Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (The Lost Classics Book 14) Read online

  The next moment Mordag began a swift crawling out of the closet and across the room by some inhuman movement of the muscles of his back. He went toward the bed. He dragged his captors sprawling after him with the resistlessness of a caterpillar.

  “For Pete’s sake!” yelled Olsen. “Let’s hold him!”

  At that instant the rail of the bed struck Poggioli’s skull. His hold on Mordag broke. Half stunned, he tried to grab his legs but they whipped under the bed and out of sight.

  The docent jumped to his feet. He grabbed Olsen, who he thought was hurt. “Get up quick; he’ll shoot from under the bed.”

  “No he won’t,” puffed the reporter. “I’ve got his gun. I’m trying to see him.”

  “Why, he’s right under the bed!” cried Poggioli, bending down.

  “No, he isn’t under here!”

  “He’s in the shadow.”

  “No, I see the light on the other side!”

  Poggioli was now staring under the bed himself. He did see the light on the other side.

  “Well, where in the devil—”

  “His hand didn’t wrench loose from mine,” panted Olsen. “It sort of melted out—it left the gun in my fingers.”

  “Thank God you got that.”

  A rustle from the closet behind them caused Poggioli to knock his head on the rail and he jumped up and whirled. Then he stood on his feet, holding his bruised scalp and staring into the closet. Olsen was beside him with the automatic ready.

  “It—it’s that damned mouse again.” The reporter shivered.

  The big man turned back to the riddle of the bed and gave a gasp. Poggioli wheeled quickly.

  Under the bedclothes, motionless, with his eyes fixed, lay Mordag. Olsen advanced with automatic ready, but as he leaned over the bed and touched the man’s face with the back of his fingers he lowered his weapon.

  In the closet the mouse pursued its tiny irrational gnawing at the foot of the clothes rack. And queerly enough while Poggioli looked at the dead man he thought of the mouse.

  In reality the little rodent eluded him as completely as did his uncanny adversary on the bed. Their whole human tragedy was removed so utterly from the realm of the mouse. The struggle of the men with Mordag; the melting of Mordag’s hand in Olsen’s grip; his vanishing from beneath the bed; his reappearance under the cover smoothed out in the cold formality of death; all this had swirled about the tiny animal unknown, undreamed of while it pursued its meaningless nibbling on a piece of varnished wood. The universe of the mouse, whatever it was, stunned Poggioli with its unthinkable simplicity.

  Olsen turned to the docent and began in a bewildered voice—

  “What I don’t understand—” Then he hushed.

  AFTERWORD

  THE ACTUAL report which Mr. Henry Poggioli made of this material in the American Journal of Psychology and which led to his requested resignation from the Ohio State University, need not be copied here. The article he wrote was as tedious as his adventure itself had been strange and diverting.

  However it did embody an attempted explanation of the foregoing episode. And also it shows Poggioli’s absurd blunder in university politics in setting down on paper what he really thought about the incident.

  Afterward, at the trial in Dayton, Ohio, one of the greatest criminal lawyers in America tried to prove that Mr. Poggioli’s written words did not mean what they appeared to mean; but he was not altogether successful in his attempts.

  It is needless to state here that a docent in an American university could not afford to employ the best legal talent in America. And as a matter of fact that eminent counselor was furnished gratis by the American Society for the Advancement of Free Speech in America. For while not a single member of this society believed in the antiquated tenet Mr. Poggioli put forth, still, as the attorney so forcefully phrased it—

  “The Society would spend its last dime in defending Mr. Poggioli’s inalienable American right to express an egregiously incorrect opinion.”

  Still it was the advocate’s equivocal tactics to soften Mr. Poggioli’s expressions where he could. One sentence which the attorney found impossible to reduce to doubtful English was the following: “The theory of dual personality will never completely cover this case, even if one gives to that theory the usual miraculous scientific stretch which modern psychology is forced to give to all such cases in order to avoid a presumption, if not indeed a positive proof of the survival of human personality after death. (Italics, the transcriber’s.)

  “Take the classical psychological theory of split personality. According to that theory, the murderous half of Mordag’s mind was aware of the normal half and was continually plotting to murder it. But the normal half was entirely unaware of this abnormal murderous half.

  “Why should not have such intercerebral knowledge have been mutual? Materialistic psychology has no reply to make save that this does not fit the theory of materialism.

  “How did the abnormal half of Mordag’s split personality know the engine number of the train that bore him to Columbus, the name of every street which he passed in a closed taxicab after midnight? Conventional psychology answers:

  He noted these data subconsciously. That to the writer’s mind is too flagrant an appeal to the miraculous to be admitted. He feels it is better to allow our modern materialism to fall flat than to have it propped up by such dubious miracles as that. “Take the reappearance of Professor La Plesse in the blue automobile. That was probably an hallucination superinduced by Mordag’s nervous apprehensions. But La Plesse’s bodily reappearance in the corridor of the Vendig Hotel, his grip on the keybolt when Olsen attempted to turn it, proves that here La Plesse was a concrete physical fact. What sort of fact was he? A mediumistic exteriorization produced by Mordag to his own undoing without any relation to the surviving personality of the deceased La Plesse? Or was it, what would be far more rational and less supernatural, the soul of La Plesse reassuming human form to revenge itself upon Mordag?” (See transcriber’s note below)

