The Mind of Mr Soames

by Maine, Charles Eric

  The interview was over. Dr Mortimer left the office consumed with doubts and misgivings.

  ❖

  It was Conway who, the next morning, was required to announce the unconditional surrender to Mr Soames, though, naturally, he chose his words carefully to convey the opposite impression. Mr Soames had been very naughty and had consequently been punished, he stated. The punishment had come to an end, and Mr Soames would now be allowed to enjoy the things he liked once more. If however, there was any further bad behaviour, the punishment would be repeated—perhaps for a longer period.

  Mr Soames, sitting hunched on the bed in his shapeless grey pyjamas with his hands tightly locked round his drawn up knees, simply stared at Conway. His eyes were dark and expressionless, betraying no reaction or even interest in his reprieve.

  Conway repeated his statement, using simple words which he knew were within the patient’s limited vocabulary, but Mr Soames’s lack of interest was, if anything, more marked than before.

  ‘To begin with, you may now have your clothes and put them on,’ Conway added He made a sign to the orderly, who left the room and returned a few seconds later with a bundle of neatly folded clothing which he placed on the small table.

  Surprisingly Mr Soames laughed, but it was a cold, terse laugh devoid of humour. He continued to clasp his knees, staring almost unblinkingly at the doctor.

  ‘We must give him time to adapt himself to the change of policy,’ Conway said quietly to the male nurse. ‘His mind is not flexible enough to switch its attitude with sufficient degree of reorientation, and that may be a rather slow process for him. I suggest we leave him alone with his clothes for a while and see what happens.’

  To Mr Soames he said, by way of incentive: ‘You can put your clothes on when you want to. As soon as you are dressed, we shall take you for a walk by the lake. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Mr Soames stubbornly refused to offer any indication of response, so they left him to ponder the new situation, locking the door of the annexe, but keeping him under observation through a small window in the adjacent room which overlooked the annexe via the meshed rectangular front of what was superficially a ventilation grille.

  After a while, as Mr Soames showed no inclination to move and did not even bother to glance in the direction of his clothes, Conway went off to attend to other assignments in the psychiatric wards. He returned more than an hour later to discover that there had been no change in the situation. Mr Soames apparently didn’t want to know that his liberty, such as it was, had been restored.

  ‘I think,’ Conway said to the male nurse, ‘that perhaps we ought to intervene. It could be that he’s accepted the fact of restriction and acquired it as a habit. Obviously, in such a case, we must make a positive effort to establish a new attitude. Would you please help him to dress, and then we can take him into the grounds?’

  The orderly nodded, and went off on his mission. Conway lit a cigarette, spending a few minutes in idle and rather gloomy thought, then decided to catch up with his written report on the Soames case. He had covered no more than a page when a muffled shout broke the silence from the next room. An instant later Mr Soames laughed in his icy, impersonal way. Before Conway could reach the observation window the door crashed open and the male nurse rushed into the room, blood streaming down the side of his face.

  ‘For God’s sake...’ Conway began, astounded.

  ‘I was trying to force him to dress,’ the orderly explained, gasping for breath, ‘and then, suddenly, while my back was turned, he picked up the steel chair and struck me over the head with it...’

  ‘Did you say or do anything to annoy him?’

  ‘Nothing at all—just pushed him around a little to get his pyjamas off.’

  ‘You didn’t hurt him at all—physically, I mean?’

  ‘Of course not, but he bloody well hurt me.’

  ‘Mm,’ Conway murmured thoughtfully. ‘It was probably just a spontaneous outburst rather than a positive change of attitude. The trouble is that Mr Soames rather has the whip hand at the moment, and he seems to rate independence higher than liberty. You’d better clean yourself up while I go and talk to him.’

  ‘I should watch out, Dr Conway,’ the orderly warned. ‘He’s in a nasty mood.’

  Conway went into the annexe and found the patient already dressed. He was standing by the window, staring pensively at the surrounding parkland, and of the nasty mood there seemed to be no further trace.

