The Bird’s Nest (20 page)

I confess I could have found it in my heart to feel sorry for the young sinner; a giddy day or so, a few hours of freedom, a taste of luxury—they would appeal to the best of us. But, I told myself sternly, the best of us would not thereby jeopardize the lives of Beth and Elizabeth, and so I went on, “And in the hospital?”

“I wasn't there,” she said, and it was a cry of agony, “I wasn't even there!”

“You mean you were inside?”

She shook her head. “I was gone,” she said. “I didn't even know about it, and I
always
know
every
thing, what Lizzie does and what Beth does and what they say and think and what they're dreaming and now I know about the hospital just because I heard
her
talking to Morgen, and I wasn't even
there—
”

“Her?”

“Her,” Betsy said with loathing.

“Then,” I said, with an attempt, at geniality, “it was not you who denied me in the hospital.”

Betsy grinned. “I heard about it,” she said. “
She
said that you—”

“The subject is not worth discussion,” I said. “We have more important things to worry about, and primary among these is the question we were working on before Elizabeth fell ill; I mean, of course, the death of your—of Elizabeth's mother.”

“I won't talk to you,” she said, sullen again. “You don't like me.”

“I don't,” I agreed readily. “You have been most unfair to me. But I believe that I should like you a good deal more if you answered my questions sensibly.”

“I won't talk to you,” she said, and made the same answer to everything I said, and finally would not speak at all.

I found in her sullenness the conviction that she knew she was beaten, and, much heartened by this taming of the villain of our piece, I gave up my questions, and wondered if I might untangle my hypnotic snarl by awakening her, but I found this almost as difficult as I had found hypnosis in the first place. Again and again I found Betsy's hating eyes fixed on mine, and I began to suspect that matters among these several personalities were coming to a head, as it were, and that instead of slipping from one to another easily through hypnosis, they were each of them enough aware of individuality to resist being pushed under, and were clinging tenaciously to the surface, each in hope of finally establishing dominance. It seemed reasonable to assume that power was closely coordinated with conscious control, and the more time any personality spent governing the others, the stronger that personality would be, bleeding the others of their precious consciousness. I already knew that here knowledge was surely power, and the personality most basic in Miss R. was the one to whom the mind was most open; Elizabeth had lost, and was losing, a large portion of her conscious life, with no conception of what was going on when she was under, and my poor Beth was very little better off; Betsy had, so far, with her ability to comprehend both Elizabeth and Beth, seemed easily the most basic of the ones I had met, and yet how unwilling I was to admit it! Now, however, Betsy's dark hints of a “she,” to whose mental workings Betsy did not have constant and easy access gave me hopes that perhaps Miss R. might be coming to herself again, although I trusted that the girl I had met in the hospital was not to be the entire final form of the personality; I could have wished her a little of Beth's sweetness!

I finally put Betsy aside, then, and awakened, as I thought, my friend Beth; she opened her eyes, looked around, sighed and sat up at once. “Again?” she said, as though to herself, and then her eyes fell on me. For a long minute she looked at me, and then she said deliberately, “I thought I asked you not to bother me any more. If you will not leave me alone I will tell my aunt.”

It may be imagined that I was not overly complimented by this address; I resisted a strong impulse to rise and show her the door, and said only, “My name is Victor Wright. I am a doctor and you have been, miss, my patient for upwards of twenty months.”

“I? Impossible.”

“I thank you,” I said stiffly. “It is not quite so impossible as you think; there are, in fact, those in this town who could, if they would, point to me as a man of science and integrity. However, madam, it is not my credentials which are in question, but your own. Can you tell me who you are?”

She flashed a look of dislike upon me. “If I have been your patient for as long as you say,” she told me arrogantly, “then you must have found out my name by now.” And she gave a short laugh which reminded me disagreeably of her aunt.

“Your name,” I said flatly, “is Elizabeth R., although in any future conversation between us I am going to surprise you by calling you Bess.”

