Chapter 2

I

A few moments later Frederick felt the solid pier beneath his feet. His brain reeled lightly. The crowd on the pier cheered and hurrahed. In that shouting, shrieking, roaring, swaying mass of humanity, he and Ingigerd, who was clinging to his arm, seemed exposed to the danger of another sort of drowning. Suddenly he found himself confronted by a little Japanese, or someone whom at first glance he took to be a Japanese, and heard him saying:

"How d'ye do, Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me? How d'ye do, Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me?" several times in rapid succession.

Frederick tried to recall the man to his memory. He scarcely knew who he himself was, with those cheers thundering in his ears, with hands on all sides shaking his hands, and newsboys flourishing newspapers behind him and above him and under his very nose.

"Don't you know me, Doctor von Kammacher?" the Japanese repeated, grinning.

"By Jove," cried Frederick, "now I recognise you. You are Willy Snyders. How do you come to be here?"

While studying several semesters in Breslau, Frederick had eked out his income by tutoring a boy, a rather desperate case, whose father, a furniture manufacturer, paid handsomely for his son's private lessons. Frederick's pupil turned out to be a good-hearted chap, an amusing scapegrace, who soon became his devoted slave. It was this scapegrace, now a full-grown man, that Frederick recognised in the jolly Japanese.

"How I come to be here? I'll explain later," said Willy, his nostrils dilating with the joy of seeing his teacher again. "The first thing is, have you already engaged rooms, and shall I slip you past that damned lot of reporters? Or do you want to be interviewed?"

"For heaven's sake, no! Not for the world."

"Then stick close to me," shouted Willy. "A cab is waiting for us, and we'll drive straight to our folks."

Frederick introduced Ingigerd.

"I must first see this young lady safe to a hotel. And even then I can't leave her entirely alone."

Willy instantly took in the situation, but it did not change his plans.

"Miss Hahlström can stop with us, too. She will be far more comfortable than in a hotel. The only question is, can she put up with Italian cooking?"

"I don't anticipate any difficulties from your macaroni and spaghetti _al sugo_," said Frederick, who read Ingigerd's willingness in her eyes. "So I'll follow your lead as you followed mine years ago."

"All right! Forward, march!" Willy's joy in his booty was patent.

When they left the pier, they saw Stoss still surrounded by reporters, working his jaws with incredible rapidity, as he discoursed upon himself and the role he had played in the sinking of the _Roland_. They were about to enter their cab after their flight, through the crowd, when an elderly gentleman, panting breathlessly and perspiring, despite the nipping wind, stepped up to Ingigerd Hahlström with, "I beg your pardon, but I come from Webster and Forster." He took off his hat and wiped the inside band with his handkerchief. "I was told--I was told--I came in a carriage--a carriage is waiting--" He stopped, too exhausted to continue.

"Miss Hahlström cannot possibly appear this evening."

"Oh, Miss Hahlström looks very well!"

"See here," said Frederick ready to flare up.

Webster and Forster's agent put his hat back on his bald pate.

"It would be the greatest mistake if Miss Hahlström were not to dance to-night," he said. "I was commissioned to provide her with money and anything else she needed. There's my carriage. Rooms have already been engaged for her at the Astor."

Frederick grew angry.

"I am a physician," he snapped, "and as a physician, I tell you Miss Hahlström will not dance to-night, nor for several nights."

"Will you make good to Miss Hahlström her financial loss?"

"What I shall do in regard to that is neither your nor Webster and Forster's business."

Frederick thought he had disposed of the matter, but the agent became offensive.

"Who are you, sir? My dealings are with Miss Hahlström exclusively. What right have you to mix in this affair?"

"I don't think I could dance to-night," Ingigerd interposed.

"You will lose that feeling as soon as you step on the stage. The manager's wife gave me a letter for you. Her maid is at the Astor with everything you need. She is entirely at your disposal."

"Our Petronilla is a jewel, too," Willy Snyders interjected. "If you tell her what you need, Miss Hahlström, she'll have it for you in five minutes." With the insistence of a seducer, he helped Ingigerd into the cab.

"Very well, then," said the agent emphatically, "you are breaking a contract, and I warn you of the consequences. I will have to ask you for your address."

Willy Snyders shouted a number on 107th street. The agent jotted it down in his note-book.

The cab with Ingigerd, Frederick, and Willy in it was transported from Hoboken to New York in the usual way, jammed in between other carriages and trucks on the ferry-boat. A newsboy on the ferry handed into the cab a copy of _The Sun_, with whole columns already describing the disaster. The authors of the information were probably the health officers and Captain Butor. When Willy Snyders began to speak of the _Roland_, Frederick checked him with a nod toward Ingigerd; but she had of herself noticed the report in the paper and asked if they had been the first to bring the news to New York.

"The _Roland_ was overdue more than three days," Willy explained. "We were already beginning to be alarmed. Finally the passenger list from Bremen was published, and soon after your name, too, Doctor von Kammacher, appeared in the newspapers, your father in the meantime having cabled that you left Paris to catch the _Roland_ at Southampton. I never lost faith that nothing but the wretched weather was delaying you, and I inquired at the steamship company's office every day. It was there that I learned of the sinking of the _Roland_ and the arrival of the _Hamburg_ with the first rescued passengers on board, with you among them." Noticing Ingigerd's sudden pallor, Willy added vivaciously, with apparent conviction, "A lot of others must surely have been rescued."

The amount of traffic, as indicated by an endless number of ferry-boats, tugs, and steamers of every sort, was immense. The ferry-boats, black with people, resembled floating towers of Babel, above which rose an iron something like a pump-handle, seesawing up and down with the invisible pistons.

When the boat lay fast in the slip, there was a great thundering as the vehicles all began to move at the same time to the accompaniment of a tramping mass of humanity.

"This city," Frederick thought, "is obsessed by a craze for money making." The idea was suggested to him chiefly by the advertisements staring on all sides, those shrill, over-spiced, over-charged asseverations, compared with which the same thing in Europe was delicate as a violet, innocent as a newborn babe. Wherever he turned his eyes, gigantic placards glared at him, gigantic letters, gigantic, garishly coloured pictures, gigantic fingers and hands pointing to something. Twenty negroes carrying bill-boards, a carriage drawn by twelve horses harnessed like circus horses passed by. It was a shrieking, greedy war of competition, waged with every conceivable means, a wild, shameless orgy of acquisitiveness, but for that very reason not lacking in a certain greatness. There was no hypocrisy about it. It was honest in its outspokenness.

The cab stopped at a telegraph office, and Frederick cabled to his father, "I am safe, sound, and well;" Ingigerd to her mother in Paris, "I am safe. Papa's fate uncertain." While Ingigerd was writing, Frederick took the chance to tell Willy Snyders that she had probably lost her father in the wreck.

Several times newsboys thrust a paper under Frederick's nose, calling out the great sensation, "All about the sinking of the _Roland_! All about the sinking of the _Roland_!" In large, catching headlines he read: "The _Roland_ leaves Bremen. Slight accident compels her to return. _Roland_ starts on trip again. Constant storms. Dead man on board. Nine hundred drowned. Heroic conduct of a servant-girl. Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery." Frederick started, reflected, but could not recall anything of the sort. "Child dies in life-boat. Captain Butor of the _Hamburg_ sights castaways. Report of survivors. Arthur Stoss, champion armless marksman, helped into life-boat by faithful valet," and so on. It was an invaluable supply of fresh, sensational, gratuitously obtained material, to be served for a week in generous portions to readers in both the old and the new worlds.

The cab rolled up Broadway, that main thoroughfare of New York stretching along for miles, with two apparently unbroken chains of street-cars moving by each other. At that time the cars were propelled by an endless cable travelling in a conduit under the roadway. The traffic all along Broadway was enormous, and the contrast was the more surprising when the cab, after traversing another lively street, turned into a deserted-looking side street, where almost country-like quiet prevailed.

The cab came to a halt, and Willy Snyders helped Ingigerd out. The travellers found themselves in front of a low one-family house with a flight of outside steps, differing in no wise from the other houses on the block, which were all built on the same plan, of exactly the same height, of exactly the same width, and with absolute similarity of detail. Frederick had observed such architectural monotony only in workingmen's houses in Germany, while here it was the mark of a fairly aristocratic section.

Twilight had already fallen when Frederick and Ingigerd at length found privacy in their rooms. The rooms, plainly furnished and scrupulously clean, were lighted by electricity and heated from a furnace in the cellar; and the floors were not laid with wood, but paved with red bricks. Petronilla, the old Italian housekeeper, took Ingigerd in charge, looking after the smallest of her wants with touching motherliness. The two said what was necessary to say in a mixture of Italian and English. 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.

Frederick feeling somewhat uneasy went with Petronilla to look after Ingigerd, and found that she had merely succumbed to a leaden sleep. Her constitution, after weeks of over-exertion and abuse, was asserting its rights. Petronilla and the maid undressed her and put her to bed, all unconscious, though now and then opening wide her shimmering sea-green eyes.

II

Frederick washed and went down-stairs to the basement with Willy Snyders. Here there was a tidy little dining-room with a table set for eight. As in the other rooms, the floors were of brick, and the walls half-way up were hung with burlap. Where the burlap ended, a narrow shelf ran around the entire room, set with all sorts of household utensils, chiefly _fiaschi_ of wine in straw cases. Like everything else about the place, the napery was exquisitely clean.

Willy in the meantime had in his droll, lively way fully informed Frederick of the character and purpose of this extremely comfortable house. It was leased by a group of German artists, whose main prop was a sculptor of twenty-eight by the name of Ritter. Willy lauded Ritter as a genius. He had entered upon a career in the New World most remarkable for a man of his age. Among his patrons were the Astors, the Goulds, and the Vanderbilts; and he had received most of the orders for exterior sculpture work on the buildings of the Chicago Exposition. Willy called Ritter "a devil of a fellow," and praised him for his "smartness."

In a corner of the dining-room, in the halls and on the stairway landings, were reproductions of Ritter's works. Willy extolled them to the skies; Frederick honestly admired them. The large bas-relief in the corner of the dining-room represented a group of singing boys, for which Ritter, probably at the suggestion of his customer, a Vanderbilt or an Astor, had used the famous relief of Luca della Robbia as a model. In style, nobility and freshness, his work surpassed anything then being done in Germany.

Another sculptor partaking of the benefits of the club-house was a friend of Ritter, who helped him with his work. Like Ritter, Lobkowitz was a native Austrian. The fourth member of the group was Franck, a painter from Silesia, an impecunious eccentric, upon whose talents his comrades placed an extremely high estimate. It was Willy Snyders the kind-hearted who, soon after a chance meeting with his fellow-Silesian, dragged him from his wretched quarters, not without much coaxing, and transferred him to the club-house.

"Wait and see the way that lunatic Franck is going to behave," said Willy in his peculiar voice, in which there was a blending of the guttural and nasal tones of American English with the Austrian German accent of his friends. "He snaps like a mad dog. He's enough to make you split your sides laughing--that is, if the perverse creature comes at all and doesn't have dinner served in his room."

As a matter of fact, Franck was the first to enter the dining-room. Willy's tongue kept wagging, while the eccentric merely shook hands limply with Frederick and said nothing. Though the three were countrymen, Franck's appearance--like Willy, he was wearing evening dress--added a touch of embarrassment where there had been perfect unconstraint; and though Willy had lent Frederick a suit, and a tailor had already been ordered, Frederick expressed regret at not being appropriately dressed.

"Yes, Ritter's a great stickler for form," Willy observed. "Every evening we have to present the appearance of at least attachés to an embassy."

Petronilla entered and explained in wordy Italian that the poor, dear, sweet little signorina had fallen asleep in bed and was breathing quietly and regularly.

"You could shoot off a cannon, bum! bum! Outside her window, and she wouldn't wake up," she said. Then holding out a newspaper, she asked whether the gentlemen had heard of the sinking of the _Roland_ and the few survivors. When Willy, with his dilating nostrils and his characteristic half-serious, half-comic expression, introduced Frederick as one of those survivors, she burst into a noisy laugh, which vastly amused two of the three Silesians. When convinced that Willy was not teasing, she stared at Frederick speechlessly, burst into tears, and kissed his hands. Then she ran out.

Soon after, Lobkowitz entered, a tall, quiet man. He had heard of Frederick's recent experience, and greeted him with simple cordiality.

"Ritter has just come in his cart," he said.

They looked out of the window. Frederick saw an elegant two-wheeled dog-cart with a handsome coachman in black livery preparing to drive off, while a thoroughbred grey, feeling the tightening of the reins, was rearing and plunging in the shafts.

"The coachman," said Willy, whose lack of reserve and extreme indiscretion his friends accepted good-naturedly, "is a ruined officer of the Austrian army. He ran away from his gambling debts. I don't know whether he got out of the army or was put out. At any rate he is of invaluable service to Ritter. He tells him to the dot how he must dress for luncheons and dinners, for tennis and golf and riding and driving; how to manage a four-in-hand, when to wear a black chimney-pot or a grey one, what colour gloves to wear, what sort of necktie, what sort of cuff links, what sort of stockings. In short, he tells him all the things a man has to pay attention to in order to succeed here in high life."

At this point Bonifacius Ritter, whom fortune had favoured in America beyond his most extravagant expectations, now entered, young, brisk, handsome, amiable as Alcibiades. Frederick was instantly carried away by his manner, radiating bonhomie, naïveté, joy in life, and simple heartiness. The atmosphere of the New World had imparted ease and fire to the flabby amiability of the Austrian.

Dinner was served, and over genuine Italian soup, conversation was soon in full swing. Willy Snyders, as commissary, poured the wine. It was evident how proud he was of Bonifacius Ritter and what satisfaction it gave him to present his quondam teacher to such friends and such a home in this foreign land. The company thawed; and by the time the maid in white cap and apron had finished serving, the four had all touched glasses with Frederick on his and his protégée's rescue. A short pause of embarrassment followed, which Frederick interpreted as a demand for a statement regarding himself. His pale scholarly face still showed deep traces of the hardships he had undergone.

"I came over," he said, "to continue some studies with a friend which he and I began years ago. You know him, Willy. He is Peter Schmidt, the physician, in Springfield, Massachusetts."

"He's in Meriden now, an hour's ride from Springfield."

"Yes?" said Frederick, "I assumed he was still in Springfield. But no matter. While I was in Berlin and Paris, I conferred with some scientists, friends of mine, before boarding the _Roland_ at Southampton. Everybody told me the _Roland_ was one of the best vessels. To my astonishment, I met the young lady who is now enjoying your hospitality. She was going to the United States with her father. We were fortunate. We got into the life-boat perfectly quietly, before the panic broke out, but we had to leave the young lady's father behind. I forgot to say I had already become acquainted with Hahlström and his daughter in Berlin. Thus, fate brought us together, and I consider myself responsible for Miss Hahlström, both as a physician and a human being. She is an artistic wonder. She is a dancer."

Willy Snyders gave a witty account of the attack of Webster and Forster's agent; and the conversation turned on art in general and on American art in particular.

"Millions of dollars annually," said Bonifacius Ritter, "are spent upon all sorts of art objects, an enormous sum on paintings alone. At the same time, there is a class of persons here of Puritanic descent to whom any kind of art is the abomination of the arch-enemy. For instance, there is an association of pious pillars of society, an association of vandals, invested with certain civic rights, whose object is the abolition of filth and the maintenance of chastity. To that end it recently broke into one of the famous clubs of the New York _jeunesse dorée_ and destroyed a number of irreplaceable art treasures, masterpieces, among them even a Venus by Titian."

"And the relation of the amateurs here," said Lobkowitz, "to their artistic possessions is very funny. You should see how they place their paintings. The "Crucifixion" by Munkaczy is displayed in a department store in Philadelphia. The Goulds have Rembrandts in their extremely comfortable bathrooms. Of course, I have nothing to say against good pictures hanging in hotel halls and stairways. The largest bar-room in New York has the whole Barbizon school--Millets, Courbets, Bastien-Lepages, and Daubignys--hanging over the bar."

"My sole reason," said Franck, "for going there every day for my whisky and soda."

Ritter, Snyders and Lobkowitz burst out laughing.

Franck had the looks of a gypsy; so that two more un-European types, as Frederick said to himself, than he and Willy Snyders were scarcely conceivable. Though a year older than Frederick, Franck, small-boned and youthfully slim, seemed to be seven or eight years younger. He was forever shoving from his eyes a pitch-black lock, which promptly fell over his forehead again to the top of his nose. He drank heavily and kept smiling. He smiled, while the others laughed as he expounded the relation of art to whisky.

A sense of security such as he had not experienced in years came over Frederick. He had always felt drawn to artists. Their conversation, their camaraderie never failed to exercise a charm over him. Now was added the fact that here, where he had counted upon a chilly foreignness and complete isolation, he had been ardently expected, had been welcomed with open arms by such a circle. In the midst of their merry toasting and informal dining, informal despite their evening dress, Frederick every now and then asked himself whether the awful experiences he had gone through had really occurred. Was he actually in New York, three thousand miles away from old Europe? Was not this his home? Within the past ten years in his own country had he ever felt even nearly so comfortable and at home as here? How life came surging toward him! Each minute a new wave rolling to his feet--to him who had undeservedly escaped with his bare existence from almost universal perdition.

"I thank you from the depths of my heart, gentlemen and countrymen," he said, "for the hospitality you show me. I don't deserve it." He raised his glass, and they all touched glasses with him. Suddenly, to his own surprise Frederick expanded in a wave of frankness, calling himself a shipwrecked man in two senses of the word. "I have gone through much in my past; and were not the sinking of the _Roland_ so fearfully tragic, I should feel inclined to look upon it as a symbol of my former life. The Old World, the New World. I have taken the step across the great pond, and already feel something like new life within me.

"I don't know just what I shall do." He did not realise he was contradicting himself. "I shall certainly not practise medicine or take up my profession as a bacteriologist. Possibly I shall write books. What sort of books I don't know. One of the things I think of a great deal is the restoration of the Venus of Milo's body. I have already completed in my mind a work on Peter Vischer and Adam Krafft. But for all I know, I may merely write on the use of artificial manure. For I am thinking of buying some land, felling trees, and living a retired life, farming and raising cattle. Then again, I may write nothing but a sort of romance, the romance of a whole life, which may turn out to be something like a modern philosophy. In that case, I should begin where Schopenhauer left off. I mean the sentence that is always going around in my head from _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_: 'Something lurks behind our existence which is inaccessible to us until we shake off the world.'"

The discourse of the young scholar, passing through his belated period of storm and stress, was listened to respectfully. His reference to artificial manure produced a burst of merriment, and when he ended, his audience applauded.

"Shaking off the world, that's something for Franck, Doctor von Kammacher. Tell him, Franck, how you came to America," said Willy.

"Or about your tramping on foot to Chicago," said Lobkowitz.

"Or," said Ritter, "your adventure in Boston, when two policemen, strangely mistaking your condition for a tremendous jag, took you on a drive in the patrol wagon to the lock-up."

"It's very good they did," said Franck, smiling and tossing the lock from his forehead. "I should certainly have caught a cold if they hadn't."

To Frederick's puzzlement, every one of Franck's utterances was greeted by a shout of laughter.

"Franck is a genuine genius," whispered Willy to Frederick, while filling a glass with Chianti, "and the greatest eccentric in the world. Franck," he cried, "didn't you come to America without a cent of money?"

"For what does one need money?" Franck rejoined, at great leisure, with a naïve smile.

"Didn't you come over as a stoker?"

"Ye-e-es," said Franck, "I was engaged as a stoker."

"But you didn't do any stoking?"

"No, I didn't have the muscle for it."

"But what did you do on the ship?" asked Lobkowitz.

"I? I sailed on the ocean."

"Of course. But you were engaged to work. You must have done something to earn money."

"I played sixty-six with the first mate."

Finally Franck's story was extracted from him. It was by painting the portrait of the head-steward that he had lived so handsomely on the steamer and had landed on American soil with fifty dollars in his pocket, though a day later not a cent of the fifty dollars was left.

"Money's a nuisance," said Franck.

III

Up to this point a wholesome-looking waitress, in white cap and apron, had been serving. Now the Italian cook himself, Simone Brambilla, came in to bring on the dessert and cheese and inquire whether the dinner had been to the gentlemen's taste. The familiarity between masters and cook, who spoke Italian together, testified to the best relations between them. This little fragment of the artists' Italy in America enlivened them all, bringing back memories of the days they had spent in Italy, the days that signify the heyday of their youth to all German scholars and artists.

"Now then, strike up a tune, my boy!" Willy suddenly ordered the cook, "Signor Simone Brambilla, you will please perform for us now! And _cantare_. Understand? _Ma forte_ not too _mezza voce_!" He took a mandolin from the sideboard and pressed it into the chef's arms.

"_Signor Guglielmo è sempre buffo_," said the cook.

"That's it--_buffo, buffo_," cried Franck, striking the table with his fist. His smile had already turned somewhat idiotic, and he seemed to think "_buffo_" meant "to sing."

"_Cosa vuole sentire?_" asked Brambilla.

"'_Addio mia bella Napoli_,'" suggested Willy, "or anything you like, Mr. Brambilla."

"What does 'like' mean?" asked Franck. "I have heard the word so often."

"Would you believe," Willy said to Frederick, "that that ox has been here over a year and doesn't know a word of English?"

"'_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!_'" Franck began to sing.

"Goodness gracious!" said Willy. "His toothache has begun to bother him again."

"'_Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten_,'" sang Franck.

"But I do!" cried Willy. "_Silentium!_ When Franck begins to sing and Lobkowitz to yawn and Ritter empties his first glass on the table-cloth, we'll soon be lying stretched out under the table."

The cook had seated himself decorously and was holding the mandolin in position. With his cap of white linen and his white linen jacket and apron, he cut a droll figure among those correctly dressed young men. Willy Snyders poured some _vino nero_ for him into a tumbler, and he struck a few notes by way of prelude, though hesitating to interrupt Franck and begin. He kept his face, glowing from the kitchen fire, turned toward Franck with an expression of courteous waiting and politely besought him in Italian to keep on singing. Finally, since Franck, instead of answering, arose, gave him a comically commanding look, and waved his fork like a baton, he began, striking up an accompaniment with a catching rhythm, which titillated his auditors' nerves. He was an excellent singer and a master-hand at playing the mandolin. He gave those well-known street-ballads which one hears everywhere in Italy, especially in Naples: "_Addio mia bella Napoli_," "_Funiculi Funicula_," "_L'altro ieri a Piedigrotta_," "_Margherita di Parete era sarta delle signore_," and also more serious songs, such as the languishing "_Ogni sera di sotto all' mio balcone sento cantar una canzon d' amore_."

The cook's melodies undoubtedly charmed back his home to him, though in colours less glorious and alluring to himself, perhaps, than to the artists, whether they had been in Italy or not. Frederick leaned his head back and closed his eyes. The dining-room was filled with the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, and the electric bulbs shone as in a mist. Frederick's thoughts carried him far, far away. His arm hung at his side limply, while a Simon Arzt cigarette burned to a stump between his fingers--throughout his adventures, his silver cigarette case had remained safe in his pocket.

Before his inner vision rose the coasts and blue gulfs of Italy, the brown Doric temples of Pæstum and the cliffs of Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri. He was standing on the Posilipo. He was with Doctor Dorn in the loggia of the zoologic station for deep-sea researches, which Hans von Marées had decorated. In Rome, Frederick had sat over many a bottle of wine with Hans von Marées and Otto, who died while working on the Luther Memorial in Berlin. He saw himself in the famous Est Est Café in Rome, or visiting the malaria patients in the hospital on the Capitol, or promenading in the sunshine on Monte Pincio with a deaf and dumb sculptor, with whom he then went to an afternoon concert. He had laughed because the artist explained that he did not hear the music with his ears, but felt it, or rather felt the drum alone, in his belly.

In that period of his life, Frederick had been undergoing a crisis. But a little more and his preoccupation with Goethe's "Italian Journey," his intercourse with the artists, and the vast number of his impressions of sublime art would have turned him aside from science. But one day he chanced to meet Mrs. Von Thorn and her daughter Angèle. He became engaged, and there was no question now of a change of profession. Angèle was beautiful, and those days, when he read aloud to her chapters from Goethe, or inspired and inspiring passages from Winckelmann, or recited Hölderlin, or held forth to her on the masterworks in the Vatican, were full of never-to-be-repeated romantic asininity. They bought engagement rings of a jeweller on the Corso. Where was his ring? He had removed it from his finger, and, like all his other possessions, it had gone down forever in the cabin of the _Roland_.

Frederick again felt that sensation of hot waves rising from his breast to his eyes. This time the emotion was a soft one, a feeling of reconciliation, of mourning over lost illusions. The second epoch of his life, if a second epoch were really to develop from this beginning, was not like the first, full of innocence and based upon illusions. Frederick was sorry for himself. He was moved almost to tears. For it is an all-too strong faith, an all-too certain hope in happiness that finally bring disillusionment.

It was in one of the intervals of clapping and applause punctuating the end of each of Brambilla's songs, that Petronilla came in and whispered something to Willy Snyders, which caused Willy in turn to whisper to Frederick, who immediately jumped up and left the room. Willy went with him.

Despite Petronilla's protestations, a gentleman and a stately, rather gorgeously dressed lady had forced their way into Ingigerd's room. Frederick and Willy arrived just as the lady was trying to wake Ingigerd and raise her up in bed.

"For Heaven's sake, child," she kept saying, "wake up for a second."

Frederick and Willy recognised Webster and Forster's agent and immediately expelled him to the hall, talking to him in whispers, but none the less energetically. They told him a few forceful things, which he received with a shrug of his shoulders. When they asked the lady by what right she had forced her way in, she said she was the proprietor of one of the largest New York theatrical agencies and had negotiated the contract between Webster and Forster and Ingigerd Hahlström's father, who had received a thousand dollars in advance.

"Time is money, especially here in New York," she declared. "Even if Miss Hahlström cannot dance to-night, she must begin to think of to-morrow. I should be willing to accommodate her, but this is only one of a hundred cases that I have to look after. And if Miss Hahlström is to appear to-morrow, she must go with me this very minute to"--she mentioned the Gerson of New York--"so that they can work on her costume over night. The establishment is on Broadway, and a cab is waiting in front of the door."

The lady said all this in Ingigerd's room, intentionally refraining from lowering her voice. Several times Frederick and Willy interrupted to ask her to moderate her tones.

"Miss Hahlström will not dance at all," said Frederick, finally.

"Indeed?" said the agent. "Then she'll be involved in a very unpleasant law suit."

"Miss Hahlström is a minor," said Frederick, "and her father, with whom you concluded the contract, probably lost his life in the sinking of the _Roland_."

"And I," said the agent, "don't want to lose a thousand dollars for nothing."

"Miss Hahlström is sick."

"Very well, then I'll send my physician."

"I myself am a physician."

"A German physician, I suppose," she said. "The only physicians that count for us are Americans."

Perhaps this American woman, equipped with a masculine intellect, masculine energy, and a masculine voice would have put through her will, had not Ingigerd's heavy sleep defied all the noise about her, even the shaking to which she had been subjected. At length Frederick displayed a degree of determination so unambiguous that the agent had to recede from her position and temporarily withdraw from the field. Besides, Willy hit upon an idea, the far-reaching significance of which Frederick did not realise until later. He declared that if the agent did not desist, he would notify the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, since Miss Hahlström was not yet seventeen years old.

"Gentlemen," said the lady, evidently taken aback and coming round a bit, "remember that both Webster and Forster and myself have been spending enormous sums on advertising for four weeks. I reckoned on a tour as far as San Francisco. Now that Miss Hahlström happens to be one of the survivors of the _Roland_ and has lost her father besides, she has become the sensation of the season. If she were to appear now, she could return to Europe in three months with fifty thousand dollars over and above the sum contracted for. Would you be responsible to Miss Hahlström for such an enormous loss?"

After the agent and her escort had left, Willy Snyders confirmed what she had said about the amount of advertising that had been done. For weeks all the bill-boards, all the building scaffoldings, every empty barrel where building was going on were covered with posters announcing "Mara, or the Spider's Victim." Sometimes they displayed a life-size figure of a dancer, represented as almost a child still, a sort of albino with red rabbit's eyes and streaming saffron-yellow hair. A spider, with a body the size of a small balloon, was crouching behind its web. The poster was by Brown, the most talented poster-painter in New York.

"You can see those posters everywhere on the streets still," said Willy Snyders. "That's why it seems so funny to think I always stared at them quite unsuspecting; and now Miss Ingigerd and you are in this house. Life concocts crazy plots. I assure you, when I looked at those posters, I thought of everything else in the world but you, Doctor von Kammacher. And little did I divine that they would ever be of more significance to me than the advertisements of any ordinary vaudeville."

When Frederick and Willy returned to the dining-room, the chef was gone, and Lobkowitz and Franck were engaged in the time-worn dispute, whether Raphael or Michael Angelo is the greater. Willy gave a humorous, though indignant account of the battle of the Amazons that had just taken place and how Webster and Forster wanted to insist on Miss Hahlström's appearing that very night. The artists' chivalry was aroused. They declared unanimously that they would refuse to give up their lovely ward, even if all New York were to come and besiege them.

Frederick looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past ten. The last thing Arthur Stoss had said on parting occurred to him, "At half past ten to the dot, I shall be on the boards behind the footlights." Frederick told the artists about Arthur Stoss; and Willy Snyders, the man of initiative, proposed that they go together to Webster and Forster to see the armless actor's performance.

