"Exactly," continued Simon. "Your hallucinations are simply due to what happened during the lunch hour."
"But nothing happened during the lunch hour," objected Hobbs.
"What! Didn't you see it?" cried Simon, with the utmost surprise.
"See what? I don't know what you mean!" stammered the cashier, thoroughly alarmed, he knew not why.
Iff struck a hand bell at his side, and the cashier almost jumped out of his chair.
The girl appeared at the door. Simon addressed her volubly in Japanese, and she answered briefly in that language, with a low bow and disappeared.
Hobbs could not contain himself. He told Iff how things looked to him.
"What, Togo in stripes?" cried Iff laughing, and then checked himself and looked at the trembling man before him with the most serious commiseration. "Strange, strange," he said in a meditative voice. "I could understand it if you had seen it."
"Seen what?" cried Hobbs, his voice rising to a scream. By his elbow was the girl in stripes. She was handing a copy of the Evening Mercury to her master.
Iff ran his finger down the columns. In the stop press was only one paragraph. It started loudly from the blank of the rest of the column.
SUICIDE in SING SING.
Stephen Adams, recently convicted for theft of bonds, hanged himself in the prison early this morning.
The finger with which Simon directed his attention to that bald statement, seemed to the guilty man like the finger of God. He was struck speechless. His face went blank as a sheet of paper. Iff took no notice.
"If you didn't see that," he said slowly, "I don't see what upset your mind so seriously as to make you see things. You don't drug?" he asked sharply.
Hobbs tried to frame the words 'never in my life' but his articulation refused its office.
"Can it be?" mused Simon Iff--and rose suddenly from his chair.
"Never mind the cause," he declared vigourously, "the cure is the thing. Business before pleasure. Attend to duty and never mind the tricks our eyes sometimes play us. Let's get down to the bank. Here, swallow this."
He poured the cashier a stiff drink of brandy which pulled him together physically but left his mind in a blank passive state. He was quite fit to do anything, but deprived of initiative, of the power to think, in all but the most superficial sense of that phrase.
He followed Iff out of the room and was not in the least surprised to find Togo looking like a quite ordinary Japanese servant. Simon asked him about it.
"You see," he said, "you're better already. But when they got to the outer entrance, instead of Iff's motor car he saw a prison van. However, it did not seem so apparently to Simon, who said:
"I think it'll do you good if we walk down to the bank this day. Nothing like fresh air to blow away the cobwebs."
Hobbs assented mechanically and Iff addressed the uniformed driver.
"I shan't want you this afternoon, Dobson," he said, "but be back for the theatre after dinner. Amuse yourself as you like till then."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir," replied the man saluting; and even distressed as he was, Hobbs could not fail to observe that the man's accent was utterly remote from anything American. He began to analyse his perceptions. He tried to look at his experiences in perspective. It seemed in particular that his ears were somehow at war with his eyes. No, that didn't account for everything. He began to realize that almost all the inexplicable perceptions had something to do with Stephen and the police. Were they then phantasms created by his conscience? If not, was he suspected? Had a comedy been staged to firghten him into confession? Knowing himself safe, he brightened instantly at the thought. And yet, when he considered the matter, it seemed impossible. There would not have been time to prepare so elaborate a scheme, for Stephen had only hanged himself that very morning. And then he realized for the first time the import of that fact. It was he that was responsible for the boy's death. He had not thought of that before. He had hated Stephen as a coward and a prig and despised him as a crank. He had felt no remorse at his imprisonment. But that he should have kiled himself was another story. Why had he not foreseen that such an issue was inevitable, given the ultra-neurotic character of the boy?
Hobbs had never believed in the supernatural, but now it seemed to him as the only rational explanation of events to suppose that by some mysterious sympathy, a dead man was somehow able to revenge himself by throwing the mental machinery of his murderer out of gear. There were plenty of well-authenticated stories of the sort.
"I must pull myself together," he thought, "whatever I do, I mustn't give myself away. I must ask for a holiday and go to a safe place till I've got over these fancies."
And he began to make plans but they were always interfered with by a vision of his victim hanging from a bar of his cell window.
"Here, wake up!" said Simon Iff, who had not spoken all the way to the bank. "Here we are."
Hobbs took stock of his surroundings. Again his eyes were playing him false. An automobile was drawn up at the door of the bank and in it were two fashionable ladies, almost extravagantly dressed. There was a little crowd around the car, which the porter was trying to keep back. And the motive of the crowd was evident, for the chauffeur was the girl in stripes.
Then did other people share his hallucinations? Slight as the matter was in comparison with what had passed, its incongruity brought to the ground all his previous theories and left his mind more completely bewildered than ever. It could be hallucination if other people could see that accursed girl, and it couldn't be a comedy staged for his benefit, for that fact would knock the house of cards to pieces.
He followed Iff to the receiving teller's desk and pulled out the sealed envelope. The teller opened it. The man's face changed. "There's some mistake here, Mr. Hobbs," he said, "except these two, these bonds are forgeries."
