Part 29

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.

XXVIII

Peter Schmidt had a serious operation to perform for a fibroid tumour. Knowing that Frederick had witnessed Kocher perform the same operation in Berne and had repeatedly been successful with it himself, he called upon him for help. The patient was a native Yankee farmer, forty-five years of age. His son, a lad of nineteen, drove out in a sleigh to fetch Frederick.

At the appointed time Frederick entered the office, very pale, but outwardly calm. Nobody suspected what a tremendous amount of will power he had to summon to keep his self-control. Like a boy saying his A B C's, he kept repeating to himself:

"I am Frederick von Kammacher. This is Peter Schmidt. This is his wife, and this is the patient."

When he looked about the room, he saw other persons, the shades of those he had met within the last few days and on his trip across the ocean. But he pulled himself together and swore to himself--even in the moment of greatest danger he had not prayed--and saw that the unbidden guests in the room were also swearing.

The farmer was sitting in the waiting-room. The physicians consulted with one another, and Peter Schmidt and his wife urged Frederick to do the operating. His head was a-whirl. He was hot, he trembled, but his friends detected nothing. He asked for a large glass of wine and went about his preparations without speaking. When Mrs. Schmidt brought the wine, he drank it down in one gulp.

Mrs. Schmidt led the old farmer in. They had agreed that she was to do the washing and administer the anæsthetic. She adjusted him on the operating table, bared his body, and washed it thoroughly. Then Peter Schmidt shaved the hair away from his armpit. The physicians exchanged only brief words and signs. It was a matter of life and death. Success hung by a thread.

The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. Yet it was with perfect lucidity and due deliberation that he selected the necessary instruments from the doctor's closet.

The anæsthetic was taking effect. Peter handed the instruments to Frederick, who once again carefully and coolly examined the morbid spot, found that the tumour might already have progressed too far, but nevertheless, with a firm, sure touch, cut into the mass of living flesh. He kept cursing at the insufficient light. The room was on the ground floor with the windows giving directly upon the main street with its heavy traffic. Contrary to expectation, the tumour lay deep, extending between the large nerve bundles and blood vessels in the inner portion of the brachial plexus. It had to be removed with a scalpel, a very ticklish operation because of the proximity to the thin-walled great vein, which at the least incision sucks in air and produces instant death. But everything went well. The large hollow wound was stuffed with antiseptic gauze, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour the farmer, with the help of his son, was carried unconscious into a hospital room on the other side of the hall and laid in bed.

Immediately after the operation, Frederick said he would have to telegraph to Miss Burns, who intended to visit him the next day, telling her not to come. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth, when a boy brought a cable message from Europe for him. He opened it, said not a word, and asked the farmer's son to drive him straight back home. He shook hands with his friends and took leave without referring to the contents of the message.

The drive in the sleigh beside the farmer's son through the snowy landscape was very different from the drive he had taken with Peter on his arrival two weeks before. This time he himself was not driving; what was worse was the absence of the earlier feeling that he had regained mastery over himself and renewed joy in life. He feared his last moment had come. The country he was in, the place he was driving to, the fact that he was sitting in a sleigh, these things he realised only intermittently. Though the sun was shining in a cloudless sky upon a dazzling white earth, he felt for minutes at a time that he was being drawn forward into utter darkness to the accompaniment of sleigh-bells. The farmer boy noticed nothing, except that the famous German physician was taciturn and extremely pale.

Frederick had never been in greater need of all his will power. But for his iron self-control, he would have gone stark mad and jumped with a shout from the sleigh dashing along at full speed. He knew a telegram was lying crumpled in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat; but each time he tried to recall what was in the telegram, it seemed that a hammer kept knocking at his head, dulling his senses. The grateful country boy had no inkling that close beside him was sitting a man who had to exert superhuman strength not to succumb to an attack of raving madness. As a matter of fact, the boy was in danger of a maniac's clutching him by the throat and drawing him into a life and death struggle.

