Shortly before ten o'clock Frederick was in his friend's consultation room. The walk to Meriden on the brisk winter day had done him good.
"How did you sleep?" asked Schmidt. "You know, you superstitious people maintain that what you dream the first night in a strange place will come true."
"I hope not," said Frederick. "My first night was rather insignificant, and things passed helter-skelter through my brain."
He said nothing of a dream he had had, in which he heard the ringing of the electric bells on the Roland. Though he fought against the impression, it obstinately transported him back to those horrid moments of the shipwreck. Little by little this illusion of his hearing had become Frederick's cross. Sometimes he feared it might be a species of aura, which he, as a physician, knew not infrequently announces an attack of severe illness.
The consultation rooms of the two physicians were separated by the waiting-room, which they used in common. Mrs. Schmidt, whom Frederick had met the day before, came over and, greeting him parenthetically, asked her husband to help her with the examination of one of her patients, a woman of about twenty-seven, who shortly before had married a workman holding a good position in one of the Meriden factories. The woman complained of an upset stomach. Mrs. Schmidt suspected cancer of the stomach.
Both Schmidt and his wife asked Frederick to join them in the examination. They found the patient smiling as she lay stretched on the table. Her smile changed to an expression of astonishment when she saw the two gentlemen. Mrs. Schmidt introduced Frederick as a famous German physician.
"I just spoiled my stomach a little," the woman, who was pretty and well dressed, said in excuse for the trouble she was giving. "My husband will laugh at me and scold me if he hears I ran to a doctor."
Frederick and Peter confirmed Mrs. Schmidt's diagnosis, and Mrs. Schmidt told the candidate for the grave, who was so gay and unsuspecting, that she might have to undergo a slight operation. She inquired kindly for her husband and her child, who had come into the world three months before with her help, and the woman gave ready answers in the best of spirits. Peter took it upon himself to acquaint her husband the very same day with her condition.
During the next week, Peter drew his friend more and more into his practice. Frederick found a certain grim attraction in it. It was a strange treadmill, set in a world of everlasting suffering and dying, in a subterranean stratum of life, having nothing in common with that deceptive existence of a comparatively happy superficiality which he had been able to lead in New York. The Schmidts were doing hard service requiring the utmost self-renunciation. They received no greater compensation than enabled them to obtain sufficient food, clothing and shelter to be able to continue in that service. Though Peter Schmidt was not a Socialist, his practice was almost exclusively confined to the working class. Most of the two doctors' clients were poor immigrants with large families, who toiled laboriously in the Britannia-metal factories to keep the wolf from the door. Their fees were extremely low, and in half the cases Peter, true to his views of life, did not collect them.
The section of the city in which their office was located was dismal beyond parallel. A factory with its offices took up a whole block. Though Frederick was well acquainted with the corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid smell of consultation rooms, he nevertheless had difficulty in concealing the depressing effect the Schmidts' home had upon him. It was dark and gloomy, and the street noises came in directly from the windows. In Germany, a city of thirty thousand inhabitants is dead. This American city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants raced and rushed, rang bells, rattled and clattered and raved like mad. Nobody had a moment's time. Everybody hurried past everybody else. No question of joy in life here. If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work. If a man worked in Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of enjoyment. Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary, provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of which was intensified when return to the home country was cut off by sins committed in the past or by expulsion and banishment. From psychologic interest, Frederick had entered into conversation with patients in the waiting-room and had already learned of sad cases of men having been ejected from their country and left without a home.
Mrs. Schmidt was a Swiss. She had a broad German head, straight, finely chiselled nose, and a figure like the figures of the women of Basel that Holbein painted.
"She is much too good for you," Frederick teased Peter. "She ought to be the wife of a Dürer, or still better, the wife of the wealthy Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer of Nuremberg. She was born to preside over a comfortable patrician household, with closets and chests full of linen and heavy silk and brocade garments. She should go to sleep every night on a bed three yards high covered with silk spreads. She should have twice as many hats and fur garments as the town council allows the wealthy. Instead of that, poor soul, she studied medicine, and you let her run around to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with her little bag of ill omen."
