Ritter's life had received a wrench in Europe. Some brutal mishap while he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert. Now, after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best suited to its growth. In the new surroundings, Ritter's nature developed simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space and sunlight. Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination in the young prince from genius-land by granting him a surplus of superordination.
Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick:
"I understand Toussaint, the Berlin sculptor, was on board the Roland."
Peter Schmidt had warned the artists in an aside not to touch upon the disaster, telling them his friend was very nervous and a reference to the accident might have a bad effect upon him. But his warning had been forgotten.
"Poor Toussaint," Frederick said, "hoped to find mountains of gold here, though, you may say, he was nothing but a fancy-cake genius."
"And yet I assure you," said Lobkowitz, "there was something grand about him as a man. In spite of his success, he was always poor. He suffered from having a wife who was too fond of society and from having to associate with the persons who bestowed favours upon him and were so much richer than himself. That dandyism of his was not natural. Had he reached America, he would probably have ignored his wife and become an entirely different man. All he wanted to do was to create, to work. What he loved best was to be perched on a scaffolding, with shirt sleeves tucked up, among first-rate workmen. Once he said to me, 'If you should happen to see a mason resembling me in New York, sitting on the pavement eating his lunch and drinking a can of beer, don't hesitate to believe I am that mason, and don't pity me. Congratulate me.'"
"Another one," thought Frederick, "who kept the best part of himself hidden beneath the conventional foppishness of his time; another one who, like me, may always have been trying in vain to reach a definite decision between being and seeming."
IX
Ritter's dog-cart was waiting in front of the door. He suggested that Frederick and Schmidt drive down in it to the railroad station, where Schmidt was to get the train back to Meriden. The two men squeezed in beside the Austrian horse-trainer, valet, or whatever Ritter's coachman was. The trotter went off at a swift gait, and again the wild, noisy phantasmagoria of the streets of the new Babylon went flashing by Frederick's eyes.