The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Was his poetry poor poetry — or what?” asked Middleton curiously.

  Hyde fumbled in his pockets. “Now, let me see — I have one here. He gave it to me the other day in exchange for an onion which I received in trade from another patient. Onions, you see, Jonathan, are much in demand here. Many of us don’t sleep well — the confinement, of course — and an onion — why an onion is almost legal tender around here. It ranks higher than an orange.” He took out a sheet of paper which, as he unfolded it, appeared to be hand-printed in ink. “Charlie told me that this poem should bring no less than a hundred dollars if submitted to the Saturday Evening Post. Well — read it yourself, Jonathan. Maybe it’s poetry at that. Maybe not.”

  Middleton read it over quickly. It ran:

  what’s become of (if you please)

  all the glory that or which was Greece

  all the grand ja that was dada?

  Waiter, a drink waiter two or three drinks.

  what’s become of Maeterlinck

  now that April’s here?

  (ask the man who owns one

  ask Dad. He knows)

  He looked up, shaking his head. “Hopelessly — well — insane, Howard,” was his comment. “I don’t wonder, frankly, that Mr. Wall was put in here.”

  There was an amused smile on Howard Hyde’s face. “You think that, do you?” he asked. “Well,” he added, “it wasn’t one of Charlie Walls’.”

  “Another patient’s, then?” inquired Middleton.

  But again Howard Hyde shook his head. “No, I am sorry to say no, Jonathan. The poem you just read was merely a couple of stanzas from a verse of this type printed in Secession, an American magazine. It is an example of what the Dadaists consider poetry; the Dadaists being a school of letters which claims that literature should take all it can from bill-poster technique, electricity, and the whole whirl of mechanical inventions that touch our lives a thousand times daily; that is, literature should search for distinctly modern sensations.”

  “Then,” said Jerry Middleton impulsively, “I can only say that a few people on the outside could well be here on the inside.”

  “Exactly,” agreed Howard Hyde, accepting the hand-printed verse, folding it up and putting it away. “You now have the theoretically perfect attitude of the theoretically perfect lunatic.” He laid a friendly hand on Middleton’s shoulder, however, to prove that his statement was but a bit of irony. Then he changed the subject adroitly. “You were asking, I believe, about the older man? Mr. Sydney Spencer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor Spencer. He was a Latin teacher. He has what are known as auditory hallucinations — a most troublesome thing, I’m inclined to believe.” He stopped short, and looked oddly at Middleton. “Pardon me, Jonathan, but you’re not — well — that is, you are not bothered with voices, are you?”

  Middleton shook his head decidedly. “Not at all.” But he didn’t smile as he thought of the things he had seen one night in a deserted house — things which never were and never had been.

  They had resumed walking by this time, and of a sudden Hyde brought him to a quick stop. About five feet in front of them was a young man with thin face and prominent cheekbones, with bright eyes that literally sparkled in contrast to his pale yellowish skin with a growth of stubbly beard forcing its way through it. He stood facing the wall, with one leg drawn up and one arm raised high in the air before him. He did not move — not by an inch. His eyes, glancing sidewise out of his half-turned head which never moved, followed Hyde and that of his visitor. But he did not stir.

  “Well, Oswald, taking your little constitutional?” said Hyde pleasantly. “Oswald, meet Mr. Doe. Jonathan, this is Oswald Olsen.”

  “Pleasedtomeetcha,” said Mr. Olsen all in one word, but he changed his position not by an iota. A pained silence followed, and there appeared to be nothing to do but to move on. So this they did, Middleton at the heels of his companion who engineered their withdrawal.

  Middleton looked back in his tracks. The young ex-pattern

  -maker still stood like a statue, his nose almost touching the wall. And he found himself wondering whether this human graven image would turn back to flesh and blood when the dinner bell should sound. Later, though, he was to learn that Olsen had to be literally broken from his pose at meal time and bed time and shoved off into the new procedures which those things entailed; that he was wasting away, as does an Indian fakir, from lack of exercise from retaining these postures for so many hours.

