Manticore Page 2

  “The death of his father is always a critical moment in a man’s life, but usually he has time to make psychological preparation for it. The father grows old, relinquishes his claims on life, is manifestly preparing for death. A violent death is certainly a severe shock. But then, you knew your father must die sometime, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t remember ever thinking about it.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Hardly a premature death. The psalmist’s span.”

  “But this was murder.”

  “Who murdered him?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. He was driven, or drove himself, off a dock in Toronto harbour. When his car was raised he was found clutching the steering-wheel so tightly that they had to pry his hands from it. His eyes were wide open, and there was a stone in his mouth.”

  “A stone?”

  “Yes. This stone.”

  I held it out to her, lying on the silk handkerchief in which I carried it. Exhibit A in the case of the murder of Boy Staunton: a piece of Canadian pink granite about the size and shape of a hen’s egg.

  She examined it carefully. Then, slowly, she pushed it into her own mouth, and looked solemnly at me. Or was it solemnly? Was there a glint in her eye? I don’t know. I was far too startled by what she had done to tell. Then she took it out, wiped it very carefully on her handkerchief, and gave it back.

  “Yes; it could be done,” she said.

  “You’re a cool customer,” said I.

  “Yes. This is a very cool profession, Mr Staunton. Tell me, did no one suggest that your father might have committed suicide?”

  “Certainly not. Utterly unlike him. Anyhow, why does your mind turn immediately to that? I told you he was murdered.”

  “But no evidence of murder was found.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I had Dr Tschudi’s report about you, and I asked the librarian at our Neue Zürcher Zeitung to check their archive. They did report your father’s death, you know; he had connections with several Swiss banks. The report was necessarily discreet and brief, but it seemed that suicide was the generally accepted explanation.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Tschudi’s report suggests you think your stepmother had something to do with it.”

  “Yes, yes; but not directly. She destroyed him. She made him unhappy and unlike himself. I never suggested she drove him off the dock. She murdered him psychologically—”

  “Really? I had the impression you didn’t think much of psychology, Mr Staunton.”

  “Psychology plays a great part in my profession. I am rather a well-known criminal lawyer—or have you checked that, too? I have to know something about the way people function. Without a pretty shrewd psychological sense I couldn’t do what I do, which is to worm things out of people they don’t want to tell. That’s your job, too, isn’t it?”

  “No. My job is to listen to people say things they very badly want to tell but are afraid nobody else will understand. You use psychology as an offensive weapon in the interest of justice. I use it as a cure. So keen a lawyer as yourself will appreciate the difference. You have shown you do. You think your stepmother murdered your father psychologically, but you don’t think that would be enough to drive him to suicide. Well—I have known of such things. But if she was not the real murderer, who do you think it might have been?”

  “Whoever put the stone in his mouth.”

  “Oh, come, Mr Staunton, nobody could put that stone in a man’s mouth against his will without breaking his teeth and creating great evidence of violence. I have tried it. Have you? No, I thought you hadn’t. Your father must have put it there himself.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps somebody told him to do it. Somebody he could not or did not wish to disobey.”

  “Ridiculous. Nobody could make Father do anything he didn’t want to do.”

  “Perhaps he wanted to do this. Perhaps he wanted to die. People do, you know.”

  “He loved life. He was the most vital person I have ever known.”

  “Even after your stepmother had murdered him psychologically?”

  I was losing ground. This was humiliating. I am a fine crossexaminer and yet here I was, caught off balance time and again by this woman doctor. Well, the remedy lay in my own hands.

  “I don’t think this line of discussion profitable, or likely to lead to anything that could help me,” I said. “If you will be good enough to tell me your fee for the consultation, we shall close it now.”

  “As you wish,” said Dr von Haller. “But I should tell you that many people do not like the first consultation and want to run away. But they come back. You are a man of more than ordinary intelligence. Wouldn’t it simplify things if you skipped the preliminary flight and continued? I am sure you are much too reasonable to have expected this kind of treatment to be painless. It is always difficult in the beginning for everyone, and especially people of your general type.”

