Atlantis — Section 34

XX

Frederick crossed the park to the main Post Office, a huge building, in which twenty-five hundred clerks and officials worked.

Here he despatched a telegram, and then turned back into the noise of the streets, where the people, bending their heads before a cutting wind, ran about in hurrying swarms.

The unceasing traffic, the cars and cabs and trucks, produced a deafening din.

Frederick drew out his watch.

It was half-past twelve, the exact time at which Miss Burns was wont to take her modest lunch in the little restaurant near the Grand Central Station.

Frederick hailed a cab and drove to the restaurant.

If on this occasion Miss Burns had failed to be lunching there, he would have been sadly disappointed.

But there she was, happy as usual to see the young German scholar.

"Miss Burns," he cried, seating himself beside her, "you see in me a man who has been dismissed from prison, from a reformatory, from an insane asylum.

Congratulate me!

I am at last a free and independent agent again."

He was blissful, exultant.

"I have the appetite of three men, the humour of six men, and good spirits enough to cheer Timon of Athens out of the blues.

I am totally indifferent to the future.

So much is certain--no Circe has power over me any more."

Miss Burns congratulated him and laughed heartily.

"What happened?"

she asked.

"I will tell you all about the tragi-comedy in the City Hall some other time.

First I have to prepare you for dreadful news.

Set your teeth, Miss Eva, and listen--you are going to lose me."

"I, you!"

she laughed.

Yet she was somewhat taken aback, and a dark red came and went on her face.

"Yes, you are going to lose me," Frederick repeated.

"I just sent a telegram to Peter Schmidt in Meriden, and to-morrow morning at the latest I shall leave you.

I shall leave New York, go to the country, and turn farmer."

"Oh, I really am sorry if you are going away," said Miss Burns, turning serious, though without the least trace of sentimentality in her voice.

"Why should you be sorry?"

Frederick cried gaily.

"You will come out to see me.

The man you have until now known me to be has been nothing but a dish-rag.

Perhaps, when you come to visit me in the country, you will discover that I am good for something after all.

I really think I see land in the distance now.

I feel I still have sound bones in my body.

To take an illustration from chemistry.

A salt solution vigorously stirred by the spoon of God Almighty begins to crystallise.

Something in me is struggling to crystallise.

Who knows whether, when the clouds that surround and penetrate the solution precipitate, the result of all the storms in the glass will not be a new, solid piece of architecture.

Perhaps the evolution of a Teuton does not stop at the age of thirty.

In that case the crisis may come just before the attainment of settled manhood, the crisis which, to all appearances, I have just safely passed through, and which, in any circumstances, I should have had to pass through."

Frederick now gave a brief account of the audience in the City Hall, the comic clash of two worlds in Garry's and Lilienfeld's speeches, which he called _tant de bruit pour une omelette_.

"The Mayor's decision," he said, "in opening up to Ingigerd the career for which she was so anxious, has opened up to me the way to a new life, a life all my own.

It was almost like a physical sensation to realise that the Mayor's verdict decided my case, too."

He described Garry and told how, despite the opposition in their views, the descendant of Cromwell's followers, whom Charles I persecuted and executed, had impressed him and made him think.

Undoubtedly his harsh, severe dealings had been dictated by purely humanitarian sentiment for Ingigerd's welfare, because of the frailty of her body and still more the frailty of her soul, all in accordance with the narrow-minded principles of a traditional belief, of which he was a credulous follower.

As for Lilienfeld, did not victory in the struggle to possess Ingigerd body and soul mean money to him?

"Garry may really have been a hypocrite, yet wasn't Lilienfeld a hypocrite, too, when he spoke openly of Ingigerd Hahlström's honour and chastity?

I looked up in alarm, and I saw a grin glide like a malicious shadow over the rows of reporters.

Doesn't falsehood blossom everywhere?

Doesn't hypocrisy flourish equally on each side of every contest?

Isn't it a matter generally taken for granted?"

Frederick, as always, was feeling very comfortable in Miss Burns's company.

Her presence always gave him, spiritually speaking, a sense of neatness and order.

A man could tell her everything, and her replies straightened things out, instead of muddling them, steadied things and gave them a mooring, instead of tossing them about tempestuously.

But he was not so well satisfied by her manner as usually, she not seeming sufficiently pleased with his release.

