eption, 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 rec