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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The image in the mirror said to Frederick:

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

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

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

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

The mirror had been an illusion.



XXVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To whom does this refer?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XXXI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indian lore had a fascination for Peter Schmidt. He liked to go to certain spots in the hilly country to which history or legend attaches stories of the conflicts between the first white colonists and the Indians, and remain there a long time, mentally living over again the experiences of the fur trappers and the tenacious wrestling of the settlers for possession. Sometimes, in a wave of warlike feeling, he would draw his revolver and shoot at a mark. Frederick was no match for him as a marksman.

"The blood of the old German adventurers and colonists is flowing in your veins," he said. "A finished civilisation, over-ripe and over-refined such as ours, really does not suit you. Where you ought to be is in a wilderness with a Utopia hovering above."

"The world is still not much more than a wilderness," said Peter. "It will be quite a while before the structure of our cosmic philosophy will stand on a solid foundation. In short, Frederick, much remains to be done."

"Like the Lord God, I shall knead human beings from wet clay and inspire them with a living breath."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Peter Schmidt. "Making dolls like that leads nowhere. You are too good to be doing it. You belong on the ramparts, in the front ranks of the battle line, my dear boy."

"I for my part," said Frederick, smiling, "have stipulated an armistice for the next few years. I want for once to try to get on with what the world is able to offer. I want to disaccustom myself as much as possible from reflection and dreams."

Frederick felt it was his duty to persuade his friend, both for his own and for his wife's sake, to return to Europe.

"Peter," he said, "the Americans have no use for a man like you. You cannot recommend patent medicines, nor can you by administering small doses keep a man chained to his bed for two months when you can cure him with quinine in a week. You have none of those characteristics which in the eyes of the average American make an aristocrat. From the American point of view you are a simpleton, because you are always ready to sacrifice yourself for every poor dog that strays your way. You ought to return to a land where, thank the Lord, the aristocracy of the spirit, the aristocracy of ideas is still a match for that other aristocracy. You ought to return to a land that would consider itself defunct and buried were the men of science and art no longer to represent the flower of its inhabitants. There are enough Germans here without you who are breaking their necks to forget the language of Goethe, the language their mothers taught them. Save your wife. Save yourself. Go back to Germany, go to Switzerland, go to France, go to England, go anywhere you will, but don't remain in this tremendous industrial corporation, where art, science, and true culture are, at present at least, wholly out of place."

But Peter Schmidt wavered. He loved America. And if, Indian fashion, he laid his ear to the ground, he already heard the festive music being rehearsed below ground that is to be played on the great day of a universal renaissance.

"All of us," he said, "should first be Americanized and then become neo-Europeans."

One of Frederick's favourite walks was to the suburb of Meriden where the Italian wine-growers settled. You could hear the men singing with their voices warm as the sunlight, the women calling the children with that cry of theirs pitched in octaves. You saw brown men binding the vines, and on Sundays you heard them talking and laughing, while the boccia balls rolled with dull thuds over the well-trodden soil in the open fields where they played. Those voices and sounds were piercingly sweet and familiar to Frederick.

"You may kill me for saying so, but I am, and will remain, a European."

His homesickness grew stronger and stronger. He went about singing such passionate praises of Europe to his friends that he entangled them in the web of his feelings, and finally melted away even Mrs. Schmidt's rigid resistance.

A surprising change came over her. She forgot her exhaustion, she moved briskly, she laughed again, and began to make all sorts of plans for a future in Europe.

The farmer upon whom Frederick had operated fairly persecuted him with gratitude. He expatiated upon how he had always relied upon God and how a man always can rely upon God, and how God on this occasion had sent him the right man at the right time. Frederick now realised the profound motive that destiny had had in sending him on his fearful trip.

