A Puzzle for fools Read Online Free Page A

heard spirit voices. You could see him suddenly break off in the middle of a sentence to listen to phantom messages which were, to him, far more important than the conversation of his fellow inmates. Spiritualism had gotten him as successfully as spirits had gotten me.
    There were about six others, but I only knew a couple of them. Franz Stroubel sat by himself, a fragile, paper-thin little man with a shock of white hair and the eyes of a fawn. He had been in Doctor Lenz’ sanitarium ever since that night six months before when, instead of conducting the Eastern Symphony Orchestra, he had begun to conduct the audience, and later had stood bare-headed in Times Square trying to conduct the traffic. The rhythm of life had become confused in his mind.
    As I watched him at the breakfast table, his beautiful hands never stopped moving. There was no other means of telling that he had suffered a setback.
    The most popular inmate was Billy Trent, a swell kid who had been hit on the head playing football. It was only a superficial brain lesion. He thought he was serving in a drug store, and he would come up all smiles and eagerness to ask your order. You couldn't resist him. You had to take a chocolate milk shake and a liverwurst on rye. Miss Brush had told me the lesion would heal soon and he would be well again. It made me glad.
    After breakfast I began to wonder about the nonappearance of Geddes. I knew that he, like myself, had a bad time nights. I couldn't help thinking that, perhaps, something had happened to him, too.
    I asked Miss Brush about it when she conducted us to the smoking room, where we were supposed to digest our breakfasts over the high-brow magazines. She didn't reply. She never did when you asked anything about the other patients. She just struck a match for my cigarette and told me there was a good article on theatrical producing in Harper's . To please her, I picked up the magazine and started to read.
    Geddes looked pretty shaken when he appeared. He strolled over to me and sat down on the couch. He was one of those thirtyish men who look like Ronald Colman; handsome, groomed, and with a mustache which you felt must be a whole-time job. He had been in America several years but like Rupert Brooke's grave, he was forever England, or, rather, Anglo-India.
    I noticed that his hand trembled as he lifted his cigarette for Miss Brush to light. I asked him quite bluntly if he had had a good night. He seemed surprised that I had started the amenities, because I was usually pretty glum.
    "A good night?" he echoed in that type of English voice which, in the Lonsdale era, used to set Broadway by the ears. "As a matter of fact, I had a rotten night."
    "I had a pretty bad time, too," I said encouragingly. "Maybe I disturbed you."
    "There was a bit of a row, but I didn't pay much attention." I felt that he was edging around to say something.
    "I guess it's fairly grim for you here," I tried. "After all, you're not a mental salad like the rest of us. Your trouble's more or less physical."
    "I suppose it is." He spoke quietly but with a strange faltering in his voice. "You're better off than I am, though. They'll cure you, but none of these doctors seem to know the first thing about narcolepsy. I've read a few medical books and I know as much about it as any of 'em. They say you've got a screw loose in the central nervous system. They know something snaps and you go to sleep fifteen times a day and that if you've got cataplexy, too, you're liable to turn as rigid as a five-bar gate. But they can't do anything about making you well."
    He looked at his hands as though he hated them for shaking. "I came here because I heard Stevens and Moreno were having real results with some new drug. For a while I had hopes, but it doesn't seem to do me any good."
    "It must be tough," I murmured.
    Geddes bit the lip under his mustache and said surprisingly: "Moreno's one of those supercilious blighters. Jolly difficult to tell him anything, if