«I can,» said he, «put you into a whisky bottle, from which you will have to emerge when a cloak-and-suit buyer draws the cork.»
«Do so,» said she. «He can be no uglier than you, and no more of a nuisance.»
«Perhaps not,» said he. «Though I imagine you have very little experience of cloak-and-suit buyers. I can feed you to an oyster, from which you'll come out imprisoned in a pearl, and find yourself traded, in the most embarrassing circumstances, for a whole wagon-load of the chastity you hold so dear.»
«I shall scream 'culture,'» said she, very coolly. «And the victim will reach for her .22, and thus we shall both be saved.»
«Very neat,» said he. «But I can send you to earth as a young girl of nineteen or twenty. That's the age when temptations are thickest, and resistance is very low. And the first time you sin, your body, soul, virtue and all is mine at seven years' purchase. And that,» said he, with an oath, «is what I'll do. I was a fool not to have hit on it before.»
No sooner said than done. He took her by the ankles, and heaved her far out into the seas of space. He saw her body descending, turning, glimmering, and he dived after it like a schoolboy after a silver coin flung into a swimming bath.
Some ordinary people, going home very late over Brooklyn Bridge, pointed out to each other what they took to be a falling star, and a little later a drunken poet, returning from an all-night party, was inspired by what he thought was the rosy dawn, glimmering through the skimpy shrubbery of Central Park. This, however, was not the dawn, but our beautiful young she-angel, who had arrived on earth as a young girl who had lost both her clothes and her memory, as sometimes young girls do, and who was wandering about under the trees in a state of perfect innocence.
It is impossible to say how long this would have continued, had she not been found by three kindly old ladies, who always were the first to enter the Park in the morning, for the purpose of taking crumbs to their friends the birds. Had our young angel remained there till lunchtime, anything might have happened, for she retained all her original beauty, and was pinker and more pearly than any dawn. She was round, she was supple, she was more luscious than peaches; there was a something about her that was irresistibly appealing.
The old ladies, with a twittering and fluttering like that of their feathered favorites, charitably surrounded this pink perfection of innocence and desirability. «Poor creature!» said Miss Belfrage, «undoubtedly some man has brought her to this condition.»
«Some devil!» said Miss Morrison. This remark afforded infinite amusement to the lubber fiend, who stood invisibly by. He could not resist giving Miss Morrison a little pinch, of a sort entirely new to her experience. «Dear me! Did you do that, Miss Shank?» cried Miss Morrison. «Surely you did not do that?»
«I? I did nothing,» said Miss Shank. «What is it?»
«I felt,» said Miss Morrison, «a sort of pinch.»
«So did I,» cried Miss Belfrage. «I felt one that very moment»
«So do I,» cried Miss Shank. «Oh, dear! Perhaps we shall all lose our memories.»
«Let us hurry with her to the hospital,» said Miss Morrison. «The Park seems all wrong this morning, and the birdies won't come near. They know! What experiences she most have gone through!»
These kind old ladies took our beautiful but unfortunate she-angel to a hospital for nervous diseases, where she was received charitably and to some extent enthusiastically. She was soon hurried into a little room, the walls of which were of duck's-egg green, this color having been found very soothing to girls discovered wandering in Central Park with neither their clothes nor their memories. A certain brilliant young psychoanalyst was put in charge of her case. Such cases were his specially, and he seldom failed to jog their memories to some purpose.
The fiend had naturally tagged along to the hospital, and now stood there picking his teeth and watching all that transpired. He was delighted to see that the young psychoanalyst was as handsome as could be. His features were manly and regular, and his eyes dark and lustrous, and they became more lustrous still when he beheld his new patient. As for hers, they took on a forget-me-not glimmer which caused the devil to rub his hands again. Everyone was pleased.
The psychoanalyst was an ornament to his much maligned profession. His principles were of the highest and yet no higher than his enthusiasm for his science. Now, dismissing the nurses who had brought her in, he took his seat by the couch on which she lay.
«I am here to make yon well,» said he. «It seems you have had a distressing experience. I want you to tell me what you can remember of it»
«I can't,» said she faintly. «I can remember nothing.»
«Perhaps you are in a state of shock,» said this excellent young analyst. «Give me your hand, my dear, so I may see if it is abnormally warm, or cold, and if there is a wedding ring on it.»
«What is a hand?» murmured the unfortunate young she-angel. «What is warm? What is cold? What is a wedding ring?»
«Oh, my poor girl!» said he. «Quite evidently you have had a very severe shock. Those who forget what wedding rings are often get the worst of all. However, this is your hand.»
«And is that yours?» said she.
«Yes, that is mine,» he replied.
The young angel said no more, but looked at her hand in his, and then she lowered her delightful eyelashes, and sighed a little. This delighted the heart of the ardent young scientist, for he recognized the beginning of the transference, a condition which indescribably lightens the labors of psychoanalysts.
«Well! Well!» said he at last. «We must find out what caused you to lose your memory. Here is the medical report. It seems you have not had a blow on the head.»
«What is a head?» she asked.
«This is your head,» he told her. «And these are your eyes, and this is your mouth.»
«And what is this?» said she.
«That,» said he, «is your neck.»
This adorable young angel was the best of patients. She desired nothing more than to please her analyst, for, such is the nature of the transference, he seemed to her like some glorious figure out of her forgotten childhood. Her natural innocence was reinforced by the innocence of amnesia, so she pulled down the sheet that covered her, and asked him, «And what are these?»
«Those?» said he. «How you could have possibly forgotten them. I shall not forget them as long as I live. I have never seen a lovelier pair of shoulders.»
Delighted by his approbation, the angel asked one or two more questions, such as at last caused this worthy young analyst to rise from his chair and pace the room in a state of considerable agitation. «Unquestionably,» he murmured, «I am experiencing the counter-transference in its purest form, or at least in its most intense one. Such a pronounced example of this phenomenon should surely be the subject of experiment. A little free association seems to be indicated, but with a bold innovation of technique. In my paper I will call it The Demonstrative Somatic Method as Applied to Cases of Complete Amnesia. It will be frowned upon by the orthodox, but after all Freud himself was frowned upon in his time.»
We will draw a veil over the scene that followed, for the secrets of the psychoanalytic couch are as those of the confessional. There was nothing sacred, however, to Tom Truncheontail, who by this time was laughing his ugly head off. «Because,» thought he, «what sin in the world could be greater than to make such an exemplary young psychoanalyst forget himself, his career, and all the ethics of his profession?»
At a certain moment the wily old devil allowed himself to become visible, leaning over the end of the couch with a cynical smile on his weather-beaten face.
