My first experience with a great logician by Jacques Foutrelle. It was once my
good fortune to meet in person Professor Augustus s. F X Van Duson,
pH D, L D, frs M, D, et cetera. The
meeting came about through a singular happening which was as mystifying as it was dangerous
to me. He saved my life in fact, and in process of hauling
me back from eternity, the edge of that appalling mist which separates life and
death, I had full opportunity of witnessing the workings of that marvelously keen,
cold brain which has made him the most distinguished scientist and logician of his day.
It was some time afterward, however, that Professor Van Dusson was identified
in my mind with the thinking machine. I had dined at the Hotel Teutonic,
taken a cigar from my pocket, lighted it, and started for a
stroll across Boston Common. It was after eight o'clock on one of those clear,
nippy evenings of winter. I was near the center of the Common,
on one of the many little bipaths which lead toward Beacon Hill, when I
became conscious of an acute pain in my chest, a sudden fluttering of my
heart, and a constriction in my throat. The lights in the distance began
to waver and grow dim. Perspiration broke out all over me from an inward,
gnawing agony, which grew more intense each moment. I felt myself reeling.
My cigar dropped from my fingers, and I clutched at a seat to
steady myself. There was no one near me. I tried to call.
Then everything grew dark and I sank down on the ground. My last recollection
was of a figure approaching me. The last words I heard were a petulant,
irritable dear me. Then I was lost to consciousness. When I recovered
consciousness, I lay on a couch in a strange room. My eyes wandered
weakly about and lingered with a certain childish interest on half a dozen spots which
reflected glitteringly the light of an electric bulb sat high up on one side.
These bright spots, I came to realize after a moment, were metal parts
of various instruments of a laboratory. For a time, I lay helpless,
listless, with trembling pulse and ear drums thumping. Then I heard steps approaching,
and someone bent over and peered into my face. It was a man,
but such a man as I had never seen before. A great shock
of straw yellow hair tumbled about a broad, high forehead, a small,
wrinkled, querulous face, the face of an aged child, a pair of
watery blue eyes squinting aggressively through thicked spectacles, and a thin lipped mouth as
straight as the mark of a surgeon's knife, save for the drooping corners.
My impression then was that it was some sort of hallucination, the distorted vagary
of a disordered brain. But gradually my vision cleared, and the grip of
slender fingers on my pulse made me realize the actuality of the apparition. How
do you feel? The thin lips had opened just enough to let out the
question. The tone was curt and belligerent, and the voice rasped unpleasantly.
At the same time, the squint eyes were focused on mine with a steady,
piercing glare that made me uneasy. I tried, I had to answer,
but my tongue refused to move. The gaze continued for an instant.
Then the man the thinking machine, turned away and prepared a particularly vile smelling
concoction, which he poured into me. Then I was lost again. After
a time it might have been minutes or hours, I felt again the hand
on my pulse, and again the thinking machine favored me with a glare.
An hour later, I was sitting up on the couch with unclouded brain and
a heartbeat which was nearly normal. It was then I learned why Professor van
Dusen, an eminent man of the sciences, had been dubbed the thinking machine.
I understood firsthand how material muddles were so unfailingly dissipated by unadulterated, infallible
logic. Remember that I had gone into that room, an inanimate thing,
inert, unconscious, mentally and physically dead to all practical intents, beyond the
point where I might have babbled any elucidating fact, and remembered, too please
that I didn't know, had not the faintest idea what had happened to me
beyond the fact that I had fallen unconscious. The thinking machine didn't ask questions,
yet he supplied all the missing details, together with a host of personal,
intimate things of which he could personally have had no knowledge. In other
words, I was an abtruse problem. And he solved me. With head
tilted back against the cushion of the chair, and such a head with eyes
unwaveringly turned upward, and fingertips pressed idly together. He sat there, a
strange, grotesque little figure in the midst of his laboratory apparatus. Not for
a moment did he display the slightest interest in me personally. It was all
as if I had been written down on a slate to be wiped off when
I was solved. Did this ever happen to you before? He asked abruptly,
No, I replied, What was it? You were poisoned? He
said. The poison was a deadly one, corrosive's subliment, or by chloride
or mercury. The shock was very severe. But you'll be all right in
poisoned, I exclaimed, aghast who poisoned me? Why you poisoned yourself?
