hing 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."

Frederick groaned aloud. A great stone seemed to be lying on his breast.
He heard the rushing of waters. He saw the flood come leaping through all
the valleys, over the tops of all the hills, wave upon wave, from all
sides. The moon was shining. He saw Angele climb to a little skiff lying
moored somewhere; and the tide carried away the skiff with her in it. The
waters overwhelmed his house.

Again the wandering began, hand in hand with Achleitner and the smoke
widows across the ocean desert. Again began that difficult dragging
up-stairs and down-stairs of the naked, dead stoker, with the help of the
young admirer of Kropotkin. The dispute between Ingigerd and Deborah, his
sermonising of Fuellenberg and the man in the smoking-room repeated
themselves, each repetition intensifying his torment. The homunculus
in the glass sphere in Doctor Wilhelm's cabin appeared again. It
developed with light thrown on it. In his anguish, in his impotence
against that martyrising chase of visions, Frederick's persecuted soul,
gasping for peace,