The Complete Simon Iff (13 page)

“Here’s the paper,” said the historian.

“I’ll get you an order from the home secretary this afternoon. I’ll go now. If you can do anything, all England will have to thank you.” This from ’Anging ’Olborne.

“Oh, I can’t do anything; but I think Briggs can.”

“Ah, you think he’s shielding some one!” put in the objectionable young man for the third time.

Simon Iff lit his cigar with deliberation. “I shall certainly be obliged to you,” he replied with studied courtesy, “if you will recommend me some of the lighter types of sentimental detective fiction. Time often hangs heavy on one’s hands in London, for one cannot always be certain” (he rose and bowed to the young man) “of enjoying such very entertaining and illuminative conversation.”

“Look here, Iff,” said Holborne; “come with me, and we’ll see the Home Secretary right away.” They left the room together.

Two hours later, Simon Iff, armed with authority, was in the condemned cell. The professor was seated on the floor, his head sunk deeply on his breast, his hands playing feverishly in his long sandy hair.

The old mystic went close up to him. “Briggs!” he cried aloud. “I’m Iff. You know me! I won’t keep you a moment; but this is damned important.”

The professor gave no sign that he had heard. “I thought not,” said Simon.

The magician proceeded to insert his thumbs under the armpits of his old friend, and began to tickle him. Briggs wriggled violently, but only murmured: “Get away!”

“I knew he was innocent,” said Simon gleefully to himself.

“But I see there is only one way to get him to talk.”

He sat down very positively in front of his victim, and began to recite from the paper in his hand, “Resolve!” “Gyre!” “Explode!” “Action and reaction!” “Balance!” “Soul!” “Wings!” Briggs looked up suddenly, savagely. “You’ll never do it!” went on the magician. “You thought you did; but you didn’t, and you never will. It’s hopeless! Resolve — gyre — explode!”

“Damn you; get out!” said Briggs.

“Taking G as 31 point 2,” continued the torturer, “and Pi as 3 point 24156, and e as ——” Briggs sprang to his feet. “You can’t! You’re getting it all wrong. Curse you! Curse you!” he yelled.

“You’ll never do it! You’ll never do it!” went on Simon implacably. “Sin Theta plus Cos Theta equals twice the root of minus eight! You’ll never do it! You’ll never do it!”

“Are you the devil come to torture me before my time?” “Good. No. I’m Simon Iff. And all I want to know is — how long do you need to finish your problem?”

“Oh, get out! Get out!”

“Seven times six is forty-four, and ——”

“Get out!”

“Log one plus X equals X, minus half X squared plus a third X cubed plus ——”

“Minus, you dolt!” shrieked Briggs. “For God’s sake, stop! You’re putting me all out!”

“Some people are going to disturb you very soon by hanging you.” He squeezed the professor’s windpipe till he gasped.

“Tell me how long you need to finish the problem, and I’ll go, and I’ll see you have all you need, and no disturbance.”

“A month, six weeks. Oh, go, there’s a good fellow!” Simon Iff went out without another word. He had an appointment to meet ’Anging ’Olborne for dinner.

“Well, I had to put him to the torture,” said the magician; “but I got him to say one rational sentence. Now I want you to trust me in this. Get the execution postponed for a month. Don’t disturb old Briggs. Let him have anything he calls for, in reason; he’ll need little. As soon as he talks rationally again, you and I will go and see him in the cell. I can promise you this thing is going to clear up like a day in spring. April showers bring May flowers.”

Just five weeks later Holborne telephoned to Simon Iff to come round to his house. “Briggs has woken up,” he said; “for the last week he has been working with drawing materials which he had asked for. Suddenly he swept the whole thing aside and looked up at the warden. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he said. ‘And where’s the lab. gone?’ They rang me up at once. Let’s get down.”

They found Briggs pacing his cell in a rage. “This is an outrage!” he cried when he saw his friends, “a damned outrage! I shall write to the Times!”

“You’d better talk to us first,” said Holborne. “I may say that all England has been waiting to hear from you for some months.”

“I should say so,” retorted Briggs; “and you may go and tell them that I did it! Alone I did it!” “Are we not talking at cross purposes?” suggested the mystic mildly. “Our mundane minds are preoccupied with the small matter of the murder of Peter Clark. And I don’t think you did that.”

