“She was afraid of boys,” Titania said, in an old-fashioned way. “These boys! What with throwing stones and letting off fireworks, they can burn you alive in your bed.”
“That’s what your poor Auntie said, isn’t it, Titania? Now, you’re not afraid of boys, are you?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Brian was a boy. He was my brother.”
“What, did Brian die, my little dear?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “He died of the flu, when Mummy did. I had the flu, too. But I didn’t die; only I was delicate afterwards. I had the rheumatic fever, too.”
“Your brother Brian must have been a fine big boy,” I said. “Now about how old would he have been when he passed away? Twelve?”
“Thirteen and a quarter,” said Titania. “He was teaching me how to spit.”
“And so he passed away, and I’m very sorry to hear it,” I said. “. . . And your Auntie Lily wouldn’t let you go to the pictures, wouldn’t she? Well, you must always obey your elders, as you are told in the catechism. Who did you like best in the pictures?”
Her face sort of lit up, then, d’you see. She told me: “Best of all I liked Pearl White in a serial, Peg O’ The Ring. Oh, it was good! And John Bunny and Flora Finch—” She giggled at the memory. “But we had only got to Part Three of The Clutching Hand when Mummy and Brian died, and I went to live with Auntie Lily. . . . Apart from the danger of fire, picture palaces are unhealthy because they are full of microbes. Microbes carry germs. . . . Auntie Lily used to wear an influenza mask on her face when she went out—you know, you can’t be too careful these days,” said this serious little girl.
“And kept all her windows locked up, too, I daresay,” I said. “But I mean to say, what did you do with yourself? Play with dolls?”
“Sometimes. Or, sometimes, I did sewing, or read books.”
“Ah, you’re a great one for reading, Titania,” I said, “like your poor mother used to be. Why, Titania is a name out of a fairy story, isn’t it? A clever girl like you could read anything she could get her hands on, if she were locked up with nobody to talk to. I bet you read your poor brother’s old books, too. I remember noticing on the mantel-piece a bound volume of the Boy’s Own Paper. And also . . . now let me see . . . a book with a black and yellow cover entitled One Thousand Things a Clever Boy Can Do—is that it?”
She said: “Not Things! Tricks.”
“And right you are! One Thousand Tricks a Clever Boy Can Do. And I’ll bet you mastered them all, didn’t you?”
She said, “Not all of them. I didn’t have the right things to do most of them with—”
“There’s one trick in that book, which I have read myself,” I said, “which you did master, though, and which you did have the right apparatus for, Titania, my dear. Tell you what it is. You get a medium needle and stick it down the center of a soft cork. Then you get a penny and place this penny between two little blocks of wood. Put your cork with the needle in it on top of the penny, and strike the cork a sharp blow with a hammer. The cork will hold the needle straight, so that it goes right through that penny. That’s the way you killed your poor Auntie Lily, isn’t it, Titania?”
Finishing the last of her meringue, she nodded. Having swallowed, she said, “Yes,” and, to my horror, she giggled.
“Why, then,” I said, “you must come back to London with me, d’you see, and tell my inspector all about it.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Only you mustn’t tell Auntie Edith.”
I told her, “Nobody will do anything dreadful to you; only you must confess and get it off your poor little mind.”
Titania’s second cousin Edith, by courtesy called “Auntie,” came with the child and me to London . . . and there, in the police station, she flatly denied every word of everything, and cried to be sent home.
Put yourself in my position, stigmatized as a madman and a brute! I lost my temper, one word led to another, and I “tendered my resignation. . . .”
I shall never forget the sly expression on the girl Titania’s face when she went back with her Auntie Edith to Luton.
I have no idea what has happened to her since. She will be about thirty-eight or thirty-nine by now, and I should not be at all surprised if she had turned out to be quite a handful.
THE SYMPATHETIC SOUSE
The Carpathians have always been the rocky-breasted wet nurse of somber and terrible fantasy. Dracula came out of these parts in which, as the peasants whisper, crossing themselves: “The dead ride hard.” Hungary, and Austria, have always been breeding grounds for vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, together with their bedevilments and bewitchings.
Psychoanalysis started in these parts. There are hundreds of professional psychologists (witch-doctors) from most other countries in the world who have studied under Freud, Jung, Adler, Groddeck, and the rest. Most of them go away with unblinking conviction: a species of owl stuffed with conjecture curdled into dogma. It is interesting, by the way, to observe that most of these fumblers in the dark are in a state of permanent nervous breakdown—an occupational disease you get when you try to take someone else’s soul to pieces and clean it and reassemble it. No man in the world ever emptied his heart and mind in an analyst’s office or anywhere else—only madmen try, who do not know what they are talking about; their candor is fantasy.
Anglo-Saxons ought to leave psychology to take care of itself. They break their hearts trying to make an exact science of what—considering the infinite permutations and combinations of the human mind—can never crystallize out of mere philosophy. In the end it all boils down to repetitive case-histories, reports, and other rubbish—sex in statistical tedium, with the spicy bits veiled in the obscurity of a dead language.
So, in effect, said that shrewd little mental specialist whom I will call Dr. Almuna, when I met him in a select scientific group at a cocktail party. He runs the Almuna Clinic—a polite, expensive kind of looney bin not far from Chicago—and specializes in dope-fiends and alcoholics.
Almuna is good company. This cheerful man who has kept clean because he has learned how to wash his hands in any kind of water—this Almuna, a kindly cynic, believes everything and nothing. There is nothing didactic about Dr. Almuna: he admits that the more he knows he knows, the less he knows he knows.
Once, in the course of a conversation he said to me, in reply to a certain question, “I know the lobes of a brain, and have followed the convolutions of many brains, and the patterns of behavior of many men and women. And still I cannot pretend to understand. I try, believe me! But every human brain is a separate labyrinth. He would be a lucky man who, in a lifetime, got to the heart of anybody’s brain. No, no; quite simply, I do not try to explain. I treat, and endeavor to understand. The other way lies theory. Hence, fanaticism; and so delusion. . . .”
On the occasion to which I have referred, when earnest professional men made a group and discussed cases, Dr. Almuna was there, cocking his head like a parrot; one eye shut; avidly attentive. Some practitioner whose name I forget was talking of a case of “sympathetic pains.” He had investigated and thoroughly authenticated the case of a girl who, at three o’clock in the morning of January 7th, 1944, uttered a piercing shriek and cried, “I’m shot!” She pointed to a spot under the collar-bone. There, mysteriously, had appeared a small blue dot, exquisitely painful to the touch. It transpired that exactly at that moment her brother, who was serving overseas, had been struck by a bullet in that very place.