Chapter XII: Part II: I (4)

"In these things, which offer the jolliest possibilities, artists nowadays are very unresourceful," he said. "We have naïve German examples in the _Gänsemännchen_, the _Männicken Piss_, and the _Tugendbrunnen_ in Nuremberg. One of the best classic examples is the drunken Silenus of Herculaneum. Water when combined as a mobile element with immobile works of art, can run, trickle, dash, splash, spray, bubble up, or rise up in a splendid jet. It can hiss and sputter and foam. From the drinking bottle of the drunken Silenus in Herculaneum it must have popped. I have had a plaster-cast model made of the little Pompeian figure of Narcissus at the spring in Naples. It is exquisitely beautiful. I am going to place it somewhere in my villa. My gardens will reach down to the seashore, and I intend to have a landing-place for boats, with marble steps and balustrades and sculpture work."

While walking in the cold sunny air next to the slim, elegantly dressed sculptor, listening to his Greek fantasies, Frederick's heart beat mightily against his ribs. Whenever the thought arose in his mind that here, in this new country, after everything that had happened, he would again see Ingigerd Hahlström dance her dance, he felt that he was no longer equal to the trial. The forces of his soul that had remained healthy were already rising in rebellion against anything that might increase the power of the little demon. Nevertheless, he was so intimately connected with her, that the public exhibition of her charms tortured him, and he suffered from the anticipation of her great success. Yet while dreading it, he fervently desired it.

The theatre was dark and empty when Ritter and his following entered. They could scarcely see and had to grope their way after the young man that led them to seats in the parquet. Gradually, their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and they could distinguish the vast windowless cave, with its rows of seats, its galleries and painted ceiling. The air, smelling of dust and decay, lay heavily on Frederick's lungs. There were recesses in the great grotto that made the impression of gloomy holes for coffins. Some of them were hung with grey canvas, and canvas lay spread over the whole parquet, with the exception of a few rows left free for seats for the visitors. The stage curtain was up, and the only lighting on the stage came from a few incandescent lamps with weak reflectors, which cast only a narrow circle of light, which widened somewhat as the visitors' eyes learned to be content with the faint illumination.

None of the men had ever before seen an empty unlighted theatre, and they felt cramped and oppressed. For no special reason, they lowered their voices in speaking, and sat there in the expectant mood in which people always await the beginning of a performance.

No wonder that Frederick's heart throbbed more and more turbulently. Even Willy Snyders, who was not easily shaken out of his composure and was always inclined to make sarcastic remarks, was silent and adjusted his glasses on his nose. He sat with his mouth open and his nostrils dilating. When Frederick's eye happened to fall upon him in his unwonted state of self-forgetfulness, he was amused by the comic appearance of his black Japanese head.

After a number of tense minutes had passed and nothing had yet occurred, the artists were about to unburden their feelings in questions and remarks, when the silence was suddenly broken by a tramping of feet, and the stage resounded with a loud, though dull and by no means melodious voice. It was the impresario Lilienfeld, in a long overcoat, his hat pushed back on his neck. He was scolding violently and flourishing a cane. The vision tickled the artists' risibilities. It was all they could do to keep their laughter within the limits of courtesy.

Lilienfeld roared and called for the porter, and thundered unmercifully at a charwoman happening to stray on the empty stage.

"Where's the carpet, where are the musicians, where is that good-for-nothing of a fellow who attends to the reflector? I expressly ordered him to be here at twelve o'clock. Miss Hahlström is standing back there and can't get into her dressing-room."

A voice from the parquet--it came from the young man that had guided the artists to their seats--several times attempted a timid "Mr. Lilienfeld, Mr. Lilienfeld." Finally Lilienfeld caught the sound and, holding his hand to his ear, stepped to the edge of the stage. Forthwith a shower of curses, which had ceased for an instant, descended upon the lad, with reinforced severity. The reflector man came and received his dose of furious rebukes. A man in a silk hat pushed in three musicians, carrying a tom-tom, a cymbal and a flute.

"Where's the flower? The flower! The flower!" Lilienfeld now shouted into the parquet, when a hesitating "I don't know" came from somewhere. Lilienfeld disappeared, crying "Where's the flower? Where's the flower?"

"Where's the flower? The flower! The flower!" was taken up in endless echoes here and there, above and below, from the wings, on the stage, and now from the last rows of the parquet--a circumstance which only increased the artists' inclination to titter.

A few more lights were turned on, and a remarkable, great red paper flower was set on the stage. Lilienfeld, now better satisfied, reappeared and entered into a conversation with the three musicians.

"Have you studied the dance I told you to?" he demanded, humming the tune and stressing the accented parts to impress it upon them. "Now then," he said, "let's hear what you can do." He raised his bamboo cane like a conductor's baton and said commandingly, "Well, begin."

