Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/50

"The girl struggled no longer, but sat watching, apathetical and hopeless."

Although our intimacy did not arise until some time afterward, my first meeting with Dr. Brodsky profoundly impressed me. He was at that time professor of nervous diseases at the hospital to which I had been newly attached—a dark, sinewy, undersized man, with a great head absurdly disproportionate to his body, and flashing eyes that seemed to pierce to pierce through you and read your thoughts as he looked at you, though without his glasses he could scarcely have seen his hand in front of his face. Ivan Brodsky, he called himself, and it was said that he was a cross between two races whose blend of shrewdness and mysticism was probably accountable for the production of so remarkable a personality as his own.

Brodsky was at once the most unassuming and the most audacious of men. Unassuming in that he took no part in the little social festivities and celebrations of the country town. Outside the confines of the hospital, where he was all-dominating, he might have been a small storekeeper for all the pose he adopted. It was said that he spent his entire spare time reading and studying—and making his remarkable investigations.

Yet he was the most audacious of men by reason of the experiments which he performed in the ward set apart for the treatment of obscure brain lesions. Uncanny experiments he would perform there, some of which curdled the blood in the veins of us younger men. He was an expert hypnotist and received delicate cases from all parts of the country: lost and multiple personality, amne-