Atlantis — Section 39

XXXI

Frederick grew better daily.

It seemed to him as if he had been ill for more than a decade.

His body was not undergoing a process of evolution but of rebuilding from fresh young cells.

The same thing seemed to be happening to his soul.

The burden that had been weighing upon his spirits, the restless thoughts that had constantly been circling about the various shipwrecks in his life had departed.

He had thrown off his past as one discards a cloak which the wind and weather, thorns and sword thrusts have torn and worn.

Memories, which before his illness had forced themselves upon him unbidden in the awful guise of actual presence, no longer recurred to him.

To his astonishment and satisfaction he observed that they had sunk forever on the other side of a remote horizon.

The itinerary of his life had brought him to a province wholly new and novel.

He had passed through a fearful process of fire and water and had come out cleansed, purified and young.

Convalescents always grope their way into their newly granted lives, like children without a past.

The American spring had come early.

Suddenly the weather turned hot.

In that part of America the transition from winter to summer is very abrupt.

In the pools and lakes, the bullfrogs croaked in rivalry with the high, clear shrilling of the other American frogs.

Now came that unendurable combination of heat and humidity which Mrs. Schmidt so dreaded.

She suffered fearfully during the summer, when she continued with her hard work just as in winter.

Frederick began again to accompany Peter Schmidt on his professional rounds, and sometimes the friends took long excursions into the country.

They fell back into their old habit of revolving problems and pondering the destinies of mankind.

To his friend's astonishment, Frederick did not display his old incisiveness in debate, whether in attack or defence.

There was a cheerful placidity about him which took the keenness from any hope or fear of a universal character upon which they touched in their discussions.

"How do you account for it?"

asked Peter Schmidt.

"I think I have well earned the precious right merely to breathe, and I think I appreciate it.

What I want to do for the time being is smell, taste, and enjoy.

An Icarus flight does not suit my present condition, and with my newly awakened tender love for the superficial, you will scarcely find me ready to dig laboriously into the depths.

I am now a bourgeois.

I am done with my former state," he concluded, smiling.

Peter Schmidt, as a practising physician, expressed his satisfaction with this mood of Frederick's. "To be sure," he said, "you will change again."

"Time will show, but I think not," rejoined Frederick.

Indian lore had a fascination for Peter Schmidt.

He liked to go to certain spots in the hilly country to which history or legend attaches stories of the conflicts between the first white colonists and the Indians, and remain there a long time, mentally living over again the experiences of the fur trappers and the tenacious wrestling of the settlers for possession.

Sometimes, in a wave of warlike feeling, he would draw his revolver and shoot at a mark.

Frederick was no match for him as a marksman.

"The blood of the old German adventurers and colonists is flowing in your veins," he said.

"A finished civilisation, over-ripe and over-refined such as ours, really does not suit you.

Where you ought to be is in a wilderness with a Utopia hovering above."

"The world is still not much more than a wilderness," said Peter.

"It will be quite a while before the structure of our cosmic philosophy will stand on a solid foundation.

In short, Frederick, much remains to be done."

"Like the Lord God, I shall knead human beings from wet clay and inspire them with a living breath."

"Stuff and nonsense!"

said Peter Schmidt.

"Making dolls like that leads nowhere.

You are too good to be doing it.

You belong on the ramparts, in the front ranks of the battle line, my dear boy."

"I for my part," said Frederick, smiling, "have stipulated an armistice for the next few years.

I want for once to try to get on with what the world is able to offer.

I want to disaccustom myself as much as possible from reflection and dreams."

Frederick felt it was his duty to persuade his friend, both for his own and for his wife's sake, to return to Europe.

"Peter," he said, "the Americans have no use for a man like you.

You cannot recommend patent medicines, nor can you by administering small doses keep a man chained to his bed for two months when you can cure him with quinine in a week.

You have none of those characteristics which in the eyes of the average American make an aristocrat.

From the American point of view you are a simpleton, because you are always ready to sacrifice yourself for every poor dog that strays your way.

You ought to return to a land where, thank the Lord, the aristocracy of the spirit, the aristocracy of ideas is still a match for that other aristocracy.

You ought to return to a land that would consider itself defunct and buried were the men of science and art no longer to represent the flower of its inhabitants.

There are enough Germans here without you who are breaking their necks to forget the language of Goethe, the language their mothers taught them.

Save your wife.

Save yourself.

Go back to Germany, go to Switzerland, go to France, go to England, go anywhere you will, but don't remain in this tremendous industrial corporation, where art, science, and true culture are, at present at least, wholly out of place."

But Peter Schmidt wavered.

He loved America.

And if, Indian fashion, he laid his ear to the ground, he already heard the festive music being rehearsed below ground that is to be played on the great day of a universal renaissance.

"All of us," he said, "should first be Americanized and then become neo-Europeans."

One of Frederick's favourite walks was to the suburb of Meriden where the Italian wine-growers settled.

You could hear the men singing with their voices warm as the sunlight, the women calling the children with that cry of theirs pitched in octaves.

