The first week Frederick regularly took his midday meal with the two
physicians in a boarding-house. Towards dusk he always returned to his
Diogenes tub, usually on foot.
The next week he did not visit his friends so often, why, he himself did
not know. He slept badly. Again and again the electric bells haunted his
dreams. Even in his waking hours, he easily took fright, a condition to
which in former times he had been a perfect stranger. If a sleigh with
bells actually did pass the house, he was sometimes so alarmed that he
trembled. That he should hear his own breathing in the silence of his
room did not surprise him; but it perturbed him strangely to listen to
it. Sometimes he had chills. As a physician he kept a clinical
thermometer, and on several occasions ascertained that he had some
temperature. These circumstances disquieted him. He seemed to be living
in an atmosphere producing mild shocks and alarms, which he tried in vain
to dispel. Once, when he was starting off to lunch with Peter Schmidt,
a disinclination to leave his room and lack of appetite kept him back.
Another time it was complete exhaustion that turned him homeward again
when he was half way on the road to Meriden. He could scarcely drag
himself back to the house. His friends never learned anything of these
secret experiences of his. It did not seem odd to them if now and then he
should prefer to remain alone under his own roof.
Over him came creeping a strange life, growing ever stranger. The world,
the sky, the landscape, the country, everything that fell within his
vision, even the human beings he met changed. They moved away. Their
affairs took on a remote, alien character. Indeed, his own affairs
underwent a change. They had been taken from him. Somebody had led them
aside for a time. Later, perhaps, he would find them again, provided the
goal of his altered condition remained the same as his former goal.
At length Peter Schmidt became observant of his friend's retired
existence. When he expressed his solicitude, Frederick repulsed him
somewhat brusquely. Even his friend had grown remote. He betrayed nothing
of that oppressive atmosphere of alarm in which he was enclosed.
Curiously, there was a secret fascination in it, which he was loath to
share with any one and so have it disturbed.
On a starless, pitch-black night, he was sitting, as usual, in his lonely
house at his desk beside his lamp, when it seemed to him that someone was
bending over his shoulder. He was holding his pen in his hand over a pile
of disordered manuscript pages, absorbed in profound thought. He started
and said:
"Rasmussen, where do you come from?" He turned and actually saw Rasmussen
sitting reading at the foot of his bed wearing the Lloyd cap in which he
had come from his trip around the world.
"How tremendously interesting!" he thought, and carefully studied the
apparition from head to foot. He could see where the stuff of his jacket
and the lining joined. He could distinguish the buttons on his waistcoat,
and noted that the last one was off. Rasmussen was holding a clinical
thermometer in his hand with the manner and attitude of a nurse who is
passing unoccupied time at the patient's bed reading.
Frederick noticed that solitude heightens the visionary character of
existence. Without a companion, a man is always condemned to intercourse
with spirits. In his hermitage Frederick had merely to think of someone
to see him in person, talking and acting as in life. This inflammability
of his imagination did not alarm him. He had given George Rasmussen's
apparition cool, careful observation. Nevertheless he was aware that his
spiritual life had entered a new phase.
Before going to bed he went down-stairs to lock up the house. To his
great astonishment, as he opened the door of one of the rooms to close
the shutters, he saw by the light of his candle another phantom as
distinct as the first. He congratulated himself upon no longer having to
depend upon mere hearsay in regard to this psycho-pathologic phenomenon.
At the table four men were sitting playing cards. One of them was looking
on. The men had rather coarse red faces, were smoking cigarettes and
drinking beer. They seemed to be business men. Suddenly Frederick clapped
his hand to his forehead. From the brand and the bottle, he recognised
the beer that had been served on the _Roland_, and these men were those
eternal drinkers and card players who had been in everybody's mouth on
the _Roland_. Shaking his head over the remarkable fact that they should
be sitting in his own house, he returned up-stairs to his warm room.
