The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  The bailiff had stopped to light a cigarette with his one free hand. This done, he drew forth from his coat pocket the paper he had borne from the courtroom and glanced at it. “Says ‘Open diagnosis: Paranoia, with Dr. Walraven disagreeing in favour of possibility of Auto-Hypnotic Pseudo-Paranoia of Von Zero.’ “ He pronounced the last words very slowly and with difficulty, and then jammed the paper back into his coat pocket. “All right — let’s get back to the ward. They’ll be wanting the next patient soon.”

  But Middleton’s mind was in a whirl as he stepped rapidly along by the side of the other. Here was a fine complication. Fortescue had promised to have his case held over. He must get in touch with Fortescue at once.

  But he got in touch with Fortescue quicker than he thought, for as he tramped around a bend in the corridor they had to step out to avoid a little group of three men who were talking together. One was a sharp-faced man, minus hat, and with a leather portfolio under his arm that branded him as a legist of some sort and perhaps an attaché of the court that was held in this building. The other was shielded by the third, who in turn had his back to the open corridor.

  It was at this point that the man whose back was turned towards Middleton and his guard looked suddenly over his shoulder, and to Middleton’s amazement proved to be no other than Fortescue. The former had stopped dead in the corridor, bringing even his own guard to a stop with him. He leaned forward excitedly, tugging at Fortescue’s sleeve.

  “Fortescue, Fortescue,” he cried, “they’ve made a blunder! They’ve sent me to the insane asylumn. They’ve — they’ve committed me. So you’ve got to speak up now, man. You’ve got to choke the proceedings off. I can’t do that, you know.”

  But Fortescue, strange to remark, drew hurriedly aside, jerking his sleeve from Middleton’s grasp and brushed himself there as though he had been contaminated. And in so doing, he moved just sufficiently to reveal the man whose body his own had been shielding. And now, indeed, it was given to Middleton to gasp audibly in surprise — to be left as speechless as a deaf and dumb man. For the individual on whom his eyes rested was Middleton’s own build, Middleton’s own height. He wore an English derby, and English cutaway suit; and it was Middleton’s own suit and hat, the very ones he had bought in Melbourne before sailing. The young man carried a cane, and it, too, was Middleton’s own cane. In his buttonhole was a flower, and across his vest was a chain — and Middleton recognised its heavy gold links as being the links of his own watch-chain. But — strangest thing of all — on his eyes were a pair of heavy, lead-rimmed, dark blue spectacles with leaden bows fastened thereto by spread-leg leaden pins, and back of them, even visible through the dark tinted glass, were eyes evenly spaced which were as like as his own eyes in spacing and shape and length of lashes as one pea is to another. And the face! Its forehead, nose, lips, chin, mouth — everything — was his own face. He passed a hand dazedly over his forehead.

  But only a second did this little tableau last, while the three men who had been talking in the corridor stared at him. Then the bailiff jerked him roughly off to one side. “Come out of it. Leave those gents alone. Get down that hall with you.” And, literally before he knew it, he was being run bodily down the corridor clear to the door of the detention ward, which was opened instantly to the bailiff’s summoning kick by Little Kelly, and a second later Middleton was jerked into it, the door closed to, and the entire vision of what he had just seen remained but a bewildering, fantastic memory.

  CHAPTER XII

  HERDED WEST

  THAT afternoon, after lunch, there was much hustle and bustle in the Psycopathic Detention Station. Patients were straightened out sartorially as best could be done, their few pieces of extra clothing and personal belongings bundled together, papers signed and carried back and forth between the ward and the outside, and close upon one o’clock deputy sheriffs, as evidenced by the stars on their vests, and obviously sent over here for this one day, began to gather in Little Kelly’s office. Most of the patients, thus far morose and downcast, showed marked signs of brightening up.

  But of this brightening-up process Middleton was not a part, for through all these preparations he sat in a brown study, his bewhiskered chin in his hands, his attitude more like that of those poor unfortunates than their own attitude of a day previous, nor did he even come to the noon meal of beans and watery tea.