You saw brown men binding the vines, and on Sundays you heard them talking and laughing, while the _boccia_ balls rolled with dull thuds over the well-trodden soil in the open fields where they played.

Those voices and sounds were piercingly sweet and familiar to Frederick.

"You may kill me for saying so, but I am, and will remain, a European."

His homesickness grew stronger and stronger.

He went about singing such passionate praises of Europe to his friends that he entangled them in the web of his feelings, and finally melted away even Mrs. Schmidt's rigid resistance.

A surprising change came over her.

She forgot her exhaustion, she moved briskly, she laughed again, and began to make all sorts of plans for a future in Europe.

The farmer upon whom Frederick had operated fairly persecuted him with gratitude.

He expatiated upon how he had always relied upon God and how a man always can rely upon God, and how God on this occasion had sent him the right man at the right time.

Frederick now realised the profound motive that destiny had had in sending him on his fearful trip.

In a morbid disinclination to learn of his comrades on the sea trip, Frederick avoided reading newspapers.

One day Ingigerd Hahlström accompanied by a distinguished looking American by no means in his prime got off the Boston train and went directly to Peter Schmidt's office.

She introduced herself and asked whether Frederick von Kammacher was still in Meriden.

Before he was taken ill they had exchanged letters.

Later she had had no time to write because she had been making a rapid tour of the whole United States.

She knew nothing of his illness.

Peter Schmidt and his wife, though they had an instinctive habit of always telling the truth, a habit which interfered with their success in life, now deliberately, shamelessly, boldly told a bare-faced lie.

"Frederick has returned to Europe.

He took a White Star steamer, the _Robert Keats_," they told Ingigerd.

Without informing anyone, Frederick had engaged passage on the _Auguste Victoria_ for the same crossing as Miss Burns.

Peter and his wife wanted to go by a slower, less expensive steamer.

They were all in a glorious state of impatience.

Once more the ocean became nothing but a small pond across which their yearning lightly swung a bridge.

At that time a sentimental song was being sung in all the theatres in America, entitled "Hands Across the Sea."

Every bill-board, fence and barrel bore "Hands Across the Sea."

Frederick went about humming "Hands Across the Sea."

Whenever he saw "Hands Across the Sea," his soul was stirred by a rich, beautiful melody.

But there was one thing that still prevented Frederick from enjoying complete serenity of spirit.

A single thought kept haunting him.

Should he express that thought by word of mouth or by letter?

He constantly wavered between the two impulses.

Not a day passed that he did not make ten decisions, one way or another, until one Sunday chance came to his rescue in the form of Willy Snyders and Miss Eva Burns, who had come to Meriden on an excursion.

When he saw the lovely girl, dressed in light summer clothes, coming towards him with a smile, he realised that "Shall I?"

or, "Shall I not?"

had until then played an important rôle in his deliberations.

But now that question was decided.

"Willy," he cried beaming, "do what you will, go wherever you will, stay wherever you will, amuse yourself as best you can, and at supper we'll all meet at the hotel."

He grasped Miss Eva's hand and drew her arm in his, and she went off with him, laughing.

Willy was greatly amazed, but he, too, burst out laughing and said in his comic fashion: "Oh, in that case I certainly am _de trop_."

When Frederick and Eva returned in the evening, to the handsome dining-room of the Meriden Hotel, a delicate charm, a tender warmth hovered about them, making them younger and comelier.

Their friends observed it.

To their own surprise, these two human beings had been penetrated by a new element and a new life.

Though they had been steering towards it, neither of them had had a divination of it even a short time before.

That evening champagne was drunk.

A week later the little colony of artists saw Miss Burns and Frederick off on the _Auguste Victoria_.

"I am going to follow you soon," Willy bawled as the steamer began to move from the pier.

Every day on board the steamer was a Sunday to Frederick and Eva.

The afternoon of the third day the captain, never suspecting that he was speaking to one of the survivors of the _Roland_, said: "It was hereabouts that the _Roland_ went down about three months ago."

The sea was smooth, like a sky eternally cloudless.

Dolphins were sporting in the waters.

The night following that afternoon, a glorious night, became Frederick's and Eva's wedding night.

In blissful dreams they were carried over the place of horror which was the grave of the _Roland_.

At the quay in Cuxhaven, Frederick's parents were awaiting him with his children.

He saw nothing but his children.

He held them, all three of them, in his arms for a whole minute.

They laughed and chattered and clung to him wildly.

Eva approached them, and everything was self-understood.

After all could get their breath again, Frederick made several obeisances and laid both hands on the ground, while looking into Eva's eyes.

Then he arose and held up his finger to command silence.

From the broad stretches of the fields with their young crops came the thousand-throated trilling of the larks.

"This is Germany, this is Europe!

What of it, if after an hour like this, one should sink?"

The captain of the _Auguste Victoria_ passed by and greeted Frederick.

"Do you know," said Frederick in his overflowing spirits, "do you know, I am actually one of the survivors of the _Roland_?"

"Indeed!"

said the captain, adding, as he walked away, "Yes, we always cross the same ocean.

I hope you have a pleasant trip, Doctor von Kammacher."

THE END

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