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.