Part 16

But her sisters were too much worried to be amused. Their children, they said, were talking about things that could not be named. Fanny did name them, however, and was grimly glad to see that even Georgy, the liberal, reeled under the blow.

She recovered enough to say, "Well, after all, is it so different? We called people Puritans instead of saying that they had inhibitions. We didn't say a boy had a fixation on the mother, but we called him mother's little carpet knight. And as for dreams, Fanny, when a young man told me he had a dream about me I did not need a doctor of philosophy to tell me what that meant."

Even Fanny was obliged to confess that her younger son Robert had been cured of his incipient stammer after a few interviews with Lisburn. And the young Carters, who, after three months of marriage, were confiding to everyone their longing for divorce, had been reconciled. There was a dream in this--about a large white gardenia--and there was an incident connected with it--a girl in a florist's shop--

About this time the mayor, still worrying over the upkeep of the museum, wanted some sort of entertainment given in order to raise money. It was suggested that a lecture on psychoanalysis by Lisburn would be popular. Norma was delegated to go and ask him--make him, was the way the committee put it. Needless to say, she returned triumphant.

Aunt Georgy was among the first to arrive at the town hall on the evening the lecture took place. She had become curious about the young man and wanted a front seat. She limped up the aisle, leaning on her grandfather's heavy ivory-headed cane, with little Evie beside her. Norma was busy taking--one might almost say snatching--tickets at the door. It is a peculiar feature of modern life that so much time is spent first in getting lecturers to consent to lecture and then in drumming up an audience to hear them. But this time the audience was not difficult to get. They came in crowds.

The mayor opened the meeting. He was not a ready speaker, and the sight of Evie, sitting so attentive in the front row, embarrassed him hideously. He said a few panting words about the needs of the museum and turned the meeting over to the Reverend Mr. Gordon, who was going to introduce the speaker--who was going, in fact, to do a little bit more than that.

He advanced to the edge of the platform, looked down at Evie and smiled--after all, he wasn't in the pulpit--folded his hands as if lawn frills ought to have been dripping from them, and began:

"It is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce the speaker of the evening, although I myself am not at all in sympathy with the subject about which--which--about which he--"

Aunt Georgy had a second of agony. Could he avoid using the verb "to speak"? It seemed impossible; but she underrated his mental agility.

"--about which he is to make his interesting and instructive address." Mr. Gordon pulled down his waistcoat with a slight gesture of triumph. "The church," he continued, "has never been in very cordial sympathy with what I may be permitted, perhaps, to call these lay miracle workers."

Here he threw a smile over his shoulder to Lisburn--a smile intended to be friendly and reassuring; but as it had in it something acid and scornful, it only served to make his words more hostile. "The church endures," he went on, "and watches in each generation the rise and fall of a new science, a new philosophy, a new panacea, a new popular fad like this one."

Having done what he could to discredit the lecture, he gave the lecturer himself a flattering sentence: "A professor in one of our great universities, a new resident in this community, and my very good friend, Mr. Kenneth Lisburn."

The Reverend Mr. Gordon had been standing between Aunt Georgy and the speaker, so that she did not really get a good look at him until he stood up.

Then she said "Mercy!" in a hissing whisper in Evie's ear.

"Mercy what?" asked little Evie, rather coldly.

"So good-looking!" murmured Aunt Georgy.

Evie moved her shoulders about.

"Roughhewn," she whispered back.

Perhaps his features were a trifle rugged; but Aunt Georgy admired his hair--black as a crow under the bright though sometimes intermittent light of the Jefferson Light and Power Company. His eyes--black also--gleamed from deep sockets--"Like a rat's in a cave," Evie said. Lecturing was evidently nothing of an adventure to him. It did not embarrass him as it had embarrassed the mayor; it did not stimulate him to an eloquence too suave and fluent as it did Mr. Gordon. It created not the least change in his personality. He stood on the platform as he swung in his chair in his college room, ready to say what he had to say as simply and as clearly as he could.