  “The final and completely insoluble riddle when viewed from the conventional angle is Mordag’s assumption of magical technique in his death struggle. First, how did Mordag, if he were not a trained prestidigitator, take from the hand of the writer the automatic pistol? This was done at a distance and without the writer’s being aware of its removal. It was a magician’s trick, but Mordag was no magician. How did he drag two heavy men across the floor by the muscles of his back? How did his hand melt from Olsen’s grip? How did his whole body melt into nothing under the bed and reappear a moment later, stretched out in death in the bed? All these are simple enough illusions for a practised thaumaturgist. But the writer repeats, Mordag was no practised thaumaturge!”

  “So here is the lion in the path of conventional psychology.

  NOTE: In a conversation with the transcriber the eminent attorney for the defense said, “I knew my case was lost when I read that damning sentence.”

  Shadowed 83

  “Mordag’s untrained brain, muscles, nervous system, must suddenly have assumed the technique of a trained adept in legerdemain. He had no practice, no instruction, no talent, and no reason for doing such a marvel.

  “The conventional reply to this certainly will be, that in his work as a magician’s famulus, his nerves, brain and muscle acquired all this training subconsciously by merely watching La Plesse.

  “This explanation places such a vast burden on the reader’s faith that the whole structure must fall.

  “Faith certainly has its uses, but the writer does not feel that faith should be the sole touchstone of the materialistic theory. Reason should have its day in court, even if it should destroy some of the pious miracles, not to call them the pious frauds of science. Science can be only all the better for allowing reason to check up on the operation of beautiful scientific faith.” (See transcriber’s note below)

  Mr. Poggioli’s article then went on to show how simply all these enigmas and riddles could be solved
by accepting the hypothesis that Professor La Plesse’s soul did survive his death. He further wrote:

  “Not only can we explain how it was done, but why it was done. The facts cease to be an amorphous and incomprehensible riddle, but become a logical, straightforward course of action.

  “La Plesse was a cynic, a passive wielder of sarcasm. He inhibited his grievance against Mordag with the sardonic gift of a knife.

  “But at his death this repressed hatred broke all bonds and drove him to consummate his vengeance by taking demoniac possession of his ex-assistant’s body. La Plesse’s paradoxical situation of trying to slay the body of Mordag after he himself had relinquished it must have formed a horrible tantalization for his unquiet soul. To have committed suicide while he himself was in possession of Mordag’s body was no revenge. That is why he pursued him with knives and poisons and what not, and finally frightened him to death with notes.

  “This tragedy not only justifies the religious command to forgive your enemy quickly, but it strongly suggests the existence of an actual spiritual hell after death, for those who die unforgiving and unforgiven.”

  This ends the docent’s fantastic paper.

  The eminent counsel for the defense used the following strange words in his peroration before the court:

  NOTE: This paragraph the counsel for the university alleged to be ironical and full of disrespect for science, which indeed was the gravamen of the action against Poggioli. But the counsel for the defense was able to prove to the court that all scientific advancement has been a product of pure faith acting under inspiration, and the above was simply Mr. Poggioli’s way of stating that well known fact.

  “And may it please your Honor, last, but not least, this action is a true bill against our whole world of Western science.

  “The aim of Occidental science, your Honor, has always been the mastery and subjugation of nature. Its aim is to make man supreme. It has sought to subdue every natural power to his dominion; the lightning that emblazons the tempest; the waterfall hurling seas over rainbowed heights must bend and toil for man.

  “Now I submit to the discretion of the court does not such an attitude beget in the subconscious mind of man the impulse to subjugate, subdue or to deny every power that thwarts, estops or overshadows it?

  “Scientists may not be aware of this profound anti-deistic tendency in their own psychology. But it is impossible for it not to exist.

  “The persecution of this ignorant, ill-advised and perhaps insane young man, must show these scientists the enormous lengths to which the subconscious intolerance goes.

  “I appear before you, your Honor, not representing this young man primarily,

  but as an advocate of free speech. My society clings to the ancient American belief that the expression of thought, even in a university, should be encouraged and not forbidden.

  “Because who really knows where the truth lies hidden? Take the quaint old theology which this young man has so anachronistically resurrected—suppose it were true? Suppose by way of a momentary hypothesis, that every man and woman in this court room today possessed a soul (laughter). Then it would not be inapplicable for the regents and faculty of Ohio’s great temple of learning to remember that once there was an angel named Lucifer, who vaulted in the face of Almighty God to his own eternal destruction; Lucifer, too, was a Bearer of Light.”

  ADDENDA: All evidence as to the facts of the case was ruled by the court as incompetent, as it did not bear on the point whether or not Henry Poggioli had committed scientific heresy. The decision of the lower court was affirmed. Mr. Poggioli lost his position in the Ohio State University and is now teaching in Tennessee.