He did not know whether he should attribute this to lack of sympathy or to secret doubts.

"I came to you, Miss Burns, because I do not know anybody to whom I would rather speak of this new phase of my life.

Tell me frankly, was I right in doing what I did, and do you understand how a man feels when he is no longer in the chains of a senseless passion?"

"Perhaps I do," said Miss Burns, "but"-- "But what?"

Miss Burns did not reply.

"What you mean is, you cannot be certain of the convalescence of a man like myself.

But I assure you, I will never sit in an audience watching that girl publicly expose her body.

Still less likely am I to follow her to the four corners of the globe, through all the music-halls in the world.

I am rid of her!

I am free!

I will prove to you that I am."

"If you were to prove it to yourself, it might be of some value to you," said Miss Burns.

But he much preferred to prove it to her.

"Perhaps you think it is a whim in me or a piece of foolishness.

Yet, the way I am constituted, it is practically impossible for me to do anything for my sake alone.

Your sympathy would act as a stimulus to keep me to my resolution."

He drew from his pocket a letter from Peter Schmidt, saying that near Meriden there was a frame house that would be suitable for Frederick.

Evidently his plan to retire to rural solitude was by no means a recent one.

"When I come to myself in the quiet of the country, and I have reason to hope I will come to myself, you will hear from me.

From time to time the world learns of a man of about thirty who suddenly disappears, leaving his family, his wife and his children in ignorance of his whereabouts.

Sometimes he is a statesman, sometimes a young professor in a university, sometimes a mayor in good standing with all the citizens of his town, sometimes a rich business man enjoying the respect of the community.

He leaves most unceremoniously, without concerning himself for the affairs of importance, even of extreme importance, that he may have to attend to the next day, perhaps the very next hour.

He obeys the iron impulse to throw off the entire world, his next of kin, his dearest friends, and be alone with himself, so alone that he passes into oblivion and may even count as dead.

It is a similar state, though perhaps not so pathologic in its character, a state conditioned rather by strokes of fortune, that has uprooted me.

Don't forget, all social connections signify an immense consumption of nerve force and attach a person to his surroundings by a thousand threads and fibres.

Ingigerd Hahlström is not the only one that is enmeshed and throttled in a spider's web.

Every now and then all of us have to pant for air and tear away wrappings.

Then the moment comes when we no longer do the thing that has been well considered, the thing that convention has established, but the very thing that has not been considered, that takes heed of nothing, the purely instinctive thing.

Call it what you will, fermentation, folly, passion, shipwreck, storm.

Whatever it may be, the fact is, all at once a man again feels the desire for life expanding his lungs."

Frederick now drew from his pocket the photographs of his three children, which his father and mother had sent along with their letters.

In their great happiness that he had escaped drowning and was safe and sound, his parents had completely forgotten their solicitude for him.

Miss Burns took a friendly interest in the pictures and found a word of praise for each child.

There was some discussion, pedagogic and non-pedagogic, of the characteristics of the little people.

Frederick again spoke of his wife, this time without any critical reflections, dwelling only on her good and lovely and excellent qualities, really native to her.

The meal was over.

Frederick had eaten heartily of the vegetarian dishes.

He rose, shook hands warmly with Miss Burns, and thanked her for having listened so patiently.

He left hastily, and jumped into a cab in order to keep his promise to Ingigerd Hahlström to come before luncheon was over at Lilienfeld's house.

XXI

The Lilienfelds lived in a one-family house, an exact replica of the other houses on the same block on 124th Street.

Frederick found the company drinking coffee in a reception-room on the first floor, richly furnished with oriental rugs, expensive lamps, Japanese vases, and fine, dark, highly polished walnut furniture.

The shades were drawn, and the electric bulbs of a gorgeous chandelier imparted a certain splendour to the room.

The air was heavy with the smoke of Lilienfeld's strong imported cigars, at which the reporters were puffing away comfortably.

Ingigerd, smoking a cigarette, was reclining in an easy-chair surrounded by the reporters.

Her hair was hanging loose about her shoulders and down her back.

Altogether her appearance was not prepossessing.

Since she looked impossible dressed as a grown lady in long skirts, she wore schoolgirl clothes and was tempted to furbish herself up like a tight-rope dancer with ribbons, openwork stockings, and white shoes.

When Frederick von Kammacher entered the room, she blushed slightly, and held her hand out to him indolently.

