The Professor's Mystery Part 28

"Very sorry," he said, "but I can not give any interview this evening. I am called out of town. Besides, I have not orderly arranged my ideas as yet. Come around on the Monday, and I will have something for your paper."

"I'm not a reporter," I interrupted hastily, for already he had found his gloves and hat. "I want to see you about Mrs. Tabor."

"What is that--Mrs. Tabor? Carefully, carefully, young man. Names are names. What have you with her to do?"

By this time I had found a card. "I'm a friend of the Tabors," I said, "and their trouble is no secret from me. You've been looking for a continual irritating cause of Mrs. Tabor's hysteria. Well, I've just found one."

"Clever," he shrilled, "diabolically clever. But it will not do, young man. I have known these your American reporters--"

"If you say that again," I burst out, "you'll have me for a patient.

Call the Tabors on the 'phone--any of them will tell you I'm in their confidence; and I can identify myself. We're both of us wasting time."

The sculptured face scowled at me for an instant, then relaxed with a piercing cackle of mirth. "Good. I waste time no more, then, but I believe you. See," he spread out the telegram. "It is to her I go. Now, if you come with me--"

"Mrs. Tabor has just started home from New York in the motor," said I.

"Our train leaves in half an hour. Are you ready?"

Doctor Paulus did not say another word until we were safely aboard the train and out of the tunnel. Then he turned suddenly upon me.

"Have I not seen you at a so-called spiritualistic seance," he chirped.

"Yes," I said, "where we both heard a mysterious voice called familiarly by the name of Mrs. Tabor's elder daughter. What is more, I have just seen Mrs. Tabor herself at another seance, where she talked with this so-called spirit intimately. She has been doing so, unknown to her family, for a long time; and there is your irritating cause. That's why she has hallucinations of her daughter's presence."

Doctor Paulus received my revelation with somewhat humiliating calm. He showed not the least astonishment, nor did he answer for some minutes, but sat frowning in front of him, and drumming with a large white hand upon the window-sill. When he spoke again, it was with a smile.

"Mr. Crosby, I find myself--yes--interested somewhat in you. First I see you at spiritualism; then before a house where another seance is about to be; next I pa.s.s you in the subway, and a few minutes thereafter I presently behold you riding a child's bicycle after my brougham to discover me-- Now also, I recall to have seen you in the country, when I was with the young medical man who sends this impetuous telegram.

Therefore I say, since you are not a reporter, you have a mind either unbalanced or very well balanced. And you now bring me eagerly this information, so that you are with the Tabors much interested, which may prove--you are no relation, is it not so?" He laid his hand upon my knee. "It is not your mind then, but a heart unbalanced, which produces often great mental activity."

I was both embarra.s.sed and impatient. "Am I right, then, about Mrs.

Tabor?" I asked. "Isn't there a chance of a permanent cure for her by removing her from this spiritualism business? If we can only--"

He held up his hand. "Let us not leap to the conclusion. That is what I tell always to the Doctor Reid. He is a bright young man, but he leaps too much to the conclusion. So probably he has said to you that Mrs.

Tabor is a paranoiac, which may be so; or perhaps with continual irritation of the mind, only hysteria that may be aided by removal of the irritation. I am too old to be quickly sure. Now, I repeat to Reid that a medical man must save his mental or physical jumps for cases of extremity. He must not jump all the time; that is how you are neurasthenic in America. Hysteria, that we can by removing suggestions and introspections palliate, or perhaps cure. And there may be also hallucinations and the fixed idea. Therefore it is so like a shadow of insanity. The daughter's death, we knew of that. And I have said that some continual suggestion was to be sought for, which might produce this illusion of her daughter's continual presence, such as you have perhaps found. So we are ready to consider. Tell me now all that you know, carefully. Not your own deductions I want, but the facts alone."

When I had finished, he sat silent for a long time, frowning on his hand as it drummed idly on the window-ledge.

"Why do you conclude that she has for some time been attending spiritualisms unknown to her family?" he asked abruptly at last.

"They all seemed to know her, and to recognize the voice called Miriam.

She went about it besides in a very accustomed way. And before her first disappearance this summer--the first I knew of personally--she had a telephone message from Mrs. Mahl. I answered it, and I recognized her voice afterward."

After another long silence I ventured: "Hasn't she always been worse after she has been away?"

He answered in a preoccupied tone, as if I had merely tapped the current of his own thought: "It seemed at first to me a temporary breakdown only, which I looked to grow better. I have been much disappointed that it has not, and she grows periodically worse coincidently with disappearances of which they do not know in time to control them. So I tell them that some harmful practice is added to the original cause, and they a.s.sure me that no new thing comes into her life, unless--" he looked at me quizzically--"a young man whose interest in the remaining daughter causes him to follow scientists about on bicycles. I recommend quiet and the removal of reminiscences, and still the irritation goes on. Now, as to spiritualism, there I have not made up my mind. I investigate it as a human abnormality, for to me, like the Roman, nothing human is to be thought foreign. It looks to be trickery, and yet that is not sure, but there may be scientific interest there. Certainly so great a man as Lombroso found much to interest. In the end we shall, as I think, find all manifestations physical, or perhaps there is here some little known semi-psychic force disengaged from the living persons present. Of the dead there is little cause to speculate. However it be of all this, there is without any doubt acute nerve-strain very bad for the neuropathic, and aggravated by belief. Yes, it is perhaps cause enough, and perhaps effect only."