And the musicians began to play that provoking, passionate melody, that barbaric music, now dull and suppressed, now loud and screeching, which, ever since it first began to excite his nerves, had pursued Frederick night and day. He thanked heaven that the darkness helped conceal his emotion. It was that hard, convulsive motive conjuring up the demons which had been the beginning of his obsession in the _Künstlerhaus_ in Berlin. Over and again those sounds had lured him and led him on.

What was this strange Ariel's intention with him? At whose bidding was he acting when he assailed his victim with inner storms and almost let him perish in a real storm on the seas? Why did he prick Frederick's flesh with this music? Why did he cast its inseverable hempen cords about his throat and limbs? How was it that after so tremendous an eternal tragedy had been enacted out there on the cosmic solitudes of the ocean, after the waters had unmercifully swallowed so vast a number of men, loving life--how was it that this music had remained untouched and unweakened, that it had here resumed its fantastic devilishness? Frederick felt as if new cords were biting into his flesh and tightening about his throat. Something like the anguish and frenzy of a bull with a lasso about its horns came over him--a bull whom a cruel power will misuse for a senseless, bloody show in the arena. Frederick did not hit about him. He did not run away, and yet he came near doing both. His head, it seemed to him, was wrapped up heavily in thick sail-cloth. He must do something finally to rid himself of that enforced blindness. He must look straight in the face of his grotesque opponent--Prospero or Caliban?

"There is no doubt," Frederick felt, while the music tortured and harrowed him, "that men seek madness, they seek it again and again. They are fond of madness. Was not madness the leader of those men who first made the impossible possible and crossed the ocean, though they were neither fish nor fowl?"

In Skagen in Denmark there is a sight worth seeing. In the dining-room of a small inn there are painted figureheads of foundered vessels saved from the wreckage. The hand of madness has unmistakably touched all those wooden men and women with their painted faces and clothes. They look forward into the distance, where they seem to see something beyond all. Their noses quiver in the air on the scent of gold and foreign spices. In some way or other they have come upon a secret and have lifted their feet from their native land to tread the air and pursue illusions and phantasmagoria and discover new secrets in the trackless salt waste. It was by such that El Dorado was discovered. It was such that have led millions and millions of men to their destruction.

And Ingigerd Hahlström, who shortly before had been his painted Madonna of wood, now became Frederick's ecstatic figurehead. He saw her high above the waves on the prow of a phantom sailing ship, bent forward with open mouth and wide eyes, her yellow hair falling straight down from both sides of her head.

The music ceased, and Ingigerd Hahlström stepped on the stage. She was wearing a long blue evening cloak over her costume.

"Mr. Lilienfeld, I think it is rather stupid to change the name of my number from 'Mara, the Spider's Victim' to 'Oberon's Revenge,'" she said very dryly.

"Miss Hahlström," said the impresario, nervously, "please, for heaven's sake, leave that to me. I know the audiences here. Besides, I have reasons for choosing another title. I want to avoid a damage suit by Webster and Forster. Please begin, Miss Hahlström. We have to hurry." Mr. Lilienfeld clapped his hands and called to the musicians to strike up.

Again those provoking strains, immediately upon which Mara danced in, like a naked elf floating in the air. While flying in wide circles about the flower, as yet unseen, she resembled a fabulous, exotic butterfly in her transparent veil shot with gold. Willy Snyders called her a naiad, Ritter a moth. Franck said nothing, merely keeping his eyes fixed upon the transformed girl.

The moment came when with her eyes closed, like a somnambulist, she sniffed the perfume and began to seek its source. In that seeking, there was both innocence and maddening wantonness. A fine quiver went through her body, like the quiver of a moth in its sultry love-play. At last she smelt of the flower itself, and her sudden rigidity showed that she had perceived the great spider on it.

As Frederick knew, she did not always represent the horror, the numbness of fright and the flight in the same way. The artists all admired the change of expression on the dancer's sweet face, where faint distaste gave way to violent repulsion, fright and stark horror. As if a great hand had tossed her, she flew to the outer limits of the circle of light.

But a force compelled her to return to the flower. Mara no longer followed sweet scents. The hideous venomous creature in the flower's calyx drew her against her will, struggling wildly. Her lids were no longer closed. It was with clairvoyant eyes that the little thing went to meet her doom.

"Strange," thought Frederick, "if her father really conceived the idea of this dance himself. In that case he may have divined his daughter's fate with greater insight and love than he is credited with. As she herself admitted, she is sometimes more irresistibly drawn by what is ugly than by what is pure and beautiful; and the dance follows a logical course leading on pitilessly to tragedy."

The new phase of the dance began, in which the dancer looks at the spider again, takes it to be harmless, and laughs at herself, as it were, for her fears. Ingigerd portrayed this with inimitable grace, innocence and merriness.

After passing through a state of pleasant repose, the fight with the imaginary threads enmeshing her limbs began. At this point, the door opening on the parquet creaked on its hinges, and a tall, stately, noble-looking old man was ushered in. He carried his hat in his hand. His hair was silvery grey, and his clear-cut face was clean shaven. He was a gentleman, "every inch of him." The young man who had led the stranger in, dashed out again, and the gentleman seated himself near the door by which he had entered. Director Lilienfeld appeared and, turning and twisting like an eel around the awe-inspiring old man, officiously begged him to be seated in one of the front rows.