IV

Ritter lent Frederick one of his evening suits, which fitted him to perfection, and within less than half an hour the company was sitting in a box at Webster and Forster's. The enormous hall, in which smoking and drinking were allowed, was full. Willy estimated that there were about four or five thousand people present. A number of immense arc-lights shone in the tobacco smoke like frosty, white moons.

When Frederick and his friends entered, a woman and a slim toreador were dancing. The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive. The dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness. When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth, or on one of the islands of the Cyclades. He promptly decided to leave Spain and follow the lovely dancer to her home in Greece, where she was his Chloë and he, her Daphnis. Old shepherds sat tippling in a pine grove dedicated to Pan. From the highland meadows he looked down upon the far off Ægean Sea beating noiselessly against the rocky coast-line.

The music of the orchestra turned into the piping of Pan, while Webster and Forster, the heavy fumes, the air vitiated by the exhalations of five thousand people no longer existed. The pure breath of spring was rustling in the pines. The shepherdess was dancing as she had learned to dance from the droll caperings of the goats or, by natural inheritance, from great Pan himself. It was a dance of young, wild, bubbling joy in life.

"The origin of all music," thought Frederick, "is dance and song in one and the same person. The feet compel the rhythm that the throat voices; and if the dancer herself does not sing, she hears music different from the music to which she is dancing, and if she dances without an accompaniment, we who behold her hear her music nevertheless. The melodies I hear in this girl's dancing are comparable in their bucolic innocence to the things of the same sort that Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert wrote. They have exorcised the vulgar muse from this vulgar place, banishing her to a remote distance."

The dancer was a Spaniard. She made little leaps in the air and tossed her head archly, as if for her own joy, unconscious both of the audience and the toreador, who sometimes picked her up and held her aloft. Her dancing was innocent, entirely free from sensuality. At the conclusion of her performance, Frederick and his friends clapped madly, while the vast audience gave very scanty signs of applause.

"Caviar to the general," said Frederick.

When she disappeared in the wings, a lackey in red livery stepped on the stage and set a number of small seats at regular distances from one another. It was not until he had left and returned again with a pea-rifle and a violin that Frederick recognised the brave private, Bulke. The next moment Stoss appeared. A frantic outburst of delight, threatening never to end, greeted him. He wore a jacket and knee-breeches of black velvet, a lace jabot, lace cuffs, black silk stockings, and buckled pumps of patent leather. His yellowish hair was brushed straight up all around his large head. His pale face, with its broad cheek bones and broad flat nose, was turned to the audience with a professional smile. The applause refused to end, and the armless trunk made a moderately profound bow.

Frederick saw the same man helpless, drenched with water, crouching under the seats of the life-boat; and he recalled with what murderous determination the sailors, Bulke, Doctor Wilhelm, and he himself, as well as the women, Rosa, Mrs. Liebling, and Ingigerd, had prevented the boat from capsizing. What an unreal contrast between the past and the present! And why was Stoss receiving such homage?

The psychology of certain mass demonstrations has yet to be written. What could the applause have been intended to signify? "We are grateful to God that he rescued you. This you have accomplished, you poor armless man, that hundreds, though they had two arms, perished, while you are privileged to appear on the stage this evening as if nothing had occurred. We must enjoy ourselves; and it is better that you who entertain and amuse us with your thousands of tricks should have been saved than any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Besides we want to reimburse you for all the troubles you have been through. What is more, because of your skill and because of your rescue, you are a lion whose worth has increased twofold."

The turbulence continued. The man the audience so honoured was fairly drowned in a sea of applause. At last a man in evening dress stepped from the wings and made signs that he wanted to speak. Silence fell, and he announced that Arthur Stoss, the world's champion, would say a few words. The next instant Stoss's sharp, clear boyish voice rang through the theatre reaching even the hindmost seats.

Frederick caught expressions here and there, "My dear New Yorkers," "hospitable Americans," "the hospitable shores of America," "Columbus," and "1492." He heard Stoss say that on the bill-boards one read "1492," the year in which modern America was born. He distinguished phrases such as "_navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse_," "through darkness to light," and so on. Stoss's speech utterly lacked inspiration.

"Noah's ark," he said, "has not yet become superfluous. Two-thirds of the earth's surface is still covered with water. But if a vessel here and there is swallowed up in the flood, the ark of humanity cannot sink, since God has set his rainbow in the heavens. The ocean is the cradle of heroism, it is the unifying, not the dividing element."

The name of Captain von Kessel resounded in the hall. Frederick saw the dead hero tossing about in the great black waters under a starless heaven. Above the performer's shrill voice, he heard the captain's voice saying:

"My brother has a wife and children. He is an enviable man, Doctor von Kammacher."

Frederick was roused from his recollections by the frantic applause that greeted the conclusion of the brilliant speech.

Arthur Stoss now seated himself on one of the seats, and Bulke, the hero and life saver in red livery, laid a violin on another and proceeded to draw off his master's shoes. Stoss's feet were clad in black stockings leaving his toes bare. With the toes of his right foot, he took the bow and with his left foot, deftly rosined it; a spectacle that sent a whisper of astonishment rippling through the audience. The orchestra struck up Bach's "Prelude," to which Stoss played Gounod's "Ave Maria." The tones he produced were beautiful, and the vast crowd was enraptured. Remembering the awful disaster, they were transported into a sentimental, religious mood. Frederick shuddered with disgust. The sinking of the _Roland_ was being exploited.

It was a relief when Stoss finally took up the pea-rifle. Bulke in the part he now played aroused as much admiration in Frederick and the artists as Stoss, if not more. While his master shot off the rifle, he stood at a distance of fifteen feet, with total unconcern holding up cards for Stoss to aim at. Stoss put a hole through the middle of the card every time.

V

When he awoke rather late the next morning, Frederick was astonished to find everything about him standing still. The bed was not pitching, the glasses and water basin were not rattling, the floor was not sloping downward, nor were the walls tumbling on his head. The grey light of a cloudy winter day coming through the window by no means made an unpleasant or cheerless impression.

He rang, and Petronilla appeared. The young lady, she said, had awakened, looking well and rosy, and had already breakfasted. She handed him a note from Willy Snyders, saying exactly where he could be found at different times during the forenoon and that he would be back for lunch at quarter past twelve.

Frederick took the second bath he had had within twelve or fourteen hours. They had laid out fresh underwear and several perfectly new suits of Bonifacius Ritter's for him to choose from; and he sat down to breakfast a "newborn" man. Petronilla herself brought in breakfast. While serving, she told him everybody, even all the servants, had gone out. She left the room, and returned a few moments later to ask if there was anything else he wished.

"Nothing, thank you."

She then requested permission to go out for about an hour and a half to purchase various trifles for the signorina. Soon after, Frederick saw the excellent housekeeper, all muffled up, step from the front door into the wet, almost deserted street.

After he had made this observation, he became uneasy, lit a cigarette, screwed his right eye meditatively, and bit his lips. The house was empty. For that reason his heart was audibly knocking against his ribs. Again the fantastic incalculableness of life struck him as so remarkable. An occasion, a condition such as this he had scarcely hoped to reach in weeks, or even months, certainly not in the wild welter of New York. From the noise of the steamer and the city, from the rushing and roaring of the Atlantic Ocean, he was suddenly plunged into the silence of the grave. It affected him with a sense of desertion and oblivion. In that city of four million inhabitants, each man was strenuously pursuing his own affairs, or was harnessed into an iron yoke of duties, which deafened and blinded him to everything beside the path he had to tread.

Frederick looked at his watch. It was twelve minutes past ten. His uneasiness increased. He was unable to sit still. Each nerve, each cell of his body was touched and excited by invisible forces storming upon him from all sides. A force of this nature, penetrating walls, floors and ceilings, has been called by various names. We speak of magnetism, of od, of electricity. As for electricity, Frederick just then had a peculiar experience of it. He was trying to find composure in front of the open fireplace; and whenever he touched metal with the tongs, crackling little sparks shot out. Everything in the room seemed to be charged. If he merely ran his finger tips lightly over the rug before the hearth, there were little flashes and reports, like the crack of a tiny whip.

"There they are," he thought, smiling, "the Toilers of the Light." And while he racked his brain to recall in what book of fairy tales he had read of those diminutive elves, the dream he had had on the _Roland_ occurred to him. "Toilers of the Light, what are you doing?" he asked several times, and snatched after the sparks, as one snatches after flies in a fit of impatience and boredom. It seemed to him that countless numbers of those little children of Lucifer were pricking his blood like so many dancing stars. Even the air was filled with stars. They clogged his breathing. He arose and walked out into the hall.

As he paced up and down there for a while, undecided what to do, making as little sound on the bricks as possible, he looked into the kitchen, which, like the dining-room, was in the basement, and convinced himself that it was empty. Then he softly ascended the marble steps to the next floor, where he tried with all his might to check the rise of a passion almost robbing him of his senses. In that endeavour he entered the library, a room comfortably furnished and well equipped with appurtenances for reading and writing. The walls were covered with views of ancient Rome and engravings by Piranesi. But neither the city of the Tiber nor the grave of Cecilia Metella, nor the Colosseum, nor the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli had the power to engage his real attention.

He was out in the hall again, though hesitating still whether to mount to the first story. For a while he stood uncertain, clinging with both hands to the wooden post of the balustrade, his head sunk on his hands, and his whole body shivering as in a chill. Then he raised his head. His eyes were fixed. He seemed a different person.

In that moment Frederick comprehended the passionate speech of his body, and sanctioned its demands. The thing that now came to the fore, despite all the grief that had been gathering in him, despite all his spiritual conflicts, his bitter mental convictions and self-condemnations, despite his repugnance, his horror, his compassion and his hesitating and delaying, the thing that came to the fore was the suppressed, unsatisfied demand of his body. In the silence of the morning in that strange house, it suddenly assumed an elemental, indomitable force. It would have overridden the firmest will opposing it. But Frederick's will did not oppose it. His clear, firm intention approved it, strengthened it, and made its power invincible. He entered Ingigerd's room. She was sitting at the open fireplace in a dressing-gown of Petronilla's purchasing, and was drying the masses of her long, light hair.

"Oh, Doctor von Kammacher!" she cried in slight alarm, and fixed her shimmering sea-green eyes upon the man standing there with eyes almost closed, breathing heavily, incapable of uttering a word. As by hypnotic influence, a helpless look of self-abandonment, of complete melting away spread over her face.

The sight of her expression robbed Frederick all the more of self-control. At last the time had come to extinguish the fires tormenting him in one wild, greedy draught. With the hoarse cry of a beast and the fury of a man dying of thirst, he plunged deep into the slowly, slowly cooling waves of love.

VI

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Petronilla returned. She was accompanied by an errand boy and a fair-haired young man, who was not dressed with the elegance of the residents of the club-house. His feet were heavily shod. While waiting in the hall he waved a wet umbrella with his sinewy left hand and a worn felt hat with his right hand, whistled very skilfully, and paced noisily to and fro in long strides, as if entirely at home in the place.

Petronilla summoned Frederick. With an almost passionate outcry of welcome, the one of the two men ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, and the other down the stairs twice as fast. They kissed and shook hands vigorously.

Frederick's early visitor was Peter Schmidt, of whom he had dreamed on the _Roland_. He had read Frederick's name in the newspaper among the survivors and had come from his home in Meriden, several hours' ride from New York, to see his old friend. The paper also gave Frederick's address, the reporters having got hold of it through his connection with the celebrity, Ingigerd Hahlström.

The first question Frederick asked after the storm of greeting had subsided, was, "I say, old boy, do you believe in telepathy?"

"Telepathy? Not a bit," replied the Friesian, and laughed a mighty laugh. "I am scarcely thirty, and sound in mind and body. I'm not an idiot. I hope no Mr. Slade has turned your head like old Zöllner's in Leipzig. Have you come over to preside at a theosophical or spiritualistic meeting? Then good-bye to our friendship, old fellow."

This was the familiar tone to which the friends were accustomed from their university days. It was infinitely refreshing to both to hear it again. No conventions of any sort divided them. Their relations were free of everything that hampers association in later years.

"You've been through a thing or two," his friend said, when Frederick confirmed the newspaper account of his having witnessed the sinking of the _Roland_. "I believe you're a married man and have children and are living in Germany, and as an avocation are doing scientific work, while practising medicine as a vocation. You were thinking of everything else in the world but a trip to America, which never had any charms for you."

"Isn't it weird," said Frederick, "how one suddenly finds oneself in a place one never dreamt of, arriving there in ways most unforeseen and at a time most unforeseen? And doesn't it seem as if the life we lived eight years ago, which was so choke-full of actuality, of real living, had all of a sudden turned to nothing?"

Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to take a walk through the streets of New York. Frederick went to consult Ingigerd. He found that for the next few hours she would be completely taken up with dressmakers. All she said was that she hoped to see him again at luncheon. Soon after, the two friends were walking along the asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar.

Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had parted only half an hour before. Within a short time, each had told the other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years. Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt. Without departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects and spiritual crises. He did not refrain from telling how he had been uprooted and torn this way and that. The first and final achievement of his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning's experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous, by no means tinged with the drab of resignation.

Peter Schmidt's account of himself, in contrast, was very brief. All he had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife, a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother and her Swiss mountains.

Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ideologist. As ideologist, he hoped for the best for humanity's future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a large number of the inhabitants of the United States had not yet struck root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty.

A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper. Peter Schmidt, who had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several.

"There you are," he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets. "The _Roland_, the _Roland_, and still the _Roland_, columns and pages of the _Roland_."

Frederick clutched at his head.

"Was I really on the _Roland_?" he exclaimed.

"Very much so, it seems," said Schmidt. "Here you are in black type. 'Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.' And here they have a picture of you."

The artist of _The World_ had with a few strokes dashed off a young man, the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.

"Did you really do it?" asked Peter Schmidt.

"I don't think so," said Frederick. "I must admit the details of the accident are not very clear in my mind any more." Frederick stood still, turned pale, and tried to recollect. "I don't know," he said, "what is most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it." Still standing in the middle of the path, he continued: "What strikes a man hardest is the absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative brutality. We know nature's brutality in theory; but to be able to live, we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality. The most enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes in something like an all-beneficent God. But such an experience gives that 'somehow' and 'somewhere' an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists. And I have come from the sinking of the _Roland_ with a spot in my soul deaf and dumb and numb. It has not awakened to life yet. The brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one's mind, one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to something that one knows to be a vile deception. What is the sense of our sentimentalising over man's dignity, his divine destiny, when such fearful, inane injustice is wrought upon innocent persons and cannot be undone?"

Frederick turned very pale. He was seized by a violent attack of nausea. His lids opened wide, his eyes popped with a curious expression of horror. He trembled slightly, and in some alarm clutched impetuously at his friend's arm. His brain reeled dully as he felt the ground beneath his feet beginning to heave.

"I have never had anything like this before," he said. "I think the accident has left me with something."

Peter Schmidt led his friend to a bench, which fortunately happened to be close by. He saw it was a nervous attack. Frederick's hands turned numb, cold sweat broke out on his body, and he suddenly fell over in a faint. When he awoke, it took some time for him to recognise his surroundings. He said things meant for somebody else. He thought he saw his wife, then his children, and then his father in full uniform. When he regained complete consciousness, he implored his friend to keep the incident a secret. Peter Schmidt promised he would.

"My opinion is," he said, "that your over-wrought, over-taxed nerves are in revolt. They are taking revenge and at the same time curing themselves."

"Though I have inherited the strongest constitution from both my father's and mother's sides," said Frederick, "yet, from last summer on, I have been assailed by so many things that I have long been expecting a collapse. I know this will not be the last attack. I should have cause for rejoicing were the condition not to become chronic."

"Oh," said Schmidt, "you may have two or three more attacks, but if you live quietly for a few months, they may never recur again."

In coming out of his swoon Frederick, as he himself said, returned from a trip around the world. He had travelled through the axis of the earth to the antipodes, which actually did hang head downward.

"I felt as if I had been dead and had come back to life," he said, trying to give his friend a conception of the remarkable state through which he had passed. "It was not like being asleep. During the first part of my dreams, I felt as if I had been something like a block of granite for hundreds of years. On awaking I stood in the shadow of the deepest abyss. I saw subterranean landscapes, gigantic caves, heavens of stone, enormous Adelsberg grottoes. Something lifted me up. The only thing I can compare it to was the way a diver must feel who slowly, slowly rises to brighter and brighter regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea. I felt as if I were forcing myself up out of the grave. I re-lived my whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day. You can imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and death-beds. At the end I went through the whole sinking of the _Roland_ again. And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little harbour where Columbus's flag-ship was slowly decaying."

"All right, all right, Friedericus Rex," Peter Schmidt soothed him. Friedericus Rex had been Frederick's nickname at the university. "Never mind," Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took Frederick's dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves. "Don't think of it, don't think of anything, old man. Let your ganglion cells rest."

Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new world and had rested better than he had for years. While they walked on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical, physiological causes of the attack. After a while, the friends regained their old liveliness and began to talk of other things. From now on, Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the _Roland_ in Frederick's presence.

VII

"We are near Ritter's studio," Schmidt said. "If you like, we might drop in for a while."

Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous attack.

"It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my fit until the very moment you were with me," he said.

Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be struck by Frederick's evident belief in predestination and the superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic.

The street that Bonifacius Ritter's studios were on adjoined Central Park. In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making was at work taking a plaster cast of a man. His cap and his smock and trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay. Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls. When the workman left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose upper body, nude to the hips, showed the brawny development of an athlete, began to speak to Frederick and Peter.

"What won't a man do to earn his bit of daily bread!" he said. "I am from Pirna"--he pronounced it "Berna," speaking in a round Saxon dialect--"and I tell you, it's no joke for fellows like me in this damned New York. At first I earned my living as a professional strong man. Then my boss failed, and I had to give up my outfit, my iron bars and my weights and everything I needed for my job. I can carry twelve hundred pounds on my stomach."

Ritter sent word asking the gentlemen to come to his private studio. They passed through a room in which a stately young lady was working without a model at an almost completed portrait bust in clay. In the next room, three or four marble-cutters were making a great noise hammering and chiselling imperturbably, without glancing up, at marble blocks of various sizes. From this room, a cast-iron circular stairway led up to a narrow skylight studio, where Bonifacius Ritter received Frederick and Peter.

It was a delight merely to behold the young master in his slimness and elegance. When the men entered, he removed his left hand from the pocket of his light smock, tossed away his burning cigarette, and greeted them with evident pleasure, blushing like a girl. He ushered them into a small room adjoining, lighted by a single window of antique stained glass from a French church. The low ceiling was coffered in weathered oak, and the walls were panelled in wood to a height of about six feet. A heavy oak table with benches on three sides took up nearly half the length of the room. The front of the room was partially blocked up by a genuine Nuremberg stove with the precious Delft tiles of antique green glaze testifying to the wonderful old potter's art. Willy Snyders had chanced upon the beautiful Renaissance piece in a shop near the wharf, and had succeeded in buying it for Ritter for only one hundred dollars.

"Here's a comfortable corner of the Fatherland," said Ritter. "Willy planned it all, collected all the stuff, and attended to the entire furnishing."

The university student in Frederick, the thorough German in him was surprised and delighted. Though the room looked like the cell of a St. Jerome, or, better still, the study of an Erasmus, it nevertheless resembled in its least details the dim sanctum of a German _Weinstube_, and all the more so when a young man in a blue apron, a stone-cutter's helper, who might equally well have been a wine-cellar keeper, brought in a bottle of old Rhine wine and several coloured hock glasses.

The wonderful poetry of their student days long past descended upon the friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old friend again and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and of the same German ways, far from the old home. Settling himself snugly in the corner by the window, like a man intending to take his ease in a restaurant, he touched glasses with the others and uttered an exclamation of rapture.

"You'll never get me to budge from this corner, Mr. Ritter--though," he added, "I should first like to see your works."

"No hurry about that," said Ritter gaily, at the same time bringing an album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure, a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a real German Gretchen.

"Willy Snyders told me," Ritter explained, "that he bought it from a rascal of a New York customs official, a man of German extraction, whose father had been a cabinet-maker in Ochsenfurt. The figure comes from the town-hall there and had been taken to the cabinet-maker for repair. He substituted another freshly painted figure, which the good folk of Ochsenfurt greeted with joy as the original greatly beautified and rejuvenated. Thus, Willy Snyders. I am not responsible for the version," he concluded laughing. "But one thing is certain, it's a genuine Riemenschneider."

The lovely statue by the Würzburg master radiated a vivid charm, which with the spell of the small room, decorated with such tender affection for old memories, and the greenish-golden sparkle of the Rhine wine in the hock glasses, brought back the German home in all its deep-seated force and beauty--a beauty, it is true, unintelligible, and therefore non-existent, to the average German of to-day.

"Once I followed up Tillman Riemenschneider's works," said Ritter. "I started at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and went down the valley of the Tauber past Kreglingen, and so forth, as far as Würzburg. I am confident of recognising every piece of his at first glance, especially his Madonnas. They have almost completely cast off the Gothic, and no other sculptor in wood of his time knew so well how to treat the peach bloom of a woman's skin or the charm of a woman's face and body. His women are the pick of the lovely girls of Würzburg and its surroundings. Each one is adorably beautiful. Here is Veit Stoss." He took a portfolio from a shelf filled with portfolios. "Veit Stoss is superior to Riemenschneider in force of temperamental expression; he has capacities in his passions that make him superior, or at least equal, to Rembrandt." Ritter spread before them several reproductions of the master, showing the seriousness and sorrow inspiring all his works. "Nevertheless," he said, "Riemenschneider holds his own against him for the very reason that he differs from him so absolutely."

"The obstinate resistance of the Gothic," said Frederick, "the nightmare condition of mediæval Christianity, its fearful revelling in pain, its ardour for suffering had to give way to the clear, healthy vision of a burgher. The atmosphere clears, the garments acquire a natural flow of line, erring flesh begins to blossom forth--"

"Tillman Riemenschneider's portraits are unsurpassed by any works, ancient or modern, unsurpassed, I say, by the very best," Ritter reiterated.

Willy Snyders entered with a great bluster. He had come directly from his work in the offices of an interior decorating firm.

"I say, Ritter," he said, shaking hands with the men, "if you think I'm not thirsty, you're very much mistaken." He examined the bottle. "The deuce! Without me to help him, the wretch taps one of the twenty bottles of Johannisberger with which a Chicago pork packer presented him when he made a portrait of his humpbacked daughter. Well, now that one is gone, another may as well follow. Gentlemen, isn't this a jolly place for little carousals?" Pointing to the Madonna from Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main. "Isn't she a smart little body? She certainly is not by Pappe. I myself collect nothing but Japanese works." The fact seemed quite to accord with his appearance. "I'm nothing but a poor dog now, but inside of four or five years I intend to have the wherewithal, and the collecting of things Japanese will proceed by electricity. There's no race that can compete with those fellows in art. But now I want to tell you something." He turned to Ritter. "With your kind permission, I'll go call Lobkowitz and, what is more, I'll call Miss Eva. Just now, as I passed through her room, she told me she would like to meet the hero of the _Roland_." Without awaiting an answer, he left the room; and within a few moments Lobkowitz, who collaborated with Ritter, and Miss Burns, the pupil, appeared.

After the conventional greetings were over, the little Madonna was used as a welcome occasion for starting conversation again, which had begun to lag a bit on the entrance of the newcomers. Willy held the statue, a little less than three feet high, against different panels of the wall to see how it looked for permanent placing there. A spot was finally chosen, and the Madonna was fastened to it temporarily.

The stone-cutter's helper brought another bottle of the heavy, expensive wine, more hock glasses, large Delft plates, and a mountain of sandwiches. Though Frederick and Peter had declared they must end their too lengthy visit, a fresh wave of conviviality swept over the company and held them on. A half hour passed, and another half hour, and a whole hour, and still the new friends were sitting over their German wine and still they were discussing that inexhaustible theme so dear to all of them, German art.

"It is an eternal shame," said Frederick, "that the spirit which created the art of the old Greeks cannot be united with that profound German spirit, an entirely new spirit, which characterises the works of Adam Krafft, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer."

"Doctor von Kammacher," Miss Burns asked, "have you ever done any work in sculpture?" Miss Burns spoke a correct German. Her father was a Dutchman, her mother a German, and when her parents settled in London, she was only a child of three.

"Doctor von Kammacher exudes talent at every pore," said Willy, answering in Frederick's place. "I can testify to it." Willy Snyders' passion for collecting had manifested itself while he was still a boy. Among his treasures had been some copies of so-called "beer gazettes," humorous sheets got up to be read at German students' merrymaking. The copies in his possession contained sketches by Frederick, both of a humorous and serious character.

"I exude talent?" Frederick exclaimed, blushing. "Never, Willy. I beg of you, Miss Burns, don't believe that enthusiast of a schoolboy. If I really have talent, those sketches of mine in beer gazettes wouldn't prove it. As a matter of fact, I once did do some work in art. Why should I deny that, like all silly children of between sixteen and twenty, I dabbled in painting, sculpture, and literature? Once my father had to bring me to reason because I was all afire for going on the stage. Later, I wanted to throw everything to the winds to enter politics and revolutionise society by working for a party which has never even existed, a German-Social party. I leave you to judge how flighty I was and how much talent I had for art. But I love art, with a love stronger, I think, now than ever before, because everything in the world beside art has become problematical to me. I would rather have carved a wooden Mary like this"--indicating the statue by Riemenschneider--"than have been Robert Koch and Helmholtz rolled into one. Of course, I am speaking purely subjectively. I know how great Koch and Helmholtz are, and I have the profoundest admiration for both."

"See here! See here! What's the matter with us, Friedericus?" cried Peter Schmidt, jumping to his feet. Though the artists had great fondness and respect for Peter Schmidt and went to him for advice, yet, whenever he was with them, a violent discussion invariably arose whether art or science deserves precedence in the field of human culture, Peter, of course, championing the cause of science. "If you were to throw that wooden statue into the fire," he said, "it would burn like wood. Neither the wood nor the immortal art infusing it resists fire. And once it burns to ashes, it can, of course, be of no significance to the world's progress. The world is full of marvellous gods and mothers of God, and so far as I know, they never cast a single ray of light into the night of the darkest ignorance."

"I'm not saying anything against science," Frederick declared laughing, "I am merely speaking of a very unsettled man's love of art. So be at ease, Peter."

"If sculpture really attracts you," said Miss Burns, who had given her exclusive attention to Frederick, "why don't you begin right away to model here under Mr. Ritter? Begin to-morrow."

"I can't say I know very much about wood-carving," said Ritter, gaily. "However, I am entirely at Doctor von Kammacher's disposal."

"I cannot leave my little Madonna, my wooden Mother of God," cried Frederick, flushed with the wine, rising and holding up his glass. The others followed his example, laughing; and they drank to the little Madonna, each with a secret thought linking Frederick's outburst with the girl in the club-house. The glasses rang, and Frederick continued rather daringly: "I wish it had been granted me to do with divine intelligence and human hands, as Goethe said, what the animal man can and must do with the animal woman." He made a cup of his hands as if to dip up water. "I feel my Madonna in the hollow of my hands like a homunculus. She is alive there. The palms of my hands are warm. They are a golden shell. Conceive my Madonna to be a hand's breadth high, of live ivory, and imagine some rosy flecks here and there on her. Imagine her robed in the garments that Godiva wore, that is, nothing but her hair of flowing sunbeams, and so on, and so on." Frederick began to improvise poetry.

"Said the master: 'Come into my workshop.' And he took, like unto the Creator, God! in both his hands a little image, And his heart with mighty throb vibrated. 'As thou seest it, once I saw it living.' And so on, and so on.

Over my hands Flowed golden wavelets, Cool, sweet lips and--

I'll say no more. I'll merely add that I should like to carve that Madonna in German linden-wood and give her all the colours of life itself, and then die, for all I care."

Frederick's enthusiastic outburst was received with great applause.

Eva Burns was a beautiful young woman of over twenty-five years, imposing and perhaps somewhat masculine in appearance. Her German was rather hard, suggesting to a hypercritical person that her tongue was too thick for her mouth, like a parrot's. Her abundant hair was parted in the middle and drawn over her ears. Her figure was broad, stately, and perfectly formed. While Frederick spoke, and even after he had done speaking, she looked at him with searching interest in her large, intelligent, meditative eyes. Finally she said:

"You really ought to try to do it."

Eva Burns was one of those knowing, companionable women that are always welcome and never disturbing in a company of men. Her eyes and Frederick's eyes met, and the young scholar answered her in a tone of mixed raillery and gallantry:

"Miss--Miss--"

"Burns," Willy helped him, "Miss Burns from Birmingham."

"Miss Burns from Birmingham, you said something of great significance. On you be the blame if the world is impoverished by the loss of a poor physician and enriched by the addition of a poor sculptor."

It had grown dark, and they lighted three large candles of the finest bee's wax in the chandelier above the table.

"I have no objections," Schmidt several times interjected in the debate, "I have no objections to your trying to help toward the evolution of sublimer types by means of divine intelligence and human hands; for all I care, by means of divine intelligence alone, that is, by means of reason. The very same, if you will allow it, is the object, the ultimate object, of the science of medicine. A day is coming when artificial selection among human beings will be obligatory." The artists burst out laughing, but Schmidt continued unabashed. "And another day, a still more beautiful day, is coming when persons like ourselves will be considered like, well, let us say at the utmost, the African Bushmen."

