Peter Schmidt’s account of himself, in contrast, was very brief.  All he had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife, a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother and her Swiss mountains.

Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered.  The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ideologist.  As ideologist, he hoped for the best for humanity’s future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a large number of the inhabitants of the United States had not yet struck root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty.

A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper.  Peter Schmidt, who had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several.

“There you are,” he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets.  “The Roland, the Roland, and still the Roland, columns and pages of the Roland.”

Frederick clutched at his head.

“Was I really on the Roland?” he exclaimed.

“Very much so, it seems,” said Schmidt.  “Here you are in black type.  ‘Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.’  And here they have a picture of you.”

The artist of The World had with a few strokes dashed off a young man, the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.

“Did you really do it?” asked Peter Schmidt.

“I don’t think so,” said Frederick.  “I must admit the details of the accident are not very clear in my mind any more.”  Frederick stood still, turned pale, and tried to recollect.  “I don’t know,” he said, “what is most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it.”  Still standing in the middle of the path, he continued:  “What strikes a man hardest is the absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative brutality.  We know nature’s brutality in theory; but to be able to live, we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality.  The most enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes in something like an all-beneficent God.  But such an experience gives that ‘somehow’ and ‘somewhere’ an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists.  And I have come from the sinking of the Roland with a spot in my soul deaf and dumb and numb.  It has not awakened to life yet.