He wasn't so sure, he began, that his subject was popular. He found most people enjoyed the exploration of other people's unconscious, not of their own. In fact you could generally tell whether you were right in a diagnosis or not by the passion with which the victim contradicted you and the rapidity with which he invented explanations other than the true one. He was not, however, going to talk about psychoanalysis in general--rather too large a subject--with its relations to art and medicine. He was going to talk about the simple, commonplace actions of everyday life as clews to the unconscious--first, the so-called trivial ones. Nothing is really trivial. The tunes we whistle, the songs we sing, nine times out of ten have a wish-thought behind them. An amusing case of this had come to him the other day. A man had consulted him because he was being driven mad by a tune that ran in his head night and day. It was the Funeral March of a Marionette. Well, when it turned out that he was unhappily married and that his wife's name was Dolly it wasn't very hard to see whose funeral it was that he was mentally staging.

Aunt Georgy was perfectly delighted. She saw that psychoanalysis was going to make life in Jefferson infinitely more entertaining. The sphere of gossip was so remarkably extended. In old times one could only talk about what had been done, said or written; but now what was dreamed, what was desired, and, best of all, what was entirely omitted could be made as interesting as a crime. She wriggled down into her chair with pleasure as he went on to take up the question of the types that people fell in love with. Of course, we have all noticed how people tend to fall in love again and again with the same type. The spoiled weak son is forever looking for a mother type to take care of him; the girl brought up under the domination of the father idea is attracted by nothing but protective older types of men.

Lisburn went on to describe such cases in greater detail so accurately that all through the audience married couples were nodding to one another and themselves. He described also a variant of this: How some people always abused the type that attracted them most; the virile man who is forever making fun of feminine weaknesses, the womanly woman always taking on about man's wickedness; they're afraid of the black magic they attack; they are trying to exorcise the spell--

As soon as the lecture was over, and while eager members of the audience were crowding to the platform to discuss with the speaker the cases of mysterious friends who had dreamed this and forgotten that, Aunt Georgy beckoned to Norma.

"Do," she said, "go and disentangle that interesting young man from his votaries, or whatever they are, and bring him down to be introduced to me."

"It was interesting, wasn't it?" said Norma, with an effort at detachment.

"I can never be sufficiently grateful," answered Aunt Georgy. "It is so satisfactory the way he lays the strictly virtuous open to attack--the sort of people we've wanted to catch in a scandal and never been able to."

Norma nodded.

"Oh, yes," she said, "Ken thinks people like that have a very foul unconscious."

Aunt Georgy gave a slight snort and asked Norma if she remembered the Bab Ballad about:

_For only scoundrels dare to do_ _What we consider just and true;_ _And only good men do in fact,_ _What we should think a dirty act._

But Norma did not enjoy a humorous approach to a subject which she had only recently made her own. She withdrew; frowning slightly, and saying that she would try to get a word with him.

"Oh, don't let's wait," said Evie after a few minutes, during which the crowd on the platform increased.

And so Aunt Georgy was led home by the mayor and her small niece without getting a word with the speaker. But she was a determined woman; and though Lisburn was a busy man, between lecturing at his college in the daytime and conferences with mentally maladjusted in Jefferson in the evening and giving a good many spare hours to Norma, a free afternoon was finally found and Norma brought him to tea. Little Evie, who happened to be spending a week or two with her aunt, immediately announced her intention of being out.

"I don't like that man," she said.

Aunt Georgy, always eager for information, inquired why she didn't.

Evie thought a long time, and then said, "Because he invades one's private life."

"Does Norma feel that way?"

Little Evie laughed. "Norma hasn't got a private life," she answered.

At five o'clock, when Aunt Georgy was settled on her blue sofa, with her cane beside her and her tea set in front, Evie stole quietly out of the back door into the garden as Norma and the seer entered at the front.

"Well, here he is, Aunt Georgy," Norma shouted from the threshold, as if she had done a good deal for an elderly relation.

He came in and shook hands, unruffled by Norma's introduction.

"Where's Evie?" Norma went on in a tone rather like a sheriff's officer.