The cashier found himself unable to utter a word. The teller gave a signal and two of the plain clothes men in the bank immediately slipped their arms through those of the terrified Hobbs. History had repeated itself. A glaring light broke in upon his mind.
"It's a conspiracy," he shouted, "and I know exactly how the trick was done."
"Yes, you might tell us about that," said Simon very gently.
Hobbs no longer knew what he was saying.
"I'm not guilty," he cried, "Adams can clear me."
"Isn't it rather for you to clear Adams?" suggested Simon Iff, and then the cashier remembered that Adams was lying dead in prison.
"I never meant to kill him," he went on. "I never thought he couldn't stand..." and once again he broke off short, appalled.
He saw that he had no chance to clear himself. He had sealed up the envelope and it had been in his possession till that moment. He knew too well that it had been changed by the girl in stripes while Mr. Lubeck was talking to him, but he couldn't tell that story to a jury, he couldn't tell it to his own attorney. they would only say that he was shamming mad to get off. He had been trapped and instinctively he turned to Simon Iff to save him.
"I didn't steal the bonds," he whined. "I want justice."
"Then you must do it yourself," answered Simon. "Come, let us go into the president's room and tell us the whole story."
Completely broken down, the cashier complied. Iff had accurately divined the method employed to scare Sterilized Stephen. Hobbs had led up to the critical moment by teasing Stephen about his fears and threatening that one day he would bring down a culture of virulent bacilli and shedding them over him. He had, in fact; squirted a little dirty water on Stephen's person and taken advantage of his distraction to change the bonds. Hobbs ended his confession with an appeal for mercy.
"It shall be granted," answered Simon, and sent for a copy of the Evening Mercury. It was the same edition as the copy in Iff's apartment, but the top press column contained no reference to Stephen Adams.
VII
Simon Iff had been absent from New York for some weeks attending to the matter (elsewhere re
corded) of Col. Van Schuyler. On his return he found a letter from Mr. Lubeck who concluded his congratulations by inviting the magician to dinner to meet Stephen Adams and his sister Violet. The boy had been released immediately on the confession of Hobbs and the dinner party was intended, not only to celebrate the victory, but to plan future campaigns. The stockbroker's original interest in his aseptic employee had been revivified by the sympathy he felt for his tribulations. The good man blamed himself quite unjustly for his reluctant contribution to the catastrophe. But Simon Iff was in the most cantankerous mood. He would not admit that any castastrophe had taken place. He blamed Lubeck, not for prosecuting his clerk, but for having encouraged him in his iniquity. He had no kind word for Stephen that night. All through dinner, in defiance of every rule of politeness, he treated the boy with savage contempt. He lost no opportunity of sneering at everything he said; he criticized his personal appearance in absolutely unpardonable terms. There was never such a bear at any dinner party that New York had ever seen. Only with Violet did he preserve the commonest form of politeness.
Not until dinner was over did Simon unmask his really heavy artillery. He attacked Sterilized Stephen with callous brutality so that Mr. Lubeck, seeing how acutely his guest was suffering, unable to defend himself because his enemy was also his saviour, ventured a word of protest.
"My dear man," retorted Iff, "have you no common sense? Can't you see that this rag of humanity is on the way to getting worse torn than ever? What's his whole attitude? That of a deeply injured man, who has been justified. His punishment begins now.
"You had Dr. Braithwaite examine you three days ago?"
"Yes," stammered Stephen, "and he told me I was perfectly healthy."
"That's what he told you," sneered Iff. "But here's his private report of the scraping he took from your throat."
He took a paper from his pocket book and passed it to Stephen. The gesture was as if he had stabbed him. The boy read the slip. It appeared that his throat harboured the germs of influenza, diphtheria, and typhoid, and some half dozen lesser diseases.
It was necessary to apply restoratives. At last, he mastered himself sufficiently to stammer something about his death warrant.
"Now look here, my boy," said Simon. "That's all nonsense. All our throats are full of those germs all the time. But none of us get any of those diseases except under special conditions, the chief of which is a lowered vitality. Now, nothing lowers vitality so much as fear. Look at yourself. The doctor declares you in perfect health and yet you nearly faint when I pass you a scrap of paper. I've travelled a bit in the tropics and seen plague and cholera sweeping away who townships as a storm scatters the leaves from trees in autumn. I thought even in America every one knew that the one sure way to get an epidemic disease was to funk it."
"That's right," put in Lubeck. "I was in Panama in the old days and the people who got yellow jack were not the people who took the big risks but the people who brooded on the danger."
"There's another point too," pursued Simon. "When fear, which is a definite pathological condition, a disease far more deadly than tuberculosis, attains a certain degree of intensity, it deprives a man of the use of his five senses. Did you ever read that essay of Sullivan's on Human Testimony?"
It appeared that nobody had.
"Well, you should," proceeded Simon. "However, I'll quote you, as nearly as memory serves me, one remark.