VIII

The candles had almost burned to the bottom when the little company decided it was time to break up. It was a half holiday, the stone-cutters had stopped work sooner than usual, and the other rooms were dark and deserted. The artists used the stumps of the candles to light the company about. In passing through the first studio, Lobkowitz partially uncovered pieces meant for the Chicago Exposition, colossal plaster casts and models in clay representing commerce, manufacture, agriculture and the like. They threw enormous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

"You can't get results in art from large figures," said Ritter, though the statues were full of animation, and there was something prepossessing in them.

"Everything for the anniversary of 1492, everything for the Chicago Exposition," said Willy. "A Viking ship is coming over from Norway. The last descendant of Christopher Columbus, a knock-kneed Spaniard, is to be passed around for show, a tremendous humbug, always an acceptable dish to the Americans. Ritter owes this big order to his monkey-like quickness. The building commission applied to various sculptors, and Ritter sent them sketches for all the statues before the other artists had even wet their clay."

"I was working in my little studio in Brooklyn," said Ritter, "and for forty-eight hours in succession I didn't take my hands out of clay. These figures don't bother me in the least. After the Exposition they won't exist except in photographs."

"That's the way the Americans are. Please, Ritter, do give us a Washington memorial. Perhaps you have a Washington memorial ready-made in your waistcoat pocket."

"No, but by eight thirty-five this evening I will have one for you."

"He can do it, too," said Willy, patting his idol. "That is why he fits so well into the United States of America."

The men now entered Ritter's real workshop. Here there were pieces very different in spirit. While the large figures for the Chicago Exposition showed traces of commercialism, here everything was thoroughly artistic. A companion piece in clay to the bas-relief in the club-house, a group of singing girls not yet completed, was standing on a heavy scaffolding. It showed the same noble qualities that Frederick had observed in the relief of the singing boys. Had these works been displayed in Germany, they would undoubtedly have been epoch-making. A bust of an old woman had some of the traits of Donatello. Everything in the room testified to the facility with which the youthful master created. There was a long decorative frieze in clay, putti with goats, dancing fauns, mænads, Silenus on his donkey, a procession of bacchantic figures celebrating the vintage and reproducing all the bacchic joyousness, the drunkenness, of men and women vintagers, as they cut and trod the grapes and drank the wine. Another uncompleted work in clay was the figure of a middle-aged Neptune at a fountain, looking with a jolly smile at a huge fish in his hands. There was a completed plaster cast of St. George, frankly inspired by its glorious model, the St. George of Donatello in the National Museum in Florence. In all these works, Ritter had struck a happy medium between the Greeks and Donatello and created a style fully expressing his own personality, yet showing permissible dependence upon his predecessors.

The pieces in this room were without exception meant for the country residence of an American Croesus, who had taken a tremendous fancy to the young sculptor and his work and jealously tried to keep his creations from straying into another's possession. He looked upon himself as a Medici of the nineteenth century. His marble palace in extensive grounds on Long Island had already swallowed up millions of dollars, though meant as a residence merely for himself, his wife, and his only daughter. No one but Ritter was to do the statuary and sculptural decorations for his house and garden, and he was to have free play. What commissions are given in America! Were talents as easy to create in "our country" as dollars, there would be a second Renaissance even greater than the great Italian Renaissance.

Frederick was fairly intoxicated by the young man's singular good fortune. What he particularly admired was the union of success and merit. When he compared the abundance of these works, tossed off apparently as in play, and the young man's cheerful evenness of temper with his own torn, distracted existence, a feeling came upon him that he had never before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of discouragement and helpless defeat. While the light of the candles glided over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the formless clay, a voice within him kept saying:

"You have frittered away your existence, you have wasted your days, you will never retrieve your loss."

And the voice of envy, of bitter reproach against a nameless being asked why he had not been permitted to find a similar path and follow it in time.

Ritter's life had received a wrench in Europe. Some brutal mishap while he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert. Now, after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best suited to its growth. In the new surroundings, Ritter's nature developed simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space and sunlight. Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination in the young prince from genius-land by granting him a surplus of superordination.

Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick:

"I understand Toussaint, the Berlin sculptor, was on board the _Roland_."

Peter Schmidt had warned the artists in an aside not to touch upon the disaster, telling them his friend was very nervous and a reference to the accident might have a bad effect upon him. But his warning had been forgotten.

"Poor Toussaint," Frederick said, "hoped to find mountains of gold here, though, you may say, he was nothing but a fancy-cake genius."

"And yet I assure you," said Lobkowitz, "there was something grand about him as a man. In spite of his success, he was always poor. He suffered from having a wife who was too fond of society and from having to associate with the persons who bestowed favours upon him and were so much richer than himself. That dandyism of his was not natural. Had he reached America, he would probably have ignored his wife and become an entirely different man. All he wanted to do was to create, to work. What he loved best was to be perched on a scaffolding, with shirt sleeves tucked up, among first-rate workmen. Once he said to me, 'If you should happen to see a mason resembling me in New York, sitting on the pavement eating his lunch and drinking a can of beer, don't hesitate to believe I am that mason, and don't pity me. Congratulate me.'"

"Another one," thought Frederick, "who kept the best part of himself hidden beneath the conventional foppishness of his time; another one who, like me, may always have been trying in vain to reach a definite decision between being and seeming."

IX

Ritter's dog-cart was waiting in front of the door. He suggested that Frederick and Schmidt drive down in it to the railroad station, where Schmidt was to get the train back to Meriden. The two men squeezed in beside the Austrian horse-trainer, valet, or whatever Ritter's coachman was. The trotter went off at a swift gait, and again the wild, noisy phantasmagoria of the streets of the new Babylon went flashing by Frederick's eyes.

Ritter had introduced his coachman as Mr. Boabo. He wore a small round hat of brown felt, brown gloves, and a short brown jockey's overcoat. His chin was heavy, his nose finely chiselled, and his moustache dark and downy. He was a handsome man, or lad, since boyish naïveté still predominated in his expression. He was about the same age as Ritter. While guiding the magnificent grey through the medley of cabs, trucks, and street-cars, he smiled faintly, as if delighted by it all.

Notwithstanding the city's excesses of architecture and engineering, its distinctive characteristic was unimaginativeness. The hurry and bustle, "business," the chase after the dollar had lashed the technical arts on to audacious attempts; for example, the skyscrapers, or the elevated railroad, with its unfenced tracks high overhead, its trains thundering along incessantly in two directions, winding sharply about the corners like an illuminated snake, and writhing into streets so narrow that a person in one of the upper stories of the houses can almost touch the coaches with his hands.

"Madness, lunacy!" Frederick exclaimed in his amazement.

"Not altogether," said Schmidt. "Back of it all is a very sane, unscrupulous practicality, riding down every obstacle in its way."

"It would be hideous were it not so tremendous," Frederick shouted above the din.

The newsboys were still calling the wreck of the _Roland_.

"What is that? What was that?" thought Frederick. "I am wallowing in life. How does that story concern me?"

A congestion of traffic compelled the grey to come to a halt. He champed on his bit, tossed his head, sending flecks of foam flying from his mouth, and looked about as if to try the heart and reins of the young Austrian officer with his heroic, fiery eyes. During the compulsory pause, Frederick had a chance to observe how sheafs of newspapers were being consumed by the pressing, crushing, jostling throngs.

"The cow gobbles grass, and New York gobbles newspapers," Frederick thought. And heaven be praised! In _The World_ that Schmidt bought of a boy, who at risk of his life had threaded his way to the cart, there were fresh sensations taking precedence of the _Roland_--"Explosion in a Pennsylvania mine. Three hundred miners cut off." "Fire in a factory in a thirteen-story skyscraper. Four hundred working-girls perish in the flames."

"After us the deluge," said Frederick. "Coal is dear, wheat is dear, oil is dear, but men are cheap as dirt. Mr. Boabo, don't you think our civilisation is a fever of a hundred and six degrees? Isn't New York a mad-house?"

But the handsome youth, after the fashion of Austrian officers, put his hand to his cap with inimitable grace, while a decided smile, a smile of happiness, played about the corners of his mouth, and his answer by no means expressed assent.

"Well, I love life. Here one really lives. When there is no war in Europe, then it is wearisome," he said, speaking in English, which most clearly proved how distant his relation to the old continent was.

At the station, when they were standing on the platform beside the train, Schmidt said to Frederick, wringing his hand impetuously in his German way:

"Now, old fellow, you must soon come to see me in Meriden. Meriden is a small place, and you can recuperate there better than here."

"I'm not altogether a free agent," Frederick replied with a faint, fatalistic smile.

"Why not?"

"I have obligations. I am tied down."

With the indiscretion of intimacy, Schmidt asked:

"Has it anything to do with the wooden Madonna?"

"Perhaps it is something of the sort," Frederick replied. "The poor little thing lost her father, her natural protector, and as I had a share in her rescue--"

"Then there was a girl in a shift, and a rope ladder!"

"Yes and no. I'll tell you more about it some other time. Now just take my word for it, there are times when all of a sudden in a most surprising way, one finds oneself saddled with complete responsibility for a fellow-creature."

Peter Schmidt laughed.

"You mean, if a woman steps up to you in a crowded city street and asks you to hold her baby a moment, and never comes back for her baby?"

"I'll tell you everything some other time."

The train with its long, elegantly built coaches began to move slowly, though no signal of any sort had been given, no whistle or bell or word of command. Without the least to-do, it slipped out of the station wholly disregarded. Peter and Frederick were the only persons taking leave of one another in this crowded train bound inland. Peter mounted the steps, and again shook hands with Frederick.

"I hope to see you soon again," each said to the other warmly.

X

When Frederick returned home, he learned that a number of reporters and other persons had been there inquiring for him. Webster and Forster's agent had given his address, Frederick deduced upon seeing among the reporters' cards one of Arthur Stoss's. There was also a letter from an impresario, a German of the name of Lehmann, who, failing to find Frederick in, had left a pencilled note asking whether, and under what conditions, Frederick would be prepared to deliver a medical lecture in New York, Boston, Chicago, and later other cities, in which lecture he was each time to touch upon the sinking of the _Roland_ and weave in some of his impressions of the event.

"What else?" thought Frederick, disgusted, though he had to admit that he had actually become famous.

Through Petronilla he sent word to Ingigerd to ask whether it would be agreeable to her to receive him. Petronilla returned with the message that Ingigerd would see him in a quarter of an hour. "Signor Pittore Franck is with her," the housekeeper added; which piece of information sent the blood rushing to Frederick's head; and though it had been his intention to wash and change his clothes, he scarcely waited for Petronilla to conclude her message, and dashed up-stairs three steps at a time. He knocked on Ingigerd's door loudly. No one said "Come in." Nevertheless he opened the door and entered and saw the gypsy painter sitting at Ingigerd's side. On the table under the electric bulbs, lay a large sheet of paper, on which Franck was sketching with a soft pencil what Frederick on stepping nearer saw to be hasty designs for costumes.

"I said in a quarter of an hour," said Ingigerd slowly, making a wry face.

"I'll come whenever I choose to," said Frederick.

Franck, rising without the least air of haste or confusion, greeted Frederick with perfect cordiality and walked to the door.

"I don't want to disturb you. Good evening, Doctor von Kammacher," he said with a grin betraying some delight in Frederick's annoyance.

"Rigo!" Ingigerd called after him. "You promised to come again to-morrow morning."

"What's that boy doing in your room, Ingigerd?" Frederick demanded somewhat roughly, in evident anger. "And 'Rigo'? What does 'Rigo' mean? Are both of you out of your wits?"

Though this tone of his must have been new to her, it seemed agreeable to her, for she said very humbly:

"Well, why did you stay away so long?"

"I'll tell you later. But as matters now stand between us, I forbid your striking up such friendships. If you want to do something for the fellow, present him with a comb and a nail brush and a tooth-brush. Besides, his name isn't Rigo but Max, and he's a seedy sort of chap, absolutely dependent upon his friends."

In his moments of jealousy, it was easy for Ingigerd to put Frederick to shame.

"It makes no difference to me," she said, "whether a man is poor or rich, whether he dresses like a dude or a tramp. Rigo intends to paint my portrait, and I'm looking forward with pleasure to being his model."

"His model? You won't be his model. I'll see to that," said Frederick. "But please explain how you hit upon 'Rigo'? Why do you call him 'Rigo'? Tell me."

"His mother was a gypsy, and when he was a child, some respectable people took him into their family."

"Do you believe that? Franck's friends say he lies every time he opens his mouth."

"I'm not a father confessor. He may lie for all I care."

Frederick did not reply.

Ingigerd was still sitting at the table. With gentle ardour he pressed his lips to her head, loosened the ribbon tying her hair at the nape of her neck, and plunged his fingers deep into the wave of flowing gold.

"Where were you?" the girl asked. Frederick told her of Peter Schmidt and the exhilarating afternoon in Ritter's studio.

"I don't like that sort of thing," she said. "How can people drink wine?"

The thought passed through Frederick's mind that the girl's remarks were rather flat and failed to echo the things he had been telling her.

About an hour later Frederick asked Willy to help him find a boarding house where he and Ingigerd could live, or Ingigerd could live alone without his protection.

"You must realise," Frederick explained, "that no matter how unprejudiced you and your friends may be, it won't do to let a young lady remain permanently in a bachelors' club-house."

Willy did realise the impropriety of the situation; and that very same evening he found an excellent place for her with friends on Fifth Avenue.

The next morning, after the men had left the house, Frederick again fell under the spell of a strange excitement that led him to Ingigerd's room. This time, however, it was not a wave of passion, but a storm of desire for self-purification.

"Ingigerd," he said, "fate has brought us together. I am sure you, too, feel that in spite of all the appalling events we underwent, something like predestination was at work." Frederick now told her, as he had fully planned to do, the story of his past. It was a complete confession. He spoke of his youth and marriage, spoke with all possible forbearance and love of his wife. "There was no hope for her ever getting well again. I have nothing to reproach myself with in regard to her, except that I was a man merely of good intentions and imperfect achievement. But I may not have been the right husband for her in so far as I could not give her the repose of spirit that she needed and I myself lacked. When the collapse finally occurred and other misfortunes--they seldom come singly--and in addition I suffered disappointments outside my family life, I had great difficulty in bearing up. I hate to speak of it, but it is the truth--before I saw you, I picked up a revolver more than once for a very definite purpose. Life weighed upon me like lead. It had turned stale and tasteless. The sight of you, Ingigerd, and, strange to say, the wreck, which I experienced not only symbolically but in actuality, taught me to value life again. You and bare existence--the two things I saved from the wreck. Once more I stand on terra firma. I love the soil. I should like to fondle it. But I am not yet secure, Ingigerd. I am still sore, without and within, you know. You have suffered a loss, I have suffered a loss. We have beheld the other side of existence, the unforgettable gloom. We have looked into the pit. Ingigerd, shall we cling to each other? Will you come to a man torn and distracted, lashed by scorpions, to a man who is greedy to-day and surfeited to-morrow, to a man who longs for peace and repose, and be peace and repose to him? Could you for my sake give up all that has until now filled your life, if I for your sake leave behind me everything that has wasted my existence? Shall we both begin afresh, on a new basis, simply and without any false glamour, and live and die as plain country persons? I will be tender with you, Ingigerd." Frederick hollowed his hands and held them as he had done when speaking of the Madonna. "I will--" He broke off and cried: "Say something! Just tell me the one thing, Ingigerd! Can you--can you become my comrade for life?"

Ingigerd was standing at the window looking out into the fog and tapping the pane with a pencil.

"Perhaps, Doctor von Kammacher," she said finally.

"Perhaps!" Frederick blazed up. "And Doctor von Kammacher!"

Ingigerd turned and said quickly:

"Why do you always fly into such a temper right away? How do I know if I am suited to your needs and desires?"

"It is merely a question of love," replied Frederick.

"I like you. Yes, I do like you, but whether my feeling for you is love, how can I tell? I always say that so far I haven't loved anything but animals."

"Animals!" cried Frederick von Kammacher. He felt mortally ashamed. Never, it seemed to him, in his whole life had he so degraded himself.

XI

A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and a man in a long overcoat and brown kid gloves, carrying a silk hat in his fat hand entered.

"Excuse me," he said, "I presume this is Miss Hahlström?"

"Yes. I am Miss Hahlström."

"My name is Lilienfeld--manager of the Cosmopolitan Theatre." He handed Frederick his card, which announced that he was also manager of a variety theatre and impresario in general. "I obtained your address from Mr. Stoss, the armless marksman, you know. I heard you had had some unpleasantness with Webster and Forster, and I said to myself, I must go and call on the daughter of a good old friend of mine. I knew both your father and mother." Mr. 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. The man's personality was by no means displeasing to him, and his presence for several reasons was highly welcome.

"Owing to the state of her health, Miss Hahlström was unable until now to appear in public. I as her physician am responsible for her refusal to dance, but Webster and Forster used such rough methods of coercion both through intermediaries and through the mail that Miss Hahlström of her own accord decided in no circumstances to dance under their management."

"Never!" explained Ingigerd. "Absolutely never."

"Besides," Frederick continued, "their terms are miserable. We have received letters offering three and four times as much."

"Exactly what was to be expected," declared Lilienfeld. "Pardon me if I give you a bit of advice. In the first place, be perfectly easy in your mind about Webster and Forster's attempts to intimidate you. For various reasons the contract with Mr. Hahlström is legally invalid. It so happens that I have pretty accurate information regarding the terms of the divorce between your father and mother. They themselves told me, and what is more, my brother was counsel for your father. Your mother was made your legal guardian. Your father had no right to make a contract for you. You ran away. You went with your father because you were devoted to him body and soul and the relation between you and your mother may not have been quite so pleasant. I do not hesitate to say you acted wisely, very wisely. Your father's training has made a great artist of you."

"Thank you," Ingigerd laughed, at the mere memory of her training involuntarily protesting against her artistic education. "For hours at a time, while he sat in a chair comfortably smoking his meerschaum, I had to dance for him without a stitch of clothing on and perform all sorts of contortions and acrobatic feats on a rug. In the afternoon he would play the piano and I would have to go through the same thing all over again."

"Your father was a positive marvel as a trainer. He put two or three international stars on their dancing legs, if you will permit the expression. He was the dancing master of two worlds and"--the impresario laughed significantly--"many other interesting things besides. But to stick to the matter in hand--if you want, your contract with Webster and Forster is null and void." He paused for an instant and began again, this time addressing himself more to Frederick. "I do not deny that I am a business man--always within the limits of gentlemanliness--and I should like to ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher. Is it your intention to let Miss Hahlström dance at all again, or have you and she decided that she is to retire to private life?"

"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.

Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul. He seemed to himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel from his body.

"No, we have not," he, too, said, "though I for my part should like Miss Hahlström to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution. But she maintains she needs the sensation of it. And when I see the offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade her against her will."

"Don't, Doctor von Kammacher, don't!" cried Mr. Lilienfeld. "Miss Hahlström, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you against Webster and Forster--bloodsuckers, I tell you--and they've insulted the lady, besides. I assure you, they are the source of a lot of vile rumours about her."

"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."

"Tush--tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."

Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held their hats in their hands.

"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing."

The offices of the famous New York lawyer, Samuelson, were partitioned off with wood and ground glass from an immense hall, a writing factory, in which there was a horde of assistants working typewriters. Samuelson made the impression of a man of nearly forty. He was not very tall, had a bad, pallid complexion, and wore a short, pointed beard. The clothes of this man, whose share of the firm's income was estimated at three hundred thousand dollars a year, though of the correct cut, were by no means new; in fact, they were rather shabby, and his entire appearance suggested that he was scarcely a model of American cleanliness. He spoke in a very low, thick voice, as if suffering from a sore throat.

Within less than fifteen minutes, the contract between Lilienfeld and Ingigerd had been concluded, a contract, which owing to the fact that Ingigerd was a minor, was no more valid than the contract with Webster and Forster. Samuelson showed that he was informed of all the details of the case of Hahlström _vs._ Webster and Forster. When the question of their demands arose, he merely smiled with an air of great disdain and said:

"We will quietly lie low and let them make the advance."

When Ingigerd and Frederick were sitting alone together in a closed cab on the way home, he put his arms about her passionately.

"If you dance on the stage, Ingigerd, I'll go out of my mind. I feel as if you and I and our love would be exposed in the pillory. If it were I instead of you, it would not be half so hard to stand."

The poor young scholar began again to pour out before the little vampire all the anguish he had been suffering, this time with hot kisses and embraces.

"I am a drowning man. If you do not hold your hand out to me I shall sink forever. You are stronger than I am. You can save me. The world is nothing to me. What I lost is nothing, was nothing and will always be nothing to me, if only I can exchange it for you. Come with me, and you shall be all in all to me, the one thing of significance in my life."

"You are not weak," the girl whispered with a dying-away look in her eyes. She breathed heavily, her narrow lips parted, and that fatal, seductive smile spread over her languishing face, like a mask.

"Take me! Run away with me!"

For a time they were silent as the cab rolled along easily on its rubber tires.

"They can wait a long while for you, Ingigerd," Frederick at length said. "To-morrow we shall be with Peter Schmidt in Meriden."

But she laughed. Yes, she laughed at him, and Frederick clearly saw he had melted her body, not her soul; or a soul was a thing this girl did not possess.

The cab came to a halt in front of the club-house. Frederick seemed to have lost his speech. Without saying a word, he escorted Ingigerd to the door, pressed her hand, and returned to the cab. He chose a place at random, and called to the coachman to drive him there.

XII

Frederick crouched in a corner of the cab. In a passion of shame, he called himself the vilest names. He removed his slouched hat, which he had not yet replaced by the New York chimney-pot, wiped the sweat from his brow, and beat his fist against his forehead.

"My poor father! Within a month, I shall probably be no more nor less than the official kept man of a prostitute. Everybody will know me and pay homage to me. Every German barber in New York will tell his patrons who my father is, and who I am, and what I live by, and whom I am running after. I shall become that worthless little fiend's lap dog, her monkey to perform tricks for her, her procurer. The German colonies in every city, large or small, that we visit will behold in me a typical example of the loathsome degree to which a scion of the German nobility can sink, into what a cesspool of vice a man who was once a good man, husband, and father can descend."

While being bowled rapidly down Broadway, Frederick, in his state of introspection and shame, looked blindly upon the houses as they glided by. Suddenly he started up from his crouching position. The sign of the Hoffman House had struck his eye and recalled the appointment the men on the _Hamburg_ had made. He consulted his watch, and found it was just about the time they had set, between twelve and one. He called to the driver, but before the horse could be brought to a stop, the cab had rolled some distance beyond the hotel. Frederick got out, paid the coachman, and in a few moments was inside the well-known New York bar-room.

He saw a long bar, marble slabs, marble wainscoting, polished brass, polished silver, shining mirrors, on which there was not the smallest speck of dust, very many shining glasses, empty glasses, glasses with straws sticking in them, and glasses partially filled with bits of ice. Bar-keepers in spotless white linen prepared the famous American drinks, innumerable in variety, with a dexterity bordering on art and a stolidity out of which nothing could shake them.

The wall behind the bar was studded within reaching distance with an array of gleaming polished metal taps; back of the bar were the passageways to the pantries and kitchen. Oil paintings hung above the taps and doorways. Over the heads of the business men standing or leaning at the bar, with derbies or silk hats shoved back from their foreheads, Frederick saw a delicious woman's figure by Courbet; sheep by Troyon; a bright seascape with clouds by Dupré; several choice pieces by Daubigny, sheep on a dune landscape, a pool reflecting the full moon hanging low over the horizon and two cud-chewing oxen; a Corot--a tree, a cow, water, a glorious evening sky; a Diaz--a pond, old birches, light reflected in the water; a Rousseau--a gigantic tree in a storm; a Millet--a pot with turnips, pewter spoons and knives; a dark portrait by Delacroix; another Courbet, a landscape; a small Bastien-Lepage, a girl and a man in the grass with a great deal of light; and many other excellent pictures. He was so fascinated that he almost forgot his recent experience and his purpose in coming.

In his complete absorption, he was only vaguely annoyed by a rather loud group, whose boisterous laughter and restlessness contrasted sharply with the quiet demeanour of the other guests. Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, started, looked around and met the eyes of a man whose bearded face seemed coarse and unfamiliar. Cocktails and other good drinks had shot his peony complexion with a bluish tinge.

"What's the matter?" the stranger said. "Don't you know me--Captain Butor?"

Captain Butor, the man to whom Frederick owed his life! And now he also recognised the other members of the noisy group. There were Arthur Stoss and his valet, Bulke, in inconspicuous black livery, sitting a little off from the others. There were Doctor Wilhelm, and the painter Jacob Fleischmann, and Wendler, the _Hamburg's_ engineer, and two sailors from the _Roland_, wearing new suits and caps. They had already been engaged on another steamer of the same line and had been presented with a fair sum of money.

The men all greeted Frederick like an old friend. Arthur Stoss, for the benefit of a New York gentleman, was retailing his old story, that he intended in a short while to give up touring and retire. He made frequent loud references to his wife, evidently considering it very worth while to publish as widely as possible the fact that he, the man without arms, actually possessed a wife.

"I have met with the most tremendous success this time," he said. "Last night the audience stormed the stage and lifted me on their shoulders to the tune of '1492,' the song they sing every evening in the Metropolitan Theatre."

"1492"--wherever he turned his eyes, on the streets and open squares, Frederick read advertisements of the ballad, a product of the vaudeville stage, in which the discovery of America, four hundred years after the landing of Columbus, was interpreted in the patriotic sense of the new nation that had since arisen.

"Well, Doctor von Kammacher, how are you?" asked Doctor Wilhelm. "How have you spent your time?"

"Oh, so, so," Frederick replied, shrugging his shoulders. He did not know how he came to frame this summary dismissal of a time so rich in content. Strange to say, here on land, in the Hoffman bar, little or none of his former impulse remained to entrust confidences to his fellow-physician.

"How's our little girl?" Doctor Wilhelm inquired, smiling significantly.

"I do not know," Frederick returned with an expression of cool astonishment, and added: "Whom do you mean?"

As his answers to all their inquiries were equally curt and stiff, it was impossible to start a conversation. He himself in the first few minutes did not understand why he had come. It was extremely disturbing to him that the other men in the bar-room recognised the group as the survivors of the _Roland_. Stoss by himself, the man without arms, the well-known marksman, would have been conspicuous.

Stoss could drink holding a glass between his teeth; but he was not touching liquor to-day. Nevertheless, he was in a treating mood, a circumstance by which Captain Butor, Wendler, Fleischmann and the sailors profited to toast one another freely. Nor did Doctor Wilhelm require much urging.

In an undertone he informed Frederick that _The Staats-Zeitung_ in its issue of the morning before had opened a collection for Fleischmann, and a sum had already come in such as the poor fellow in his whole life had probably never before seen. At last Frederick laughed, and heartily. He understood why Fleischmann was drinking heavily, with so determined a manner, and why he was puffing himself like a turkey.

"What do you think of that stuff, Doctor von Kammacher?" he asked, pointing to the paintings and snorting disdainfully. "To call such stuff art! Millions and millions are spent on getting those things over from France. They palm the trash off on the Americans. I'll wager that if one of us Germans in Munich, Dresden, or Berlin were to do no better than that, or that"--he pointed at random to several pictures--"we'd put him in the A B C class."

"Perfectly true," said Frederick, laughing.

"Just you wait," cried Fleischmann. "I'll show the Americans a thing or two. German art--"

But Frederick ceased to listen. His only impression after the lapse of some time was, that in the meanwhile Fleischmann had misused the same words, "German art," an endless number of times. Turning to Doctor Wilhelm he said unblushingly:

"Do you remember the way this howling dog, this creature laughing like a lunatic, rose up out of the waves beside our boat?"

Captain Butor and Wendler, who had been laughing mightily over something, now stepped up with brimming eyes, as if they deemed the time had come to be serious for a few moments in the company of the two physicians.

"Did you hear, gentlemen, that Newfoundland fishermen have sighted corpses and floating fragments of the _Roland_?" said Captain Butor. "Life-preservers from the _Roland_ have also been found. The corpses and fragments are said to have been washed on a sand reef, where a lot of sharks and birds are hovering and swarming. The fishermen say the sharks and birds are what first attracted their attention."

"What is your opinion, Captain?" asked Doctor Wilhelm. "Do you think anybody from the _Roland_ beside ourselves will turn up dead or alive?"

As to living persons, the captain would not commit himself.

"It may be," he said, "that one or two of the life-boats were carried farther south and entered calm waters. Only, in that case, they were not in the course of the large steamers, and they may not have met a vessel for three or four days. Derelicts, fragments, and corpses are usually carried south by the Labrador Current until they meet the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the northeast. If they turn northward with the Gulf Stream at the Azores, they may soon reach the coast of Scotland."

"Then there is a chance," said Frederick, "that our magnificent Captain von Kessel may still find a grave in some Scotch potter's field."

"We poor captains," said Butor, who looked more like a German horse-car conductor than a captain. "They ask us to command the sea and the storm, like our Lord Jesus Christ, and if we cannot, we have the choice of drowning in the ocean or hanging on land."

Arthur Stoss joined them, and said:

"Do you remember when the _Roland_ began to sink, were the bulkheads shut down?"

Frederick reflected and said, "No, they weren't."

"I am of the same impression," said Stoss. "The sailors declare they know nothing about it."

"We carried out whatever orders we received," said the sailors.