At his door Frederick shook hands with the farmer's son and groped his way into the house through midnight darkness. The boy's few words of thanks went down in a rushing and roaring of vast black waters. The sleigh-bells began to jingle again and never ceased, turning into that infernal ringing that had become firmly fixed in Frederick's head since the shipwreck.

"I am dying," he thought when he reached his room. "I am dying, or else I am going crazy." The clock on the wall came into his vision and receded again. He saw his bed and clutched for the post.

"Don't fall," said Rasmussen, who was still sitting there with the thermometer in his hand.

But no, this time it was not Rasmussen. It was Mr. Rinck, with his yellow cat in his lap, the man who had been in charge of the mail on the _Roland_.

"What are you doing here, Mr. Rinck?" Frederick roared.

The next moment he was at the window in the light of the dazzling sun, which radiated, not light, but raven-black darkness, like a hole in the heavens pouring out night. The wind suddenly began to moan and howl about the house. It whistled derisively through the door cracks, like the jeers and taunts of a mob of rowdies. Or was it Mr. Rinck's cat miauing? Or was it children whimpering in the hall? Frederick groped about. The house quivered and was thrown from its foundations. It swayed to and fro. The walls began to snap and crack like wickerwork. The door flew open. The rain and hail whipped in. A sudden gust of wind lifted Frederick from his feet. Somebody cried "Danger!" The electric bells raged and mingled with the voices of the storm.

"It's not so! It's a lie! The devil is hoaxing you. You will never set foot on American soil. Your hour is come. You are at the Judgment seat. You are going to perdition."

Suddenly silence set in. Something unheard-of was about to happen, something far worse to see perhaps than to experience. Frederick wanted to save himself. He tried to gather his things together, but he had no hat. He could not find his trousers, his coat, or his boots.

Outside, the moon was shining. In the bright light, the storm was raging. Suddenly, like a wall broad as the horizon, the sea came rolling up. The ocean had risen over both its banks.

"Atlantis! The hour has come," thought Frederick. "Our earth is to be submerged like Atlantis of old."

He ran down-stairs. On the steps he caught up his three children and realised it was they who all the time had been whining and whimpering in the hall. He carried the smallest one on his arm and led the other two by the hand. At the front door, they saw the dreadful tidal wave sweeping nearer and nearer in the ashen light of the moon, carrying along the ship, which was a steamer rolling and pounding fearfully in the waters. The whistles were blowing frightfully, sometimes in a prolonged blare, sometimes in abrupt toots, one after the other.

"It's the _Roland_ with Captain von Kessel," Frederick explained to the children. "I know it. I was on the ship. I myself went down with that superb steamer." He heard shots being fired from the struggling vessel. Rockets hissed up towards the moon and burst in the sombre grey of dawn, dazzling his eyes. "All's over," he said to the children. "All those fine, brave men are doomed to rot in the water."

And picking up on his arm now one of the children, now another, and losing them and finding them again, he began to run to save their lives from the flood. He ran, he raced, he jumped, he fell down. He protested against having to sink after all, though he had already been rescued. He swore, he ran, he fell, and scrambled to his feet, and ran and ran, with a hideous fear in his breast, a senseless fear such as he had never before experienced. When the wave overtook him, fear changed into soothing peace and calm.

XXIX

The next morning, with the same train by which Frederick had come, Miss Burns arrived in Meriden. She went directly to Peter Schmidt's office to inquire for him, having expected to find him awaiting her at the station. Peter told her of the operation Frederick had performed the day before.

"It was a mighty difficult job, I tell you," said Peter Schmidt, "and he covered himself with glory. He intended immediately afterwards to send you a telegram telling you not to come. But just as he was about to go, he himself received a cablegram."

"Well, now that I am here," said Miss Burns in her sprightly way, "I shall not allow myself to be turned down in such an offhand manner. I don't intend to visit Rome without seeing the Pope."

