XXIII
The next morning Frederick went down alone to the train. He had taken final leave of his friends the night before, telling them expressly not to let his departure interfere with their day's routine. After placing his luggage in a wire basket hanging over one of the red plush seats in a coach which was one of a train of six or seven similar coaches, long and elegantly built, he returned to the platform. All of a sudden the whole little colony of artists appeared, with the master-sculptor at their head—in corpore, as college students say. Miss Burns, too, had come, like the rest of them, carrying three of those purplish-red, long-stemmed roses with deep green leaves which were not yet being grown in Europe.
"I feel like a prima donna," Frederick said, really touched, as he took the roses from each.
The platform and the train were as quiet as a cemetery, as if there never were arrivals or departures between friends. But here and there, the face of a traveller, aroused by the "temperamental" chatter of the Germans, peered from behind the window-panes of the train to look curiously upon the little rose procession. Finally, without a signal, or a word from any official, the train started to move, as if by chance.
Soon the group of artists in the station receded. There stood Bonifacius Ritter, dignified and elegant, waving his handkerchief. There was Lobkowitz, friendly and serious, Willy Snyders the good-hearted, Franck the gypsy painter, and, last but not least, Miss Eva Burns. Frederick felt that with this moment, an epoch of his life had come to a close. He was conscious of what he owed these fellow-countrymen and kindred spirits for their warmth and hospitality, and of what he lost in losing them. Nevertheless, after the strange way of man, he was in a state of joyous excitement because his future, in a real and in a metaphoric sense, had been set in motion.
At first the train rolled for some time through a dark tunnel under the city, then through an open cut between high walls of masonry, and finally it burst into a wide, free landscape. So this was America's real face. Only now, after the noises of the Witches' Sabbath, the turmoil of the great invasion, had somewhat subsided, Frederick breathed the true breath of the virgin country's soil.
Observing that all the passengers in the coach stuck their tickets in their hat bands, Frederick did the same, and then turned his eyes on the fields and hills clothed in their white winter garments. To the young man, uprooted from his native soil, there was a happy, stimulating mystery in this landscape, which in the light of the winter sun so closely resembled his birthplace. The alien surroundings all spoke to him of his home. He could have jumped from the car and taken the snow in his hands, not only to look upon it, but to feel that it was the very same snow which as a schoolboy he had rolled into balls for bombarding his playmates. He felt as a spoiled child feels which is torn from its mother's arms and thrown upon a heartless world of strangers and, after a long period of anguish, unexpectedly meets a sister of his mother in a dreary country far, far from home. He feels the blood-tie, he feels how like he is to her and she to him, how surprisingly, how delightfully she resembles his mother, feature by feature.
At last, it seemed to Frederick, the great Atlantic Ocean was really behind him. Though he had landed in New York, he felt that until now he had not planted his feet firmly on the ground. Great well-established mother earth, the breadth and extent of her solidity, which he beheld again after so long a separation, at last set bounds in his soul to the fearful expanse and might of the ocean. Mother earth was a good and great giantess who had cunningly snatched the lives of her children from the giantess ocean and had put everything on a firm, everlasting basis with a hedge of safety all around.
"Forget the tumbling waters, forget the ocean, strike root into the soil," a voice within Frederick spoke; and while the train rolled smoothly and faster and further inland, he had a sense of being on a blissful flight.