  “So you have typed me already?”

  “I beg your pardon; it would be impertinent to pretend anything of the kind. I meant only that intelligent people of wealth, who are used to having their own way, are often hostile and prickly at the beginning of analytical treatment.”

  “So you suggest that I bite the bullet and go on.”

  “Go on, certainly. But let us have no bullet-biting. I think you have bitten too many bullets recently. Suppose we proceed a little more gently.”

  “Do you consider it gentle to imply that my father killed himself when I tell you he was murdered?”

  “I was telling you only what was most discreetly implied in the news report. I am sure you have heard the implication before. And I know how unwelcome such an implication usually is. But let us change our ground. Do you dream much?”

  “Ah, so we have reached dreams already? No, I don’t dream much. Or perhaps I should say that I don’t pay much attention to the dreams I have.”

  “Have you had any dreams lately? Since you decided to come to Zürich? Since you arrived?”

  Should I tell her? Well, this was costing me money. I might as well have the full show, whatever it might be.

  “Yes. I had a dream last night.”

  “So?”

  “Quite a vivid dream, for me. Usually my dreams are just scraps—fragmentary things that don’t linger. This was of quite a different order.”

  “Was it in colour?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, it was full of colour.”

  “And what was the general tone of the dream? I mean, did you enjoy it? Was it pleasant?”

  “Pleasant. Yes, I would say it was pleasant.”

  “Tell me what you dreamed.”

  “I was in a building that was familiar, though it was nowhere known to me. But it was somehow associated with me, and I was somebody of importance there. Perhaps I should say I was surrounded by a building, because it was like a college—like some of the colleges at Oxford—and I was hurrying through the quadrangle because I was leaving by the back gate. As I went under the arch of the gate two men on duty there—porters, or policemen, functionaries and guardians of some kind—saluted me and smiled as if they knew me, and I waved to them. Then I was in a street. Not a Canadian street. Much more like a street in some pretty town in England or in Europe; you know, with trees on either side and very pleasant buildings like houses, though there seemed to be one or two shops, and a bus with people on it passed by me. But I was hurrying because I was going somewhere, and I turned quickly to the left and walked out into the country. I was on a road, with the town behind me, and I seemed to be walking beside a field in which I could see excavations going on, and I knew that some ruins were being turned up. I went through the field to the little makeshift hut that was the centre of the archaeological work—because I knew that was what it was—and went in the door. The hut was very different inside from what I had expected, because as I said it looked like a temp
orary shelter for tools and plans and things of that kind, but inside it was Gothic; the ceiling was low, but beautifully groined in stone, and the whole affair was a stone structure. There were a couple of young men in there, commonplace-looking fellows in their twenties, I would say, who were talking at the top of what I knew was a circular staircase that led down into the earth. I wanted to go down, and I asked these fellows to let me pass, but they wouldn’t listen, and though they didn’t speak to me and kept on talking to one another, I could tell that they thought I was simply a nosey intruder, and had no right to go down, and probably didn’t want to go down in any serious way. So I left the hut, and walked to the road, and turned back towards the town, when I met a woman. She was a strange person, like a gypsy, but not a dressed-up showy gypsy; she wore old fashioned, ragged clothes that seemed to have been faded by sun and rain, and she had on a wide-brimmed, battered black velvet hat with some gaudy feathers in it. She seemed to have something important to say to me, and kept pestering me, but I couldn’t understand anything she said. She spoke in a foreign language; Romany, I presumed. She wasn’t begging, but she wanted something, all the same. I thought, ‘Well, well; every country gets the foreigners it deserves’—which is a stupid remark, when you analyse it. But I had a sense that time was running short, so I hurried back to town, turned sharp to the right, this time, and almost ran into the college gate. One of the guardians called to me, ‘You can just make it, sir. You won’t be fined this time.’ And next thing I knew I was sitting at the head of a table in my barrister’s robes, presiding over a meeting. And that was it.”

