« p. 17-21:Southampton Water
A Fog Over the Sea
p. 21-27
In the morning, after you’ve gotten over the seasickness, everything on deck looks striped, rusted and marbled. But the sea is as calm as the River Spree by Köpenick, and you slowly go red in the face. On steerage, everything is out in the open air, which is really the best barometer on ocean steamships. A couple of miserable human-like bundles are lying here and there on the thick planks; a few small, deathly pale children lie here and there like poor, plucked chickens next to their mother’s skirts, which are gently ironed smooth by the wind; but in general the people are all right. They’re even drinking beer and brandy up here. The barometer calls for good weather!
Piffl scrambles over tables and benches, Moischele places his coat over the skylight of the steerage dining room, the father explains to the mother some hairsplitting detail in the Megillah -- when the foghorn toots like the cattle of Helios, with a hollow, mythological sound, clanging out in time in the fog, which is white and thick like cotton from the sea, entering from all sides of the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great. It is impermeable and thick and wraps us up like a sore finger or a small, valuable item in a pocketbook!
The good cow roars into the sea. No comrades are answering. In these hours, when the sea is as calm as a stream by a town, that’s when ships cut open each other’s sides, when a courageous boat bleeds to death and the people flee in groups on pieces of wood, splashing in the water while their cruel neighbors in the fish world lie greedily in wait.
In these hours, you start slapping yourself in the forehead and saying: my God, what a priceless situation, an unusual situation, as we all find ourselves suddenly thrown together! In the middle of all this water, far away from anybody, on the flat hand of God, which is rocking us lightly in the gentle wash of the waves.
But the people here walk back and forth, stand around and chat with each other, as if being stuck together on a plodding ship in a thick fog with no light, no color, only a hollow roaring seeping through . . . as if this were the most natural thing in the world! I sit in my deckchair and stare at the breathless passengers, my brothers and sisters in death and life. They hurry by me stubbornly with long, quick steps. In a little more than a minute on the promenade deck people run by me twenty times, thirty times, forty times, one behind the other!
I know them all quite well by now. At a table next to me, a nice woman from Ohio sits down and provides me with gossip which has drifted up from the bottom of the ship. The small family dressed in black walks by my deckchair. There is the mother, the son, the two daughters. The children are bursting with health, the mother is as yellow as a quince, but in everything they do they’re earnest, their faces are empty and drained, nobody speaks. When they started their journey a little over two weeks ago, there were still five of them. The father is still coming back with them to their homeland, but now he is down in the lowest room of the ship in a dark coffin. The three weathered Spaniards, with names out of the time of the Armada. The small clan of bettors, the gamblers who push by noisily making a wide berth -- these get together the fastest. For them, the ocean voyage is nothing but seven days of constant possibility, where they can bet on how many miles they’ve put behind them and cut cards from morning to night in the Viennese café. These people hold together and follow the life fantastic, where they gather together in gambling dens much faster than they would if they held themselves detached and sober. They have to get to know each other quickly over the course of seven days, and then they wish each other good luck. For seven days, they miss nothing about the person standing next to them, not a single characteristic, virtue or weakness. Look at the others, finishing books, daydreaming on the rail. And then there are those who isolate themselves. Over there is the typical married couple, who you know from the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson and the tables d’hote in Florence, Rome and London. The withering rich old lady, who has swiftly bought herself an athlete. (Society people, my neighbor says, she says it with the agreeable tone of a working woman.) In the morning, Madame steps out completely enameled, pearls down to the belt, laden with rings, her gentleman carrying a vague, bored look, a novel by William Le Queux under his arm. Before lunch, they sit in their suite, whose window looks out on the promenade deck, and play cards. After dinner, in the evening, they do the same. The light burns in their cabin, the gentleman sits in pajamas and the electric light plays on his golden chest. Madame has two burning cigarettes in her mouth, she smiles and gives one to her partner, smiles with a vague look in her eyes . . . In the evening she immediately becomes ten years younger than her comrade . . . And then the people walk by with a level of indifference you can read in their faces. Then we have the proud, who came over once in steerage and are now traveling with us in the best class on the ship, maybe the same ship, which is barely ten years old. Then there are the all-too mobile, who, once here, talk cleverly about things they’ve only known from a distance, and one day they will creep out from between the decks into that inferior, cruel Europe, of which they are now speaking so terribly. Then there are the blasé, who lock themselves in their cabins; and the colorless, who win nothing and lose nothing; and the hyenas of the trip and those who gladly tear each other apart, but how gladly! Then there are these and those, the caustic, the determined, the dreamers, and through all this bustle, the fog horn roars its warning noise for a few seconds. The noise hurts your chest. You’d think that this noise would be vibrating the plankton under the sea.
