He reached for a pad of pink paper and began writing on it, his head swaying like a violinist's.
"What are you going to do with me?"
When he had finished writing, the doctor said, "I'm putting you out on probation, Mrs. Casement. For twenty-eight days in the first instance. You leave this asylum next Wednesday. That will give you time to make arrangements."
He had, at last, succeeded in disconcerting her. Without any effort on her part, a sense of what it was like outside came upon her: railway stations, drinks, shopping, laughter, traffic, telephones, men. Catharine hugged her hands between her knees. "Where shall I live? What am I going to do?"
"Your room at Lady Hazell's establishment is ready for you any time you care to go there. She was most definite on that point. I gather you're not in any financial difficulties. So you should manage perfectly well."
Dr. Best prodded a bell-push on his desk, smiled distantly and went on, "You'll be back where you started from. The results of this little experiment should be interesting. To both of us."
"We'll give it to you in the arm today, Maxie, as a special concession," said the nurse. "Seeing as how there are gentlemen present."
"We'd better be getting along," said Ayscue.
"This is the main event of the afternoon," said Hunter, unbuttoning his pajama jacket. "It would be insensitive of you to go now." He swallowed quickly twice and licked his lips.
Churchill, about to follow Ayscue's lead, noticed this. He fancied too that a couple of paler patches had appeared on Hunter's pale face. "It'll do us good to watch-might make us go a bit steadier with the pink gins tonight. What are you getting?"
"Little multi-vitamin shot," answered the nurse, a muscular man in his thirties with one of the smallest noses Churchill had ever seen. "All our thirsty friends start missing out on their carrots and liver after a bit. This will make our Maxie a healthy boy as well as a good boy."
The nurse had placed a round metal tray at the foot of the bed. He took from it a small glass phial with a narrow neck which he nipped with a pincer-like instrument. Next he carefully filled a syringe with the dark amber-colored liquid in the phial and then picked up an antiseptic pad.
"Is this all he gets?" asked Churchill, meaning only to break the silence as the man worked.
"Oh no, soldier." The nurse began swabbing a patch of skin on the inside of Hunter's upper arm. "There's the little blue sausages that make Maxie go bye-byes, and the weeny round orange jokers that cheer him up when he's feeling sad. Right. Now just relax, will you? Relaxie, Maxie. Good…"
"Incredible taste you get at the back of your throat with these vitamin shots," said Hunter, looking past them at the wall. "I don't think I shall ever be able to drink barley water with the same relish after this. Not that it does much to take the taste away. I think perhaps… a couple of nice solid sandpaper sandwiches might help. But they don't provide those here."
"Good boy, Maxie." The nurse patted Hunter lightly on the top of the head. "You'll be able to see in the dark now. Just what you could do with, eh? You know, you blokes don't want to take your old pal's troubles too seriously. He's just a bit of a boozer, is our Maxie. Nothing compared to some we got here."
He took a cigarette from Hunter's bedside table, lit it with a lighter from a pocket in his white knee-length coat, blew out a shred of tobacco and continued to talk, slowly stroking his forehead with the fingers of the hand that held the cigarette.
"That geezer over there, now. Fellow with my colleague in attendance." Although the nurse did not drop his voice at all, the man who had been carefully examining the room went on doing so without any sign of having heard. "Keen as mustard. In love with the stuff. This conditioned-reflex treatment, now that's no buggy-ride, I can tell you. It's this idea where they start off by giving you a bomb that makes you throw up. Strychnine was what they used to use, but as the years rolled by they got to notice that it had, uh, undesirable side-effects. You know, like death." The nurse gave a long chuckle, bowing deeply once like an actor taking a curtain call. "All that's been ironed out. Anyway, you know the form, I dare say: fill him full of emetine hydrochloride and the rest of it and let the old tachycardia and sweating and vertigo soften him up a bit. Then the technique is to slip him a glass of Scotch or whatever he's hooked on about half a minute before the emetine makes him spew his ring. It's an art, really. If you do it right you get to where just the Scotch'll make him throw up. Our brother got that far and it's only about twenty-five per cent that do. Then the big white chief sends him out on probation-great on timing, the old chief. Comes a fortnight later and our brother's back in. Acute exhaustion and malnutrition. What he'd been doing, he'd been knocking back the Scotch and spewing his bloody guts out and then knocking back the Scotch. And so on. You see what I mean. There's a geezer who really cares about drink. It's what I said, our little Maxie's still in the kindergarten.
"Well, I'll be getting along." The nurse picked up his tray and shook his head philosophically. "Oh, you get some peculiar buggers in here," he added, seemingly by way of introduction to further material.
"Don't let us keep you," said Naidu.
"Not on your life, General. And you'd better not stay around too long either. We don't want our Maxie getting over-excited and tossing and turning all night. He's being tapered off on the sodium amytal, see. Well, so long, my trusty lads. Fix bayonets and charge the old bomb, eh? That's the style."
The man walked smartly away.
Naidu said, "I'd be happy to go straight to whoever's in charge here and lodge a complaint in person. You've only to say the word, Max."
