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."
The artist of _The World_ had with a few strokes dashed off a young man,
the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat
on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and
carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.
"Did you really do it?" asked Peter Schmidt.
"I don't think so," said Frederick. "I must admit the details of the
accident are not very clear in my mind any more." Frederick stood still,
turned pale, and tried to recollect. "I don't know," he said, "what is
most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the
fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it." Still standing in the
middle of the path, he continued: "What strikes a man hardest is the
absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative
brutality. We know nature's brutality in theory; but to be able to live,
we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality. The most
enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes
in something like an all-beneficent God. But such an experience gives
that 'somehow' and 'somewhere' an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists.
And I have come from the sinking of the _Roland_ with a spot in my
soul deaf and dumb and numb. It has not awakened to life yet. The
brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one's mind,
one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity
or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to
something that one knows to be a vile deception. What is the sense of
our sentimentalising over man's dignity, his divine destiny, when such
fearful, inane injustice is wrought upon innocent persons and cannot be
undone?"
Frederick turned very pale. He was seized by a violent attack of nausea.
His lids opened wide, his eyes popped with a curious expression of
horror. He trembled slightly, and in some alarm clutched impetuously at
his friend's arm. His brain reeled dully as he felt the ground beneath
his feet beginning to heave.
"I have never had anything like this before," he said. "I think the
accident has left me with something."
Peter Schmidt led his friend to a bench, which fortunately happened to be
close by. He saw it was a nervous attack. Frederick's hands turned numb,
cold sweat broke out on his body, and he suddenly fell over in a faint.
When he awoke, it took some time for him to recognise his surroundings.
He said things meant for somebody else. He thought he saw his wife, then
his children, and then his father in full uniform. When he regained
complete consciousness, he implored his friend to keep the incident a
secret. Peter Schmidt promised he would.
"My opinion is," he said, "that your over-wrought, over-taxed nerves are
in revolt. They are taking revenge and at the same time curing
themselves."
"Though I have inherited the strongest constitution from both my father's
and mother's sides," said Frederick, "yet, from last summer on, I have
been assailed by so many things that I have long been expecting a
collapse. I know this will not be the last attack. I should have cause
for rejoicing were the condition not to become chronic."
"Oh," said Schmidt, "you may have two or three more attacks, but if you
live quietly for a few months, they may never recur again."
In coming out of his swoon Frederick, as he himself said, returned from
a trip around the world. He had travelled through the axis of the earth
to the antipodes, which actually did hang head downward.
"I felt as if I had been dead and had come back to life," he said, trying
to give his friend a conception of the remarkable state through which he
had passed. "It was not like being asleep. During the first part of my
dreams, I felt as if I had been something like a block of granite for
hundreds of years. On awaking I stood in the shadow of the deepest abyss.
I saw subterranean landscapes, gigantic caves, heavens of stone, enormous
Adelsberg grottoes. Something lifted me up. The only thing I can compare
it to was the way a diver must feel who slowly, slowly rises to brighter
and brighter regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea.
I felt as if I were forcing myself up out of the grave. I re-lived my
whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day. You can
imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming
for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and
death-beds. At the end I went through the whole sinking of the _Roland_
again. And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed
condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little
harbour where Columbus's flag-ship was slowly decaying."
"All right, all right, Friedericus Rex," Peter Schmidt soothed him.
Friedericus Rex had been Frederick's nickname at the university. "Never
mind," Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took
Frederick's dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves. "Don't
think of it, don't think of anything, old man. Let your ganglion cells
rest."
Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new
world and had rested better than he had for years. While they walked
on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical,
physiological causes of the attack. After a while, the friends regained
their old liveliness and began to talk of other things. From now on,
Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the _Roland_
in Frederick's presence.