It was nearly eleven o'clock when Petronilla returned. She was accompanied by an errand boy and a fair-haired young man, who was not dressed with the elegance of the residents of the club-house. His feet were heavily shod. While waiting in the hall he waved a wet umbrella with his sinewy left hand and a worn felt hat with his right hand, whistled very skilfully, and paced noisily to and fro in long strides, as if entirely at home in the place.
Petronilla summoned Frederick. With an almost passionate outcry of welcome, the one of the two men ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, and the other down the stairs twice as fast. They kissed and shook hands vigorously.
Frederick's early visitor was Peter Schmidt, of whom he had dreamed on the Roland. He had read Frederick's name in the newspaper among the survivors and had come from his home in Meriden, several hours' ride from New York, to see his old friend. The paper also gave Frederick's address, the reporters having got hold of it through his connection with the celebrity, Ingigerd Hahlström.
The first question Frederick asked after the storm of greeting had subsided, was, "I say, old boy, do you believe in telepathy?"
"Telepathy? Not a bit," replied the Friesian, and laughed a mighty laugh. "I am scarcely thirty, and sound in mind and body. I'm not an idiot. I hope no Mr. Slade has turned your head like old Zöllner's in Leipzig. Have you come over to preside at a theosophical or spiritualistic meeting? Then good-bye to our friendship, old fellow."
This was the familiar tone to which the friends were accustomed from their university days. It was infinitely refreshing to both to hear it again. No conventions of any sort divided them. Their relations were free of everything that hampers association in later years.
"You've been through a thing or two," his friend said, when Frederick confirmed the newspaper account of his having witnessed the sinking of the Roland. "I believe you're a married man and have children and are living in Germany, and as an avocation are doing scientific work, while practising medicine as a vocation. You were thinking of everything else in the world but a trip to America, which never had any charms for you."
"Isn't it weird," said Frederick, "how one suddenly finds oneself in a place one never dreamt of, arriving there in ways most unforeseen and at a time most unforeseen? And doesn't it seem as if the life we lived eight years ago, which was so choke-full of actuality, of real living, had all of a sudden turned to nothing?"
Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to take a walk through the streets of New York. Frederick went to consult Ingigerd. He found that for the next few hours she would be completely taken up with dressmakers. All she said was that she hoped to see him again at luncheon. Soon after, the two friends were walking along the asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar.
Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had parted only half an hour before. Within a short time, each had told the other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years. Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt. Without departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects and spiritual crises. He did not refrain from telling how he had been uprooted and torn this way and that. The first and final achievement of his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning's experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous, by no means tinged with the drab of resignation.
Peter Schmidt's account of himself, in contrast, was very brief. All he had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife, a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother and her Swiss mountains.
Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ideologist. As ideologist, he hoped for the best for humanity's future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a large number of the inhabitants of the United States had not yet struck root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty.
A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper. Peter Schmidt, who had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several.
"There you are," he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets. "The Roland, the Roland, and still the Roland, columns and pages of the Roland."
Frederick clutched at his head.
"Was I really on the Roland?" he exclaimed.
"Very much so, it seems," said Schmidt. "Here you are in black type. 'Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.' And here they have a picture of you."
The artist of The World had with a few strokes dashed off a young man, the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.
"Did you really do it?" asked Peter Schmidt.
"I don't think so," said Frederick. "I must admit the details of the accident are not very clear in my mind any more." Frederick stood still, turned pale, and tried to recollect. "I don't know," he said, "what is most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it." Still standing in the middle of the path, he continued: "What strikes a man hardest is the absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative brutality. We know nature's brutality in theory; but to be able to live, we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality. The most enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes in something like an all-beneficent God. But such an experience gives that 'somehow' and 'somewhere' an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists. And I have come from the sinking of the Roland with a spot in my soul deaf and dumb and numb. It has not awakened to life yet. The brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one's mind, one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to something that one knows to be a vile deception. What is the sense of our sentimentalising over man's dignity, his divine destiny, when such fearful, inane injustice is wrought upon innocent persons and cannot be undone?"
Frederick turned very pale. He was seized by a violent attack of nausea. His lids opened wide, his eyes popped with a curious expression of horror. He trembled slightly, and in some alarm clutched impetuously at his friend's arm. His brain reeled dully as he felt the ground beneath his feet beginning to heave.
"I have never had anything like this before," he said. "I think the accident has left me with something."
Peter Schmidt led his friend to a bench, which fortunately happened to be close by. He saw it was a nervous attack. Frederick's hands turned numb, cold sweat broke out on his body, and he suddenly fell over in a faint. When he awoke, it took some time for him to recognise his surroundings. He said things meant for somebody else. He thought he saw his wife, then his children, and then his father in full uniform. When he regained complete consciousness, he implored his friend to keep the incident a secret. Peter Schmidt promised he would.
"My opinion is," he said, "that your over-wrought, over-taxed nerves are in revolt. They are taking revenge and at the same time curing themselves."
"Though I have inherited the strongest constitution from both my father's and mother's sides," said Frederick, "yet, from last summer on, I have been assailed by so many things that I have long been expecting a collapse. I know this will not be the last attack. I should have cause for rejoicing were the condition not to become chronic."
"Oh," said Schmidt, "you may have two or three more attacks, but if you live quietly for a few months, they may never recur again."
In coming out of his swoon Frederick, as he himself said, returned from a trip around the world. He had travelled through the axis of the earth to the antipodes, which actually did hang head downward.
"I felt as if I had been dead and had come back to life," he said, trying to give his friend a conception of the remarkable state through which he had passed. "It was not like being asleep. During the first part of my dreams, I felt as if I had been something like a block of granite for hundreds of years. On awaking I stood in the shadow of the deepest abyss. I saw subterranean landscapes, gigantic caves, heavens of stone, enormous Adelsberg grottoes. Something lifted me up. The only thing I can compare it to was the way a diver must feel who slowly, slowly rises to brighter and brighter regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea. I felt as if I were forcing myself up out of the grave. I re-lived my whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day. You can imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and death-beds. At the end I went through the whole sinking of the Roland again. And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little harbour where Columbus's flag-ship was slowly decaying."
"All right, all right, Friedericus Rex," Peter Schmidt soothed him. Friedericus Rex had been Frederick's nickname at the university. "Never mind," Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took Frederick's dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves. "Don't think of it, don't think of anything, old man. Let your ganglion cells rest."
Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new world and had rested better than he had for years. While they walked on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical, physiological causes of the attack. After a while, the friends regained their old liveliness and began to talk of other things. From now on, Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the Roland in Frederick's presence.