"She was so sorry--she had an engagement," said Aunt Georgy, quite as if it were true.

Norma gave a short shout.

"Oh, Ken knows she doesn't like him," she said; "and as a matter of fact, he isn't very keen about her."

Lisburn looked at Miss Hadley, not exactly embarrassed, but as if to say that when you told a thing to Norma you told it to the whole world. Aunt Georgy was interested in his not denying the accusation. She had never before happened to meet a man who actually did not like Evie.

"You don't admire my little niece?" she said, in her tone of seeking information merely.

"No," shouted Norma from the hearthrug. "He thinks she's too colorless, too much tied up with inhibitions to be interesting."

"Of course, I see your niece's great charm," he answered; "but, as I said the other night, we all have our own type--the type that particularly appeals--and I am attracted to a more active, aggressive type."

"That's why he likes me," said Norma, with her mouth not empty of chocolate cake--"because I lead a great, free, ramping life. Isn't that true, Ken?"

"I'm sure it's true you lead a great, free, ramping life, Norma," said her aunt.

"Yes, and that's why I'm so healthy," answered Norma, and she danced a little on her flat-heeled shoes. They were large shoes, but then, she was a large woman.

Aunt Georgy was surprised to find herself a partisan. It annoyed her to hear her favorite niece dismissed as attractive to other men but not to this reader of human hearts.

She said almost pettishly, "Evie is healthy, too--one of the healthiest people I ever knew."

"I bet she has dreams," said Norma.

"I doubt it."

"Everybody dreams, Aunt Georgy," said Norma, really astonished at her aunt's ignorance of the facts of life. "If you don't remember your dreams, that only shows that they are so awful that you don't allow them to come up into your conscious at all."

Aunt Georgy was opening her mouth to contradict, but found that Lisburn was speaking.

"That's the theory, Miss Hadley," he said, less positively than Norma; "that everyone dreams, and that our dreams represent our unfulfilled and unacknowledged desires. A type like--like Miss--"

"Like Evie," said Norma, a foe to last names.

"That type," Lisburn went on--"so restrained, so inhibited, so what is called well-bred, is particularly likely to have dreams and almost certain to be unwilling to admit having them."

He stopped as a slight sound at the door that led to the garden made them all turn. Little Evie was standing there--had evidently been standing there for some time. She had on a sky-blue dress, a large childish hat and her arms were full of cherry blossoms. She looked more than usually like a fashion plate of the '40's.

Norma immediately shouted at her, "You do dream, don't you, Evie? Be honest for once in your life."

Aunt Georgy, who was herself an honest person, was aware of an utterly unsuppressed wish that, whatever the facts were, Evie would say that she had never had a dream in her life. Instead the girl, with her blue eyes fixed on Lisburn, was nodding slowly.

"I've begun to dream lately," she said in a low tone.

Norma was delighted.

"I knew it," she said. "I'd have bet on it. It's extraordinary how one gets to know these things. Tell us what your dream is about, Evie."

"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "Isn't a person allowed more than one dream nowadays?"

Evie sank down on the sofa at her aunt's feet.

"Mine's always the same," she murmured.

"Ah," said Lisburn, "a recurrent dream." He looked at her with interest. "Does it trouble you?"

Evie made a cooing sound like a dove, in doubt. Norma began to tease her to tell. Aunt Georgy thought she was tiresome, nagging and bothering like that. She told her to let Evie alone. Norma shrugged her shoulders.

"It's so characteristic of that introverted type," she said, "not to be willing to be frank enough to be cured."

"Can one be cured?" asked Evie, and she raised her eyes to Lisburn.

He was a busy man, and he had stood up to go.

"I might--if it troubles you--be able to help you."

"Even," said Evie, "though you are not interested in my type?"

"Oh," cried Norma, "isn't that like you, Evie! You overheard the whole thing, and instead of having it out then and there, as I should have, you wait and give him a poisoned dig in the ribs when he's trying to be nice to you."

Evie repeated in exactly the same tone: "Even though you are not interested in my type?"

"I'm always interested in a case," he answered.

