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with a Mephisto in reverse, only the world that he showed me spread out below us was not one to be coveted, but a grave, human world to be studied, to be understood and to be healed insofar as healing might be possible. It was not in the least cold-blooded, Inspector. It was an image, an ideal, suddenly present where all had been panic ^'and' disillusionment."

  "Did you ever see him again?"
  "We went on talking, all the way across, about everything we

could think of, and then finally we parted as the boat tied up at the dock in New York. I don't remember what we could have said in leave-taking, but I do remember feeling that it had been the briefest and the greatest friendship of my life. Less than a year later I was again in New York, this time to find out the prerequisite for entrance into medical school. By that time I had forgotten just how the whole thing had come about, and the memory of that voyage home did not reappears in its full meaning until many years had passed, in the course of which I managed to complete the requirements for medical school and get started. But after I had finished all my training and was launched both in practice and in research I picked up the evening paper on my way home one night, and came upon a little squib which said that a cancer specialist had been called from Sweden to attend one of the Russian Soviet politicians - presumably Stalin - and that the consultant was Dr. Elis Berven. This threw the last fifteen or twenty years of my life into a sudden vivid perspective and showed me how decisive had been that friendship formed during the crossing from Bremen to New York on the S.S. Berlin. On an impulse I sat down after dinner and wrote a note which I can still remember quite clearly. It was, of course, to say that the notice in the paper had recalled the meeting in 1930, and that it was suddenly clear to me that the decision to study medicine had been dictated by the [crossed out: influence] talks of those many years ago, that Dr Berven had, [?in fact?] been my first professor of medicine and that the letter should bring to him my affectionate thanks. This I dispatched to my old friend at the Radium hemmet in Stockholm. The reply came in very few days.