It was agreed that all should meet again, and Doctor Wilhelm made an appointment with Captain Butor, Wendler, and even the tattered painter, Fleischmann, for noon of the day after next. The place chosen for the meeting was the Hoffman House bar. From there, they would go together on a jaunt through the city.
Poor Jacob Fleischmann, the painter, was somewhat perplexed by the mad city, and turned rather mealy-mouthed. He could not speak English, he had little cash, and he had lost his only capital, his paintings. He tried delicately, though with evident anxiety, to attach himself to the men with whom fate had thrown him, and they did not withhold the support he sought. They agreed to look out for him. Even Arthur Stoss proffered his services and good advice.
"Should you have trouble with the company's agent," he said, "call on me, and I'll introduce you to my friend, the owner of the _Staats-Zeitung_."
A few moments later Frederick felt the solid pier beneath his feet. His brain reeled lightly. The crowd on the pier cheered and hurrahed. In that shouting, shrieking, roaring, swaying mass of humanity, he and Ingigerd, who was clinging to his arm, seemed exposed to the danger of another sort of drowning. Suddenly he found himself confronted by a little Japanese, or someone whom at first glance he took to be a Japanese, and heard him saying:
"How d'ye do, Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me? How d'ye do, Doctor von Kammacher? Don't you know me?" several times in rapid succession.
Frederick tried to recall the man to his memory. He scarcely knew who he himself was, with those cheers thundering in his ears, with hands on all sides shaking his hands, and newsboys flourishing newspapers behind him and above him and under his very nose.
"Don't you know me, Doctor von Kammacher?" the Japanese repeated, grinning.
"By Jove," cried Frederick, "now I recognise you. You are Willy Snyders. How do you come to be here?"
While studying several semesters in Breslau, Frederick had eked out his income by tutoring a boy, a rather desperate case, whose father, a furniture manufacturer, paid handsomely for his son's private lessons. Frederick's pupil turned out to be a good-hearted chap, an amusing scapegrace, who soon became his devoted slave. It was this scapegrace, now a full-grown man, that Frederick recognised in the jolly Japanese.