When Dr. Pendergast Potter arrived, he proved to be a short,
square-built man, with a red spade beard and soft but shifty brown
eyes--like an Airedale's. He had, he told me almost at once, studied
with Jung in Vienna and I thought of that mischievous parody--
"Bliss was it in that Freud to be alive,
But to be Jung was very Heaven!"
"Dr. Folsom tells me, Mr. Tompkins," Potter continued in a sort of
heel-clicking, stiff-bow-from-the-waist manner which was meant, I
suppose, to reveal his Viennese training, "that you have reason
to believe that your business partners are plotting against you,
conspiring to throw you in the asylum? This sense of special
persecution, sir, have you had it long? Perhaps when you were a child,
you hated your father? It began then, not so? And, later at school,
perhaps--"
I got out of bed and advanced on the psychiatrist.
"Dr. Potter," I informed him, "you are here for only one reason, to
certify that I am sane in the legal sense. For this service I am paying
the Sanctuary a fee of five thousand dollars. To which, of course, I
will add a personal fee of one thousand dollars to you, Dr. Potter,
assuming that you can sign a certificate of sanity with a clear
scientific conscience."
Potter subsided in the arm-chair and cackled gleefully. "Boy, oh boy!"
he exclaimed, "for one thousand smackers I'd certify that Hitler is the
Messiah. Damn Folsom for sending me in blind! He didn't tell me it was
one of those."
"Besides," I added, "I have a really serious loss of memory, which is
worth your attention, though I haven't time to go into it now. So get
ahead with your tests, please, and let's clean up this one."
"Cross your knees, either leg!" he ordered and gave me a few brisk
taps just below the knee-cap with the edge of his flattened palm. My
knee-jerks were all that could be desired.
"Good!" remarked Potter. "That's still the only physical test for
sanity that's worth a damn. Hell! They have all sorts of gadgets but
they all amount to the same thing: Is your nervous system functioning
normally or is it not? What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Tompkins?
Partners closing in on your assets or has your wife made book with
your lawyer?"
"My only trouble," I informed him, "is that I'm damned if I can
remember anything that happened before April second of this year.
That's been getting me close to trouble and I'd like to clear it up. I
remember all sorts of things before then, but it's about another man."
"Hm!" Potter suddenly looked formidably medical. "That's what I call
schizophrenia with a pretzel twist. We could keep you here and give you
sedatives and baths and exercises and analysis, but it would be just
the same if we left you alone. You've had some kind of shock causing a
temporary occlusion of personality, and the best thing you can do is
wait. Sooner or later there will be another shock and everything will
come straight again. What do you think you remember from the blank
period?"
"Damned if I know," I replied. "I think I sank a battleship or killed a
President, or something."
Potter laughed. "That's just a variation of the good old Napoleon
complex--which is an inferiority complex gone wild. You ought to take
up a hobby, like expert book-binding or watch-repairing. That would
give you a sense of power and you wouldn't feel the need for sinking
ships. Ten to one, you can't even shoot a decent game of golf."
"I'm pretty good at poker," I defended myself.
"That's not power, Mr. Tompkins, that's just shrewdness. You have a
profound sense of physical inadequacy. The record says you're married.
Any children?"
I shook my head.
"That's it," Potter declared. "We had a case like that in Jung's
clinic--a baker named Hermann Schultz, who insisted that he was the
Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. We were baffled for a while, since
Schultz was married and had three children. Then we learned that his
wife was the girl-friend of one of the Habsburg Archdukes and that
poor Schultz was not the father of little Franz, Irma and Ernst. We
solved it for him with his wife's help. She agreed to have another
child. Of course, it was the Archduke's but Schultz never guessed.
He ceased to believe that he was the Barbarossa and became a highly
successful baker. What you ought to do, Mr. Tompkins, is to father a
child and then you will forget all this nonsense about battleships and
Presidents. Not so?"
I grinned at him knowingly. "There's much in what you say, Dr. Potter,"
I complimented him, "but what the hell can I do about it bottled up
here in the Sanctuary? Just give me a clean mental bill of health--in
case any of my partners try to pull a fast one--and I'll go home to my
wife and give earnest consideration to your suggestion. After all, if
that fails, I can always take up wood-carving. Or try another girl."
"There are one or two around here--" he began, then checked himself.
"Well," he continued, "I can't say that I see anything really abnormal
about you. Sitting here, talking with you, I would have noticed any
psychopathic tendencies. We psychiatrists develop a sort of sixth sense
for the abnormal. I couldn't prove it scientifically, but I am sure as
Adam ate little green apples that there's nothing wrong with you that
can't be cured by a drink, a kiss and a baby."
There was a brisk knock on the door and the nurse appeared.
"Sorry to disturb you, doctor," she said, "but there's a man named Vail
downstairs with a writ of habeas corpus for Mr. Tompkins."
Potter looked at me accusingly, as though Jung had never for-seen this
kind of complication.
"Merry Vail," I agreed. "Yes, he's my lawyer. I told him to come here
but never dreamed--just send him up, nurse. In the meanwhile, doctor,
if you could get that certificate ready--"
Potter again gave the effect of heel-clicking, and withdrew.
Three minutes later Merriwether Vail and Arthurjean Briggs came
bursting into my room.
"Glory be, you're still safe, old man," my lawyer announced. "When Miss
Briggs phoned me your curious message, we put two and two together."
"And made it twenty-two?" I suggested.
"No, we made it four. We weren't going to stand for any nonsense from
the F.B.I. and I owe them something for pulling me in for questioning.
And when you spoke of fifteen thousand dollars and a doctor, I had a
brain-storm. So I flew up here and swore out a writ from the Federal
Court. I got a deputy to help me serve it--cost me all of twenty
bucks--and here we are."