  Over and over his mind ran ceaselessly upon the incident of that morning — of that bewildering replica of himself which he had seen just as he was literally dragged away by the man delegated to guard him — a replica that even in its eyes, though covered with hideous spectacles, presented his own eyes, his own lashes. The hand of Fortescue in this childish plot showed now at every point. Again Middleton went back and mentally reviewed the various manœuvres by which that gentleman had brought about to-day’s unhappy termination to things. It was Fortescue’s doing, all right. Yet what could the latter gain by it all? Middleton shook his head wearily.

  And thus, getting nowhere nearer the solution of the enigma than when he had started, he found himself suddenly called up to Little Kelly’s office and assigned to a huge bullnecked fellow smoking a thick black cigar.

  “Is this bird a bad actor?” asked he of the bullneck.

  Little Kelly shook his head. “No, indeed, Laherty. He’s one of the quietest ones here.”

  But he nevertheless took from a drawer one of the leather handcuffs and handed it to Bullneck. With his head Bullneck motioned Middleton to step closer. “This way, ‘bo. Lord, ‘bo, but you need a scraping with a razor when you get to your happy home at Birkdale. Here, stick your hand in this.”

  “Do I have to be led like a criminal?” asked Middleton, disheartened. “And through the city streets at that? Can’t you trust me to go along with you without that?”

  But Bullneck only shook his head. “Sorry, ‘bo, but this is the way you got to go. Regulations, my boy. So stick her out.”

  Middleton looked appraisingly at Little Kelly, at Bullneck, and at several other deputy-sheriffs wreathed in cigar smoke. Then, remembering only too well the expedite manner in which the recalcitrant McCarthy had been handled in this realm of compulsion, stuck out his wrist quietly and felt himself locked to that of the deputy with the stout leather cufflet. His time would come, he assured himself, and come quickly too. Five minutes later five deputies and ten patients were proceeding down a narrow staircase into an interior court where a chugging auto-bus, with driver leaning on the wheel, awaited them. To the left wrist of each deputy was handcuffed the right wrist of a patient; and to the left wrist of that same patient was handcuffed the right wrist of still a second.

  And Middleton, fuming, found himself to be the middle man. Not even to scratch his chin could he raise a hand.

  The bus, containing its nine occupants, rolled off into the train shed. Evidently their arrival had been carefully timed and the necessary transportation had already been secured, for the deputies led the way immediately on and into one of the trains. Ten minutes after they had all taken the very foremost seats in one of the day coaches, the conductor called “All Aboard,” and Middleton knew that he was at last, unbelievable as it could sound, on the way to an insane asylum.

  The ride was about two hours and a half. At length the conductor came through calling Birkdale, with a friendly grin to the deputies as though they were all old friends. The group dismounted at the station platform of a little town in which one long street, lighted by the bright sun of the late afternoon, was fronted with new little stores on either side. Green side-streets, with little cottages thereon, gave a charming small-town effect, and the usual crowd of loafers which hover about every inland station, whether it be in Australia or whether it be in America, were there, waiting among the empty milk cans on the platform. Here another closed bus was waiting with the words on it: “State Hospital”; and into this bus patients were hustled by two deputies. A moment later the little redshingled depôt bearing its lone sign “Birkdale “was
rapidly being left behind.

  Through the little town, no one saying a word, the bus rolled; the houses grew finally less pretentious, and farther apart, and it was plain that they were now on the outskirts of the town. And then, suddenly, coming around a turn in the road, the bus rolled in between two great stone pillars carrying an ironwork arch, where a gate-tender raised a hand in greeting to the driver. Perhaps five minutes more the bus continued to travel, this time along an artificial gravelled road, when suddenly it drew into the shadows of a great building and stopped dead. The driver climbed out and threw open the door in the rear.

  “All out,” he said with a wide grin. “Home.”

