Atlantis — Section 24

III

Up to this point a wholesome-looking waitress, in white cap and apron, had been serving.

Now the Italian cook himself, Simone Brambilla, came in to bring on the dessert and cheese and inquire whether the dinner had been to the gentlemen's taste.

The familiarity between masters and cook, who spoke Italian together, testified to the best relations between them.

This little fragment of the artists' Italy in America enlivened them all, bringing back memories of the days they had spent in Italy, the days that signify the heyday of their youth to all German scholars and artists.

"Now then, strike up a tune, my boy!"

Willy suddenly ordered the cook, "Signor Simone Brambilla, you will please perform for us now!

And _cantare_.

Understand?

_Ma forte_ not too _mezza voce_!"

He took a mandolin from the sideboard and pressed it into the chef's arms.

"_Signor Guglielmo è sempre buffo_," said the cook.

"That's it--_buffo, buffo_," cried Franck, striking the table with his fist.

His smile had already turned somewhat idiotic, and he seemed to think "_buffo_" meant "to sing."

"_Cosa vuole sentire?

_" asked Brambilla.

"'_Addio mia bella Napoli_,'" suggested Willy, "or anything you like, Mr. Brambilla."

"What does 'like' mean?"

asked Franck.

"I have heard the word so often."

"Would you believe," Willy said to Frederick, "that that ox has been here over a year and doesn't know a word of English?"

"'_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!

_'" Franck began to sing.

"Goodness gracious!"

said Willy.

"His toothache has begun to bother him again."

"'_Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten_,'" sang Franck.

"But I do!"

cried Willy.

"_Silentium!

_ When Franck begins to sing and Lobkowitz to yawn and Ritter empties his first glass on the table-cloth, we'll soon be lying stretched out under the table."

The cook had seated himself decorously and was holding the mandolin in position.

With his cap of white linen and his white linen jacket and apron, he cut a droll figure among those correctly dressed young men.

Willy Snyders poured some _vino nero_ for him into a tumbler, and he struck a few notes by way of prelude, though hesitating to interrupt Franck and begin.

He kept his face, glowing from the kitchen fire, turned toward Franck with an expression of courteous waiting and politely besought him in Italian to keep on singing.

Finally, since Franck, instead of answering, arose, gave him a comically commanding look, and waved his fork like a baton, he began, striking up an accompaniment with a catching rhythm, which titillated his auditors' nerves.

He was an excellent singer and a master-hand at playing the mandolin.

He gave those well-known street-ballads which one hears everywhere in Italy, especially in Naples: "_Addio mia bella Napoli_," "_Funiculi Funicula_," "_L'altro ieri a Piedigrotta_," "_Margherita di Parete era sarta delle signore_," and also more serious songs, such as the languishing "_Ogni sera di sotto all' mio balcone sento cantar una canzon d' amore_."

The cook's melodies undoubtedly charmed back his home to him, though in colours less glorious and alluring to himself, perhaps, than to the artists, whether they had been in Italy or not.

Frederick leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

The dining-room was filled with the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, and the electric bulbs shone as in a mist.

Frederick's thoughts carried him far, far away.

His arm hung at his side limply, while a Simon Arzt cigarette burned to a stump between his fingers--throughout his adventures, his silver cigarette case had remained safe in his pocket.

Before his inner vision rose the coasts and blue gulfs of Italy, the brown Doric temples of Pæstum and the cliffs of Amalfi, Sorrento, and Capri.

He was standing on the Posilipo.

He was with Doctor Dorn in the loggia of the zoologic station for deep-sea researches, which Hans von Marées had decorated.

In Rome, Frederick had sat over many a bottle of wine with Hans von Marées and Otto, who died while working on the Luther Memorial in Berlin.

He saw himself in the famous Est Est Café in Rome, or visiting the malaria patients in the hospital on the Capitol, or promenading in the sunshine on Monte Pincio with a deaf and dumb sculptor, with whom he then went to an afternoon concert.

He had laughed because the artist explained that he did not hear the music with his ears, but felt it, or rather felt the drum alone, in his belly.

