It was an exciting moment when the American, in defiance of the Captain’s presence, again made ready for his dangerous play.

Von Kessel, broad and ponderous and somewhat too short-legged, seemed out of proportion in the dainty parlour.  He was speaking quietly with his lady.  From the expression of his face it was evident that the weather was giving him cause to be serious.  Suddenly the matches flared up.  Now the captain’s calm St. Bernard head turned slightly, and a voice said in a tone not to be misunderstood: 

“Put that fire out!”

Frederick had never heard an order from a man’s lips so incisive, so truly commanding, so fearful.  The American turned pale and in the twinkling of an eye smothered the flame.  The beautiful Canadian closed her eyes.  But the captain, as if nothing had occurred, continued to converse with his lady.

XVIII

Soon after, Frederick was in the barbershop getting a shave.

“Wretched weather,” observed the barber, wielding the razor with a sure hand, despite the dreadful tossing of the vessel.  He seemed to be an intelligent man.  Frederick had to listen to a second account of the Nordmania, of how the waterspout had plunged through the ladies’ parlour and carried the piano down into the hold.

An ordinary German servant-girl of the peasant class entered.  She looked healthy to the core and none too intelligent.  The barber called her Rosa and gave her a bottle of eau de Cologne.

“That’s the fifth bottle of eau de Cologne that I’ve given her for her mistress since we left Cuxhaven,” the barber explained after she had left.  “Her mistress is a divorced woman with two children.  Her name is Mrs. Liebling.  She is very nervous.  Rosa hasn’t a very easy time of it.  For five dollars a month she has to be at Mrs. Liebling’s beck and call morning, noon and night.  She takes entire charge of the children.  Soon after we left Cuxhaven, Mrs. Liebling came to have her hair dressed.  You should have heard how she went on about that girl.  The things she said against her.  Not a spark of gratitude.  She said the stupid, lazy thing wasn’t worth the price of her second-class cabin.”

Several times Frederick had heard the sound of quarrelling mingled with children’s crying in the cabin opposite his.  Once he had even distinctly caught the slapping sound of what must have been a box over somebody’s ear.

“Does she hit Rosa?” he asked the barber.

“Yes.”

Clearly, then, it was his neighbour of the opposite cabin in whose service the girl was.

Frederick enjoyed listening to the lively barber retail gossip, while he lay stretched out in his patented chair.  It diverted his mind from troublesome thoughts.  The barber, who had been sailing the seas for many years, was by no means of the ordinary type of his class.  He delivered a short discourse on modern shipbuilding, the moral of which was, not to construct light steamers for speed.