Part 19

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

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

"Miss Hahlström is sick."

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

"I myself am a physician."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

"Caviar to the general," said Frederick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

"Nothing, thank you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick clutched at his head.

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

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