“Who? I. Of course not. Don’t be so silly!”

“Well, you were there. We should really be grateful if you would tell us who did do it.”

“That fool Marshall, of course.”

“Marshal?” said the mystic.

“The farmer down by Saffield. Peter had seduced his wife. He tracked the boy up here — I mean up there; I can’t realize this isn’t my lab, you know, just yet. Followed him into the lab. Peter drew an automatic. Marshall got my Webley, and fired while the boy was hesitating. Then he threw down the gun, and went out.”

“Don’t you think you might have explained this before?” said Holborne. “Do you realize that you’ve been convicted for murder; if it hadn’t been for Iff here, we’d have hanged you a fortnight ago.”

“How could I?” said Briggs irritably. “You don’t understand.” “Well, explain later. We’ll get you a free pardon as soon as possible. I may tell you that Marshall fell down a quarry the same night as the murder. He must have been half insane. But we never connected his death with your case. Anyhow, I’ll see to it that you get out by to-morrow, and we’ll celebrate it at the club. Perhaps you would make us a little speech, and tell us what you’ve been doing all these months.”

“All right. But I’ve got to see Williams right away.” “Williams!” said Simon Iff. “So that is what it was, was it? I’ll tell him to-day to come right down and see you; and we’ll have him up to the dinner to-morrow, and we’ll all live happy ever after!”

Two days later Briggs was on his feet at a great and special gathering of the Hemlock Club. Simon Iff was on his best behavior, except that he would drink only tea, saying that his mood was exquisite and aesthetic like a Ming Vase. Briggs, as the guest of honor, was seated on the right of the president of the club, on whose other hand sat Rear-Admiral Williams, a trusted member of the Secret Committee of Public Defense, which is known to just a few people in London as a liaison between Navy and Army, and a background to both.

The professor was no orator, but he did not lack encouragement. “I want to thank you all very much,” he said. “Of course we can’t tell you just what this thing is, but Admiral Williams has been good enough to say that it’s all right as far as he can see, and that ought to be good enough for us all. He’s a jolly good fellow, Williams, and I wish we had a few more like him. I mean I’m glad we’ve got a lot more like him. Oh hang it! that’s not what I mean either. I’m no speaker, you know; but anyhow I thought you’d like to hear just how I came to think of this damned thing. You see I was working that morning — just finished verifying Mersenne’s statement for p equals 167, rather a tricky proof, but awfully jolly, so my mind was absolutely clear and empty. Well, here comes the Watts and the Kettle business. That poor devil Marshall runs in after Peter, right on his heels. Peter draws; I didn’t notice particularly, Marshall gets my Webley and fires. I see it revolve and explode. See! Two ideas, revolve and explode. Nothing in that. Well, then Peter stays on his feet, quite a while, though he was dead. So I thought of reflex balance; you know, the automatic dodge in our soles; it goes wrong when you get locomotor ataxia. Then he gives a gasp, and puts his arms out, like wings: and then I thought of his soul flying away. Nothing in that. Well, then, Plummer throws down my Webley by the body and runs out. I picked up the gun, because its proper place was on my desk; I’m a man of precision in such matters; but to get to the desk I had to cross Clark’s body, which should not have been there at all. It brought me up with a jerk. I stood by it, I dare say for a long time. Now here’s the funny part. I was thinking, or rather something inside me was thinking, for I don’t know to this minute who was thinking, or what. The next thing I remember, I was picking the automatic out of Peter’s hand; and my mind clove to the contrast with the revolver, the way in which recoil is used to reload and recock the Brown. Then all the pieces of my mind flew together. I became conscious of an idea. I would make a duplex rotating engine to act as a gyroscope, with a system of automatic balances, operated by the recoil of the explosions in the engine. In other words, I had the idea for a self-balancing aeroplane, a true mechanical bird. When the vicar asked me if I realized what I had done, I naturally replied: “By God, I should think I did,” or something of the sort. After that I got more and more absorbed in the details of the problem — can you wonder that I could think of nothing else? I remember nothing but a great deal of irritating talk around me, though with long intervals of most blessed silence. Then I woke up to find myself in the condemned cell! I want to tell you all how much I appreciate your kindness, and I thank you all very much.”

