"I have met with the most tremendous success this time," he said. "Last night the audience stormed the stage and lifted me on their shoulders to the tune of '1492,' the song they sing every evening in the Metropolitan Theatre."
"1492"—wherever he turned his eyes, on the streets and open squares, Frederick read advertisements of the ballad, a product of the vaudeville stage, in which the discovery of America, four hundred years after the landing of Columbus, was interpreted in the patriotic sense of the new nation that had since arisen.
"Well, Doctor von Kammacher, how are you?" asked Doctor Wilhelm. "How have you spent your time?"
"Oh, so, so," Frederick replied, shrugging his shoulders. He did not know how he came to frame this summary dismissal of a time so rich in content. Strange to say, here on land, in the Hoffman bar, little or none of his former impulse remained to entrust confidences to his fellow-physician.
"How's our little girl?" Doctor Wilhelm inquired, smiling significantly.
"I do not know," Frederick returned with an expression of cool astonishment, and added: "Whom do you mean?"
As his answers to all their inquiries were equally curt and stiff, it was impossible to start a conversation. He himself in the first few minutes did not understand why he had come. It was extremely disturbing to him that the other men in the bar-room recognised the group as the survivors of the Roland. Stoss by himself, the man without arms, the well-known marksman, would have been conspicuous.
Stoss could drink holding a glass between his teeth; but he was not touching liquor to-day. Nevertheless, he was in a treating mood, a circumstance by which Captain Butor, Wendler, Fleischmann and the sailors profited to toast one another freely. Nor did Doctor Wilhelm require much urging.
In an undertone he informed Frederick that The Staats-Zeitung in its issue of the morning before had opened a collection for Fleischmann, and a sum had already come in such as the poor fellow in his whole life had probably never before seen. At last Frederick laughed, and heartily. He understood why Fleischmann was drinking heavily, with so determined a manner, and why he was puffing himself like a turkey.
"What do you think of that stuff, Doctor von Kammacher?" he asked, pointing to the paintings and snorting disdainfully. "To call such stuff art! Millions and millions are spent on getting those things over from France. They palm the trash off on the Americans. I'll wager that if one of us Germans in Munich, Dresden, or Berlin were to do no better than that, or that"—he pointed at random to several pictures—"we'd put him in the A B C class."