In that period of his life, Frederick had been undergoing a crisis.

But a little more and his preoccupation with Goethe's "Italian Journey," his intercourse with the artists, and the vast number of his impressions of sublime art would have turned him aside from science.

But one day he chanced to meet Mrs. Von Thorn and her daughter Angèle.

He became engaged, and there was no question now of a change of profession.

Angèle was beautiful, and those days, when he read aloud to her chapters from Goethe, or inspired and inspiring passages from Winckelmann, or recited Hölderlin, or held forth to her on the masterworks in the Vatican, were full of never-to-be-repeated romantic asininity.

They bought engagement rings of a jeweller on the Corso.

Where was his ring?

He had removed it from his finger, and, like all his other possessions, it had gone down forever in the cabin of the _Roland_.

Frederick again felt that sensation of hot waves rising from his breast to his eyes.

This time the emotion was a soft one, a feeling of reconciliation, of mourning over lost illusions.

The second epoch of his life, if a second epoch were really to develop from this beginning, was not like the first, full of innocence and based upon illusions.

Frederick was sorry for himself.

He was moved almost to tears.

For it is an all-too strong faith, an all-too certain hope in happiness that finally bring disillusionment.

It was in one of the intervals of clapping and applause punctuating the end of each of Brambilla's songs, that Petronilla came in and whispered something to Willy Snyders, which caused Willy in turn to whisper to Frederick, who immediately jumped up and left the room.

Willy went with him.

Despite Petronilla's protestations, a gentleman and a stately, rather gorgeously dressed lady had forced their way into Ingigerd's room.

Frederick and Willy arrived just as the lady was trying to wake Ingigerd and raise her up in bed.

"For Heaven's sake, child," she kept saying, "wake up for a second."

Frederick and Willy recognised Webster and Forster's agent and immediately expelled him to the hall, talking to him in whispers, but none the less energetically.

They told him a few forceful things, which he received with a shrug of his shoulders.

When they asked the lady by what right she had forced her way in, she said she was the proprietor of one of the largest New York theatrical agencies and had negotiated the contract between Webster and Forster and Ingigerd Hahlström's father, who had received a thousand dollars in advance.

"Time is money, especially here in New York," she declared.

"Even if Miss Hahlström cannot dance to-night, she must begin to think of to-morrow.

I

should be willing to accommodate her, but this is only one of a hundred cases that I have to look after.

And if Miss Hahlström is to appear to-morrow, she must go with me this very minute to"--she mentioned the Gerson of New York--"so that they can work on her costume over night.

The establishment is on Broadway, and a cab is waiting in front of the door."

The lady said all this in Ingigerd's room, intentionally refraining from lowering her voice.

Several times Frederick and Willy interrupted to ask her to moderate her tones.

"Miss Hahlström will not dance at all," said Frederick, finally.

"Indeed?"

said the agent.

"Then she'll be involved in a very unpleasant law suit."

"Miss Hahlström is a minor," said Frederick, "and her father, with whom you concluded the contract, probably lost his life in the sinking of the _Roland_."

"And I," said the agent, "don't want to lose a thousand dollars for nothing."

"Miss Hahlström is sick."

"Very well, then I'll send my physician."

"I myself am a physician."

"A German physician, I suppose," she said.

"The only physicians that count for us are Americans."

Perhaps this American woman, equipped with a masculine intellect, masculine energy, and a masculine voice would have put through her will, had not Ingigerd's heavy sleep defied all the noise about her, even the shaking to which she had been subjected.

At length Frederick displayed a degree of determination so unambiguous that the agent had to recede from her position and temporarily withdraw from the field.

Besides, Willy hit upon an idea, the far-reaching significance of which Frederick did not realise until later.

He declared that if the agent did not desist, he would notify the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, since Miss Hahlström was not yet seventeen years old.

"Gentlemen," said the lady, evidently taken aback and coming round a bit, "remember that both Webster and Forster and myself have been spending enormous sums on advertising for four weeks.

