I
A few moments later Frederick felt the solid pier beneath his feet. His
brain reeled lightly. The crowd on the pier cheered and hurrahed. In that
shouting, shrieking, roaring, swaying mass of humanity, he and Ingigerd,
who was clinging to his arm, seemed exposed to the danger of another sort
of drowning. Suddenly he found himself confronted by a little Japanese,
or someone whom at first glance he took to be a Japanese, and heard him
saying:
"How d'ye do, Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me? How d'ye do,
Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me?" several times in rapid
succession.
Frederick tried to recall the man to his memory. He scarcely knew who he
himself was, with those cheers thundering in his ears, with hands on all
sides shaking his hands, and newsboys flourishing newspapers behind him
and above him and under his very nose.
"Don't you know me, Doctor von Kammacher?" the Japanese repeated,
grinning.
"By Jove," cried Frederick, "now I recognise you. You are Willy Snyders.
How do you come to be here?"
While studying several semesters in Breslau, Frederick had eked out his
income by tutoring a boy, a rather desperate case, whose father, a
furniture manufacturer, paid handsomely for his son's private lessons.
Frederick's pupil turned out to be a good-hearted chap, an amusing
scapegrace, who soon became his devoted slave. It was this scapegrace,
now a full-grown man, that Frederick recognised in the jolly Japanese.
"How I come to be here? I'll explain later," said Willy, his nostrils
dilating with the joy of seeing his teacher again. "The first thing is,
have you already engaged rooms, and shall I slip you past that damned
lot of reporters? Or do you want to be interviewed?"
"For heaven's sake, no! Not for the world."
"Then stick close to me," shouted Willy. "A cab is waiting for us, and
we'll drive straight to our folks."
Frederick introduced Ingigerd.
"I must first see this young lady safe to a hotel. And even then I can't
leave her entirely alone."
Willy instantly took in the situation, but it did not change his plans.
"Miss Hahlström can stop with us, too. She will be far more comfortable
than in a hotel. The only question is, can she put up with Italian
cooking?"
"I don't anticipate any difficulties from your macaroni and spaghetti _al
sugo_," said Frederick, who read Ingigerd's willingness in her eyes. "So
I'll follow your lead as you followed mine years ago."
"All right! Forward, march!" Willy's joy in his booty was patent.
When they left the pier, they saw Stoss still surrounded by reporters,
working his jaws with incredible rapidity, as he discoursed upon himself
and the role he had played in the sinking of the _Roland_. They were
about to enter their cab after their flight, through the crowd, when
an elderly gentleman, panting breathlessly and perspiring, despite the
nipping wind, stepped up to Ingigerd Hahlström with, "I beg your pardon,
but I come from Webster and Forster." He took off his hat and wiped the
inside band with his handkerchief. "I was told--I was told--I came in a
carriage--a carriage is waiting--" He stopped, too exhausted to continue.
"Miss Hahlström cannot possibly appear this evening."
"Oh, Miss Hahlström looks very well!"
"See here," said Frederick ready to flare up.
Webster and Forster's agent put his hat back on his bald pate.
"It would be the greatest mistake if Miss Hahlström were not to dance
to-night," he said. "I was commissioned to provide her with money and
anything else she needed. There's my carriage. Rooms have already been
engaged for her at the Astor."
Frederick grew angry.
"I am a physician," he snapped, "and as a physician, I tell you Miss
Hahlström will not dance to-night, nor for several nights."
"Will you make good to Miss Hahlström her financial loss?"
"What I shall do in regard to that is neither your nor Webster and
Forster's business."
Frederick thought he had disposed of the matter, but the agent became
offensive.
"Who are you, sir? My dealings are with Miss Hahlström exclusively. What
right have you to mix in this affair?"
"I don't think I could dance to-night," Ingigerd interposed.
"You will lose that feeling as soon as you step on the stage. The
manager's wife gave me a letter for you. Her maid is at the Astor with
everything you need. She is entirely at your disposal."
"Our Petronilla is a jewel, too," Willy Snyders interjected. "If you
tell her what you need, Miss Hahlström, she'll have it for you in five
minutes." With the insistence of a seducer, he helped Ingigerd into the
cab.
"Very well, then," said the agent emphatically, "you are breaking a
contract, and I warn you of the consequences. I will have to ask you for
your address."
Willy Snyders shouted a number on 107th street. The agent jotted it down
in his note-book.
The cab with Ingigerd, Frederick, and Willy in it was transported from
Hoboken to New York in the usual way, jammed in between other carriages
and trucks on the ferry-boat. A newsboy on the ferry handed into the cab
a copy of _The Sun_, with whole columns already describing the disaster.
The authors of the information were probably the health officers and
Captain Butor. When Willy Snyders began to speak of the _Roland_,
Frederick checked him with a nod toward Ingigerd; but she had of herself
noticed the report in the paper and asked if they had been the first
to bring the news to New York.