They exchanged unfriendly looks. Then he came to the sofa to say good-by to Aunt Georgy. She was rummaging for a pencil among the litter of papers and books beside her. She wanted to write down the name of his book, but he insisted very civilly on sending it to her.

When he and Norma had gone Aunt Georgy turned to Evie.

"I'm glad," she said, "that you did not tell them what your dream was about. They would have been sure to make something horrid out of it."

"I couldn't tell them."

"You mean it is horrid?"

"I hadn't made it up yet," answered Evie. "Dear Aunt Georgy, I never, never dream. I'm always asleep before I get the covers well tucked in at the nape of my neck, and I never wake up until someone comes in and opens the shutters. Norma was so determined that I should have a dream--perhaps she won't be so pleased. Mine is going to be a hard one to interpret. Interested in cases, is he? Well, mine is going to be an interesting one. Wait till we get his book."

The book was left at the door after dinner, and Aunt Georgy plunged at once into it. She habitually read as a famished animal eats, tearing the heart out of a book, utterly oblivious of the world until she had finished. At last she looked up.

"Really, Evie," she exclaimed, "I'm afraid you can't get a dream out of this. I'm not old-fashioned, but I must say--" She did not say what it was she must say.

Evie took the book calmly.

"Of course, I shall be perfectly innocent as to what my dream means, Aunt Georgy," she said. "Let's see. X, a young employe in a shoe factory, dreamed-- My goodness, what an unpleasant man X must have been! Now this isn't bad-- Or, no, that would involve mother. I don't want to drag poor mother into it. Something wonderful might be done with a tune--Old Black Joe, if only his name were Joe, which it isn't.... And I shall begin to do a strange and apparently meaningless thing--to have a compulsion. I mean--like buttering my bread on both sides--"

"Don't you think it's a little dangerous?" said Aunt Georgy. "They interpret everything so oddly."

"Yes, it's dangerous; but everything is. If you do nothing, that's the worst of all." And Evie sank into the book.

A few days later, when Lisburn reached home in the late afternoon, he found a note waiting for him at his house. It was written in Evie's neat, fine hand, and said:

_Dear Mr. Lisburn_: Do you remember offering to help me in case the dream--of which I think I spoke to you--began to give me trouble? I must say I hesitate to take up your time, as the whole thing seems so trivial [Lisburn gave a little shake of his head, an indication that such experiences were far from trivial] but it would be a relief to me to talk it over with you, and I shall stop at your house for a few minutes this evening on the chance that you may have a spare minute.

He laid the letter on the table and eyed it sideways as he lit his pipe. Then he went to the telephone and called up Norma. He said he was sorry, but that he wouldn't be able to come that evening for bridge. Norma, as she herself had observed, did not suffer from inhibitions. Her emotions found easy expression, and her emotion on this occasion was disappointment mingled with anger. She expressed it freely over the telephone. Lisburn hung up the receiver sharply. Self-expression was all very well, he thought; but there was such a thing as having no self-control. It was necessary for him to have a calm and receptive mind in order to be of any assistance to this child who was coming to consult him. He must make a mental picture of her personality and recall her gestures, her vocabulary.

Soon after eight he heard her step on the piazza and went to the door himself. She entered with that timid, conscious, apologetic manner which had become so familiar to him in his patients. It seemed as if she would have liked to make fun of herself for coming if only she had been less frightened at finding herself there. The hand she gave him shook. He drew forward a deep comfortable chair for her.

"Now tell me everything you can think of," he said; "your own way; I won't interrupt."

She drew an uncertain breath.

"Well, I didn't think anything about it--you know how casually I spoke the other day--but now I find it is beginning to affect my conduct. I find I cannot bring myself to get into an automobile. I have never driven a car myself, but I have always enjoyed driving with other people; but now-- This dream of mine is about a car."

She described the dream at great length, though it was strangely lacking in incident. It was merely that she was driving a small car of her own--a very pretty white car with a good deal of blue about it. She was driving along a wide street, and suddenly the car began to skid, slowly at first and then faster and faster; and though her agony became extreme and she turned the steering wheel more and more, she could do nothing--the car made straight for the bushes, where some terrific but unseen and unknown object was lurking.