Fleischmann put in his word:

"The bulkheads were not closed down. I never saw the captain, and I don't know what sort of man he was. But the bulkheads were not closed. My place was next to a family of Russian Jewish emigrants. We felt an awful shock, and a crashing and crunching as if the ship had run against a great rock. The panic broke out immediately. All lost their heads and went clean out of their minds. We were hurled against one another and against the walls. Here you can see how I was bruised." He rolled up his sleeves. "There was a dark girl belonging to the Russian Jewish family who saw to it that time should not hang heavy on my hands during the trip." Doctor Wilhelm looked at Frederick significantly. "She wouldn't let go of me. She was hoarse from screaming. Finally, all she could do was pant. She hung on to me, and, as I said, kept panting, 'Either you'll go down with me or you'll save me.' What could I do? I really had to give her one over her head."

"Yes," said Wendler, "what is a man to do in a case like that? Here's to you, gentlemen!"

All touched glasses. Frederick turned pale, and the others laughed heartily.

"By the way, Doctor von Kammacher," said Stoss, "I just thought of that Hahlström girl. Really, you ought to persuade her to come to an agreement with Webster and Forster. If you keep her from dancing, you will be interfering with her future."

"I?" queried Frederick. "What an idea! What business is it of mine?"

Stoss, without heeding him, continued:

"Webster and Forster are, as a rule, very decent. But their influence and connections are incalculable. Woe to the man or woman that incurs their displeasure."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Stoss, but you may as well spare your breath. I am by no means the girl's guardian. Nor am I at all fitted to be a trafficker in men or girls."

"Oh, oh, oh! Why so severe?" said Stoss. The others, including Doctor Wilhelm, chimed in; which only heightened Frederick's brusqueness. "Don't you know there's lots of money in that little witch just now? As the American business man says, 'There's money in it.' Don't forget we're in the dollar land, where you can't rest until the ground has been completely exhausted and the last nugget of gold has been extracted."

Frederick was outraged. He felt like taking his hat and running away. In his present mood, he could scarcely conceive why he had come to meet these people. To turn the conversation and give vent to his spite and ill humour, and also for a nobler reason, he suddenly began to speak of the maid, Rosa, denouncing the American newspapers for having said almost nothing of the heroic girl.

"It would be of far more importance to me to do something for her than for any other woman. I'm not a man to bargain and haggle; but if a collection was made and they did not collect for Rosa, then they neglected a true heroine of the _Roland_."

"What do you mean by that? What do you mean?" Fleischmann demanded somewhat rudely, afraid of losing his booty.

Here Bulke intervened.

"Remember, Mr. Fleischmann, Rosa was the first to see you. If Rosa hadn't dragged you out of the water--she's as strong as a bear--the rest of us in the boat might merely have struck you over the head with our oars and let you sink."

"You're talking nonsense, you numskull," said Fleischmann, withdrawing and turning toward the wall with the pictures. "I keep seeing nothing but those two moonstruck oxen." He referred to one of the wonderful Daubignys.

Frederick paid and took leave, declining, as politely as he could, their proposition that they all lunch together.

XIII

When alone on the street, Frederick felt some disgust with himself for lacking humour. Were those innocent men to blame if he happened to have rasped nerves? Since it was Frederick's way, as soon as he perceived that he had done a wrong, to set resolutely to work to undo it to the full extent of his ability, he decided, after coming to the conclusion that the fault had been his, to lunch with his shipmates after all. He had been walking about eight minutes. He now turned back, accelerating his pace, and within five minutes the sign of the Hoffman House was again in sight. Broadway as usual was crowded, and the two endless chains of yellow cable cars with short spaces between were perpetually moving by each other. It was cold and windy. There was a great din and bustle on the streets, and into the din and bustle Frederick saw his friends of the _Roland_ and the _Hamburg_ step from the bar. As he was about to wave to them, he slipped and stumbled on a piece of fruit on the pavement.

"Don't fall, Doctor von Kammacher!" a woman's voice cried. "How do you do?" On regaining his equilibrium Frederick found himself face to face with a beautiful, dignified young lady hidden behind a veil and wearing a fur hat and coat. He slowly recognised Miss Eva Burns. "I'm in luck," she said. "I very rarely come to this part of the city. It just so happened that I had to buy something near here, and I am on the way now to my restaurant. I always take my meals in a restaurant, because I loathe boarding-houses. By chance, too, I am later than usual. A little lady whom you know, Miss Hahlström, visited the studio with Mr. Franck and kept me three quarters of an hour longer than I am accustomed to stay."

"Do you take your meals alone, Miss Burns?"

"Yes," she said, somewhat taken aback at the abrupt question. "Does that seem strange to you?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Frederick hastened to assure her. "The astonished expression on my face was merely due to my stumbling and to this unexpected meeting with you. The reason I inquired whether you eat alone was because I wanted to ask you if you had any objections to my lunching with you."

"I should be very glad if you were to, Doctor von Kammacher."

The stately couple attracted much attention from passers-by. Frederick was tall and rather broad and carried himself well, and his hair and beard may have gone rather too long without the application of the shears. Eva Burns was almost as tall. She was a brunette, suggesting in her face and figure, which bore no resemblance to the wasp-like figures of the American women, a race and type more in accordance with the Titian ideal of feminine beauty.

"Would you mind waiting here a minute?" Frederick asked. "You see those people over there getting into the car? Some of them God in his inscrutable ways destined to be fellow-passengers of mine on the _Roland_, the others my rescuers. I should not like to meet them again." When the little company was safely aboard the car on the way to Brooklyn, he said: "I am profoundly grateful--" and stopped.

"Because you were rescued from those men in the car?" Miss Burns laughed.

"No. Because I met you, and you rescued me from them. I admit I am ungrateful. There's that captain--when I saw his ship come steaming toward us from across the waters and saw him standing on the bridge, he seemed to me to be an instrument of God, if not an archangel. Awe-inspiring repose, solemn, awe-inspiring grandeur rested upon him. He was not _a_ man, he was _the_ man, the saviour man, and beside him there was none. My soul, all of our souls, clamoured for him, worshipped him. But here he has dwindled into nothing but a good, commonplace little workman. On the trip, Stoss's liveliness was a relief. Now, in the treadmill of his daily occupation, he has turned from the finer thoughts of his leisure moments. Duty, while deepening Captain Butor and temporarily converting him into a useful, even an important personage, acts as a leveller on Stoss. Stoss merely seemed to partake in the life on the sea, while in actuality concerned with nothing but himself. And there's my colleague, the ship's surgeon. I was completely upset to find what an empty vessel he is. I really thought he was more interesting." As if sluices in his being had been opened wide, Frederick began to speak freely of the shipwreck, to which he had never before more than merely alluded.

"What particularly frightened me to-day was the fact that a man can, as it were, digest an oak-tree twice within less than forty-eight hours. I keep discovering myself in the act of doubting the wreck of that giant steamer, every corner of which was familiar to me. I saw something, but I am so infinitely remote from it that I still cannot grasp it. I am only just beginning to feel the ship coming to life in my soul. Four or five times within the past twenty-four hours, I experienced the whole accident over again. Last night I started up actually bathed in cold sweat, and did not know where I was. The confusion on board, the tooting of the distress signals, the bloody, distorted faces, the floating human limbs, all was so frightfully appalling. If I keep on seeing such visions, I'll go down with the _Roland_ again.

"It may be morbid to feel as I do. A man in my condition may say to himself, 'Go down and stay down, if once you have sunk.' But those people who got into the car do not even say that, Miss Burns. The whole thing has gone down for them once for all. They have digested the whole of the _Roland_ and everything that happened to the hundreds of human beings it was carrying. They have digested the whole affair and almost forgotten it. That ability of theirs, enviable though it may be, insults my general humanitarian instincts. It is loathsome to me. And their clumsy phrases revealing the indifference, the obtuseness of their souls make me shudder. In their eyes I see that calm selfish sense of their own security to the damage of another person's security which is at the bottom of a murderous madness that I myself experienced. Those men are cold men, they are murderous men. And a brutal state of self-defence but slightly veiled and suppressed is their permanent state."

"Your friends, it seems to me, must have behaved very badly," Miss Burns said, laughing.

To this Frederick could not truthfully assent. He merely repeated:

"The way I feel about it is that they have taken the ship between their teeth, the ship with all its timber and iron and its immense human cargo, and chewed it to a pulp, and swallowed it down without leaving a trace behind." He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

"If you really do wish to lunch with me, Doctor von Kammacher, you must not have high-flown notions, like Mr. Ritter," said Miss Burns halting in front of a tidy little restaurant.

They entered a low room with a red brick floor and panelled walls and ceiling. Owing to the enormous timber resources of their country, the Americans make a very free, though refined use of wood. The clean little room was frequented by German barbers, riding-masters, coachmen, and clerks. An inexpensive lunch and the usual American drinks were dispensed at the bar. The corner where the proprietor sat was decorated with a small collection of sporting pictures, well-known jockeys with their horses, acrobats, and baseball champions. Something in his appearance suggested that at night he had different customers to deal with than in the daytime, that his athletic figure--he was neatly dressed, but in his shirt sleeves--was meant to inspire respect in his clients. Frederick still suffered from too much breeding, and he was secretly astonished that Eva Burns ventured into such a place.

"You are late, Miss Burns. Aren't you feeling well?" inquired the host, with an immobile mask-like seriousness of expression.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Brown. I'm always all right," Miss Burns answered brightly. "Bring me my regular lunch. But the gentleman, I am afraid, will not be satisfied with it. Perhaps you have something special for him?"

Frederick, however, insisted upon ordering the very same as Miss Burns.

"I give you fair warning," she said when they were alone, "I really don't think you will be satisfied with my diet. I never eat meat, I want you to know, and you surely do."

Frederick laughed. "We physicians," he said, "are also coming more and more to give up a meat diet."

"I think it is horrible to eat meat," said Miss Burns. "I have a handsome fowl in my garden. I see it every day, and then I go and cut its throat and eat it up. When we were children, we had a pony which had to be killed, and the people in the East End ate it." She drew her long kid gloves from her hands without removing them from her arms. "People eat dogs, too. I adore dogs. But the worst thing is the frightful, endless shedding of blood which human meat-eaters deem necessary for their preservation. Think of all the butchers in the world, think of those immense slaughter-houses in Chicago and other places where the machine-like, wholesale murder of innocent animals is constantly going on. People can live without meat. It isn't indispensable to their welfare."

She said all this in a tone of seriousness tinged with humour, speaking a correct, though somewhat laboured German.

"For various reasons," Frederick said, "I still hesitate to form a definite opinion in regard to meat-eating. As for myself, I can do very well without meat, provided I have my steak regularly every day for lunch and my roast beef for dinner."

Miss Burns looked astonished, then laughed merrily.

"You are a physician," she cried. "You physicians are all animal torturers."

"You refer to vivisection?"

"Yes, to vivisection. It's a shame, it's a sin. It's a horrible sin to torture innocent animals to death just for the sake of adding a few days more to the life of some commonplace person."

Frederick did not reply, being too much a man of science to concur in her opinion. Miss Burns detected this, and said:

"You German physicians are horrible men. When I am in Berlin, I am in a constant state of dread that I shall die unexpectedly and before my relatives can prevent it, I shall be taken to your dreadful laboratories for dissection."

"Oh, then you have been in Berlin, Miss Burns?"

"Certainly, I have been everywhere."

The conversation now turned on Berlin. Miss Burns spoke of it glowingly, because it offered the greatest opportunities for hearing good music and seeing good plays.

"I have a number of friends among the Berlin professors and artists. One of them is a Polish pianist. He brings back money by the bushel from his American tours. He owns an estate near Cracow, and has asked me to visit him there. Unless I accept his invitation sooner than I expect to, I shall not see Berlin again for a long time."

The host served the lunch, consisting of baked potatoes, cabbage and fried eggs. Though at any other time this would scarcely have satisfied Frederick, he ate with a hearty appetite and, like Miss Burns, drank American ice-water.

Miss Burns's manner in talking was thoroughly unconstrained and sprightly. She had observed that the foundering of the _Roland_ was still too vivid in Frederick's thoughts, and bearing Peter Schmidt's warning in mind, purposely turned the conversation away from it. But Frederick, for some reason dissatisfied with himself for his criticism of his fellow-passengers, tried several times to revert to the shipwreck. His whole demeanour showed that something was gnawing at him and tormenting him.

"We speak of a justice imminent in the plan of the world. But why was such a pitiful collection of men saved, while hundreds of others drowned? Why did that splendid Captain von Kessel drown? I shall never forget him. Why did all those splendid picked men of the crew of the _Roland_ drown? Why and for what purpose was I myself saved?"

"Doctor von Kammacher," said Miss Burns, "yesterday you were an entirely different man. You were full of brightness and life; to-day you are all gloom. I think you are wholly wrong in not being simply grateful for your good fortune. In my opinion, you are not responsible either for the quality of those who were rescued, or for your own rescue, or for the number of those that sank. The creation was planned and executed without regard to you, and you have to accept it as it is. After all, to accept life is the one art the practice of which is really of permanent use."

"You are right," said Frederick, "only I am a man. Besides I inherit a most unnecessary instinct for ideal rather than practical activity. 'The time is out of joint,' says your Danish Englishman, Hamlet. 'O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.' I cannot get rid of that absurd megalomania. To make matters worse, there is the Faust in me that sticks in every good German who thinks anything of himself. 'I've studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine,' and so on. As a result, a man has all the more chances of being disillusioned at every turn, and so would rather pledge himself to the devil. Strange to say, the first thing the devil usually prescribes is a blonde Gretchen, or something like her."

Miss Burns remained silent, and Frederick felt himself under the necessity of continuing.

"I don't know whether it is of interest to you to learn something of the remarkable adventures of a German scholar and ideologic bankrupt."

Miss Burns laughed and said:

"A bankrupt? No, I don't think you are a bankrupt. Of course, whatever concerns you and whatever you wish to tell me is of interest to me."

"Very well," said Frederick, "we'll see whether you are right. Conceive a man who, until he was thirty years old, was always going the wrong way, or if not that, then, at least, the trips he took, no matter along what way, always ended precipitately in a broken shaft or a fractured limb. That I escaped the real catastrophe, the shipwreck, is really most peculiar. Nevertheless, I think my ship has been wrecked and I with it, or I and my ship are in the midst of foundering. For I see no land. I see nothing solid or firm anywhere near me.

"I was kept in a military school until I was ten years old. The desire came upon me to commit suicide, and I was punished for insubordination. There was no fascination for me in being prepared for a great carnage. So my father, though it meant that he had to give up his pet idea, took me away from the school, and I went through the much-discussed humanistic _Gymnasium_. My father is a passionate soldier. I became a physician, but I had scientific interests outside of my profession, and I devoted myself to bacteriology. Broken shafts and fractured limbs again. Good-bye to medicine and bacteriology. It is scarcely likely that I shall ever work in those fields again. I married. Beforehand, I had reared, as it were, an artificial structure of the whole matter of marriage--a house, a little garden, a wife and children, children whom I intended to educate in a freer, better way than most people do. I practised in a poor country district, being of the opinion that I could do more real good there than in Berlin West. 'But, my dear boy,' everybody said, 'with your ancestral name, your income in Berlin could be thirty or forty times larger.' And my wife absolutely objected to having children. From the very moment she knew a child was coming until its birth, there was one desperate scene after the other. Life became a veritable hell to us. It was no rare thing for us, instead of sleeping, to argue the whole night through, from ten o'clock in the evening until five the next morning. I would try mild persuasion and comfort, I would urge every conceivable argument softly and loudly, violently and gently, wildly and tenderly. My wife's mother, too, did not understand me. My wife was disillusioned, her mother was disillusioned. She saw nothing but craziness in my avoiding a great career. Then there was this--I don't know whether it occurs in all young marriages--each time before the child was born, we quarrelled over all the minutiæ of its education, from infancy to its twentieth year. We quarrelled over whether the boy should be educated in the house, as I wished, or in the public schools, as my wife wished. I said, 'The girl shall receive instruction in gymnastics.' My wife said, 'She shall not receive instruction in gymnastics.' And the girl was not yet born. We quarrelled so violently, that we threatened each other with divorce and suicide. My wife would lock herself into a room and I would beat against the door, because I was frightened and dreaded the worst. Then there were reconciliations, the consequences of which were only to increase the miserable nervous tension in our home. One day I had to put my mother-in-law out of the house as a way of securing peace. Even my wife realised that it was necessary to do it. We loved each other, and in spite of all that happened, we both had the best intentions. We have three children, Albrecht, Bernhard and Annemarie. They came inside of three years, one very soon after the other, you see. My wife had a nervous tendency which these births brought to a crisis. After the very first child was born, she had an attack of profound melancholia. Her mother had to admit that Angèle had been subject to similar attacks from childhood up. After the last child was born, I took her on a two months' trip in Italy. It was a lovely time, and her spirits actually seemed to brighten under the happy sky of Italy. But her sickness progressed below the surface. I am thirty-one years old and have been married eight years. My oldest boy is seven years old. It is now"--Frederick reflected a few moments--"it is now the beginning of February. It was about the middle of October last fall when I found my wife in her room slashing to tiny bits a piece of not exactly inexpensive silk which we had bought in Zürich and which had been lying in her drawer more than four years. I can still see the costly red stuff, that is, as much of it as had not been cut, and a loose mountain of patches lying on the floor. I said, 'Angèle, what are you doing?' And then I took in the situation. Nevertheless, I cherished hopes for a time. But one night I awoke and saw my wife's face close above me with a ghastly far-away look in it. At the same time I felt something at my throat. It was the very pair of scissors with which she had cut the red silk. 'Come, Frederick,' she said, 'get up and dress. We must both go to sleep in a coffin of linden-wood.' It was high time to tell her relatives and mine and convoke a family council. I might have protected myself, but it was dangerous for the children.

"So you see," Frederick concluded, "it was not very far along the road of marriage that I travelled with my talent for life. I want everything and nothing. I can do everything and nothing. My mind has been over-loaded, and yet has remained empty."

"You certainly did go through a hard time," said Miss Burns simply.

"Yes," said Frederick, "you are right, but only if you use the present tense instead of the past and if you fully gauge the extent to which the trouble with my wife has been complicated for me. The question is, am I to blame for the course that my wife's mental suffering took, or may I acquit myself of all blame? All I can say is, that the suit in this case, in which I myself am plaintiff, defendant and judge, is still pending, and no definite decision has yet been rendered.

"Now, Miss Burns, do you see any sense in the Atlantic Ocean's having refused to take me of all the persons on board the _Roland_? Do you see any sense in my having fought like a madman for my mere existence? Do you see any sense in my having struck some unfortunate creatures over the head with my oars because they nearly capsized our boat? I struck them so hard that they sank back in the water without a sound and disappeared. Isn't it vile that I still cling to life and that I would rather do anything than give up this botched and bungled existence of mine?"

Though he had spoken in a light conversational tone, Frederick was pale and excited. It was long since the plates had been removed, and Miss Burns, perhaps to avoid a painful answer, asked:

"Shall we take coffee here, Doctor von Kammacher?"

"Whatever you will, to-day, to-morrow, and forever, provided I do not annoy you. I am a gloomy companion, I fear. I fancy there is no other person in the world troubled with such petty egoism as I am. Think of it, my wife locked up in an asylum is occupied every moment of the day with proving her own selfishness, weakness, unworthiness and wickedness toward me. Because she is so unworthy, as she says, and because I am so great, so noble, so admirable, they have to watch her all the time, I am told, to keep her from inflicting injury upon herself. A very pleasant fact to be conscious of, isn't it, Miss Burns, and haven't I good reason to feel proud?"

"What you need," said Miss Burns, "is rest. I never thought--I beg your pardon for saying so--that a man who outwardly makes the impression of such strength can possess such a wee, trembling soul. What you ought to do now, I should think, is simply cover up your past as much as possible. All of us have to do some covering up in order to be fit for life."

"But I am altogether unfit," said Frederick. "This minute I am feeling strong, because I am with someone in whose presence, for some reason or other, I can wash myself in clean water--excuse me, I am speaking euphemistically."

"You ought to concentrate on something, you ought to work," said Miss Burns. "You ought to make yourself physically tired to the point of exhaustion."

"Oh, my dear Miss Burns," cried Frederick, "how you overestimate me! Work! I am no better than a tramp. The thing I thought to cure myself with was laziness, idleness. Here I sit in a land discovered and conquered as a result of the tremendous will power of the Europeans, with my oars gone, my rudder gone and my last bit of free will. It is this that distinguishes most men of to-day from the men of that time."

Coffee was served, and for a while Frederick and Miss Burns stirred the sugar without speaking. Then Miss Burns asked:

"How did you come to lose your free will, as you say?"

"Theridium triste," said Frederick and suddenly recalled the simile of the spider that Doctor Wilhelm had used in reference to Ingigerd. Miss Burns, of course, did not understand him; but Frederick broke off, and though she questioned him, refused to explain. She promptly withdrew her question, saying she thought it was quite right and good for him if the conversation lost its German philosophic cast and descended to the level of a superficial person like herself.

"I advise you," she added, "no matter how sharply you may criticise yourself for having travelled so many roads without reaching the end, to strike out into a new road, and do so quite cheerfully. Confine yourself to something that makes an equal demand on your hands, your eyes and your brain. In short, return to your old love and try your hand again on sculpture. Perhaps in a few months you will be the creator of a world-famous Madonna in polychrome wood."

"You are mistaken in me," Frederick rejoined. "I do nothing but blow soap bubbles. Leave me to my illusion, that there is a great artist in me awaiting the moment of self-expression and development. What I am really much more fitted for is to be Mr. Ritter's coachman, or valet, or at best his business manager."

XIV

Miss Burns took out her little purse, refusing to let Frederick pay for her, and they stepped out again into the busy streets.

"By Jove," said Frederick, whose manner when in the hurly-burly changed completely, "what a lot of stuff I have been chattering! I deserve to be punished for trying your patience to such an extent. I must have bored you horribly."

"Oh, no," she said, "I am accustomed to such conversations. I have associated with artists for many years."

"Do you mean to impugn my truthfulness, Miss Burns?" Frederick asked in some alarm.

"No, but I think," she said calmly, with almost masculine firmness, "that if nature makes us suffer through something, she does not intend us to suffer again and again from the same thing. It seems to me the Creator had a definite intention in always and everywhere placing night and sleep between day and day."

"Not always and not everywhere," Frederick observed, thinking of the difficulty he had had for many nights in snatching a few hours' sleep.

At a street crossing Miss Burns stopped to wait for a car to take her back to the studio.

"Look at that," said Frederick, pointing to six similar placards of gigantic dimensions, which represented Mara, the Spider's Victim, in screaming colours. A green stripe was pasted slantwise on each placard, announcing that the dancer had been suffering from the consequences of the shipwreck, but that she would appear at Webster and Forster's the next day for the first time in America. Above the advertisement on the same wall were seven or eight full-length pictures of Arthur Stoss larger than life-size.

"Your little friend invited Mr. Ritter to a rehearsal in a theatre on Broadway day after to-morrow. It was not Webster and Forster's," said Miss Burns. Frederick explained what had happened in connection with Mr. Lilienfeld, though he himself had not known of the intended rehearsal.

"I feel nothing but pity for that girl," he said lightly. "As a result of a strange combination of circumstances, I feel I am responsible for her. She lost her father, who was all in all to her, since she is not on good terms with her mother."

"Indeed?" said Miss Burns. "Why, this very morning in a short conversation in the studio, she told me something very different."

"She did!" exclaimed Frederick.

"She told me that in many ways her father had been a fearful burden to her. In the first place, she had to earn money for him, and then he tyrannised over her terribly."

"Well," said Frederick, somewhat confused, "it is perhaps the essence of perversion that a person feels compelled to hoodwink people by doing things and making statements the very reverse of what is natural and what is to be expected. Miss Burns, I wish, I heartily wish, you would look out a little for that poor creature drifting about without anybody or anything to guide her."

"Good-bye," said Miss Burns, hailing a car. "Come and start work in the studio as soon as possible. As for your little friend, she is too self-willed. In fact, she has an iron will. There is no holding her, or leading her, that would keep her from doing anything she had once made up her mind to do."

When the car had carried Miss Burns off into the stream of New York traffic, Frederick, strangely enough, had a fleeting sense of forlornness, to him a novel sensation. Feeling inclined to taste it to the full, he continued to walk the streets alone, choosing his way at random. For the first time after speaking so freely to a comparative stranger, he did not regret his conduct. Again and again he went over in his mind his first meeting with Miss Burns in the studio, her manner during the lively carousal, when they discussed the wooden Madonna, his second meeting with her on the street, her upright carriage, her proud eyes, her imposing appearance in the little cosmopolitan restaurant. Without intending to, she undeniably dominated her surroundings, and that merely as a result of her naturalness. It had given Frederick secret pleasure to watch her eat and drink daintily, yet heartily, without any airs or graces, and systematically dissect her orange and peel her apple. Eating and drinking was to her a noble, legitimate and also inevitable act, not to be disposed of lightly beneath a foolish masquerade. When Frederick recommended Ingigerd to her guidance, he did so because he himself had experienced a beneficent influence from her remarks, dictated by a beautiful intellect, and from the glance of her straight, honest, scrutinising eyes.

"At the risk of making myself ridiculous," he said to himself, "I will go to Ritter's studio to-morrow morning, bury my hands in the clay, and try to reconstruct my life again from the bottom up out of moist clay."

XV

At about ten o'clock the next morning Ritter himself gave Frederick a very glad, bright welcome to his studio, and assigned to him a small room opening on Miss Burns's room. Miss Burns proposed that he begin by copying a plaster-cast of the arm of the Saxon athlete.

Frederick for the first time handled the moist clay fraught with so much significance, the clay out of which the gods made man and man in turn has made gods. As a result of the hours he had spent in Rome with sculptor friends, watching them work and observing each movement of their fingers, he accomplished his task with great ease, to his own astonishment and Miss Burns's admiration. His anatomical knowledge and medical experience also stood him in good stead. Shortly before completing his course as a medical student, he had for a time entertained the idea of publishing an anatomy for sculptors, and with this in view had made a number of drawings which won the favour of real connoisseurs.

After Frederick had worked feverishly with his shirt sleeves rolled up for three hours, the athlete's muscular arm began to take shape clearly, and he felt a sense of satisfaction wholly novel to him. In working he completely forgot who he was, and where he was. When Willy Snyders came in, as he usually did on his way from his work to luncheon for the purpose of saying "how-do-you-do" to Bonifacius Ritter and art, it seemed to Frederick that he had been awakened from a dream and called back to a strange life.

"I am sorry to have to leave work and go to lunch. Lunch is really a very disturbing thing," he confessed.

When Ritter entered, they all laughed heartily at his genuine passion for sculpture.

"When I return to Europe," he said, "I must immediately make portraits of my three children."

Miss Burns and Willy Snyders had actually made Frederick proud by their praise, though in Ritter's presence they turned silent awaiting the master's verdict.

"You must certainly have modelled in clay before," said Ritter. Frederick could honestly deny that he ever had. "Well," Ritter rejoined, "then you have handled your material like a man who has art in his blood. To judge by this first attempt, it seems to me you have merely been waiting for the clay and the clay has been waiting for you."

"We'll see," said Frederick, and added, "Unfortunately there is a serious drawback. The saying is that all beginnings are difficult. My former experiences lead me to believe that with me the reverse is generally true. As a rule I win the first and second round of chess, or cards, or billiards, and lose in the end. I succeeded at first in my practice and my bacteriological researches. If I write a book, only the first and second chapters are worth anything."

The artists refused to believe this, though there was a grain of truth in what he said. Nevertheless, Frederick left the studio with them in a healthier frame of mind than he had been in for years.

But his spirits departed in a measure after he had spoken with Ingigerd Hahlström in the club-house. The girl listened unsympathetically, if not ironically, to his account of his new occupation. Ritter, Willy and Lobkowitz were secretly outraged at her disdainful remarks, especially since they observed that Frederick was still entangled in the girl's meshes, body and soul.

She told him he must go to Webster and Forster and insist on their withdrawing a notification which they had sent to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Since her new contract with Lilienfeld meant the loss of the money that she was worth to them, they wanted revenge, at least, and were going to put a spoke in their competitor's wheel. Ingigerd, beside herself with rage, told Frederick that in the morning she had had a brief rehearsal in the theatre, and a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had announced his intention of attending the rehearsal the next day. She was bent upon letting her light shine in New York and receiving twofold homage, the homage of pity and the homage of admiration. Besides, she did not want to lose the money in prospect. If she were prevented from appearing in New York, there was no chance for her anywhere in the United States.

It was useless to oppose the girl's obstinate will. Whether or no, to his unspoken disgust, Frederick had to perform messenger and handy-man services for the little star. He rushed from Webster and Forster to Lilienfeld, from Lilienfeld to the attorneys, Brown and Samuelson, from Second Avenue to Fourth Avenue, from Fourth Avenue to Fifth Avenue, finally to knock at the door of Mr. Garry himself, the head of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and represent to him Ingigerd Hahlström's position, which was, that by preventing her appearance, the society would expose her to material want in a strange country. Mr. Garry refused to receive Frederick.

Fortunately for him, Willy Snyders the good-hearted, in order to make things as easy as possible for him, sacrificed himself by obtaining an afternoon's leave of absence from work. His saucy, healthy humour, his jolly remarks on New York conditions helped Frederick through many unpleasant moments.