Unfortunately, this hand had short, ordinary fingers, probably the plebeian heritage from her mother, her father having had long, beautiful hands.

Frederick was at least a head taller than anybody in the room and was distinguished from the other gentlemen by his air of good breeding.

He kissed Mrs. Lilienfeld's hand, German fashion, and begged her pardon for having come so late.

The subject of discussion, of course, was the hearing in the City Hall.

Lilienfeld ran about, offering the reporters cigars and cordials, so importunate in his hospitality as not to shrink from sticking long Havanas into their coat pockets and cigarettes into their cases.

There was design in this.

Every now and then he would take a reporter aside to force upon him information regarding Ingigerd's past, her birth, her rescue, her father, her European success, and the way in which her talent had been discovered.

It was a rather garish mixture of truth and fiction.

Lilienfeld knew that this story of her life would appear in the New York newspapers that very same evening in connection with the report of the audience in the City Hall.

He had brewed the concoction according to his own recipe from various details that he had heard, and he felt certain of its effectiveness.

Ingigerd looked very tired.

But she had received orders to be as lavish as possible with her amiabilities so long as a single reporter remained in the house.

Frederick felt sorry for her.

He saw that her severe professional duties had begun.

Mrs. Lilienfeld was a calm, refined woman of nearly forty, with a look of suffering on her face, yet extremely attractive.

She was dressed with tasteful simplicity.

One got the impression that her husband worshipped her blindly and was accustomed to act, or to refrain from acting, according to a scarcely perceptible glance from her soft, grave eyes.

For all his noisiness the bull-necked man, coarse, brutal, sensual, was like a timid child before her.

She devoted herself for a while to Frederick, who felt he had found grace in the lady's eyes and that for some reason she wished to be helpful to him in leading him away from the aberrations of his passion.

Had he not had a sense of security in the firmness of his decision, he might perhaps have given more serious attention to her searching questions, which showed that she had done some thinking about him.

Her method was far from flattering to Ingigerd.

With an infinitely disdainful smile, she called the girl, who was chattering nonsense to a circle of flirtatious reporters and was overwhelmed with their tokens of approval, "a mechanical doll with a light head of porcelain filled with sawdust."

"A good plaything," she said, "a plaything for a man, an article of merchandise, but nothing more.

She may be worth money, but she is not worth anything else.

She is not worth more than any piece of emptiness, any trifle, or knickknack."

Ingigerd, moved perhaps by a little wave of jealousy, came up and asked Frederick, without suspecting the significance the question had in his eyes, whether he had packed his things.

"Not yet.

Why should I pack my things?"

"Mr. Lilienfeld," she said, "has made a contract for me for two evenings a week in Boston.

You must get ready and go to Boston with me day after to-morrow."

"To the ends of the world," said Frederick lightly, "to the ends of the world, dear lady."

She was contented, and gave Mrs. Lilienfeld a look of satisfaction.

XXII

Frederick was greatly relieved when the festivity at Lilienfeld's house was at last a thing of the past.

With Willy Snyders' help, he had succeeded in getting together a few effects, and he spent part of the afternoon arranging them.

In the evening the artists, who had grown very fond of their guest and were sorry to lose him, gave him a farewell dinner at the round table.

For a long time Frederick had not felt so serene and at peace with himself and the world as that afternoon.

After he had got his baggage ready, Willy Snyders, who had been waiting ever since Frederick's arrival to show him his collection of Japanese art objects, invited him to his room.

It was a small room on the top floor, cluttered up with a mass of antiques.

He first placed before Frederick a number of Japanese sword-guards, tsubas, as the Japanese call them, small elliptical pieces of metal, about which a man's hand can easily reach.

They are decorated with figures in slight relief, partly of the same metal as the ground, partly damascened, or inlaid with copper, gold, or silver.

"A tiny object, tremendous labour," Frederick observed, after more than an hour spent in admiring the wonderful workmanship of pieces in the Kamakura and Namban styles, pieces by members of the Goto family extending over centuries, of the Jakushi family, and the Kinai family;

pieces of the Akasaka school and the Nara school; pieces from Fushimi in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Gokinai and Kagonami;

glorious sword-guards in the maru-bori, maru-bori-zogan, and hikone-bori styles; pieces of the Hamano family, and so on.

