She wondered if there were any hearses upstairs, handy, among the other vehicles.
CHAPTER VIII
To the Asylum
Senator Burnside had lived with horror in his heart for days. It wasn’t a vague horror. It was a very precise one. It was a horror of padded cells and strait jackets, asylums and high gates closing behind him and shutting off the outside world forever.
He knew exactly what he was afraid of. So that, almost at the sound of the men’s voices, he realized at once what was going on.
Burnside was in the living room of his home — that living room in which he had seen something it was impossible for any man to see because it was impossible for it really to have been there: a little bright-red man leading a green, smiling dog on a leash made out of flowers.
The voice sounded at the front door, heavy, arrogant, callously indifferent.
“Is Senator Burnside in?”
The Senator heard his servant answer to the effect that he was in. And Burnside started to get out of the living room.
If he went out the regular door, it would land him in the hall in plain sight of the street door. So he didn’t try to get out that way. He stole toward the dining-room door.
Then he heard steps as somebody, his servant he thought, came to cut that doorway off. So he jumped like a frightened rabbit toward the window.
What he saw out there in the street confirmed his worst fears. There was a sort of ambulance out there, which had grating over the windows. It looked like a cage in which dangerous animals might be borne off.
Or dangerous men. Madmen!
Burnside was tugging at the window, but it wouldn’t go up. Then he heard someone come into the room behind him. He turned with what dignity he could muster. There was only one course, now. Try to bluster it out. The man standing in the hall doorway was broad of shoulder and hairy of hands. He had on white like an interne, but he looked, Burnside thought in terror, more like a butcher.
Beside the big man in white was a little fellow, middle-aged, with a kind of happy smile on his face as if he went around continually with a secret joke in his mind that he didn’t intend to share with the rest of the world.
“Senator Burnside!” the little man chirped, rubbing his hands together. The hands looked like bird claws. “You surely weren’t trying to go out the window, were you? Or were you? That wouldn’t be a reasonable thing to do when there are doors to use.”
“Of course I wasn’t trying to go out the window,” said Burnside stiffly. “I merely wanted a little fresh air in the room and was raising the window to get it. Who are you, sir?”
“My name is Sherman,” said the little man. “Dr. Sherman, of the Washington Board of Psychiatrists. We — the board, that is — want to have a little talk with you. So I came in the car, which the board has at its disposal, to get you. If you will just get your hat and coat—”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Burnside thickly. When you’ve dreamed of something like this for days, and then it happens, the fact tends to clog your throat a little and make it hard to talk.
“We merely want to talk to you a bit,” soothed the birdlike little man who called himself Dr. Sherman. His jolly smile beamed out. “We understand you have been having a little trouble lately with — your eyes. You see things. So if you will just come along with us—”
Burnside lost all reason, then. He forgot about trying to act pompous and authoritative.
Fram, he thought wildly, had betrayed him. He had gone to Fram with a story of a “friend of his” seeing the little red man with the green dog. Fram, after saying that anyone seeing such things could not be sane, had deduced that Burnside was talking about himself and not any mythical third party. Then Fram had gone to the Washington Board of Psychiatrists about him.
Probably Burnside wouldn’t have gone so completely to pieces if he hadn’t entertained such grave doubts in the last two weeks as to his own sanity. He didn’t need anyone to insinuate that perhaps he didn’t have all his buttons; he was increasingly afraid of it himself.
And now — an asylum wagon, an attendant, and a horribly smiling little psychiatrist!
Burnside screamed and leaped for the dining-room door in spite of the steps he had heard there a moment ago. He was confronted by his butler, who stepped into view when Burnside charged.
Burnside was hopelessly aware that his servants had been looking askance at him for days — realizing that he was acting very queerly indeed. The butler had never, for example, swallowed that story about Burnside’s gun going off in the dead of night because he had been “cleaning” it.
The servants thought he was crazy, too. So the butler promptly closed with Burnside and kept him from getting out of the living room into the dining-room.
The Senator lashed out wildly with his fists. The servant went down. But by then the white-coated man had him. He got the Senator down and held him by sitting on his head, as one would hold an unruly horse.
“I’m not crazy!” screamed Burnside. If he wasn’t, it was exactly the wrong thing to yell. “I swear I’m sane!”
“There, there,” soothed the little doctor, never losing his smile or his professional composure for a moment. “Of course you’re sane. Of course you’re not crazy. But we just want to ask you a few questions— Oh, you would, would you!”
Burnside had tried to grab Sherman’s legs. So the little birdlike doctor nodded to the big man sitting on Burnside’s head, and the man smacked the Senator in the jaw.
Burnside wasn’t out, but he was unable to move when they hoisted him out the door and into the dreadful vehicle with the grated windows. He heard the little man say: “My, but it’s fortunate this was discovered! Think of having the nation’s affairs handled by a crazy man! A United States Senator, gone mad in office!”
“Sometimes I think they’re all a little nuts,” observed the big man, dumping Burnside into the wagon.
Burnside was stirring again; but it did him no good, then, because the door at the end had clanged shut on him. It sounded to the anguished Senator like the big iron asylum gates which would also presently clang shut on him. Unless he could beat this — somehow.
“Just make yourself comfortable, Senator,” chirped birdlike Dr. Sherman. He had climbed into the rear of the ambulance with Burnside. So had the big man in white, who now glowered at him, plainly ready to sock him again if he tried any tricks.
Burnside couldn’t see the driver. There was a little window in the front wall of the padded truck, but the man at the wheel was sitting to the left of it, out of his range of vision. All he knew was that there was a driver, because the car was moving.
“Look, here,” the Senator said to Sherman. “This is all pretty ridiculous. I don’t care what Fram told you, it isn’t true.”
“Of course, it isn’t,” said the little psychiatrist, beaming.
“The things I told Fram were about a friend of mine,” said Burnside.
“Of course. About a friend of yours.”
The ambulance slowed, then stopped.
The little doctor hopped to the small front window, opened it a crack, and said to the driver: “What’s up? Why are you stopping?”
“Dr. Fram is out here. He wants to go with us, I guess,” Burnside heard the driver reply.
Then the car sagged a little as a man got on. Burnside saw the back of someone’s back, beside the driver. The car started on—
Afterward, Burnside never knew exactly what had happened. For that matter, neither did the husky man in white, nor little Dr. Sherman.
The driver of the car with the grated windows had stopped for the man with the trim goatee and the mustache that looked waxed but wasn’t. Dr. Fram nodded pleasantly to him and climbed up beside him.