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Updated: June 7, 2025
Every instant Frederick had to perform some small service, and while she was giving an enthusiastic description of a little monkey from Java that she had once owned, he asked himself whether he was a physician, a nurse, a hairdresser, a chambermaid, or a steward, and whether Ingigerd Hahlström would not in the end reduce him to a messenger boy. He yearned to be on deck in the open air.
Soon after, Achleitner entered with an anxious, questioning expression in his eyes, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him back to the girl's couch.
In the meantime the Roland, sinking into deep troughs and climbing over watery mountain crests in an ocean that was like a great machine regularly at work, had plowed its way into fog. The siren was bellowing. "Fog?" exclaimed Ingigerd. Every bit of blood vanished from her face, which was already too pale.
But the girl stepped to the edge of the stage. "What's the matter?" she inquired. "Nothing, nothing at all," the director assured her, all impatience. Ingigerd called for Doctor von Kammacher. Frederick, who was reminded of his father by the old gentleman and had been looking at him with respect, was not a little startled when he heard his name echo through the theatre.
"No," was the decided answer. To keep the air in her cabin pure, Ingigerd left the door slightly ajar; and the sight of the colossal Roland, as seen from her cabin, helplessly drifting in the ocean, by no means seemed to bear out the stewards' declaration. "There is no use concealing the fact that we are scudding under bare poles," said Hahlström.
After showing Ingigerd to her room and seeing that she was provided with everything, Petronilla stepped out into the hall to call a maid, who was working in another part of the house. Frederick heard her, and put his head out of the door to inquire after Ingigerd. "The signorina dropped on the couch without undressing and fell right asleep," she said.
"When my boys found out what was doing," said Captain Butor, "they began to carry on like lunatics. I had to use some of my sea-lingo on them. They wanted to dive over the railing into the sea, and swim to the boat." Ingigerd was lying stretched out in her comfortable steamer chair, and Frederick was sitting on a camp-stool in front of her.
Lilienfeld, in tactfully subdued tones, wound up his rather lengthy address with delicate expressions of sympathy and his personal sorrow at Hahlström's death. Ingigerd being helpless as a child in business matters, Frederick had taken it upon himself to represent her, and he used the pause in the impresario's speech to put in a word.
Some stewards, whom he distinctly recognised, were still heroically executing orders. But they got entangled in fighting groups. One of them covered with blood, struggling and shouting, helped a woman and her child into a life-boat, but the boat capsized and disappeared. "Father! My father!" Ingigerd suddenly cried. It was only a faint breath blown away by the raging elements.
For about a quarter of an hour, it actually seemed to torture her. It was serious, severe, full of concern, and not unloving. Her mother referred sorrowfully to Hahlström's death, and asked Ingigerd to come and live with her in Paris. She told her of a woman in New York, the wife of a German barber, with whom it would be eminently suitable for her to remain until she returned to Europe.
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