Chapter 24

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.”