As a matter of fact, the ugliness of her surroundings and the strenuousness of her occupation, which opened up no vista of hope and usually robbed her of four nights' sleep in a week, had made of Mrs. Schmidt an embittered person suffering from homesickness. What aggravated matters was that she was dominated by an obstinate sense of duty and that dogged insistence on saving characteristic of the Swiss. Since her parents' letters strengthened her in her notions, she was not to be shaken in her resolve not to return home until after a certain sum had been laid aside, and of this there was no immediate prospect. Whenever Peter, saddened to see his wife withering away from overwork and nostalgia, proposed that they return to Europe, she would become very hard, cutting and bitter. But when she had a free hour in which to talk to Frederick and her husband of the Swiss mountains and mountain climbs, she revived visibly. There, in the musty office, or in the physicians' private rooms, arose the glorious vision of Sentis, in the face of which Mrs. Schmidt had been rocked in her cradle. The conversation, of course, turned on Scheffel's "Ekkehard," the chamois reserve, Lake Constance, and St. Gall. They recalled memories of a Rigi tour, a tour up from Lake Lucerne at Fluelen to Göschenen, from Göschenen to Andermatt, from Andermatt up over the Rhone glacier and down to the wonderful Grimsel Hospice, with its clear icy-cold lake, which lies in a rocky funnel, like the entrance to the kingdom of shades. One looks about to see if Charon's raft is not waiting. Mrs. Schmidt said she would rather be the dirtiest shepherdess on Sentis than a physician in Meriden.
"Very well," cried Peter, "we will cross the ocean again and settle in Berne or Zürich." As always when Peter Schmidt made this proposition, Mrs. Schmidt's face took on an expression of hard, hostile determination. It did not escape Frederick's notice.
Everything Mrs. Schmidt said testified to her humanity and her clear, serious, sympathetic insight. What a pity she had forgotten how to laugh! What a pity she was not Ratsherr Willibald Pirkheimer's stately, respected wife, surrounded by his healthy children! Her broad shoulders and hips, her long, thick hair required the soft curves of a body blooming in happiness, sunlight and wealth. As it was, her face, though she was only twenty-seven years old, was fearfully worn and anxious, and her shabby clothes hung carelessly on her angular figure. Nevertheless, Frederick perceived the beauty even in her neglected appearance.
Naturally Peter Schmidt, the blond Friesian, also suffered under these conditions, but not to such an extent as to be shaken in his peculiar, deep-seated idealism. It was his idealism, never for an instant forsaking him, that raised him above all momentary hardships. This very fact, it seemed to Frederick, only added to his wife's vexation. From certain remarks of hers, he could tell that it would have been more pleasing to her had Peter cared more for his own advancement and less for the advancement of humanity at large. No man possessed firmer belief than he in the triumph of good, and no man rejected religious beliefs with greater horror. He was one of those who disavow the Garden of Eden and declare the next world to be a myth, yet are firmly convinced that the earth may be developed and will develop into a paradise and that man may be developed and will develop into the divinity of that paradise. Frederick, too, had an inclination for Utopias, and his friend's notions had a revivifying effect upon him. When accompanying him on his professional visits, or skating on the little Lake of Hanover, or conversing with him in his Diogenes tub, hope came back to him; but when his friend left, hope forsook him.
But Peter Schmidt was no vain Utopist. He had a solid basis for his ideals, and endeavoured to realise them in practice. Frederick knew no one so well versed in the natural sciences, political economy, and medicine; and since he also had very accurate knowledge of the geography and history of the important countries, his survey of political conditions was enviably broad. When twenty years old, he had upheld the pan-Germanic ideal. Now, at thirty, he wrote anonymous editorials, which received much attention, advocating the coalition of America, Germany and England, while strongly objecting to the Russian policy in Germany that originated with Bismarck. The theme that the friends chiefly discussed in those days may be summed up in the names of Marx and Darwin, or either of them. In Peter Schmidt a sort of adjustment, or rather fusing, of the fundamental tendencies of those two great personalities was in process, though the Christ-Marxian principle of the protection of the weaker gave way to the natural principle of the protection of the stronger; and this mirrors the result of the profoundest revolution that has ever taken place in the history of mankind.
"If, with that tough Friesian skull of yours," Frederick once said to him, "you succeed for twenty years in propagating the idea of artificial selection as applied to man, and if the idea of race hygiene, of a teleologic improvement of human types is sufficiently spread, it will undoubtedly be fruitful of practical results some day. That is, a fresh, healthy, vigorous stream of blood will flow through our veins and tend more and more to counteract the increasing marasmus that is enfeebling the race."