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?"