  ‘Mr Soames,’ Conway said sharply.

  Soames turned slowly, his lips curved in an apologetic half smile.

  ‘That was a bad thing to do,’ Conway admonished.

  For a moment Soames looked bewildered and slightly resentful, as if he had been unjustly accused of a heinous offence, and then the smile brightened his swarthy face again.

  ‘I dress myself,’ he announced uncompromisingly.

  ‘You had every chance to dress yourself,’ Conway accused. ‘We left your clothes on the table for over an hour, but you did nothing.’

  ‘I think about what you say. I think slowly, and I take a long time.’

  ‘All right,’ Conway agreed, ‘but when the orderly tried to help you, why did you hit him with the chair?’

  ‘I did not,’ Mr Soames said blandly. ‘He hit himself with chair to make me laugh...’

  That proved something of a stopper for Conway. A new phenomenon had emerged: Mr Soames telling infantile lies. Not surprising, perhaps. After all, his mind was presumably following the normal evolutionary process, and the point had to come when he would lie to avoid punishment just as any child might he. But the problem was how to deal with the situation in an adult. To accept the he implied surrender once more, and would encourage further and more ambitious efforts in distorting the truth. To reject it would precipitate a behaviour which might well retard the patient’s mental development and certainly introduce difficulties so far as the imminent visit of his mother and half-sister were concerned. For a while there seemed to be no possible compromise, until abruptly the solution came to him—the ploy-counter-ploy, resulting in the awareness, if Soames were shrewd enough, of conditioned triumph and disguised failure.

  ‘Mr Soames,’ Conway said firmly, ‘that is not exactly what happened, but perhaps you do not remember. If you were thinking so much about what I said, perhaps you do not remember what took place when the orderly came into your room to help you to dress.’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Mr Soames said eagerly. ‘He hit himself on head with chair to make me laugh.’

  ‘That is not true,’ Conway said patiently. ‘Either you do not remember or you are telling an untruth.’

  ‘But I did laugh.’

  ‘Yes, so you did. On the other hand, the orderly did not hit himself on the head.’

  ‘He did.’

  Conway shook his head. ‘No he didn’t, but perhaps you thought he did. Perhaps you do not properly remember what happened.’

  ‘I remember. He hit himself...’

  ‘No!’ Conway shouted impatiently. ‘It is not true.’

  ‘It is true!’ Mr Soames stated vehemently. ‘He hit himself on the head—like this...’ An instant later, with immense strength and dexterity, he picked up the steel-tube chair and hurled it at Conway, who ducked wildly. The chair caught his shoulder, spinning him round, then crashed to the floor. The air of the room quivered with Mr Soames’s raucous laughter.

  Conway suppressed the fury that surged within him, and maintained a calm, patient demeanour. ‘Exactly,’ he said quietly. ‘You picked up the chair and hit the orderly with it, just as you tried to do to me. But it’s not funny, you know. It’s not funny to try to hurt people.’

  Mr Soames looked slightly crestfallen in a sombre way. ‘People hurt me—I hurt people,’ he pronounced solemnly.

  ‘How do people hurt you?’ Conway demanded.

  ‘No clothes, bad food, lock me in a room all day...’

  ‘That is because you were...’ He
almost used the word ‘naughty’, but decided against it. ‘Because you were being difficult—disobedient. You understand disobedient?’

  . Mr Soames shook his head morosely.

  ‘Because you would not do what you were told to do,’ Conway explained. ‘We are trying to help you, but sometimes you do not wish to be helped, and you have to be punished.’

  ‘I don’t want to be punished.’

  ‘Then you must do what people who are trying to help you tell you to do.’

  ‘I don’t want to do what they tell me.’

  ‘You must learn,’ Conway said slowly and emphatically, ‘that what you want and what you don’t want are not important. There are many things that matter more. Doing what you are told to do is one of the things that are far more important at present. When you have learned all that we can teach you, then you will be able to make up your own mind about what you want to do, but until then you must do as we say.’

