“The pigeons are very good, aren’t they, John?”
“Excellent,” the doctor replied. He was enjoying his dinner, and, while he ate, quietly planning the lines on which he would commence a real study of a subject no longer in a position to escape from him until he had finished with her.
Glowing dark eyes. Long green eyes. Bland servant’s eyes piercing through the back of her skull. What did one do with a mouthful of tiny, needle-sharp bones?
The finger-bowls were Georgian silver, the mats Alençon lace. “At least I know what to do with these,” Psyche thought grimly. And as she carefully lifted them from her dessert plate, she saw again a bare deal table and jelly glasses set on brown paper mats, and heard Butch’s great voice saying, “Dee-licious—damned if it ain’t!”
A full understanding of homesickness sweeping over her, she thought, “If I could go back there now, this minute, I would never want to leave again.”
They had their coffee in the drawing-room, a rose-and-gold symphony that would have been almost too large for fifty people. In spite of its size, Psyche felt that in here things should be better than they had been in the panelled dining-room. For some reason, they were not. Perhaps it was because even Nora fell silent, and they were left without anything to say, two who should have been alone together at the day’s end and a third, a stranger who had no excuse for intruding upon them. Thus it appeared to Psyche, and thus Nora meant it to appear.
When they had finished their coffee, the doctor turned to Psyche. “We might make a small beginning to-night, if you are not too tired.”
“I am too tired,” Psyche thought, “but I want to do it because then I will believe that I have some purpose in being here.”
“I would like” she began, but Nora interrupted her.
“She needs to rest to-night, John. She should go to bed right away.”
Dr. Scarletti’s handsome features were expressionless as he searched his wife’s face, but he found nothing there other than a concern in which he did not believe. That she was hindering him deliberately he was almost sure, but her statement was a valid one regardless of its motivation.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said coldly.
“Of course I am, darling. Women often know more about other women than even their doctors do. She may be crossed off the sick list, but she still isn’t strong. You can perfectly well wait until tomorrow evening to begin your little guessing games.”
Fury, which always seized him when Nora disparaged his work in this manner, kept him silent, and Psyche’s last impression of him as Nora led her toward the door was of a tall, commanding figure, frightening in its complete immobility.
At the foot of the staircase she resisted the guiding pressure of Nora’s hand. “I think he’s annoyed,” she said quietly. “Really, I would like to talk with him for an hour or so now.”
And regain some of your shattered confidence, my dear Maggie? Oh, no. Perhaps even discover that it was I, not you, who angered him? Oh, no! “Nonsense, darling. In a few minutes he will be deep in some ponderous tome and have forgotten all about you. Come on, I’ll take you up to your room. I do hope you like it. It’s my favourite room in the house.”
When Psyche stood on the threshold of the room that was to be hers, seeing it in detail by the light of lamps controlled from a wall switch, she turned to the small, slim woman in open desperation. “Couldn’t you give me something else? Something smaller, simpler? Please!”
Nora’s bell-like voice was soft with compassion. “John has told me a little of your story, Maggie dear. So tragic. I could not be happy if you didn’t have the very best I had to offer. Now—good night, and sleep well.”
Alone, Psyche looked around the enormous bedroom, and knew that she was going to hate it—more, probably, than she would ever again hate any inanimate collection of things. Mutely it defied her to touch any part of it, to sully, even by her presence, its impossibly delicate perfection.
Glancing first at the closed door behind her, she stooped and took off her shoes before walking across a carpet that was not just off-white, but pure white. The whole room was done in white and silver; white damask on the chairs, on the head-board of the bed, on the small stool in front of a dressing-table crowded with fragile china figurines; silver shades on slender silver lamps that seemed poised, ready to fall if one but looked at them; silvery walls, on which hung silver-framed abstractions that started no fresh chain of thought, because there was apparently no thought in, or behind, their meaningless convolutions. The only thing that looked as if it were meant to be touched without gloves was her blue nightgown, laid out on the snowy expanse of the bed.
Nora, when she went downstairs again, found her husband in the library that was also his study. It was where she had expected to find him.
Looking up from the papers spread across his desk, he said curtly, “ In future I must ask you not to interfere in any way between myself and Miss Moran. In short, you will be good enough to mind your own business.”
Nora smiled. She was in a very good humour. “Haven’t you made her my business too, darling?”
“Up to a point only. Which room have you put her in?”
“The west front, darling.”
The doctor’s eyebrows betrayed his very real surprise. “I thought you reserved that for royalty, my dear Nora.”
“You told me to do everything I could for her. I am. Everything l can.”
“Almost too much,” he returned, but he did not follow the thought through. “What are you doing to-night?”
“Playing bridge.”
“Can’t you find anything better to do than that?”
“What do you suggest? That I spend an enchanted evening lying on your couch baring my libido?”
The doctor regarded her with acute distaste. “It would be an unwholesome spectacle.”
“I could show you something more wholesome if you wished. But you don’t wish, do you, darling?”