I turned to Arthurjean. "Honeychile," I asked, "did you by any chance,
think to bring me some of the office brandy? I've been moving so fast
for the last three days that I'm out of training."
My secretary turned her back, gave a sort of dip-dive-and-wiggle and
produced from God knows where a half pint bottle of what proved to be
excellent brandy, well-warmed above room temperature. I heartlessly
refused to notice Vail's pathetic signs of desperate thirst and passed
the flask back to Arthurjean. "Thanks," I told her, "that just about
saved my life."
"Mr. Vail was all set that the doctors had hijacked you and were
holding you for ransom," she remarked, taking a short but deep drink
herself. "Seems like there's been a mistake."
"Uh-uh!" I indicated strong disagreement. "I came here under my own
power and am about to leave under the same and in my right mind."
"Whoever said you weren't?" Vail demanded. "God! we'll sue them for
libel."
I shook my head. "It was the Secret Service and only God can sue them,"
I said. "They took a notion to have me thrown in the Washington asylum
because they were sore at me on general principles. So I decided to
beat them to the draw and produce a certificate of sanity."
Vail looked at me with amusement. "Worst thing you could possibly
do, old man," he informed me. "If you start going around showing
people proof that you're not crazy, first thing you know you'll be in
Matteawan. Now if you want to prove to anybody that you're really in
your right mind, you'll try to do the right thing by this little girl
here."
In some bewilderment I looked at Arthurjean, whom nobody could
accurately accuse of being little.
"What are you driving at, Merry?" I asked.
"I refer to my client, Miss Briggs," he replied with dignity. "We have
strong written evidence of breach of promise."
"Sugar-puss?" I turned to my secretary, "Don't tell me that you've
shown my letters to this legal lout?"
She nodded. "Sorry, angel, but a girl's got to take care of herself in
this world. You remember where you wrote me, 'Be but mine and I shall
buy you a porterhouse steak with mushrooms'."
"It was onions, darling," I insisted. "Onions aren't breach of promise.
Damn it! they're cause for divorce."
"It was mushrooms," she repeated. "That was the same letter in which
you promised me hearts of lettuce, and ice-cream and--" she broke down,
sobbing with laughter.
I pulled her face down to me and gave her a kiss. "You big slob," I
told her, "all you think about, with democracy at the crossroads, is
food. Take that shyster downstairs and wait for me. I'll be down as
soon as I collect my certificate. Even if I can't wear it on my coat
like a campaign-ribbon it will be nice to hang in my den alongside my
Harvard B.A. diploma and the moose I didn't kill--it was the Indian
guide but they don't count--in New Brunswick."
Arthurjean laughed. "You sure do make your help sing for their supper,
angel," she told me. "And just because I call you angel don't you start
worrying about that nice wife of yours. From now on, I'll make like a
sister."
So I smacked her on the porte-cochere and ordered her out of the room
until I got dressed. As the door closed behind her and Vail, I rang for
the nurse and asked to have my bags packed.
"Goodness, Mr. Tompkins," she exclaimed. "Don't you like it here? We
understood that you wanted a rest-cure."
She stood just a fraction of an inch too close to me and I was aware of
pretty brown hair under her starched nurse's cap, a whiff of something
that smelled far more expensive than antiseptic, and a pleasingly
rounded effect underneath the prim blouse of her uniform. So I put my
arm around her, gave her a friendly kiss and said, "Name, please, and
when do you get off duty?"
"Emily Post," she answered, "so help me, but don't let that stop you,
and nine o'clock tonight."
"Good," I told her. "Will you join us for dinner and a drink at--what's
the best hotel here now we've a war on?"
"The Governor Baldwin," she replied.
"Meet us at the Baldwin, then, as soon as you can get away. I'd like
you to meet my friends socially and--"
She nodded brightly and hurried from the room, with a distinctly
unmedical motion of her hips.
A moment later Dr. Folsom came lounging in, his strangler's hands
dangling at his side.
"Sorry you feel you must leave, Mr. Tompkins," he told me. "Here's that
certificate. It will stand up in any court east of the Mississippi if
you have to use it. That will be five thousand, as agreed."
I sat down at the little writing-desk and laboriously made out three
checks: one for five thousand to the order of the Sanctuary, one for
one thousand to the order of Pendergast Potter, and another for one
thousand to the order of--
"Any initials, Dr. Folsom?" I asked.
"A. J.," he replied, "but just make it to the Sanctuary."
"A. J. Folsom," I wrote on the final check and endorsed it with "W. S.
Tompkins," as well as I could with my still bandaged fingers.
"What--" Folsom was startled. "Gosh! You're a white man, Mr. Tompkins.
And Potter will be glad to have this, too. He is--"
"Think nothing of it!" I announced grandly. "The market's been working
for me all week, and this won't even cost you income-tax; I'll put it
down as a gift."
Folsom's face was positively transfigured with gratitude and a devotion
that would not have been out of place in a stained glass window.
"By George!" he insisted. "You _are_ a white man. I'd be proud to go
before the Supreme Court of the United States and testify--" He stopped
abruptly. "Are these checks good?" he inquired.
"Oh, come, doctor, who's loony now?" I demanded. "Why would I expose
myself to a bad check charge just to keep out of a private asylum with
my lawyer fully equipped with a writ?"
"That's so, that's so!" he beamed reassured. "Well, sir, it's been fine
having you here and any time--day or night--if you want refuge from the
stormy blast, just come out to the Sanctuary. We'll always be honored
to put you up and give you the best we have for as long as you care to
stay. Believe me, Mr. Tompkins, it may seem odd but you'll never find
warmer hospitality or a more sincere welcome than right here in this
little old asylum."