Shortly before ten o'clock Frederick was in his friend's consultation
room. The walk to Meriden on the brisk winter day had done him good.
"How did you sleep?" asked Schmidt. "You know, you superstitious people
maintain that what you dream the first night in a strange place will come
true."
"I hope not," said Frederick. "My first night was rather insignificant,
and things passed helter-skelter through my brain."
He said nothing of a dream he had had, in which he heard the ringing of
the electric bells on the _Roland_. Though he fought against the
impression, it obstinately transported him back to those horrid moments
of the shipwreck. Little by little this illusion of his hearing had
become Frederick's cross. Sometimes he feared it might be a species of
aura, which he, as a physician, knew not infrequently announces an attack
of severe illness.
The consultation rooms of the two physicians were separated by the
waiting-room, which they used in common. Mrs. Schmidt, whom Frederick had
met the day before, came over and, greeting him parenthetically, asked
her husband to help her with the examination of one of her patients, a
woman of about twenty-seven, who shortly before had married a workman
holding a good position in one of the Meriden factories. The woman
complained of an upset stomach. Mrs. Schmidt suspected cancer of the
stomach.
Both Schmidt and his wife asked Frederick to join them in the
examination. They found the patient smiling as she lay stretched on the
table. Her smile changed to an expression of astonishment when she saw
the two gentlemen. Mrs. Schmidt introduced Frederick as a famous German
physician.
"I just spoiled my stomach a little," the woman, who was pretty and well
dressed, said in excuse for the trouble she was giving. "My husband will
laugh at me and scold me if he hears I ran to a doctor."
Frederick and Peter confirmed Mrs. Schmidt's diagnosis, and Mrs. Schmidt
told the candidate for the grave, who was so gay and unsuspecting, that
she might have to undergo a slight operation. She inquired kindly for her
husband and her child, who had come into the world three months before
with her help, and the woman gave ready answers in the best of spirits.
Peter took it upon himself to acquaint her husband the very same day with
her condition.
During the next week, Peter drew his friend more and more into his
practice. Frederick found a certain grim attraction in it. It was a
strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying,
in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that
deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had
been able to lead in New York. The Schmidts were doing hard service
requiring the utmost self-renunciation. They received no greater
compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and
shelter to be able to continue in that service. Though Peter Schmidt was
not a Socialist, his practice was almost exclusively confined to the
working class. Most of the two doctors' clients were poor immigrants
with large families, who toiled laboriously in the Britannia-metal
factories to keep the wolf from the door. Their fees were extremely low,
and in half the cases Peter, true to his views of life, did not collect
them.
The section of the city in which their office was located was dismal
beyond parallel. A factory with its offices took up a whole block. Though
Frederick was well acquainted with the corrosive sublimate and carbolic
acid smell of consultation rooms, he nevertheless had difficulty in
concealing the depressing effect the Schmidts' home had upon him. It was
dark and gloomy, and the street noises came in directly from the windows.
In Germany, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants is dead. This American
city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants raced and rushed, rang bells,
rattled and clattered and raved like mad. Nobody had a moment's time.
Everybody hurried past everybody else. No question of joy in life here.
If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work. If a man worked in
Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally
to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of
enjoyment. Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen
and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary,
provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of which was
intensified when return to the home country was cut off by sins committed
in the past or by expulsion and banishment. From psychologic interest,
Frederick had entered into conversation with patients in the waiting-room
and had already learned of sad cases of men having been ejected from
their country and left without a home.
Mrs. Schmidt was a Swiss. She had a broad German head, straight, finely
chiselled nose, and a figure like the figures of the women of Basel that
Holbein painted.
"She is much too good for you," Frederick teased Peter. "She ought to be
the wife of a Dürer, or still better, the wife of the wealthy Ratsherr
Willibald Pirkheimer of Nuremberg. She was born to preside over a
comfortable patrician household, with closets and chests full of linen
and heavy silk and brocade garments. She should go to sleep every night
on a bed three yards high covered with silk spreads. She should have
twice as many hats and fur garments as the town council allows the
wealthy. Instead of that, poor soul, she studied medicine, and you let
her run around to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with her little bag of ill
omen."
As a matter of fact, the ugliness of her surroundings and the
strenuousness of her occupation, which opened up no vista of hope and
usually robbed her of four nights' sleep in a week, had made of Mrs.
