THE CONSULTATION OF AN EXPERT AND A LAYMAN
It was a situation in which I felt that I needed counsel, and that of an
expert order; so I made my way as fast as a taxicab could carry me to
the home of Doctor Immanuel Paulus. Unless I was very much mistaken, I
had something which would interest him. A messenger boy was running down
his steps as I climbed them, and in the hall stood Doctor Paulus
himself, opening the yellow envelop of a telegram. He nodded without
looking at me, and with some sibilance of excuse, read the message. Then
he thrust it into his pocket.
"Very sorry," he said, "but I can not give any interview this evening. I
am called out of town. Besides, I have not orderly arranged my ideas as
yet. Come around on the Monday, and I will have something for your
paper."
"I'm not a reporter," I interrupted hastily, for already he had found
his gloves and hat. "I want to see you about Mrs. Tabor."
"What is that--Mrs. Tabor? Carefully, carefully, young man. Names are
names. What have you with her to do?"
By this time I had found a card. "I'm a friend of the Tabors," I said,
"and their trouble is no secret from me. You've been looking for a
continual irritating cause of Mrs. Tabor's hysteria. Well, I've just
found one."
"Clever," he shrilled, "diabolically clever. But it will not do, young
man. I have known these your American reporters--"
"If you say that again," I burst out, "you'll have me for a patient.
Call the Tabors on the 'phone--any of them will tell you I'm in their
confidence; and I can identify myself. We're both of us wasting time."
The sculptured face scowled at me for an instant, then relaxed with a
piercing cackle of mirth. "Good. I waste time no more, then, but I
believe you. See," he spread out the telegram. "It is to her I go. Now,
if you come with me--"
"Mrs. Tabor has just started home from New York in the motor," said I.
"Our train leaves in half an hour. Are you ready?"
Doctor Paulus did not say another word until we were safely aboard the
train and out of the tunnel. Then he turned suddenly upon me.
"Have I not seen you at a so-called spiritualistic seance," he chirped.
"Yes," I said, "where we both heard a mysterious voice called familiarly
by the name of Mrs. Tabor's elder daughter. What is more, I have just
seen Mrs. Tabor herself at another seance, where she talked with this
so-called spirit intimately. She has been doing so, unknown to her
family, for a long time; and there is your irritating cause. That's why
she has hallucinations of her daughter's presence."
Doctor Paulus received my revelation with somewhat humiliating calm. He
showed not the least astonishment, nor did he answer for some minutes,
but sat frowning in front of him, and drumming with a large white hand
upon the window-sill. When he spoke again, it was with a smile.
"Mr. Crosby, I find myself--yes--interested somewhat in you. First I see
you at spiritualism; then before a house where another seance is about
to be; next I pass you in the subway, and a few minutes thereafter I
presently behold you riding a child's bicycle after my brougham to
discover me-- Now also, I recall to have seen you in the country, when
I was with the young medical man who sends this impetuous telegram.
Therefore I say, since you are not a reporter, you have a mind either
unbalanced or very well balanced. And you now bring me eagerly this
information, so that you are with the Tabors much interested, which may
prove--you are no relation, is it not so?" He laid his hand upon my
knee. "It is not your mind then, but a heart unbalanced, which produces
often great mental activity."
I was both embarrassed and impatient. "Am I right, then, about Mrs.
Tabor?" I asked. "Isn't there a chance of a permanent cure for her by
removing her from this spiritualism business? If we can only--"
He held up his hand. "Let us not leap to the conclusion. That is what I
tell always to the Doctor Reid. He is a bright young man, but he leaps
too much to the conclusion. So probably he has said to you that Mrs.
Tabor is a paranoiac, which may be so; or perhaps with continual
irritation of the mind, only hysteria that may be aided by removal of
the irritation. I am too old to be quickly sure. Now, I repeat to Reid
that a medical man must save his mental or physical jumps for cases of
extremity. He must not jump all the time; that is how you are
neurasthenic in America. Hysteria, that we can by removing suggestions
and introspections palliate, or perhaps cure. And there may be also
hallucinations and the fixed idea. Therefore it is so like a shadow of
insanity. The daughter's death, we knew of that. And I have said that
some continual suggestion was to be sought for, which might produce this
illusion of her daughter's continual presence, such as you have perhaps
found. So we are ready to consider. Tell me now all that you know,
carefully. Not your own deductions I want, but the facts alone."
When I had finished, he sat silent for a long time, frowning on his hand
as it drummed idly on the window-ledge.
"Why do you conclude that she has for some time been attending
spiritualisms unknown to her family?" he asked abruptly at last.
"They all seemed to know her, and to recognize the voice called Miriam.
She went about it besides in a very accustomed way. And before her first
disappearance this summer--the first I knew of personally--she had a
telephone message from Mrs. Mahl. I answered it, and I recognized her
voice afterward."