He made her go over the details of it two or three times. The shade of blue was about the same shade as the dress she was wearing, but he elicited very little more. She could not, she said, get any clew as to what was hidden in the bushes, except that it was something she was horribly afraid of.

"And yet," he said, "you go toward it?"

"Yes; but entirely against my will, Mr. Lisburn."

"You're sure you go against your will?"

Her voice was almost hysterical as she protested, "Yes--yes, indeed!"

"And yet you go?"

"No, Mr. Lisburn, the car goes."

"Don't you think you and the car are the same?"

She gave him a long wondering stare, and presently insisted that she must go. She promised, however, that she would do everything in her power to find out what was hidden in those sinister bushes. She was to keep a pencil and paper beside her bed and write down everything she could remember as soon as she waked up in the morning.

She hurried home to tell Aunt Georgy all that had occurred and was disappointed to find her aunt established at the bridge table with Norma and two of Norma's friends. It seemed that Mr. Lisburn had been expected as a fourth and they had been obliged to come to Aunt Georgy at the last minute to make up the table. Norma was still angry.

"They can't have it both ways--these psychoanalysts," Norma was saying. "It's always a Freudian forgetting--a wish-thought--when you forget an engagement with them, and something quite professional and unavoidable when they break an engagement with you."

"What Norma means, Evie," said Aunt Georgy, without raising her eyes from the interesting hand which had just been dealt her, "is that she suspects Mr. Lisburn of having had something more amusing to do."

Evie shook her head as if you couldn't be sure with men like that.

"Perhaps he had," she said.

Then Aunt Georgy knew the interview had gone well.

Three days later, not having heard anything more from her, he came to the house late in the afternoon. He was in his own car, and he suggested that perhaps he could help her to overcome her repugnance to motoring. At first she refused with every appearance of terror; but soon she admitted that with him she would feel perfectly safe, and so she yielded and got in.

She spoke little, and he could hear that she drew her breath in a tremulous and disturbing manner. At last, in a lonely road, her terror seemed to overmaster her, and she opened the door and would have sprung out while the car was going thirty-five miles an hour if Lisburn had not held her in.

As soon as he had brought the car to a standstill he took his arm away, while little Evie cowered in the seat beside him.

"You see," she said at last, "how it is with me? If you had not been there I should have jumped out and been killed. It's stronger than I am."

"I see," he answered gently. "Well, if it happens again I won't force you to stay in the car. You shall get out and walk home."

She thanked him warmly for his concession, but it did not happen again.

After this they had conferences every evening, as her stay at Jefferson was coming to an end, and she still did not seem to be able to see what was the emotional center of her dream.

The fact that Lisburn was trying to help little Evie soon began to be known, and the knowledge affected different people differently. Norma said that she should think Evie would be ashamed to take up so much of Mr. Lisburn's time, considering how contemptuous she had been about the whole science of psychoanalysis. The Reverend Mr. Gordon said that he had never been in any doubt that the human spirit needed the confessional, but that only a man in holy orders was fit to receive confession. The mayor was a little more violent. He said that it appeared to him that this fellow was practicing medicine without a license, and that if the law could not reach him it ought to be able to. He hoped it wasn't doing little Miss Evie any harm. Aunt Georgy tried to reassure him, and said Evie seemed in the best of health and spirits, at which the mayor, looking gloomier than ever, said he was much relieved. Aunt Georgy had just been telling this to Evie as she was about to start for her last conference. She was going away the next day.

"Have you decided what it is that is hidden in the bushes?" her aunt asked her.

Evie nodded.

"Yes," she said; "it's a black panther--a beautiful, lithe, vigorous, graceful, dangerous wild animal."

"Mercy!" exclaimed Aunt Georgy. "He'll think it's himself."

"Do you think he's a vain man, Aunt Georgy?"

"Everyone's as vain as that."

"Well, that isn't my fault," said Evie, and went on her way.