Frederick was happy when the next morning came and he could go at his modelling again. His brain, whirling with the rattle and clatter of New York, could spend itself in his passionate occupation, which employed both his eyes and his hands. He deemed himself fortunate for being genuinely unpractical and not having to take part in that gruesome horse-racing and sack-racing and target-shooting, that crawling and dancing and jumping for the sacrosanct dollar. The very breath of that frenzied life tore the garments of his soul into shreds, as it were, while this simple occupation of modelling the details of the athlete's arm, was healing to his soul. He was conscious of it. Now and then Miss Burns came in to inspect his work and exchange a few words with him. He liked this. Her companionable presence soothed him and even made him happy. Her figure, her gestures, her conversation seemed to be the very essence of firmness and repose, and her self-sufficiency always aroused Frederick's silent admiration. When he told her how perceptibly his new work acted as a sedative upon him, she replied that she had had the same experience, and if he did not fly off at a tangent but remained steadily at the work, he would feel the good it did him even more.

XVI

Ingigerd Halström had "invited" the artists to her rehearsal at twelve o'clock. When they gathered in Miss Burns's room--beside Frederick, there were Ritter, Lobkowitz, Willy Snyders, Miss Burns, and the gypsy-like painter Franck, who carried a portfolio and sketching material--there was a certain solemnity in their manner.

It was a clear day and the streets were dry, and they decided to walk to the theatre. On the way Ritter told Frederick of a little country house he was building for himself on Long Island. Frederick had already heard of it through Willy Snyders. It was to be a rather pretentious building, with gardens and stables and barns. Ritter was erecting it according to his own ideas and plans. He discussed the beauties of the Doric column. It was the most natural of column forms and therefore the most suitable for any surroundings. That was why he had used it in his villa. For his interiors, he had partly followed Pompeian models, and there was to be an atrium. He spoke of a little figure, a gargoyle, which he intended to place over a square fountain.

"In these things, which offer the jolliest possibilities, artists nowadays are very unresourceful," he said. "We have naïve German examples in the _Gänsemännchen_, the _Männicken Piss_, and the _Tugendbrunnen_ in Nuremberg. One of the best classic examples is the drunken Silenus of Herculaneum. Water when combined as a mobile element with immobile works of art, can run, trickle, dash, splash, spray, bubble up, or rise up in a splendid jet. It can hiss and sputter and foam. From the drinking bottle of the drunken Silenus in Herculaneum it must have popped. I have had a plaster-cast model made of the little Pompeian figure of Narcissus at the spring in Naples. It is exquisitely beautiful. I am going to place it somewhere in my villa. My gardens will reach down to the seashore, and I intend to have a landing-place for boats, with marble steps and balustrades and sculpture work."

While walking in the cold sunny air next to the slim, elegantly dressed sculptor, listening to his Greek fantasies, Frederick's heart beat mightily against his ribs. Whenever the thought arose in his mind that here, in this new country, after everything that had happened, he would again see Ingigerd Hahlström dance her dance, he felt that he was no longer equal to the trial. The forces of his soul that had remained healthy were already rising in rebellion against anything that might increase the power of the little demon. Nevertheless, he was so intimately connected with her, that the public exhibition of her charms tortured him, and he suffered from the anticipation of her great success. Yet while dreading it, he fervently desired it.

The theatre was dark and empty when Ritter and his following entered. They could scarcely see and had to grope their way after the young man that led them to seats in the parquet. Gradually, their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and they could distinguish the vast windowless cave, with its rows of seats, its galleries and painted ceiling. The air, smelling of dust and decay, lay heavily on Frederick's lungs. There were recesses in the great grotto that made the impression of gloomy holes for coffins. Some of them were hung with grey canvas, and canvas lay spread over the whole parquet, with the exception of a few rows left free for seats for the visitors. The stage curtain was up, and the only lighting on the stage came from a few incandescent lamps with weak reflectors, which cast only a narrow circle of light, which widened somewhat as the visitors' eyes learned to be content with the faint illumination.

None of the men had ever before seen an empty unlighted theatre, and they felt cramped and oppressed. For no special reason, they lowered their voices in speaking, and sat there in the expectant mood in which people always await the beginning of a performance.

No wonder that Frederick's heart throbbed more and more turbulently. Even Willy Snyders, who was not easily shaken out of his composure and was always inclined to make sarcastic remarks, was silent and adjusted his glasses on his nose. He sat with his mouth open and his nostrils dilating. When Frederick's eye happened to fall upon him in his unwonted state of self-forgetfulness, he was amused by the comic appearance of his black Japanese head.

After a number of tense minutes had passed and nothing had yet occurred, the artists were about to unburden their feelings in questions and remarks, when the silence was suddenly broken by a tramping of feet, and the stage resounded with a loud, though dull and by no means melodious voice. It was the impresario Lilienfeld, in a long overcoat, his hat pushed back on his neck. He was scolding violently and flourishing a cane. The vision tickled the artists' risibilities. It was all they could do to keep their laughter within the limits of courtesy.

Lilienfeld roared and called for the porter, and thundered unmercifully at a charwoman happening to stray on the empty stage.

"Where's the carpet, where are the musicians, where is that good-for-nothing of a fellow who attends to the reflector? I expressly ordered him to be here at twelve o'clock. Miss Hahlström is standing back there and can't get into her dressing-room."

A voice from the parquet--it came from the young man that had guided the artists to their seats--several times attempted a timid "Mr. Lilienfeld, Mr. Lilienfeld." Finally Lilienfeld caught the sound and, holding his hand to his ear, stepped to the edge of the stage. Forthwith a shower of curses, which had ceased for an instant, descended upon the lad, with reinforced severity. The reflector man came and received his dose of furious rebukes. A man in a silk hat pushed in three musicians, carrying a tom-tom, a cymbal and a flute.

"Where's the flower? The flower! The flower!" Lilienfeld now shouted into the parquet, when a hesitating "I don't know" came from somewhere. Lilienfeld disappeared, crying "Where's the flower? Where's the flower?"

"Where's the flower? The flower! The flower!" was taken up in endless echoes here and there, above and below, from the wings, on the stage, and now from the last rows of the parquet--a circumstance which only increased the artists' inclination to titter.

A few more lights were turned on, and a remarkable, great red paper flower was set on the stage. Lilienfeld, now better satisfied, reappeared and entered into a conversation with the three musicians.

"Have you studied the dance I told you to?" he demanded, humming the tune and stressing the accented parts to impress it upon them. "Now then," he said, "let's hear what you can do." He raised his bamboo cane like a conductor's baton and said commandingly, "Well, begin."

And the musicians began to play that provoking, passionate melody, that barbaric music, now dull and suppressed, now loud and screeching, which, ever since it first began to excite his nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the _Künstlerhaus_ in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him and led him on.

What was this strange Ariel's intention with him? At whose bidding was he acting when he assailed his victim with inner storms and almost let him perish in a real storm on the seas? Why did he prick Frederick's flesh with this music? Why did he cast its inseverable hempen cords about his throat and limbs? How was it that after so tremendous an eternal tragedy had been enacted out there on the cosmic solitudes of the ocean, after the waters had unmercifully swallowed so vast a number of men, loving life--how was it that this music had remained untouched and unweakened, that it had here resumed its fantastic devilishness? Frederick felt as if new cords were biting into his flesh and tightening about his throat. Something like the anguish and frenzy of a bull with a lasso about its horns came over him--a bull whom a cruel power will misuse for a senseless, bloody show in the arena. Frederick did not hit about him. He did not run away, and yet he came near doing both. His head, it seemed to him, was wrapped up heavily in thick sail-cloth. He must do something finally to rid himself of that enforced blindness. He must look straight in the face of his grotesque opponent--Prospero or Caliban?

"There is no doubt," Frederick felt, while the music tortured and harrowed him, "that men seek madness, they seek it again and again. They are fond of madness. Was not madness the leader of those men who first made the impossible possible and crossed the ocean, though they were neither fish nor fowl?"

In Skagen in Denmark there is a sight worth seeing. In the dining-room of a small inn there are painted figureheads of foundered vessels saved from the wreckage. The hand of madness has unmistakably touched all those wooden men and women with their painted faces and clothes. They look forward into the distance, where they seem to see something beyond all. Their noses quiver in the air on the scent of gold and foreign spices. In some way or other they have come upon a secret and have lifted their feet from their native land to tread the air and pursue illusions and phantasmagoria and discover new secrets in the trackless salt waste. It was by such that El Dorado was discovered. It was such that have led millions and millions of men to their destruction.

And Ingigerd Hahlström, who shortly before had been his painted Madonna of wood, now became Frederick's ecstatic figurehead. He saw her high above the waves on the prow of a phantom sailing ship, bent forward with open mouth and wide eyes, her yellow hair falling straight down from both sides of her head.

The music ceased, and Ingigerd Hahlström stepped on the stage. She was wearing a long blue evening cloak over her costume.

"Mr. Lilienfeld, I think it is rather stupid to change the name of my number from 'Mara, the Spider's Victim' to 'Oberon's Revenge,'" she said very dryly.

"Miss Hahlström," said the impresario, nervously, "please, for heaven's sake, leave that to me. I know the audiences here. Besides, I have reasons for choosing another title. I want to avoid a damage suit by Webster and Forster. Please begin, Miss Hahlström. We have to hurry." Mr. Lilienfeld clapped his hands and called to the musicians to strike up.

Again those provoking strains, immediately upon which Mara danced in, like a naked elf floating in the air. While flying in wide circles about the flower, as yet unseen, she resembled a fabulous, exotic butterfly in her transparent veil shot with gold. Willy Snyders called her a naiad, Ritter a moth. Franck said nothing, merely keeping his eyes fixed upon the transformed girl.

The moment came when with her eyes closed, like a somnambulist, she sniffed the perfume and began to seek its source. In that seeking, there was both innocence and maddening wantonness. A fine quiver went through her body, like the quiver of a moth in its sultry love-play. At last she smelt of the flower itself, and her sudden rigidity showed that she had perceived the great spider on it.

As Frederick knew, she did not always represent the horror, the numbness of fright and the flight in the same way. The artists all admired the change of expression on the dancer's sweet face, where faint distaste gave way to violent repulsion, fright and stark horror. As if a great hand had tossed her, she flew to the outer limits of the circle of light.

But a force compelled her to return to the flower. Mara no longer followed sweet scents. The hideous venomous creature in the flower's calyx drew her against her will, struggling wildly. Her lids were no longer closed. It was with clairvoyant eyes that the little thing went to meet her doom.

"Strange," thought Frederick, "if her father really conceived the idea of this dance himself. In that case he may have divined his daughter's fate with greater insight and love than he is credited with. As she herself admitted, she is sometimes more irresistibly drawn by what is ugly than by what is pure and beautiful; and the dance follows a logical course leading on pitilessly to tragedy."

The new phase of the dance began, in which the dancer looks at the spider again, takes it to be harmless, and laughs at herself, as it were, for her fears. Ingigerd portrayed this with inimitable grace, innocence and merriness.

After passing through a state of pleasant repose, the fight with the imaginary threads enmeshing her limbs began. At this point, the door opening on the parquet creaked on its hinges, and a tall, stately, noble-looking old man was ushered in. He carried his hat in his hand. His hair was silvery grey, and his clear-cut face was clean shaven. He was a gentleman, "every inch of him." The young man who had led the stranger in, dashed out again, and the gentleman seated himself near the door by which he had entered. Director Lilienfeld appeared and, turning and twisting like an eel around the awe-inspiring old man, officiously begged him to be seated in one of the front rows.

The gentleman, Mr. Garry, President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and many other organisations, declined with a wave of his hand and fixed his attention upon the performance. Ingigerd had been confused by the creaking of the door, the arrival of a new spectator, and the mumbled greeting of her impresario. She stopped dancing.

"Keep on! Keep on!" cried Lilienfeld. 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. It was fearfully painful and humiliating to him to have to step up to the platform and speak to Ingigerd. She bent down and told him to go "sound that old guy from the Society and try to bring him around."

"If I am not allowed to dance, I will jump from Brooklyn Bridge, and you can go fishing for me where my father is," she cried.

Amid convulsive jerkings of her body, throttled by the spider's threads, Ingigerd ended what was apparently her life, though in reality nothing but her dance. Lilienfeld introduced Frederick to Mr. Garry. The stiff old descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, who had come over in the _Mayflower_ and founded the New England States, measured Frederick with a cold, penetrating glance of his steely grey eyes, a glance hostile as a cat's and as capable, it seemed to Frederick, as a cat's to see in utter darkness. Mr. Garry spoke very quietly, but what he said scarcely aroused hopes that his attitude would be tolerant.

"Evidently," he said after Lilienfeld had got done with an eager harangue, "evidently, the girl's father has already misused her for low purposes, and evidently, the child's education has been neglected. The creature is to be pitied for not having been taught even the commonest notions of feminine shame and decency. Unfortunately," he added in a cold, haughty manner, which in advance robbed any statements in controversion of their force, "unfortunately we have as yet no law to prevent such revolting performances, which grossly offend public sentiment and morality." He scarcely seemed to comprehend Lilienfeld's arguments, assuming without question that Lilienfeld must know how vile he and his profession were in the eyes of every gentleman and that Lilienfeld in his, Mr. Garry's, eyes was entitled to but one epithet, "vermin."

His inadequate English prevented Frederick from taking an important part in the conversation. Nevertheless, he ventured to mention the necessity under which Ingigerd was of earning her own living. Mr. Garry instantly silenced him with the old question:

"Are you the girl's brother?"

Mr. Garry left the room, and Lilienfeld cursed and stormed against the miserable hypocrisy of those old-fashioned Yankees and Puritans.

"I have my strong suspicions," he said, "that an injunction will be issued preventing Ingigerd Hahlström from appearing in public. I owe the whole cursed business to Webster and Forster."

When Frederick went to fetch Ingigerd in the dressing-room, he found her in tears.

"I have nobody but you to thank for this," she cried in a fury. "Why couldn't you let me dance the first day under Webster and Forster, as Mr. Stoss and everybody else advised?"

"Ingigerd," said Frederick, "I had to look out for your health."

"Stuff and nonsense! You took the whole matter into your hands. You acted illegally, against my expressed wish, when you chased Webster and Forster's agent away from the cab when we left the steamer."

Frederick was disgusted. Mr. Garry had made his father's personality more vivid to him than it had been for weeks. Although his father would never have expressed and carried out his views in the same form as Mr. Garry, yet his opinions, as Frederick very well knew, were akin to the Yankee's. Indeed, even in Frederick's soul, many of the same notions, implanted by birth and education, remained unshaken. For the first time since he had fallen under Ingigerd's spell, he realised that he was inwardly independent of her. The one question that still troubled and occupied him was how to rid himself outwardly as well as inwardly from the degrading liaison. Without fully admitting it to himself, he had suffered a disenchantment in Ingigerd's dance; to judge by which, the demon's spell was broken. This time that alluring seductive dance had seemed inconceivably empty. Nor was his compassion aroused to nearly the same extent as formerly.

Franck, the gypsy painter, burst in. He behaved like a madman. His enthusiasm, which somewhat improved Ingigerd's temper, was of the sort that stammers and stutters and cannot find the words to express itself. Frederick looked at him in disgust, but the next moment started when he recognised in his behaviour the marks of his own former obsession. Ingigerd let the painter take her hand and cover it with wild, passionate kisses, which travelled from her wrist to her elbow, a demonstration that seemed to her to be perfectly natural and quite in order.

"I wish you would go visit Mr. Garry again and try to influence him with pleas and threats and money," she said to Frederick.

"That would be foolish and useless," Frederick declared; whereupon Ingigerd wept.

"The only friends I have," she wailed, "are friends that exploit me. Why isn't Achleitner here? Why did Achleitner have to lose his life, and not somebody else? Achleitner was my real friend. He knew how to go about things in the world, and he was rich and unselfish, too."

XVII

The very next day the injunction was issued, restraining Ingigerd Hahlström from dancing in public. The girl conducted herself wildly. Lilienfeld said the time had come to place the matter before the Mayor of New York. In order to protect Ingigerd from slander and from being sent to an orphan asylum, Lilienfeld, who was married but had no children, offered her a refuge in his own home on 124th Street near Lenox Avenue. Whether she wanted to or not, Ingigerd had to accept.

The morning after Ingigerd's departure to Mr. Lilienfeld's home, when Frederick sat in front of his modelling in a new smock of unbleached linen of Miss Burns's buying, he experienced a sense of relief on Ingigerd's account. A burden had been lifted from him. Her change of home had removed a part of the responsibility from his shoulders and made a break in the feeling he had had of their belonging to each other.

After the rehearsal, Ingigerd was much discussed in the studio. Ritter had expressed to Miss Burns and his friends a desire to make a model of the dancing girl for a bronze statuette. Miss Burns told Frederick of his wish. But Frederick, who was still regarded somewhat in the light of Ingigerd's guardian, assented unwillingly.

"You see, Miss Eva," he said, "I am really the last person in the world to stand in the way when beautiful things are to be created. But I am only a man, and if Ritter were to use Miss Hahlström as a model here, where only one or two walls would separate us, that would mean an end to my peace of soul." Miss Burns laughed. "You may well laugh," he said, "but I am a convalescent, and relapses, you know, are worse than the sickness they follow."

A week passed, in which Frederick carried on a remarkable, but not, as yet, victorious warfare. He worked in the studio daily, and Miss Burns became his confidante. From his own mouth she learned what she had already observed, that he was languishing in the chains of an unhappy passion. Without ever interfering in his spiritual struggles unless he positively demanded it of her, she gave him advice as a good friend and comrade.

"Every time I see Ingigerd, or go out with her, or spend any time at all with her," he said, "I feel outraged and bored. I have firmly made up my mind not to go back to her."--A resolution frequently broken a few hours after it was made.

Miss Eva was so long-suffering that Frederick never felt compelled to drop the theme of Ingigerd Hahlström. The girl's soul was turned inside out and back again.

One day Ingigerd said to him:

"Take me, seduce me, do with me whatever you will, Frederick. Be strict, be cruel with me. Lock me up. You are the only man I want to have anything to do with me any more." Another time she said beseechingly: "I want to be good, Frederick. Make me good."

But the very next day she again subjected her friend and protector to unpardonably vile treatment. The fact was, she already had a following of men, running errands for her, attending to her affairs, thinking for her, and paying for her.

The thing that Frederick could not wean himself from was that sweet, fair, frail, pathetic body. Yet he was determined to wean himself.

One day Ingigerd came to sit for Miss Burns for her portrait. Frederick placed a revolving stand in front of her and also tried to model the blonde Madonna in clay. Even Ritter had a mass of clay for modelling a bust of her prepared on a revolving stand, and the master entered into rivalry with his pupils. Miss Burns's purpose in arranging these sittings was not easily fathomed. The result was, however, that the very severe study of his idol's features had a remarkable effect upon Frederick.

The flatness of her forehead, her eyebrows, the setting of her eyes, the turn of her temples, the shape of her ears and the twist they took where they joined her head, her nose as narrow as the dull edge of a knife, her nostrils, the oldish-looking nasolabial line, the depressions at the corners of her mouth, her beautiful yet brutal chin, her unbeautiful throat, with the washer-woman's pit in it--all these traits had a very sobering effect upon Frederick, sapping from his imagination every bit of its strength to beautify or palliate. Perhaps Miss Burns knew what results from such strenuous, such persistently logical observation of an object. In some ways it has the same effect as blood-letting. That is why the artist must bleed to death unless new sources of illusion always open up to him.

Moreover, in the long sittings, to which Ingigerd submitted from vanity, she betrayed the narrowness, the attenuation, the barrenness of her mind. In contrast with Miss Burns, Frederick perceived in Ingigerd with fearful clearness that incompleteness which is eternally rudimentary. Once she brought a letter from her mother in Paris and read it aloud. 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. She even mentioned the steamer she should take.

"I am not wealthy," she wrote. "You will have to help me with my work, Ingigerd, but I will try to be a mother to you in every respect,"--here came the apodosis--"if you make up your mind to change your mode of life."

There was hard, stupid, even savage hatred in Ingigerd's commentaries on this and other parts of her mother's letter.

"I am to go to her and repent," she mimicked, "because the Lord has so miraculously saved me. Mamma should be the first to repent. I am not going to be such a fool as to turn myself into a dressmaker. Always to receive orders and listen to sermons from mamma! I am not bothered about myself so long as I am not under somebody's thumb."

And so she went on, without the least hesitancy retailing the ugliest intimacies in the life of her parents.

XVIII

The Mayor of New York appointed the twenty-fifth of February for a hearing in the City Hall, at which Lilienfeld and his attorneys, Brown and Samuelson, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were to present their arguments for and against the injunction restraining Ingigerd Hahlström from dancing in public. Mrs. Lilienfeld dressed Ingigerd up in "smart" clothes, put her in a cab, and in the capacity of chaperone drove down to the City Hall with her. Frederick, upon whose presence Ingigerd had insisted, had gone ahead in another cab with Lilienfeld.

"This is the situation," Lilienfeld explained as they drove through the length of the cold, grey, dreary city. "At present New York is in the control of Tammany. At the last elections the Republicans were defeated. Ilroy, the Mayor, is a Tammany man. The word Tammany is derived from an Indian sachem, Tamenund, who figures in Cooper's Leather-stocking novels. The party leaders have silly Indian names and titles. But don't be deceived by all that romantic Indian nonsense. The members of Tammany Hall are mighty practical. The Tammany tiger is an animal not to be trifled with in the great New York sheepfold. I think we may feel pretty sure, though not absolutely certain, of having the Tammany tiger, and therefore the Mayor, with us in this matter. Mr. Garry is a Republican, a deadly enemy of Tammany Hall, and it would give Ilroy the greatest satisfaction to deal a neat little blow at him and that idiotic institution, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. But his term is nearly expired, and as he would like to be elected again, it is politic for him to make a few concessions to the Republicans. Well, we'll see. We have to wait and see."

The cab rolled down Lenox Avenue through Central Park and along Fifth Avenue, past the Metropolitan Museum, the Lenox Library, the millionaire residences, and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Below Fiftieth Street it turned into Broadway, where Lilienfeld pointed out the buildings of interest, Madison Square, and the Hoffman House, the gathering place of the Democrats. Finally they reached the City Hall Park, in the centre of which stands the City Hall, a marble structure with a cupola and a portico. In the portico the gentlemen awaited the ladies.

While walking to and fro, Frederick suddenly felt someone tugging at his coat. He turned and saw a pretty, stylishly dressed little girl.

"Why, Ella Liebling, where do you come from?"

Ella courtesied and said:

"I am out with Rosa. There she is."

Frederick turned and saw Rosa standing on the steps.

"Good morning, Doctor von Kammacher," she said.

Frederick introduced Ella to Mr. Lilienfeld. "Ella was in the shipwreck. Here you have additional proof of the tremendous physical power of resistance of the so-called weaker sex."

"Good morning, little girl. Is it really true that you were in that awful shipwreck?"

"Yes, indeed," came the unabashed answer, spiced with a dash of childishly coquettish pride, "and my brother was drowned."

"Oh, poor child," said Lilienfeld. His manner was abstracted. Evidently his mind was on the speech he might be compelled to deliver before the Mayor of New York. "Excuse me," he said suddenly to Frederick, and moved a few steps away to make a hasty, nervous perusal of his notes, which he had written on a slip of paper and had taken from his pocket.

"My mother was dead, too, but came back to life again."

"How's that? How's that?" asked Lilienfeld, raising his gold spectacles slightly from his nose and peering at her from under them.

Frederick explained how they had had to work over Mrs. Liebling for several hours before they succeeded in resuscitating her.

"If in this world honours were awarded according to merit," Frederick added, "then that simple servant-girl there"--he pointed to Rosa--"ought to receive greater honour as a hero of two worlds than Lafayette. She performed miracles. She never thought of herself, but only of her mistress, Mrs. Liebling, of the two children, and the rest of us."

Frederick went to Rosa and shook hands with her. When he inquired for Mrs. Liebling, she turned red as a peony.

"Mrs. Liebling is very well," she said, and promptly burst into tears, having been reminded of little Siegfried. When she dried her eyes, she told Frederick that she and a German consul, without Mrs. Liebling, had attended to all the formalities of the burial and that she had been the only one to see the little corpse laid away in the Jewish cemetery.

"Oh, why did you stop trying to revive Siegfried so soon? I begged and begged you to go on. There was still life in him. He would have come to," she wailed.

Here a stranger joined them. It was not until he was quite close that Frederick recognised in the correctly clad man the valet of Arthur Stoss.

"Doctor von Kammacher," said Bulke, "Rosa cannot get it out of her mind. Can't you make her understand that it isn't right always to be going over and over such a thing and that she ought to forget it? It couldn't be worse if she had lost a boy of her own. I want to tell you, Doctor von Kammacher, Rosa and I are engaged to be married."

"You are certainly to be congratulated, Mr. Bulke. I am delighted to hear it."

"As soon as I can get away from Mr. Stoss and Rosa can get away from Mrs. Liebling, we are going back to Europe. Before I entered the navy, I was a skilled butcher. My brother in Bremen wrote to me that there was a little meat and sausage and steamer supply business to be had there. We both have some money saved up. So why shouldn't we try it? You can't go on working for strangers forever."

"I quite agree with you," said Frederick.

The marksman's valet held out his hand to Rosa, whispered "Mrs. Liebling's coming," and left. The same instant Ella ran off calling, "Mamma."

Mrs. Liebling was coming through the park, walking beside a gentleman. From her costume, befitting the wife of a Russian prince of the royal house, it was evident that she had already found the opportunity to replace her wardrobe. Frederick shook hands with her and remembered the mole under her left breast and several other marks on the lovely body, which he had so ruthlessly worked like a machine to restore the breath to it.

She introduced him to her companion, a dark, thick-set, elegantly dressed man, who eyed Frederick with a suspicious, repellent expression.

"Curious," thought Frederick. "This microcephalous creature thinks I am his enemy, whereas he ought to know what he owes me. There I toiled and travailed and sweated to raise the dead. I considered myself a highly moral instrument of Providence, and after all, I was working for nothing but the pleasure of a sleek, consequential Don Juan."

Mrs. Liebling, who had already been in Boston and Washington, was perfectly delighted with America.

"What do you think of the New York hotels? I am living at the Waldorf. Aren't they magnificent? I have four rooms in the front. Such quiet, such luxury, such beautiful pictures! You feel as if you were in the Arabian Nights. Doctor von Kammacher, you positively must go to Delmonico's. What has Berlin, or even Paris, to compare with it? You can't find a restaurant like Delmonico's or hotels like New York hotels in Europe."

"Possibly," said Frederick, quite dazed.

"Have you been in the Metropolitan Opera House yet?"

Mrs. Liebling continued to put similar lively interrogations, to which she demanded small responses from Frederick, supplying most of the answers herself.

He thought of Rosa and Siegfried and had time to inspect and reinspect the signor's brand-new patent leather shoes, the straight creases down his trousers, his watch chain, his diamond scarf pin, his monocle, his high hat, and his expensive fur coat.

"What have you got to do with our famous tenor of the Metropolitan Opera Company?" Lilienfeld asked Frederick, when he returned to the portico with a "Whew!" of relief. Frederick did not understand, and Lilienfeld repeated the same Italian name that Mrs. Liebling had mentioned in introducing the signor to Frederick. He was astonished that Frederick did not know what a world-renowned star this new friend of Mrs. Liebling's was.

XIX

The meeting had so clearly put before Frederick the tragi-comedy of existence that his sense of humour was stirred and he was capable of taking the painful situation less seriously.

The cab with the ladies drove up. Simultaneously half a dozen reporters stepped into the lobby. Frederick, to his surprise, observed that most of them were on a rather free and easy footing with Ingigerd, and shook hands with her familiarly. She looked very dainty and pretty.

Her rather numerous body-guard, which now included Mr. Samuelson and his assistant, were ushered into the audience chamber, a lofty wainscoted room with bay windows. When they entered, they saw Mr. Garry's tall figure already seated at a long table near the empty chair that the Mayor was to occupy. He was dressed in black, almost like an English clergyman, and the theological spirit of the Puritan shone from his face. Yet there was too much worldly acumen, too much cold determination in his impressive features for a clergyman. He held his eye-glasses in his hand and now and then turned over the pages of his notes. Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Lilienfeld took seats on the other side of the Mayor's chair, without greeting him. The rest of the space about the table was occupied by a few clerks, the reporters, and other persons interested, among whom sat Frederick, Lilienfeld's wife, prepossessing and stately, and Ingigerd Hahlström, the _casus belli_.

The Mayor entered by a high folding door a few feet behind his chair. He was an Irishman, somewhere between forty and fifty, wearing a smile of mixed shrewdness and embarrassment. Though he did not go through the formality of a greeting, there was a touch of courteous affability in the glance he cast about the room.

One of the reporters at the bottom of the table whispered to Frederick:

"Miss Hahlström's case is going to come out all right. Everybody is of the firm opinion that the Mayor is going to give that old hypocrite a jolt." As a matter of fact, the Mayor's manner toward his honourable neighbour on the right was too cordial to presage good. Silence was ordered, and the session began. The Mayor called upon Mr. Garry to speak.

The old gentleman arose in all his height, with a gravity and self-assurance seldom seen except in eminent statesmen. Frederick was fascinated. He could not remove his eyes from him and almost regretted that his speech, according to the reporter, was doomed to failure in advance. As for Frederick's feelings in regard to the real issue, when he listened to the voice of his passion, he did not desire Ingigerd's appearance in public. But for some time he had learned to silence that voice, and he had no objections if his cure were to be accomplished as the result of a severe operation. He felt certain that for Ingigerd to receive permission to dance in public would mean a definite verdict in his own case.