"During the war it was noticed that the evidence of soldiers freshly wounded was often of the most fantastic description. They would testify to the details of catastrophes which had never occurred; they would assert that so-and-so had been decapitated in front of their eyes, and so-and-so buried by an explosion, when, as a matter of fact, nothing remotely resembling these events had taken place."
"Is that possible?" asked Lubeck.
"Well, you ought to know," retorted the magician. "You've had the case of this wretched invertebrate here and a much more striking example under your very nose."
"Yes," said Lubeck; "of course. Do you know, I've never really understood how you got away with that absurd business of Hobbs. He wasn't at all the nervous hysterical type and he hadn't been freshly wounded."
"Fishing for compliments," laughed Simon. "I've already congratulated you on the goodness of heart which inhibits so effectively the operation of your cerebral cortex. Hobbs had lived for years with the worst kind of fear: that of being found out. It wasn't pathological in the sense of being irrational, but on the other hand, he had no protection whatever against it. He couldn't fly to antiseptics whenever it became acute. He couldn't even relieve his mind by talking about it. He had to be perpetually sitting on the safety valve; and any form of suppression always tends to turn normal instinct into pathological channels. I didn't expect to break him down by the scene in the office. I saw to it that he was freshly wounded.
"I staged the comedy to prepare him for the wound. I wanted to evoke his fear from the hell of the unconscious self in order that it might shake his confidence in his own critical judgement; in his sense of reality."
"But no one would really believe that his eyes and ears had gone wrong so suddenly and to that extent. He must have suspected that we were laying a fantastic trap for him and that should have put him on his guard rather than induced him to betray himself."
"True enough," admitted Simon. "But the things he saw were, so to speak, phantasms of his hidden fear, connected vaguely with Stephen through Violet's likeness to him, and the circumstances of the plot, assuming it to be one, were all so wildly improbable. The result was that a mere trifle of absolutely genuine evidence, as he supposed, believing (as people of his class do) in the newspapers, was enough to wound his guilty conscience. It never occurred to him that I had had that paragraph specially printed in my copy of the Mercury, especially as we had both prepared him for it by attributing his experiences, which we both assumed to be hallucinations, to something which we pretended to suppose that he must have seen during the lunch hour."
"Yes," said Mr. Lubeck thoughtfully, "but Hobbs was hardened by years of crime and utterly callous of the consequences to others."
Simon looked at him very sadly. "Surely you understand," he said slowly, "that such callousness is the very measure of the intensity of his own fear. The thought of prison was so intolerable to him that he did not dare to allow himself the luxury of the faintest human sympathy for his victims. But he had not contemplated death. He saw in an instant, taking him at his worst, that to be found out might drive him to kill himself. As a matter of fact, he was not as mad as that; he suffered genuine remorse. The psychological resultant was however the same. What he lost on the swings, he made up on the roundabouts. In any case we were sure of the main object: to render him incapable, at the critical moment, of the normal reaction. He saw himself caught in the identical trap which he had sprung on Stephen. He saw instantly, with every particle of his instinct of self-preservation, that this fact proved his innocence; that he was the victim of a clever scheme, so that in his anxiety to prove his innocence, he exclaimed jubilantly that he knew exactly how the trick was turned. In his normal state he would have perceived the implications of the statement. Suppose a man has been swindled by the three card trick; he could not have been swindled if he knew exactly how the trick was done. His explanation proved previous knowledge. We cannot be sure of the deep workings of his mind at this point but this at least is evident; that the series of shocks had quite abrogated his conscious control. He probably recognized his blunder in some stratum beneath clear consciousness; for he instantly completed it by the appeal to Stephen to clear him, very much as a man in certain conditions will run his bicycle into the very object which he is trying to avoid. The realization that Stephen was dead crowned the edifice with ills, as Euripides says. His unconscious stood before us all, stark in its horror of malignity and fear. The one relief which he had so long denied himself--confession--became the over mastering passion and he reeled off the list of his iniquities wi
th something really not far from gusto. He had to get rid of 20 years of silence in a single outburst."
"Well, I must say," remarked Mr. Lubeck, "it has been a most masterly demonstration of psychology."
"I'm not very proud of it," replied Simple Simon. "The method was far too elaborate and complex to please me. It ought to have been managed in a quiet conversation. My excuse is that I had really no access even to the person of Hobbs. He was guarded in every way but one; and I had to arrange a scenario which would cut short all ways of escape. It was necessary that all explanations of events were equally untenable. However, enough of the past. Our business is to unsterilize Stephen. The bacillus of self-esteem finds him a most favourable medium. I doubt if he understands even now how I despise and loathe him. My chief satisfaction in getting him out of gaol is that I have saved his fellow criminals from the contamination of his example. I cannot even make him angry," growled the mystic. "If he had any self respect, instead of self-esteem, he would have walked out of the house an hour ago."
The Complete Simon Iff Page 49