“Bess?” she said, more nettled than surprised. “But why?”

“Because I choose to,” I said, just like Betsy. I believe that if she had not reminded me of her aunt (a picture which will always remind me in turn, most vividly, of my experiences in the airplane) I should have not been so brusque; I ought to have spoken to her kindly and patiently, and brought her slowly to an acceptance of myself, but even a man of science cannot always be impartial, and sensible, and invulnerable, and she had antagonized me hopelessly.

She was not stupid; she perceived this at once, and perhaps had some inkling of future favors to be gained from me, for she changed her tone and said more civilly, “I am sorry to be rude. I have not been myself since my mother's death; I have been very nervous, and I may say things I never really mean to. I was very much affected by my mother's death.” She seemed to consider this a most handsome apology, and flounced and simpered at me to show that she bore me no ill-will for having insulted me twice before.

I thought her tawdry, and artificial, and mincing, and I did not at all care for her obvious attempts to sound refined; how, I wondered, could Elizabeth and Beth speak like quietly-educated girls, and this one speak so lispingly, and then thought that the mind behind this one was surely faulty, although strong, and must be securely incorporated with Elizabeth and Beth to manufacture a final endurable personality. As soon as I felt that I might answer her with composure, I said, “I am not surprised, of course, that you felt grief at your mother's death; it would be unnatural if you had not. But surely, in this length of time . . .”

I paused, and she lifted her handkerchief to her eyes.

“After all,” I continued, when it appeared that she was too much “affected” to speak, “your aunt was also devoted to your mother, and she has succeeded in overcoming her loss.”

“Aunt Morgen has no fine feelings at all.” This coincided very nearly with my own view of Aunt Morgen, but I said nothing; after a minute she went on, “Besides, Aunt Morgen is old and fat and foolish, and I am young and” (she simpered) “attractive and rich; surely it is a shame that sorrow should—”

“Blight?” I suggested ironically.

She gave me another look of dislike, and continued, “Many people have told me that I look very much like my mother when she was younger, except that my hair has a better color than hers did, and my ankles are narrower.” She regarded her ankles with pleasure, and I could not resist saying, “Then let us hope that those scratches do not leave scars on your face.”

She looked up at me and for a minute she was as badly frightened as anyone I have ever seen. Then she said, with a false smile, “They won't, thank you for asking. I checked with Doctor Ryan.”

“Did you tell him how you got them?” I asked.

“I fell,” she said quickly, still desperately afraid. “I don't know why you keep asking about them, it isn't polite and it doesn't matter anyway.”

“And Betsy?”

She stood up, trembling, and said ferociously, “There isn't any such thing as Betsy, and you know it, you want to frighten me again and I won't
have
it!” She stopped, caught her breath, and then went on more quietly. “I told you that I have not been myself since my mother's death. I sometimes . . . imagine things. I am a very nervous person by nature.”

“I see,” I said. “And how long did you say it had been, since your mother died?”

She lifted the handkerchief again. “Three weeks,” she said.

“I see,” I said. “Most distressing. But your aunt has completely gotten over it?”

“To tell you the truth,” she said, sitting down again and obviously relieved that we had gotten away from the scratches on her face, “Aunt Morgen and I don't get on very well. I expect to be moving out on her soon.”

I did not envy Aunt the graceless society of this young lady, and would have liked to send her home Miss R. in the form of Elizabeth, as a gesture of common humanity, but I could not really see my way clear to proposing soberly to Miss R. that I put her into an hypnotic trance, so I only said, “I trust your agitation will have abated somewhat, Miss Bess R., by our next appointment.”

“Our?” she said in absolute astonishment. “My dear man, you do not suppose that I am coming here again?”

“Indeed?”

She laughed, with a return to her former arrogance. “There are so many people who speak so well of you,” she said, “that you hardly need to beg for patients to come to your office. I told you I had seen Doctor Ryan;
he
is
my
doctor, and I am telling you plainly, once and for all, that I do not want or intend to be any patient of yours. There is nothing personal in it, and I have told you already that I am sorry for being rude before, but just because I apologized to you, you needn't expect to send me a bill and get paid for this short conversation. I may be rich, but I am not going to be taken in by every . . .”