  Hyde looked at the clock. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Five minutes to twelve already. It seems — ” But his words were cut short by an attendant who came to the middle of the ward and called loudly:

  “Dining-room men! Dining-room men!”

  Hyde looked about him, and then turned to Middleton. “I have to go now, Jonathan. I’m eating at the butter table, and I want to hold on to it. Got to get washed up in a hurry. Just have a seat here. See you later. When the bell rings, come to dinner and you’ll be placed at one of the tables.” And without further ado he was down the hall with the haste of one upon whose speed hung some valuable prerogative.

  Jerry Middleton dropped into one of the hard mission chairs which studded the green carpet at mathematically exact intervals. So this was an insane asylum? And this was the mad, topsy-turvy, delirious world into which he had been precipitated by a schemester aided by a jury of stupid doctors who saw paranoia through magnifying opera-glasses and sanity through those same glasses — inverted! He shook his head uncertainly. It would be a difficult world in which to take a part. But he would be patient as long as he could — he was born with that valuable faculty.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE TRUST COMPANY REPLIES

  LIFE in a ward of an insane asylum, in the days that immediately followed, proved to be a trying sort of an ordeal, but when one realises that the arrival of a certain letter means one’s vindication and ultimate liberation, one develops an inordinate capacity for enduring trials and tribulations. And this Jerry Middleton found out. Perhaps, had he been alone in this mad land of fantasy, his endurance of his surroundings would have been a burden indeed: but he found himself blessed with that rare thing — a friend. Of his own strange story, he never made mention to his new-found friend. For even if it had been the most heinous of crimes that had caused Hyde to accept such a legal defence as had placed him here, Middleton wanted the respect of this one man, whose sanity — whose clear, straight-thinking mind — was the one stable thing in this world of fallacy. More than once he had caught Hyde looking at him curiously as though trying to fathom why he really was kept there. But he retained silence.

  The keynote of the life in Birkdale was, if anything, discipline — a very trying discipline. The day began by the night watch — a husky Swedish giant by the name of Svenson who came on duty every evening at seven and who remained sitting up playing solitaire throughout the entire night till six next morning — going up and down the ward, thrusting his head inside of each door and calling “All up!” Here, in this deathlike silence that surrounded Birkdale for twenty-four hours a day, one tended to sleep harder and longer, and the cry of “All Up!” always sounded like a call back to a weary disappointing world of reality.

  With the donning of clothing by the fifty-four inmates of Ward A-i, and the splashing of gallons of water over the rims of the bowls in the washroom, came the stentorian call of “Dining-room men!” at which four men who always sat at the “butter table” detached themselves immediately from the other fifty, who proceeded to stand around like sheep waiting for the morning meal. The breakfast — each meal, in fact — came to the ward in huge covered rectangular pans from a central kitchen in tiny two-wheeled carts, rising to the proper wards in dumb-waiters. In spite of its long travel, the food was still steaming when the cover of each pan was removed.

  For the first couple of days Jerry Middleton found himself pulling down the law of averages as it applied to Ward A-i! For he had little appetite. Indee
d, no doubt because 3,000 inmates had to be cooked for three times a day, the cooking was solely of the boiled variety; that is, food which could be prepared by the hundreds of pounds in giant kettles. The delicacies of the grill were not known here. The noon meal generally contained some kind of a stewed or boiled beef, some fresh vegetables, boiled, bread and oleomargarine — which was the element which caused the “butter table” to get its name. For while there were not only special pans of extra food sent up for the attendants, there was a limited supply of genuine butter sent up too; and this butter was divided between the two attendants and the four carefully selected inmates who set and cleared the tables, dished the food, and washed the dishes afterwards — the so-called “dining-room men.” Thus the “butter table.”

