At the skat table, the players were sitting, smoking, drinking whisky and coffee, and tossing the cards on the table. Everything else seemed to be a matter of indifference to them. Frederick ordered wine and continued to goad his mind into activity. His head ached. He could scarcely hold it upright on his aching neck. His eyelids ached with weariness; but when they drooped, his eyes seemed to radiate a painful light shining from within. Every nerve, every muscle, every cell in him was alert. He could not hope for sleep. How weeks in his life, months, years had passed as in the twinkling of an eye! And this evening only three and a half days had elapsed since he boarded the _Roland_ at Southampton, a period with the content of years, in which seconds were eternities. Its beginning lay in the remote distance, at the conclusion of a life lived long before, on an earth from which he had parted long before. "You're tired, Doctor von Kammacher," said Wilhelm. "So I won't invite you to the stoker's funeral on the after-deck." "Oh, I'll come," said Frederick. 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. XLIV 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. Frederick recalled his dream--how the dead stoker had been standing under the vines with the cords in his hand and had then led Peter Schmidt and himself to the Toilers of the Light. A great change had taken place in his appearance. His face was no longer of flesh, but seemed to be chiselled out of yellow wax, to which his hair, his eyebrows and beard were pasted. A faint, cunning smile seemed to be curving his mouth; and when Frederick with odd interest and curiosity scrutinised him closely, it seemed to him he was saying, "_Legno santo!_ Toilers of the Light!" When the dead man's face was covered up and his whole body had been sewed into the cloth in coarse stitches, the sailors bound the puppet, with difficulty keeping it in position, on a smoothly planed board, weighted with iron. "Will such a chrysalis ever really turn into a butterfly?" Frederick wondered. The procedure, a piece of reeling, staggering acrobatics, was less gruesome than ridiculous. Yet, though this long package might be only the mortal shell of an immortal soul, one had a sense of infinite sadness in entrusting it to the fearful solitudes of the ocean.