The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “One thing at a time please. You are quite sure of that last statement?”

  “As certain as that you and I are sitting here talking. Oh, I know,” Middleton added wearily, “that I’m supposed to have some sort of delusion or something — but, mark my words, when I’m done you and a few others around here will be holding a somewhat different attitude than you now have. I tell you, I — ”

  Stonecipher raised a hand irritably. “Let me ask you a further question. Are you the victim of a plot of any sort?”

  “The most damnable kind of a plot and the most childish one that was ever conceived,” Middleton poured forth, his words tumbling one on the other. “People on the outside of this institution have substituted a double for me, and are pretending that he is I, while I am sidetracked in here to rot for a few weeks. But there’ll be a reckoning. They’ll pay for it, and pay dearly.”

  “Where do you believe they obtained a double such as this?” asked Stonecipher placatingly.

  “God only knows,” retorted Middleton, uncrossing his legs, and then re-crossing them again in his agitation. “Doubles don’t grow on bushes. I have no brothers — no sisters — no twins.”

  “Then you have no explanation at all as to how they could obtain a double?”

  “None. But I — ”

  Stonecipher again raised a restraining hand. “Who is the active brain in this plot against you, according to your lights?”

  “The active brain,” declared Middleton grimly, “is a man named Luther Fortescue, named as general manager of my father’s estate.”

  “Just why, in your estimation, would this man Fortescue try to have you incarcerated in this place?”

  Middleton shook his head hopelessly. “To get rid of me for some purpose; that’s all I can say.”

  “You have no conception at present, however, as to the identity of the man who has — er — usurped your identity?” was Stonecipher’s new question coming on the heels of his last.

  “How could I have?” Middleton snapped. “I only passed him for the first time as I was being taken from the county court back to the detention ward in Chicago.”

  “But why,” demanded Stonecipher, “did you, while in the detention station in that city, refuse to make an allegation concerning the identity which you now call your own?”

  “Because,” Middleton retorted hotly, “I had received a letter from this man Fortescue, brought there by a foreigner some messenger — who claimed I was his son and got me off into a private room. In the letter this man Fortescue begged me to remain silent for a few days until he could get a statement from a certain woman who had shot herself up in Chicago to the effect that he hadn’t fired the shot. He had used me for an alibi, and my speaking out would have destroyed that alibi.”

  “Well, let us see this letter,” said Stonecipher. But he did not uncurl his hands from his paunchy abdomen. Which showed plainly that he did not anticipate its production.

  “I haven’t it,” said Middleton desperately, “because I gave it back to the man who brought it there. The letter itself so requested.”

  “I see.” Stonecipher nodded his head slowly. Then he spoke once more. “You are quite convinced that you are Jerome Herbert Middleton?” he queried. “Has there at no time since your incarceration here come an idea to you that perhaps you were wrong — and we were right?”

  “That you are right and that I am not?” Middleton repeated angrily. “Do you ever doubt yourself, doctor? Do you ever think that you are not Doctor Stonecipher?”

  The doctor looked sour. “Well, you and I are two different people.” He paused. Then he leaned forward. “Now let me ask you another question; recite for me, please, this episode which occurred in Chicago in that deserted house where you had been living for days.”

  “Been living for days,” expostulated Middleton sharply. “I was in it about half-hour — never any more. What gives you the idea that I had been in it any longer? Why, I — ”

  “Well, never mind that part of it, then,” said Stonecipher. “Tell me again about this old man and the band of anarchists.”

  Middleton recited once more the scene that had been enacted before his own eyes that night. He completed the entire tale, in simple, forceful words. He talked, and felt that he talked, as a man who carries conviction. But the alienist’s face was a mask of impassiveness.

  The latter had listened most attentively, however, and now he put in a query. “How do you account for the police failing that night, even when you were present, to find the window from which would be visible the window of the room where this anarchist meeting took place?”