The gentleman, Mr. Garry, President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and many other organisations, declined with a wave of his hand and fixed his attention upon the performance. Ingigerd had been confused by the creaking of the door, the arrival of a new spectator, and the mumbled greeting of her impresario. She stopped dancing.

"Keep on! Keep on!" cried Lilienfeld. But the girl stepped to the edge of the stage.

"What's the matter?" she inquired.

"Nothing, nothing at all," the director assured her, all impatience.

Ingigerd called for Doctor von Kammacher. Frederick, who was reminded of his father by the old gentleman and had been looking at him with respect, was not a little startled when he heard his name echo through the theatre. It was fearfully painful and humiliating to him to have to step up to the platform and speak to Ingigerd. She bent down and told him to go "sound that old guy from the Society and try to bring him around."

"If I am not allowed to dance, I will jump from Brooklyn Bridge, and you can go fishing for me where my father is," she cried.

Amid convulsive jerkings of her body, throttled by the spider's threads, Ingigerd ended what was apparently her life, though in reality nothing but her dance. Lilienfeld introduced Frederick to Mr. Garry. The stiff old descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, who had come over in the _Mayflower_ and founded the New England States, measured Frederick with a cold, penetrating glance of his steely grey eyes, a glance hostile as a cat's and as capable, it seemed to Frederick, as a cat's to see in utter darkness. Mr. Garry spoke very quietly, but what he said scarcely aroused hopes that his attitude would be tolerant.

"Evidently," he said after Lilienfeld had got done with an eager harangue, "evidently, the girl's father has already misused her for low purposes, and evidently, the child's education has been neglected. The creature is to be pitied for not having been taught even the commonest notions of feminine shame and decency. Unfortunately," he added in a cold, haughty manner, which in advance robbed any statements in controversion of their force, "unfortunately we have as yet no law to prevent such revolting performances, which grossly offend public sentiment and morality." He scarcely seemed to comprehend Lilienfeld's arguments, assuming without question that Lilienfeld must know how vile he and his profession were in the eyes of every gentleman and that Lilienfeld in his, Mr. Garry's, eyes was entitled to but one epithet, "vermin."

His inadequate English prevented Frederick from taking an important part in the conversation. Nevertheless, he ventured to mention the necessity under which Ingigerd was of earning her own living. Mr. Garry instantly silenced him with the old question:

"Are you the girl's brother?"

Mr. Garry left the room, and Lilienfeld cursed and stormed against the miserable hypocrisy of those old-fashioned Yankees and Puritans.

"I have my strong suspicions," he said, "that an injunction will be issued preventing Ingigerd Hahlström from appearing in public. I owe the whole cursed business to Webster and Forster."

When Frederick went to fetch Ingigerd in the dressing-room, he found her in tears.

"I have nobody but you to thank for this," she cried in a fury. "Why couldn't you let me dance the first day under Webster and Forster, as Mr. Stoss and everybody else advised?"

"Ingigerd," said Frederick, "I had to look out for your health."

"Stuff and nonsense! You took the whole matter into your hands. You acted illegally, against my expressed wish, when you chased Webster and Forster's agent away from the cab when we left the steamer."

Frederick was disgusted. Mr. Garry had made his father's personality more vivid to him than it had been for weeks. Although his father would never have expressed and carried out his views in the same form as Mr. Garry, yet his opinions, as Frederick very well knew, were akin to the Yankee's. Indeed, even in Frederick's soul, many of the same notions, implanted by birth and education, remained unshaken. For the first time since he had fallen under Ingigerd's spell, he realised that he was inwardly independent of her. The one question that still troubled and occupied him was how to rid himself outwardly as well as inwardly from the degrading liaison. Without fully admitting it to himself, he had suffered a disenchantment in Ingigerd's dance; to judge by which, the demon's spell was broken. This time that alluring seductive dance had seemed inconceivably empty. Nor was his compassion aroused to nearly the same extent as formerly.

Franck, the gypsy painter, burst in. He behaved like a madman. His enthusiasm, which somewhat improved Ingigerd's temper, was of the sort that stammers and stutters and cannot find the words to express itself. Frederick looked at him in disgust, but the next moment started when he recognised in his behaviour the marks of his own former obsession. Ingigerd let the painter take her hand and cover it with wild, passionate kisses, which travelled from her wrist to her elbow, a demonstration that seemed to her to be perfectly natural and quite in order.

"I wish you would go visit Mr. Garry again and try to influence him with pleas and threats and money," she said to Frederick.

"That would be foolish and useless," Frederick declared; whereupon Ingigerd wept.

"The only friends I have," she wailed, "are friends that exploit me. Why isn't Achleitner here? Why did Achleitner have to lose his life, and not somebody else? Achleitner was my real friend. He knew how to go about things in the world, and he was rich and unselfish, too."

