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

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

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

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

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

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

"Keep on! Keep on!" cried Lilienfeld. But the girl stepped to the edge of the stage.

"What's the matter?" she inquired.

"Nothing, nothing at all," the director assured her, all impatience.

Ingigerd called for Doctor von Kammacher. Frederick, who was reminded of his father by the old gentleman and had been looking at him with respect, was not a little startled when he heard his name echo through the theatre. It was fearfully painful and humiliating to him to have to step up to the platform and speak to Ingigerd. She bent down and told him to go "sound that old guy from the Society and try to bring him around."

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

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

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

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

"Are you the girl's brother?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One day Ingigerd said to him:

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, in the long sittings, to which Ingigerd submitted from vanity, she betrayed the narrowness, the attenuation, the barrenness of her mind. In contrast with Miss Burns, Frederick perceived in Ingigerd with fearful clearness that incompleteness which is eternally rudimentary. Once she brought a letter from her mother in Paris and read it aloud. For about a quarter of an hour, it actually seemed to torture her. It was serious, severe, full of concern, and not unloving. Her mother referred sorrowfully to Hahlstroem's death, and asked Ingigerd to come and live with her in Paris. She told her of a woman in New York, the wife of a German barber, with whom it would be eminently suitable for her to remain until she returned to Europe. She even mentioned the steamer she should take.

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

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

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

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



XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

Ella courtesied and said:

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

Frederick turned and saw Rosa standing on the steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I quite agree with you," said Frederick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Possibly," said Frederick, quite dazed.

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

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

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

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



XIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here a reporter whispered in Frederick's ears:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garry now came down to the subject of Ingigerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lilienfeld had left his highest trump for the last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XX

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

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

Miss Burns congratulated him and laughed heartily.

"What happened?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But what?"

Miss Burns did not reply.

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

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

But he much preferred to prove it to her.

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

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

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

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



XXI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, yes it is," Frederick declared.

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

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



XXV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXVII

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