LVIII

It was the fifth of February, about thirteen days after the Roland had left Bremen, and twelve after Frederick had boarded the Roland at the Needles in the Channel, when the pilot took the guidance of the Hamburg. Compared with the length of the Fuerst Bismarck's record-making passage, this was an extremely long time. But how inconceivably brief it seemed to him when he recalled all he had experienced in that period, both in his waking and sleeping hours. On the Hamburg, he no longer dreamed at night. A mighty blast had swept his soul clean and denuded it of all images.

Shortly before ten o'clock in the morning of the sixth of February, Captain Butor, standing back of Ella Liebling, who was sitting under the telescope merrily kicking her thin legs, spied land. It was a tremendously stirring moment when the news was carried to the passengers. The steward that called it into Frederick's cabin and the next instant disappeared little realised how his brief announcement, "Land!" affected the stranger. Frederick closed the door, shaken by great, hollow, toneless sobs coming from the depths of his being.

"Such is life," went through his heart. "Did not a steward on a gloomy, horrid night call 'Danger!' into my cabin, like the shouting of a death sentence into the cell of a poor sinner by both the judge and the hangman? And now comes the peaceful piping of the shepherd's reed, while the thunder is still rolling." It was not until his sobbing ceased that he felt a thrill of bliss, as if life were again drawing near in triumph. A flash of feeling set him afire, as when a vast army approaches with music playing and banners flying, an army of invincible brethren, among whom he is safe at home again. Never before had life come rolling toward him in waves so strong or colours so shining. One must have been cast very, very deep down in darkness and confusion to learn that there is no more glorious sun in all God's heavens than the sun that shines upon our earth.

The other passengers from the Roland were each in his own way affected by the call of "Land!" Mrs. Liebling was heard to cry for Rosa and Flitte.

"By Jove, you rascal," said Arthur Stoss to his faithful Bulke, "by Jove, we'll feel the land under our soles again after all."

Doctor Wilhelm peeped into Frederick's cabin.

"Congratulate you, Doctor von Kammacher," he said. "The land of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci has been sighted. We enjoy the advantage of having no trunks to pack."

Suddenly the fat little engineer, Mr. Wendler, was peering over Doctor Wilhelm's shoulder.

"Doctor," he cried, wringing his hands with a comic air of helplessness, "you must come right on deck. Your ward is crying her eyes out." He referred, of course, to Ingigerd.

She was still crying when Frederick reached deck. His attempts at consolation did not touch her. He had never before seen her cry, and the state she was in, so like the one from which he himself had scarcely emerged, aroused his pity and sympathy, which, however, were rather of a paternal sort, untinged by his former passion.

"I am not to blame," she suddenly said, "that my father lost his life. I am not even responsible for Mr. Achleitner. I did my best to dissuade him from making the trip."

Frederick stroked Ingigerd's hand.

"All due respect to Achleitner, but if I mourn single victims of that fearful night, I first think of the heroes of the Roland, Captain von Kessel, his mate, Von Halm, and all those picked braves who really died like great men fulfilling their duty. They are a loss to the world. At the first sight of them, I, in my innocence, actually believed the Lord would never permit their destruction."



LIX

The Hamburg had left behind the vast solitude of the ocean, broken only at long intervals by single far-off ships, and was already making its way through waters lively with a large number of steamers and sailing craft, leaving, and making for, the port. Now the lighthouse at Sandy Hook was visible.

Though Ingigerd as well as Frederick could not still the fluttering of their shaken souls, they were fascinated by the changing pictures of the entrance to the harbour. It was an amazing spectacle. Surprise followed surprise. Each second brought a new sensation.

A gigantic White Star liner came gliding toward them slowly, to the accompaniment of its brass band. It was starting out on the passage that the Hamburg was just concluding. Passengers swarmed like ants on the majestic vessel's decks, giving an impression of gaiety and festivity. What knew they of the thing awaiting them, perhaps, out there on the ocean? When they looked down upon the little Hamburg, with its few passengers on deck, they had not the least inkling of the greatness, the fearfulness of the event of which those few puny persons were the sole surviving witnesses.