  “The explanation is simple. And, mark me, my explanation will be proven. The old house was evidently papered all throughout with but one kind of wallpaper. I originally stood in a certain room. But when the police came later and brought me with them, we stumbled into an entirely different room from which only a brick wall was visible. They wouldn’t wait to go over the rest of the house. No — we had to hurry on to the Federal Bureau. Bah!”

  Stonecipher sat back in his swivel chair, lost in thought. “Tell me your life from the beginning — start with your earliest recollections and very lightly sketch for me your existence up to the present day.”

  So Middleton began, and gladly too. He began with his life in Australia and ran lightly, touching only the highlights in it, up to the present day, including his affair with Pamela Martindale and his later interview with Fortescue. And at length he stopped, for he had come to the end. “And here I am,” he concluded desperately, “locked in an insane asylum.”

  “Don’t call it that,” begged Stonecipher. “Call it just a — well — rest cure.”

  “Well, whatever you call it, it’s a living grave for the poor blighters who have to stay here,” retorted Middleton.

  “Then you don’t think that there is a possibility of your having to remain here?” Stonecipher queried curiously.

  “By all means no,” was Middleton’s somewhat startled response. “Who — who ever heard of a man being locked up permanently because he had a delusion that he was himself?”

  Stonecipher laughed a dry, mirthless laugh. “Delusions, my dear man, are the strangest phenomena that human life presents. Now in your own case, suppose we call your delusion the fact that you believe you are Jerome Herbert Middleton. The moment we even broach the subject that you are not he, you get angry and begin to bluster and raise your voice. And this is precisely the case of every such one as you.”

  “But, in the name of God, man,” ejaculated Middleton fiercely, “you can see that I am sane, can’t you? Are you going to blindly accept a ready-made diagnosis without using your own judgment a bit? Do I talk like an insane man? Do I act like one?”

  Stonecipher shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “The insane,” he pronounced wearily, “are the sanest of all people — outside of their delusions.” He made another impotent gesture with his two hands. “Doe, what would you say if I should tell you that we have absolute and incontrovertible proof that you are the victim of a delusion which is so convincing to you that you cannot even conceive of the truth of the matter that you are somebody — God knows who — other than the man you think you are? That you have had a transformation of personality so complete that it marks you either as one who must remain under these roofs for the rest of your life or — ” He stopped.

  “I would say that you are crazy — that you are all crazy,” raged Middleton, getting up out of his chair and pacing angrily up and down the floor in his agitation. “What is your proof? Where is it? I demand to see this proof. You can’t have such. There isn’t any. You can’t prove that I am not Jerome Middleton. You can’t prove a lie.”

  “That proof is to be found in that complete transcript of your case known as your case-history,” said Stonecipher curtly, “and we do not show patients their case-histories. For one thing, it is not in accordance with the practice of psychiatry to do so, and, for another thing, half of the patients would rip
those case-histories to bits and jump upon them. Hence you will not be shown yours. You were sent here by a jury of competent alienists, who declared that you had paranoia, a most stubborn and bewildering psychosis; only one doctor disagreed, and his disagreement was only to the extent that your form was perhaps a peculiar variation of this condition — a psychosis that is known as Auto-Hypnotic Pseudo-Paranoia of Von Zero.”

  “Rot!” raged Middleton. “Rot — rot — rot! A lot of grandmother fools sitting on a jury. Damn them all — you, too — you are all in a conspiracy to keep me here. Fortescue has paid you. He has promised you — ”

  Stonecipher sighed. “I have been accused of that so many times in my work here,” he said sadly, “that sometimes I almost wish somebody would pay me to keep somebody else in here. I am a poor man to-day, Doe; a mere State employee. And God knows the State pinches its pennies when it comes to salaries. I am likewise, however, the author of three text books on insanity and lecturer in psychiatry in the medical college of the North-Western University. Yet to date nobody has ever even offered me pay to keep somebody else in here — and I would be drawing down a million a year were the accusations that are hurled at me by patients true.”

  Middleton stared at him.