XVII

The very next day the injunction was issued, restraining Ingigerd Hahlström from dancing in public. The girl conducted herself wildly. Lilienfeld said the time had come to place the matter before the Mayor of New York. In order to protect Ingigerd from slander and from being sent to an orphan asylum, Lilienfeld, who was married but had no children, offered her a refuge in his own home on 124th Street near Lenox Avenue. Whether she wanted to or not, Ingigerd had to accept.

The morning after Ingigerd's departure to Mr. Lilienfeld's home, when Frederick sat in front of his modelling in a new smock of unbleached linen of Miss Burns's buying, he experienced a sense of relief on Ingigerd's account. A burden had been lifted from him. Her change of home had removed a part of the responsibility from his shoulders and made a break in the feeling he had had of their belonging to each other.

After the rehearsal, Ingigerd was much discussed in the studio. Ritter had expressed to Miss Burns and his friends a desire to make a model of the dancing girl for a bronze statuette. Miss Burns told Frederick of his wish. But Frederick, who was still regarded somewhat in the light of Ingigerd's guardian, assented unwillingly.

"You see, Miss Eva," he said, "I am really the last person in the world to stand in the way when beautiful things are to be created. But I am only a man, and if Ritter were to use Miss Hahlström as a model here, where only one or two walls would separate us, that would mean an end to my peace of soul." Miss Burns laughed. "You may well laugh," he said, "but I am a convalescent, and relapses, you know, are worse than the sickness they follow."

A week passed, in which Frederick carried on a remarkable, but not, as yet, victorious warfare. He worked in the studio daily, and Miss Burns became his confidante. From his own mouth she learned what she had already observed, that he was languishing in the chains of an unhappy passion. Without ever interfering in his spiritual struggles unless he positively demanded it of her, she gave him advice as a good friend and comrade.

"Every time I see Ingigerd, or go out with her, or spend any time at all with her," he said, "I feel outraged and bored. I have firmly made up my mind not to go back to her."--A resolution frequently broken a few hours after it was made.

Miss Eva was so long-suffering that Frederick never felt compelled to drop the theme of Ingigerd Hahlström. The girl's soul was turned inside out and back again.

One day Ingigerd said to him:

"Take me, seduce me, do with me whatever you will, Frederick. Be strict, be cruel with me. Lock me up. You are the only man I want to have anything to do with me any more." Another time she said beseechingly: "I want to be good, Frederick. Make me good."

But the very next day she again subjected her friend and protector to unpardonably vile treatment. The fact was, she already had a following of men, running errands for her, attending to her affairs, thinking for her, and paying for her.

The thing that Frederick could not wean himself from was that sweet, fair, frail, pathetic body. Yet he was determined to wean himself.

One day Ingigerd came to sit for Miss Burns for her portrait. Frederick placed a revolving stand in front of her and also tried to model the blonde Madonna in clay. Even Ritter had a mass of clay for modelling a bust of her prepared on a revolving stand, and the master entered into rivalry with his pupils. Miss Burns's purpose in arranging these sittings was not easily fathomed. The result was, however, that the very severe study of his idol's features had a remarkable effect upon Frederick.

The flatness of her forehead, her eyebrows, the setting of her eyes, the turn of her temples, the shape of her ears and the twist they took where they joined her head, her nose as narrow as the dull edge of a knife, her nostrils, the oldish-looking nasolabial line, the depressions at the corners of her mouth, her beautiful yet brutal chin, her unbeautiful throat, with the washer-woman's pit in it--all these traits had a very sobering effect upon Frederick, sapping from his imagination every bit of its strength to beautify or palliate. Perhaps Miss Burns knew what results from such strenuous, such persistently logical observation of an object. In some ways it has the same effect as blood-letting. That is why the artist must bleed to death unless new sources of illusion always open up to him.

Moreover, in the long sittings, to which Ingigerd submitted from vanity, she betrayed the narrowness, the attenuation, the barrenness of her mind. In contrast with Miss Burns, Frederick perceived in Ingigerd with fearful clearness that incompleteness which is eternally rudimentary. Once she brought a letter from her mother in Paris and read it aloud. For about a quarter of an hour, it actually seemed to torture her. It was serious, severe, full of concern, and not unloving. Her mother referred sorrowfully to Hahlström's death, and asked Ingigerd to come and live with her in Paris. She told her of a woman in New York, the wife of a German barber, with whom it would be eminently suitable for her to remain until she returned to Europe. She even mentioned the steamer she should take.

"I am not wealthy," she wrote. "You will have to help me with my work, Ingigerd, but I will try to be a mother to you in every respect,"--here came the apodosis--"if you make up your mind to change your mode of life."

There was hard, stupid, even savage hatred in Ingigerd's commentaries on this and other parts of her mother's letter.