Schmidt an embittered person suffering from homesickness. What aggravated
matters was that she was dominated by an obstinate sense of duty and that
dogged insistence on saving characteristic of the Swiss. Since her
parents' letters strengthened her in her notions, she was not to be
shaken in her resolve not to return home until after a certain sum had
been laid aside, and of this there was no immediate prospect. Whenever
Peter, saddened to see his wife withering away from overwork and
nostalgia, proposed that they return to Europe, she would become very
hard, cutting and bitter. But when she had a free hour in which to talk
to Frederick and her husband of the Swiss mountains and mountain climbs,
she revived visibly. There, in the musty office, or in the physicians'
private rooms, arose the glorious vision of Sentis, in the face of which
Mrs. Schmidt had been rocked in her cradle. The conversation, of course,
turned on Scheffel's "Ekkehard," the chamois reserve, Lake Constance, and
St. Gall. They recalled memories of a Rigi tour, a tour up from Lake
Lucerne at Fluelen to Göschenen, from Göschenen to Andermatt, from
Andermatt up over the Rhone glacier and down to the wonderful Grimsel
Hospice, with its clear icy-cold lake, which lies in a rocky funnel, like
the entrance to the kingdom of shades. One looks about to see if Charon's
raft is not waiting. Mrs. Schmidt said she would rather be the dirtiest
shepherdess on Sentis than a physician in Meriden.
"Very well," cried Peter, "we will cross the ocean again and settle in
Berne or Zürich." As always when Peter Schmidt made this proposition,
Mrs. Schmidt's face took on an expression of hard, hostile determination.
It did not escape Frederick's notice.
Everything Mrs. Schmidt said testified to her humanity and her clear,
serious, sympathetic insight. What a pity she had forgotten how to laugh!
What a pity she was not Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer's stately,
respected wife, surrounded by his healthy children! Her broad shoulders
and hips, her long, thick hair required the soft curves of a body
blooming in happiness, sunlight and wealth. As it was, her face, though
she was only twenty-seven years old, was fearfully worn and anxious, and
her shabby clothes hung carelessly on her angular figure. Nevertheless,
Frederick perceived the beauty even in her neglected appearance.
Naturally Peter Schmidt, the blond Friesian, also suffered under these
conditions, but not to such an extent as to be shaken in his peculiar,
deep-seated idealism. It was his idealism, never for an instant forsaking
him, that raised him above all momentary hardships. This very fact, it
seemed to Frederick, only added to his wife's vexation. From certain
remarks of hers, he could tell that it would have been more pleasing to
her had Peter cared more for his own advancement and less for the
advancement of humanity at large. No man possessed firmer belief than he
in the triumph of good, and no man rejected religious beliefs with
greater horror. He was one of those who disavow the Garden of Eden and
declare the next world to be a myth, yet are firmly convinced that the
earth may be developed and will develop into a paradise and that man
may be developed and will develop into the divinity of that paradise.
Frederick, too, had an inclination for Utopias, and his friend's
notions had a revivifying effect upon him. When accompanying him on
his professional visits, or skating on the little Lake of Hanover, or
conversing with him in his Diogenes tub, hope came back to him; but when
his friend left, hope forsook him.
But Peter Schmidt was no vain Utopist. He had a solid basis for his
ideals, and endeavoured to realise them in practice. Frederick knew no
one so well versed in the natural sciences, political economy, and
medicine; and since he also had very accurate knowledge of the geography
and history of the important countries, his survey of political
conditions was enviably broad. When twenty years old, he had upheld the
pan-Germanic ideal. Now, at thirty, he wrote anonymous editorials, which
received much attention, advocating the coalition of America, Germany and
England, while strongly objecting to the Russian policy in Germany that
originated with Bismarck. The theme that the friends chiefly discussed in
those days may be summed up in the names of Marx and Darwin, or either
of them. In Peter Schmidt a sort of adjustment, or rather fusing, of the
fundamental tendencies of those two great personalities was in process,
though the Christ-Marxian principle of the protection of the weaker gave
way to the natural principle of the protection of the stronger; and this
mirrors the result of the profoundest revolution that has ever taken
place in the history of mankind.
"If, with that tough Friesian skull of yours," Frederick once said to
him, "you succeed for twenty years in propagating the idea of artificial
selection as applied to man, and if the idea of race hygiene, of a
teleologic improvement of human types is sufficiently spread, it will
undoubtedly be fruitful of practical results some day. That is, a fresh,
healthy, vigorous stream of blood will flow through our veins and tend
more and more to counteract the increasing marasmus that is enfeebling
the race."