He replied testily, It was your own carelessness. Nine out of ten persons
handle poison as if it were candy, and you are like all the rest.
But I couldn't have poisoned myself, I protested, Why I've had no
occasion to handle poisons, not for I don't know how long. I do
know, he said, it was nearly a year ago when you handled this.
The corrosive sublement is always dangerous. The tone irritated me. The impassive
arrogance of the little man inflamed my reeling brain. And I'm not sure that
I did not shake my finger in his face. If I was poisoned,
I declared, with some heat, it was not my fault. Somebody gave
it to me, somebody tried to You poisoned yourself, said the thinking machine
again, impatiently. You talk like a child. How do you know I
poisoned myself? How do you know I ever handled it poisoned? And how
do you know it was a year ago? If I did? The Thinking
Machine regarded me coldly for an instant, and then those strange eyes of his
wandered upward again. I know those things, he said, just as I
know your name, address, and profession from cards I found in your pockets,
Just as I know you smoke from half a dozen cigars on you,
just as I know that you're wearing those clothes for the first time this winter,
Just as I know you lost your wife within a few months that you
kept house then, and that your house was an infested with insects. I
know, just as I know everything else, by the rules of inevitable logic.
My head was whirling. I stared at him in blank astonishment. But
how do you know those things? I insisted in bewilderment. The average person
of today replied, the scientist knows nothing unless it is written down and thrust
under his nose. I happened to be a physician. I saw you fall
and went to you, my first thought being of heart trouble. Your pulse
showed it was not that, and it was obviously not apoplexy. Now there
was no visible reason why you should have collapsed like that. There had been
no shot, There was no wound, therefore poisoned. An examination confirmed this
first hypothesis. Your symptoms showed that the poison was by chloride of mercury.
I put you in a cab and brought you here. From the fact you
were not dead, then I knew that your system had absorbed only a minute
quantity of poison, a quantity so small that it demonstrated instantly that there had
been no suicidal intent, and was indicated too that no one else had administered
it. If that was true, I knew. I didn't guess. I
knew that the poisoning was accidental. How accidental. My first surmise, naturally,
was that the poison had been absorbed through the mouth. I searched your
pockets. The only thing I found that you would put in your mouth were
the cigars where they poisoned. A test showed they were all of them with
intent to kill. No, not enough poison was used. Was the poison
a part of the gum used to bind the cigar? Possible, of course,
but not probable. Then what his eyes and squinted at me suddenly aggressively,
I shook my head, and as an afterthought, I closed my gaping
mouth. Perhaps you carried corrosive supplement in your pocket. I didn't find any,
but perhaps you once carried it. I tore out the coat pocket in
which I found the cigars and subjected it to the test. At some time
there had been corrosive supplement in the form of powder or crystals in the pocket,
and in some manner, perhaps because of an imperfection in the package,
a minute quantity was loose in your pocket. Here was an answer to every
question, and more, Here was how the cigars were poisoned, and in
combination with a tailor's tag inside your pocket, a short history of your life.
Briefly, it was like this. Once you had corrosive supplement in your
pocket. For what purpose? First thought, to rid your home of insects?
Second thought, if you were boarding, married or unmarried, the task
of getting rid of the insects would have been left to the servant. This
would possibly have been the case if you had been living at home. So
I assumed for the instant that you were keeping house, And if keeping house
you were married, you bought the poison for use in your own house.
Now without an effort, naturally, I had you married and keeping house.
Then what the tailor's tag with your name and the date your clothing was made
one year and three months ago. It is winter clothing. If you had
worn it since the poison was loose in your pocket, the thing that happened
to you to night would have happened to you before. But it never happened
before. Therefore, I assumed that you had the poison early last spring,
when insects began to be troublesome, and immediately after that you laid away the
suit until this winter. I know you are wearing the suit for the first
time this winter, because again, this thing has not happened before, and
because two of the faint odor of mothballs, a band of crape on your
hat, the picture of a young woman in your watch, and the fact
you are now living at your club as your bill for last month's shows established
beyond doubt that you are a widower. It's perfectly miraculous, I exclaimed.
Logic. Logic, Logic, snapped the irritable little scientist. You are a
lawyer. You ought to know the correlation of facts. You ought to know
that two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time.
End of my first experience with the great logician.