"The _Roland_ was overdue more than three days," Willy explained. "We
were already beginning to be alarmed. Finally the passenger list from
Bremen was published, and soon after your name, too, Doctor von
Kammacher, appeared in the newspapers, your father in the meantime having
cabled that you left Paris to catch the _Roland_ at Southampton. I never
lost faith that nothing but the wretched weather was delaying you, and I
inquired at the steamship company's office every day. It was there that I
learned of the sinking of the _Roland_ and the arrival of the _Hamburg_
with the first rescued passengers on board, with you among them."
Noticing Ingigerd's sudden pallor, Willy added vivaciously, with apparent
conviction, "A lot of others must surely have been rescued."
The amount of traffic, as indicated by an endless number of ferry-boats,
tugs, and steamers of every sort, was immense. The ferry-boats, black
with people, resembled floating towers of Babel, above which rose an
iron something like a pump-handle, seesawing up and down with the
invisible pistons.
When the boat lay fast in the slip, there was a great thundering as the
vehicles all began to move at the same time to the accompaniment of a
tramping mass of humanity.
"This city," Frederick thought, "is obsessed by a craze for money
making." The idea was suggested to him chiefly by the advertisements
staring on all sides, those shrill, over-spiced, over-charged
asseverations, compared with which the same thing in Europe was delicate
as a violet, innocent as a newborn babe. Wherever he turned his eyes,
gigantic placards glared at him, gigantic letters, gigantic, garishly
coloured pictures, gigantic fingers and hands pointing to something.
Twenty negroes carrying bill-boards, a carriage drawn by twelve horses
harnessed like circus horses passed by. It was a shrieking, greedy war of
competition, waged with every conceivable means, a wild, shameless orgy
of acquisitiveness, but for that very reason not lacking in a certain
greatness. There was no hypocrisy about it. It was honest in its
outspokenness.
The cab stopped at a telegraph office, and Frederick cabled to his
father, "I am safe, sound, and well;" Ingigerd to her mother in Paris,
"I am safe. Papa's fate uncertain." While Ingigerd was writing, Frederick
took the chance to tell Willy Snyders that she had probably lost her
father in the wreck.
Several times newsboys thrust a paper under Frederick's nose, calling out
the great sensation, "All about the sinking of the _Roland_! All about
the sinking of the _Roland_!" In large, catching headlines he read: "The
_Roland_ leaves Bremen. Slight accident compels her to return. _Roland_
starts on trip again. Constant storms. Dead man on board. Nine hundred
drowned. Heroic conduct of a servant-girl. Doctor Frederick von Kammacher
performs miracles of bravery." Frederick started, reflected, but could
not recall anything of the sort. "Child dies in life-boat. Captain Butor
of the _Hamburg_ sights castaways. Report of survivors. Arthur Stoss,
champion armless marksman, helped into life-boat by faithful valet," and
so on. It was an invaluable supply of fresh, sensational, gratuitously
obtained material, to be served for a week in generous portions to
readers in both the old and the new worlds.
The cab rolled up Broadway, that main thoroughfare of New York stretching
along for miles, with two apparently unbroken chains of street-cars
moving by each other. At that time the cars were propelled by an endless
cable travelling in a conduit under the roadway. The traffic all along
Broadway was enormous, and the contrast was the more surprising when
the cab, after traversing another lively street, turned into a
deserted-looking side street, where almost country-like quiet prevailed.
The cab came to a halt, and Willy Snyders helped Ingigerd out. The
travellers found themselves in front of a low one-family house with a
flight of outside steps, differing in no wise from the other houses on
the block, which were all built on the same plan, of exactly the same
height, of exactly the same width, and with absolute similarity of
detail. Frederick had observed such architectural monotony only in
workingmen's houses in Germany, while here it was the mark of a fairly
aristocratic section.
Twilight had already fallen when Frederick and Ingigerd at length found
privacy in their rooms. The rooms, plainly furnished and scrupulously
clean, were lighted by electricity and heated from a furnace in the
cellar; and the floors were not laid with wood, but paved with red
bricks. Petronilla, the old Italian housekeeper, took Ingigerd in charge,
looking after the smallest of her wants with touching motherliness. The
two said what was necessary to say in a mixture of Italian and English.
After showing Ingigerd to her room and seeing that she was provided with
everything, Petronilla stepped out into the hall to call a maid, who was
working in another part of the house. Frederick heard her, and put his
head out of the door to inquire after Ingigerd.
"The signorina dropped on the couch without undressing and fell right
asleep," she said.
Frederick feeling somewhat uneasy went with Petronilla to look after
Ingigerd, and found that she had merely succumbed to a leaden sleep. Her
constitution, after weeks of over-exertion and abuse, was asserting its
rights. Petronilla and the maid undressed her and put her to bed, all
unconscious, though now and then opening wide her shimmering sea-green
eyes.