After another long silence I ventured: "Hasn't she always been worse
after she has been away?"
He answered in a preoccupied tone, as if I had merely tapped the current
of his own thought: "It seemed at first to me a temporary breakdown
only, which I looked to grow better. I have been much disappointed that
it has not, and she grows periodically worse coincidently with
disappearances of which they do not know in time to control them. So I
tell them that some harmful practice is added to the original cause, and
they assure me that no new thing comes into her life, unless--" he
looked at me quizzically--"a young man whose interest in the remaining
daughter causes him to follow scientists about on bicycles. I recommend
quiet and the removal of reminiscences, and still the irritation goes
on. Now, as to spiritualism, there I have not made up my mind. I
investigate it as a human abnormality, for to me, like the Roman,
nothing human is to be thought foreign. It looks to be trickery, and yet
that is not sure, but there may be scientific interest there. Certainly
so great a man as Lombroso found much to interest. In the end we shall,
as I think, find all manifestations physical, or perhaps there is here
some little known semi-psychic force disengaged from the living persons
present. Of the dead there is little cause to speculate. However it be
of all this, there is without any doubt acute nerve-strain very bad for
the neuropathic, and aggravated by belief. Yes, it is perhaps cause
enough, and perhaps effect only."
The train was pulling into Stamford as he ended, and it was not until
the waiting automobile had carried us nearly to the house that Doctor
Paulus spoke again.
"I think," he said, "that possibly, I say possibly, Mr. Crosby, you have
made a valuable discovery. At least we know now the circumstances
better. But on the one hand these visits to seances may be aggravating
cause of the unbalancement, and on the other mere results of unnatural
cravings in the unbalanced mind. It is a circle, and we seek the
slenderest point where it may be broken."
Mr. Tabor met us at the door, and as we came up the steps Reid slipped
eagerly past him.
"Splendid!" he exclaimed, wringing the great man's hand. "Splendid!
Hoped it would be this train, but I hardly dared think so. I know how
important your time is. Very good of you to come out, very good indeed.
Now as to the case; manifestations unfortunately very clear just now.
Very unfortunate, but I'm afraid we have been right all along. Come out
to my rooms a moment, and I'll give you the whole matter in detail.
Better to run over the whole thing scientifically."
Doctor Paulus smiled at me dryly: "I shall be most happy," he shrilled,
and after a formal word or two with Mr. Tabor, stalked soberly around
the house. Mr. Tabor and I went into the living-room without speaking.
"Has Lady told you--?" I began.
He nodded. "I hardly know what to say to you, Crosby. I feel very sorry
for you both. I am sorry for all of us. Mrs. Tabor has not been herself
at all since the other day, and of course for the time everything else
is secondary to her. But don't think that I'm anything but very glad
personally." He held out his hand.
I took it in silence, and a moment later, Lady came in, greeting me very
quietly, as if my presence at this time were entirely a matter of
course. Father and daughter evidently understood each other. We sat
almost in silence until the two doctors returned, Paulus frowning
downward and Reid more jerkily busy than ever. The scene had the air of
a deliberate family council.
"Mr. Tabor," Doctor Paulus began, "I have thought better not to disturb
our patient by an interview just now, since she is asleep after so long
a wakefulness. Doctor Reid besides has made the conditions very clear.
Only on one point he has not been able to inform me wholly: It appears
that Mrs. Tabor has attended meetings of spiritualists habitually in
secret, which accounts for those excursions of which we know lately. How
long ago may we possibly date the commencement of this practice?"
"She was interested in spiritualism carelessly and as a sort of fad
before Miriam's marriage," Mr. Tabor answered, "but so far as I know,
she never actually attended any sittings then; and she hasn't spoken of
it for years. She might, of course, have kept it secret all along; it's
only within the last few months that we have tried to follow all her
movements."
Doctor Paulus settled heavily into a chair, and fell to drumming on the
arm of it. Lady stood beside her father, her arm resting upon his
shoulder; and Reid paced nervously up and down the room. A chirp and a
rustle made me notice the canary hanging in the farther window. Finally
Paulus looked up.
"Do you prefer to have my opinion in private?" he asked.
Mr. Tabor was looking older than I had ever seen him. "Your opinion
means a great deal to all of us, Doctor," he said. Reid stopped a moment
in his pacing.
"Well, my opinion is not quite positive, because I have not certainly
all the facts. That is the fault with all our opinions, that we never
can base them upon wholly complete data. Mrs. Tabor we have thought
insane, and there was much to bear that out. So if I had been certain
that all her illusions proceeded from within her own mind, I should have
said that it was surely so. But now Mr. Crosby makes known to us this
external suggestion of spirits, with its continual reminding of her
trouble and the unnatural strain. He argues also--and I am not at all
certain but that he argues rightly--that this practice, this
superstition of hers, may be the cause of her deterioration, so that by
removing it she will grow better or perhaps well. Is it so far clear?"
