Peter Schmidt had a serious operation to perform for a fibroid tumour. Knowing that Frederick had witnessed Kocher perform the same operation in Berne and had repeatedly been successful with it himself, he called upon him for help. The patient was a native Yankee farmer, forty-five years of age. His son, a lad of nineteen, drove out in a sleigh to fetch Frederick.
At the appointed time Frederick entered the office, very pale, but outwardly calm. Nobody suspected what a tremendous amount of will power he had to summon to keep his self-control. Like a boy saying his A B C's, he kept repeating to himself:
"I am Frederick von Kammacher. This is Peter Schmidt. This is his wife, and this is the patient."
When he looked about the room, he saw other persons, the shades of those he had met within the last few days and on his trip across the ocean. But he pulled himself together and swore to himself—even in the moment of greatest danger he had not prayed—and saw that the unbidden guests in the room were also swearing.
The farmer was sitting in the waiting-room. The physicians consulted with one another, and Peter Schmidt and his wife urged Frederick to do the operating. His head was a-whirl. He was hot, he trembled, but his friends detected nothing. He asked for a large glass of wine and went about his preparations without speaking. When Mrs. Schmidt brought the wine, he drank it down in one gulp.
Mrs. Schmidt led the old farmer in. They had agreed that she was to do the washing and administer the anæsthetic. She adjusted him on the operating table, bared his body, and washed it thoroughly. Then Peter Schmidt shaved the hair away from his armpit. The physicians exchanged only brief words and signs. It was a matter of life and death. Success hung by a thread.
The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. Yet it was with perfect lucidity and due deliberation that he selected the necessary instruments from the doctor's closet.
The anæsthetic was taking effect. Peter handed the instruments to Frederick, who once again carefully and coolly examined the morbid spot, found that the tumour might already have progressed too far, but nevertheless, with a firm, sure touch, cut into the mass of living flesh. He kept cursing at the insufficient light. The room was on the ground floor with the windows giving directly upon the main street with its heavy traffic. Contrary to expectation, the tumour lay deep, extending between the large nerve bundles and blood vessels in the inner portion of the brachial plexus. It had to be removed with a scalpel, a very ticklish operation because of the proximity to the thin-walled great vein, which at the least incision sucks in air and produces instant death. But everything went well. The large hollow wound was stuffed with antiseptic gauze, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour the farmer, with the help of his son, was carried unconscious into a hospital room on the other side of the hall and laid in bed.
Immediately after the operation, Frederick said he would have to telegraph to Miss Burns, who intended to visit him the next day, telling her not to come. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth, when a boy brought a cable message from Europe for him. He opened it, said not a word, and asked the farmer's son to drive him straight back home. He shook hands with his friends and took leave without referring to the contents of the message.
The drive in the sleigh beside the farmer's son through the snowy landscape was very different from the drive he had taken with Peter on his arrival two weeks before. This time he himself was not driving; what was worse was the absence of the earlier feeling that he had regained mastery over himself and renewed joy in life. He feared his last moment had come. The country he was in, the place he was driving to, the fact that he was sitting in a sleigh, these things he realised only intermittently. Though the sun was shining in a cloudless sky upon a dazzling white earth, he felt for minutes at a time that he was being drawn forward into utter darkness to the accompaniment of sleigh-bells. The farmer boy noticed nothing, except that the famous German physician was taciturn and extremely pale.
Frederick had never been in greater need of all his will power. But for his iron self-control, he would have gone stark mad and jumped with a shout from the sleigh dashing along at full speed. He knew a telegram was lying crumpled in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat; but each time he tried to recall what was in the telegram, it seemed that a hammer kept knocking at his head, dulling his senses. The grateful country boy had no inkling that close beside him was sitting a man who had to exert superhuman strength not to succumb to an attack of raving madness. As a matter of fact, the boy was in danger of a maniac's clutching him by the throat and drawing him into a life and death struggle.
At his door Frederick shook hands with the farmer's son and groped his way into the house through midnight darkness. The boy's few words of thanks went down in a rushing and roaring of vast black waters. The sleigh-bells began to jingle again and never ceased, turning into that infernal ringing that had become firmly fixed in Frederick's head since the shipwreck.
"I am dying," he thought when he reached his room. "I am dying, or else I am going crazy." The clock on the wall came into his vision and receded again. He saw his bed and clutched for the post.
"Don't fall," said Rasmussen, who was still sitting there with the thermometer in his hand.
But no, this time it was not Rasmussen. It was Mr. Rinck, with his yellow cat in his lap, the man who had been in charge of the mail on the Roland.
"What are you doing here, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick roared.
The next moment he was at the window in the light of the dazzling sun, which radiated, not light, but raven-black darkness, like a hole in the heavens pouring out night. The wind suddenly began to moan and howl about the house. It whistled derisively through the door cracks, like the jeers and taunts of a mob of rowdies. Or was it Mr. Rinck's cat miauing? Or was it children whimpering in the hall? Frederick groped about. The house quivered and was thrown from its foundations. It swayed to and fro. The walls began to snap and crack like wickerwork. The door flew open. The rain and hail whipped in. A sudden gust of wind lifted Frederick from his feet. Somebody cried "Danger!" The electric bells raged and mingled with the voices of the storm.
"It's not so! It's a lie! The devil is hoaxing you. You will never set foot on American soil. Your hour is come. You are at the Judgment seat. You are going to perdition."
Suddenly silence set in. Something unheard-of was about to happen, something far worse to see perhaps than to experience. Frederick wanted to save himself. He tried to gather his things together, but he had no hat. He could not find his trousers, his coat, or his boots.
Outside, the moon was shining. In the bright light, the storm was raging. Suddenly, like a wall broad as the horizon, the sea came rolling up. The ocean had risen over both its banks.
"Atlantis! The hour has come," thought Frederick. "Our earth is to be submerged like Atlantis of old."
He ran down-stairs. On the steps he caught up his three children and realised it was they who all the time had been whining and whimpering in the hall. He carried the smallest one on his arm and led the other two by the hand. At the front door, they saw the dreadful tidal wave sweeping nearer and nearer in the ashen light of the moon, carrying along the ship, which was a steamer rolling and pounding fearfully in the waters. The whistles were blowing frightfully, sometimes in a prolonged blare, sometimes in abrupt toots, one after the other.
"It's the Roland with Captain von Kessel," Frederick explained to the children. "I know it. I was on the ship. I myself went down with that superb steamer." He heard shots being fired from the struggling vessel. Rockets hissed up towards the moon and burst in the sombre grey of dawn, dazzling his eyes. "All's over," he said to the children. "All those fine, brave men are doomed to rot in the water."
And picking up on his arm now one of the children, now another, and losing them and finding them again, he began to run to save their lives from the flood. He ran, he raced, he jumped, he fell down. He protested against having to sink after all, though he had already been rescued. He swore, he ran, he fell, and scrambled to his feet, and ran and ran, with a hideous fear in his breast, a senseless fear such as he had never before experienced. When the wave overtook him, fear changed into soothing peace and calm.