The emotion that filled the Roland's passengers with restlessness and excited them as with fire and tears when the Hamburg entered New York Harbour and steamed up through the Lower Bay toward the Narrows, was both a farewell to home and to the dangers of the sea and a greeting to solid land, to a stable human civilisation. This was the known, the usual, the mother's lap from which they had sprung and in which they had grown until the time came for them to start out upon their spiritual life's journey. It was also that without which the individual even to-day is helpless against the powers of nature.

Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must forget the murderous in those watery transitional realms—man, that insect-like being whose sense organs and intellect are capacitated for the knowledge of his vast isolation in the world, but for nothing beyond that knowledge.

Sailing vessels passed one another, steamers blew their whistles, flocks of gulls swooped down on the water for fish, or darted hither and thither in the fresh breeze. Another great ocean greyhound, of the Hamburg-American line, neared them at Norton Point. The huge structure was propelled forward quietly and surely, as by some mysterious force. The gong summoning the passengers from the promenade deck to the dining-room could be distinctly heard.

"At this moment," said Frederick, drawing his watch from his pocket, "it is quarter of six in Europe, and still dark."

Captain Butor exchanged flag signals with the quarantine station. The Hamburg came to a standstill to receive health officers on board. After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which the physicians were called upon to give detailed information, the sick woman from the steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling's consent, Siegfried's corpse were taken from the Hamburg. Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in her cabin and was spared the too painful scene. Within half an hour, the gallant Hamburg was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the magnificent Upper Bay.

Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation. Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts. From the distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic. She seemed to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.

"Liberty!" The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic or promise.



LX

And now, suddenly, the world seemed to Frederick to have gone mad. The Hamburg was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless grotesquely shaped ferry-boats. The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic. In that crater of life civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes and whirls. Here is a colony of white ants, whose activity is staggering, bewildering, stupefying. It seemed inconceivable that in that intricate, raging chaos, a single minute could pass without a collision, or a collapse, or a killing. How could one possibly pursue one's own affairs quietly amid that shrieking, that hammering, that clanging, that mad uproar?

During these last moments together, the involuntary passengers of the Hamburg had become as one in heart and soul. Frederick had not lost his cash in the disaster, and he persuaded Ingigerd Hahlstroem not to reject his services during her first days on land. All agreed not to lose sight of one another in New York. Naturally enough, there had been much lively, genuinely heartfelt leave-taking and well-wishing for more than an hour before the Hamburg was secured to the dock.

The dithyrambic noise of the mighty city, where millions of men were at work, exercised a renewing, transforming influence. It was a whirlpool into which one was drawn unresistingly. It suffered no pondering, no immersion in an unalterable past. Everything in it urged and impelled forward. Here was the present, nothing but the present.

Arthur Stoss seemed already to have one foot planted on Webster and Forster's stage. There was much parleying in regard to Ingigerd's appearance in theatre. She and Stoss had been engaged for the same time, which was already past. With the uncertainty in her heart as to her father's fate, she said she could not possibly dance; while Arthur Stoss declared if he got there in time, he would appear for his number that very evening.

"I've already lost two evenings," he said, "at a round five hundred dollars an evening. Besides, I must work, I must get among people."

He advised Ingigerd for her own advantage to do the same, and cited instances of persons who had not allowed the greatest griefs to keep them from the exercise of their calling. He knew of a scholar, he said, who delivered his lecture while his wife was dying, of a clown who cracked his jokes on the stage, though his wife had eloped with another man and his heart was bleeding.

