HYPNOTIC POWER OF HER.
I HAVE received a letter from Tyler, Texas,
propounding the following fateful conundrum: “Can
Woman Hypnotize Man?” My correspondent adds
that “by answering, the ICONOCLAST will confer a
favor on the people of Tyler, decide a bet and settle a
vexatious question.”
The affirmative scoops the stakes—wins dead
easy, and world without end. The man who puts his
doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman
until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him
when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined
that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was
threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck
by lightning. Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of
some “wily Vivien” even now, and laying
foolish wagers in his mesmeric sleep. “Can woman
hynotize{sic} man? “Well, I should snigger. She
can hypnotize anything that wears pants, from the prince
at his gilded poker game, to the peasant scattering worm
poison in the lowly cotton patch and revolving in his
think tank the tenets of Populism; and I'm not sure but
the clothing store dummies and their brother dudes are
simply the physical wrecks and mental ruins of her
hypnotic medicine.
She hypnotizes because she can't help it. She's
built that way. The Tyler savants are 'way behind the
times. They are plunging into the shoreless realm of
psychology in search of information that was trite in
antediluvian times. They are trying to determine whether
man is a free moral agent in matters matrimonial, when
the sire of Solomon had made answer, and Lillian
Russell's multitudinous husbands settled the
“vexatious question” forever and for aye. But
perhaps Tyler has been too busy raising politicians to
keep pace with the psychological procession. Eve
hypnotized Adam and made him cast away the empire of
the earth for a scrubby apple, and ever since her fair
daughters have been making men imitate their remote
forefather's folly.
Woman does not “operate” as do
the professional he-hypnotists. Instead of giving you a
bright button or brand-new dime to look at, she puts her
dimples in evidence—maelstroms of love in a sea of
beauty. She dazzles you for a moment with the dreamy
splendor of her eyes, then studies the toe of a boot that
would raise a Kansas corn-crop for Trilby or supply
Cinderella with bunions. She looks down to blush and
she looks up to sigh—catches you “a-comin' an'
goin' ”—and you're gone! You realize that the
linchpin is slipping out of your logic, but you let 'er slip.
You suspect that your judgment has taken unto itself
wings, and that you couldn't tell whether you're a red-licker Democrat or a hard-cider Prohibitionist; but you
don't care. You simply bid farewell to every fear and
give the “operator” your undivided attention.
She plays with a skilled hand on all your senses, until the
last one of them “passes in music out of sight”
and leaves you a mental bankrupt. She makes you
drunken with the music of her voice and maddens you
with the low, sweet melody of her skirts. She permits
you, quite accidentally,
of course, to catch a glimpse of an ankle turned for an
angel, and, as she bends forward to chastise you with
her fan, your vagrant gaze rests for a fleeting moment on
alabaster hemispheres rising in a billowy sea of lace, like
Aphrodite cradled in old ocean's foam. You are now far
advanced in the hypnotic trance, and very fond of it as
far as you've got. Her every posture is a living picture,
her slightest movement a sensuous symphony, her breath
upon your cheek a perfumed air to waft you to the
dreamy but dangerous land of the lotus-eaters. You drift
nearer, and ever nearer, like a moth revolving in
narrowing circles around an incandescent light, until you
find yourself alone with her in some cozy nook, the world
forgetting if not by your creditors forgot. Being naturally
industrious, you seek employment, and she gives you her
hand to hold. Of course, she could hold it herself, but
the occupation pleases you, and she doesn't mind.
Besides, you make more rapid progress into the realm of
irresponsibility by taking care of it for her occasionally.
You conceive that what is worth doing at all is worth
doing well, and freeze to that little fragment of pulsing
snow like a farmer to his Waterbury in a camp-meeting
crowd. She rewards your devotion to duty by a gentle
pressure, and a magnetic thrill starts at your finger tips
and goes through your system like an applejack toddy,
until it makes your toes tingle, then starts on its return
trip, gathering volume as it travels, until it becomes a
tidal wave that envelops all your world. You are now
uncertain whether you have hit the lottery for the capital
prize or been nominated for justice of the peace. You
have lost your identity, and should you chance to meet
yourself in the middle of the road would need an
introduction. The larger the supply of brains you sat into
the game with, the less you have left. You begin to talk
incoherently, and lay the premise for a
breach of promise case. You sip the hand-made nectar
from the rosy slot in her face, harrow the Parisian peach
bloom on her cheek with your scrubbing-brush mustache,
reduce the circumference of her health-corset with your
manly arm, and your hypnotism is complete. Right there
the last faint adumbration of responsibility ends and
complete mental aberration begins. You sigh like a furnace
and write sonnets to your mistress' eyebrow—you cut
fantastic capers before high Heaven for the divertisement
of those who don't yet know how it is themselves. The
“operator” may break the spell by marrying
you, in which case you will return by easy stages to the
normal and again become a sane man and useful member
of society; but if she lets you down with the
“sister” racket, your nervous system is pretty
apt to sour. When a woman loses her hypnotic power
she either straddles a bike, becomes a religious crank or
seeks surcease for her sorrow among the female
suffragists.
