Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 15

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Still, it might in time have faded out of her mind completely, or at most remained only as a dim infrequent speculation, had it not been for two rather strange women she encountered who came to the Royal Hawaiian as guests, having landed from the liner Lurline a few days after her own arrival.

The older of the two attracted attention at first merely by so obviously not belonging in the gay, cosmopolitan, cocktail-drinking crowd that disported itself in the bars, along the exclusive beaches, and on the ballroom floors of the hotel. She was not young and far from smart, in fact quite dowdy in appearance, given to plain, dark-colored, rather loose and shapeless dresses that hung from her shoulders to her feet, her gray hair combed in some nondescript old-fashioned manner, always wearing glasses, and usually with a book in her long-fingered hands.

Her companion was younger, perhaps about thirty, with a thin unformed figure and a quaint little snub-nosed face, who attended the older woman with such assiduity that Mary Agnes put her down as a secretary-companion. When she had the opportunity, however, she occupied herself with acquiring a tan on the beach like so many of the other guests, female and male. Both seemed aloof and reserved toward strangers.

At first Mary Agnes paid little attention to either of them beyond wondering why they came to this expensive and ultra-fashionable hotel instead of taking some light-housekeeping rooms where they could potter about and knit or get their own little meals, or do whatever else they did to keep themselves busy. But she revised her opinion quite drastically concerning them one afternoon.

She had gone down to the beach to lie in the sun, spreading her rug on the sand and seating herself on it in her swimsuit to put oil on her arms and legs and shoulders, when she saw the younger of the two women lying on a mat not far from her.

“Hello,” said the young woman with an odd tentative little smile.

“Hello,” responded Mary Agnes, busy with her suntan oil.

After a moment the other said rather hesitantly, “I’m Miss Isham—Julie Isham.”

Mary Agnes nodded and smiled rather distantly. “I am Mrs. Wedge.”

She was willing to let things drop there, but Miss Isham, for some reason, seemed determined to persist with the conversation.

“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” she said, gazing out at the ocean, dark blue beyond the dazzling white surf and growing indigo blue toward the horizon, with Diamond Head crouching against the skyline.

“Yes, I’ve always thought so,” said Mary Agnes.

“This is the first time I’ve been in Hawaii,” the other ventured. “Dr. Lewin needed a rest, and she decided it would be nice here.”

“Oh?” said Mary Agnes, glancing at her with slightly increased interest. “Your friend is a doctor?”

“Yes! Oh yes! One of the very greatest in her field. Dr. Flora Elizabeth Lewin, of New York.” Miss Isham pronounced the name quite impressively, but Mary Agnes was unimpressed; she had never heard it before.

“What’s her specialty?” she inquired.

Miss Isham’s expression said she could hardly believe this benightedness. “Why—psychology, of course. She’s one of the world’s foremost authorities—her books are read everywhere——”

“You mean she’s an analyst?”

Miss Isham sat up. “She’s a student of human problems,” she said solemnly, as if reciting a lesson. “She tries to help people find values and stability in their inner world to stand over against the sufferings and fears and frustrations which are the diseases of our time. She has degrees from Johns Hopkins and Edinburgh, and she took intensive work in Zurich, under Jung himself!”

“Really? She sounds interesting.”

“She’s a very great woman, Mrs. Wedge. I’m a patient of hers myself—xenophobic tendencies with anxiety neuroses. She brought me here with her and I’m coming out of it. You see—I spoke to you just now without your even saying anything to me.”

Mary Agnes looked at her. Back in Jericho, as everywhere else, it was thought smart to talk glibly, although not necessarily intelligently, on the vaguely fascinating subject of psychiatry. To this end Mary Agnes, in common with most of her feminine friends, had done a little haphazard reading, more to acquire a smattering of the curious jargon of the psychiatrists than for any real knowledge or understanding. She remembered now that the term xenophobia referred to fear of—or was it resentment of?—strangers, and she felt that this young woman probably had done much self-examination and study, as was usual with those who became preoccupied with psychiatry from an amateur standpoint.

Miss Isham was like a new convert, zealous to proselyte others. “Do you ever suffer anxiety neurosis, Mrs. Wedge?” she asked. “Everyone does. Dr. Lewin would be glad to talk to you.”

Mary Agnes laughed. “I don’t care to be analyzed, exactly. But I’d like to meet your friend because she seems unusual.”

“Very well. You shall. I’ll see to it.” Miss Isham gave her a smile. “I think I’ve had about enough of this sun now. I don’t want to blister—I’ve been here quite a while, you know. Shall I see you this evening?”

She took up her mat and robe and bottles of unguent and went off to the hotel, her brown legs twinkling.

