Having been built for summer use only, it had no cellar. On the ground floor there was a little kitchen and two other rooms; in the attic a bedroom as large as the two down-stairs rooms together. In the attic room Frederick immediately decided to build his nest for an indeterminate length of time. He scouted Peter's considerations in regard to household service.
"I feel," he declared, "as if this house had been waiting for me, and I for the house."
XXV
The very next day he took up his abode in his lonely refuge on Lake Hanover, which he alternately dubbed his Diogenes tub, his Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his retort. It was no Diogenes tub, because the two friends brought wood and anthracite coal for a little American stove in the bedroom, which gave quite a good deal of heat and made a cosey appearance with the glow of the burning coal visible; and because the kitchen and pantry contained everything that is necessary for life, and a little more. Frederick refused to have anybody share his quarters with him or help with the housework. As he said, he wanted to settle his accounts and take his trial balance, and the presence of another person might be disturbing to that process.
After Peter Schmidt disappeared in the distance and the sound of the sleigh-bells had died away and Frederick felt he was quite alone in that wide American landscape wrapped in the night's darkness, it was a supreme moment for him. He returned into the house, closed the door and listened. He heard the crackling of the wood in the small kitchen stove. Taking the candle that had been left standing on one of the lower steps in the hall, he went up-stairs, where the warmth and the dusky glow of his little American stove rejoiced him. He lit a lamp, and after arranging his toilet articles on an unusually long, bare dresser, he settled himself beside the lamp in a comfortable bamboo chair. He was filled with a mysterious sense of rich, deep delight.
He was alone. Outside, lay the clear, silent winter's night, the same that he had known in the home of his childhood. The things he had hitherto experienced were no more, or as if they never had been. His home, his parents, his wife, his children, the girl that had drawn him across the ocean, everything that had happened to him on his trip were nothing more in his soul than magic lantern pictures.
"Is life," Frederick asked himself, "meant to be nothing more than material for dreams? So much is certain, my present condition is the sort that leaves an everlasting effect. We should not be unsociable, but we have still less right to leave this state uncultivated, which is the basic state of man's personality, in which he is most natural and undisturbed and stands face to face with the mystery of life as though it were a dream."
During the past months, he had led a life full of incidents of the extremest contrasts. He had been alarmed, excited, menaced. His own anguish had been submerged in the anguish of others, and their pangs had only increased his own. From the ashes of a dead love, the flames of another passionate illusion had flared up. Frederick had been driven, pursued, lured on, led about in the world, without a will of his own, like a puppy on a strap—without a will of his own and with his senses departed. Now at last his senses had returned. And the senses return when the life that has been lived in an unconscious state becomes material for dreams to the mind in a conscious state.
Frederick took a sheet of paper, dipped a new American pen in a new inkwell of fresh ink, and wrote: "Life: Material for Dreams."