Atlantis. Gerhart Hauptmann

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СКАЧАТЬ dawn he was on deck watching England's ghostly coast-line draw nearer and nearer, until finally the steamer entered the port of Southampton, where he was to await the Roland.

      At the steamship office, he was told that the Roland would scarcely make Southampton before evening, and at seven o'clock a tender would be at the pier to convey the passengers to the ship as soon as it was sighted. That meant twelve idle hours in a dreary foreign town, with the thermometer at ten degrees below freezing-point. Frederick decided to take a room in a hotel, and, if possible, pass some of the time in sleep.

      In a shop window he saw a display of cigarettes of the brand of Simon Arzt of Port Said. He entered the shop, which a maid was sweeping, and bought several hundred. It was an act dictated by sentiment rather than by a desire for enjoyment. The cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port Said were excellent, the best he had ever smoked; but the significance they had acquired for him was not due to any intrinsic virtue of theirs.

      He carried an alligator portfolio in his waistcoat pocket. In that portfolio, among other things, was a letter he had received the very day he left Paris:

      Dear Frederick,

      It's no u left the sanatorium in the Harz and returned to my parents' home a lost man. That cursed winter in the Heuscheuer Mountains! After a stay in tropical countries, I should not have thrown myself into the fangs of such a winter. Of course, the worst thing was my predecessor's fur coat. To my predecessor's fur coat I owe my sweet fate. May the devil in hell take special delight in burning it. I need scarcely tell you that I gave myself copious injections of tuberculin and spat a considerable number of bacilli. But enough remained behind to provide me with a speedy exitus letalis.

      Now for the essential. I must settle my bequests. I find I owe you three thousand marks. You made it possible for me to complete my medical studies. To be sure, they have failed me miserably. But that, of course, you cannot help, and, curiously enough, now that all's lost, the thing that most bothers me is the horrid thought that I cannot repay you.

      My father, you know, is principal of a public school and actually managed to save some money. But he has five children beside myself, all of whom are unprovided for. He looked upon me as his capital which would bring more than the usual rate of interest. Being a practical man, he now realises he has lost both principal and interest.

      In brief, he is afraid of responsibilities which unfortunately I cannot shoulder in the better world to come—faugh, faugh, faugh!—I spit three times. What shall I do? Would you be able to forego the payment of my debt?

      Several times, old boy, I have been two thirds of the way over already, and I have left for you some notes on the states I have passed through, which may not be lacking in scientific interest. Should it be possible for me, after the great moment, to make myself noticeable from the Beyond, you will hear from me again.

      Where are you? Good-bye. In the vivid, flashing orgies of my nocturnal dreams, you are always tossing in a ship on the high seas. Do you intend to go on an ocean trip?

      It is January. Isn't there a certain advantage in not needing to dread April weather any longer? I shake hands with you, Frederick von Kammacher.

      Yours, George Rasmussen.

      Frederick, of course, had immediately sent a telegram from Paris, which relieved the son, dying a heroic death, from solicitude for his hale father.

      Though Frederick von Kammacher had profound troubles of his own to occupy his mind, his thoughts kept recurring to the letter in his pocket and his dying friend. To an imaginative person of thirty, his life of the past few years is in an eminent degree present to his mind. There had been a tragic turn in Frederick's own life, and now tragedy had also entered his friend's life, a tragedy far more awful.

      The two young men had been separated for a number of years. They had met again and passed a number of happy weeks together, enriched by a liberal exchange of ideas. Those weeks were the beginning of similar epochs in the career of each. It was at little winter festivities in Frederick von Kammacher's comfortable home that the cigarettes of Simon Arzt of Port Said, which Rasmussen had brought from the place of their manufacture, had played their rôle.

      Now, in the reading-room of Hofmann's Hotel, near the harbour, he wrote him a letter.

      Dear old George,

      My fingers are clammy. I am constantly dipping a broken pen in mouldy ink; but if I don't write to you now, you won't get any news of me for three weeks. This evening I board the Roland of the North German Steamship Company.

      There seems to be something in your dreams. Nobody could have told you of my trip. Two hours before I started, I myself knew nothing of it.

      Day after to-morrow it will be a year since you came to us direct from Bremen, after your second journey, with a trunk full of stories, photographs, and the cigarettes of Simon Arzt. I had scarcely set foot in England when twenty paces from the landing-place, I beheld our beloved brand in a shop window. Of course, I bought some, by wholesale, in fact, and am smoking one while writing, for the sake of auld lang syne. Unfortunately, this horrible reading-room in which I am writing doesn't get any the warmer, no matter how many cigarettes I light.

      You were with us two weeks when fate came and knocked at the door. We both rushed to the door and caught a cold, it seems. As for me, I have sold my house, given up my practice, and put my three children in a boarding school. And as for my wife, you know what has befallen her.

      The devil! Sometimes it makes one creepy to think of the past. To both of us it seemed a splendid thing for you to take over our sick colleague's practice. I can see you dashing about to visit your patients in his sleigh and fur coat. And when he died, I had not the slightest objection to your settling down as a country physician in the immediate vicinity, although we had always poked a lot of fun at a country physician's starvation practice.

      Now things have turned out very differently.

      Do you remember with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of gold. In the evening we dined on goldfinches, because the hunters who went out on Sundays sold them in great quantities and my tippling cook cooked them deliciously. At that time you swore you would not remain a physician. You were not to live from the pockets of poor patients; the State was to salary you and put at your disposal a huge store of provisions, so that you could supply your impoverished patients with flour, wine, meat and necessities. And now, in token of its gratitude, the evil demon of the medical guild has dealt you this blow. But you must get well again.

      I am off for America. When we see each other again, you will learn why. I can be of no use to my wife. With Binswanger, she is in excellent hands. Three weeks ago, when I visited her, she did not even recognise me.

      I have finished forever with my profession and my medical and bacteriological studies. I have had ill luck, you know. My scientific reputation has been torn to shreds. They say it was fuzz instead of the exciting organism of anthrax that I examined in a dye and wrote about. Perhaps, but I don't think so. At any rate, the thing is a matter of indifference to me.

      Sometimes I am thoroughly disgusted with the clownish tricks the world plays upon us, and I feel an approach to English spleen. Nearly the whole world, or, at least Europe, has turned into a cold dish on a station lunch-counter, and I have no appetite for it.

      He wound up with cordial СКАЧАТЬ