"I am to go to her and repent," she mimicked, "because the Lord has so miraculously saved me. Mamma should be the first to repent. I am not going to be such a fool as to turn myself into a dressmaker. Always to receive orders and listen to sermons from mamma! I am not bothered about myself so long as I am not under somebody's thumb."

And so she went on, without the least hesitancy retailing the ugliest intimacies in the life of her parents.

XVIII

The Mayor of New York appointed the twenty-fifth of February for a hearing in the City Hall, at which Lilienfeld and his attorneys, Brown and Samuelson, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were to present their arguments for and against the injunction restraining Ingigerd Hahlström from dancing in public. Mrs. Lilienfeld dressed Ingigerd up in "smart" clothes, put her in a cab, and in the capacity of chaperone drove down to the City Hall with her. Frederick, upon whose presence Ingigerd had insisted, had gone ahead in another cab with Lilienfeld.

"This is the situation," Lilienfeld explained as they drove through the length of the cold, grey, dreary city. "At present New York is in the control of Tammany. At the last elections the Republicans were defeated. Ilroy, the Mayor, is a Tammany man. The word Tammany is derived from an Indian sachem, Tamenund, who figures in Cooper's Leather-stocking novels. The party leaders have silly Indian names and titles. But don't be deceived by all that romantic Indian nonsense. The members of Tammany Hall are mighty practical. The Tammany tiger is an animal not to be trifled with in the great New York sheepfold. I think we may feel pretty sure, though not absolutely certain, of having the Tammany tiger, and therefore the Mayor, with us in this matter. Mr. Garry is a Republican, a deadly enemy of Tammany Hall, and it would give Ilroy the greatest satisfaction to deal a neat little blow at him and that idiotic institution, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. But his term is nearly expired, and as he would like to be elected again, it is politic for him to make a few concessions to the Republicans. Well, we'll see. We have to wait and see."

The cab rolled down Lenox Avenue through Central Park and along Fifth Avenue, past the Metropolitan Museum, the Lenox Library, the millionaire residences, and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Below Fiftieth Street it turned into Broadway, where Lilienfeld pointed out the buildings of interest, Madison Square, and the Hoffman House, the gathering place of the Democrats. Finally they reached the City Hall Park, in the centre of which stands the City Hall, a marble structure with a cupola and a portico. In the portico the gentlemen awaited the ladies.

While walking to and fro, Frederick suddenly felt someone tugging at his coat. He turned and saw a pretty, stylishly dressed little girl.

"Why, Ella Liebling, where do you come from?"

Ella courtesied and said:

"I am out with Rosa. There she is."

Frederick turned and saw Rosa standing on the steps.

"Good morning, Doctor von Kammacher," she said.

Frederick introduced Ella to Mr. Lilienfeld. "Ella was in the shipwreck. Here you have additional proof of the tremendous physical power of resistance of the so-called weaker sex."

"Good morning, little girl. Is it really true that you were in that awful shipwreck?"

"Yes, indeed," came the unabashed answer, spiced with a dash of childishly coquettish pride, "and my brother was drowned."

"Oh, poor child," said Lilienfeld. His manner was abstracted. Evidently his mind was on the speech he might be compelled to deliver before the Mayor of New York. "Excuse me," he said suddenly to Frederick, and moved a few steps away to make a hasty, nervous perusal of his notes, which he had written on a slip of paper and had taken from his pocket.

"My mother was dead, too, but came back to life again."

"How's that? How's that?" asked Lilienfeld, raising his gold spectacles slightly from his nose and peering at her from under them.

Frederick explained how they had had to work over Mrs. Liebling for several hours before they succeeded in resuscitating her.

"If in this world honours were awarded according to merit," Frederick added, "then that simple servant-girl there"--he pointed to Rosa--"ought to receive greater honour as a hero of two worlds than Lafayette. She performed miracles. She never thought of herself, but only of her mistress, Mrs. Liebling, of the two children, and the rest of us."

Frederick went to Rosa and shook hands with her. When he inquired for Mrs. Liebling, she turned red as a peony.

"Mrs. Liebling is very well," she said, and promptly burst into tears, having been reminded of little Siegfried. When she dried her eyes, she told Frederick that she and a German consul, without Mrs. Liebling, had attended to all the formalities of the burial and that she had been the only one to see the little corpse laid away in the Jewish cemetery.

"Oh, why did you stop trying to revive Siegfried so soon? I begged and begged you to go on. There was still life in him. He would have come to," she wailed.

Here a stranger joined them. It was not until he was quite close that Frederick recognised in the correctly clad man the valet of Arthur Stoss.

"Doctor von Kammacher," said Bulke, "Rosa cannot get it out of her mind. Can't you make her understand that it isn't right always to be going over and over such a thing and that she ought to forget it? It couldn't be worse if she had lost a boy of her own. I want to tell you, Doctor von Kammacher, Rosa and I are engaged to be married."

"You are certainly to be congratulated, Mr. Bulke. I am delighted to hear it."

