“The Gibson Gallery?”
“Yes. There is an ongoing exhibition of diamonds, among which is the Great Sari. The Gibson Gallery is not far from the place where the cyclist first appeared. Now do you realize…”
It was only then that all the pieces fell into place of this cleverly planned crime. Lured by the cyclist, we were supposed to rush to the opposite side of town while the thieves robbed the Gibson Gallery undisturbed.
I took my revolver, and Holmes took his hunting knife, his weapon of choice. Then we called a cab.
“Incredible,” inspector Lestrade said as we waited, hidden in a broom closet, for the robbers to appear. “I never would have guessed that they are so clever.”
“Inspector,” said Holmes, “you should never forget that criminals also stay in step with times. That’s why it is important for us to stay one step ahead of the times.”
We stood there in the closet for quite a while. How long, we could not even guess, because in the absolute dark our watches were useless. Then someone knocked on the door and we all jumped. It was just one of Lestrade’s men.
“Inspector,” he said, “I’m afraid that we’ve been waiting here for no reason. They just reported that the cyclist appeared in a different place. He’s been riding around all night like crazy, shooting at clocks.”
“Give me a list of the places where he showed up,” Holmes demanded, visibly disturbed for the first time.
Back home (and I should note that we did not utter a word during the ride), Holmes unfolded the map of London and dotted in the cyclist’s latest movements. We were looking at a nonsensical drawing. Something like a cross was sticking up from the handlebars.
“The Devil take it, Watson, it seems like you and Lestrade were right after all. The chap must be a psychopath.”
Holmes had already composed himself. In no way did he show that he was upset by the fact that his predictions had not come true. Soon after he retired into his room, from where the warm notes of a serenade could be heard.
The next day, he left for Sussex.
SIGMUND FREUD. THE CASE OF ERNEST M
In the pages that follow, I will present an example of a subject who withdrew into the world of dreams, and of the personality split that resulted. The patient, Ernest M., was admitted to Professor Breuer’s clinic after he took a meat mallet and broke all the clocks in the house, then hit his mother with the same object, inflicting serious injury on her. After thirty days of hospitalization, Ernest seemed to be completely healthy, but was also slightly depressed; his mother insisted that the young man be psychoanalyzed and Professor Breuer, knowing that I was working on the book The Interpretation of Dreams, recommended to me in a letter that I study Ernest’s case.
From the patient’s history, I learned that Ernest M. was left without a father early on. He grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, a strict but fair man, with strong Calvinistic principles. At no time in his childhood did Ernest M. display abnormalities or signs of psychological instability. According to the words of his mother, Mrs. M., he was a completely normal young man, enjoying his friends and entertainment, but also regularly fulfilling all his obligations; he played the violin and was a member of a hiking club. However, at the end of the first year of his studies, Ernest M. suddenly imagined that he was a member of a mystical sect whose followers met in their sleep. Mrs. M. discovered this quite by accident; while cleaning her sons’ room, she found a file containing written portions of poems, texts, and instructions, among which — and this caused the greatest doubt — was also a text ordering the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This happened in 1928 — a full fourteen years after the unfortunate misdeed was carried out in Sarajevo. Mrs. M. gave me the abovementioned notebook, from which I offer two stanzas that are significant for psychoanalysts:
1.
When you fall asleep, die
to this world. Then arise from your corpse and go
Straight ahead regardless of the ghosts.
Know that those unfortunate beings exist only
When they trick you into believing that you exist, too.
Withstand, you must, the burden of death.
2.
In your dreams it is always
good to know that you are not you, and that you are far
from yourself. Neglected because you turned your attention
to the specters in your body. Do not connect yourself,
either through pain or joy, to the illusions of reality
so that you also will not exist as they do.
Disturbed by the morbid tone of the poem (about which more will be said later) and by the preparations to assassinate someone who had long been dead, Mrs. M. attempted to talk to her son, which caused an eruption of anger that ended in the above-described incident and Ernest’s admission to Professor Breuer’s clinic.
During our first meeting, Ernest left the impression of being a polite, well-adapted, but melancholic and above all introverted person. I must admit that this was the first and last time in my practice till now that I have met such a person. Except for the fact that he was unshakably convinced of absurd and illogical things, Ernest seemed to be a psychologically stable young man. It was quite difficult for me to penetrate the barrier that Ernest had placed between himself and the world; if it had not been such an interesting case I doubtlessly would have put it aside, because the patient showed absolutely no desire to be healed, which is the basic condition for the work of the psychoanalyst. However, Ernest showed much more interest and desire to cooperate whenever we began talking about dreams. In spite of that, he had great difficulty talking about what he had dreamt, not because he lacked education — quite evident from the texts in the notebook — but because of his hesitancy; he obviously did not want to betray his secret. I was present during the unusually interesting (but also slightly troubling) process of the split of Ernest’s personality into the personality of the Dreamer and the personality of the wakening Ernest, where the Dreamer personality — obsessed with delusions of holiness and edification — mostly neglected and later even despised the personality of the waking Ernest M.
When I told the patient that his spite was leading toward an even more drastic separation of his personalities, he reacted quite calmly. “Of course,” he said, “the old Ernest must die. In order for me to be born in the Spirit, I must get rid of the old Ernest. He likes girls, and women have the image of a soul instead of a soul.” To my question: What is that, the image of a soul? Ernest drew this sign 
. I asked him to explain it to me and he agreed, with pleasure. What he ended up recounting to me was a flood of images from, I am convinced of it, the darkest regions of the collective unconscious. The female soul, according to Ernest’s account, is only an image of the male soul; it is Adam’s rib twisted, the archetype of the letter M, like mater; hyle without form or substance. The male soul, on the other hand, has a horizontal cross-bar that gives it stability and it looks like this: 
. But that is not its real state, but its state after the fall because, as can be seen, its top, all of its ends, are pointed toward the earth. Therefore it is necessary to turn things around (metanoia?) and point the soul toward the vertical axis anew —