Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation.  Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts.  From the distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic.  She seemed to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.

“Liberty!” The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic or promise.

LX

And now, suddenly, the world seemed to Frederick to have gone mad.  The Hamburg was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless grotesquely shaped ferry-boats.  The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic.  In that crater of life civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes and whirls.  Here is a colony of white ants, whose activity is staggering, bewildering, stupefying.  It seemed inconceivable that in that intricate, raging chaos, a single minute could pass without a collision, or a collapse, or a killing.  How could one possibly pursue one’s own affairs quietly amid that shrieking, that hammering, that clanging, that mad uproar?

During these last moments together, the involuntary passengers of the Hamburg had become as one in heart and soul.  Frederick had not lost his cash in the disaster, and he persuaded Ingigerd Hahlstroem not to reject his services during her first days on land.  All agreed not to lose sight of one another in New York.  Naturally enough, there had been much lively, genuinely heartfelt leave-taking and well-wishing for more than an hour before the Hamburg was secured to the dock.

The dithyrambic noise of the mighty city, where millions of men were at work, exercised a renewing, transforming influence.  It was a whirlpool into which one was drawn unresistingly.  It suffered no pondering, no immersion in an unalterable past.  Everything in it urged and impelled forward.  Here was the present, nothing but the present.

Arthur Stoss seemed already to have one foot planted on Webster and Forster’s stage.  There was much parleying in regard to Ingigerd’s appearance in theatre.  She and Stoss had been engaged for the same time, which was already past.  With the uncertainty in her heart as to her father’s fate, she said she could not possibly dance; while Arthur Stoss declared if he got there in time, he would appear for his number that very evening.

“I’ve already lost two evenings,” he said, “at a round five hundred dollars an evening.  Besides, I must work, I must get among people.”

He advised Ingigerd for her own advantage to do the same, and cited instances of persons who had not allowed the greatest griefs to keep them from the exercise of their calling.  He knew of a scholar, he said, who delivered his lecture while his wife was dying, of a clown who cracked his jokes on the stage, though his wife had eloped with another man and his heart was bleeding.