Fancies and Goodnights - Collier John - Страница 14

«Oh, what is that, darling?» cried the young she-angel, in accents of frustration and dismay.

«What is what?» asked the analyst, who was at this moment somewhat preoccupied by his researches.

The young she-angel became very silent and melancholy. She knew what she had seen, and now remembered things she wished she had thought of before. It is well-known that this makes sins of this sort no smaller. «Alas,» said she, «I think I have recovered my memory.»

«Then you are cured,» cried the analyst in delight, «and my method has been proved correct, and will be unanimously adopted in the profession. What an inestimable benefit I have conferred upon my colleagues, or at least on those whose patients are half or a quarter as beautiful as you are! But tell me what you remember. I ask you, not as your doctor, but as your future husband.»

How easily one sin follows upon another, particularly the sin of lying upon that which had just been committed! The poor angel could not find it in her heart to destroy his happiness by telling him that after seven years he would have to relinquish her to the gross and bristly fiend. She murmured something about having fallen asleep in her bath, and having a tendency to somnambulism. Her story was eagerly accepted, and the happy young analyst hastened out to procure a marriage license.

The fiend immediately made himself visible again, and smiled upon his victim with abominable good-nature. «Quick work!» said he. «You've saved me a lot of trouble. There are girls in this town who'd have shilly-shallied for the best part of a week. In return, I'll get you a box or two with some clothes in 'em, so your story will hold together, and you can marry the guy and be happy. You have to hand it to old Tom T. — he hasn't a jealous hair in his tail!» The truth is, the old rascal knew she'd sooner or later many someone or other, and as actually he was as jealous as a demon, he thought it better to be jealous of one than of two. Also, he felt she might just as well choose a good provider, with a well-stocked ice-box and liquor closet, and a basement furnace beside which he could sleep warm of nights. Psychoanalysts are always well furnished in these respects. And what had finally decided him was the reflection that a marriage which is founded on a lie is usually fertile in other transgressions, as pleasant to the nostrils of a fiend as are roses and lilies to the rest of us.

In this last respect, we may say at once that the old villain was bitterly disappointed. No wife could possibly be more angelic than our angel. In fact, the sweet odours of domestic virtue became so oppressive to the devil that he took himself off to Atlantic City for a breath of fresh air. He found the atmosphere of that resort so exhilarating that he remained there most of the seven years. Thus the angel was almost able to forget the future in the extreme happiness of the present. At the end of the first year she became the mother of a sturdy boy, and at the end of the third she had a beautiful little girl. The apartment they lived in was arranged in the best of taste; her husband rose higher and higher in his profession, and was cheered to the echo at all the principal meetings of psychoanalysts. But as the seventh year drew to a close the fiend came around to see how things were getting along. He told her much of what he had seen in Atlantic City, and embroidered on the life they would live together when her time was up. From that day on he appeared very frequently, and not only when she was alone. He was utterly without delicacy, and would permit himself to be seen by her at moments when even an elephant-hided devil should have realized his presence was embarrassing. She would close her eyes, but fiends are seen more easily with the eyes dosed. She would sigh bitterly.

«How can you sigh so bitterly at such a moment as this?» her husband asked her. The angel could hardly explain, and it almost made a rift between them.

«I wonder,» said the analyst on another such occasion, «if this can be connected with your experiences before yon lost your memory. Is it possible your cure is not complete? It almost shakes my faith in my method.»

This thought preyed upon his mind until he was on the point of a breakdown. «My work is ruined,» said he one day. «I have lost, faith in my great discovery. I am a failure. I shall go downhill. I shall take to drink. Here is a grey hair! What is worse than an old, grey, drunken psychoanalyst, who has lost faith in himself and his science, both of which he believed equal to anything? My poor children, what a father you will have to grow up with! You will have no pleasant home, no education, and probably no shoes. You will have to wait outside saloons. You will get inferiority complexes, and when you are married you will take it out on your unfortunate partners, and they too will have to be psychoanalyzed.»

At this the poor young angel gave way altogether. After all, there were only a few weeks left She thought it better to destroy the remnant of her happiness than to ruin the lives of her husband and children. That night she told him all.

«I would never have credited such things,» said her husband, «but you, my dear, have made me believe in angels, and from that it is a short step to believing in fiends as well. You have restored my faith in my science, which has frequently been likened to the casting out of devils. Where is he? Can I get a sight of him?»

«All too easily,» replied the angel. «Go upstairs a little earlier than usual, and hide yourself in my wardrobe. When I come up and begin to undress, he'll be quite certain to show himself.»

«Very well,» said her husband. «Perhaps tonight, as it is rather chilly, you need not…»

«Oh, my dear,» said she, «it is far too late to bother about trifles of that sort.»

«You are right,» said he, «for after all, I am a psychoanalyst, and therefore broad-minded, and he is only a devil.»

He at once went upstairs and concealed himself, and his angelic wife followed him soon after. Just as she had expected, the devil appeared at a certain moment, lying stretched out on the chaise-longue and leering insolently at the angel. He went so far as to give this innocent creature one of his humorous little pinches as she went by. «You're getting thin,» said he. «However, you'll soon be back in your old form once we've started our honeymoon. What fun we shall have together! You've no idea how much I've learned in Atlantic City!»

He went on like this for some time. In the end the husband stepped out of the wardrobe and took him by the wrist

«Let go of my wrist!» said the devil, trying to pull himself free, for these old, gross, and sensual devils are like scared and sullen children when a psychoanalyst gets hold of them.

«It is not your wrist that interests me,» said the analyst in a tone of lofty detachment. «It's that tail of yours.»

«My tail?» muttered old Tom, taken altogether aback. «What about my tail? What's wrong with it?»

«I'm sure it's a very good tail,» replied the analyst. «But I imagine you'd like to get rid of it.»

«Get rid of my tail?» cried the startled devil. «Why in the name of all that's unholy should I want to do that!»

«Everyone to his taste,» said the analyst with a contemptuous shrug. «Did you see any little appendages of that description in Atlantic City?»

«Well, no, as a matter of fact I didn't,» replied the crestfallen fiend. The truth is, devils, who suggest so very much to the rest of us, are themselves extremely suggestible. That is how they got that way.

«In my opinion that tail is purely psychic in origin,» said the analyst. «And I believe it could be cured without much difficulty.»

«Who said I want it cured?» retorted the devil angrily.

«No one said so,» replied the man of science in a tranquil tone. «But you have thought so, and tried to suppress the thought. By your own admission you are very pronouncedly a voyeur — I'll touch on the disadvantages of that later. At least you have seen what is considered normal and pleasing in a well-formed male, and no doubt you would like to be in the mode.»