"That's our profession," Stoss continued, "and not only our profession, but everybody's profession—to do his duty, whether with liking or disliking, whether with happiness or with anguish in his soul. Every man is a tragi-comic clown, although he doesn't pass for one, perhaps, as we do. To me it is a triumph, after what I have gone through, to stand on the stage this evening without trembling, among three thousand sensation-seeking spectators, and shoot the middle out of an ace."

By degrees Stoss fell more and more into a lively strain of boasting, which, though not disagreeable, utterly lacked wit. "If you haven't anything better to do," he said, turning to the physicians, "you might come to Webster and Forster's and see me cut my capers. Work! Work!"—this was meant for Ingigerd—"I very much wish you would make up your mind to dance. Work is medicine, work is everything. To lament the past is of no use. Besides," he said, turning serious, "don't forget, stocks in us are booming. Actors must not reject such an opportunity. Just wait and see how we'll be surrounded by reporters the moment we set foot on land."

"How so?" said Frederick. "Don't you suppose that all the details of the sinking of the Roland have been telegraphed to New York from quarantine? Look at those great skyscrapers, that one with the cupola is the World building. We have already gone to press, and millions of newspapers have spun us out, in the greatest detail. The next four or five days there won't be a man or woman in New York who can vie in celebrity with the survivors of the Roland."

Amid similar talk, the Hamburg reached its pier, and leave-taking began in earnest. It was truly remarkable to see what emotion suddenly seized these people, who at bottom were strangers to one another. Mrs. Liebling wept, and Frederick and Doctor Wilhelm had to submit to her overflowing kisses of gratitude. Rosa kissed Bulke; she kissed Doctor Wilhelm's and Frederick's hands again and again, amid veritable howls. It goes without saying that the ladies also exchanged endearments. Praises were bestowed upon Flitte; and Captain Butor and Wendler, in fact the entire crew of the Hamburg, were extolled as brave, noble rescuers. The physicians and Stoss called the sailors of the Roland, "Our dear comrades! Our heroes!"

It was agreed that all should meet again, and Doctor Wilhelm made an appointment with Captain Butor, Wendler, and even the tattered painter, Fleischmann, for noon of the day after next. The place chosen for the meeting was the Hoffman House bar. From there, they would go together on a jaunt through the city.

Poor Jacob Fleischmann, the painter, was somewhat perplexed by the mad city, and turned rather mealy-mouthed. He could not speak English, he had little cash, and he had lost his only capital, his paintings. He tried delicately, though with evident anxiety, to attach himself to the men with whom fate had thrown him, and they did not withhold the support he sought. They agreed to look out for him. Even Arthur Stoss proffered his services and good advice.

"Should you have trouble with the company's agent," he said, "call on me, and I'll introduce you to my friend, the owner of the Staats-Zeitung."



PART II



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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem cannot possibly appear this evening."

"Oh, Miss Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem will not dance to-night, nor for several nights."

"Will you make good to Miss Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem, 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 attaches 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, naivete, 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 protegee'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 Hahlstroem and his daughter in Berlin. Thus, fate brought us together, and I consider myself responsible for Miss Hahlstroem, 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 doree 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 naive 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 e 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 ueber 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 Paestum 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 Marees had decorated. In Rome, Frederick had sat over many a bottle of wine with Hans von Marees and Otto, who died while working on the Luther Memorial in Berlin. He saw himself in the famous Est Est Cafe 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 Angele. He became engaged, and there was no question now of a change of profession. Angele was beautiful, and those days, when he read aloud to her chapters from Goethe, or inspired and inspiring passages from Winckelmann, or recited Hoelderlin, 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 Hahlstroem's father, who had received a thousand dollars in advance.

"Time is money, especially here in New York," she declared. "Even if Miss Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem will not dance at all," said Frederick, finally.

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

"Miss Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem 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 Hahlstroem'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 Chloe 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 AEgean 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 Hahlstroem.

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 Zoellner'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 Wuerzburg 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 Wuerzburg. 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 Wuerzburg 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 mediaeval 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, maenads, 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."