  THE RESURRECTION OF CHIN LEE

  Galloway, superintendent of the Everglades Mill & Manufacturing Company, and Professor Henry Poggioli, his weekend guest, were discussing at the breakfast table in the superintendent’s bungalow the rather didactic subject of recognition. The mill official did not expect, it did not even occur to him, that an immediate personal relevance could arise from so detached a theme. He was simply saying that he himself never could tell negro babies or Cubans or Chinamen apart.

  Poggioli, the psychologist, was about to make some reply when a tall, raw boned white man came up the conk lined walk and halted just outside the screened breakfast room.

  “Jim,” he called to the mill official, “them last potatoes I got from Tampa ain’t fitten to feed hawgs on, much less mill han’s. What am I goin’ to do about it?”

  “Write to Farburger & Company and tell them about it.”

  “Yeh, and they’ll think I’m tryin’ to flim-flam ’em and next time they’ll want cash with their order.”

  “Just when did the Everglades Mill Company lose its reputation for honesty?”

  “These ain’t mill potatoes. They’re mine. I bought ’em for the ships.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, that’s different.”

  “So I figgered I’d send one hamper back by Chin Lee when he goes up to buy supplies today, just to show ’em what rotten stuff they tried to put off on me. The freight won’t be nothin’. Chin Lee can take one hamper along with him as personal baggage.”

  “M-m . . . Well, all right, do that. Good plan to show folks you’re on the level when you happen to be—helps out at other times when you don’t happen to be.” The superintendent opened his teeth but kept his lips closed with the expression of a man inwardly laughing at his own jest.

  The man outside the screen wall was not amused. “Then I’ll tell Chin Lee to take a hamper with him.”

  He turned back down the garden path under the red flaming boughs of some poincianas.

  The superintendent bestirred himself to make amends for a possible discourtesy. “Wait a minute, Erb. I want to introduce you to Professor Poggioli. Professor Poggioli is one of the greatest criminal psychologists in America. He was attending a convention in Miami and I got him to come visit us over here in Everglades. Now I want you to spread yourself in the kitchen while he’s here. Mr. Poggioli, this is Erb Skaggs, our cook.”

  The sun-tanned man peered at the guest through the wire.

  “You say he’s a criminal psychologist?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s he done?”

  Both gentlemen laughed. Galloway said— “What he does is to find out what other folks do.”

  “Oh—you mean he’s a detective?”

  “In a way. He bears the same relation to an ordinary detective that the president of the Everglades Company bears to one of our lumberjacks.”

  “Gosh, he’s a high-priced man,” said the cook soberly. “Who’s he after down here?”

  “Nobody at all. Just down for the weekend to eat and fish.”

  The rough faced man pulled down his lips in a grimace meant to be humorous.

  “Hope he uses jedgment in what he fishes after.”

  And with that he turned and walked back toward the mill kitchen.

  “Good old Skaggs,” remarked the superintendent half affectionately. “Always in hot water about a little ship chandlery business that he runs on the side, and he brings me his troubles.”

  Conversation paused for a moment and then the psychologist said:

  “By the way, what were we talking about a moment ago? I had a question to ask.”

  “You mean just before Skaggs came in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now, lemme see—what were we talking about?”

  For a moment or two the breakfasters sat trying to think back, but they came to nothing.

  “I recall what I wanted to ask you,” said Poggioli. “I wanted to know if you were especially fond of chop suey?”

  “Am I fond of chop suey?” Galloway smiled at the oddity of this question. “Yes,” Poggioli said, “but I can’t remember why I wanted to ask it.”

  “That’s funny. Why, no, I don’t believe I ever tasted chop suey. I wonder why you wanted to ask that?”

  Poggioli shook his head with the a
ir of a man giving up a problem, then ejaculated:

  “Certainly I remember! What you said about not being able to tell negro babies, Cubans and Chinese apart. I understand how you came to use Cubans and negro babies, but I wondered where you had met enough Chinese to choose them for examples?”

  “Why, Chin Lee, our kitchen boy.”

  “Just Chin Lee? Don’t you know other Chinese besides Chin Lee?”

  “No, none at all,” said the superintendent, rather amused at the psychologist’s problem.

  Poggioli puckered his brows.

  “Why, that makes it more extraordinary than ever!”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because you seriously say you can’t tell one Chinese from another, and here you never have known but just one Chinaman. You were serious, weren’t you— you were not trying to be funny?”

  Galloway broke out laughing.

  “No, I wasn’t trying to be funny. I meant what I said.”

  “Well, that’s absolutely amazing. Have you any idea how you arrived at the generalization that all Chinese look alike when you have known only one?”

  The superintendent became humorously thoughtful.

  “Now, lemme see: Chin Lee—Chin Lee—What could there be about Chin Lee?” He pondered for some moments and finally nodded. “Yes, it must be that.”

  “Be what?”

  “This may strike you as funny. I suppose it will. I never had thought of it myself before. The truth is I never have really known Chin Lee. I see him only now and then, and I don’t remember how he looks from one time to the next. Of course I recognize his Chinese generalizations. I know he has a yellow face, slant eyes and wears his shirt outside his trousers; but the actual man himself— honestly, I can’t recall his features at this moment.”

  Poggioli was astonished.

  “How long have you known him?”

  “He’s worked here two or three years.”