I
The German fast mail steamer, _Roland_, one of the older vessels of the
North German Steamship Company, plying between Bremen and New York, left
Bremen on the twenty-third of January, 1892.
It had been built in English yards with none of those profuse, gorgeous
gold decorations in a riotous rococo style which are so unpleasant in the
saloons and cabins of ships more recently built in German yards.
The crew of the vessel included the captain, four officers, two engineers
of the first rank, assistant engineers, firemen, coal-passers, oilers, a
purser, the head-steward and the second steward, the chef, the second
cook, and a doctor. In addition to these men with their assistants, to
whom the well-being of that tremendous floating household was entrusted,
there were, of course, a number of sailors, stewards, stewardesses,
workers in the kitchen, and so on, besides two cabin-boys and a nurse.
There was also an officer in charge of the mail on board. The vessel was
carrying only a hundred cabin passengers from Bremen; but in the steerage
there were four hundred human beings.
Frederick von Kammacher, to whom, the day before, the _Roland_ had been
non-existent, telegraphed from Paris to have a cabin on it reserved for
him. Haste was imperative. After receiving notification from the company
that the cabin was being held, he had only an hour and a half in which to
catch the express that would bring him to Havre at about twelve o'clock.
From Havre he crossed to Southampton, spending the night in a bunk in
one of those wretched saloons in which a number of persons are herded
together. But he managed to sleep the whole time, and the crossing went
without incident.
At dawn he was on deck watching England's ghostly coast-line draw nearer
and nearer, until finally the steamer entered the port of Southampton,
where he was to await the _Roland_.
At the steamship office, he was told that the _Roland_ would scarcely
make Southampton before evening, and at seven o'clock a tender would be
at the pier to convey the passengers to the ship as soon as it was
sighted. That meant twelve idle hours in a dreary foreign town, with the
thermometer at ten degrees below freezing-point. Frederick decided to
take a room in a hotel, and, if possible, pass some of the time in sleep.
In a shop window he saw a display of cigarettes of the brand of Simon
Arzt of Port Said. He entered the shop, which a maid was sweeping, and
bought several hundred. It was an act dictated by sentiment rather than
by a desire for enjoyment. The cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port Said were
excellent, the best he had ever smoked; but the significance they had
acquired for him was not due to any intrinsic virtue of theirs.
He carried an alligator portfolio in his waistcoat pocket. In that
portfolio, among other things, was a letter he had received the very day
he left Paris:
* * * * *
Dear Frederick,
It's no use. I left the sanatorium in the Harz and returned to my
parents' home a lost man. That cursed winter in the Heuscheuer Mountains!
After a stay in tropical countries, I should not have thrown myself into
the fangs of such a winter. Of course, the worst thing was my
predecessor's fur coat. To my predecessor's fur coat I owe my sweet fate.
May the devil in hell take special delight in burning it. I need scarcely
tell you that I gave myself copious injections of tuberculin and spat
a considerable number of bacilli. But enough remained behind to provide
me with a speedy _exitus letalis_.
Now for the essential. I must settle my bequests. I find I owe you three
thousand marks. You made it possible for me to complete my medical
studies. To be sure, they have failed me miserably. But that, of course,
you cannot help, and, curiously enough, now that all's lost, the thing
that most bothers me is the horrid thought that I cannot repay you.
My father, you know, is principal of a public school and actually managed
to save some money. But he has five children beside myself, all of whom
are unprovided for. He looked upon me as his capital which would bring
more than the usual rate of interest. Being a practical man, he now
realises he has lost both principal and interest.
In brief, he is afraid of responsibilities which unfortunately I cannot
shoulder in the better world to come--faugh, faugh, faugh!--I spit three
times. What shall I do? Would you be able to forego the payment of my
debt?
Several times, old boy, I have been two thirds of the way over already,
and I have left for you some notes on the states I have passed through,
which may not be lacking in scientific interest. Should it be possible
for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the
Beyond, you will hear from me again.
Where are you? Good-bye. In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal
dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend
to go on an ocean trip?
It is January. Isn't there a certain advantage in not needing to dread
April weather any longer? I shake hands with you, Frederick von
Kammacher.
Yours,
George Rasmussen.
* * * * *
Frederick, of course, had immediately sent a telegram from Paris, which
relieved the son, dying a heroic death, from solicitude for his hale
father.
Though Frederick von Kammacher had profound troubles of his own to occupy
his mind, his thoughts kept recurring to the letter in his pocket and his
dying friend. To an imaginative person of thirty, his life of the past
few years is in an eminent degree present to his mind. There had been a
tragic turn in Frederick's own life, and now tragedy had also entered his
friend's life, a tragedy far more awful.
The two young men had been separated for a number of years. They had met
again and passed a number of happy weeks together, enriched by a liberal
exchange of ideas. Those weeks were the beginning of similar epochs in
the career of each. It was at little winter festivities in Frederick von
Kammacher's comfortable home that the cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port
Said, which Rasmussen had brought from the place of their manufacture,
had played their rôle.
Now, in the reading-room of Hofmann's Hotel, near the harbour, he wrote
him a letter.
* * * * *
Dear old George,
My fingers are clammy. I am constantly dipping a broken pen in mouldy
ink; but if I don't write to you now, you won't get any news of me for
three weeks. This evening I board the _Roland_ of the North German
Steamship Company.
There seems to be something in your dreams. Nobody could have told you
of my trip. Two hours before I started, I myself knew nothing of it.
