“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 Fuellenberg, 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.

XLIX

Late in the afternoon of the same day, the captain of a sturdy little trading vessel from Hamburg sighted a boat drifting on the long, high swells.  The weather was clear, and the captain made certain that the people in the boat were signalling with handkerchiefs.  Within half an hour, the shipwrecked passengers of the Roland were with great difficulty hoisted on board the trader, one at a time.