  Stonecipher went on. “But my dear fellow, I am happy to say that there are circumstances in your case that make it extremely improbable that you have Von Zero’s psychosis, as it is now termed. Should that be the case, there is no reason why you should not eventually go out of here a free man, shorn of the unseen shackles that bind you. Psychiatry wants to see such of you cured as can be cured. We don’t want to keep you — but if the State puts you here we have to retain you until we can conscientiously say you are absolutely restored to yourself. We are only servants of the State.”

  “But, good God, man,” protested Middleton, “do you want to keep a sane man here? Let me see the proofs that say I am not Jerome Middleton. I’ll — I’ll demolish them, I tell you.”

  “The proofs are incontestable,” said Stonecipher sadly, “and I should not in the first place have dropped into argument with you about them. But I was carried away by the fact that some day I may be able to shake you by the hand and hear you say that Stonecipher was right — Stonecipher was right. And then we shall be friends for life.”

  “Friends for life?” sneered Middleton. “Friends for life?” Why, you poor, doddering idiot in your seventh childhood, you — ”

  “No names,” warned Stonecipher, nettled. “No names please. You’re getting perilously close to what we call violent around here; one degree more and I’ll have to call an attendant and have you put under restraint for a while.” But his hand made no move to press the prominent button in his desk, and Middleton was forced to admire him, in this respect at least.

  “I demand to see my case-history,” he bit out.

  But Stonecipher only shook his head. “A patient is never shown his case-history, I told you. Rule 49 of this institution, in force since the institution was built, forbids it.”

  “I — I will appeal to the superintendent,” Middleton broke in. “I — I will see that case-history.”

  “The superintendent is most difficult to see,” declared Stonecipher coolly, “even for us staff physicians. Every letter to him posted in any of the wards is first scanned by us doctors. I am frank to say that we do not bother him with such communications. When particular ones are sent on to him, he invariably refers them back to the ward doctor. My dear fellow, won’t you be reasonable?”

  “Reasonable? How can I be reasonable? Here am I, Jerome H. Middleton, son of Digby Middleton, who was worth ten million dollars, sitting here begging you to believe what is the truth. And you calmly tell me I am not. You ask me to be reasonable. Why don’t you ask me to be insane? That would be easier. Now listen — damn it all! — I can demolish your proofs if you give me a chance, but if you won’t, by God, I myself will prove that I’m the man I claim to be.”

  “And how will you do this?” inquired Stonecipher gently.

  “Get Andrew Lockwood, a lawyer who knows me — who met me in London, who — ”

  “Mr. Lockwood has already taken up your case with Mr. Jerome Middleton himself, that is, the real one.”

  “Lockwood? And he, too, is taken in by that double of mine? Well, I’ll be damned! Then get Searles, the vice-president of the Mid-West Trust Company in Chicago. He met me in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he was there with his wife. He — he knows me.”

  “Mr. Searles it was who gave the authorities an order requesting that you be locked up. In fact, the commitment petition papers are signed by the representatives of the Middleton estate jointly.”

  “Well, I’ll be — why, damn them, they’re all in a conspiracy, that’s what they are. They’re all neck and shoulders in this plot.”

  Stonecipher shrugged his shoulders. “That was precisely the next remark in order.”

  Middleton bit his lips. Somehow, some way, he must break down this ridiculous impasse. “Now listen to me, please,” he burst out. “Get Miss Pamela Martindale, now Mrs. van Ware, to be exact. We were together for one entire month on the water. We — ”

  Stonecipher pursed his lips. “I would not want to send for any young woman and bring her here over such a distance, as I would have to bring her, on such an excuse,” he said calmly. “For I read in the newspapers with my own eyes that Miss Martindale sailed for London right after her marriage to Mr. van Ware. She is — well — she should be docking at Southampton to-day.”

  Middleton shook his head hopelessly. Stonecipher was right. There would be no bringing of Pamela Martindale van Ware back over five thousand miles to identify as her ex-fiancé the tramp who had nearly ruined her wedding.

