The next morning Frederick went down alone to the train. He had taken
final leave of his friends the night before, telling them expressly not
to let his departure interfere with their day's routine. After placing
his luggage in a wire basket hanging over one of the red plush seats in a
coach which was one of a train of six or seven similar coaches, long and
elegantly built, he returned to the platform. All of a sudden the whole
little colony of artists appeared, with the master-sculptor at their
head--_in corpore_, as college students say. Miss Burns, too, had come,
like the rest of them, carrying three of those purplish-red, long-stemmed
roses with deep green leaves which were not yet being grown in Europe.
"I feel like a prima donna," Frederick said, really touched, as he took
the roses from each.
The platform and the train were as quiet as a cemetery, as if there never
were arrivals or departures between friends. But here and there, the face
of a traveller, aroused by the "temperamental" chatter of the Germans,
peered from behind the window-panes of the train to look curiously upon
the little rose procession. Finally, without a signal, or a word from any
official, the train started to move, as if by chance.
Soon the group of artists in the station receded. There stood Bonifacius
Ritter, dignified and elegant, waving his handkerchief. There was
Lobkowitz, friendly and serious, Willy Snyders the good-hearted, Franck
the gypsy painter, and, last but not least, Miss Eva Burns. Frederick
felt that with this moment, an epoch of his life had come to a close. He
was conscious of what he owed these fellow-countrymen and kindred spirits
for their warmth and hospitality, and of what he lost in losing them.
Nevertheless, after the strange way of man, he was in a state of joyous
excitement because his future, in a real and in a metaphoric sense, had
been set in motion.
At first the train rolled for some time through a dark tunnel under the
city, then through an open cut between high walls of masonry, and finally
it burst into a wide, free landscape. So this was America's real face.
Only now, after the noises of the Witches' Sabbath, the turmoil of the
great invasion, had somewhat subsided, Frederick breathed the true breath
of the virgin country's soil.
Observing that all the passengers in the coach stuck their tickets in
their hat bands, Frederick did the same, and then turned his eyes on the
fields and hills clothed in their white winter garments. To the young
man, uprooted from his native soil, there was a happy, stimulating
mystery in this landscape, which in the light of the winter sun so
closely resembled his birthplace. The alien surroundings all spoke to him
of his home. He could have jumped from the car and taken the snow in his
hands, not only to look upon it, but to feel that it was the very same
snow which as a schoolboy he had rolled into balls for bombarding his
playmates. He felt as a spoiled child feels which is torn from its
mother's arms and thrown upon a heartless world of strangers and, after
a long period of anguish, unexpectedly meets a sister of his mother in
a dreary country far, far from home. He feels the blood-tie, he feels how
like he is to her and she to him, how surprisingly, how delightfully she
resembles his mother, feature by feature.
At last, it seemed to Frederick, the great Atlantic Ocean was really
behind him. Though he had landed in New York, he felt that until now he
had not planted his feet firmly on the ground. Great well-established
mother earth, the breadth and extent of her solidity, which he beheld
again after so long a separation, at last set bounds in his soul to the
fearful expanse and might of the ocean. Mother earth was a good and great
giantess who had cunningly snatched the lives of her children from the
giantess ocean and had put everything on a firm, everlasting basis with a
hedge of safety all around.
"Forget the tumbling waters, forget the ocean, strike root into the
soil," a voice within Frederick spoke; and while the train rolled
smoothly and faster and further inland, he had a sense of being on a
blissful flight.
Frederick was so lost in meditation that he started when someone
without saying a word took the ticket from his hatband. It was a
cultivated-looking man in a simple uniform, the conductor, who punched
the card, said not a word, moved not a muscle of his face, and travelled
from seat to seat, performing the same operation and always returning the
punched tickets to the men's hats, which they kept on their heads. Nobody
paid the least attention to him. Frederick smiled when he thought of
Germany, where every train was received with the clanging of a bell and
set in motion with three soundings of a gong, amid the general uproar
of the officials, who bellowed like a horde of Apaches; and where the
conductors demanded the tickets from the passengers with much rough,
awkward ceremony.
The whirring of the wheels made a pleasant accompaniment to his thoughts.
He was enjoying his flight, which signified anything but shame and
disgrace. In his complete absorption, he discovered himself picking
little threads from his clothes, like a spider's cobweb, and he observed
how with each minute he drew his breath more freely. Sometimes it seemed
to him that the wheels of the tremendous express train were not turning
swiftly enough on their axles, and that he himself ought to put his hands
to the wheels to hasten on the new health-giving impressions and place
them behind him like thin curtains, so that the partitions dividing him
from that dangerous, fatal magnet which he had left behind should grow
denser and denser.
In New Haven, where the train halted for a short time, a negro with
sandwiches and a boy with newspapers passed through the train. Frederick
bought one of the papers, and found the whole disaster of the _Roland_
warmed up over again in connection with the sensational reports of the
hearing in the City Hall. On that bright winter day his mood was too gay
and peaceful to suffer the appalling impressions of the sinking of the
vessel and its drowning mass of humanity to revive in his soul. To be
sure, he had had absolutely no right to escape, and he was still somewhat
ashamed that the regnant powers had preferred him to so many innocent
brothers and sisters. On that account, there had been a time when he
would have given back his life in a passion of embittered pity and
glowing indignation; for there was no sin great enough to justify that
horrible, brutal drowning on the seas and no merit great enough to
justify escape from it. But on this winter day, on his flight from New
York, his rescue filled him with nothing but sincere gratitude. Captain
von Kessel and the many others that had gone down with the _Roland_ were
dead and so were removed from all pain and suffering. Everything about
Frederick this day breathed an atmosphere of convalescence and
reconciliation.
All the way from New Haven to Meriden he regaled himself with the sketch
of Ingigerd's life that appeared in the papers. He could scarcely keep
from laughing. Lilienfeld displayed a positively poetical, exuberant
imagination. Though Ingigerd's father was of German parentage and her
mother a French Swiss, Ingigerd figured as the scion of a noble Swedish
family, and the body of a relative of hers was reported to be resting in
the Riddarholms-Kyrka in Stockholm. The impresario well knew that
Americans are fascinated by a single drop of royal blood.
"Poor little thing!" thought Frederick, as he folded up the newspaper.
Then, at the sudden realisation of what tremendous import the "poor
little thing" had until that moment been to him and others, he clapped
his hand to his brow and muttered, "That's over and done with, that's
over and done with," and swore several oaths at himself.