Who can boast a prouder aristocracy than Goto Mitsunori, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and could trace his descent back through a line of sixteen ancestors, all great masters in the art of sword-decorating, a glorious race of craftsmen, inheriting not only the life, but also the skill of their fore-fathers.

And all the things portrayed on those small oval tsubas!

The cloven turnip of Daikoku, god of fortune.

The god Sennin creating a man by his breath.

A shining full moon and flying geese.

Wild geese flying over reeds.

The moon rising from between snow-clad mountains, an oval of iron, gold and silver, no larger than a man's palm, yet suggesting the vast reaches of a moonlit night.

Frederick and Willy both marvelled at the lapidary style of this metal work, in which the artist with the finest understanding of his art displayed a wealth of composition within the smallest space.

One of the tsubas represented a tea pavilion behind a hedge.

In the spacious landscape was a waterfall, sky and air, perfectly depicted by holes in the iron, that is, by nothing.

Others represented the hero Hidesato vanquishing a monster on the bridge of Seta; the sage Lao Tsze on his ox; Senno Kinko, a pious man, riding on his golden-eyed carp, absorbed in a book; the god Idaten, pursuing an oni, or devil, who had stolen Buddha's pearl; a bird prying open a Venus's shell with his bill;

a golden-eyed octopus or cuttlefish; the sage Kiko leaning from the window of his house, reading a scroll by moonlight.

Willy, endlessly resourceful and allowing nothing to daunt him, had ferreted this collection out of a restaurant in the Five Points district, a restaurant of viler repute than even the neighbourhood it was in.

A

Japanese had left the tsubas with the proprietor of the den as pledge of the payment of his bill, but had disappeared without ever returning to redeem his pledge.

Scarcely a day passed that Willy did not visit a junk shop on the Bowery, or in the Jewish quarter.

Peering with his fearless, fiery eyes, which always wore an expression of mingled astonishment and indignation, he ventured into the worst sections of the city, even into the obscurest opium hells of Chinatown.

His confident manner and round spectacles, he told Frederick, caused him to be mistaken for a detective;

which stood him in good stead in making his purchases.

In one shop in Chinatown, belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints.

These were the next things he showed Frederick.

There were most of Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai.

One of the most exquisite showed remnants of snow left on the mountain and a brownish red sun setting in a cold sky with fleecy clouds.

There were Shunsho's and Shigemasa's illustrations of the book, "Mirror of the Beauties of the Green Houses," Yedo, 1776, and Shunsho's illustrations of "The Book of Sprouting Weeds."

Frederick called one of Hokusai's prints "the golden poem of summer."

It was a deep-blue heaven with Fujiyama to the left and golden grain beneath, persons sitting on benches, heat, radiance, joy!

One of Hiroshige's prints he dubbed "the great poem of the moon."

On wide, moist, melancholy meadows, scant-leaved trees, like weeping willows, their branches drooping in the mirror of an idly flowing stream, barges loaded with turf passing by, a floating bridge propelled by Japanese raftsmen, the water blue in the evening twilight, a great, pale moon, veiled by pale, bloody tints, rising above the distant edge of the melancholy plain.

In addition to his tsubas and prints, Willy had a collection of so-called netsuke, some in boxwood, some in ivory, small, dice-like carvings, representing with remarkable animation all sorts of real and fantastic scenes.

Among the finest of Willy's possessions was a Japanese figure carved in wood not more than a foot high, a woman selling oysters.

Each least detail was most precisely rendered.

It was the attempt of a more recent Japanese master to portray feminine beauty.

In this one rare instance he had succeeded, having produced one of those precious objects adapted to make thieves of their lovers.

Willy, who mingled in American sporting circles, had also found occasion to collect a few Indian curiosities.

He showed Frederick the feather adornment of an Apache chief, a wampum belt, Indian knives and bows and arrows.

He had made the acquaintance of Buffalo Bill, the famous hunter, and some Indian chief and cowboys in his troupe, men in whom natural instincts are combined with a Barnum and Bailey business sense, and real excellence with the actor's vanity.

Willy's especial friend, whom he had been very eager for Frederick to meet, was a well-known acrobat who had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River.

"Willy," said Frederick, "since you have so profitably employed your time in America, you won't be going back to Europe empty-handed."

"The devil!"

replied Willy.

"What else is to be got out of this damned country?"