Frederick washed and went down-stairs to the basement with Willy Snyders. Here there was a tidy little dining-room with a table set for eight. As in the other rooms, the floors were of brick, and the walls half-way up were hung with burlap. Where the burlap ended, a narrow shelf ran around the entire room, set with all sorts of household utensils, chiefly fiaschi of wine in straw cases. Like everything else about the place, the napery was exquisitely clean.
Willy in the meantime had in his droll, lively way fully informed Frederick of the character and purpose of this extremely comfortable house. It was leased by a group of German artists, whose main prop was a sculptor of twenty-eight by the name of Ritter. Willy lauded Ritter as a genius. He had entered upon a career in the New World most remarkable for a man of his age. Among his patrons were the Astors, the Goulds, and the Vanderbilts; and he had received most of the orders for exterior sculpture work on the buildings of the Chicago Exposition. Willy called Ritter "a devil of a fellow," and praised him for his "smartness."
In a corner of the dining-room, in the halls and on the stairway landings, were reproductions of Ritter's works. Willy extolled them to the skies; Frederick honestly admired them. The large bas-relief in the corner of the dining-room represented a group of singing boys, for which Ritter, probably at the suggestion of his customer, a Vanderbilt or an Astor, had used the famous relief of Luca della Robbia as a model. In style, nobility and freshness, his work surpassed anything then being done in Germany.
Another sculptor partaking of the benefits of the club-house was a friend of Ritter, who helped him with his work. Like Ritter, Lobkowitz was a native Austrian. The fourth member of the group was Franck, a painter from Silesia, an impecunious eccentric, upon whose talents his comrades placed an extremely high estimate. It was Willy Snyders the kind-hearted who, soon after a chance meeting with his fellow-Silesian, dragged him from his wretched quarters, not without much coaxing, and transferred him to the club-house.
"Wait and see the way that lunatic Franck is going to behave," said Willy in his peculiar voice, in which there was a blending of the guttural and nasal tones of American English with the Austrian German accent of his friends. "He snaps like a mad dog. He's enough to make you split your sides laughing—that is, if the perverse creature comes at all and doesn't have dinner served in his room."
As a matter of fact, Franck was the first to enter the dining-room. Willy's tongue kept wagging, while the eccentric merely shook hands limply with Frederick and said nothing. Though the three were countrymen, Franck's appearance—like Willy, he was wearing evening dress—added a touch of embarrassment where there had been perfect unconstraint; and though Willy had lent Frederick a suit, and a tailor had already been ordered, Frederick expressed regret at not being appropriately dressed.
"Yes, Ritter's a great stickler for form," Willy observed. "Every evening we have to present the appearance of at least attachés to an embassy."
Petronilla entered and explained in wordy Italian that the poor, dear, sweet little signorina had fallen asleep in bed and was breathing quietly and regularly.
"You could shoot off a cannon, bum! bum! Outside her window, and she wouldn't wake up," she said. Then holding out a newspaper, she asked whether the gentlemen had heard of the sinking of the Roland and the few survivors. When Willy, with his dilating nostrils and his characteristic half-serious, half-comic expression, introduced Frederick as one of those survivors, she burst into a noisy laugh, which vastly amused two of the three Silesians. When convinced that Willy was not teasing, she stared at Frederick speechlessly, burst into tears, and kissed his hands. Then she ran out.
Soon after, Lobkowitz entered, a tall, quiet man. He had heard of Frederick's recent experience, and greeted him with simple cordiality.
"Ritter has just come in his cart," he said.
They looked out of the window. Frederick saw an elegant two-wheeled dog-cart with a handsome coachman in black livery preparing to drive off, while a thoroughbred grey, feeling the tightening of the reins, was rearing and plunging in the shafts.
"The coachman," said Willy, whose lack of reserve and extreme indiscretion his friends accepted good-naturedly, "is a ruined officer of the Austrian army. He ran away from his gambling debts. I don't know whether he got out of the army or was put out. At any rate he is of invaluable service to Ritter. He tells him to the dot how he must dress for luncheons and dinners, for tennis and golf and riding and driving; how to manage a four-in-hand, when to wear a black chimney-pot or a grey one, what colour gloves to wear, what sort of necktie, what sort of cuff links, what sort of stockings. In short, he tells him all the things a man has to pay attention to in order to succeed here in high life."
At this point Bonifacius Ritter, whom fortune had favoured in America beyond his most extravagant expectations, now entered, young, brisk, handsome, amiable as Alcibiades. Frederick was instantly carried away by his manner, radiating bonhomie, naïveté, joy in life, and simple heartiness. The atmosphere of the New World had imparted ease and fire to the flabby amiability of the Austrian.
Dinner was served, and over genuine Italian soup, conversation was soon in full swing. Willy Snyders, as commissary, poured the wine. It was evident how proud he was of Bonifacius Ritter and what satisfaction it gave him to present his quondam teacher to such friends and such a home in this foreign land. The company thawed; and by the time the maid in white cap and apron had finished serving, the four had all touched glasses with Frederick on his and his protégée's rescue. A short pause of embarrassment followed, which Frederick interpreted as a demand for a statement regarding himself. His pale scholarly face still showed deep traces of the hardships he had undergone.
"I came over," he said, "to continue some studies with a friend which he and I began years ago. You know him, Willy. He is Peter Schmidt, the physician, in Springfield, Massachusetts."
"He's in Meriden now, an hour's ride from Springfield."