Mr. Garry first set forth clearly and succinctly the aims of his society, citing a number of cases to show how children are maltreated, how their health is ruined in industry, commerce and on the stage.

Here a reporter whispered in Frederick's ears:

"He should sweep before his own door. He's a Wall Street man and employs a whole lot of children in his chemical works in Brooklyn. He is a merciless exploiter."

Mr. Garry went on to explain that these abuses had necessitated the organisation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society made it its duty to interfere only in cases in which the maltreatment could be actually proved. Such a one was the case in hand.

"For several years," he said, "New York has been overrun by a peculiar sort of freebooters." He laid emphasis on the word freebooters. "There is a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion. This growing immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills the sails of those pirates. The disease is not of American origin. It has come to us from the dens of vice in the large European cities, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna. It is an epidemic the spread of which must be arrested, and to that end we must put a curb upon the freebooters who spread the infection and continue to bring it in from abroad."

Lilienfeld, red as a lobster with rage, fidgeted on his seat.

"In the opinion of these men, circumventers and despisers of the laws of the land, the United States is here merely for their purposes, to allow them to sow disease and rake in the dollars. They are not good American citizens, these peculiar Europeans. They are not citizens at all." Mr. Garry pronounced every word with hard correctness. "That is why it is a matter of perfect indifference to them if our religion, our customs, our morals are destroyed. They are unscrupulous birds of prey, and once they have filled their crops, they return with their spoil to their haunts in Europe. The time has come when Americans should take thought and repel the invasion of such parasites."

While the old jingo made these cutting remarks, speaking with an unshaken front, proudly, hitting straight out from the shoulder, Frederick unwearyingly watched every movement of his hard, noble old face. The anthropologist and the newly awakened sculptor in him were equally stirred. When comparing the "freebooters" to birds of prey, Garry himself had resembled a bird of prey. His expression was like an eagle's. He stood with his back to the windows, but with his head turned slightly to one side, and when he spoke of the birds filling their crops, it seemed to Frederick that his light-blue eyes paled to a whitish sheen.

Garry now came down to the subject of Ingigerd.

"By God's will a tremendous shipwreck has occurred, an appalling event, wholly calculated to turn men's thoughts to repentance." He interrupted himself to say it was useless to go into more details on this point, since those who did not know how to respect such a visitation from God were beyond redemption. "It has not been proved that the girl who survived the shipwreck is over sixteen years of age. I propose to place her in a hospital, have one of the steamship companies transport her back to Europe as soon as possible, and consign her to her mother, who lives in Paris. She should be placed in the care of a physician and under guardianship. She has been trained to do a certain dance, during which she falls into a pathologic condition not unlike an epileptic fit. She turns stiff and rigid as a block of wood, her eyes start from her head, she plucks at her clothes. Finally, she falls into a faint and loses consciousness of her surroundings. Such things do not belong on the stage. It would be an outrage, an insult to public opinion to reproduce this hospital scene in a theatre. I protest against it in the name of good taste, in the name of public morality, in the name of American decency. It is not seemly to drag that poor unfortunate child before an audience and shamelessly exploit her misery, merely because the shipwreck has placed her name in everybody's mouth."

Mr. Garry seated himself. He had pronounced his last words with sharp emphasis. Mr. Samuelson, Lilienfeld's counsel, turned pale and arose instantly. The reporters moved up closer and leaned forward, cocking their ears to catch every word of the famous lawyer. He began in a very faint voice. Frederick as a physician saw he was suffering from chronic laryngitis, probably having exchanged his sound larynx for his millions. Samuelson's delivery, his way of pleading were well known. At first he would spare himself, in order later to take his auditors by storm in a violent outburst of passion.

When the violent outburst of passion came, it did not fulfill the expectations either of Lilienfeld, his client, or the reporters, or Frederick. It was very noticeable that his indignation was forced, that it did not flow from a natural source, but from a bottle standing long uncorked. His iron will compelled him to simulate a feeling that he owed it to his client to display. In fact, the tired, harassed man, with his small, pointed beard and his worn, dirty-looking skin, was remarkable merely as a victim of his profession. Even in that capacity he was not so imposing as pitiable. Unfortunately, he was most pitiable when he gave the whip and spurs to that jaded little charger, the Rosinante of his eloquence, to ride down his opponent.

Mr. Garry and Mr. Ilroy, the Mayor, looked at each other significantly. They seemed to wish to return good for evil and come to the help of this knight of the sorry figure on his hack all skin and bone, which at the end of the attack fell and broke his legs.

Lilienfeld could not restrain himself. He turned crimson. The veins of his forehead swelled. The time for remaining silent had ended and the time to speak had come. Since the man with the hundred typewriters and the millions was unequal to the task, Lilienfeld had to take the reins in his own hands. From the mouth of the dumpy, bull-necked impresario, the words came pouring with irresistible momentum, with elemental force, as from the crater of a volcano.

Now it was Mr. Garry's turn to suffer in silence the thrusts and blows that rained down on him from his opponent. The old gentleman was not spared. He had to swallow many disagreeable statements about the exploitation of children in certain factories in Brooklyn, about Puritan hypocrisy, about drinking water in public and wine in secret. He was told he was a member of that narrow-minded caste hating art, culture, and life itself, and seeing devils with cloven hoofs and long tails in authors like Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe.

"Such people," Lilienfeld said, "are always trying to turn back the hands on the clock, a most revolting sight in this so-called land of freedom. There is very little hope of success in trying to turn back the hands on the clock. The days of Puritan prudery, the bothersome Puritan conscience, Puritan orthodoxy, and Puritan intolerance have passed, never to return. There is no stemming the tide of time, or the tide of progress, or the tide of culture. But the forces of reaction, threatened in their mediæval management of things, have begun a cowardly guerilla warfare, a series of petty, cowardly, miserable, meddlesome tricks."

And now Lilienfeld handed back to Mr. Garry what Mr. Garry had given Mr. Lilienfeld.

"If there really is a pest in America, its seat is in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society is the very breeding-place of the epidemic, in so far as there is an epidemic in the land. It is ridiculous in Mr. Garry to maintain that Europe is a plague-boil. Europe is the mother of America. Without the genius of a Columbus--we are at this very moment celebrating Columbus's discovery of America--without the genius of a Columbus and the constant influx of powerful intellects from Germany, England and Ireland," here he winked an eye at the Mayor, "the United States would be a dead and dreary land."

After thus moving heaven and earth and sea for the little dancer's sake, Lilienfeld exposed the base intent of his competitors, Webster and Forster, in denouncing him to the Society, and indignantly repudiated Garry's assertion that he, Lilienfeld, was an exploiter. His competitors, perhaps, were exploiters.

"See how good the conditions are under which Miss Hahlström is filling her engagement with me. There is my wife. In some respects she has been a mother to the girl. She is taking care of her in our own home, and the girl is in good health. She has a dancer's physique. It is a piece of bare-faced impudence to impugn the girl's honour. She is not a degenerate. She is not a neglected child. On the contrary she is simply a great artist."

Lilienfeld had left his highest trump for the last.

"Mr. Garry," he shouted so loud that the lofty windows rattled, "Mr. Garry called me a foreigner, a freebooter and the like. I object most decidedly. I am as much an American citizen as Mr. Garry. Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" For certain reasons Lilienfeld had had himself naturalised only a month before. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" he cried several times in succession, directly addressing the old jingo and leaning far across the table. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen? Mr. Garry, I am an American citizen, and I will have my rights like you."

That was the end. The wheezing in Lilienfeld's chest, as he seated himself, breathing heavily, was distinctly audible. There was not the faintest quiver in Mr. Garry's face.

After a rather lengthy pause, during which there was profound silence, the Mayor spoke. His words came out quietly, in his customary manner of mild embarrassment and shrewd affability, which rather became him. His decision was exactly what the political augurers, judging by the constellation in the ascendant, had prophesied. Ingigerd was granted the right to dance in public.

"The young lady, according to the decision of physicians called upon to testify, has been declared sound in body. There is no occasion to doubt that she is over sixteen years of age and no reason for preventing her from earning her livelihood by the exercise of an art which she has already practised in Europe."

The reporters grinned at one another significantly. The secret hate of the Irish Catholic toward the native Puritan of English descent had broken through the surface. Mr. Garry arose and shook his enemy's hand with cold dignity. Then he walked away, drawn up to his full height. His other adversary, of a very different nature from the Mayor, did not succeed in darting in his face his look of hate, also of a very different nature from the Mayor's; for Mr. Garry's eyes did not rest upon Lilienfeld for the fraction of a second.

Everybody crowded about Ingigerd, overwhelming the girl, the impresario and his wife with congratulations. In her joyous excitement Ingigerd's small face beamed sweetly. She looked very lovely. It was something to her heart's desire, this struggle to possess her carried on, as it were, before the eyes of two continents. Indeed, the extreme importance to which her person had attained almost humbled her a bit; but her pride and pleasure every now and then showed in her glances, even in the glances she sent Frederick. The men fairly courted her and did homage to her. Had a princess of the royal blood come along at that moment, their attention could not have been diverted for an instant from the little dancer, whom the delight, even gratitude shining in her face made very attractive.

Lilienfeld immediately invited all the reporters to luncheon. Mr. Samuelson declined the invitation, pleading an urgent appointment in the Court House. This may have been a pretext, for Frederick noticed, not without peculiar sympathy, that he was suffering under the consciousness of his failure. The poor man, so famous and influential, but now totally disregarded, was extremely grateful when Frederick, descending the City Hall stairs beside him, said a few words of appreciation of Samuelson's presentation of the case, though he actually felt no appreciation.

To excuse himself from taking part in the luncheon, Frederick said he had several business engagements. Nevertheless he had to promise Ingigerd that he would return in time for the demi-tasse.

XX

Frederick crossed the park to the main Post Office, a huge building, in which twenty-five hundred clerks and officials worked. Here he despatched a telegram, and then turned back into the noise of the streets, where the people, bending their heads before a cutting wind, ran about in hurrying swarms. The unceasing traffic, the cars and cabs and trucks, produced a deafening din. Frederick drew out his watch. It was half-past twelve, the exact time at which Miss Burns was wont to take her modest lunch in the little restaurant near the Grand Central Station. Frederick hailed a cab and drove to the restaurant. If on this occasion Miss Burns had failed to be lunching there, he would have been sadly disappointed. But there she was, happy as usual to see the young German scholar.

"Miss Burns," he cried, seating himself beside her, "you see in me a man who has been dismissed from prison, from a reformatory, from an insane asylum. Congratulate me! I am at last a free and independent agent again." He was blissful, exultant. "I have the appetite of three men, the humour of six men, and good spirits enough to cheer Timon of Athens out of the blues. I am totally indifferent to the future. So much is certain--no Circe has power over me any more."

Miss Burns congratulated him and laughed heartily.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I will tell you all about the tragi-comedy in the City Hall some other time. First I have to prepare you for dreadful news. Set your teeth, Miss Eva, and listen--you are going to lose me."

"I, you!" she laughed. Yet she was somewhat taken aback, and a dark red came and went on her face.

"Yes, you are going to lose me," Frederick repeated. "I just sent a telegram to Peter Schmidt in Meriden, and to-morrow morning at the latest I shall leave you. I shall leave New York, go to the country, and turn farmer."

"Oh, I really am sorry if you are going away," said Miss Burns, turning serious, though without the least trace of sentimentality in her voice.

"Why should you be sorry?" Frederick cried gaily. "You will come out to see me. The man you have until now known me to be has been nothing but a dish-rag. Perhaps, when you come to visit me in the country, you will discover that I am good for something after all. I really think I see land in the distance now. I feel I still have sound bones in my body. To take an illustration from chemistry. A salt solution vigorously stirred by the spoon of God Almighty begins to crystallise. Something in me is struggling to crystallise. Who knows whether, when the clouds that surround and penetrate the solution precipitate, the result of all the storms in the glass will not be a new, solid piece of architecture. Perhaps the evolution of a Teuton does not stop at the age of thirty. In that case the crisis may come just before the attainment of settled manhood, the crisis which, to all appearances, I have just safely passed through, and which, in any circumstances, I should have had to pass through."

Frederick now gave a brief account of the audience in the City Hall, the comic clash of two worlds in Garry's and Lilienfeld's speeches, which he called _tant de bruit pour une omelette_.

"The Mayor's decision," he said, "in opening up to Ingigerd the career for which she was so anxious, has opened up to me the way to a new life, a life all my own. It was almost like a physical sensation to realise that the Mayor's verdict decided my case, too."

He described Garry and told how, despite the opposition in their views, the descendant of Cromwell's followers, whom Charles I persecuted and executed, had impressed him and made him think. Undoubtedly his harsh, severe dealings had been dictated by purely humanitarian sentiment for Ingigerd's welfare, because of the frailty of her body and still more the frailty of her soul, all in accordance with the narrow-minded principles of a traditional belief, of which he was a credulous follower. As for Lilienfeld, did not victory in the struggle to possess Ingigerd body and soul mean money to him?

"Garry may really have been a hypocrite, yet wasn't Lilienfeld a hypocrite, too, when he spoke openly of Ingigerd Hahlström's honour and chastity? I looked up in alarm, and I saw a grin glide like a malicious shadow over the rows of reporters. Doesn't falsehood blossom everywhere? Doesn't hypocrisy flourish equally on each side of every contest? Isn't it a matter generally taken for granted?"

Frederick, as always, was feeling very comfortable in Miss Burns's company. Her presence always gave him, spiritually speaking, a sense of neatness and order. A man could tell her everything, and her replies straightened things out, instead of muddling them, steadied things and gave them a mooring, instead of tossing them about tempestuously. But he was not so well satisfied by her manner as usually, she not seeming sufficiently pleased with his release. He did not know whether he should attribute this to lack of sympathy or to secret doubts.

"I came to you, Miss Burns, because I do not know anybody to whom I would rather speak of this new phase of my life. Tell me frankly, was I right in doing what I did, and do you understand how a man feels when he is no longer in the chains of a senseless passion?"

"Perhaps I do," said Miss Burns, "but"--

"But what?"

Miss Burns did not reply.

"What you mean is, you cannot be certain of the convalescence of a man like myself. But I assure you, I will never sit in an audience watching that girl publicly expose her body. Still less likely am I to follow her to the four corners of the globe, through all the music-halls in the world. I am rid of her! I am free! I will prove to you that I am."

"If you were to prove it to yourself, it might be of some value to you," said Miss Burns.

But he much preferred to prove it to her.

"Perhaps you think it is a whim in me or a piece of foolishness. Yet, the way I am constituted, it is practically impossible for me to do anything for my sake alone. Your sympathy would act as a stimulus to keep me to my resolution." He drew from his pocket a letter from Peter Schmidt, saying that near Meriden there was a frame house that would be suitable for Frederick. Evidently his plan to retire to rural solitude was by no means a recent one. "When I come to myself in the quiet of the country, and I have reason to hope I will come to myself, you will hear from me. From time to time the world learns of a man of about thirty who suddenly disappears, leaving his family, his wife and his children in ignorance of his whereabouts. Sometimes he is a statesman, sometimes a young professor in a university, sometimes a mayor in good standing with all the citizens of his town, sometimes a rich business man enjoying the respect of the community. He leaves most unceremoniously, without concerning himself for the affairs of importance, even of extreme importance, that he may have to attend to the next day, perhaps the very next hour. He obeys the iron impulse to throw off the entire world, his next of kin, his dearest friends, and be alone with himself, so alone that he passes into oblivion and may even count as dead. It is a similar state, though perhaps not so pathologic in its character, a state conditioned rather by strokes of fortune, that has uprooted me. Don't forget, all social connections signify an immense consumption of nerve force and attach a person to his surroundings by a thousand threads and fibres. Ingigerd Hahlström is not the only one that is enmeshed and throttled in a spider's web. Every now and then all of us have to pant for air and tear away wrappings. Then the moment comes when we no longer do the thing that has been well considered, the thing that convention has established, but the very thing that has not been considered, that takes heed of nothing, the purely instinctive thing. Call it what you will, fermentation, folly, passion, shipwreck, storm. Whatever it may be, the fact is, all at once a man again feels the desire for life expanding his lungs."

Frederick now drew from his pocket the photographs of his three children, which his father and mother had sent along with their letters. In their great happiness that he had escaped drowning and was safe and sound, his parents had completely forgotten their solicitude for him.

Miss Burns took a friendly interest in the pictures and found a word of praise for each child. There was some discussion, pedagogic and non-pedagogic, of the characteristics of the little people. Frederick again spoke of his wife, this time without any critical reflections, dwelling only on her good and lovely and excellent qualities, really native to her.

The meal was over. Frederick had eaten heartily of the vegetarian dishes. He rose, shook hands warmly with Miss Burns, and thanked her for having listened so patiently. He left hastily, and jumped into a cab in order to keep his promise to Ingigerd Hahlström to come before luncheon was over at Lilienfeld's house.

XXI

The Lilienfelds lived in a one-family house, an exact replica of the other houses on the same block on 124th Street. Frederick found the company drinking coffee in a reception-room on the first floor, richly furnished with oriental rugs, expensive lamps, Japanese vases, and fine, dark, highly polished walnut furniture. The shades were drawn, and the electric bulbs of a gorgeous chandelier imparted a certain splendour to the room. The air was heavy with the smoke of Lilienfeld's strong imported cigars, at which the reporters were puffing away comfortably.

Ingigerd, smoking a cigarette, was reclining in an easy-chair surrounded by the reporters. Her hair was hanging loose about her shoulders and down her back. Altogether her appearance was not prepossessing. Since she looked impossible dressed as a grown lady in long skirts, she wore schoolgirl clothes and was tempted to furbish herself up like a tight-rope dancer with ribbons, openwork stockings, and white shoes.

When Frederick von Kammacher entered the room, she blushed slightly, and held her hand out to him indolently. Unfortunately, this hand had short, ordinary fingers, probably the plebeian heritage from her mother, her father having had long, beautiful hands. Frederick was at least a head taller than anybody in the room and was distinguished from the other gentlemen by his air of good breeding. He kissed Mrs. Lilienfeld's hand, German fashion, and begged her pardon for having come so late.

The subject of discussion, of course, was the hearing in the City Hall. Lilienfeld ran about, offering the reporters cigars and cordials, so importunate in his hospitality as not to shrink from sticking long Havanas into their coat pockets and cigarettes into their cases. There was design in this. Every now and then he would take a reporter aside to force upon him information regarding Ingigerd's past, her birth, her rescue, her father, her European success, and the way in which her talent had been discovered. It was a rather garish mixture of truth and fiction. Lilienfeld knew that this story of her life would appear in the New York newspapers that very same evening in connection with the report of the audience in the City Hall. He had brewed the concoction according to his own recipe from various details that he had heard, and he felt certain of its effectiveness.

Ingigerd looked very tired. But she had received orders to be as lavish as possible with her amiabilities so long as a single reporter remained in the house. Frederick felt sorry for her. He saw that her severe professional duties had begun.

Mrs. Lilienfeld was a calm, refined woman of nearly forty, with a look of suffering on her face, yet extremely attractive. She was dressed with tasteful simplicity. One got the impression that her husband worshipped her blindly and was accustomed to act, or to refrain from acting, according to a scarcely perceptible glance from her soft, grave eyes. For all his noisiness the bull-necked man, coarse, brutal, sensual, was like a timid child before her.

She devoted herself for a while to Frederick, who felt he had found grace in the lady's eyes and that for some reason she wished to be helpful to him in leading him away from the aberrations of his passion. Had he not had a sense of security in the firmness of his decision, he might perhaps have given more serious attention to her searching questions, which showed that she had done some thinking about him.

Her method was far from flattering to Ingigerd. With an infinitely disdainful smile, she called the girl, who was chattering nonsense to a circle of flirtatious reporters and was overwhelmed with their tokens of approval, "a mechanical doll with a light head of porcelain filled with sawdust."

"A good plaything," she said, "a plaything for a man, an article of merchandise, but nothing more. She may be worth money, but she is not worth anything else. She is not worth more than any piece of emptiness, any trifle, or knickknack."

Ingigerd, moved perhaps by a little wave of jealousy, came up and asked Frederick, without suspecting the significance the question had in his eyes, whether he had packed his things.

"Not yet. Why should I pack my things?"

"Mr. Lilienfeld," she said, "has made a contract for me for two evenings a week in Boston. You must get ready and go to Boston with me day after to-morrow."

"To the ends of the world," said Frederick lightly, "to the ends of the world, dear lady."

She was contented, and gave Mrs. Lilienfeld a look of satisfaction.

XXII

Frederick was greatly relieved when the festivity at Lilienfeld's house was at last a thing of the past. With Willy Snyders' help, he had succeeded in getting together a few effects, and he spent part of the afternoon arranging them. In the evening the artists, who had grown very fond of their guest and were sorry to lose him, gave him a farewell dinner at the round table.

For a long time Frederick had not felt so serene and at peace with himself and the world as that afternoon. After he had got his baggage ready, Willy Snyders, who had been waiting ever since Frederick's arrival to show him his collection of Japanese art objects, invited him to his room. It was a small room on the top floor, cluttered up with a mass of antiques. He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces of metal, about which a man's hand can easily reach. They are decorated with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground, partly damascened, or inlaid with copper, gold, or silver.

"A tiny object, tremendous labour," Frederick observed, after more than an hour spent in admiring the wonderful workmanship of pieces in the Kamakura and Namban styles, pieces by members of the Goto family extending over centuries, of the Jakushi family, and the Kinai family; pieces of the Akasaka school and the Nara school; pieces from Fushimi in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Gokinai and Kagonami; glorious sword-guards in the maru-bori, maru-bori-zogan, and hikone-bori styles; pieces of the Hamano family, and so on. Who can boast a prouder aristocracy than Goto Mitsunori, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and could trace his descent back through a line of sixteen ancestors, all great masters in the art of sword-decorating, a glorious race of craftsmen, inheriting not only the life, but also the skill of their fore-fathers.

And all the things portrayed on those small oval tsubas! The cloven turnip of Daikoku, god of fortune. The god Sennin creating a man by his breath. A shining full moon and flying geese. Wild geese flying over reeds. The moon rising from between snow-clad mountains, an oval of iron, gold and silver, no larger than a man's palm, yet suggesting the vast reaches of a moonlit night.

Frederick and Willy both marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art displayed a wealth of composition within the smallest space.

One of the tsubas represented a tea pavilion behind a hedge. In the spacious landscape was a waterfall, sky and air, perfectly depicted by holes in the iron, that is, by nothing. Others represented the hero Hidesato vanquishing a monster on the bridge of Seta; the sage Lao Tsze on his ox; Senno Kinko, a pious man, riding on his golden-eyed carp, absorbed in a book; the god Idaten, pursuing an oni, or devil, who had stolen Buddha's pearl; a bird prying open a Venus's shell with his bill; a golden-eyed octopus or cuttlefish; the sage Kiko leaning from the window of his house, reading a scroll by moonlight.

Willy, endlessly resourceful and allowing nothing to daunt him, had ferreted this collection out of a restaurant in the Five Points district, a restaurant of viler repute than even the neighbourhood it was in. A Japanese had left the tsubas with the proprietor of the den as pledge of the payment of his bill, but had disappeared without ever returning to redeem his pledge. Scarcely a day passed that Willy did not visit a junk shop on the Bowery, or in the Jewish quarter. Peering with his fearless, fiery eyes, which always wore an expression of mingled astonishment and indignation, he ventured into the worst sections of the city, even into the obscurest opium hells of Chinatown. His confident manner and round spectacles, he told Frederick, caused him to be mistaken for a detective; which stood him in good stead in making his purchases.

In one shop in Chinatown, belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints. These were the next things he showed Frederick. There were most of Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai. One of the most exquisite showed remnants of snow left on the mountain and a brownish red sun setting in a cold sky with fleecy clouds. There were Shunsho's and Shigemasa's illustrations of the book, "Mirror of the Beauties of the Green Houses," Yedo, 1776, and Shunsho's illustrations of "The Book of Sprouting Weeds." Frederick called one of Hokusai's prints "the golden poem of summer." It was a deep-blue heaven with Fujiyama to the left and golden grain beneath, persons sitting on benches, heat, radiance, joy! One of Hiroshige's prints he dubbed "the great poem of the moon." On wide, moist, melancholy meadows, scant-leaved trees, like weeping willows, their branches drooping in the mirror of an idly flowing stream, barges loaded with turf passing by, a floating bridge propelled by Japanese raftsmen, the water blue in the evening twilight, a great, pale moon, veiled by pale, bloody tints, rising above the distant edge of the melancholy plain.

In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings, representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic scenes.

Among the finest of Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters. Each least detail was most precisely rendered. It was the attempt of a more recent Japanese master to portray feminine beauty. In this one rare instance he had succeeded, having produced one of those precious objects adapted to make thieves of their lovers.

Willy, who mingled in American sporting circles, had also found occasion to collect a few Indian curiosities. He showed Frederick the feather adornment of an Apache chief, a wampum belt, Indian knives and bows and arrows. He had made the acquaintance of Buffalo Bill, the famous hunter, and some Indian chief and cowboys in his troupe, men in whom natural instincts are combined with a Barnum and Bailey business sense, and real excellence with the actor's vanity. Willy's especial friend, whom he had been very eager for Frederick to meet, was a well-known acrobat who had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River.

"Willy," said Frederick, "since you have so profitably employed your time in America, you won't be going back to Europe empty-handed."

"The devil!" replied Willy. "What else is to be got out of this damned country?"

XXIII

The next morning Frederick went down alone to the train. He had taken final leave of his friends the night before, telling them expressly not to let his departure interfere with their day's routine. After placing his luggage in a wire basket hanging over one of the red plush seats in a coach which was one of a train of six or seven similar coaches, long and elegantly built, he returned to the platform. All of a sudden the whole little colony of artists appeared, with the master-sculptor at their head--_in corpore_, as college students say. Miss Burns, too, had come, like the rest of them, carrying three of those purplish-red, long-stemmed roses with deep green leaves which were not yet being grown in Europe.

"I feel like a prima donna," Frederick said, really touched, as he took the roses from each.

The platform and the train were as quiet as a cemetery, as if there never were arrivals or departures between friends. But here and there, the face of a traveller, aroused by the "temperamental" chatter of the Germans, peered from behind the window-panes of the train to look curiously upon the little rose procession. Finally, without a signal, or a word from any official, the train started to move, as if by chance.

Soon the group of artists in the station receded. There stood Bonifacius Ritter, dignified and elegant, waving his handkerchief. There was Lobkowitz, friendly and serious, Willy Snyders the good-hearted, Franck the gypsy painter, and, last but not least, Miss Eva Burns. Frederick felt that with this moment, an epoch of his life had come to a close. He was conscious of what he owed these fellow-countrymen and kindred spirits for their warmth and hospitality, and of what he lost in losing them. Nevertheless, after the strange way of man, he was in a state of joyous excitement because his future, in a real and in a metaphoric sense, had been set in motion.

At first the train rolled for some time through a dark tunnel under the city, then through an open cut between high walls of masonry, and finally it burst into a wide, free landscape. So this was America's real face. Only now, after the noises of the Witches' Sabbath, the turmoil of the great invasion, had somewhat subsided, Frederick breathed the true breath of the virgin country's soil.

Observing that all the passengers in the coach stuck their tickets in their hat bands, Frederick did the same, and then turned his eyes on the fields and hills clothed in their white winter garments. To the young man, uprooted from his native soil, there was a happy, stimulating mystery in this landscape, which in the light of the winter sun so closely resembled his birthplace. The alien surroundings all spoke to him of his home. He could have jumped from the car and taken the snow in his hands, not only to look upon it, but to feel that it was the very same snow which as a schoolboy he had rolled into balls for bombarding his playmates. He felt as a spoiled child feels which is torn from its mother's arms and thrown upon a heartless world of strangers and, after a long period of anguish, unexpectedly meets a sister of his mother in a dreary country far, far from home. He feels the blood-tie, he feels how like he is to her and she to him, how surprisingly, how delightfully she resembles his mother, feature by feature.

At last, it seemed to Frederick, the great Atlantic Ocean was really behind him. Though he had landed in New York, he felt that until now he had not planted his feet firmly on the ground. Great well-established mother earth, the breadth and extent of her solidity, which he beheld again after so long a separation, at last set bounds in his soul to the fearful expanse and might of the ocean. Mother earth was a good and great giantess who had cunningly snatched the lives of her children from the giantess ocean and had put everything on a firm, everlasting basis with a hedge of safety all around.

"Forget the tumbling waters, forget the ocean, strike root into the soil," a voice within Frederick spoke; and while the train rolled smoothly and faster and further inland, he had a sense of being on a blissful flight.

Frederick was so lost in meditation that he started when someone without saying a word took the ticket from his hatband. It was a cultivated-looking man in a simple uniform, the conductor, who punched the card, said not a word, moved not a muscle of his face, and travelled from seat to seat, performing the same operation and always returning the punched tickets to the men's hats, which they kept on their heads. Nobody paid the least attention to him. Frederick smiled when he thought of Germany, where every train was received with the clanging of a bell and set in motion with three soundings of a gong, amid the general uproar of the officials, who bellowed like a horde of Apaches; and where the conductors demanded the tickets from the passengers with much rough, awkward ceremony.

