Peter Schmidt had a serious operation to perform for a fibroid tumour.
Knowing that Frederick had witnessed Kocher perform the same operation in
Berne and had repeatedly been successful with it himself, he called upon
him for help. The patient was a native Yankee farmer, forty-five years of
age. His son, a lad of nineteen, drove out in a sleigh to fetch
Frederick.
At the appointed time Frederick entered the office, very pale, but
outwardly calm. Nobody suspected what a tremendous amount of will power
he had to summon to keep his self-control. Like a boy saying his A B C's,
he kept repeating to himself:
"I am Frederick von Kammacher. This is Peter Schmidt. This is his wife,
and this is the patient."
When he looked about the room, he saw other persons, the shades of those
he had met within the last few days and on his trip across the ocean. But
he pulled himself together and swore to himself--even in the moment of
greatest danger he had not prayed--and saw that the unbidden guests in
the room were also swearing.
The farmer was sitting in the waiting-room. The physicians consulted with
one another, and Peter Schmidt and his wife urged Frederick to do the
operating. His head was a-whirl. He was hot, he trembled, but his friends
detected nothing. He asked for a large glass of wine and went about his
preparations without speaking. When Mrs. Schmidt brought the wine, he
drank it down in one gulp.
Mrs. Schmidt led the old farmer in. They had agreed that she was to do
the washing and administer the anæsthetic. She adjusted him on the
operating table, bared his body, and washed it thoroughly. Then Peter
Schmidt shaved the hair away from his armpit. The physicians exchanged
only brief words and signs. It was a matter of life and death. Success
hung by a thread.
The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who
with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and
hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his
own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. Yet
it was with perfect lucidity and due deliberation that he selected the
necessary instruments from the doctor's closet.
The anæsthetic was taking effect. Peter handed the instruments to
Frederick, who once again carefully and coolly examined the morbid spot,
found that the tumour might already have progressed too far, but
nevertheless, with a firm, sure touch, cut into the mass of living flesh.
He kept cursing at the insufficient light. The room was on the ground
floor with the windows giving directly upon the main street with its
heavy traffic. Contrary to expectation, the tumour lay deep, extending
between the large nerve bundles and blood vessels in the inner portion of
the brachial plexus. It had to be removed with a scalpel, a very ticklish
operation because of the proximity to the thin-walled great vein, which
at the least incision sucks in air and produces instant death. But
everything went well. The large hollow wound was stuffed with antiseptic
gauze, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour the farmer, with the
help of his son, was carried unconscious into a hospital room on the
other side of the hall and laid in bed.
Immediately after the operation, Frederick said he would have to
telegraph to Miss Burns, who intended to visit him the next day, telling
her not to come. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth, when a boy
brought a cable message from Europe for him. He opened it, said not a
word, and asked the farmer's son to drive him straight back home. He
shook hands with his friends and took leave without referring to the
contents of the message.
The drive in the sleigh beside the farmer's son through the snowy
landscape was very different from the drive he had taken with Peter
on his arrival two weeks before. This time he himself was not driving;
what was worse was the absence of the earlier feeling that he had
regained mastery over himself and renewed joy in life. He feared his last
moment had come. The country he was in, the place he was driving to, the
fact that he was sitting in a sleigh, these things he realised only
intermittently. Though the sun was shining in a cloudless sky upon a
dazzling white earth, he felt for minutes at a time that he was being
drawn forward into utter darkness to the accompaniment of sleigh-bells.
The farmer boy noticed nothing, except that the famous German physician
was taciturn and extremely pale.
Frederick had never been in greater need of all his will power. But for
his iron self-control, he would have gone stark mad and jumped with a
shout from the sleigh dashing along at full speed. He knew a telegram was
lying crumpled in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat; but each time he
tried to recall what was in the telegram, it seemed that a hammer kept
knocking at his head, dulling his senses. The grateful country boy had
no inkling that close beside him was sitting a man who had to exert
superhuman strength not to succumb to an attack of raving madness. As a
matter of fact, the boy was in danger of a maniac's clutching him by the
throat and drawing him into a life and death struggle.
At his door Frederick shook hands with the farmer's son and groped his
way into the house through midnight darkness. The boy's few words of
thanks went down in a rushing and roaring of vast black waters. The
sleigh-bells began to jingle again and never ceased, turning into that
infernal ringing that had become firmly fixed in Frederick's head since
the shipwreck.
"I am dying," he thought when he reached his room. "I am dying, or else
I am going crazy." The clock on the wall came into his vision and receded
again. He saw his bed and clutched for the post.
"Don't fall," said Rasmussen, who was still sitting there with the
thermometer in his hand.
But no, this time it was not Rasmussen. It was Mr. Rinck, with his yellow
cat in his lap, the man who had been in charge of the mail on the
_Roland_.
"What are you doing here, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick roared.
The next moment he was at the window in the light of the dazzling sun,
which radiated, not light, but raven-black darkness, like a hole in the
heavens pouring out night. The wind suddenly began to moan and howl
about the house. It whistled derisively through the door cracks, like the
jeers and taunts of a mob of rowdies. Or was it Mr. Rinck's cat miauing?
Or was it children whimpering in the hall? Frederick groped about. The
house quivered and was thrown from its foundations. It swayed to and fro.
The walls began to snap and crack like wickerwork. The door flew open.
The rain and hail whipped in. A sudden gust of wind lifted Frederick from
his feet. Somebody cried "Danger!" The electric bells raged and mingled
with the voices of the storm.
"It's not so! It's a lie! The devil is hoaxing you. You will never set
foot on American soil. Your hour is come. You are at the Judgment seat.
You are going to perdition."
Suddenly silence set in. Something unheard-of was about to happen,
something far worse to see perhaps than to experience. Frederick wanted
to save himself. He tried to gather his things together, but he had no
hat. He could not find his trousers, his coat, or his boots.
Outside, the moon was shining. In the bright light, the storm was raging.
Suddenly, like a wall broad as the horizon, the sea came rolling up. The
ocean had risen over both its banks.
"Atlantis! The hour has come," thought Frederick. "Our earth is to be
submerged like Atlantis of old."
He ran down-stairs. On the steps he caught up his three children and
realised it was they who all the time had been whining and whimpering in
the hall. He carried the smallest one on his arm and led the other two by
the hand. At the front door, they saw the dreadful tidal wave sweeping
nearer and nearer in the ashen light of the moon, carrying along the
ship, which was a steamer rolling and pounding fearfully in the waters.
The whistles were blowing frightfully, sometimes in a prolonged blare,
sometimes in abrupt toots, one after the other.
"It's the _Roland_ with Captain von Kessel," Frederick explained to the
children. "I know it. I was on the ship. I myself went down with that
superb steamer." He heard shots being fired from the struggling vessel.
Rockets hissed up towards the moon and burst in the sombre grey of dawn,
dazzling his eyes. "All's over," he said to the children. "All those
fine, brave men are doomed to rot in the water."
And picking up on his arm now one of the children, now another, and
losing them and finding them again, he began to run to save their lives
from the flood. He ran, he raced, he jumped, he fell down. He protested
against having to sink after all, though he had already been rescued. He
swore, he ran, he fell, and scrambled to his feet, and ran and ran, with
a hideous fear in his breast, a senseless fear such as he had never
before experienced. When the wave overtook him, fear changed into
soothing peace and calm.