VII

"We are near Ritter's studio," Schmidt said. "If you like, we might drop

in for a while."

Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous

attack.

"It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my

fit until the very moment you were with me," he said.

Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be

struck by Frederick's evident belief in predestination and the

superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic.

The street that Bonifacius Ritter's studios were on adjoined Central

Park. In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making

was at work taking a plaster cast of a man. His cap and his smock and

trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock

and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay.

Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the

human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls. When the workman

left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose upper body, nude

to the hips, showed the brawny development of an athlete, began to speak

to Frederick and Peter.

"What won't a man do to earn his bit of daily bread!" he said. "I am from

Pirna"--he pronounced it "Berna," speaking in a round Saxon dialect--"and

I tell you, it's no joke for fellows like me in this damned New York. At

first I earned my living as a professional strong man. Then my boss

failed, and I had to give up my outfit, my iron bars and my weights and

everything I needed for my job. I can carry twelve hundred pounds on my

stomach."

Ritter sent word asking the gentlemen to come to his private studio. They

passed through a room in which a stately young lady was working without

a model at an almost completed portrait bust in clay. In the next room,

three or four marble-cutters were making a great noise hammering and

chiselling imperturbably, without glancing up, at marble blocks of

various sizes. From this room, a cast-iron circular stairway led up to

a narrow skylight studio, where Bonifacius Ritter received Frederick and

Peter.

It was a delight merely to behold the young master in his slimness and

elegance. When the men entered, he removed his left hand from the pocket

of his light smock, tossed away his burning cigarette, and greeted them

with evident pleasure, blushing like a girl. He ushered them into a small

room adjoining, lighted by a single window of antique stained glass from

a French church. The low ceiling was coffered in weathered oak, and the

walls were panelled in wood to a height of about six feet. A heavy oak

table with benches on three sides took up nearly half the length of the

room. The front of the room was partially blocked up by a genuine

Nuremberg stove with the precious Delft tiles of antique green glaze

testifying to the wonderful old potter's art. Willy Snyders had chanced

upon the beautiful Renaissance piece in a shop near the wharf, and had

succeeded in buying it for Ritter for only one hundred dollars.

"Here's a comfortable corner of the Fatherland," said Ritter. "Willy

planned it all, collected all the stuff, and attended to the entire

furnishing."

The university student in Frederick, the thorough German in him was

surprised and delighted. Though the room looked like the cell of a St.

Jerome, or, better still, the study of an Erasmus, it nevertheless

resembled in its least details the dim sanctum of a German _Weinstube_,

and all the more so when a young man in a blue apron, a stone-cutter's

helper, who might equally well have been a wine-cellar keeper, brought in

a bottle of old Rhine wine and several coloured hock glasses.

The wonderful poetry of their student days long past descended upon the

friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational

recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his

yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back

memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old friend again

and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and of the same German

ways, far from the old home. Settling himself snugly in the corner by the

window, like a man intending to take his ease in a restaurant, he touched

glasses with the others and uttered an exclamation of rapture.

"You'll never get me to budge from this corner, Mr. Ritter--though," he

added, "I should first like to see your works."

"No hurry about that," said Ritter gaily, at the same time bringing an

album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write

their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the

floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure,

a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely

face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a real German Gretchen.

"Willy Snyders told me," Ritter explained, "that he bought it from a

rascal of a New York customs official, a man of German extraction, whose

father had been a cabinet-maker in Ochsenfurt. The figure comes from the

town-hall there and had been taken to the cabinet-maker for repair. He

substituted another freshly painted figure, which the good folk of

Ochsenfurt greeted with joy as the original greatly beautified and

rejuvenated. Thus, Willy Snyders. I am not responsible for the version,"

he concluded laughing. "But one thing is certain, it's a genuine

Riemenschneider."

The lovely statue by the Würzburg master radiated a vivid charm, which

with the spell of the small room, decorated with such tender affection

for old memories, and the greenish-golden sparkle of the Rhine wine in

the hock glasses, brought back the German home in all its deep-seated

force and beauty--a beauty, it is true, unintelligible, and therefore

non-existent, to the average German of to-day.