His eyes fixed on her, he thought, “Some day I will rid myself of this woman. When I have finished my work, when I have placed myself so far above the herd that their loose tongues cannot reach me, she shall go out of my life, and she shall not go un-scarred.”
Usually quite impervious to those eyes, Nora felt cold to the marrow. But hers was a devil that operated in any climate, and she could not forego the pleasure of a final, wicked mockery. “Don’t rape Cinderella while I’m out,” she said, and left him.
Motionless, he heard her go up the stairs, and a few minutes later come down again. He listened to the front door closing, to the sound of her car as she backed it out of the double garage. Not until all audible reminder of her had gone did he get up and turn off the overhead lights.
Returning to his desk, he seated himself, shadows obscuring him save for long, well-manicured hands moving purposefully in the circle of light cast by a heavily shaded desk lamp. Drawing a large pad of lined paper toward him, he wrote at the top of a clean sheet—’Margaret Moran’. In brackets after the name he placed a small question mark. Then, neatly subdividing the sheet with ruler and pen, he added three sub-headings: Heredity—Instinct—Memory.
Somewhere outside in the dusk a single robin was still singing when Psyche sat across the desk from the doctor, twenty-four hours later.
“I have no liking for this man,” she thought, “and I don’t expect I ever will have, but it is better here than in the rest of the house, though I’m damned if I know why.”
“My wife has looked after you satisfactorily to-day?”
Couched in these terms, it was a question she could answer without polite evasion. “She has been very kind. She spent the whole afternoon with me.”
“Good. Now we are going to approach our problem from three different angles. This evening we will establish our pattern, little more. I intend to begin with association tests, go on from there to question and answer, and finish up with conversation, the purpose of which will be to supply cause and motivation for your react
ions to the earlier parts of the program.”
“And if I don’t always answer as fully, or as truthfully, as I might?” Psyche asked quietly.
“I hope you will. If you don’t, that in itself may be revealing. However, I can give you my absolute assurance that nothing you say to me will be used in any form sufficiently personalized or complete to be recognizable.”
“Even so——”
Dr. Scarletti allowed himself a frosty smile. “Even so there are a few things that you might prefer to keep to yourself, if you can. That is quite understandable, but I hope you will have the good judgement to limit your discretion to the immediate past. If it is any satisfaction to you, I might say that you have shown a remarkable degree of success so far in doing exactly that. Yours is an unusually controlled mind, Miss Moran. For that reason I would like to make it quite clear that this is not to be psychoanalysis in the ordinary sense, and that both your time and mine will be wasted if you do not exhibit an interest and initiative at least equal to my own.”
He looks like a portrait of himself painted three hundred years ago. “How long do you think it will take?”
“We will have either succeeded or failed in six weeks.”
“As long as that!”
“You don’t look forward to staying here for that length of time?”
Avoiding a too penetrating gaze. Psyche concentrated on the pale smoke spiral rising from her cigarette. “It’s rather a long period in which to mark time, in which to do nothing useful.”
“You don’t consider that what we will be doing will be useful to you?”
“Yes, in a way, of course, but——”
“I think we had better try to dispose of your ‘buts’ before we attempt to go any further. You might be interested in some of the tentative conclusions I have already reached.”
She watched him pick up a stack of papers, and start leafing through them. At the top of each page she saw a name that was not really her name, and was astonished by her own passionate wish to see ‘Psyche’ written there, as if this alone would make truth of hypothesis, would in itself illumine to its farthest corners a long darkness. But still she could not bring herself to tell him.
“Does all that concern me?” she asked incredulously. “Have I already told you so much?”
“This is only a very small beginning. Now, having correlated and studied these notes, I think I can safely say that if you did not go direct from your parents’ house to the shack, the intervening space of time could be measured in months. When I say ‘parents’ you must realize that I employ the term as a symbol representing guardianship, and choose it simply because, on a purely mathematical basis, it is the most likely relationship between a child of three years and the adults living under the same roof. Because of the nature and precision of your memories. I think that your friend Mag must have misjudged your age a little. I would say that if you are not already twenty, you are much closer to it than you have assumed.”
“But I remember nothing Í”
“Although you are not aware of it, you remember a great deal.” The doctor turned another page. “Now here, for example, we have your statement of the age at which you first envisaged parents with definite physical attributes, and a description of them as you represented them to yourself. You have described a young man and a young woman, the latter bearing a very close resemblance to yourself as you are now. If these people had been nothing more than a product of your imagination, it would have been much more natural if they had been middle-aged, or at least approaching it. You drew for yourself the picture of a woman so young she could not possibly have been the mother of a ten-year-old child. You were, at ten, remembering what you had seen when you were approximately three. You attempted, and failed, to imagine brothers and sisters as part of your family circle. If the whole conception had been entirely imaginary, you would have had no difficulty in fitting them in—any number that pleased you. My present contention, and we will explore it a great deal more thoroughly, is that your mind refused brothers and sisters for the excellent reason that they did not exist.”