  Mr Soames stared at him blankly for a while, then said : ‘Why?’

  Why indeed, Conway thought. Because the particular society in which we happen to live possesses certain criteria of conduct and behaviour, and it is generally better to conform, if one wishes to live a peaceful life and avoid trouble. Because the particular form of psychological conditioning known as education is required to follow a preordained pattern developed over the centuries to produce the kind of citizens most suited to their environment. Because homo sapiens, in his condition of civilised enlightenment (if that is the word), has adopted a simple binary classification of human behaviour into good and bad. Good is right and bad is wrong, but only in terms of social relationships and responsibilities. ‘I want’ is good if it also fits the existing structure of social conditioning; if not, then it is bad. ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’ are irrelevant in themselves. One must learn to like what is good because it is right, and, conversely, to dislike what is bad because it is wrong. In such a way one acquires social education and conditioning, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  None of which was an answer to Mr Soames’s blunt question, however. With the simple logic of a child he just wanted to know why he had to do as he was told, to differentiate between arbitrary standards of right and wrong when, in fact, right was what he liked and wrong was what he didn’t like. There was no adequate reply that could satisfy him in his present stage of mental development; indeed, a reply was not needed. Training required no explanation. It was a discipline imposed from outside; a drill demanding obedience and, to some extent, dedication. Above all, there had to be the recognition of, and respect for, authority—and that was Mr Soames’s trouble all along the line. He was being educated as a child with the status of a man, and in consequence he recognised no authority but his own. It was the typical syndrome of the spoilt brat, the juvenile delinquent, the post-war ‘crazy mixed-up kid’—the defiant adolescent suffering from under-discipline and over-indulgence, the only one in step in an out-of-step world.

  Still no answer to Mr Soames’s vital question. Why! Conway could think of a thousand reasons why, but none of them would be comprehensible to Mr Soames’s naïve and egocentric mind. But clearly there had to be an answer, and a quick answer, for Mr Soames was becoming restless and uneasy.

  Conway said, with all the authority he could muster: ‘Because I said so.’

  Mr Soames considered that for a while. Conway could almost visualise his mind ticking over, fitting the words into place semantically. Why must Soames do as he is told? Because Conway said so. Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer...

  ‘Why should I?’ Mr Soames said presently. ‘Why not you do as I say? I stronger than you.’

  Eminently reasonable, Conway decided. Mr Soames was something of a fundamentalist. Might is right, and right is what I want. The basic conflict of nature herself, and certainly of human beings from the dawn of history. Law is power and power is law: conquer and rule, or surrender and serve. On the other hand, in this particular case, it was essential to avoid any feeling of personal conflict. True, Mr Soames had to be made to respect authority, but it had to be an impersonal authority involving the recognition of accepted behaviour codes. Therein lay the fault. If Mr Soames was in essence a child, then logically he should pursue the step-by-step progression of the typical child, accepting first the totalitarian but benevolent authority of the parent, and then transferring it incrementally to the school-teacher, the employer, the police, the judiciary and the government, progressing ultimately to the acceptance of an abstract system of morality that would override and justify, all other forms of authoritarian discipline. But such progress could hardly be accomplished without punishment, or the threat of punishment, exercised in the shape of guidance firmly imposed: the slapping hand of the parent, the cane of the school-teacher or the imprisonment of school detention, the danger of dismissal from a job or the shadow of demotion or unemployment, the impersonal machinery of the law, empowered by the police and activated by the courts, and finally the arbitrary dictates of government, whether democratic or otherwise, subordinating the individual to the corporate jurisdiction of the human mass that comprised the State. Here and now, what Mr Soames obviously needed more than anything was a father—a firm, strong, uncompromising father. But Mr Soames was also a big, strong adult, and, as he had just stated, stronger than Conway himself if it came to the point.

