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

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

Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick:

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

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

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

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

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



IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

The newsboys were still calling the wreck of the Roland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?"

"I have obligations. I am tied down."

With the indiscretion of intimacy, Schmidt asked:

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

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

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

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

Peter Schmidt laughed.

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

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

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

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



X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick did not reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingigerd turned and said quickly:

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

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

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

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



XI

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

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

"Yes. I am Miss Hahlstroem."

"My name is Lilienfeld—manager of the Cosmopolitan Theatre." He handed Frederick his card, which announced that he was also manager of a variety theatre and impresario in general. "I obtained your address from Mr. Stoss, the armless marksman, you know. I heard you had had some unpleasantness with Webster and Forster, and I said to myself, I must go and call on the daughter of a good old friend of mine. I knew both your father and mother." Mr. Lilienfeld, in tactfully subdued tones, wound up his rather lengthy address with delicate expressions of sympathy and his personal sorrow at Hahlstroem's death.

Ingigerd being helpless as a child in business matters, Frederick had taken it upon himself to represent her, and he used the pause in the impresario's speech to put in a word. The man's personality was by no means displeasing to him, and his presence for several reasons was highly welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Take me! Run away with me!"

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

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

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

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



XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Perfectly true," said Frederick, laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Stoss joined them, and said:

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

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

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

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

Fleischmann put in his word:

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

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

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

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

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

Stoss, without heeding him, continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Bulke intervened.

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

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

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



XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Burns looked astonished, then laughed merrily.

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

"You refer to vivisection?"

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

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

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

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

"Certainly, I have been everywhere."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Burns laughed and said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She did!" exclaimed Frederick.

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

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

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

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

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



XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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