But had his sleep actually meant peace? Lying on his back with wide,
staring eyes, he saw vast nocturnal spaces of his soul opened up, where
in bottomless depths another chaotic life had been born--a multitude of
tormenting visions, in which things and persons most familiar had arisen
in combination with things and persons entirely strange. He tried to
recall his dreams.
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. He smoothed over a quarrel
between the Russian Jewess and Ingigerd Hahlstroem, who fought and called
each other abusive names. He was sitting with Doctor Wilhelm in his
cabin, and, as Wagner once had done, was observing a homunculus still
undergoing embryonic development in a glass sphere on which light was
shining. At the same time Ingigerd's cockatoo was squawking in Arthur
Stoss's voice and continually asseverating:
"I am already a man of absolutely independent fortune. I am touring
simply to bring my fortune up to a certain amount."
Under the impression that he was recalling these things to his memory,
Frederick was really dreaming again. Suddenly he started up, cuffing Hans
Fuellenberg furiously and saying: "I'll box your ears." Shortly afterward
he was in the smoking-room delivering a crushing sermon for the third or
fourth time, morally felling to the ground the man who had desecrated his
sacred relation to Ingigerd. But the captain came in, and said they had
to bury the stoker. There was a dead man on board. When Frederick stepped
from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not
Zickelmann, the stoker, but Angele, 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. Captain von Kessel was standing in the
garden clipping a privet hedge. It was at night, but a full moon was
shining bright as day over the lonely valley meadows in front of his
house. Angele arose and Frederick went to lead her into the house. She
resisted. Now the consciousness of his spiritual separation from her
filled him with infinite sadness, a sadness more bitter and profound
than any that had ever inspired him in his waking moments.
"I am a mother," said Angele, "but not by you."
He embraced her, weeping, and wanted to draw her into his house. She
resisted gently, but firmly, and declared she was forbidden to enter. He
saw her wandering across the meadows in the moonshine, slowly and
wearily.
"Angele!" he cried. He ran after her.
"It is so hard for me," she said, "because life and not death has robbed
me of you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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