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Then came the loud rattling of the cinders pouring overboard. Frederick looked at his watch. It was five o'clock. So three hours had passed since he had first awakened! Again, with a clatter and a thunder, a load of ashes slid into the Atlantic Ocean. Was it not the mates of the dead stoker, Zickelmann, who were throwing it overboard?
He was obsessed by a stinging rage not to spare himself anything, but to taste to the dregs even the bitterest impressions of this detached, jogged and jolted fragment of a human world. The physicians arrived when they were sewing the stoker, Zickelmann, into sail-cloth. The bare cabin was not very brilliantly lighted by a single electric bulb.
"Of course. The people are all celebrating their escape from drowning yesterday and day before yesterday." Pander had come at the captain's order for the stoker's death certificate. The document was lying ready in the medicine closet. After Pander had left, Wilhelm told Frederick some remarkable incidents of the dead man. "His name was Zickelmann. There was the beginning of a letter in his pocket.
One day Frederick skated miles up the stream to follow it to its source. On the way he was accompanied by a hovering shadow, the corporeality of which he never for a moment doubted. It resembled the stoker Zickelmann who had died on the Roland, not the Zickelmann that he had seen lying stretched out a corpse in the stoke-hole, but the Zickelmann he had seen in his dream.
He had dreamed he was wandering hand in hand with Achleitner among the dark smoke widows trailing backward over the ocean from the funnels of the Roland, far, far away. He and the Russian Jewess together with great difficulty dragged the dead stoker, Zickelmann, up into the blue ladies' parlour; and by means of a serum, which he himself had discovered, he brought him back to life.
When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angèle, his suffering, neglected wife, in one of her hysterical attacks in which she lay in a trance. And it was not at the entrance to the smoking-room, but in Plassenberg in the Heuscheuer, in front of his comfortable house.
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