“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 anaesthetic.  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 anaesthetic 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