"As soon as I can get away from Mr. Stoss and Rosa can get away from Mrs. Liebling, we are going back to Europe. Before I entered the navy, I was a skilled butcher. My brother in Bremen wrote to me that there was a little meat and sausage and steamer supply business to be had there. We both have some money saved up. So why shouldn't we try it? You can't go on working for strangers forever."

"I quite agree with you," said Frederick.

The marksman's valet held out his hand to Rosa, whispered "Mrs. Liebling's coming," and left. The same instant Ella ran off calling, "Mamma."

Mrs. Liebling was coming through the park, walking beside a gentleman. From her costume, befitting the wife of a Russian prince of the royal house, it was evident that she had already found the opportunity to replace her wardrobe. Frederick shook hands with her and remembered the mole under her left breast and several other marks on the lovely body, which he had so ruthlessly worked like a machine to restore the breath to it.

She introduced him to her companion, a dark, thick-set, elegantly dressed man, who eyed Frederick with a suspicious, repellent expression.

"Curious," thought Frederick. "This microcephalous creature thinks I am his enemy, whereas he ought to know what he owes me. There I toiled and travailed and sweated to raise the dead. I considered myself a highly moral instrument of Providence, and after all, I was working for nothing but the pleasure of a sleek, consequential Don Juan."

Mrs. Liebling, who had already been in Boston and Washington, was perfectly delighted with America.

"What do you think of the New York hotels? I am living at the Waldorf. Aren't they magnificent? I have four rooms in the front. Such quiet, such luxury, such beautiful pictures! You feel as if you were in the Arabian Nights. Doctor von Kammacher, you positively must go to Delmonico's. What has Berlin, or even Paris, to compare with it? You can't find a restaurant like Delmonico's or hotels like New York hotels in Europe."

"Possibly," said Frederick, quite dazed.

"Have you been in the Metropolitan Opera House yet?"

Mrs. Liebling continued to put similar lively interrogations, to which she demanded small responses from Frederick, supplying most of the answers herself.

He thought of Rosa and Siegfried and had time to inspect and reinspect the signor's brand-new patent leather shoes, the straight creases down his trousers, his watch chain, his diamond scarf pin, his monocle, his high hat, and his expensive fur coat.

"What have you got to do with our famous tenor of the Metropolitan Opera Company?" Lilienfeld asked Frederick, when he returned to the portico with a "Whew!" of relief. Frederick did not understand, and Lilienfeld repeated the same Italian name that Mrs. Liebling had mentioned in introducing the signor to Frederick. He was astonished that Frederick did not know what a world-renowned star this new friend of Mrs. Liebling's was.

XIX

The meeting had so clearly put before Frederick the tragi-comedy of existence that his sense of humour was stirred and he was capable of taking the painful situation less seriously.

The cab with the ladies drove up. Simultaneously half a dozen reporters stepped into the lobby. Frederick, to his surprise, observed that most of them were on a rather free and easy footing with Ingigerd, and shook hands with her familiarly. She looked very dainty and pretty.

Her rather numerous body-guard, which now included Mr. Samuelson and his assistant, were ushered into the audience chamber, a lofty wainscoted room with bay windows. When they entered, they saw Mr. Garry's tall figure already seated at a long table near the empty chair that the Mayor was to occupy. He was dressed in black, almost like an English clergyman, and the theological spirit of the Puritan shone from his face. Yet there was too much worldly acumen, too much cold determination in his impressive features for a clergyman. He held his eye-glasses in his hand and now and then turned over the pages of his notes. Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Lilienfeld took seats on the other side of the Mayor's chair, without greeting him. The rest of the space about the table was occupied by a few clerks, the reporters, and other persons interested, among whom sat Frederick, Lilienfeld's wife, prepossessing and stately, and Ingigerd Hahlström, the _casus belli_.

The Mayor entered by a high folding door a few feet behind his chair. He was an Irishman, somewhere between forty and fifty, wearing a smile of mixed shrewdness and embarrassment. Though he did not go through the formality of a greeting, there was a touch of courteous affability in the glance he cast about the room.

One of the reporters at the bottom of the table whispered to Frederick:

"Miss Hahlström's case is going to come out all right. Everybody is of the firm opinion that the Mayor is going to give that old hypocrite a jolt." As a matter of fact, the Mayor's manner toward his honourable neighbour on the right was too cordial to presage good. Silence was ordered, and the session began. The Mayor called upon Mr. Garry to speak.

The old gentleman arose in all his height, with a gravity and self-assurance seldom seen except in eminent statesmen. Frederick was fascinated. He could not remove his eyes from him and almost regretted that his speech, according to the reporter, was doomed to failure in advance. As for Frederick's feelings in regard to the real issue, when he listened to the voice of his passion, he did not desire Ingigerd's appearance in public. But for some time he had learned to silence that voice, and he had no objections if his cure were to be accomplished as the result of a severe operation. He felt certain that for Ingigerd to receive permission to dance in public would mean a definite verdict in his own case.

Mr. Garry first set forth clearly and succinctly the aims of his society, citing a number of cases to show how children are maltreated, how their health is ruined in industry, commerce and on the stage.