I reckoned on a tour as far as San Francisco.

Now that Miss Hahlström happens to be one of the survivors of the _Roland_ and has lost her father besides, she has become the sensation of the season.

If she were to appear now, she could return to Europe in three months with fifty thousand dollars over and above the sum contracted for.

Would you be responsible to Miss Hahlström for such an enormous loss?"

After the agent and her escort had left, Willy Snyders confirmed what she had said about the amount of advertising that had been done.

For weeks all the bill-boards, all the building scaffoldings, every empty barrel where building was going on were covered with posters announcing "Mara, or the Spider's Victim."

Sometimes they displayed a life-size figure of a dancer, represented as almost a child still, a sort of albino with red rabbit's eyes and streaming saffron-yellow hair.

A spider, with a body the size of a small balloon, was crouching behind its web.

The poster was by Brown, the most talented poster-painter in New York.

"You can see those posters everywhere on the streets still," said Willy Snyders.

"That's why it seems so funny to think I always stared at them quite unsuspecting; and now Miss Ingigerd and you are in this house.

Life concocts crazy plots.

I assure you, when I looked at those posters, I thought of everything else in the world but you, Doctor von Kammacher.

And little did I divine that they would ever be of more significance to me than the advertisements of any ordinary vaudeville."

When Frederick and Willy returned to the dining-room, the chef was gone, and Lobkowitz and Franck were engaged in the time-worn dispute, whether Raphael or Michael Angelo is the greater.

Willy gave a humorous, though indignant account of the battle of the Amazons that had just taken place and how Webster and Forster wanted to insist on Miss Hahlström's appearing that very night.

The artists' chivalry was aroused.

They declared unanimously that they would refuse to give up their lovely ward, even if all New York were to come and besiege them.

Frederick looked at his watch.

It was a few minutes past ten.

The last thing Arthur Stoss had said on parting occurred to him, "At half past ten to the dot, I shall be on the boards behind the footlights."

Frederick told the artists about Arthur Stoss; and Willy Snyders, the man of initiative, proposed that they go together to Webster and Forster to see the armless actor's performance.

IV

Ritter lent Frederick one of his evening suits, which fitted him to perfection, and within less than half an hour the company was sitting in a box at Webster and Forster's. The enormous hall, in which smoking and drinking were allowed, was full.

Willy estimated that there were about four or five thousand people present.

A number of immense arc-lights shone in the tobacco smoke like frosty, white moons.

When Frederick and his friends entered, a woman and a slim toreador were dancing.

The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive.

The dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness.

When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth, or on one of the islands of the Cyclades.

He promptly decided to leave Spain and follow the lovely dancer to her home in Greece, where she was his Chloë and he, her Daphnis.

Old shepherds sat tippling in a pine grove dedicated to Pan.

From the highland meadows he looked down upon the far off Ægean Sea beating noiselessly against the rocky coast-line.

The music of the orchestra turned into the piping of Pan, while Webster and Forster, the heavy fumes, the air vitiated by the exhalations of five thousand people no longer existed.

The pure breath of spring was rustling in the pines.

The shepherdess was dancing as she had learned to dance from the droll caperings of the goats or, by natural inheritance, from great Pan himself.

It was a dance of young, wild, bubbling joy in life.

"The origin of all music," thought Frederick, "is dance and song in one and the same person.

The feet compel the rhythm that the throat voices;

and if the dancer herself does not sing, she hears music different from the music to which she is dancing, and if she dances without an accompaniment, we who behold her hear her music nevertheless.

The melodies I hear in this girl's dancing are comparable in their bucolic innocence to the things of the same sort that Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert wrote.

They have exorcised the vulgar muse from this vulgar place, banishing her to a remote distance."

The dancer was a Spaniard.

She made little leaps in the air and tossed her head archly, as if for her own joy, unconscious both of the audience and the toreador, who sometimes picked her up and held her aloft.

Her dancing was innocent, entirely free from sensuality.

At the conclusion of her performance, Frederick and his friends clapped madly, while the vast audience gave very scanty signs of applause.