"Once I followed up Tillman Riemenschneider's works," said Ritter. "I

started at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and went down the valley of the

Tauber past Kreglingen, and so forth, as far as Würzburg. I am confident

of recognising every piece of his at first glance, especially his

Madonnas. They have almost completely cast off the Gothic, and no other

sculptor in wood of his time knew so well how to treat the peach bloom of

a woman's skin or the charm of a woman's face and body. His women are the

pick of the lovely girls of Würzburg and its surroundings. Each one is

adorably beautiful. Here is Veit Stoss." He took a portfolio from a shelf

filled with portfolios. "Veit Stoss is superior to Riemenschneider in

force of temperamental expression; he has capacities in his passions that

make him superior, or at least equal, to Rembrandt." Ritter spread before

them several reproductions of the master, showing the seriousness and

sorrow inspiring all his works. "Nevertheless," he said, "Riemenschneider

holds his own against him for the very reason that he differs from him

so absolutely."

"The obstinate resistance of the Gothic," said Frederick, "the nightmare

condition of mediæval Christianity, its fearful revelling in pain, its

ardour for suffering had to give way to the clear, healthy vision of a

burgher. The atmosphere clears, the garments acquire a natural flow of

line, erring flesh begins to blossom forth--"

"Tillman Riemenschneider's portraits are unsurpassed by any works,

ancient or modern, unsurpassed, I say, by the very best," Ritter

reiterated.

Willy Snyders entered with a great bluster. He had come directly from his

work in the offices of an interior decorating firm.

"I say, Ritter," he said, shaking hands with the men, "if you think I'm

not thirsty, you're very much mistaken." He examined the bottle. "The

deuce! Without me to help him, the wretch taps one of the twenty bottles

of Johannisberger with which a Chicago pork packer presented him when he

made a portrait of his humpbacked daughter. Well, now that one is gone,

another may as well follow. Gentlemen, isn't this a jolly place for

little carousals?" Pointing to the Madonna from Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main.

"Isn't she a smart little body? She certainly is not by Pappe. I myself

collect nothing but Japanese works." The fact seemed quite to accord with

his appearance. "I'm nothing but a poor dog now, but inside of four or

five years I intend to have the wherewithal, and the collecting of things

Japanese will proceed by electricity. There's no race that can compete

with those fellows in art. But now I want to tell you something." He

turned to Ritter. "With your kind permission, I'll go call Lobkowitz and,

what is more, I'll call Miss Eva. Just now, as I passed through her room,

she told me she would like to meet the hero of the _Roland_." Without

awaiting an answer, he left the room; and within a few moments Lobkowitz,

who collaborated with Ritter, and Miss Burns, the pupil, appeared.

After the conventional greetings were over, the little Madonna was used

as a welcome occasion for starting conversation again, which had begun to

lag a bit on the entrance of the newcomers. Willy held the statue, a

little less than three feet high, against different panels of the wall to

see how it looked for permanent placing there. A spot was finally chosen,

and the Madonna was fastened to it temporarily.

The stone-cutter's helper brought another bottle of the heavy, expensive

wine, more hock glasses, large Delft plates, and a mountain of

sandwiches. Though Frederick and Peter had declared they must end their

too lengthy visit, a fresh wave of conviviality swept over the company

and held them on. A half hour passed, and another half hour, and a whole

hour, and still the new friends were sitting over their German wine and

still they were discussing that inexhaustible theme so dear to all of

them, German art.

"It is an eternal shame," said Frederick, "that the spirit which created

the art of the old Greeks cannot be united with that profound German

spirit, an entirely new spirit, which characterises the works of Adam

Krafft, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer."

"Doctor von Kammacher," Miss Burns asked, "have you ever done any work in

sculpture?" Miss Burns spoke a correct German. Her father was a Dutchman,

her mother a German, and when her parents settled in London, she was only

a child of three.

"Doctor von Kammacher exudes talent at every pore," said Willy, answering

in Frederick's place. "I can testify to it." Willy Snyders' passion for

collecting had manifested itself while he was still a boy. Among his

treasures had been some copies of so-called "beer gazettes," humorous

sheets got up to be read at German students' merrymaking. The copies in

his possession contained sketches by Frederick, both of a humorous and

serious character.

"I exude talent?" Frederick exclaimed, blushing. "Never, Willy. I beg

of you, Miss Burns, don't believe that enthusiast of a schoolboy. If

I really have talent, those sketches of mine in beer gazettes wouldn't

prove it. As a matter of fact, I once did do some work in art. Why should

I deny that, like all silly children of between sixteen and twenty, I

dabbled in painting, sculpture, and literature? Once my father had to

bring me to reason because I was all afire for going on the stage. Later,

I wanted to throw everything to the winds to enter politics and

revolutionise society by working for a party which has never even

existed, a German-Social party. I leave you to judge how flighty I was

and how much talent I had for art. But I love art, with a love stronger,

I think, now than ever before, because everything in the world beside art

has become problematical to me. I would rather have carved a wooden Mary

like this"--indicating the statue by Riemenschneider--"than have been

Robert Koch and Helmholtz rolled into one. Of course, I am speaking

purely subjectively. I know how great Koch and Helmholtz are, and I have

the profoundest admiration for both."