  Bread was cut only by one or the other of the two attendants, for it was a rule that no patient should be allowed to hold a steel knife in his hand. Every knife was carefully kept in a locked drawer with a powerful padlock. Discipline held forth even at the meal table. With the opening of the dining-room door, and the clang of a handbell, the inmates filed in, but no man was allowed to sit down. With every man in his place — except Oswald Olsen, the katatonic, who as a customary thing had to be retrieved and brought in, came the call “All down!” and fifty-four inmates sat down as one man. Then came silence, the clink of pitchers, a wrangle over the amount of butterine, a call for more corn syrup in the syrup containers. As table utensils were to be found thin cheap spoons, forks and knives whose ends were rounded and whose edges scarcely served to cut into even the butterine; but Middleton learned that on many of the wards not even such utensils as those were allowed.

  The chief attendant, Blake, had had a talk with Middleton on the evening of his first day in Ward A-i. “Now every man here works — see?” he had said. “If you don’t work, you can’t stay in Ward A-i; you have to go to a loafer ward. Now I usually got five bedmakers — each man makes ten beds. But,” he added, as he caught sight of Middleton’s look of acquiescence, “it ain’t easy this making of ten beds — for every sheet and every coverlid’s got to be just so in case of an inspection. One of my bedmakers is in the hospital ward just now. Bedmakers gets a private room. So it’s up to you. Swabbers get room only in the dormitory. Which’ll it be?”

  Middleton, not knowing anything of what a “swabber” was, chose bed-making, and thus, on his very first night he was installed in one of the tiny rooms with its single, ivy-covered, barred window, and was making ten beds next morning as one might lay out a delicate problem in mensuration. Each sheet, each coverlid, each pillow, had to be done so, and placed so. And Joe Blake, living in hourly fear evidently of the dread “inspection,” was a hard taskmaster.

  And there was a job for everyone! Just as meticulously as Jerry Middleton made up his ten beds, so did other men do their respective tasks. There was, for instance, Todd Miller, a stolid-looking ex-Illinois truck gardener who thought he had erected the cables from which Brooklyn Bridge was hung, and who had annoyed Congress with bills for his work until, quite naturally, he had come into this place. Every morning, Todd Miller went stoically around the entire ward with a long handled brush catching and demolishing the cobwebs that grew overnight in the high corners and mouldings of the tall old-fashioned walls and ceiling.

  Another man dusted the stout mission furniture. The dining-room men, exempt from these tasks, washed up the pans and breakfast dishes. Other men washed the insides of the windows, taking a limited few each morning. To each and every one fell a task, and it was plain that attendants in this ward had to be housekeepers as well as guards. And thus, at least for one busy hour each day, fifty-four men were compelled to forego the pleasures of indulging in their grievances.

  With the restoration of the long carpet, the putting away of the swabs, and the last smoothing-out of the newly-made beds, fifty-four men were allowed once more to come back into the land of fantasy. For there was nothing more to be done. Some miraculously produced packs of greasy worn cards from various pockets in their clothing and took up positions of vantage at the nearest window-sill; others formed card games around a table, with lookers-on over their shoulders; while still others began the long day by pacing up and down, lost in their own reveries.

  Once Middleton heard a deep-toned bell sounding out — three times — then a pause — again three times — again a pause. “What is that bell?” he asked Hyde, who was at his side. “It’s not the bell in the clock-tower.”

  “No,” said the other. “It’s the bell in the fire-tower. It sounds for ten miles across the country. It is ringing now because an inmate has escaped. But every farmer for miles around has already been notified by rural telephone. Posses of attendants are out in all directions. The inmate, poor devil, will be recaptured. He will have no weapon, no money, nothing to aid him. And back he will come. And then — well — he will be in a different ward after that.”

  Middleton said nothing. There was an ominousness in that bell. It seemed to say that if the State declared a man must remain here, here he must remain.