The whirring of the wheels made a pleasant accompaniment to his thoughts. He was enjoying his flight, which signified anything but shame and disgrace. In his complete absorption, he discovered himself picking little threads from his clothes, like a spider's cobweb, and he observed how with each minute he drew his breath more freely. Sometimes it seemed to him that the wheels of the tremendous express train were not turning swiftly enough on their axles, and that he himself ought to put his hands to the wheels to hasten on the new health-giving impressions and place them behind him like thin curtains, so that the partitions dividing him from that dangerous, fatal magnet which he had left behind should grow denser and denser.

In New Haven, where the train halted for a short time, a negro with sandwiches and a boy with newspapers passed through the train. Frederick bought one of the papers, and found the whole disaster of the _Roland_ warmed up over again in connection with the sensational reports of the hearing in the City Hall. On that bright winter day his mood was too gay and peaceful to suffer the appalling impressions of the sinking of the vessel and its drowning mass of humanity to revive in his soul. To be sure, he had had absolutely no right to escape, and he was still somewhat ashamed that the regnant powers had preferred him to so many innocent brothers and sisters. On that account, there had been a time when he would have given back his life in a passion of embittered pity and glowing indignation; for there was no sin great enough to justify that horrible, brutal drowning on the seas and no merit great enough to justify escape from it. But on this winter day, on his flight from New York, his rescue filled him with nothing but sincere gratitude. Captain von Kessel and the many others that had gone down with the _Roland_ were dead and so were removed from all pain and suffering. Everything about Frederick this day breathed an atmosphere of convalescence and reconciliation.

All the way from New Haven to Meriden he regaled himself with the sketch of Ingigerd's life that appeared in the papers. He could scarcely keep from laughing. Lilienfeld displayed a positively poetical, exuberant imagination. Though Ingigerd's father was of German parentage and her mother a French Swiss, Ingigerd figured as the scion of a noble Swedish family, and the body of a relative of hers was reported to be resting in the Riddarholms-Kyrka in Stockholm. The impresario well knew that Americans are fascinated by a single drop of royal blood.

"Poor little thing!" thought Frederick, as he folded up the newspaper. Then, at the sudden realisation of what tremendous import the "poor little thing" had until that moment been to him and others, he clapped his hand to his brow and muttered, "That's over and done with, that's over and done with," and swore several oaths at himself.

XXIV

Peter Schmidt was at the train to meet Frederick, who was the only passenger getting off at Meriden. The little station was empty, but near by was the hurry-scurry of the main street of this country town of about twenty-five thousand inhabitants.

"Now," said Schmidt, "all's well. No more New York dissipation. We'll sound different chords here in Meriden. My wife sends her regards. She could not come to meet you because she had to look after some patients. If you like, we might lunch together and afterwards drive out in a sleigh to take a look at the little house I found for you in the country. If it suits you, you can rent it at a very low figure. In the meantime you can take a room at our hotel here, which the whole city is proud of."

"Oh," said Frederick, "I have a wild longing for solitude. I should prefer to spend the very first night beneath my own roof far, far from the madding crowd of Meriden."

"Very well," responded Schmidt, "the man that owns the house is a good friend of mine, a druggist. His name is Lamping, a pleasant Dutchman. He'll be satisfied with any arrangements we make; and if you decide to take the house, everything can be settled with him in fifteen minutes."

The two men went to the hotel, where they were served with a rather tasteless meal in surroundings comfortable and luxurious far beyond European notions. Schmidt left Frederick alone for a while and in a few moments sent a bell-boy to announce that the sleigh was waiting outside. To Frederick's astonishment he found his friend sitting alone in a pretty, two-seated sleigh reining in a fiery chestnut.

"I congratulate you on this tidy little conveyance," he said.

Peter laughed and quickly dispelled Frederick's illusion, that the immaculate little vehicle with the horse and harnessings were his own. He had merely hired it without a driver, a frequent practice in America.

"In fact," he joked, "I shall be quite content if we get there without being pitched out into the snow. I confess, I have never in my life driven a horse."

"Ah," said Frederick with chuckling satisfaction, "it is not for nothing that my father is a general. Let me drive."

Frederick's luggage was placed in the sleigh, he jumped in, caught up the reins, the chestnut reared, and off they dashed, with a deafening jingle of the sleigh-bells. Their way lay along the main street, a broad, bustling thoroughfare.

"Is this the sort of horse they usually have here?" asked Frederick. "The beast is positively running away. If we come out of this crowded street without broken limbs, it will be God's doing, not mine."

"Let him have his way. Every day there are one or more runaways here. What's the difference if it's our turn to-day?"

But Frederick reined the horse in so tightly, that he actually succeeded in pulling him up just as the Boston-New York express thundered by on a line of railroad tracks crossing the street not safeguarded by gates or fence. Frederick wondered how it was that a multitude of children, workmen, gentlemen in high hats, ladies in silk dresses, horses, dogs, trucks, and carriages were not mangled to a pulp and dashed against the walls of the houses lining the tracks. The horse plunged and reared and shot forward over the rails behind the last coach, sending clods of ice and snow flying in Frederick's and Peter's faces.

"The devil!" snorted Frederick. "Now for the first time I observe that form of madness which is specifically American. If you fall under the wheels, you fall under the wheels. If you want to take a drive, be your own coachman. If you break your bones, you break your bones. If you break your neck, you break your neck."

Farther along on the same highway Frederick for the first time saw an electric street car, then still unknown in Europe. The brilliant sparking at the meeting of the trolley and the overhead wire was to him a new, stimulating phenomenon. The posts holding up the wire were all shapes, thick and slender, bowed and slanting, so that the whole made a promiscuous impression, though the coaches were of a pleasing shape and glided along with great rapidity.

They had passed the more frequented and dangerous section of the city without an accident and had reached the open country. The houses grew lower and farther apart. Before the chestnut with his jingling bells lay an endless stretch of unblocked roadway, with excellent tracks for the sleigh worn into the snow. The valiant American could speed to his heart's content.

"How strange!" thought Frederick. "Here I am riding in a sleigh and driving a horse, things I have not done since I was a boy."

Stories of sports and incidents that he had not thought of for ten years or more occurred to him. How his father's accounts of hunting expeditions and sleighing mishaps had set them all laughing when the family was cosily gathered together in one room on a winter evening.

During that brisk, refreshing drive Frederick's heart was rejuvenated. The happiest years of his boyhood were as vivid to him as yesterday--thrilling, romantic rides by night, when the same sound of sleigh-bells scared the silence of sleeping forests and filled the boy's soul with pictures of midnight attacks, romantic murders, and strange devilish phantoms. In the dazzling brilliance of the snowy fields, breathing in the pure, bracing air, mere existence became unspeakable bliss. Sitting there in that dainty sleigh Frederick was inclined to look on life as a pleasure drive.

Suddenly he turned pale and had to hand the reins over to Peter Schmidt. In the jingling of the sleigh-bells his ear caught something like the insistent hammering ring of electric bells. It was an illusion of his hearing, but it filled him with rising horror, and a shiver went through his whole body. By the time Peter Schmidt, who instantly observed the change in his friend, had brought the horse to a stop, Frederick had already mastered his nervous attack. He did not admit it was the sinking of the _Roland_ that had unexpectedly announced its presence again. He merely said that the noise of the bells had irritated his nerves beyond endurance. Fortunately, the spotless expanse of Lake Hanover was already close by and the little house on the other shore already visible. So the two men descended from the sleigh. Peter Schmidt, in silence, removed the bells from the harness and hitched the horse to the branch of a bare tree. They crossed the frozen lake on foot, making for the solitary house under its heavy covering of snow.

Peter ascended the front door steps, which resembled great bolsters of snow, and opened the door.

"To judge by the way it looks now, the house is scarcely habitable in winter."

"Oh, yes it is," Frederick declared.

Having been built for summer use only, it had no cellar. On the ground floor there was a little kitchen and two other rooms; in the attic a bedroom as large as the two down-stairs rooms together. In the attic room Frederick immediately decided to build his nest for an indeterminate length of time. He scouted Peter's considerations in regard to household service.

"I feel," he declared, "as if this house had been waiting for me, and I for the house."

XXV

The very next day he took up his abode in his lonely refuge on Lake Hanover, which he alternately dubbed his Diogenes tub, his Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his retort. It was no Diogenes tub, because the two friends brought wood and anthracite coal for a little American stove in the bedroom, which gave quite a good deal of heat and made a cosey appearance with the glow of the burning coal visible; and because the kitchen and pantry contained everything that is necessary for life, and a little more. Frederick refused to have anybody share his quarters with him or help with the housework. As he said, he wanted to settle his accounts and take his trial balance, and the presence of another person might be disturbing to that process.

After Peter Schmidt disappeared in the distance and the sound of the sleigh-bells had died away and Frederick felt he was quite alone in that wide American landscape wrapped in the night's darkness, it was a supreme moment for him. He returned into the house, closed the door and listened. He heard the crackling of the wood in the small kitchen stove. Taking the candle that had been left standing on one of the lower steps in the hall, he went up-stairs, where the warmth and the dusky glow of his little American stove rejoiced him. He lit a lamp, and after arranging his toilet articles on an unusually long, bare dresser, he settled himself beside the lamp in a comfortable bamboo chair. He was filled with a mysterious sense of rich, deep delight.

He was alone. Outside, lay the clear, silent winter's night, the same that he had known in the home of his childhood. The things he had hitherto experienced were no more, or as if they never had been. His home, his parents, his wife, his children, the girl that had drawn him across the ocean, everything that had happened to him on his trip were nothing more in his soul than magic lantern pictures.

"Is life," Frederick asked himself, "meant to be nothing more than material for dreams? So much is certain, my present condition is the sort that leaves an everlasting effect. We should not be unsociable, but we have still less right to leave this state uncultivated, which is the basic state of man's personality, in which he is most natural and undisturbed and stands face to face with the mystery of life as though it were a dream."

During the past months, he had led a life full of incidents of the extremest contrasts. He had been alarmed, excited, menaced. His own anguish had been submerged in the anguish of others, and their pangs had only increased his own. From the ashes of a dead love, the flames of another passionate illusion had flared up. Frederick had been driven, pursued, lured on, led about in the world, without a will of his own, like a puppy on a strap--without a will of his own and with his senses departed. Now at last his senses had returned. And the senses return when the life that has been lived in an unconscious state becomes material for dreams to the mind in a conscious state.

Frederick took a sheet of paper, dipped a new American pen in a new inkwell of fresh ink, and wrote: "Life: Material for Dreams."

He rose and again went about arranging his Robinson Crusoe household to suit his fancy. He piled up books that he had got in New York, little Reclams and other volumes, among them a copy of Schleiermacher's translation of Plato, which he had borrowed from Peter Schmidt. In front of an old Dutch sofa covered in leather, which Lamping, the druggist, had brought over from Leyden, his birthplace, stood a large, round table. Frederick covered the table with a green cloth and arranged the long-stemmed roses that the artists had given him in plain glass vases, placing Miss Burns's roses by themselves. Before Peter Schmidt had left, he and Frederick had taken a cup of coffee together. Frederick now washed and cleared away the utensils, loaded a revolver that Schmidt had lent him, and placed it beside the inkstand on his writing table. Next he took from his trunk a more peaceable instrument, a Zeiss microscope, examined all its parts, and set it up. It was the microscope that he had selected years ago in Jena for his friend, Peter, when he was leaving for America. Here was a remarkable meeting with the old instrument.

There were more things that Frederick had to do. He had to take apart a seaman's clock, put it together again and hang it on the wall. It was an antique that he had come across that very day and secured at a low price along with some furniture. To his joy the old grandfather began to tick away at a proper, dignified pace on the wall at the foot of the bed. There it was to remain in its brown case about three feet long until, as Frederick inwardly vowed, he would return it to its home in Europe, Schleswig-Holstein, for which it was pining. When Frederick lay on his bed, he could see the yellow brass pendulum gleam back and forth behind a small glass door. The dial was a curiosity. It was painted in garish colors in a primitive style and represented a chubby-cheeked sun wearing the Island of Heligoland as a crown. Below the face, little metal sailing vessels connected with the clockwork swayed back and forth in the same sober rhythm as the pendulum. This was designed to make the tempest-tossed seafarer doubly sensible of the comforts of a solid hearth.

"When was it," Frederick pondered, "that I listened to Mr. Garry's cutting remarks, Mr. Samuelson's unsuccessful attack, and Lilienfeld's wild sally against Puritan intolerance--a low, hypocritical battle ostensibly fought for the salvation of a soul; in reality nothing more than the clapperclawing of crows over a helpless hare. When was it? It must have been years ago. But no, it was only last night that Ingigerd appeared in public for the first time. So it cannot have been longer ago than day before yesterday."

He had already received her first letter. He had laughed over it heartily, and yet it had moved him. She was furious and complained bitterly of his breach of faith. In one and the same breath, she said she had been dreadfully deceived in him and had seen through him the very moment she laid eyes on him when he came up to speak to her after her dance in Berlin. In one sentence she tore his character to shreds, in the next sentence urged him to return.

"I celebrated a tremendous triumph to-day. The audience lost their heads. After the performance Lord ---- came up to congratulate me. He is a handsome young Englishman, who is living over here because he had a falling out with his father. But when the old man dies, he will inherit the title of duke and millions."

"This story," Frederick thought, "is either a true story or a concoction. If a concoction, then I have reason to assume that the little girl wants to make me jealous and so has not lost interest in me. But the story need not be an invention, either wholly or in part. For if an invention, it will undoubtedly become a fact within three or four days, or, at the utmost, within a week. Some rich rascal will come along and buy her."

Frederick shrugged his shoulders. He no longer felt the slightest impulse to be the girl's protector, knight and saviour, or the faintest solicitude for her probable fate.

The next morning he awoke in a shiver, though the stove had retained some heat and the sun was shining into the room brightly. He took his gold watch from his pocket--a possession that had escaped drowning with him--and ascertained that his pulse was beating more than a hundred times a minute, which is too much for a healthy man. But he paid no attention to his condition, got up, washed all over in cold water, dressed, and prepared his breakfast, by no means feeling like an invalid. Nevertheless he was aware he ought to be cautious, knowing that now, when the tension and excitement had relaxed, his body might have to confess to its consumption of capital and file a petition in bankruptcy. Sometimes, without a warning to one's strength, the body overcomes the severest hardships as if the thing were mere child's play; and all goes well so long as the stimulated body is in motion. It works on its surplus energy, and as soon as the will and the tension relax, it collapses.

XXVI

Shortly before ten o'clock Frederick was in his friend's consultation room. The walk to Meriden on the brisk winter day had done him good.

"How did you sleep?" asked Schmidt. "You know, you superstitious people maintain that what you dream the first night in a strange place will come true."

"I hope not," said Frederick. "My first night was rather insignificant, and things passed helter-skelter through my brain."

He said nothing of a dream he had had, in which he heard the ringing of the electric bells on the _Roland_. Though he fought against the impression, it obstinately transported him back to those horrid moments of the shipwreck. Little by little this illusion of his hearing had become Frederick's cross. Sometimes he feared it might be a species of aura, which he, as a physician, knew not infrequently announces an attack of severe illness.

The consultation rooms of the two physicians were separated by the waiting-room, which they used in common. Mrs. Schmidt, whom Frederick had met the day before, came over and, greeting him parenthetically, asked her husband to help her with the examination of one of her patients, a woman of about twenty-seven, who shortly before had married a workman holding a good position in one of the Meriden factories. The woman complained of an upset stomach. Mrs. Schmidt suspected cancer of the stomach.

Both Schmidt and his wife asked Frederick to join them in the examination. They found the patient smiling as she lay stretched on the table. Her smile changed to an expression of astonishment when she saw the two gentlemen. Mrs. Schmidt introduced Frederick as a famous German physician.

"I just spoiled my stomach a little," the woman, who was pretty and well dressed, said in excuse for the trouble she was giving. "My husband will laugh at me and scold me if he hears I ran to a doctor."

Frederick and Peter confirmed Mrs. Schmidt's diagnosis, and Mrs. Schmidt told the candidate for the grave, who was so gay and unsuspecting, that she might have to undergo a slight operation. She inquired kindly for her husband and her child, who had come into the world three months before with her help, and the woman gave ready answers in the best of spirits. Peter took it upon himself to acquaint her husband the very same day with her condition.

During the next week, Peter drew his friend more and more into his practice. Frederick found a certain grim attraction in it. It was a strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying, in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had been able to lead in New York. The Schmidts were doing hard service requiring the utmost self-renunciation. They received no greater compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and shelter to be able to continue in that service. Though Peter Schmidt was not a Socialist, his practice was almost exclusively confined to the working class. Most of the two doctors' clients were poor immigrants with large families, who toiled laboriously in the Britannia-metal factories to keep the wolf from the door. Their fees were extremely low, and in half the cases Peter, true to his views of life, did not collect them.

The section of the city in which their office was located was dismal beyond parallel. A factory with its offices took up a whole block. Though Frederick was well acquainted with the corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid smell of consultation rooms, he nevertheless had difficulty in concealing the depressing effect the Schmidts' home had upon him. It was dark and gloomy, and the street noises came in directly from the windows. In Germany, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants is dead. This American city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants raced and rushed, rang bells, rattled and clattered and raved like mad. Nobody had a moment's time. Everybody hurried past everybody else. No question of joy in life here. If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work. If a man worked in Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of enjoyment. Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary, provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of which was intensified when return to the home country was cut off by sins committed in the past or by expulsion and banishment. From psychologic interest, Frederick had entered into conversation with patients in the waiting-room and had already learned of sad cases of men having been ejected from their country and left without a home.

Mrs. Schmidt was a Swiss. She had a broad German head, straight, finely chiselled nose, and a figure like the figures of the women of Basel that Holbein painted.

"She is much too good for you," Frederick teased Peter. "She ought to be the wife of a Dürer, or still better, the wife of the wealthy Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer of Nuremberg. She was born to preside over a comfortable patrician household, with closets and chests full of linen and heavy silk and brocade garments. She should go to sleep every night on a bed three yards high covered with silk spreads. She should have twice as many hats and fur garments as the town council allows the wealthy. Instead of that, poor soul, she studied medicine, and you let her run around to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with her little bag of ill omen."

As a matter of fact, the ugliness of her surroundings and the strenuousness of her occupation, which opened up no vista of hope and usually robbed her of four nights' sleep in a week, had made of Mrs. Schmidt an embittered person suffering from homesickness. What aggravated matters was that she was dominated by an obstinate sense of duty and that dogged insistence on saving characteristic of the Swiss. Since her parents' letters strengthened her in her notions, she was not to be shaken in her resolve not to return home until after a certain sum had been laid aside, and of this there was no immediate prospect. Whenever Peter, saddened to see his wife withering away from overwork and nostalgia, proposed that they return to Europe, she would become very hard, cutting and bitter. But when she had a free hour in which to talk to Frederick and her husband of the Swiss mountains and mountain climbs, she revived visibly. There, in the musty office, or in the physicians' private rooms, arose the glorious vision of Sentis, in the face of which Mrs. Schmidt had been rocked in her cradle. The conversation, of course, turned on Scheffel's "Ekkehard," the chamois reserve, Lake Constance, and St. Gall. They recalled memories of a Rigi tour, a tour up from Lake Lucerne at Fluelen to Göschenen, from Göschenen to Andermatt, from Andermatt up over the Rhone glacier and down to the wonderful Grimsel Hospice, with its clear icy-cold lake, which lies in a rocky funnel, like the entrance to the kingdom of shades. One looks about to see if Charon's raft is not waiting. Mrs. Schmidt said she would rather be the dirtiest shepherdess on Sentis than a physician in Meriden.

"Very well," cried Peter, "we will cross the ocean again and settle in Berne or Zürich." As always when Peter Schmidt made this proposition, Mrs. Schmidt's face took on an expression of hard, hostile determination. It did not escape Frederick's notice.

Everything Mrs. Schmidt said testified to her humanity and her clear, serious, sympathetic insight. What a pity she had forgotten how to laugh! What a pity she was not Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer's stately, respected wife, surrounded by his healthy children! Her broad shoulders and hips, her long, thick hair required the soft curves of a body blooming in happiness, sunlight and wealth. As it was, her face, though she was only twenty-seven years old, was fearfully worn and anxious, and her shabby clothes hung carelessly on her angular figure. Nevertheless, Frederick perceived the beauty even in her neglected appearance.

Naturally Peter Schmidt, the blond Friesian, also suffered under these conditions, but not to such an extent as to be shaken in his peculiar, deep-seated idealism. It was his idealism, never for an instant forsaking him, that raised him above all momentary hardships. This very fact, it seemed to Frederick, only added to his wife's vexation. From certain remarks of hers, he could tell that it would have been more pleasing to her had Peter cared more for his own advancement and less for the advancement of humanity at large. No man possessed firmer belief than he in the triumph of good, and no man rejected religious beliefs with greater horror. He was one of those who disavow the Garden of Eden and declare the next world to be a myth, yet are firmly convinced that the earth may be developed and will develop into a paradise and that man may be developed and will develop into the divinity of that paradise. Frederick, too, had an inclination for Utopias, and his friend's notions had a revivifying effect upon him. When accompanying him on his professional visits, or skating on the little Lake of Hanover, or conversing with him in his Diogenes tub, hope came back to him; but when his friend left, hope forsook him.

But Peter Schmidt was no vain Utopist. He had a solid basis for his ideals, and endeavoured to realise them in practice. Frederick knew no one so well versed in the natural sciences, political economy, and medicine; and since he also had very accurate knowledge of the geography and history of the important countries, his survey of political conditions was enviably broad. When twenty years old, he had upheld the pan-Germanic ideal. Now, at thirty, he wrote anonymous editorials, which received much attention, advocating the coalition of America, Germany and England, while strongly objecting to the Russian policy in Germany that originated with Bismarck. The theme that the friends chiefly discussed in those days may be summed up in the names of Marx and Darwin, or either of them. In Peter Schmidt a sort of adjustment, or rather fusing, of the fundamental tendencies of those two great personalities was in process, though the Christ-Marxian principle of the protection of the weaker gave way to the natural principle of the protection of the stronger; and this mirrors the result of the profoundest revolution that has ever taken place in the history of mankind.

"If, with that tough Friesian skull of yours," Frederick once said to him, "you succeed for twenty years in propagating the idea of artificial selection as applied to man, and if the idea of race hygiene, of a teleologic improvement of human types is sufficiently spread, it will undoubtedly be fruitful of practical results some day. That is, a fresh, healthy, vigorous stream of blood will flow through our veins and tend more and more to counteract the increasing marasmus that is enfeebling the race."

XXVII

The first week Frederick regularly took his midday meal with the two physicians in a boarding-house. Towards dusk he always returned to his Diogenes tub, usually on foot.

The next week he did not visit his friends so often, why, he himself did not know. He slept badly. Again and again the electric bells haunted his dreams. Even in his waking hours, he easily took fright, a condition to which in former times he had been a perfect stranger. If a sleigh with bells actually did pass the house, he was sometimes so alarmed that he trembled. That he should hear his own breathing in the silence of his room did not surprise him; but it perturbed him strangely to listen to it. Sometimes he had chills. As a physician he kept a clinical thermometer, and on several occasions ascertained that he had some temperature. These circumstances disquieted him. He seemed to be living in an atmosphere producing mild shocks and alarms, which he tried in vain to dispel. Once, when he was starting off to lunch with Peter Schmidt, a disinclination to leave his room and lack of appetite kept him back. Another time it was complete exhaustion that turned him homeward again when he was half way on the road to Meriden. He could scarcely drag himself back to the house. His friends never learned anything of these secret experiences of his. It did not seem odd to them if now and then he should prefer to remain alone under his own roof.

Over him came creeping a strange life, growing ever stranger. The world, the sky, the landscape, the country, everything that fell within his vision, even the human beings he met changed. They moved away. Their affairs took on a remote, alien character. Indeed, his own affairs underwent a change. They had been taken from him. Somebody had led them aside for a time. Later, perhaps, he would find them again, provided the goal of his altered condition remained the same as his former goal.

At length Peter Schmidt became observant of his friend's retired existence. When he expressed his solicitude, Frederick repulsed him somewhat brusquely. Even his friend had grown remote. He betrayed nothing of that oppressive atmosphere of alarm in which he was enclosed. Curiously, there was a secret fascination in it, which he was loath to share with any one and so have it disturbed.

On a starless, pitch-black night, he was sitting, as usual, in his lonely house at his desk beside his lamp, when it seemed to him that someone was bending over his shoulder. He was holding his pen in his hand over a pile of disordered manuscript pages, absorbed in profound thought. He started and said:

"Rasmussen, where do you come from?" He turned and actually saw Rasmussen sitting reading at the foot of his bed wearing the Lloyd cap in which he had come from his trip around the world.

"How tremendously interesting!" he thought, and carefully studied the apparition from head to foot. He could see where the stuff of his jacket and the lining joined. He could distinguish the buttons on his waistcoat, and noted that the last one was off. Rasmussen was holding a clinical thermometer in his hand with the manner and attitude of a nurse who is passing unoccupied time at the patient's bed reading.

Frederick noticed that solitude heightens the visionary character of existence. Without a companion, a man is always condemned to intercourse with spirits. In his hermitage Frederick had merely to think of someone to see him in person, talking and acting as in life. This inflammability of his imagination did not alarm him. He had given George Rasmussen's apparition cool, careful observation. Nevertheless he was aware that his spiritual life had entered a new phase.

Before going to bed he went down-stairs to lock up the house. To his great astonishment, as he opened the door of one of the rooms to close the shutters, he saw by the light of his candle another phantom as distinct as the first. He congratulated himself upon no longer having to depend upon mere hearsay in regard to this psycho-pathologic phenomenon. At the table four men were sitting playing cards. One of them was looking on. The men had rather coarse red faces, were smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. They seemed to be business men. Suddenly Frederick clapped his hand to his forehead. From the brand and the bottle, he recognised the beer that had been served on the _Roland_, and these men were those eternal drinkers and card players who had been in everybody's mouth on the _Roland_. Shaking his head over the remarkable fact that they should be sitting in his own house, he returned up-stairs to his warm room.

The daytime, in which he did a great deal of out-of-door work, even though by himself, had a wholesome effect upon him and brought him back to reality. On the whole, his opinion of his own condition remained sound. Nevertheless, as the sickness came creeping over him stealthily, he failed to notice it. It seemed natural to him that he should reckon with the apparition of Rasmussan sitting at the foot of his bed and the four men playing skat in one of his down-stairs rooms as with realities. In the instinct to counteract the physical crisis, which in a dull way he felt was approaching, he resorted to exercise. But even while skating on the lake, which he himself had swept clean of snow, dreams, he found, gradually threw their veil over him, and he associated with men and things that were not of the lake or of its snowy, solitary banks.

Many Indian legends are connected with the lake and the little stream, the Luinnipiac, which empties into it. One day Frederick skated miles up the stream to follow it to its source. On the way he was accompanied by a hovering shadow, the corporeality of which he never for a moment doubted. It resembled the stoker Zickelmann who had died on the _Roland_, not the Zickelmann that he had seen lying stretched out a corpse in the stoke-hole, but the Zickelmann he had seen in his dream.

The shade of the stoker told him that five engine-men, thirty-six stokers, and thirty-eight coal-passers had sunk with the _Roland_, a number far greater than Frederick had thought.

"The harbour where you landed in your dreams," he told Frederick, "was the Atlantis, a submerged continent. The Azores, the Madeira Islands, and the Canary Islands are the remnants of that continent."

When Frederick found himself leaning over a hole such as foxes make, seriously hunting for a way to the Toilers of the Light, he came to his senses and laughed at himself.

From day to day, aye, from hour to hour, the creations of his disordered brain assumed more and more fantastic forms. Rasmussen was always sitting on his bed, the four passengers of the _Roland_ were always playing skat in the lower room, and the sick man went about his house conversing in whispers with all sorts of invisible men and things, unconscious for hours at a time of where he was. Sometimes he thought he was in the house in which he lived when a practising physician, at other times, in the home of his parents. As a rule, he was on the deck, or in the saloons of the _Roland_, crossing the ocean to America.

"Why," he said to himself, shaking his head, "after all, the _Roland_ did not sink."

After midnight he would get up from bed and take the wrapping from a mirror hanging on the wall, which he had covered up because he was not fond of mirrors. He would hold the candle close to the glass and frighten himself by making grimaces, which distorted his features beyond recognition. Then he would talk to himself, asking questions and listening to answers, and hearing questions and giving answers. Some of this was utterly irrational, some perfectly rational. It showed that he had investigated one of the obscurest, most awful psychic problems, the sickness of men who are haunted by their doubles. He jotted down a note:

"The mirror has made man out of the animal. Without the mirror, no I and no you. Without an I and a you, no thought. All fundamental concepts are twins, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, hard and soft, sorrow and joy, hate and love, cowardice and courage, jest and earnest, and so on."

The image in the mirror said to Frederick:

"You have divided yourself into you and me before you could distinguish the separate characteristics of your being, which acts only as a whole. That is, you divided yourself before you could divide yourself. Until you saw yourself in a mirror, you saw nothing of the world."

"It is good to be alone with my image in the mirror," thought Frederick. "I don't need all those distressing concave and convex mirrors which other people are. This condition in which I am is the original condition, and in the original condition one escapes the distortion to which other people's words and glances subject one. The best thing is to be silent or to speak with oneself, that is, with oneself in the mirror."

