Atlantis — Section 35

XXIII

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.

XXIV

Peter Schmidt was at the train to meet Frederick, who was the only passenger getting off at Meriden.

The little station was empty, but near by was the hurry-scurry of the main street of this country town of about twenty-five thousand inhabitants.

"Now," said Schmidt, "all's well.

No more New York dissipation.

We'll sound different chords here in Meriden.

My wife sends her regards.

She could not come to meet you because she had to look after some patients.

If you like, we might lunch together and afterwards drive out in a sleigh to take a look at the little house I found for you in the country.

If it suits you, you can rent it at a very low figure.

In the meantime you can take a room at our hotel here, which the whole city is proud of."

"Oh," said Frederick, "I have a wild longing for solitude.

I should prefer to spend the very first night beneath my own roof far, far from the madding crowd of Meriden."

"Very well," responded Schmidt, "the man that owns the house is a good friend of mine, a druggist.

His name is Lamping, a pleasant Dutchman.

He'll be satisfied with any arrangements we make; and if you decide to take the house, everything can be settled with him in fifteen minutes."

The two men went to the hotel, where they were served with a rather tasteless meal in surroundings comfortable and luxurious far beyond European notions.

Schmidt left Frederick alone for a while and in a few moments sent a bell-boy to announce that the sleigh was waiting outside.

To Frederick's astonishment he found his friend sitting alone in a pretty, two-seated sleigh reining in a fiery chestnut.

"I congratulate you on this tidy little conveyance," he said.

Peter laughed and quickly dispelled Frederick's illusion, that the immaculate little vehicle with the horse and harnessings were his own.

He had merely hired it without a driver, a frequent practice in America.

"In fact," he joked, "I shall be quite content if we get there without being pitched out into the snow.

I confess, I have never in my life driven a horse."

"Ah," said Frederick with chuckling satisfaction, "it is not for nothing that my father is a general.

Let me drive."

Frederick's luggage was placed in the sleigh, he jumped in, caught up the reins, the chestnut reared, and off they dashed, with a deafening jingle of the sleigh-bells.

Their way lay along the main street, a broad, bustling thoroughfare.

"Is this the sort of horse they usually have here?"

asked Frederick.

"The beast is positively running away.

If we come out of this crowded street without broken limbs, it will be God's doing, not mine."

"Let him have his way.

Every day there are one or more runaways here.

What's the difference if it's our turn to-day?"

But Frederick reined the horse in so tightly, that he actually succeeded in pulling him up just as the Boston-New York express thundered by on a line of railroad tracks crossing the street not safeguarded by gates or fence.

Frederick wondered how it was that a multitude of children, workmen, gentlemen in high hats, ladies in silk dresses, horses, dogs, trucks, and carriages were not mangled to a pulp and dashed against the walls of the houses lining the tracks.

The horse plunged and reared and shot forward over the rails behind the last coach, sending clods of ice and snow flying in Frederick's and Peter's faces.

"The devil!"

snorted Frederick.

"Now for the first time I observe that form of madness which is specifically American.

If you fall under the wheels, you fall under the wheels.

If you want to take a drive, be your own coachman.

If you break your bones, you break your bones.

If you break your neck, you break your neck."

Farther along on the same highway Frederick for the first time saw an electric street car, then still unknown in Europe.

The brilliant sparking at the meeting of the trolley and the overhead wire was to him a new, stimulating phenomenon.

The posts holding up the wire were all shapes, thick and slender, bowed and slanting, so that the whole made a promiscuous impression, though the coaches were of a pleasing shape and glided along with great rapidity.

They had passed the more frequented and dangerous section of the city without an accident and had reached the open country.

The houses grew lower and farther apart.

Before the chestnut with his jingling bells lay an endless stretch of unblocked roadway, with excellent tracks for the sleigh worn into the snow.

The valiant American could speed to his heart's content.

"How strange!"

thought Frederick.

"Here I am riding in a sleigh and driving a horse, things I have not done since I was a boy."

Stories of sports and incidents that he had not thought of for ten years or more occurred to him.

How his father's accounts of hunting expeditions and sleighing mishaps had set them all laughing when the family was cosily gathered together in one room on a winter evening.

During that brisk, refreshing drive Frederick's heart was rejuvenated.

The happiest years of his boyhood were as vivid to him as yesterday--thrilling, romantic rides by night, when the same sound of sleigh-bells scared the silence of sleeping forests and filled the boy's soul with pictures of midnight attacks, romantic murders, and strange devilish phantoms.

In the dazzling brilliance of the snowy fields, breathing in the pure, bracing air, mere existence became unspeakable bliss.

Sitting there in that dainty sleigh Frederick was inclined to look on life as a pleasure drive.

Suddenly he turned pale and had to hand the reins over to Peter Schmidt.

In the jingling of the sleigh-bells his ear caught something like the insistent hammering ring of electric bells.

It was an illusion of his hearing, but it filled him with rising horror, and a shiver went through his whole body.

By the time Peter Schmidt, who instantly observed the change in his friend, had brought the horse to a stop, Frederick had already mastered his nervous attack.

He did not admit it was the sinking of the _Roland_ that had unexpectedly announced its presence again.

He merely said that the noise of the bells had irritated his nerves beyond endurance.

Fortunately, the spotless expanse of Lake Hanover was already close by and the little house on the other shore already visible.

So the two men descended from the sleigh.

Peter Schmidt, in silence, removed the bells from the harness and hitched the horse to the branch of a bare tree.

They crossed the frozen lake on foot, making for the solitary house under its heavy covering of snow.

Peter ascended the front door steps, which resembled great bolsters of snow, and opened the door.

"To judge by the way it looks now, the house is scarcely habitable in winter."

"Oh, yes it is," Frederick declared.

Having been built for summer use only, it had no cellar.

On the ground floor there was a little kitchen and two other rooms; in the attic a bedroom as large as the two down-stairs rooms together.

In the attic room Frederick immediately decided to build his nest for an indeterminate length of time.

He scouted Peter's considerations in regard to household service.

"I feel," he declared, "as if this house had been waiting for me, and I for the house."