"Oh, Moti, where's your sense of humor? He's really a very nice lad. In his way. He's as gentle as a child. When another child's trying to take its toy railway train off it. No, that's not quite fair."
"Is he the one you call the nice nurse?" asked Churchill. "Because I'd hate to-"
"No, the nice nurse is truly and demonstrably nice. He says I need looking after. He's promised to sit next to me on the coach trip to St. Jerome's Priory on Sunday."
Ayscue grinned. "What are you going to do there?"
"Look at it, I suppose, and then come back. It'll make a break."
A minute later the three visitors had taken their leave and were walking back along the corridor. Churchill was brooding. He said in a strained voice,
"Why does this sort of thing have to happen? A chap like Max in that horrible situation. It isn't right."
"He's being made well," said Naidu. "It's necessary, James. I didn't like that swine of a nurse any better than you did, but you may be sure that if he over-stepped the mark in a big way then the authorities would get to hear of it and take necessary action. You know that. You must be reasonable."
"I'm trying to be. I'm trying to see the reason in it. It isn't the nurse so much. I don't want there to be people like that but I'm not against the idea of it. What I'm against is it being possible for a man like Max being able to damage himself in that way. A man like anybody, come to that."
They emerged into the brilliant sunshine. Naidu said earnestly,
"Man has free will. He has the things of this world before him and it's up to him what he does with them. That we must all recognize. There is such a thing as alcohol and if a man indulges in it to an excess then he has only himself to blame. I trust I'm not sounding censorious towards our good friend when I say that, you understand."
Averting his eyes from the stone figure of the lion-like creature, which they were now passing, Churchill looked at Naidu. The small neat handsome face with its shapely bones and rich brown skin was troubled, but not unhappy. It was as if new reasons for envying him came up every day.
"I see that, Moti," said Churchill. "But why couldn't alcohol just have had good effects, or at least not have had such bad ones as it's had on the fellows in that ward? It could have been, you know, no worse than overeating, making you fat or something if you went on with it. So why did it have to be so bad?"
"My dear Jam
es, why is there arsenic, why are there poisonous snakes, why is there cholera and bubonic plague and the other things of that sort? Come along, padre, you're the expert here. You must render me some assistance."
"I'd be worse than useless, I'm afraid," said Ayscue. "I've been into this with James before, more than once. I just make him angry."
Churchill flushed. "Not angry, Willie, merely disturbed to find someone of your intelligence defending the indefensible."
"Don't let's start."
"All right. Sorry."
As they drew level with the water-tower, a door in the adjacent building opened and the two women they had seen earlier came out. Churchill felt a shock, as if the aircraft had again passed between him and the sun. He realized that he had thought of the girl every couple of minutes since his first sight of her. He caught her glance now and held it until they passed. Immediately he was filled with shame at his own foolishness and lack of forethought in not having looked at the girl properly. She was thin and tall and perhaps had a slight stoop and her hair was neither light nor dark. Instead of noticing more he had just stared into her eyes, and after five seconds he could not even remember their color. But he had a feeling he would know her again anywhere.
With no more said they rounded the corner and made for their car, one of the passé jeeps wished on the unit as a result of some turn of Captain Leonard's thought. Yellow lettering on its body said 6 HQ Adm Bn, shorthand for the unit's cover name. Ayscue got into the driver's seat and they moved off.
"It's an exceedingly pleasant situation, you can say that much." Naidu looked out at the grassy slopes, dotted with rhododendrons and azaleas, between which they were riding. "Doesn't the whole place remind you of an English country house of the traditional sort?"
"It used to be just that," said Ayscue. "I was reading their pamphlet. Apparently the fellow who was squire here in Victorian times was a sort of pioneer in mental illness. Set up what amounted to a clinic, one of the first in the world. Then one of his successors handed it over to a trust, and there we are."
"I can see there's been a lot of building since those days, but it still keeps its very charming historical appearance."
Sitting behind them, Churchill heard little of this. He was trying to satisfy himself that there was nothing he could have done about the girl. Even if he had had the resource to give his two friends the slip and follow her back to her ward, he would probably not have been able to find out so much as her name. And her name alone would not have been much use-just a lot better than nothing at all. Why had he not been able to run after her, pretend he thought he knew her or something? Oh well, it was done now, or rather not done.
At the lodge, a thickset man in a blue suit peered at them through a sort of guichet, then waved them past impatiently.
"Rather lax security measures here," said Naidu. "How does that worthy fellow know we aren't three raving maniacs who have overpowered three unsuspecting Army types? He'd get short shrift from our gallant Captain Leonard."
Churchill roused himself; he would think about the girl again later. "Apart from the violent chaps, who never leave the ward, it's all open here, apparently. Max was telling me last week. The problem is keeping chaps who've been chucked out from worming their way back in."
The traffic across their front was heavy. While they waited for a gap, a motorcyclist in Army uniform drew over to the curb near them, stopped his machine and pulled it onto its rest. As he approached, pushing his goggles up, they saw that he was a dispatch-rider of the Royal Corps of Signals. He crossed to Ayscue's side of the jeep, saluted with something of a flourish, and said,
"Excuse me, sir, but you seem to be part of the unit I'm trying to find, Sixth HQ Admin Battalion. Can you tell me where your place is? This is the second time I've been along this bit of road."