Frederick kept this up until one evening, when he was returning from a walk in the neighbourhood, he opened the door of his room and saw himself sitting at his desk. He stood still and rubbed his eyes, but the man continued to sit there, though Frederick tried to drive him away with a sharp look as a ray of light dispels a cloud of fog. He was filled with horror, and at the same time a wave of hate swept over him.

"You or I!" he cried, quickly grasping his revolver and holding it to the face of his double. Hate confronted hate. It was not twin love and hate, each confronting the other.

The mirror had been an illusion.

XXVIII

Peter Schmidt had a serious operation to perform for a fibroid tumour. Knowing that Frederick had witnessed Kocher perform the same operation in Berne and had repeatedly been successful with it himself, he called upon him for help. The patient was a native Yankee farmer, forty-five years of age. His son, a lad of nineteen, drove out in a sleigh to fetch Frederick.

At the appointed time Frederick entered the office, very pale, but outwardly calm. Nobody suspected what a tremendous amount of will power he had to summon to keep his self-control. Like a boy saying his A B C's, he kept repeating to himself:

"I am Frederick von Kammacher. This is Peter Schmidt. This is his wife, and this is the patient."

When he looked about the room, he saw other persons, the shades of those he had met within the last few days and on his trip across the ocean. But he pulled himself together and swore to himself--even in the moment of greatest danger he had not prayed--and saw that the unbidden guests in the room were also swearing.

The farmer was sitting in the waiting-room. The physicians consulted with one another, and Peter Schmidt and his wife urged Frederick to do the operating. His head was a-whirl. He was hot, he trembled, but his friends detected nothing. He asked for a large glass of wine and went about his preparations without speaking. When Mrs. Schmidt brought the wine, he drank it down in one gulp.

Mrs. Schmidt led the old farmer in. They had agreed that she was to do the washing and administer the anæsthetic. She adjusted him on the operating table, bared his body, and washed it thoroughly. Then Peter Schmidt shaved the hair away from his armpit. The physicians exchanged only brief words and signs. It was a matter of life and death. Success hung by a thread.

The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. Yet it was with perfect lucidity and due deliberation that he selected the necessary instruments from the doctor's closet.

The anæsthetic was taking effect. Peter handed the instruments to Frederick, who once again carefully and coolly examined the morbid spot, found that the tumour might already have progressed too far, but nevertheless, with a firm, sure touch, cut into the mass of living flesh. He kept cursing at the insufficient light. The room was on the ground floor with the windows giving directly upon the main street with its heavy traffic. Contrary to expectation, the tumour lay deep, extending between the large nerve bundles and blood vessels in the inner portion of the brachial plexus. It had to be removed with a scalpel, a very ticklish operation because of the proximity to the thin-walled great vein, which at the least incision sucks in air and produces instant death. But everything went well. The large hollow wound was stuffed with antiseptic gauze, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour the farmer, with the help of his son, was carried unconscious into a hospital room on the other side of the hall and laid in bed.

Immediately after the operation, Frederick said he would have to telegraph to Miss Burns, who intended to visit him the next day, telling her not to come. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth, when a boy brought a cable message from Europe for him. He opened it, said not a word, and asked the farmer's son to drive him straight back home. He shook hands with his friends and took leave without referring to the contents of the message.

The drive in the sleigh beside the farmer's son through the snowy landscape was very different from the drive he had taken with Peter on his arrival two weeks before. This time he himself was not driving; what was worse was the absence of the earlier feeling that he had regained mastery over himself and renewed joy in life. He feared his last moment had come. The country he was in, the place he was driving to, the fact that he was sitting in a sleigh, these things he realised only intermittently. Though the sun was shining in a cloudless sky upon a dazzling white earth, he felt for minutes at a time that he was being drawn forward into utter darkness to the accompaniment of sleigh-bells. The farmer boy noticed nothing, except that the famous German physician was taciturn and extremely pale.

Frederick had never been in greater need of all his will power. But for his iron self-control, he would have gone stark mad and jumped with a shout from the sleigh dashing along at full speed. He knew a telegram was lying crumpled in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat; but each time he tried to recall what was in the telegram, it seemed that a hammer kept knocking at his head, dulling his senses. The grateful country boy had no inkling that close beside him was sitting a man who had to exert superhuman strength not to succumb to an attack of raving madness. As a matter of fact, the boy was in danger of a maniac's clutching him by the throat and drawing him into a life and death struggle.

At his door Frederick shook hands with the farmer's son and groped his way into the house through midnight darkness. The boy's few words of thanks went down in a rushing and roaring of vast black waters. The sleigh-bells began to jingle again and never ceased, turning into that infernal ringing that had become firmly fixed in Frederick's head since the shipwreck.

"I am dying," he thought when he reached his room. "I am dying, or else I am going crazy." The clock on the wall came into his vision and receded again. He saw his bed and clutched for the post.

"Don't fall," said Rasmussen, who was still sitting there with the thermometer in his hand.

But no, this time it was not Rasmussen. It was Mr. Rinck, with his yellow cat in his lap, the man who had been in charge of the mail on the _Roland_.

"What are you doing here, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick roared.

The next moment he was at the window in the light of the dazzling sun, which radiated, not light, but raven-black darkness, like a hole in the heavens pouring out night. The wind suddenly began to moan and howl about the house. It whistled derisively through the door cracks, like the jeers and taunts of a mob of rowdies. Or was it Mr. Rinck's cat miauing? Or was it children whimpering in the hall? Frederick groped about. The house quivered and was thrown from its foundations. It swayed to and fro. The walls began to snap and crack like wickerwork. The door flew open. The rain and hail whipped in. A sudden gust of wind lifted Frederick from his feet. Somebody cried "Danger!" The electric bells raged and mingled with the voices of the storm.

"It's not so! It's a lie! The devil is hoaxing you. You will never set foot on American soil. Your hour is come. You are at the Judgment seat. You are going to perdition."

Suddenly silence set in. Something unheard-of was about to happen, something far worse to see perhaps than to experience. Frederick wanted to save himself. He tried to gather his things together, but he had no hat. He could not find his trousers, his coat, or his boots.

Outside, the moon was shining. In the bright light, the storm was raging. Suddenly, like a wall broad as the horizon, the sea came rolling up. The ocean had risen over both its banks.

"Atlantis! The hour has come," thought Frederick. "Our earth is to be submerged like Atlantis of old."

He ran down-stairs. On the steps he caught up his three children and realised it was they who all the time had been whining and whimpering in the hall. He carried the smallest one on his arm and led the other two by the hand. At the front door, they saw the dreadful tidal wave sweeping nearer and nearer in the ashen light of the moon, carrying along the ship, which was a steamer rolling and pounding fearfully in the waters. The whistles were blowing frightfully, sometimes in a prolonged blare, sometimes in abrupt toots, one after the other.

"It's the _Roland_ with Captain von Kessel," Frederick explained to the children. "I know it. I was on the ship. I myself went down with that superb steamer." He heard shots being fired from the struggling vessel. Rockets hissed up towards the moon and burst in the sombre grey of dawn, dazzling his eyes. "All's over," he said to the children. "All those fine, brave men are doomed to rot in the water."

And picking up on his arm now one of the children, now another, and losing them and finding them again, he began to run to save their lives from the flood. He ran, he raced, he jumped, he fell down. He protested against having to sink after all, though he had already been rescued. He swore, he ran, he fell, and scrambled to his feet, and ran and ran, with a hideous fear in his breast, a senseless fear such as he had never before experienced. When the wave overtook him, fear changed into soothing peace and calm.

XXIX

The next morning, with the same train by which Frederick had come, Miss Burns arrived in Meriden. She went directly to Peter Schmidt's office to inquire for him, having expected to find him awaiting her at the station. Peter told her of the operation Frederick had performed the day before.

"It was a mighty difficult job, I tell you," said Peter Schmidt, "and he covered himself with glory. He intended immediately afterwards to send you a telegram telling you not to come. But just as he was about to go, he himself received a cablegram."

"Well, now that I am here," said Miss Burns in her sprightly way, "I shall not allow myself to be turned down in such an offhand manner. I don't intend to visit Rome without seeing the Pope."

Three quarters of an hour later the two-seated sleigh drawn by the spirited chestnut, with whose peculiarities they now knew better how to deal, reached Uncle Tom's Cabin on Lake Hanover. Peter, who was anxious to bring Frederick news of the farmer and tell him he had not developed fever, drove Miss Burns out. They were amazed at the condition in which they found things, and, as they mounted the stairs, freely exchanged criticisms without lowering their voices. The door to Frederick's room was slightly ajar. They walked in. He was lying stretched on his bed, still wearing the fur coat in which he had left the office after the operation. He was unconscious, mumbling in a delirium, evidently very ill. Peter Schmidt picked up the cablegram lying on the floor. He and Miss Burns felt that in the circumstances they were justified in learning its contents. What they read was:

Dear Frederick, news from Jena. In spite of the greatest care Angèle passed away yesterday afternoon. Take the inevitable with composure. Keep yourself well for your loving old parents.

For a week Frederick hovered between life and death. The powers of darkness, perhaps, had never grappled for him so greedily. For a week his whole body was like something about which tongues of fire lick and roar, ready to consume it and send it up into the air, like a puff of smoke.

Peter Schmidt, of course, brought all his medical skill to his friend's service. Mrs. Schmidt, too, did whatever she could for him. Miss Burns felt it was predestination, not chance, that had brought her to his side at so critical a moment, and instantly decided not to leave until he was entirely out of danger. She engaged a woman attendant and a man to go on errands by day and night.

The terrible frenzy in which Frederick had been the night before was apparent from the way in which things had been thrown about. The glass of his seaman's clock on the wall was broken, and dishes were shivered to bits. Peter Schmidt's diagnosis was typhoid fever. The first two days and nights he did not leave Frederick's side, except when his wife took his place. The paroxysms repeated themselves. Memories of the shipwreck still tormented him, and at certain hours he would tell his attendants, whom he did not recognise, to look in a corner of the room, where, he said, a black spider, the size of a bowling ball, was lying in wait for him. Peter and his wife with extreme caution applied all the means at a physician's disposal to reduce his temperature; but the third day passed, and still it did not fall below 105.8°. Peter grew graver and graver. Finally, however, the fever curve showed declinations, and by the end of a week its downward course remained pretty constant.

Frederick looked like a pale, empty, incombustible husk, inside of which a great auto-da-fé had taken place. What a wild orgy salamander-like creatures must have been holding behind his sweaty forehead. Countless times, by the most different methods, Angèle murdered Ingigerd and Ingigerd Angèle. His father, the general, fought a pistol duel with Mr. Garry, Captain von Kessel acting as second and measuring the distance. Doctor Wilhelm kept rising again and again from beneath the raging chaos in his soul. Ten or twenty times he brought him a human embryo wrapped in paper, and said:

"To live is good. Not to live is better."

Hans Füllenberg had to leave his hiding-place and join in the gruesome, grotesque dance to death. Sometimes it seemed as if a puff of burning air swept all these figures into an oven to destroy them forever.

Something like the dizzy movement of the sea kept tossing up and down. He was carried aloft--his consciousness left him. He sank deep down--again his consciousness left him. He flew--he lost his sense of ponderosity. High on the crest of this cosmic, immaterial swell, he suffered constantly from nausea. In his lucid moments he said to himself:

"The ocean does not wish me to be saved. It kept me alive just to display the full extent of its powers and draw me down from my security."

He had dreams of tremendous cosmic proportions, showing he had images of a might and power far exceeding the sane, normal strength of conception, with no precedent for them in experience. Even when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic minuteness of his personality.

At the end of the first week he recognised Miss Burns and began to understand what she had done for him. He smiled with difficulty and made signs with his hand lying limply on the bedspread.

It was not until the end of the second week, the twenty-sixth of March, that the fever left him entirely. He spoke, slept, had vivid dreams. In a tired voice and sometimes with a touch of humour, he told of the wild things that had passed through his brain. He expressed desires, showed gratitude, inquired for the farmer on whom he had operated, and smiled when Peter told him the wound had healed promptly and the farmer had driven out to bring some guinea-fowls for bouillon.

Miss Burns's management of the household was exemplary. Such considerate, ever-ready ministrations as Frederick received do not fall to the lot of many men. Physicians like Peter and his wife are not, of course, prone to prudery. Neither was Miss Burns, with her strong arms and sculptor hands, which were accustomed to modelling from life. Though her manner was calm and composed, there was secret passion and a strong maternal instinct in her nursing. She seemed to have found her true vocation.

At her bidding Peter sent cablegrams to Frederick's parents, keeping them informed of his condition, and notifying them when he was pronounced out of danger. With the request that it be held for him until his health was restored, she returned a thick letter from the general written before Frederick was taken ill, correctly assuming that it contained details of his wife's tragic end. She knew that by keeping the letter, she might be tempted to betray its existence to the sick man and would then find it too hard to prevent him from reading it. At the beginning of the fourth week, she received a letter from the old general, in which he thanked her and the two doctors from the depths of his heart for all they had done for his son.

"I may tell you," he wrote, "that poor Angèle did not die a natural death. At the institution, they knew she needed the strictest watching, but, unfortunately, even with the greatest care, there are moments when a patient is not observed. It was one of those moments that Angèle seized to take poison, one of the poisons that are frequently used and are not kept under lock and key."

The snow had melted away. Slowly, slowly Frederick adjusted himself to life again. There was a mildness in him like the mildness of nature outside his window. It was a surprisingly sweet experience. The world seemed to be granting him indulgence. Lying on his clean bed, with the little pewter sailing vessels on the old seaman's clock ticking to and fro, he had a sense of security and, what is more, a sense of rejuvenation, of having expiated and received pardon. From torrid black clouds, a storm had come with thunder and lightning to cleanse the air. It was still rumbling on the distance horizon, farther and farther away, never to return again, leaving behind in the weak man a rich, full, peaceful joy in life.

"A cure of force, a violent eruption and revolution has purged your body of all poisons and putrid matter," said Peter Schmidt.

XXX

"A pity no birds are singing," Frederick said one day to Miss Burns, who had opened his bedroom window wide.

"Yes," said Miss Burns, "it is a pity."

"Because," Frederick went on, "you say it is already greening on the banks of Lake Hanover."

"What does that mean--'greening'?" asked Miss Burns, who did not know the German word he had used. He laughed.

"It means spring is coming, and spring without the singing of birds is a deaf and dumb spring."

"Come to England. There's where you hear birds."

"You come to Germany, Miss Burns. There's where you hear birds," Frederick mimicked his friend's drawl.

When the time came for him to sit up for a while, he refused.

"I don't want to get out of bed. I feel too comfortable lying here," he declared.

Soon after the fever left him, he ceased to feel ill, and for the last week they had been bringing him books, entertaining him with stories and anecdotes of the neighbourhood, and reading the papers to him, all in moderation, of course. They divined his wishes from his eyes. His microscope was put beside his bed, and he set seriously to work to examine specimens from his own body, an occupation that brought many jests down on him. The horror of his illness had turned into a diversion, a pleasant subject of study.

It was not until he had left his bed and was sitting in a comfortable chair wrapped in blankets that he inquired whether a letter had not come from his parents. Miss Burns told him his father had written and recounted those things in his letter which she knew would please Frederick and ease his mind. She was astonished to hear the pale convalescent say:

"I am convinced poor Angèle took her own life. Well," he continued, "I have suffered what I had to suffer; but I will not reject the hand that I feel is graciously extended towards me. By that I mean," he added, thinking from the expression in Miss Burns's eyes that she did not understand him, "that for a' that and a' that, I am glad to be restored to life and confidence in life."

One day, while Miss Burns was telling of some eminent men in different countries with whom she had become acquainted, mild complaints escaped her, showing she had suffered disenchantments.

"In a year," she said, "I am going back to England, to some village, and devote myself to the education of neglected children. The sculptor's profession does not satisfy me."

"How would you like this, Miss Burns," said the convalescent, with a frank, roguish smile, "wouldn't you like to educate a rather difficult big child?"

Peter and Eva had agreed not to mention Ingigerd Hahlström's name. But one day Frederick handed Miss Burns a piece of paper with a verse written in lead pencil in a trembling hand.

"To whom does this refer?" he asked.

"Have threads been spun? No, there were none! We were so chill, so small and lone. Have we to higher regions gone? To give the key Peter was not prone. I saw the sacramental stone And laid my hallowed hands thereon. Alas! the bread and wine were gone. With dazzling radiance all things shone, 'Twas base deceit; I was undone."

Miss Burns was touched to see that his thoughts were still engaged with the little dancer. On another occasion he said to her:

"I am not fitted to be a physician. I am incapable of making the sacrifice to humanity of pursuing an occupation that depresses me so. I have a riotous imagination. Perhaps I could be a writer. But I am determined to become a sculptor. While I was sick, especially at the end of the second week, I remodelled all the works of Phidias and Michael Angelo. Don't misunderstand me, Eva. In becoming a sculptor, I am no longer ambitious of distinction. I shall merely be rendering homage to the greatness of art. While remaining a faithful workman asking nothing for myself, I may in time succeed in mastering the nude form sufficiently to produce at least one good piece."

"You know I have confidence in your talent," said Miss Burns.

"Then, what do you think of this plan, Miss Eva? The income from my wife's estate is about five thousand marks, enough for the education of my three children. I receive an annuity of three thousand marks. Do you think we five could end our days in peace in a little house with a studio, say, near Florence?"

Miss Burns's answer to the weighty question was a hearty laugh.

She was intimately acquainted with the artistic disposition and so, perhaps, was actually well fitted to educate adult children. She had been the good friend and comrade of two or three great artists in France and England, and had a soothing way of entering into the work, the interests, and the experiences of such extraordinary men. Neither of her parents had been an artist. Her father had been a plain business man. Yet both had possessed that veneration and love of art and artists which is almost as rare as the creative gift. In the museum at Birmingham, there were pictures by Burne-Jones and Rossetti and a collection of drawings, the gift of her father while still a prosperous man. She herself was not convinced that she had an imperative calling to art. Her passion was to be useful to art in serving artists. This was not the first time, and Frederick knew it, that she had acted the part of the good Samaritan. She was always ready to sacrifice herself in order to help artists out of every sort of difficulty.

"I have no desire to be a Bonifacius Ritter," said Frederick. "A great collection of studios, with works turned out by wholesale, no matter how excellent they may be, does not suit my disposition. What I want is a workshop opening on a garden, where I can pick violets in winter and break off branches of evergreen oak, yew, and laurel. There, in peace and quiet, hidden from the world, I should like to devote myself to art and culture in general. The myrtle, too, would have to blossom again within my garden wall, Miss Burns." Miss Burns laughed and paid no attention to the allusion.

She thoroughly approved of his plans from her own healthy point of view.

"There are enough people," she said, "who are born physicians and men of action, and there are far too many entering those careers and jostling one another out of the way."

She spoke of Ritter with sympathy, yet in a tone of superiority, and smiled with benignant understanding upon his naïve penetration into the regions of the Upper Four Hundred.

"Life," she said, "when it is eager to hurry on with a show of vivacity, demands credulity, love of pleasure, ambition. I, myself, before my father lost the greater part of his fortune, got to know high life in England through and through. I found it insipid and boresome."

When Frederick was able to stand alone and walk and go up and down stairs, Miss Burns left for New York to complete the work that she had begun in Ritter's studio, wishing to finish it before the middle of May, when she intended to return to England to straighten out some legal matters in connection with a small inheritance from her mother, who had died two years before. She had already engaged passage on the _Auguste Victoria_ of the Hamburg-American line. Frederick von Kammacher let her go without protest. He did not try to detain her. He profoundly admired the girl who was so strong and stately; and he had conceived of his future existence as a state of lasting companionship with her. There was Dutch and German blood combined with the culture and polish of the Englishwoman. Wherever she settled down, wherever she busied herself, she produced the cosey charm of the English home. She was healthy and, as Frederick had to admit, very beautiful. He did not detect the faintest symptom of the thing he most dreaded, feminine hysteria.

"I should like to have a comrade like her for life," he thought. "I should like her to be the mother of Angèle's children."

XXXI

Frederick grew better daily. It seemed to him as if he had been ill for more than a decade. His body was not undergoing a process of evolution but of rebuilding from fresh young cells. The same thing seemed to be happening to his soul. The burden that had been weighing upon his spirits, the restless thoughts that had constantly been circling about the various shipwrecks in his life had departed. He had thrown off his past as one discards a cloak which the wind and weather, thorns and sword thrusts have torn and worn. Memories, which before his illness had forced themselves upon him unbidden in the awful guise of actual presence, no longer recurred to him. To his astonishment and satisfaction he observed that they had sunk forever on the other side of a remote horizon. The itinerary of his life had brought him to a province wholly new and novel. He had passed through a fearful process of fire and water and had come out cleansed, purified and young. Convalescents always grope their way into their newly granted lives, like children without a past.

The American spring had come early. Suddenly the weather turned hot. In that part of America the transition from winter to summer is very abrupt. In the pools and lakes, the bullfrogs croaked in rivalry with the high, clear shrilling of the other American frogs. Now came that unendurable combination of heat and humidity which Mrs. Schmidt so dreaded. She suffered fearfully during the summer, when she continued with her hard work just as in winter.

Frederick began again to accompany Peter Schmidt on his professional rounds, and sometimes the friends took long excursions into the country. They fell back into their old habit of revolving problems and pondering the destinies of mankind. To his friend's astonishment, Frederick did not display his old incisiveness in debate, whether in attack or defence. There was a cheerful placidity about him which took the keenness from any hope or fear of a universal character upon which they touched in their discussions.

"How do you account for it?" asked Peter Schmidt.

"I think I have well earned the precious right merely to breathe, and I think I appreciate it. What I want to do for the time being is smell, taste, and enjoy. An Icarus flight does not suit my present condition, and with my newly awakened tender love for the superficial, you will scarcely find me ready to dig laboriously into the depths. I am now a bourgeois. I am done with my former state," he concluded, smiling.

Peter Schmidt, as a practising physician, expressed his satisfaction with this mood of Frederick's.

"To be sure," he said, "you will change again."

"Time will show, but I think not," rejoined Frederick.

Indian lore had a fascination for Peter Schmidt. He liked to go to certain spots in the hilly country to which history or legend attaches stories of the conflicts between the first white colonists and the Indians, and remain there a long time, mentally living over again the experiences of the fur trappers and the tenacious wrestling of the settlers for possession. Sometimes, in a wave of warlike feeling, he would draw his revolver and shoot at a mark. Frederick was no match for him as a marksman.

"The blood of the old German adventurers and colonists is flowing in your veins," he said. "A finished civilisation, over-ripe and over-refined such as ours, really does not suit you. Where you ought to be is in a wilderness with a Utopia hovering above."

"The world is still not much more than a wilderness," said Peter. "It will be quite a while before the structure of our cosmic philosophy will stand on a solid foundation. In short, Frederick, much remains to be done."

"Like the Lord God, I shall knead human beings from wet clay and inspire them with a living breath."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Peter Schmidt. "Making dolls like that leads nowhere. You are too good to be doing it. You belong on the ramparts, in the front ranks of the battle line, my dear boy."

"I for my part," said Frederick, smiling, "have stipulated an armistice for the next few years. I want for once to try to get on with what the world is able to offer. I want to disaccustom myself as much as possible from reflection and dreams."

Frederick felt it was his duty to persuade his friend, both for his own and for his wife's sake, to return to Europe.

"Peter," he said, "the Americans have no use for a man like you. You cannot recommend patent medicines, nor can you by administering small doses keep a man chained to his bed for two months when you can cure him with quinine in a week. You have none of those characteristics which in the eyes of the average American make an aristocrat. From the American point of view you are a simpleton, because you are always ready to sacrifice yourself for every poor dog that strays your way. You ought to return to a land where, thank the Lord, the aristocracy of the spirit, the aristocracy of ideas is still a match for that other aristocracy. You ought to return to a land that would consider itself defunct and buried were the men of science and art no longer to represent the flower of its inhabitants. There are enough Germans here without you who are breaking their necks to forget the language of Goethe, the language their mothers taught them. Save your wife. Save yourself. Go back to Germany, go to Switzerland, go to France, go to England, go anywhere you will, but don't remain in this tremendous industrial corporation, where art, science, and true culture are, at present at least, wholly out of place."

But Peter Schmidt wavered. He loved America. And if, Indian fashion, he laid his ear to the ground, he already heard the festive music being rehearsed below ground that is to be played on the great day of a universal renaissance.

"All of us," he said, "should first be Americanized and then become neo-Europeans."

One of Frederick's favourite walks was to the suburb of Meriden where the Italian wine-growers settled. You could hear the men singing with their voices warm as the sunlight, the women calling the children with that cry of theirs pitched in octaves. You saw brown men binding the vines, and on Sundays you heard them talking and laughing, while the _boccia_ balls rolled with dull thuds over the well-trodden soil in the open fields where they played. Those voices and sounds were piercingly sweet and familiar to Frederick.

"You may kill me for saying so, but I am, and will remain, a European."

His homesickness grew stronger and stronger. He went about singing such passionate praises of Europe to his friends that he entangled them in the web of his feelings, and finally melted away even Mrs. Schmidt's rigid resistance.

A surprising change came over her. She forgot her exhaustion, she moved briskly, she laughed again, and began to make all sorts of plans for a future in Europe.

The farmer upon whom Frederick had operated fairly persecuted him with gratitude. He expatiated upon how he had always relied upon God and how a man always can rely upon God, and how God on this occasion had sent him the right man at the right time. Frederick now realised the profound motive that destiny had had in sending him on his fearful trip.

In a morbid disinclination to learn of his comrades on the sea trip, Frederick avoided reading newspapers. One day Ingigerd Hahlström accompanied by a distinguished looking American by no means in his prime got off the Boston train and went directly to Peter Schmidt's office. She introduced herself and asked whether Frederick von Kammacher was still in Meriden. Before he was taken ill they had exchanged letters. Later she had had no time to write because she had been making a rapid tour of the whole United States. She knew nothing of his illness. Peter Schmidt and his wife, though they had an instinctive habit of always telling the truth, a habit which interfered with their success in life, now deliberately, shamelessly, boldly told a bare-faced lie.

"Frederick has returned to Europe. He took a White Star steamer, the _Robert Keats_," they told Ingigerd.

Without informing anyone, Frederick had engaged passage on the _Auguste Victoria_ for the same crossing as Miss Burns. Peter and his wife wanted to go by a slower, less expensive steamer. They were all in a glorious state of impatience. Once more the ocean became nothing but a small pond across which their yearning lightly swung a bridge.

At that time a sentimental song was being sung in all the theatres in America, entitled "Hands Across the Sea." Every bill-board, fence and barrel bore "Hands Across the Sea." Frederick went about humming "Hands Across the Sea." Whenever he saw "Hands Across the Sea," his soul was stirred by a rich, beautiful melody.

But there was one thing that still prevented Frederick from enjoying complete serenity of spirit. A single thought kept haunting him. Should he express that thought by word of mouth or by letter? He constantly wavered between the two impulses. Not a day passed that he did not make ten decisions, one way or another, until one Sunday chance came to his rescue in the form of Willy Snyders and Miss Eva Burns, who had come to Meriden on an excursion. When he saw the lovely girl, dressed in light summer clothes, coming towards him with a smile, he realised that "Shall I?" or, "Shall I not?" had until then played an important rôle in his deliberations. But now that question was decided.

"Willy," he cried beaming, "do what you will, go wherever you will, stay wherever you will, amuse yourself as best you can, and at supper we'll all meet at the hotel." He grasped Miss Eva's hand and drew her arm in his, and she went off with him, laughing. Willy was greatly amazed, but he, too, burst out laughing and said in his comic fashion:

"Oh, in that case I certainly am _de trop_."

When Frederick and Eva returned in the evening, to the handsome dining-room of the Meriden Hotel, a delicate charm, a tender warmth hovered about them, making them younger and comelier. Their friends observed it. To their own surprise, these two human beings had been penetrated by a new element and a new life. Though they had been steering towards it, neither of them had had a divination of it even a short time before. That evening champagne was drunk.

A week later the little colony of artists saw Miss Burns and Frederick off on the _Auguste Victoria_.

"I am going to follow you soon," Willy bawled as the steamer began to move from the pier.

Every day on board the steamer was a Sunday to Frederick and Eva. The afternoon of the third day the captain, never suspecting that he was speaking to one of the survivors of the _Roland_, said:

"It was hereabouts that the _Roland_ went down about three months ago."

The sea was smooth, like a sky eternally cloudless. Dolphins were sporting in the waters. The night following that afternoon, a glorious night, became Frederick's and Eva's wedding night. In blissful dreams they were carried over the place of horror which was the grave of the _Roland_.

At the quay in Cuxhaven, Frederick's parents were awaiting him with his children. He saw nothing but his children. He held them, all three of them, in his arms for a whole minute. They laughed and chattered and clung to him wildly. Eva approached them, and everything was self-understood.

After all could get their breath again, Frederick made several obeisances and laid both hands on the ground, while looking into Eva's eyes. Then he arose and held up his finger to command silence. From the broad stretches of the fields with their young crops came the thousand-throated trilling of the larks.

"This is Germany, this is Europe! What of it, if after an hour like this, one should sink?"

The captain of the _Auguste Victoria_ passed by and greeted Frederick.

"Do you know," said Frederick in his overflowing spirits, "do you know, I am actually one of the survivors of the _Roland_?"

"Indeed!" said the captain, adding, as he walked away, "Yes, we always cross the same ocean. I hope you have a pleasant trip, Doctor von Kammacher."

THE END