The White Cat

The White Cat by Gelett Burgess

Chester Castle, an architect, wakes injured after a motor-car accident on a lonely road, having been thrown clear when his steering gear failed. He finds himself in a strange guest-room at Midmeadows, tended by his rescuer, Joy Fielding, and her companion Leah, a refined, educated negro woman who acts as maid, friend, and confidante. Joy nurses Castle through a broken rib and concussion, and the two fall into an intense, playful rapport she calls "staying on the island," in which he agrees not to pry into her circumstances. She names herself, cryptically, "the White Cat," after the old fairy tale of a prince and an enchanted princess, and gives him her dog Hiawatha as a keepsake. As Castle recovers, he notices Joy's manner changes abruptly from day to day: sometimes she is refined, melancholic, and cultured, given to poetry, violin, and reading Browning and Verlaine with Leah; other days she becomes coarser, more athletic, forgetful, flirtatious, and cruel to the collies and to Leah, going by impulses she cannot account for. She eventually confesses to amnesia, and Leah privately warns Castle that trouble is coming and urges him to leave. Before he departs, Joy admits the truth: she has two alternating personalities, "Joy" and a second self she calls Edna, of which her waking self usually has no memory, and which has recurred since she was a girl, growing more frequent with age. Leah alone has managed the household through these changes, protecting Joy from doctors who might commit her to an asylum, and from any outsider learning her secret. Castle receives Hiawatha as a parting gift and leaves, believing the episode over. Weeks later, Leah writes urging him to return secretly. He finds Joy exhausted and distraught: after two consecutive days as Edna, during which Edna had violently driven Leah away with a horsewhip, Leah had fled and hidden, afraid to return lest she provoke "the other one." Joy, terrified that if she falls asleep from sheer exhaustion she will wake as Edna, has stayed up for two days waiting for Leah, unable to trust her own body. Castle calls Leah back, and together they revive Joy just before sleep can claim her, restoring "her own" personality rather than Edna's. Over dinner the three work out how to manage the situation, since Leah cannot always tell at a glance which personality has awakened, and Edna has been growing stronger and increasingly resentful of Leah's authority and of the collies. Castle, now deeply attached to Joy, promises to help by any means necessary, including managing Edna's favor toward him to keep Leah safe in the household. He also grows suspicious of Doctor Copin, the physician who visits regularly, noting that Edna appears more often when the doctor has been present, that Joy has inexplicably taken to telephoning him, that money and a piece of jewelry seem to have passed from Edna to him, and that he refuses to speak frankly about her condition while pressing to hypnotize her. The next morning Edna is in possession of Joy's body: energetic, mechanically inclined, careless of the servants, unafraid of using a whip on the loyal collie Nokomis, and openly attracted to Castle, to whom she surrenders keepsakes and confidences. Castle secures Edna's agreement to keep Leah on, and spends the day observing her mannerisms, her animosity toward the dogs, and her intimacy with Doctor Copin, who arrives and closets himself with her for hours while rebuffing Castle's questions with evasive jokes. Castle finds evidence that Edna has given the doctor money without Joy's knowledge, and begins to suspect he is deliberately cultivating Edna's dominance over Joy's true self for his own purposes, perhaps financial, perhaps romantic, rather than trying to cure her as he claims. When Joy's own personality returns the next day, Castle and Leah share their suspicions of Doctor Copin's manipulations and the missing money, deepening Joy's dread of losing more and more of her life to Edna. Castle asks for, and receives, Joy's trust to investigate covertly, even to the point of eavesdropping, in order to determine whether the doctor can be trusted or must be exposed as dangerous. Joy, meanwhile, shows Castle her disciplined, scholarly private life — her study, her scientific interest in training the collie Nokomis to remarkable feats of counting and comprehension, and her careful records charting the increasing frequency of Edna's takeovers over the years. That night, with Nokomis sleeping in Joy's room for comfort, Castle is woken by growling and a sudden, sharp yelp from within.

By Gelett Burgess · First published 1897 · Genre: Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Adventure · 17 chapters · 93,240 words

First lines

I came to myself with a disturbing sense that something was wrong with / me. My discomfort, increasing steadily, resolved itself into two / distinct factors -- a pain in my side at every breath and a throbbing ache / in the top of my head. I realized that I was in bed, and the first / strangeness of it struck me. I could not account for it. The wild, / spicy odor of flowers came to me, adding to my perplexity. Then I / opened my eyes.

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fantasy · children's literature · adventure · animals · whimsy · imagination · friendship · magic · fairy tale · narrative · illustrated · moral lessons

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More by Gelett Burgess