  One day an inmate suddenly struck out in violent anger at another inmate. But his clenched fist never reached the other’s chin. A dozen inmates, as well as the two attendants, sprang in and separated the two combatants. The aggressor mysteriously disappeared that afternoon. He was moved to the “bad ward.” And thus were those punished who conceivably did not know right from wrong

  There were many strange, queer fellows, so silent, so brooding, that Middleton could not get acquainted with them, and Hyde, on his part, made no effort to get him acquainted. But others Middleton added rapidly to his acquaintanceship in this topsy-turvy world.

  He met John Chassevain, who had once been an interior decorator, a tall thin man who wore a black moustache with ends waxed as much as the floor; a pale, unhealthy, sallow face and soft hands that bespoke a previous life that was too confining both physically and mentally. Chassevain had an implicit belief that while the sun was out, he was paralysed from his waist down. And of the fifty-four men he and he alone was allowed to remain in bed on sunny days. There, on such days, he spent his time painting with canvases and paints.

  There was Professor Marcus Wilder. An elderly man Wilder, dressing always in a faded shiny black suit of old fashioned cut, with coat-tails flapping behind him, with white shirt and black bow-tie knotted under a stiff batwing collar — the garb of three decades back. His face was that of a student, an idealist almost, and the rumpled hair heavily tinged with white crowned a brow that was high and thinking. As Hyde had explained his case to his friend:

  “Poor Wilder is an ex-professor of mathematics who went to pieces trying to explain to his confrères that time and space, two apparently entirely different entities, were simply relatives and were functions of each other. Perhaps if they had accepted that premise, it might have saved him — but his mind is completely gone now and he has a thousand false ideas to-day where then he had only the misconception about time and space!”

  “But, good God,” Middleton had ejaculated, “his idea was nothing other than the Einstein theory, was it not?”

  Hyde nodded. “Yes — but Marcus is in and Albert is out. There’s little difference, my boy, little difference in many things about being in — or being out!”

  “Lord, Howard,” Middleton had exclaimed admiringly that day, “you seem to know a little about everything. The Einstein theory, geology, medicine; what haven’t you read up about? I suppose you’ve covered every step in Einstein’s thesis?”

  “Well — practically so — but not quite. I’ve checked up every equation in his theory but one. And the ones that follow depend upon the truth of that one. So I’m waiting for somebody to arrive here with a clear-thinking mathematical brain who can help me to establish the truth or falsity of that one doubtful equation. And if I accept it — then I’ll sure be crazy, eh?” He had smiled.

  When the hour for retiring came in this strange land, the night-watch shouted it loud and emphatically from the end o
f the ward. “Bed-time” would sound his booming voice up and down the row of rooms. And it would be taken up by other wards, filled with less dignified inmates, to which it penetrated, till from all directions over the institution one could hear the cry of attendants and inmates both: “Bay-Yed Ti-ime!” And it was a verdict from which there was no appeal; whether a game were solitaire or whether it were fourhanded, it had to stop in the middle of the play. Fifteen minutes later, promptly at nine o’clock, lights were put out.

  The inexorable bed-time call had just been made on the evening of October 20, after Middleton had been in this ward for practically four long days. Standing in his door, he gazed curiously to see who was visiting A-i at this hour of night. And to his surprise he saw that the incoming man was no other than young Dr. Odza with his tortoise-shell glasses on his face and his physician’s keys at his belt. With a glad cry, Middleton hurried up the ward and stopped in front of Odza. “Thank God,” he said, “the letter has come at last.”

  But Odza, silent, handed him a typewritten communication. His heart fell as he read it. It ran:

  “DEAR SIR,

  “With respect to your very special inquiry as to the signature enclosed by you, we have, at your request, compared it with the one in our possession, same being a receipt for a pair of antique spectacles, to ascertain to what extent the two signatures differ. In answer thereto we wish to say that the two signatures have only a rudimentary similarity, and our handwriting expert declares unequivocally that they are written by two entirely different men.

  “Very truly yours,

  “THE MID-WEST TRUST COMPANY,