  “A very good dream. Perhaps you are a better dreamer than you think.”

  “Are you going to tell me that it means something?”

  “All dreams mean something.”

  “For Joseph and Pharaoh, or Pilate’s wife, perhaps. You will have to work very hard to convince me that they mean anything here and now.”

  “I am sure I shall have to work hard. But just for the moment, tell me without thinking too carefully about it if you recognized any of the people in your dream.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Do you think they might be people you have not yet seen? Or had not seen yesterday?”

  “Doctor von Haller, you are the only person I have seen whom I did not know yesterday.”

  “I thought that might be so. Could I have been anybody in your dream?”

  “You are going too fast for me. Are you suggesting that I could have dreamed of you before I knew you?”

  “That would certainly seem absurd, wouldn’t it? Still—I asked if I could have been anybody in your dream?”

  “There was nobody in the dream who could possibly have been you. Unless you are hinting that you were the incomprehensible gypsy. And you won’t get me to swallow that.”

  “I am sure nobody could get a very able lawyer like you to swallow anything that was ridiculous, Mr Staunton. But it is odd, don’t you think, that you should dream of meeting a female figure of a sort quite outside your experience, who was trying to tell you something important that you couldn’t understand, and didn’t want to understand, because you were so eager to get back to your enclosed, pleasant surroundings, and your barrister’s robes, and presiding over something?”

  “Doctor von Haller, I have no wish to be rude, but I think you are spinning an ingenious interpretation out of nothing. You must know that until I came here today I had no idea that J. von Haller was a woman. So even if I had dreamed of coming to an analyst in this very fanciful way, I couldn’t have got that fact right, could I?”

  “It is not a fact, except insofar as all coincidences are facts. You met a woman in your dream, and I am a woman. But not necessarily that woman. I assure you it is nothing uncommon for a new patient to have an important and revealing dream before treatment begins—before he has met his doctor. We always ask, just in case. But an anticipatory dream containing an unknown fact is a rarity. Still, we need not pursue it now. There will be time for that later.”

  “Will there be any later? If I understand the dream, I cannot make head or tail of the gypsy woman with the incomprehensible conversation, and go back to my familiar world. What do you deduce from that?”

  “Dreams do not foretell the future. They reveal states of mind in which the future may be implicit. Your state of mind at present is very much that of a man who wants no conversation with incomprehensible women. But your state of mind may change. Don’t you think so?”

  “I really don’t know. Frankly, it seems to me that this meeting has been a dogfight, a grappling for advantage. Would the treatment go on like this?”

  “For a time, perhaps. But it could not achieve anything on that level. Now—our hour is nearly over, so I must cut some corners and speak frankly. If I am to help you, you will have to speak to me from your best self, honestly and with trust; if you continue to speak always from your inferior, suspicious self, trying to catch me out in some charlatanism, I shall not be able to do anything for you, and in a few sessions you will break off your treatment. Perhaps that is what you want to do now. We have one minute, Mr Staunton. Shall I see you at our next appointment, or not? Please do not think I shall be offended if you decide not to continue, for there are many patients who wish to see me, and if you knew them they would assure you that I am no charlatan, but a serious, experienced doctor. Which is it to be?”

  I have always hated being put on the spot. I was very angry. But as I reached for my hat, I saw that my hand was shaking, and she saw it, too. Something had to be done about that tremor.

  “I shall come at the appointed time,” I said.

  “Good. Five minutes before your hour, if you please. I keep a very close schedule.”

  And there I was, out in the street, furious with myself, and Dr von Haller. But in a quiet corner of my mind I was not displeased that I should be seeing her again.