  The two deputies climbed out, as did likewise the negro, Middleton, the Chinaman and the Italian boy. Visible a hundred feet away, was a colossal building of grey stone above whose great ornate central entrance a tower, also of stone, rose high in the air. The top of the tower bore a gilded clock-face with gigantic hands, and even at that very moment the sound of four chimes rang out into the clear, still, almost deathlike quiet air. To either side of this tower building ran great wings, three stories in height; and to both of these wings were attached more buildings, also in the shape of wings; and to these wings were even still more wings, so that the entire institution seemed to be a mammoth grey butterfly that had not even opened itself to full capacity. Of aged stone — the stone showing many decades of weather in colour — it was covered almost everywhere with ivy, but even the ivy did not conceal the stout iron bars that covered each and every window from top to bottom, from the very first window of the first wing to the very foremost opening of that farthest one — where the eye scarcely reached.

  Up into the main doorway the men were hustled, and here one deputy locked his pair of patients to the wrist of the negro who was attached to Middleton, thus leaving behind him his companion attached to a human chain. He was gone inside an office marked “superintendent” for a moment or two, and then returned minus the papers he had carried, but accompanied this time by a white-coated attendant who conducted the deputies and the dragging human chain down a tiled corridor to where another white-coated attendant unlocked a door on which was stencilled “Receiving Ward.” All passed inside. And with the closing of that door, the leather wristlets were removed, and the deputies, with a final remark, passed on out again and the door closed behind them.

  The receiving ward of the Birkdale asylum was nothing but a long, long corridor, perhaps thirty feet wide, with at various intervals in it a small table or a chair to take from it its strict institutional air. But those tables and chairs were in each case bolted to studs protruding from the floor! A green carpet extended its entire length, and along it, on either side, as far as the eye could reach, were tiny rooms with doors that were nothing but powerful iron gratings. Through the gratings could be seen inmates, newly arrived from all over the State, clad only in pyjamas, some lying in bed, and some standing with curious noses pressed against the iron mesh of the gratings, peering out with eyes in which burned strange fires.

  “Follow me, boys,” said the attendant cheerily, and started to lead the way down the corridor. But Middleton, moving not, tapped him politely on the shoulder. “Now I say,” he ejaculated angrily, “this farce and humiliation has gone on just about long enough for me. Where is the superintendent? Either he or an examining physican? I want to see one or the other and see them quick.”

  “Of course you do,” said the attendant, and these words were Middleton’s first introduction to a new land where everything an unwilling inhabitant asked or suggested or believed was instantly agreed with — a land where patient was king and no one committed lèse majesté! “But you see, my boy, the doctor isn’t here just now. So first you go to bed and get a nice rest and a bath and a shave. Then in due course you see the doctor. Come now, I’ll let you be first.”

  The thought of a bath, let alone a shave, was solace indeed to Jerry Middleton, who had not seen a razor for two weeks. He reached up and passed a hand troubledly over the bristly whiskers that were making his face a veritable underbrush. Then he made up his mind. Shave first — doctor later. He had stood enough this far. He could be patient a short while longer.

  He fell in behind the attendant. Up the long corridor the latter conducted him. At last the attendant threw open the door of a room. It was a bathroom with a huge tub already filled with water. “Take off your clothes,” the man in the white coat directed.

  Middleton did so. The attendant looked into each of the pockets in turn. Then he stepped for an instant through a small swinging door marked “Patient’s Belongings,” and returned with something in his hand.

  “This is all you had,” he asked, “when they locked you up in Chicago? If it is, I’ll tag it with your number. These old clothes of yours’ll probably have to be burned up.”

  Middleton, stripped of the last of his garments and just immersing himself gratefully in the tub, looked up in surprise. In one of the attendant’s hands was a large wooden tag with a number stencilled on it, and in the other — with a big manilla tag displaying plainly the name Jonathan Doe hand-printed on it — was a pair of leaden, blue-tinted spectacles.

