June 15th, and it was in the direction of that city that my present trip had taken me.  I considered this but the first step of my return under the auspices of its Police Department.  “Called Back” was the title of the book that stared me in the face.  After refusing for a long time I finally weakened and signed the slip; but I did not place it on the book.  To have done that would, in my mind, have been tantamount to giving consent to extradition; and I was in no mood to assist the detectives in their mean work.  At what cost had I signed that commitment slip?  To me it was the act of signing my own death-warrant.

VI

During the entire time that my delusions of persecution, as they are called, persisted, I could not but respect the mind that had laid out so comprehensive and devilishly ingenious and, at times, artistic a Third Degree as I was called upon to bear.  And an innate modesty (more or less fugitive since these peculiar experiences) does not forbid my mentioning the fact that I still respect that mind.

Suffering such as I endured during the month of August in my own home continued with gradually diminishing force during the eight months I remained in this sanatorium.  Nevertheless my sufferings during the first four of these eight months was intense.  All my senses were still perverted.  My sense of sight was the first to right itself—­nearly enough, at least, to rob the detectives of their moving pictures.  But before the last fitful film had run through my mind, I beheld one which I shall now describe.  I can trace it directly to an impression made on my memory about two years earlier, before my breakdown.

Shortly after going to New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee.  One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman.  It was that impression which now revived in my mind.  But by a process strictly in accordance with Darwin’s theory, the Eden Musee gorilla had become a man—­in appearance not unlike the beast that had inspired my distorted thought.  This man held a bloody dagger which he repeatedly plunged into the woman’s breast.  The apparition did not terrify me at all.  In fact I found it interesting, for I looked upon it as a contrivance of the detectives.  Its purpose I could not divine, but this fact did not trouble me, as I reasoned that no additional criminal charges could make my situation worse than it already was.

For a month or two, “false voices” continued to annoy me.  And if there is a hell conducted on the principles of my temporary hell, gossippers will one day wish they had attended strictly to their own business.  This is not a confession.  I am no gossipper, though I cannot deny that I have occasionally gossipped—­a little.  And this was my punishment:  persons in an adjoining room seemed to be repeating the very same things which I had said of others on these communicative occasions.  I supposed that those whom I had talked about had in some way found me out, and intended now to take their revenge.