Three quarters of an hour later the two-seated sleigh drawn by the spirited chestnut, with whose peculiarities they now knew better how to deal, reached Uncle Tom's Cabin on Lake Hanover. Peter, who was anxious to bring Frederick news of the farmer and tell him he had not developed fever, drove Miss Burns out. They were amazed at the condition in which they found things, and, as they mounted the stairs, freely exchanged criticisms without lowering their voices. The door to Frederick's room was slightly ajar. They walked in. He was lying stretched on his bed, still wearing the fur coat in which he had left the office after the operation. He was unconscious, mumbling in a delirium, evidently very ill. Peter Schmidt picked up the cablegram lying on the floor. He and Miss Burns felt that in the circumstances they were justified in learning its contents. What they read was:

Dear Frederick, news from Jena. In spite of the greatest care Angèle passed away yesterday afternoon. Take the inevitable with composure. Keep yourself well for your loving old parents.

For a week Frederick hovered between life and death. The powers of darkness, perhaps, had never grappled for him so greedily. For a week his whole body was like something about which tongues of fire lick and roar, ready to consume it and send it up into the air, like a puff of smoke.

Peter Schmidt, of course, brought all his medical skill to his friend's service. Mrs. Schmidt, too, did whatever she could for him. Miss Burns felt it was predestination, not chance, that had brought her to his side at so critical a moment, and instantly decided not to leave until he was entirely out of danger. She engaged a woman attendant and a man to go on errands by day and night.

The terrible frenzy in which Frederick had been the night before was apparent from the way in which things had been thrown about. The glass of his seaman's clock on the wall was broken, and dishes were shivered to bits. Peter Schmidt's diagnosis was typhoid fever. The first two days and nights he did not leave Frederick's side, except when his wife took his place. The paroxysms repeated themselves. Memories of the shipwreck still tormented him, and at certain hours he would tell his attendants, whom he did not recognise, to look in a corner of the room, where, he said, a black spider, the size of a bowling ball, was lying in wait for him. Peter and his wife with extreme caution applied all the means at a physician's disposal to reduce his temperature; but the third day passed, and still it did not fall below 105.8°. Peter grew graver and graver. Finally, however, the fever curve showed declinations, and by the end of a week its downward course remained pretty constant.

Frederick looked like a pale, empty, incombustible husk, inside of which a great auto-da-fé had taken place. What a wild orgy salamander-like creatures must have been holding behind his sweaty forehead. Countless times, by the most different methods, Angèle murdered Ingigerd and Ingigerd Angèle. His father, the general, fought a pistol duel with Mr. Garry, Captain von Kessel acting as second and measuring the distance. Doctor Wilhelm kept rising again and again from beneath the raging chaos in his soul. Ten or twenty times he brought him a human embryo wrapped in paper, and said:

"To live is good. Not to live is better."

Hans Füllenberg had to leave his hiding-place and join in the gruesome, grotesque dance to death. Sometimes it seemed as if a puff of burning air swept all these figures into an oven to destroy them forever.

Something like the dizzy movement of the sea kept tossing up and down. He was carried aloft--his consciousness left him. He sank deep down--again his consciousness left him. He flew--he lost his sense of ponderosity. High on the crest of this cosmic, immaterial swell, he suffered constantly from nausea. In his lucid moments he said to himself:

"The ocean does not wish me to be saved. It kept me alive just to display the full extent of its powers and draw me down from my security."

He had dreams of tremendous cosmic proportions, showing he had images of a might and power far exceeding the sane, normal strength of conception, with no precedent for them in experience. Even when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic minuteness of his personality.

At the end of the first week he recognised Miss Burns and began to understand what she had done for him. He smiled with difficulty and made signs with his hand lying limply on the bedspread.

It was not until the end of the second week, the twenty-sixth of March, that the fever left him entirely. He spoke, slept, had vivid dreams. In a tired voice and sometimes with a touch of humour, he told of the wild things that had passed through his brain. He expressed desires, showed gratitude, inquired for the farmer on whom he had operated, and smiled when Peter told him the wound had healed promptly and the farmer had driven out to bring some guinea-fowls for bouillon.