He sat down suddenly, exhausted and embarrassed. “I hope I said the right thing. I’m such an ass,” he whispered to his neighbor. But the applause reassured him.

A little later the president turned to the old magician. “I’m sure we are all keenly interested to hear how Mr. Iff solved this case, and saved his friend — our friend — and helped him to do this great thing for England. I will call upon him to say a few words to us.” Iff rose rather awkwardly. “I’m afraid of boring you,” he said; “you know I’m a bit of a crank, with theories about the tendencies of the mind.”

“Go on! Go on!” came from every quarter.

“Well, it’s like this. If we get full of alcohol — any of us — too often and too steadily and too long — we begin to see rats and serpents and such things. We don’t see horses and elephants. That is, our minds are machines which run in grooves, narrow grooves, mostly. We can’t think what we like, and how we like; we have to think as we have been taught to think, or as our whole race has been taught to think by aeons of experience. So I know that there are certain ways of thought in which a given man cannot think, however obvious such ways might seem to another man. For instance, imagine a man of high lineage and education and wealth. By some accident he is stranded penniless in a far city. He is actually starving. He revolves the situation in his mind. He exerts his whole intelligence to meet the problem. But what does he do? There are thousands of ways of making money. He could get a job at the docks; he could obtain relief at a charitable organization — no such method occurs to him at all. He does not look through the want advertisements in the papers. His one idea is to go to his consul or some person of position, explain his situation, and make a highly dignified loan. Perhaps he is too proud even to do that; ultimately it strikes him to pledge his jewelry. A thief in a similar position is equally limited; he looks about him merely for an opportunity to steal.

Similarly, an Alpine guide will despair and die on a quite easy mountain if it be unfamiliar. It is the flower of biological success to be able to adapt oneself to one’s conditions without effort. The whole of human anatomy is in accord with these theses. The brain is merely a more elaborate thinking machine than the rest of the body. The spinal cord thinks, in its own fashion. Even such simple organs as those which operate digestion have their own type of thought; and narrow indeed is the groove in which they move. A bee, inclosed in an empty flower pot, held against a window pane, will beat itself to death against the glass, though it could escape quite easily at the other end, if it were only capable of thinking outside its groove; similarly, the alimentary canal is so convinced that its sole duty is peristaltic action that it will insanely continue this movement when rest would save the man attached to it from a lingering and agonizing death. We are all highly specialized and not particularly intelligent machines.

In the matter of crime these remarks are peculiarly applicable; outside quite obvious things like picking pockets, you have merely to describe a crime to the police; they will tell you that five or six men only, in a city of as many millions, could have done it. Swindling has as much individuality and style as writing poetry — and it is infinitely more respectable! But I digress. With regard to this case, I knew at once that however much our friend here might have wanted to get rid of his nephew, it simply was not in him to do it. It is not a question of his moral outfit, but of his mental equipment.

But much more interesting than this, which is, or should be, obvious to us all, is this point: How did I manage to communicate with the man, absorbed as he was in some world beyond ordinary ken? I found him quite insensible to direct appeal. His situation? He did not know that there was any situation. I tickled him. His body responded automatically, but his mind was wholly disconnected by an act of his very highly trained will, and was merely conscious of an irritation and disturbance.

So I determined to talk to his mind on its own plane. I knew from the so-called confession to the vicar that he was acutely conscious of having done something. I suspected that something to be of the nature of the solution of a problem; and by his continued abstraction, I knew that he had only got a general idea, and was at work on the details. So I told him that he would never do it, again and again. I knew that he must have had many moments of despair. It woke him up; the voice of his particular devil — we all of us have one; he always tells us to give up, that it’s hopeless, that we shall never do it — that voice became material in mine; so he responded with curses. But that was not enough; to rouse him further I began to attack his mind by quoting mathematical formulae incorrectly. I knew that must upset his calculation, confuse him, rouse him to contradiction. The plan succeeded; he had been deaf — physically deaf, to all intents and purposes — to all other remarks; but to an attack on the fortress in which he was shut up he was bound to reply. I forced him to come to terms by refusing to stop the torture. He was distracted, upset, uncertain whether two and two still made four. In this way I made him tell me how long he needed to finish his work; and it was then easy to arrange a reprieve to allow him to finish his work. I’m sorry; I hope I have not bored you.” And he sat down abruptly.