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.