In a morbid disinclination to learn of his comrades on the sea trip, Frederick avoided reading newspapers. One day Ingigerd Hahlstroem accompanied by a distinguished looking American by no means in his prime got off the Boston train and went directly to Peter Schmidt's office. She introduced herself and asked whether Frederick von Kammacher was still in Meriden. Before he was taken ill they had exchanged letters. Later she had had no time to write because she had been making a rapid tour of the whole United States. She knew nothing of his illness. Peter Schmidt and his wife, though they had an instinctive habit of always telling the truth, a habit which interfered with their success in life, now deliberately, shamelessly, boldly told a bare-faced lie.

"Frederick has returned to Europe. He took a White Star steamer, the Robert Keats," they told Ingigerd.

Without informing anyone, Frederick had engaged passage on the Auguste Victoria for the same crossing as Miss Burns. Peter and his wife wanted to go by a slower, less expensive steamer. They were all in a glorious state of impatience. Once more the ocean became nothing but a small pond across which their yearning lightly swung a bridge.

At that time a sentimental song was being sung in all the theatres in America, entitled "Hands Across the Sea." Every bill-board, fence and barrel bore "Hands Across the Sea." Frederick went about humming "Hands Across the Sea." Whenever he saw "Hands Across the Sea," his soul was stirred by a rich, beautiful melody.

But there was one thing that still prevented Frederick from enjoying complete serenity of spirit. A single thought kept haunting him. Should he express that thought by word of mouth or by letter? He constantly wavered between the two impulses. Not a day passed that he did not make ten decisions, one way or another, until one Sunday chance came to his rescue in the form of Willy Snyders and Miss Eva Burns, who had come to Meriden on an excursion. When he saw the lovely girl, dressed in light summer clothes, coming towards him with a smile, he realised that "Shall I?" or, "Shall I not?" had until then played an important role in his deliberations. But now that question was decided.

"Willy," he cried beaming, "do what you will, go wherever you will, stay wherever you will, amuse yourself as best you can, and at supper we'll all meet at the hotel." He grasped Miss Eva's hand and drew her arm in his, and she went off with him, laughing. Willy was greatly amazed, but he, too, burst out laughing and said in his comic fashion:

"Oh, in that case I certainly am de trop."

When Frederick and Eva returned in the evening, to the handsome dining-room of the Meriden Hotel, a delicate charm, a tender warmth hovered about them, making them younger and comelier. Their friends observed it. To their own surprise, these two human beings had been penetrated by a new element and a new life. Though they had been steering towards it, neither of them had had a divination of it even a short time before. That evening champagne was drunk.

A week later the little colony of artists saw Miss Burns and Frederick off on the Auguste Victoria.

"I am going to follow you soon," Willy bawled as the steamer began to move from the pier.

Every day on board the steamer was a Sunday to Frederick and Eva. The afternoon of the third day the captain, never suspecting that he was speaking to one of the survivors of the Roland, said:

"It was hereabouts that the Roland went down about three months ago."

The sea was smooth, like a sky eternally cloudless. Dolphins were sporting in the waters. The night following that afternoon, a glorious night, became Frederick's and Eva's wedding night. In blissful dreams they were carried over the place of horror which was the grave of the Roland.

At the quay in Cuxhaven, Frederick's parents were awaiting him with his children. He saw nothing but his children. He held them, all three of them, in his arms for a whole minute. They laughed and chattered and clung to him wildly. Eva approached them, and everything was self-understood.

After all could get their breath again, Frederick made several obeisances and laid both hands on the ground, while looking into Eva's eyes. Then he arose and held up his finger to command silence. From the broad stretches of the fields with their young crops came the thousand-throated trilling of the larks.

"This is Germany, this is Europe! What of it, if after an hour like this, one should sink?"

The captain of the Auguste Victoria passed by and greeted Frederick.

"Do you know," said Frederick in his overflowing spirits, "do you know, I am actually one of the survivors of the Roland?"

"Indeed!" said the captain, adding, as he walked away, "Yes, we always cross the same ocean. I hope you have a pleasant trip, Doctor von Kammacher."

THE END