ssness would lead him like a blind man across
the city square.

Frederick felt that the sinking of the _Roland_ had left him with a
gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the
spaces of his soul. With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when
something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated
the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.

Why had the powers revealed Judgment Day to him, not as a vision, but as
an actuality? Why had they showed such partiality as to let him and a few
others escape perdition? Was he, the tiny ant, which was susceptible of
such titanic terrors, important enough to assume the guidance of things
for himself, to fulfil a loftier purpose for good or evil? Had he
transgressed? Was he deserving of punishment? But that wholesale massacre
was too fearful, too vast a thing! It was ridiculous to attribute to it a
pedagogic purpose for the discipline of one minute human existence.
Indeed, he felt how the large generalness of the event had almost
entirely dislodged everything personal. No! Nothing but blind, deaf
and dumb powers of destruction had been at work.

Yet, in facing the elemental tragedy of the human race, the inexorable
gruesomeness of the powers, in looking into the eyes of death, he had
acquired knowledge that turned something in his being into the hardness
of the hardest rock. What was the sense of such a disaster if the eternal
goodness ordained it? And where was the power of eternal goodness, if it
was incapable of hindering it? Nothing remained but to strip oneself bare
of all pride and dignity and grovel in the dust before the great unknown,
a humble, will-less slave, completely at its mercy.

LIII

While on the _Roland_, time had crawled at a snail's pace, the hour hand
of the clock on the _Hamburg_ travelled twice around its face with
surprising rapidity. During that interval, the two ladies remained in
bed, though the weather, which was clear and moderate, permitted being
on deck. In Mrs. Liebling the consequences of the strain manifested
themselves in periodic attacks of great excitement and fear accompanied
by violent palpitation; in Ingigerd Hahlstroem, in healthy sleepiness,
which made the administration of morphine in her case unnecessary.
Neither of the women developed fever. But the sailor whose feet were
frozen and the woman from the steerage had a high temperature. The
immigrant i