  (4)

  Two days passed before my next appointment, during which I changed my mind several times, but when the hour came, I was there. I had chewed over everything that had been said and had thought of a number of good things that I would have said myself if I had thought of them at the proper time. The fact that the doctor was a woman had put me out more than I cared to admit. I have my own reasons for not liking to be instructed by a woman, and by no means all of them are associated with that intolerable old afreet Netty Quelch, who has ridden me with whip and spur for as long as I can remember. Nor did I like the dream-interpretation game, which contradicted every rule of evidence known to me; the discovery of truth is one of the principal functions of the law, to which I have given the best that is in me; is truth to be found in the vapours of dreams? Nor had I liked the doctor’s brusque manner of telling me to make up my mind, not to waste her time, and to be punctual. I had been made to feel like a stupid witness, which is as ridiculous an estimate of my character as anybody could contrive. But I would not retreat before Dr Johanna von Haller without at least one return engagement, and perhaps more than that.

  A directory had told me her name was Johanna. Beyond that, and that she was a Prof. Dr med. und spezialarzt für Psychiatrie, I could find out nothing about her.

  Ah well, there was the tremor of my hand. No sense in making a lot of that. Nerves, and no wonder. But was it not because of my nerves I had come to Zürich?

  This time we did not meet in the sitting-room but in Dr von Haller’s study, which was rather dark and filled with books, and a few pieces of modern statuary that looked pretty good, though I could not examine them closely. Also, there was a piece of old stained glass suspended in the window, which was fine in itself, but displeased me because it seemed affected. Prominent on the desk was a signed photograph of Dr Jung himself. Dr von Haller did not sit behind the desk, but in a chair near my own; I knew this trick, which is supposed to inspire confidence because it sets aside the natural barrier—the desk of the professional person. I had my eye on the doctor this time, and did not mean to let her get away with anything.<
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  She was all smiles.

  “No dogfight this time, I hope, Mr Staunton?”

  “I hope not. But it is entirely up to you.”

  “Entirely? Very well. Before we go further, the report has come from the clinic. You seem to be in depleted general health and a little—nervous, shall we say? What used to be called neurasthenic. And some neuritic pain. Rather underweight. Occasional marked tremor of the hands.”

  “Recently, yes. I have been under great stress.”

  “Never before?”

  “Now and then, when my professional work was heavy.”

  “How much have you had to drink this morning?”

  “A good sharp snort for breakfast, and another before coming here.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “It is what I usually take on a day when I am to appear in court.”

  “Do you regard this as appearing in court?”

  “Certainly not. But as I have already told you several times, I have been under heavy stress, and that is my way of coping with stress. Doubtless you think it a bad way. I think otherwise.”

  “I am sure you know all the objections to excessive use of alcohol?”

  “I could give you an excellent temperance lecture right now. Indeed, I am a firm believer in temperance for the kind of people who benefit from temperance. I am not one of them. Temperance is a middle-class virtue, and it is not my fate. On the contrary, I am rich and in our time wealth takes a man out of the middle class, unless he made all the money himself. I am the third generation of money in my family. To be rich is to be a special kind of person. Are you rich?”

  “By no means.”

  “Quick to deny it, I observe. Yet you seem to live in a good professional style, which would be riches to most people in the world. Well—I am rich, though not so rich as people imagine. If you are rich you have to discover your own truths and make a great many of your own rules. The middle-class ethic will not serve you, and if you devote yourself to it, it will trip you up and make a fool of you.”

  “What do you mean by rich?”

  “I mean good hard coin, Doctor. I don’t mean the riches of the mind or the wealth of the spirit, or any of that pompous crap. I mean money. Specifically, I count a man rich if he has an annual income of over a hundred thousand dollars before taxes. If he has that he has plenty of other evidences of wealth, as well. I have considerably more than a hundred thousand a year, and I make much of it by being at the top of my profession, which is the law. I am what used to be called ‘an eminent advocate.’ And if being rich and being an eminent advocate also requires a drink before breakfast, I am prepared to pay the price. But to assure you that I am not wholly unmindful of my grandparents, who hated liquor as the prime work of the Devil, I always have my first drink of the day with a raw egg in it. That is my breakfast.”