Part 25

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 Hahlström 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 Hahlström 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 Hahlström 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 Hahlström. 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 Hahlström'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 Hahlström 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 Hahlström, 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 Hahlström'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.