Wilke!" he shouted. "Jump into the boat!"
"Right away, right away," Wilke answered several times. Then he did something that Frederick tried to scold him out of doing, because it seemed so senseless and useless to everybody in the boat. He had discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be struggling desperately for their lives.
The boat did not wait for him. Under the third mate's command, the sailors began to row. The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than thirty yards from the Roland's side.
Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict, had bored the flank of the Roland, making a great gash near the engine-room. Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold. Frederick thought he could hear its greedy gulping. At the sight, for all the horror about him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior Roland, and with difficulty restrained an outcry. The fog closed in and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.
When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some incomprehensible way turned. The twenty persons in the boat looked down from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level with the water. They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in there, swarming like ants.
Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception. All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their way. Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots. Some of the life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark, swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape dropped off and fell into the sea.
Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view. But a sound, which Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the metallic clanging of the hurricane. For several seconds Frederick's thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in their passage. But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached his ears through the fog. It was the outcry of those human beings, who were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conception, that no human crime, he felt, could be great enough to justify such atonement. He distinctly felt how, through the excess of the hideous impression, the bridge carrying the message of his senses to his innermost soul snapped.
But suddenly the fever of the visible death struggle of eight or nine hundred innocent men after all did penetrate to his innermost soul, and wrung a cry from him, in which the whole boat load joined as by command. In that cry were fear, anguish, fury, protest, supplication, horror, wailing, cursing, and despair.
And the horror was increased by the consciousness that there was no merciful ear to listen, but only a deaf heaven. Wherever Frederick turned his eyes, he saw death. Indifferently the bottle-green, mountainous waves came rolling. In their march there was a murderous regularity, with which nothing interfered and which recognised no obstacles. He closed his eyes ready to die. Several times he felt for his parents' letters in his breast pocket, as if he needed them for passports to the land of darkness, where he was soon going. He dared not open his eyes again, because he could no longer bear to see the convulsions of the women in the boat or the hideous massacre on the stern of the Roland.
The sea raged. It was icy cold. The water froze on the edge of the boat. Rosa, the maid, was the only one that constantly bestirred herself to help others, the children, Mrs. Liebling, Ingigerd, and Arthur Stoss. Bulke and she vied with each other in bailing out the water in which Stoss and Mrs. Liebling were lying and which reached to the knees of the others.
What was in the meantime happening on the deck of the Roland, so far as Frederick caught momentary glimpses of it, did not fit in with his conception of human nature. The things he thought he saw in detail had nothing in common with those civilised, decorous ladies and gentlemen whom he had seen in the dining-room and on deck, promenading, conversing, smiling, exchanging greetings, and daintily dissecting the fish on their plates with forks. He could have sworn that he distinguished the white figure of a cook cutting his way, with a long knife, through the honourable person of a first-class passenger for whom he had cooked. Frederick was convinced he saw a stoker, a black fellow, strike a woman who was clinging to him—perhaps she was the beautiful Canadian—pick her up and throw her overboard. Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised, were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting, helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and disappeared.
"Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath blown away by the raging elements. She pointed, and Frederick looked where she pointed with vacant, staring eyes. Again the fog lifted and opened a sort of gap through which the sinking steamer could be seen in all its length. Somebody was standing at the railing waving a white handkerchief. It was impossible to tell who it was. But a man whom Frederick recognised as distinctly as if he were looking through a spy-glass was Hans Füllenberg, racing about like a madman, leaping with the agility of a squirrel from one point of the deck to the other.
The port-holes, making a slanting line from stem to stern, still shone with the electric lights inside. Now and then a stifled shot could be heard, as a rocket rose up into the air, making a pale line of light. But soon the gem-like gleam of the port-holes was extinguished. As if the sea in its unbridled hate of man's work had been waiting for this event, it swept over the deck from the other side. That instant the waters on the near side swarmed with human beings, swimming, shrieking, and struggling.
Suddenly, no one knew how, the boat was carried close to the Roland again, where maddened, half-drowned, desperate men clutched at it. A hideous, bestial conflict began.
Frederick saw it all, yet without seeing it. Although it went on under his very eyes, it seemed to be happening at an infinite distance. He struck at something. It was a hand, an arm, a head, a wet monster of the deep, shrieking in a voice not human. Suddenly, pulled backwards by the merciless hands of a hidden executioner, it disappeared. Frederick saw how, with the strength of desperation, Rosa's red fists and Mrs. Liebling's and Ingigerd's little cramped fingers unloosened the hold of the hand or arm of a fellow-man from the icy edge of the boat. The sailors used their oars in a way that produced dark spurts of blood.
None in the boat noticed that the third mate disappeared, that Bulke took his place at the helm, and that in the bottom of the boat lay a long-haired young man, who gave no sign of life.
The servant, Bulke, took command. For the sake of something to do and to delay the inevitable capsizing, Frederick and Wilhelm each seized an oar and rowed with the sailors.
Minutes passed. The fog lifted. Many eternally moving mountains and valleys of water had rolled between the little boat and the wreck. Of the Roland, the mighty fast mail steamer of the North German Steamship Company, nothing was to be seen.