"See here! See here! What's the matter with us, Friedericus?" cried Peter

Schmidt, jumping to his feet. Though the artists had great fondness and

respect for Peter Schmidt and went to him for advice, yet, whenever he

was with them, a violent discussion invariably arose whether art or

science deserves precedence in the field of human culture, Peter, of

course, championing the cause of science. "If you were to throw that

wooden statue into the fire," he said, "it would burn like wood. Neither

the wood nor the immortal art infusing it resists fire. And once it burns

to ashes, it can, of course, be of no significance to the world's

progress. The world is full of marvellous gods and mothers of God, and so

far as I know, they never cast a single ray of light into the night of

the darkest ignorance."

"I'm not saying anything against science," Frederick declared laughing,

"I am merely speaking of a very unsettled man's love of art. So be at

ease, Peter."

"If sculpture really attracts you," said Miss Burns, who had given her

exclusive attention to Frederick, "why don't you begin right away to

model here under Mr. Ritter? Begin to-morrow."

"I can't say I know very much about wood-carving," said Ritter, gaily.

"However, I am entirely at Doctor von Kammacher's disposal."

"I cannot leave my little Madonna, my wooden Mother of God," cried

Frederick, flushed with the wine, rising and holding up his glass. The

others followed his example, laughing; and they drank to the little

Madonna, each with a secret thought linking Frederick's outburst with the

girl in the club-house. The glasses rang, and Frederick continued rather

daringly: "I wish it had been granted me to do with divine intelligence

and human hands, as Goethe said, what the animal man can and must do with

the animal woman." He made a cup of his hands as if to dip up water. "I

feel my Madonna in the hollow of my hands like a homunculus. She is alive

there. The palms of my hands are warm. They are a golden shell. Conceive

my Madonna to be a hand's breadth high, of live ivory, and imagine some

rosy flecks here and there on her. Imagine her robed in the garments that

Godiva wore, that is, nothing but her hair of flowing sunbeams, and so

on, and so on." Frederick began to improvise poetry.

"Said the master: 'Come into my workshop.'

And he took, like unto the Creator,

God! in both his hands a little image,

And his heart with mighty throb vibrated.

'As thou seest it, once I saw it living.'

And so on, and so on.

Over my hands

Flowed golden wavelets,

Cool, sweet lips and--

I'll say no more. I'll merely add that I should like to carve that

Madonna in German linden-wood and give her all the colours of life

itself, and then die, for all I care."

Frederick's enthusiastic outburst was received with great applause.

Eva Burns was a beautiful young woman of over twenty-five years, imposing

and perhaps somewhat masculine in appearance. Her German was rather hard,

suggesting to a hypercritical person that her tongue was too thick for

her mouth, like a parrot's. Her abundant hair was parted in the middle

and drawn over her ears. Her figure was broad, stately, and perfectly

formed. While Frederick spoke, and even after he had done speaking, she

looked at him with searching interest in her large, intelligent,

meditative eyes. Finally she said:

"You really ought to try to do it."

Eva Burns was one of those knowing, companionable women that are always

welcome and never disturbing in a company of men. Her eyes and

Frederick's eyes met, and the young scholar answered her in a tone of

mixed raillery and gallantry:

"Miss--Miss--"

"Burns," Willy helped him, "Miss Burns from Birmingham."

"Miss Burns from Birmingham, you said something of great significance. On

you be the blame if the world is impoverished by the loss of a poor

physician and enriched by the addition of a poor sculptor."

It had grown dark, and they lighted three large candles of the finest

bee's wax in the chandelier above the table.

"I have no objections," Schmidt several times interjected in the debate,

"I have no objections to your trying to help toward the evolution of

sublimer types by means of divine intelligence and human hands; for all

I care, by means of divine intelligence alone, that is, by means of

reason. The very same, if you will allow it, is the object, the ultimate

object, of the science of medicine. A day is coming when artificial

selection among human beings will be obligatory." The artists burst out

laughing, but Schmidt continued unabashed. "And another day, a still more

beautiful day, is coming when persons like ourselves will be considered

like, well, let us say at the utmost, the African Bushmen."