I showed her the door at last.

 • • •

Without enthusiasm, I added R
4
to my notes, and hoped she was the last; each of Miss R.'s varying selves, I thought, proved more disagreeable than the last—always, of course, excepting Beth, who, although weak and almost helpless, was at least possessed of a kind of winsomeness, and engaging in her very helplessness. I found myself, lying awake that night in bed—one finds, I think, that even with a clear conscience there comes an age when sleep forsakes the weary mind; I am not elderly, but I frequently, now, court sleep in vain—that I was telling over and over, as though they were figures in a charade, my four girls: Elizabeth the numb, the stupid, the inarticulate, but somehow enduring, since she had remained behind to carry on when the rest of them went under; Beth, the sweet and susceptible; Betsy, the wanton and wild; and Bess, the arrogant and cheap. I perceived that no one of these could possibly be permitted to assume the role of the true, complete (by very definition none of
them
could be complete!) Miss R., and, equally, none of them could be judged “imposters”; Miss R. would be at last a combination in some manner of all four, although I must admit that the contemplation of a personality combining Elizabeth's stupidity with Beth's weakness, Betsy's viciousness with Bess's arrogance, left me with an urge to throw the blankets over my face and hide myself!

I saw myself, if the analogy be not too extreme, much like a Frankenstein with all the materials for a monster ready at hand, and when I slept, it was with dreams of myself patching and tacking together, trying most hideously to chip away the evil from Betsy and leave what little was good, while the other three stood by mockingly, waiting their turns.

As I sat the next morning at my desk, putting my notes in order, I heard Miss Hartley's surprised voice in the outer office, and then the door to my private office slammed open, and Betsy ripped in, raging like a fury, shaking and white; “What is this, you old fool,” she shouted, without even closing the door, “what is this I hear, that you have chosen this proud cold beastly bitch
*
to manage all of us now? Do you think I'm going to let you get away with anything like that? Do you suppose—”

“Close the door, please,” I said quietly, “and moderate your language. Even if you are not a lady, you are addressing a gentleman.”

She laughed, uncaring for the harm she did her own cause by angering me, and I swear that I thought for a moment she might strike me; she came up to the desk and leaned over (and I most heartily grateful to be securely behind such a solid piece of furniture) and shouted into my very face, “Madman! What are you doing to all of us?”

“My dear Betsy,” I said imploringly, “do compose yourself, I beg of you; I cannot possibly discuss the matter with you so long as you are in this overwrought state.”

She quieted somewhat, and stood with her hands shaking and her eyes, flashing, pressed close against the other side of the desk. Still more than half afraid that she might suddenly spring at me, I held myself tense, back against the wall, and with an effort kept my voice quiet and steady as I asked her to sit down. “For,” I added, “we cannot talk quietly, you and I, until we sit together like human beings, and do not hold one another at bay like animals.”

Apparently seeing that I was not afraid of her, she gave a resigned shrug and threw herself into her usual chair, where she sat with her face turned from me and her hands still clenched into fists. I took the first real breath I had drawn since she entered my office, and passed warily around her to close the door. “Now, my dear,” I said, returning to my own chair behind the desk, “tell me what has upset you so.”

“Well,” said Betsy, as one diagramming an enormous injustice, “Lizzie and Beth and I are all your old friends, and even though you don't like
me,
it's not fair to pick a stranger to take charge of us.”

“I am not going to put anyone in charge, as you call it. This Bess is merely another self, just like yourself and Beth and Elizabeth.”

“She's not like
me,
” Betsy said. “She's awful.”

I smiled at the pot calling the kettle black, and continued, “My intention is not to choose among you, but to coax you all back together into a whole person again. Why should you suppose that I am discriminating against the rest of you in favor of Bess?”