I love this noise. This is the chord which binds together the souls of humans and the sea. All the noises which make up the songs and hymns of seafarers are contained in this noise. In it are these words, which have been writ large on the hearts and flags of travelers: We have to sail, we do not have to live. The discoveries of Marco Polo, Magellan, Roald Amundsen, Shackleton and many others beside are in this noise. Yet from all my travels, I know that when I hear this call of the foghorn, I shut up my ears and hope that the fog goes away so the noise will finally stop!
A boy comes up to the sundeck and brings me a telegram. A friendly man from Oklahoma stands and looks at me as I open the telegram and read.
“Sad news?”
I shake my head, thank him for his interest and he goes calmly on his way.
Everyone was thinking of me back in my country. A couple of loving words from my country twitch through the atmosphere, seeking and finding its recipients on the fast, good ship, who are allowed to listen to the telegram outside the wireless station on the sundeck.
We are really not alone in the world! The same spirit, which drags us away from our ventures into the unknown, the same spirit, which swings us under the pistons and wheels and throws us out into the open and the longing and looking and passion of people, the same spirit which lays open and conscious to the entire earth and the round world. Dry land and water, earth and stars, sun and ether are no longer separate, person belongs to person from moment to moment. And a ship in the fog on the high sea, three days from the mainland, is about as alone on this earth as a man in a suit in the middle of a crowded throng.
Up on the sundeck, in this fantastic yellow city of chimneys, of wind-scoops with open jaws and ventilators and swinging boats and whirring ropes, the small brown building connects us departed to the wide world. For once I would like the fates of geniuses to be less stupid and cruel, so that the rays that reach this brown house are attached to the name Hertz and not the empty Marconi. That would be right and proper, and a beautiful thing would finally have the right name, which will be listened to closely, a fine symbol.
In the evenings, as you sit in the rooms down below or lie in bed in your cabin, you suddenly hear the wheee -- tak tak -- tak tak of the telegrapher above, who speaks over thousands of nautical miles with the Minnetonka, the Cymric, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, talking to the ships in the night and receiving friendly responses in return. Out in the open, the wheee -- tak tak -- tak tak pounds with the pulse of the earth.
The operator explains to me that you don’t have to point the telephone in a certain direction. You’re just sending transmissions in a general radius of so many nautical miles at a certain frequency which corresponds with the frequency of your target and then he reports it and answers. I let this serious young man talk. He says Marconi so often I correct it to myself and say Hertz.
And I think to myself, as I go down from the sundeck to the promenade deck, that I, just like the ship, am no longer sailing romantically alone through the world as in earlier days. But my trip belongs to everyone who reads about where I’ve gone and what I’ve passed by. No more abandoned to the rushing winds, but instead to people’s eyes, good and hard. People from my neighborhood and beyond . . .
This situation is so new to me, as new as Kaiser Wilhelm the Great, and about as uncomfortable all those little brown buildings on your back. But in spite of it all, I feel the bombastic, noble and insatiable desire to travel, to travel, and the bizarre idea overcomes me on the last step: We go to sea alone. We live here alone and we are counted, not like the innumerable masses on the mainland!
Now a thunderstorm tears through the fog. Lightning the color of aluminum travels over milk-white walls and splits into countless white layers, veils and curtains, which hang behind one another down from the sky to the water. The fog leaves immediately after the storm. The fog horn falls silent. I stand, paper in hand, before the railing and read the words which have come to me through the atmosphere. Now the sea is completely light and calm.
We travel again at full speed.