  ‘I do not make the rules,’ Conway said tactfully. ‘The rules are made by many people and we all have to obey—even I have to obey. If I do not obey, then I, too, may be punished.’

  Mr Soames began to show mild interest. ‘They lock you in room and take away your clothes?’

  ‘If I break certain rules called laws they can certainly lock me in a room, perhaps for many years, and they can take away my clothes and give me other bad clothes to wear. And if I were to break certain other laws they could put a rope round my neck and hang me.’

  ‘Hang?’ Soames echoed.

  ‘Kill-with a rope.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It was fairly evident to Conway that Mr Soames was getting a little out of his depth, and that it was premature and probably unwise to embark on a simplified explanation of crime, punishment and execution. For one thing, the association of ideas was undesirable, and it seemed an ill-judged moment to implant in his mind visual images associated with killing—albeit judicial killing—as if the simple violence of the patient were being countered by the implied threat of a more lethal kind of violence. Mr Soames certainly seemed to have become suddenly thoughtful and subdued, and it was time to change the subject ‘Let’s go for a walk in the grounds,’ Conway suggested.

  Mr Soames nodded slowly and glumly.

  ‘Good,’ Conway went on. ‘It will make you feel much better, and then you can have the food you like, and the games, and see films and so on. Just wait here for a few minutes, and I will come back for you.’

  He left the room, locking the door quietly behind him, and went in search of another male nurse to help escort the patient on his excursion out of doors. Mr Soames’s pacific mood seemed just a little too good to be true, and it wasn’t wise to take chances.

  8

  Mr Soames remained on his behaviour throughout the remainder of the day, as if his violent outburst of the morning had been a mere tantrum, but Conway was far from gratified. The patient had become docile, it was true, but in a morose, withdrawn fashion suggesting utter defeat. At no time did he show any sign of pleasure at his newly restored privileges.

  It was, in a way, a logical enough reaction, Conway supposed, characteristic of the cycloid or manic-depressive type of personality. Mr Soames was happiest when asserting himself in defiance of authority, and the negative phase of surrender and submission merely produced depression, even though the circumstances of living became more pleasant. If the pattern proved to be consistent, one might even be able to predict his probable behaviour by his moods; good humour would signal stubbornness and truculence, while despondency would indicate obedient sulky comp
liance.

  Conway put this viewpoint to Dr Mortimer during the afternoon. Mortimer was conducting what amounted to a formal enquiry into the assault on the male nurse, presumably to allocate responsibility and prepare a report for Dr Breuer. The enquiry proved to be relatively inconclusive, and even Mortimer himself admitted that the incident was fundamentally childish, which was what one might expect, anyway. He did not think it called for a further withdrawal of privileges or any disciplinary action under the circumstances, though obviously the male nurses, and the doctors too, for that matter, would need to exercise more caution when dealing with the patient, ‘As I see it,’ Conway said, ‘Mr Soames is likely to be dangerous when happy and harmless when unhappy. I think that might prove a useful barometer as to his behaviour, for the present, at least. In a sense he’s trying to establish himself as an individual, and that implies a certain resistance to imposed regulations. He hasn’t yet learned to compromise—how to make the best of both worlds.’

  ‘I think we need to be particularly careful at this stage,’ Mortimer said thoughtfully. ‘We have to encourage the feeling of contentment combined with independence, but at the same time we must suppress any hint of open conflict with authority, and try to do it without causing unnecessary depression in the patient. There is a very real danger that we might inadvertently create a fundamentally schizophrenic personality operating in two parallel modes.’

  Conway said: ‘I can’t help feeling that he ought to be allowed to mix with other people, at his own level, as it were. At the moment he’s the focus of attention, and the film units making documentary records of his progress haven’t helped. He’s being spoiled—as a kind of superlative only child—and it’s producing the inevitable reaction: the truculent phase followed by the sulking phase. The “you can’t play in my garden” attitude.’