"We're going there now, Corporal," said Ayscue. "Perhaps we can deliver your packet for you."
"Not unless one of you gentlemen happens to be…"-the man referred to a typewritten instruction-"Captain P. B. Leonard, 17th Dragoons? I've got to deliver to him personally and get his signature, you see. Thank you all the same, sir. Now if you could just give me an idea…"
Churchill half listened while Ayscue furnished directions. The dispatch-rider's head and shoulders were out of sight from the back seat of the jeep, and his voice was unremarkable. He was quite young: nothing more.
"You'll be there long before we are," Ayscue was saying. "By the way, I thought you fellows were all on four wheels these days."
"We keep up a few of the bikes for special runs like this where there isn't a lot to carry. Better in traffic, too. And this weather, well, it's a treat to be in the saddle. Well, thanks again, sir. I'll probably pass you on my way back."
In a few seconds he was off. Churchill fancied he waved as he went, but was not sure. By the time there was a gap in the stream of vehicles long enough to take the jeep, the dispatch-rider was out of sight ahead of them.
Naidu started a conversation with Ayscue about discipline, inspired, he said, by their brief exchange with Corporal Fawkes an hour earlier. Was that admittedly very pleasant young NCO not perhaps a trifle… free and easy? He, Naidu, ought not to have encouraged this spirit by offering even that very minor jest of his at the expense of Security and, by implication, of a brother officer. Or was he being over-scrupulous, too much the son of a subadar-major father whose views on such matters were probably indistinguishable from those current in Victoria's Indian Army?
As Churchill had expected, Ayscue said more or less that everything was all right really. Saying that everything was all right really, however different it sometimes looked, earned Ayscue his living, of course, but at the moment none of his masters was in earshot. Surely he must forget himself sometimes? Never to do so would verge on the inhuman. Well: he was decent enough in other respects for it to be regrettable that he was a parson.
Churchill soon got tired of regretting this. Although he would not be able to think about the girl properly until after dark and when he was alone, he was encouraged to do so now by the stretch of country they were passing through, sunlit meadows on one side, shade over the road and on the other side, where there was also a stream splashing down among rocks with ash and birch trees on the slopes and drifts of dead leaves seemingly undisturbed since autumn.
It was not that Churchill visualized himself walking among the trees with the girl, nor so much that he would have liked to be doing so. Instead, by a process familiar since childhood but never analyzed, he used the thought of her to focus his attention on the scene, finding much more in it physically than he would otherwise have cared to, and taking its and her joint existence as a signal, almost a guarantee, that the real joyful life existed somewhere. Churchill was not an unhappy person, either by nature or by experience, but since leaving school five years ago he had several times been disconcerted by doubts about whether the joy of which he knew his heart was capable would ever find its occasion or its setting. Only sad or frightening things, like this afternoon's visit to Max Hunter, seemed to have the power that joy ought to have, and the necessity for getting through the ordinary day sometimes felt, late at night, as if it were detuning his heart, screening and muffling its capacities.
He could admit to himself now that it had been a relief to have been prevented by circumstances from pursuing the girl. Her apparent status as inmate of a mental hospital would certainly have raised unusual obstacles to his pursuit of her, but if he had managed to surmount these he would only have found himself committed to some variation on that repetitious and mechanical program which had turned out to be the accepted way of dealing with women: telephone calls, restaurant dinners, car drives, seaside trips and attempted or actual seduction. He had been round this course a dozen times over the last few years and had got quite good at it, usually finishing successfully, always enjoying it after a fashion once he was off the mark, and hardly ever having to cheer himself up by reflecting that women who needed no pursuing were probabl
y not much of a catch. But at times the whole thing would strike him as oddly out of touch with what it was supposed to be about. The proportions seemed wrong. He could only get them right in his thoughts.
"Hullo, what's up here?" said Naidu. "An obstruction of some kind?"
"Looks like it."
Ahead of them was a line of halted traffic. Ayscue drove up to the rear of it and stopped. A minute went by.
"Shall I walk on round the bend and have a look?" said Churchill. He wanted to be in the sun and alone, even if only momentarily.
"I think they're just starting to move now."
After another minute they came to two stationary lorries almost side by side and blocking most of the roadway, an ambulance and a police car parked on the verge, and a small crowd just beginning to be dispersed by policemen. Churchill saw somebody's hand sticking out from under one of the lorries, just behind the front wheel. Two ambulance attendants and a man in plain clothes were kneeling nearby. The hand clenched, then opened again.
"It looks as if you may be needed here, padre," said Naidu.
Ayscue drew into the nearside verge, stopped the jeep, got out and walked across the road. Churchill watched. Then he noticed a motor-bicycle lying on its side on the opposite verge. He had a view of its rear mudguard, across which were painted bands of blue and white, the insigne of the Royal Corps of Signals. He got out and went over.
As he approached, a police constable was saying to an Inspector, "It's a ten-ton crane, sir. Should do the job all right."
The Anti-Death League Page 3