Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/51

sia, agraphia, aboulia, all the odds and ends of neuroses that had been given up in despair by the "regulars." There for weeks—for months, sometimes—he would devote himself incessantly to the unfolding of some labyrinthine twist in the brain, piecing together lost fragments of the soul by constant hypnosis, until he had straightened out the complications and restored a clean human being to the world. And when he had at last brought back health and sanity, perhaps after half a year of wallowing in the slough of madness, he would turn to us with his whimsical

"Is there any among you gentlemen who still denies the existence of a personal, immortal soul?" he would ask, expecting the instantaneous negative that would spring from our

Perhaps some student, younger or bolder than the rest, would acknowledge the impeachment.

"You are half right," Brodsky would rejoin, with that curious touch of the unexpected which was always characteristic of him. "Not in that you deny the soul. There is soul everywhere; it contains the body as the amber holds the fly. But you are half right when you deny that the soul is personal, for we have one common fund to draw upon, and there is not much more difference between one individual and another than between two flowers on the same shrubs. The body is the merest external; it is the soul which occupies it, moving from house to house."

Few of us could follow the doctor when he became metaphysical. Some of us inferred that he was alluding to those peculiar cases of multiple personality that we sometimes investigated, in which two or more separate and distinct individuals seemed to be struggling for control of a single body. Others believed that he referred to the doctrine of reincarnation, in which he was said to be a believer.

The beginning of my real intimacy with Brodsky was that day in which he selected me to assist him in the examination of the brain of Radovitch, the murderer. Radovitch was a huge Slav miner, a man of enormous strength and stature, and the intelligence of a child. He was brutalized as few even among his kind are. During the entire period of his thirty-odd years of life no single redeeming influence had ever come to him. To work for twelve hours each day, stripped to the waist, begrimed with coal dust, in the mines, to go home to sleep like an animal or to consume potations of brandy until he lay stretched out upon some pot-house floor insensible—such was the routine of his life, varied only by occasionally beating his wife and smashing the wretched furniture in their squalid home upon the outskirts of the town. During the course of one prolonged debauch he murdered the woman amid circumstances of atrocious cruelty; he then set fire to the house, which was insured for a small sum, by means of a clumsy contrivance of oil-soaked cotton waste and gunpowder, and calmly presented himself at the offices of the insurance company the next day in order to draw the money. His trial and conviction were the merest formality—the jury did not even leave the box—and he was duly sentenced to die in the electric chair.

I had visited the adjoining death cell to treat an Italian murderer for defective hearing (the proneness of a man under sentence of death to worry about some minor ailment is an interesting and frequent psychological phenomenon, akin, I suppose, to that which induces him, upon the very morning of his execution, to partake of a hearty breakfast) when the head jailer pointed out Radovitch to me. The giant Slav's appearance