  “I will have to terminate our examination now,” the physician stated abruptly, “for the case-histories have to be typed and completed as fast as the examinations are made. To-morrow morning I shall want to ask you a further question or two and talk to you, and then I shall assign you to a ward and have your case-history carefully filed away where it will from time to time be added to with notes regarding your conduct and demeanour here. Now, my poor fellow, try to be of good cheer. For I am happy to say that certain circumstances in your case prevent me from at all regarding it as hopeless.”

  Middleton stood up. He was quite collected. True, he had accomplished absolutely nothing in this past hour, and he knew now that he would accomplish no more should he be closeted with the doctor for another ten hours. It was neither laws nor men who were holding him here. It was that case-history. And in his soul had come a powerful resolution: that by trickery or by craft he would obtain that case-history before he ever wasted another breath in fruitless argument. He must play his game against known cards — not unknown ones. And of a sudden, there came into his bearing the guile of the lunatic himself. Yet not quite to the extent that he could resist saying:

  “Well, if it’s necessary for me to remember who I am and who my people are and to prove it likewise in order to get out of here — and that somebody has to be other than Jerome Middleton, I might as well prepare to spend my life in this place. That’s all. But I’ll prove my case. I’ll prove my case.”

  “All right. Go back to bed.” Stonecipher nodded his head in dismissal. “I’ll let you up to-morrow morning and have you fixed up with some clothes to wear.”

  It was in a frame of mind considerably more disturbed from what it had been when he had gone to Stonecipher’s office that Jerry Middleton pattered back to his bed. Where thus far his thoughts had roamed wildly, willy-nilly, over the strange features of his incarceration in this tomb of stone and iron, they now concentrated on but one thing: that case-history! A thousand plans for attaining a look at it buzzed through his head, only to be discarded one by one for a single simple one which seemed less improbable of accomplishment than all of the other thousand.

  Early next morning, with the very removal of the breakfast tray, he was again ordered to proceed down the corrido
r to the office where he had yesterday spent a bad hour. When he entered it, he found Stonecipher at his desk. Middleton sat down. And then his eyes opened wide. For on the slide of that desk was a bulky folder across whose top were the printed words: “COMPLETE CASE-HISTORY OF “; and underneath these the hand-printed name: “JONATHAN DOE, 46.”

  It was now or never. Jerry Middleton stifled an imaginary yawn to conceal his inward tension. And he spoke idly, casually. “I daresay, doctor, you saw the chief attendant? He was looking for you a while back. About some telephone message that you were wanted at once in the superintendent’s office.”

  The examining physician rose to his feet with the greatest alacrity. With a hasty glance all about him to see that the various sheet-iron cabinets on the walls were securely locked, he turned to his patient and gave one peremptory order: “Go back to your bed. I will send for you a short while later.” Waiting only until he saw his patient pattering back along the corridor once more, he turned and made his way rapidly to the front door of the ward. With his personal keys he was soon letting himself out. But with the slam of the big double-locked door, Middleton wheeled like a shot in his tracks and was soon pattering toward, and not away from, the door of the little examination room. Entering it silently and alone, he took three great steps across the floor, grabbed up the precious case-history, and thrust it underneath the blouse of his State pyjamas. Then, with the document held tight to his body by one stiffly-placed arm, he pattered back once more to his bed. And with fingers that trembled appreciably from suspense, Jerry Middleton unfolded the cardboard folder. He wondered how quickly Stonecipher would return; but he did not know that Stonecipher was sitting patiently in the superintendent’s office, and that the superintendent, in turn, in his comfortable house far across the grounds of the institution, was just rising from a generous breakfast of Illinois quail on toast.

  He first ruffled over the papers comprising the case-history. The first five pages were evenly matched sheets of rich bond paper, neatly typed in purple ink; but stapled and clipped to the back of the last one were document after document, some bearing the words “affidavit”; others appearing to be court orders; quite a few much-indented transcripts of testimony; more than one certificate of something or other, not to mention a blue-print as well — all exhibits, as it were, in his case. He began to read. And, as he read, he realised with a sinking heart that a malign fate indeed had linked hands with a hypocrite and master schemer; that in Luther Fortescue he had indeed met with an artist who overlooked few minutiæ.