“Kitchen! That’s my dark-room.” Egholm spoke as might a God to whom creations are the merest trifle. The place might have been a kitchen. Well and good—Egholm spoke the words: “Let there be a dark-room.”
“You’ll have to manage in there—at any rate, for the present.” He nodded towards the nondescript apartment opposite. “Make that a kitchen.”
“But, my dear....” Fru Egholm pulled herself together with a poor attempt at a smile. Then she shook her head; it was hopeless to try to explain to the uninitiate what a little world in itself a kitchen is. “The stove....” she managed to protest. “There’s not even a heating-stove in there.”
She waited still, with the chest of utensils in her hands, before the forbidden door. She must get in there.
Egholm reflected that it was perfectly true about there being no stove. It was for that reason he had had his bed in here for the winter. He could find no way out of the difficulty, and grew furious—for even he was not so far almighty as to create a kitchen where no kitchen was.
“All right, get along with you, then?” he said, pushing her in, and Hedvig, with Emanuel in her arms, behind her. “There you are! But mind! No fooling about with any of my things!”
The door opened with a queer sucking noise—it had been caulked with strips of cardboard and cloth.
Hedvig and her mother stood aghast, while Egholm thrust past them and began moving his bottles with the easy familiarity of habit.
All the windows were darkened but one, that glared red as a furnace door. They could see nothing save their own hands, which looked strange and uncanny in the red light.
“Egholm, you surely don’t mean to say we’re to do the cooking here? When you can’t see your hand before your face!”