  Leaden spectacles! Middleton, with one foot already in the water and the other poised above it, stared in amazement. Leaden spectacles they were, indeed, as like the ones he had received by his father’s will as was he himself like that strange replica of himself which he had seen back in Chicago that morning. Now, however, he knew for sure that his possessions had never been given up by the police or the county authorities — that those leaden spectacles seen that day on his double were a cunning imitation — that he beheld no other than the spectacles of Joseph Balsamo, or Cagliostro as the famous quack and necromancer was known. He found his tongue.

  “That’s all I have,” he said dropping weakly down into the water. Whereupon the attendant, motioning to soap and a brush on a shelf at the side of the tub, disappeared with both clothing and spectacles back into that small adjoining room once more. A second later his voice was audible calling out each and every item to another attendant who evidently took them down on paper.

  He was back in short order. Middleton had finished scrubbing himself. He dried himself, the attendant looking on curiously at his finely-built lithe body, which must have presented a striking contrast with his bewhiskered face. Then, throwing him a set of white cotton pyjamas, a pair of black felt slippers, and a thin bathrobe, he waited till the patient had donned these garments, after which he threw open another door stencilled “Barbering room.” A huge plush barber’s chair, stationed close to a tightly locked steel cabinet, stood revealed.

  “Step in, my boy. Get in a chair.”

  Middleton passed through the swinging door and climbed gratefully into the chair. The attendant motioned him to put each of his wrists on the handles of it. “But what for?” asked Middleton in surprise.

  “Rules,” replied the other cryptically. His face grew a bit stern. “Now if you want to get those uncomfortable whiskers off your phiz, better do just as I tell you. I want to see you get along here smoothly with everybody. All right. Wrists — so!”

  Middleton followed directions. Whereupon two stout straps that were affixed to the under side of each handle were brought around, looped over each of his wrists and buckled tight. Now the attendant kneeled down, and, without in any manner getting in the way of Middleton’s feet, looped two straps around each of his ankles and affixed them fast to the chair.

  “As we say down in my neck of the country,” he stated calmly, “you’re now hawg-tied.”

  From the steel cabinet, which he unlocked, he got out a big shining razor and a shaving mug. Lathering Middleton from temple to neck, he rubbed the lather well in; then stropping the razor, he began to shave. At length the job was over, the razor locked safely back in the steel cabinet, his wrists and ankles released, and he was being conducted out of a door and across the wide hall-like corridor with its myriads of screen-rooms, — resembling no
thing so much as the various zoos he had been in in his life — where, in a little room devoid of all furniture other than a single white bed, he was put into clean white covers.

  He lay for a while staring at the blank yellow walls. As does the mind, when shorn of all distractions, examine minutely insignificant features of its own environment, so too did Middleton become conscious of a number of factors in his new abode. For one thing, he noted that each bar on the window was formed so that its cross-section would be a miniature cross; and from his experience in the steel mills at Newcastle, Australia, he knew that each bar was in itself a small beam — a beam that could resist the most powerful attempts to bend it. At rare intervals an attendant hurried past the door outside, and every quarter of an hour the “tang” of the bell in the big tower was audible reverberating through the quiet that was that of a graveyard. And what more was this place than a graveyard — a graveyard for living human beings?

  Supper consisted of an egg standing upright in a very solid cup, a dish of some kind of wheat gruel, and a cup of tea. He sat up in bed and ate, and when he finished the tray was taken away by the same attendant who brought it in. His face was new to Middleton. But nothing daunted, the latter again impatiently asked his vital question.

  “When do I get a chance to see the doctor? I’ve waited pretty long now, it seems to me.”

  “Very soon, Doe,” said the attendant placatingly — who had evidently familiarised himself with the name under which this patient was booked. “There are some other patients from down-State ahead of you. Each of you must take his turn. But you shall see the doctor.”

  Middleton sighed. He was being sorely tried. But he rolled over and at last managed to drop off to sleep.