"Quite so, exactly," Reid broke in. "Perfectly clear, Doctor, perfectly.
But why not effect rather than cause? Another symptom, that's all.
Fixed idea, unnatural craving for communication with the other world,
because the mind is unbalanced by loss."
"I think that is to place the horse after the wagon, as we say. It is
certainly a vicious circle, but still--"
"Precisely," exclaimed Reid, "but the impulse comes--"
Doctor Paulus held up a white hand. "Wait a little. I do not come to
conclusions hastily. Now I conclude that Mrs. Tabor is thus far no more
than hysterical, and what we have to do is first to remove entirely from
her this superstitious influence." The shrill voice took suddenly a
sharper edge. "Moreover, Doctor Reid, I will say to you that only two
other men in the world know more than I know of my specialty, and of
those unfortunately neither one is here." He waited until Reid subsided
into a seat, then went slowly on: "Now the question is how this harmful
belief is to be removed, and that is the difficult matter."
"If she were in a sanatorium--" Reid began.
"She'd worry herself to pieces," Lady interrupted; and Doctor Paulus
nodded heavily. "She'd feel imprisoned, and imagine and brood and worry,
and the atmosphere of impersonal restraint would make her worse. We can
at least help to keep her mind off herself and make her cheerful."
"We can prevent from now on, I think, any further communications," said
Mr. Tabor.
"But the trouble's inside her own mind," snapped Reid; and the shrill
voice of his colleague added:
"That is partly true, so far as she has now hallucinations and
re-creates her own harm. Suppose then we held her from seeking harm
elsewhere, that is something; but still even so she feels restraint, and
still her misbelief goes on. If we could reach that--but how to make her
not thus believe?" He fell silent, and the white hand began its drumming
again. I felt irritably that he was the most deliberate man in the
world.
Suddenly I found Lady's eyes upon me. "I think Mr. Crosby has something
to suggest," she said, and with her words a suggestion came to me.
Reid snorted.
Doctor Paulus smiled very gravely. "That busy mind of Mr. Crosby has
before been useful," he said. "What is this idea, then?"
"It sounds pretty wild and theatrical," said I, "but couldn't we reach
the root of the trouble by making the cure come from the same source? We
might tell her for ever that her ideas were false and harmful, and
she'd only feel that we were profane. But if the medium herself denied
them--these visions and voices must be at least partly a fake. Now, if
we can persuade or force her to show Mrs. Tabor how it's done--and I
think I know how to exert pressure upon her--then might not the illusion
be dispelled once for all? I mean, whether Mrs. Mahl is a fake or not,
can't she be made to undo the work she has done, and discredit the
dangerous belief she has taught?"
Mr. Tabor was leaning forward in his chair as I finished. Reid was
walking the floor again and shrugging his shoulders; and Lady was
looking at me with eyes of absolute belief.
"Fake?" asked Doctor Paulus unexpectedly.
"Sham, trick, fraud," I explained, and he nodded, frowning.
"Oh, but this whole thing's absurd," Reid put in. "Crosby's a good
fellow and clever, and all that, but he's a layman and this is a
complicated problem. It's all one if after another. If the woman's
willing to expose herself, and if she does it well, and if mother
believes her, and if all this would have anything to do with the case.
Besides it would be a shock, a violent shock, a dangerous shock. No
sense at all in it. Melodrama isn't medicine."
"I am not so sure," said Doctor Paulus. "It is unusual and what you call
theatrical, but my work is unusual and many times theatrical also. I
have need to act much of the time with my patients. With the individual
mind one must use each time an individual cure. This at least strikes at
the cause of the trouble, and might succeed. With your permission, Mr.
Tabor, we will try it."
"But her heart, man, her heart," objected Reid, "what about her heart,
and the shock?"
"Well, we can dare, I think, to risk that. Every operation is a risk
that we judge wise to take, and this is a malignant misbelief to be
extirpated. There will be no unreasonable danger."
"If we can somehow get this medium out here--" said Mr. Tabor.
"That I shall manage, to bring her to-morrow afternoon, telling her
perhaps of a private sitting in the interest of science. I am not often
so much away, but this case is of importance." He rose, and looked at
his watch. "Is not that the motor-car now at the door?"
On the step he turned to me with his quizzical smile. "It is perhaps
well for us all to have your mind stimulated, Mr. Crosby. That is a
beautiful and intelligent young lady." He looked abruptly from me to the
midnight sky. "It appears, if I do not mistake, that we shall have
rain," he chirped. "Good night," and he stepped gravely into the
limousine and closed the door with a slam.