"Yes?" said Frederick, "I assumed he was still in Springfield. But no matter. While I was in Berlin and Paris, I conferred with some scientists, friends of mine, before boarding the Roland at Southampton. Everybody told me the Roland was one of the best vessels. To my astonishment, I met the young lady who is now enjoying your hospitality. She was going to the United States with her father. We were fortunate. We got into the life-boat perfectly quietly, before the panic broke out, but we had to leave the young lady's father behind. I forgot to say I had already become acquainted with Hahlström and his daughter in Berlin. Thus, fate brought us together, and I consider myself responsible for Miss Hahlström, both as a physician and a human being. She is an artistic wonder. She is a dancer."
Willy Snyders gave a witty account of the attack of Webster and Forster's agent; and the conversation turned on art in general and on American art in particular.
"Millions of dollars annually," said Bonifacius Ritter, "are spent upon all sorts of art objects, an enormous sum on paintings alone. At the same time, there is a class of persons here of Puritanic descent to whom any kind of art is the abomination of the arch-enemy. For instance, there is an association of pious pillars of society, an association of vandals, invested with certain civic rights, whose object is the abolition of filth and the maintenance of chastity. To that end it recently broke into one of the famous clubs of the New York jeunesse dorée and destroyed a number of irreplaceable art treasures, masterpieces, among them even a Venus by Titian."
"And the relation of the amateurs here," said Lobkowitz, "to their artistic possessions is very funny. You should see how they place their paintings. The "Crucifixion" by Munkaczy is displayed in a department store in Philadelphia. The Goulds have Rembrandts in their extremely comfortable bathrooms. Of course, I have nothing to say against good pictures hanging in hotel halls and stairways. The largest bar-room in New York has the whole Barbizon school—Millets, Courbets, Bastien-Lepages, and Daubignys—hanging over the bar."
"My sole reason," said Franck, "for going there every day for my whisky and soda."
Ritter, Snyders and Lobkowitz burst out laughing.
Franck had the looks of a gypsy; so that two more un-European types, as Frederick said to himself, than he and Willy Snyders were scarcely conceivable. Though a year older than Frederick, Franck, small-boned and youthfully slim, seemed to be seven or eight years younger. He was forever shoving from his eyes a pitch-black lock, which promptly fell over his forehead again to the top of his nose. He drank heavily and kept smiling. He smiled, while the others laughed as he expounded the relation of art to whisky.
A sense of security such as he had not experienced in years came over Frederick. He had always felt drawn to artists. Their conversation, their camaraderie never failed to exercise a charm over him. Now was added the fact that here, where he had counted upon a chilly foreignness and complete isolation, he had been ardently expected, had been welcomed with open arms by such a circle. In the midst of their merry toasting and informal dining, informal despite their evening dress, Frederick every now and then asked himself whether the awful experiences he had gone through had really occurred. Was he actually in New York, three thousand miles away from old Europe? Was not this his home? Within the past ten years in his own country had he ever felt even nearly so comfortable and at home as here? How life came surging toward him! Each minute a new wave rolling to his feet—to him who had undeservedly escaped with his bare existence from almost universal perdition.
"I thank you from the depths of my heart, gentlemen and countrymen," he said, "for the hospitality you show me. I don't deserve it." He raised his glass, and they all touched glasses with him. Suddenly, to his own surprise Frederick expanded in a wave of frankness, calling himself a shipwrecked man in two senses of the word. "I have gone through much in my past; and were not the sinking of the Roland so fearfully tragic, I should feel inclined to look upon it as a symbol of my former life. The Old World, the New World. I have taken the step across the great pond, and already feel something like new life within me.
"I don't know just what I shall do." He did not realise he was contradicting himself. "I shall certainly not practise medicine or take up my profession as a bacteriologist. Possibly I shall write books. What sort of books I don't know. One of the things I think of a great deal is the restoration of the Venus of Milo's body. I have already completed in my mind a work on Peter Vischer and Adam Krafft. But for all I know, I may merely write on the use of artificial manure. For I am thinking of buying some land, felling trees, and living a retired life, farming and raising cattle. Then again, I may write nothing but a sort of romance, the romance of a whole life, which may turn out to be something like a modern philosophy. In that case, I should begin where Schopenhauer left off. I mean the sentence that is always going around in my head from Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: 'Something lurks behind our existence which is inaccessible to us until we shake off the world.'"
The discourse of the young scholar, passing through his belated period of storm and stress, was listened to respectfully. His reference to artificial manure produced a burst of merriment, and when he ended, his audience applauded.
"Shaking off the world, that's something for Franck, Doctor von Kammacher. Tell him, Franck, how you came to America," said Willy.
"Or about your tramping on foot to Chicago," said Lobkowitz.
"Or," said Ritter, "your adventure in Boston, when two policemen, strangely mistaking your condition for a tremendous jag, took you on a drive in the patrol wagon to the lock-up."
"It's very good they did," said Franck, smiling and tossing the lock from his forehead. "I should certainly have caught a cold if they hadn't."
To Frederick's puzzlement, every one of Franck's utterances was greeted by a shout of laughter.
"Franck is a genuine genius," whispered Willy to Frederick, while filling a glass with Chianti, "and the greatest eccentric in the world. Franck," he cried, "didn't you come to America without a cent of money?"
"For what does one need money?" Franck rejoined, at great leisure, with a naïve smile.
"Didn't you come over as a stoker?"
"Ye-e-es," said Franck, "I was engaged as a stoker."
"But you didn't do any stoking?"
"No, I didn't have the muscle for it."
"But what did you do on the ship?" asked Lobkowitz.
"I? I sailed on the ocean."
"Of course. But you were engaged to work. You must have done something to earn money."
"I played sixty-six with the first mate."
Finally Franck's story was extracted from him. It was by painting the portrait of the head-steward that he had lived so handsomely on the steamer and had landed on American soil with fifty dollars in his pocket, though a day later not a cent of the fifty dollars was left.
"Money's a nuisance," said Franck.