Here a reporter whispered in Frederick's ears:

"He should sweep before his own door. He's a Wall Street man and employs a whole lot of children in his chemical works in Brooklyn. He is a merciless exploiter."

Mr. Garry went on to explain that these abuses had necessitated the organisation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society made it its duty to interfere only in cases in which the maltreatment could be actually proved. Such a one was the case in hand.

"For several years," he said, "New York has been overrun by a peculiar sort of freebooters." He laid emphasis on the word freebooters. "There is a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion. This growing immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills the sails of those pirates. The disease is not of American origin. It has come to us from the dens of vice in the large European cities, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna. It is an epidemic the spread of which must be arrested, and to that end we must put a curb upon the freebooters who spread the infection and continue to bring it in from abroad."

Lilienfeld, red as a lobster with rage, fidgeted on his seat.

"In the opinion of these men, circumventers and despisers of the laws of the land, the United States is here merely for their purposes, to allow them to sow disease and rake in the dollars. They are not good American citizens, these peculiar Europeans. They are not citizens at all." Mr. Garry pronounced every word with hard correctness. "That is why it is a matter of perfect indifference to them if our religion, our customs, our morals are destroyed. They are unscrupulous birds of prey, and once they have filled their crops, they return with their spoil to their haunts in Europe. The time has come when Americans should take thought and repel the invasion of such parasites."

While the old jingo made these cutting remarks, speaking with an unshaken front, proudly, hitting straight out from the shoulder, Frederick unwearyingly watched every movement of his hard, noble old face. The anthropologist and the newly awakened sculptor in him were equally stirred. When comparing the "freebooters" to birds of prey, Garry himself had resembled a bird of prey. His expression was like an eagle's. He stood with his back to the windows, but with his head turned slightly to one side, and when he spoke of the birds filling their crops, it seemed to Frederick that his light-blue eyes paled to a whitish sheen.

Garry now came down to the subject of Ingigerd.

"By God's will a tremendous shipwreck has occurred, an appalling event, wholly calculated to turn men's thoughts to repentance." He interrupted himself to say it was useless to go into more details on this point, since those who did not know how to respect such a visitation from God were beyond redemption. "It has not been proved that the girl who survived the shipwreck is over sixteen years of age. I propose to place her in a hospital, have one of the steamship companies transport her back to Europe as soon as possible, and consign her to her mother, who lives in Paris. She should be placed in the care of a physician and under guardianship. She has been trained to do a certain dance, during which she falls into a pathologic condition not unlike an epileptic fit. She turns stiff and rigid as a block of wood, her eyes start from her head, she plucks at her clothes. Finally, she falls into a faint and loses consciousness of her surroundings. Such things do not belong on the stage. It would be an outrage, an insult to public opinion to reproduce this hospital scene in a theatre. I protest against it in the name of good taste, in the name of public morality, in the name of American decency. It is not seemly to drag that poor unfortunate child before an audience and shamelessly exploit her misery, merely because the shipwreck has placed her name in everybody's mouth."

Mr. Garry seated himself. He had pronounced his last words with sharp emphasis. Mr. Samuelson, Lilienfeld's counsel, turned pale and arose instantly. The reporters moved up closer and leaned forward, cocking their ears to catch every word of the famous lawyer. He began in a very faint voice. Frederick as a physician saw he was suffering from chronic laryngitis, probably having exchanged his sound larynx for his millions. Samuelson's delivery, his way of pleading were well known. At first he would spare himself, in order later to take his auditors by storm in a violent outburst of passion.

When the violent outburst of passion came, it did not fulfill the expectations either of Lilienfeld, his client, or the reporters, or Frederick. It was very noticeable that his indignation was forced, that it did not flow from a natural source, but from a bottle standing long uncorked. His iron will compelled him to simulate a feeling that he owed it to his client to display. In fact, the tired, harassed man, with his small, pointed beard and his worn, dirty-looking skin, was remarkable merely as a victim of his profession. Even in that capacity he was not so imposing as pitiable. Unfortunately, he was most pitiable when he gave the whip and spurs to that jaded little charger, the Rosinante of his eloquence, to ride down his opponent.

Mr. Garry and Mr. Ilroy, the Mayor, looked at each other significantly. They seemed to wish to return good for evil and come to the help of this knight of the sorry figure on his hack all skin and bone, which at the end of the attack fell and broke his legs.

Lilienfeld could not restrain himself. He turned crimson. The veins of his forehead swelled. The time for remaining silent had ended and the time to speak had come. Since the man with the hundred typewriters and the millions was unequal to the task, Lilienfeld had to take the reins in his own hands. From the mouth of the dumpy, bull-necked impresario, the words came pouring with irresistible momentum, with elemental force, as from the crater of a volcano.