Day after to-morrow it will be a year since you came to us direct from
Bremen, after your second journey, with a trunk full of stories,
photographs, and the cigarettes of Simon Arzt. I had scarcely set foot in
England when twenty paces from the landing-place, I beheld our beloved
brand in a shop window. Of course, I bought some, by wholesale, in fact,
and am smoking one while writing, for the sake of auld lang syne.
Unfortunately, this horrible reading-room in which I am writing doesn't
get any the warmer, no matter how many cigarettes I light.
You were with us two weeks when fate came and knocked at the door. We
both rushed to the door and caught a cold, it seems. As for me, I have
sold my house, given up my practice, and put my three children in a
boarding school. And as for my wife, you know what has befallen her.
The devil! Sometimes it makes one creepy to think of the past. To both of
us it seemed a splendid thing for you to take over our sick colleague's
practice. I can see you dashing about to visit your patients in his
sleigh and fur coat. And when he died, I had not the slightest objection
to your settling down as a country physician in the immediate vicinity,
although we had always poked a lot of fun at a country physician's
starvation practice.
Now things have turned out very differently.
Do you remember with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the
goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish
us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and
fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of
gold. In the evening we dined on goldfinches, because the hunters who
went out on Sundays sold them in great quantities and my tippling cook
cooked them deliciously. At that time you swore you would not remain a
physician. You were not to live from the pockets of poor patients; the
State was to salary you and put at your disposal a huge store of
provisions, so that you could supply your impoverished patients with
flour, wine, meat and necessities. And now, in token of its gratitude,
the evil demon of the medical guild has dealt you this blow. But you must
get well again.
I am off for America. When we see each other again, you will learn why.
I can be of no use to my wife. With Binswanger, she is in excellent
hands. Three weeks ago, when I visited her, she did not even recognise
me.
I have finished forever with my profession and my medical and
bacteriological studies. I have had ill luck, you know. My scientific
reputation has been torn to shreds. They say it was fuzz instead of the
exciting organism of anthrax that I examined in a dye and wrote about.
Perhaps, but I don't think so. At any rate, the thing is a matter of
indifference to me.
Sometimes I am thoroughly disgusted with the clownish tricks the world
plays upon us, and I feel an approach to English spleen. Nearly the whole
world, or, at least Europe, has turned into a cold dish on a station
lunch-counter, and I have no appetite for it.
* * * * *
He wound up with cordial lines to his dying friend, and handed the letter
to a German porter to mail.
In his room, the temperature was icy, the window-panes frozen over.
Without undressing he lay down in one of two vast, chilly beds.
At best, the frame of mind of a traveller with a night's journey behind
him and an ocean crossing ahead of him, is not enviable. Frederick's
condition was aggravated by a whirl of painful, partially warring
recollections, which crowded into his mind, jostling and pushing one
another aside in a ceaseless chase. For the sake of storing up strength
for the events to come, he would gladly have gone to sleep, but as he lay
there, whether with open or closed eyes, he saw past events with vivid
clearness.
The young man's career from his twentieth to his thirtieth year had not
departed from the conventional lines of his class. Ambition and great
aptitude in his specialty had won him the protection of eminent
scientists. He had been Professor Koch's assistant, and, without a
rupture of their friendly relations, had also studied several semesters
under Koch's opponent, Pettenkofer, in Munich. When he went to Rome for
the purpose of investigating malaria, he met Mrs. Thorn and her daughter,
who later became his wife and whose mind was now deranged. Angèle Thorn
brought him a considerable addition to his own small fortune. The
delicacy of her constitution caused him, eventually, to move with her and
the three children that had come to them to a healthy mountain district;
but the change did not interfere with his scientific work or professional
connections.
Thus it was that in Munich, Berlin, and other scientific centres, he had
been considered one of the most competent bacteriologists, a man whose
career had passed the stage of the problematical. The worst against
him--and that only in the opinion of the cut-and-dried among his
fellow-scientists, who shook their heads doubtfully--had been a certain
belletristic tendency. Now, however, that his abortive work had appeared
and he had suffered his great defeat, all serious scientists said it was
the cultivation of side interests that had weakened his strength and led
the promising young intellect along the path of self-destruction.
In his icy room in the English hotel, Frederick meditated on his past.
"I see three threads which the Parcæ have woven into my life. The
snapping of the thread that represents my scientific career leaves me
utterly indifferent. The bloody tearing of the other thread"--he had in
mind his love for his wife--"makes the first event insignificant. But
even though I should still hold a place among the most hopeful of the
younger generation of scientists, the third thread, which is still whole,
which pierces my soul like a live wire, would have nullified my ambitions
and all my endeavours in science."
The third thread was a passion.
Frederick von Kammacher had gone to Paris to rid himself of this passion;
but the object of it, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Swedish teacher
of stage dancing, held him in bondage against his will. His love had
turned into a disease, which had reached an acute stage, probably because
the gloomy events of so recent occurrence had induced in him a state in
which men are peculiarly susceptible to love's poison.
It was a friend of his, a physician, who had introduced him in Berlin to
the girl and her father, and who later, when sufficiently acquainted with
Frederick's secret, raging love, had to take it upon himself to inform
the enamoured man of every change in the couple's address.
Doctor von Kammacher's scanty luggage did not indicate careful
preparation for a long trip. In a fit of desperation, or, rather, in an
outburst of passion, he had made the hasty decision to catch the _Roland_
at Southampton when he learned that the Swede and his daughter had
embarked on it at Bremen on the twenty-third of January.