Part 28

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

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

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

"Oh, yes it is," Frederick declared.

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

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

XXV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXVII

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

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.