The train was pulling into Stamford as he ended, and it was not until the waiting automobile had carried us nearly to the house that Doctor Paulus spoke again.

"I think," he said, "that possibly, I say possibly, Mr. Crosby, you have made a valuable discovery. At least we know now the circ.u.mstances better. But on the one hand these visits to seances may be aggravating cause of the unbalancement, and on the other mere results of unnatural cravings in the unbalanced mind. It is a circle, and we seek the slenderest point where it may be broken."

Mr. Tabor met us at the door, and as we came up the steps Reid slipped eagerly past him.

"Splendid!" he exclaimed, wringing the great man's hand. "Splendid!

Hoped it would be this train, but I hardly dared think so. I know how important your time is. Very good of you to come out, very good indeed.

Now as to the case; manifestations unfortunately very clear just now.

Very unfortunate, but I'm afraid we have been right all along. Come out to my rooms a moment, and I'll give you the whole matter in detail.

Better to run over the whole thing scientifically."

Doctor Paulus smiled at me dryly: "I shall be most happy," he shrilled, and after a formal word or two with Mr. Tabor, stalked soberly around the house. Mr. Tabor and I went into the living-room without speaking.

"Has Lady told you--?" I began.

He nodded. "I hardly know what to say to you, Crosby. I feel very sorry for you both. I am sorry for all of us. Mrs. Tabor has not been herself at all since the other day, and of course for the time everything else is secondary to her. But don't think that I'm anything but very glad personally." He held out his hand.

I took it in silence, and a moment later, Lady came in, greeting me very quietly, as if my presence at this time were entirely a matter of course. Father and daughter evidently understood each other. We sat almost in silence until the two doctors returned, Paulus frowning downward and Reid more jerkily busy than ever. The scene had the air of a deliberate family council.

"Mr. Tabor," Doctor Paulus began, "I have thought better not to disturb our patient by an interview just now, since she is asleep after so long a wakefulness. Doctor Reid besides has made the conditions very clear.

Only on one point he has not been able to inform me wholly: It appears that Mrs. Tabor has attended meetings of spiritualists habitually in secret, which accounts for those excursions of which we know lately. How long ago may we possibly date the commencement of this practice?"

"She was interested in spiritualism carelessly and as a sort of fad before Miriam's marriage," Mr. Tabor answered, "but so far as I know, she never actually attended any sittings then; and she hasn't spoken of it for years. She might, of course, have kept it secret all along; it's only within the last few months that we have tried to follow all her movements."

Doctor Paulus settled heavily into a chair, and fell to drumming on the arm of it. Lady stood beside her father, her arm resting upon his shoulder; and Reid paced nervously up and down the room. A chirp and a rustle made me notice the canary hanging in the farther window. Finally Paulus looked up.

"Do you prefer to have my opinion in private?" he asked.

Mr. Tabor was looking older than I had ever seen him. "Your opinion means a great deal to all of us, Doctor," he said. Reid stopped a moment in his pacing.

"Well, my opinion is not quite positive, because I have not certainly all the facts. That is the fault with all our opinions, that we never can base them upon wholly complete data. Mrs. Tabor we have thought insane, and there was much to bear that out. So if I had been certain that all her illusions proceeded from within her own mind, I should have said that it was surely so. But now Mr. Crosby makes known to us this external suggestion of spirits, with its continual reminding of her trouble and the unnatural strain. He argues also--and I am not at all certain but that he argues rightly--that this practice, this superst.i.tion of hers, may be the cause of her deterioration, so that by removing it she will grow better or perhaps well. Is it so far clear?"

"Quite so, exactly," Reid broke in. "Perfectly clear, Doctor, perfectly.

But why not effect rather than cause? Another symptom, that's all.

Fixed idea, unnatural craving for communication with the other world, because the mind is unbalanced by loss."

"I think that is to place the horse after the wagon, as we say. It is certainly a vicious circle, but still--"

"Precisely," exclaimed Reid, "but the impulse comes--"

Doctor Paulus held up a white hand. "Wait a little. I do not come to conclusions hastily. Now I conclude that Mrs. Tabor is thus far no more than hysterical, and what we have to do is first to remove entirely from her this superst.i.tious influence." The shrill voice took suddenly a sharper edge. "Moreover, Doctor Reid, I will say to you that only two other men in the world know more than I know of my specialty, and of those unfortunately neither one is here." He waited until Reid subsided into a seat, then went slowly on: "Now the question is how this harmful belief is to be removed, and that is the difficult matter."

"If she were in a sanatorium--" Reid began.

"She'd worry herself to pieces," Lady interrupted; and Doctor Paulus nodded heavily. "She'd feel imprisoned, and imagine and brood and worry, and the atmosphere of impersonal restraint would make her worse. We can at least help to keep her mind off herself and make her cheerful."

"We can prevent from now on, I think, any further communications," said Mr. Tabor.

"But the trouble's inside her own mind," snapped Reid; and the shrill voice of his colleague added:

"That is partly true, so far as she has now hallucinations and re-creates her own harm. Suppose then we held her from seeking harm elsewhere, that is something; but still even so she feels restraint, and still her misbelief goes on. If we could reach that--but how to make her not thus believe?" He fell silent, and the white hand began its drumming again. I felt irritably that he was the most deliberate man in the world.