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.