"Caviar to the general," said Frederick.

When she disappeared in the wings, a lackey in red livery stepped on the stage and set a number of small seats at regular distances from one another.

It was not until he had left and returned again with a pea-rifle and a violin that Frederick recognised the brave private, Bulke.

The next moment Stoss appeared.

A frantic outburst of delight, threatening never to end, greeted him.

He wore a jacket and knee-breeches of black velvet, a lace jabot, lace cuffs, black silk stockings, and buckled pumps of patent leather.

His yellowish hair was brushed straight up all around his large head.

His pale face, with its broad cheek bones and broad flat nose, was turned to the audience with a professional smile.

The applause refused to end, and the armless trunk made a moderately profound bow.

Frederick saw the same man helpless, drenched with water, crouching under the seats of the life-boat; and he recalled with what murderous determination the sailors, Bulke, Doctor Wilhelm, and he himself, as well as the women, Rosa, Mrs. Liebling, and Ingigerd, had prevented the boat from capsizing.

What an unreal contrast between the past and the present!

And why was Stoss receiving such homage?

The psychology of certain mass demonstrations has yet to be written.

What could the applause have been intended to signify?

"We are grateful to God that he rescued you.

This you have accomplished, you poor armless man, that hundreds, though they had two arms, perished, while you are privileged to appear on the stage this evening as if nothing had occurred.

We must enjoy ourselves; and it is better that you who entertain and amuse us with your thousands of tricks should have been saved than any Tom, Dick, or Harry.

Besides we want to reimburse you for all the troubles you have been through.

What is more, because of your skill and because of your rescue, you are a lion whose worth has increased twofold."

The turbulence continued.

The man the audience so honoured was fairly drowned in a sea of applause.

At last a man in evening dress stepped from the wings and made signs that he wanted to speak.

Silence fell, and he announced that Arthur Stoss, the world's champion, would say a few words.

The next instant Stoss's sharp, clear boyish voice rang through the theatre reaching even the hindmost seats.

Frederick caught expressions here and there, "My dear New Yorkers," "hospitable Americans," "the hospitable shores of America," "Columbus," and "1492." He heard Stoss say that on the bill-boards one read "1492," the year in which modern America was born.

He distinguished phrases such as "_navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse_," "through darkness to light," and so on.

Stoss's speech utterly lacked inspiration.

"Noah's ark," he said, "has not yet become superfluous.

Two-thirds of the earth's surface is still covered with water.

But if a vessel here and there is swallowed up in the flood, the ark of humanity cannot sink, since God has set his rainbow in the heavens.

The ocean is the cradle of heroism, it is the unifying, not the dividing element."

The name of Captain von Kessel resounded in the hall.

Frederick saw the dead hero tossing about in the great black waters under a starless heaven.

Above the performer's shrill voice, he heard the captain's voice saying: "My brother has a wife and children.

He is an enviable man, Doctor von Kammacher."

Frederick was roused from his recollections by the frantic applause that greeted the conclusion of the brilliant speech.

Arthur Stoss now seated himself on one of the seats, and Bulke, the hero and life saver in red livery, laid a violin on another and proceeded to draw off his master's shoes.

Stoss's feet were clad in black stockings leaving his toes bare.

With the toes of his right foot, he took the bow and with his left foot, deftly rosined it; a spectacle that sent a whisper of astonishment rippling through the audience.

The orchestra struck up Bach's "Prelude," to which Stoss played Gounod's "Ave Maria."

The tones he produced were beautiful, and the vast crowd was enraptured.

Remembering the awful disaster, they were transported into a sentimental, religious mood.

Frederick shuddered with disgust.

The sinking of the _Roland_ was being exploited.

It was a relief when Stoss finally took up the pea-rifle.

Bulke in the part he now played aroused as much admiration in Frederick and the artists as Stoss, if not more.

While his master shot off the rifle, he stood at a distance of fifteen feet, with total unconcern holding up cards for Stoss to aim at.

Stoss put a hole through the middle of the card every time.