The daytime, in which he did a great deal of out-of-door work, even
though by himself, had a wholesome effect upon him and brought him back
to reality. On the whole, his opinion of his own condition remained
sound. Nevertheless, as the sickness came creeping over him stealthily,
he failed to notice it. It seemed natural to him that he should reckon
with the apparition of Rasmussan sitting at the foot of his bed and
the four men playing skat in one of his down-stairs rooms as with
realities. In the instinct to counteract the physical crisis, which in a
dull way he felt was approaching, he resorted to exercise. But even while
skating on the lake, which he himself had swept clean of snow, dreams, he
found, gradually threw their veil over him, and he associated with men
and things that were not of the lake or of its snowy, solitary banks.
Many Indian legends are connected with the lake and the little stream,
the Luinnipiac, which empties into it. One day Frederick skated miles up
the stream to follow it to its source. On the way he was accompanied
by a hovering shadow, the corporeality of which he never for a moment
doubted. It resembled the stoker Zickelmann who had died on the _Roland_,
not the Zickelmann that he had seen lying stretched out a corpse in the
stoke-hole, but the Zickelmann he had seen in his dream.
The shade of the stoker told him that five engine-men, thirty-six
stokers, and thirty-eight coal-passers had sunk with the _Roland_, a
number far greater than Frederick had thought.
"The harbour where you landed in your dreams," he told Frederick, "was
the Atlantis, a submerged continent. The Azores, the Madeira Islands, and
the Canary Islands are the remnants of that continent."
When Frederick found himself leaning over a hole such as foxes make,
seriously hunting for a way to the Toilers of the Light, he came to his
senses and laughed at himself.
From day to day, aye, from hour to hour, the creations of his disordered
brain assumed more and more fantastic forms. Rasmussen was always sitting
on his bed, the four passengers of the _Roland_ were always playing skat
in the lower room, and the sick man went about his house conversing in
whispers with all sorts of invisible men and things, unconscious for
hours at a time of where he was. Sometimes he thought he was in the house
in which he lived when a practising physician, at other times, in the
home of his parents. As a rule, he was on the deck, or in the saloons of
the _Roland_, crossing the ocean to America.
"Why," he said to himself, shaking his head, "after all, the _Roland_ did
not sink."
After midnight he would get up from bed and take the wrapping from
a mirror hanging on the wall, which he had covered up because he was
not fond of mirrors. He would hold the candle close to the glass and
frighten himself by making grimaces, which distorted his features
beyond recognition. Then he would talk to himself, asking questions and
listening to answers, and hearing questions and giving answers. Some of
this was utterly irrational, some perfectly rational. It showed that he
had investigated one of the obscurest, most awful psychic problems, the
sickness of men who are haunted by their doubles. He jotted down a note:
"The mirror has made man out of the animal. Without the mirror, no I and
no you. Without an I and a you, no thought. All fundamental concepts are
twins, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, hard and soft, sorrow and joy,
hate and love, cowardice and courage, jest and earnest, and so on."
The image in the mirror said to Frederick:
"You have divided yourself into you and me before you could distinguish
the separate characteristics of your being, which acts only as a whole.
That is, you divided yourself before you could divide yourself. Until
you saw yourself in a mirror, you saw nothing of the world."
"It is good to be alone with my image in the mirror," thought Frederick.
"I don't need all those distressing concave and convex mirrors which
other people are. This condition in which I am is the original condition,
and in the original condition one escapes the distortion to which other
people's words and glances subject one. The best thing is to be silent or
to speak with oneself, that is, with oneself in the mirror."
Frederick kept this up until one evening, when he was returning from a
walk in the neighbourhood, he opened the door of his room and saw himself
sitting at his desk. He stood still and rubbed his eyes, but the man
continued to sit there, though Frederick tried to drive him away with a
sharp look as a ray of light dispels a cloud of fog. He was filled with
horror, and at the same time a wave of hate swept over him.
"You or I!" he cried, quickly grasping his revolver and holding it to the
face of his double. Hate confronted hate. It was not twin love and hate,
each confronting the other.
The mirror had been an illusion.