Mary Agnes completed the oiling of her body, stretched herself on her back, and adjusted her sunglasses. There was something more than a casual motive in her expressing a willingness to meet Dr. Lewin. It had occurred to her that someone who was truly conversant with the shadowy world of the inner mind, as Miss Isham said Dr. Lewin was, might give her an insight into a question—that question—that again had arisen in her thoughts.

She approached her objective in her usual oblique way. That evening Miss Isham, showing off her patron with a childish sort of pride, introduced her to Dr. Lewin in the lanai. The “student of human problems” was quite plain, with a long, horsy face and deep lines in her forehead above her glasses; yet her expression was not unpleasant, and she proved to have a dry sense of humor, and they wound up having dinner together.

Not at first did Mary Agnes bring up the subject that interested her; not that evening at all. She met the two casually, here and there about the hotel, or in the shopping districts of the city, and was always cordial and friendly, rather seeking to get on an easy footing with them, although her own activities, quite social since she knew a good many people on the Island, forbade spending much time with them even had she wanted to do so.

But the opportunity she had been looking for came one day about a week later when she happened to find Dr. Lewin alone, reading on the terrace.

She sat down near, and the older woman looked up with a smile.

“Where’s Miss Isham?” said Mary Agnes.

“She’s sunning herself.”

“I was noticing your book, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology—it’s by Jung, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Are you interested in psychology?”

“I’m interested, but I don’t know much about it.”

“Nobody knows much about it. The subject is too vast.”

“Miss Isham says she’s a patient of yours.”

Dr. Lewin smiled again. “Not very much of a patient. More of a friend. She was a little confused, and perhaps uneasy, but she is adjusting herself well. I’m not concerned about her future.”

“Perhaps,” said Mary Agnes, “since you deal in matters of the mind, you can explain something that’s rather mystified me since I heard it.”

She tried to speak casually, but she felt that Dr. Lewin glanced at her rather keenly through her glasses.

“I can at least try to give some sort of a suggestion,” she said.

“I have a friend,” Mary Agnes began, “a professional model. She told me of a peculiar incident during a sitting for a certain artist.”

Dr. Lewin nodded.

As tersely as possible, always relating it as if it had been told her by her fictitious “friend,” Mary Agnes described the occurrence in Erskine de Lacey’s studio.

At the end Dr. Lewin said, “Did you find the experience shocking, Mrs. Wedge?”

“I?” cried Mary Agnes. “Why do you assume it happened to me?”

“There are certain signs. Your preoccupation with the matter. Overemphasis of this friend you describe, showing that you are anxious to have me accept such an identity. Minuteness of detail in one or two respects almost necessitating firsthand observance. It’s really nothing to be concerned over, you know. Obviously you’re no professional model. You agreed to pose for an artist you knew, didn’t you? An artist you perhaps did not know as well as you thought you did?”

Mary Agnes hesitated, and then, a little shamefaced, gave up and nodded.

“What you’ve just described,” Dr. Lewin went on in a voice quite matter of fact, “is known among sexologists as a ‘deviation of object,’ perhaps related to fetishism. The term sometimes applied to it is Pygmalion-eroticism. The subject obtains release, sometimes only psychic, sometimes both psychic and physical, out of the act of painting or modeling in clay a human form, usually of the opposite sex. In rare cases it becomes obsessive.”

When Mary Agnes returned to her room, her face was blank with thought.

So he was that kind.

Pygmalion-erotic—they gave names to everything, the psychiatrists, based usually on some Greco-Roman myth. Thus, Oedipus complex, a child’s fixation on a parent; thus, narcissism, the worship of one’s own body.

Pygmalionism drew its name from the fabled king and sculptor who fell in love with a statue of a woman which he himself had carved.

Mary Agnes saw it now, she was sure of it: Erskine de Lacey painting so furiously, his intense lascivious gaze, his hands on her naked body, his single heated kiss—they comprised a sexual act. His face, like a man suffering, was the face of one in the paroxysm.

A curious tangent thought came: so he had not rejected her after all! From the first Erskine had wooed her, a strange wooing, a seduction leading to an unnatural consummation.

Her shoulders twisted in repugnance and she felt degraded.

Gradually, however, she thought more clearly. She did not fancy the role she had played, yet, offensive as it was, no harm had been done to her, except perhaps to her pride. It came over her that Erskine probably could do no real harm to any woman ... in a normal way. He was perhaps to be pitied more than hated.

Then she remembered that he had asked her to return, to pose for him again when she was back from the Islands. Decidedly not! The mere suggestion was revolting.

But what about the picture? Not finished but recognizable: Mary Agnes Wedge, very much in the nude.

She could imagine what people would whisper in Jericho if someone who knew her ever saw that painting:

“... you could recognize her just as plain as anything ... not a stitch on, mind you ... what can she have been thinking about? ... a woman who would do that would do anything ...”

With that she became more anxious than before to get possession of that picture as soon as she returned to California.