“Go on,” Psyche said quietly.
Dr. Scarletti had intended to do no more than ensure her cooperation, and this he felt he had already done. She was, however, an exceptionally sympathetic audience, and he decided that it would serve some purpose to talk a little longer.
“Every human being is an infinitely complex puzzle, unique, individual, never exactly duplicated. Each one responds, however, to certain basic physiological and emotional stimuli. Know ingthis, rough behaviour patterns can be calculated in advance on the foundation of a known ancestry and heredity. These patterns are blurred, reshaped, and at last moulded into their final form by the onslaught of environmental pressures. There are those who believe that such pressures are greater in their effect on the individual than the original, or hereditary, shaping. I hold, and strongly, to the reverse belief. I consider, therefore, that you at this moment represent far more of your original heredity than might be generally supposed.
“Working in reverse, studying you more carefully and thoroughly than you have possibly realized, I have sketched in the kind of background from which I am virtually positive you must have originated. Yours is, I would judge, a purely Anglo-Saxon heritage for some generations back. Both your inhibitions, and the directions in which you are uninhibited, are representative, quite apart from bone structure and colouring. To come a little closer to the present, I consider it almost a foregone conclusion that not one, but both of your parents are—or were— endowed with a very high degree of intelligence, and were extremely well educated.”
As if the words still echoed on, undying, Psyche heard a sentence she had flung at Nick. “Why not the both of them?”
“The rapidity with which you threw off the manners and colloquialisms of speech that were yours for so many years is, I think, proof of this last contention. First, because you have inherited the measure and kind of mental equipment to make such a thing possible. Secondly, because I believe that you were returning, to some extent at least, to remembered standards. With your subconscious memory as my chief instrument, I expect to fill in the details of a provisional history so precisely that its counterpart in reality can be rediscovered. A fascinating experiment, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Psyche replied slowly, “it is a fascinating—experiment.”
To herself she thought, “He will give me bright fragments that I can cherish as truth; but more than that, no. He is extraordinarily clever, this man who sees so much that is human with so little humanity, but he would have to be a veritable wizard to accomplish what he now proposes.” And she knew that whatever else she might or might not be led to believe under the influence of those magnetic eyes, she would not believe in wizardry. The unending winds of time had blown too long, the restless sands shifted too often, for this to be anything other than a glass through which she would see at best darkly.
“Does six weeks still seem like too much of your life to give to such a purpose?”
Psyche’s blue gaze rested on the sheaf of papers on the desk between them. Although she could not persuade herself that he would succeed, he would nevertheless give her much of herself that she might otherwise never know. To deny such an opportunity would be to prove herself both a fool and a coward, and she was neither. Even if the days to follow were as wretchedly uncomfortable as to-day had been, six weeks would pass very quickly.
“No, it is not too much,” she said.
“Did you have a good time, Hannah?” Sharon asked.
“Does one ever have a good time at a summer resort?”
“You’re beautifully tanned.”
“I’m glad there’s something beautiful about me,” Hannah replied crisply. “Well, where is your art exhibit?”
Sharon led her across the hall, past the circular staircase, and through a door that opened into a large library. “There you are,” she said quietly.
A tall figure that contrived an
angular elegance, Hannah walked past Sharon, to come to a halt at the far end of the room where hung seven paintings. The minutes passed, and then she said, “She’s very like you in all ways. She’s lucky. If she hadn’t been tough—”
“Are you telling mel’m tough?”
Hannah swung round. “Yes. Very. You couldn’t have stood up to this, any of it, if you hadn’t been. Where is the ‘Venus’?”
“In the National Gallery,” Sharon told her bitterly. “It was bought the day it was hung. It isn’t for sale now at any price. What would you like, tea or a drink?”
“How long have you known me, darling?”
Sharon smiled, which was what the dark woman had intended, and moved toward a mahogany cabinet.
“Did you like the artist?” Hannah asked curiously.
“Yes and no. He’s an attractive egotist. Mostly no, I think. Ring for ice, will you, Hannah.”
“Why did she leave him?”
Sharon bit her lip. “Apparently because she wanted to.”
“But you don’t believe him?”
“It’s difficult not to believe him. He has a great deal of charm. But—no, I didn’t.”
Hannah did not speak again until they were seated in two deep chairs near a window through which could be seen the terraced garden.
“Your delphiniums are fantastic, darling.”
Sharon leaned forward to light a cigarette. Hannah was her closest friend, but there were a few things she had not told her. “I’m fond of blue,” she said quietly.
“And the rustic foster-parents?”
Sharon’s smile was spontaneous this time, and her blue eyes were soft and amused. “Butch and Mag? They are incredible, awful, utterly preposterous, both of them—and I loved them.”
“And so 1 suppose you and Dwight have set them up for life?”
“We owed them more than we can ever repay.”
“And what are you doing now?”
Sharon’s gaze, clouded over, returned to the paintings in front of which she sat for many hours every day. “We are employing an army of detectives—and waiting.”
Psyche Page 31