Now it was Mr. Garry's turn to suffer in silence the thrusts and blows that rained down on him from his opponent. The old gentleman was not spared. He had to swallow many disagreeable statements about the exploitation of children in certain factories in Brooklyn, about Puritan hypocrisy, about drinking water in public and wine in secret. He was told he was a member of that narrow-minded caste hating art, culture, and life itself, and seeing devils with cloven hoofs and long tails in authors like Shakespeare, Byron, and Goethe.

"Such people," Lilienfeld said, "are always trying to turn back the hands on the clock, a most revolting sight in this so-called land of freedom. There is very little hope of success in trying to turn back the hands on the clock. The days of Puritan prudery, the bothersome Puritan conscience, Puritan orthodoxy, and Puritan intolerance have passed, never to return. There is no stemming the tide of time, or the tide of progress, or the tide of culture. But the forces of reaction, threatened in their mediæval management of things, have begun a cowardly guerilla warfare, a series of petty, cowardly, miserable, meddlesome tricks."

And now Lilienfeld handed back to Mr. Garry what Mr. Garry had given Mr. Lilienfeld.

"If there really is a pest in America, its seat is in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society is the very breeding-place of the epidemic, in so far as there is an epidemic in the land. It is ridiculous in Mr. Garry to maintain that Europe is a plague-boil. Europe is the mother of America. Without the genius of a Columbus--we are at this very moment celebrating Columbus's discovery of America--without the genius of a Columbus and the constant influx of powerful intellects from Germany, England and Ireland," here he winked an eye at the Mayor, "the United States would be a dead and dreary land."

After thus moving heaven and earth and sea for the little dancer's sake, Lilienfeld exposed the base intent of his competitors, Webster and Forster, in denouncing him to the Society, and indignantly repudiated Garry's assertion that he, Lilienfeld, was an exploiter. His competitors, perhaps, were exploiters.

"See how good the conditions are under which Miss Hahlström is filling her engagement with me. There is my wife. In some respects she has been a mother to the girl. She is taking care of her in our own home, and the girl is in good health. She has a dancer's physique. It is a piece of bare-faced impudence to impugn the girl's honour. She is not a degenerate. She is not a neglected child. On the contrary she is simply a great artist."

Lilienfeld had left his highest trump for the last.

"Mr. Garry," he shouted so loud that the lofty windows rattled, "Mr. Garry called me a foreigner, a freebooter and the like. I object most decidedly. I am as much an American citizen as Mr. Garry. Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" For certain reasons Lilienfeld had had himself naturalised only a month before. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen?" he cried several times in succession, directly addressing the old jingo and leaning far across the table. "Mr. Garry, do you hear I am an American citizen? Mr. Garry, I am an American citizen, and I will have my rights like you."

That was the end. The wheezing in Lilienfeld's chest, as he seated himself, breathing heavily, was distinctly audible. There was not the faintest quiver in Mr. Garry's face.

After a rather lengthy pause, during which there was profound silence, the Mayor spoke. His words came out quietly, in his customary manner of mild embarrassment and shrewd affability, which rather became him. His decision was exactly what the political augurers, judging by the constellation in the ascendant, had prophesied. Ingigerd was granted the right to dance in public.

"The young lady, according to the decision of physicians called upon to testify, has been declared sound in body. There is no occasion to doubt that she is over sixteen years of age and no reason for preventing her from earning her livelihood by the exercise of an art which she has already practised in Europe."

The reporters grinned at one another significantly. The secret hate of the Irish Catholic toward the native Puritan of English descent had broken through the surface. Mr. Garry arose and shook his enemy's hand with cold dignity. Then he walked away, drawn up to his full height. His other adversary, of a very different nature from the Mayor, did not succeed in darting in his face his look of hate, also of a very different nature from the Mayor's; for Mr. Garry's eyes did not rest upon Lilienfeld for the fraction of a second.

Everybody crowded about Ingigerd, overwhelming the girl, the impresario and his wife with congratulations. In her joyous excitement Ingigerd's small face beamed sweetly. She looked very lovely. It was something to her heart's desire, this struggle to possess her carried on, as it were, before the eyes of two continents. Indeed, the extreme importance to which her person had attained almost humbled her a bit; but her pride and pleasure every now and then showed in her glances, even in the glances she sent Frederick. The men fairly courted her and did homage to her. Had a princess of the royal blood come along at that moment, their attention could not have been diverted for an instant from the little dancer, whom the delight, even gratitude shining in her face made very attractive.

Lilienfeld immediately invited all the reporters to luncheon. Mr. Samuelson declined the invitation, pleading an urgent appointment in the Court House. This may have been a pretext, for Frederick noticed, not without peculiar sympathy, that he was suffering under the consciousness of his failure. The poor man, so famous and influential, but now totally disregarded, was extremely grateful when Frederick, descending the City Hall stairs beside him, said a few words of appreciation of Samuelson's presentation of the case, though he actually felt no appreciation.

To excuse himself from taking part in the luncheon, Frederick said he had several business engagements. Nevertheless he had to promise Ingigerd that he would return in time for the demi-tasse.

XX

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?"