Atlantis | Page 3

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 lines to his dying friend, and handed the letter to a German porter to mail.
In his room, the temperature was icy, the window-panes frozen over. Without undressing he lay down in one of two vast, chilly beds.
At best, the frame of mind of a traveller with a night's journey behind him and an ocean crossing ahead of him, is not enviable. Frederick's condition was aggravated by a whirl of painful, partially warring recollections, which crowded into his mind, jostling and pushing one another aside in a ceaseless chase. For the sake of storing up strength for the events to come, he would gladly have gone to sleep, but as he lay there, whether with open or closed eyes, he saw past events with vivid clearness.
The young man's career from his twentieth to his thirtieth year had not departed from the conventional lines of his class. Ambition and great aptitude in his specialty had won him the protection of eminent scientists. He had been Professor Koch's assistant, and, without a rupture of their friendly relations, had also studied several semesters under Koch's opponent, Pettenkofer, in Munich. When he went to Rome for the purpose of investigating malaria, he met Mrs. Thorn and her daughter, who later became his wife and whose mind was now deranged. Angèle Thorn brought him a considerable addition to his own small fortune. The delicacy of her constitution caused him, eventually, to move with her and the three children that had come to them to a healthy mountain district; but the change did not interfere with his scientific work or professional connections.
Thus it was that in Munich, Berlin, and other scientific centres, he had been considered one of the most competent bacteriologists, a man whose career had passed the stage of the problematical. The worst against him--and that only in the opinion of the cut-and-dried among his fellow-scientists, who shook their heads doubtfully--had been a certain belletristic tendency. Now, however, that his abortive work had appeared and he had suffered his great defeat, all serious scientists said it was the cultivation of side interests that had weakened his strength and led the promising young intellect along the path of self-destruction.
In his icy room in the English hotel, Frederick meditated on his past.
"I see three threads which the Parc? have woven into my life. The snapping of the thread that represents my scientific career leaves me utterly indifferent. The bloody tearing of the other thread"--he had in mind his love for his wife--"makes the first event insignificant. But even though I should still hold a place among the most hopeful of the younger generation of scientists, the third thread, which is still whole, which pierces my soul like a live wire, would have nullified my ambitions and all my endeavours in science."
The third thread was a passion.
Frederick von Kammacher had gone to Paris to rid himself of this passion; but the object of it, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Swedish teacher of stage dancing, held him in bondage against his will. His love had turned into a disease, which had reached an acute stage, probably because the gloomy events of so recent occurrence had induced in him a state in which men are peculiarly susceptible to love's poison.
It was a friend of his, a physician, who had introduced him in Berlin to the girl and her father, and who later, when