CHAPTER III

A MADHOUSE

On an excitingly warm evening late in March the famous psychiatrist George Kien paced the rooms of his Paris Institute. The windows were open wide. Between the patients a stubborn contest was in progress for the limited space close to the bars. One head banged another. Abuse was bandied about. Almost all were suffering from the unfamiliar air which all day long they had been — some of them literally — gulping and swallowing in the garden. When the attendants had brought them back to the dormitories they were discontented. They wanted more air. Not one would admit to being tired. Until it was time for sleep they were still breathing at the window bars the last dregs of the evening. Here they felt themselves to be even closer to the air which filled their light, lofty rooms.

Not even the Professor, whom they loved because he was beautiful and kind, distracted them at their occupation. At other times when it was rumoured he was coming, the greater number of the patients in a dormitory would run in a body to meet him. Usually they strove for some contact with him, either by touch or voice, just as to-day they strove for places at the window. The loadiing which so many of them felt for the Institute where they thought themselves confined, was never vented on the youthful Professor. It was only two years since he had become in name the director of the extensive Institute which he had in fact directed before, as the good angel of a diabolical superior. Those patients who thought that they had been detained by force, or who in fact had been, ascribed the blame to that all-powerful, although now dead, predecessor.

This latter had embraced official psychiatry with the obstinacy of a madman. He took it for his real work in life, to use the vast material at his disposal to support the accepted terminology. Typical cases, in his sense of the word, robbed him of his sleep. He clung to the infallibility of the system and hated doubters. Human beings, especially nerve cases and criminals, were nothing to him. He allowed them a certain right to existence. They provided experiences which authorities could use to build up the science. He himself was an authority. On die value of such constructive mind he would — although a surly man of few words — make long and vehement speeches to which his assistant Georges Kien, under compulsion and burning with shame at his narrow-mindedness, must listen from beginning to end and from end to beginning, hour after hour, standing to attention. When a milder and a more severe opinion were in opposition, his predecessor would decide for the more severe. To patients who wearied him on his every round with the same old story, he would say: 'I know all that.' To his wife he complained bitterly of the professional necessity of having to deal with people not responsible for their actions. To her moreover he revealed his most secret thoughts about the essence of insanity, which he did not publish only because they were too simple and crude for the system and therefore dangerous. Madness, he said with great emphasis, and looked at his wife with penetrating and accusing gaze (she blushed), madness is the disease which attacks those very people who think only of themselves. Mental disease is the punishment of egoism. Thus asylums are always full of the scum of the earth. Prisons perform the same task, but science requires asylums for its experimental material. He had nothing else to say to his wife. She was thirty years younger than him and cast a glow over the evening of his life. His first wife had run away before he could shut her up — as he had done with his second — in his own institute; she was an incurable egoist. His third, against whom he had nothing save his own jealousy, loved George Kien.

To her he owed his rapid rise. He was tall, strong, fiery, and sure of himself; in his features there was something ofthat gentleness which women need before they can feel at home with a man. Those who saw him compared him to Michelangelo's Adam. He understood very well how intelligence and elegance could be combined. His brilliant gifts had been brought to fruitful effectiveness by the policy of his beloved. When she was sure that no one would follow her husband as the head of the institute but George himself, the director suddenly died without provoking any comment. George was at once nominated his successor and married her as a reward for her earlier services; of her last one he had no suspicion.

In the hard school of his predecessor he had developed quickly into his exact opposite. He treated his patients as if they were human beings. Faithfully he would listen to stories he had heard a thousand times before, and would express spontaneous surprise and amazement at the stalest dangers and anxieties. He laughed and cried with the patient he had in front of him. The division of his days was significant: three times — as soon as he got up, early in the afternoon, and late in the evening — he would make his rounds, so that on no single day did he ever miss one of the eight hundred odd inhabitants. A rapid glance was enough. When he saw the slightest alteration, a mere crack which offered a possibility of sliding into the other's soul, he would act at once and move the patient in question into his own private house. Instead of taking him to an ante-room, which did not exist, he would lead him, with cleverly interjected words of courtesy, into his study and offer him the best place. There he would easily win, if he did not enjoy it already, the confidence of the man who, towards anyone else, would hide behind the screen of his insanity. Kings he addressed reverently as Your Majesty; with Gods he would fall on his knees and fold his hands. Thus even the most sublime eminences stooped to him and went into particulars. He became their sole confidant, whom, from the moment he had recognized them, they would keep informed of the changes in their own spheres and seek his advice. He advised them with crystal cleverness, as though their wishes were his own, cautiously keeping their aims and their beliefs before his eyes, cautiously shifting ground, expressing doubts in his ability, never authoritative in his dealings with men, so diffident that many smilingly encouraged him; was he not after all their chief minister, their prophet or their apostle, occasionally even their chamberlain?

Thus he lived simultaneously in numberless different worlds. Among the mentally diseased he grew into one of the most comprehensive intellects of his time. Hé learnt more from them than he gave them. They enriched him with their unique experiences; he merely simplified them in order to make them healthy. What powers of mind and wit did he not find in many! They were the only true personalities, of perfect single-mindedness, real characters, of a concentration and force of will which Napoleon might have envied them. He knew inspired satirists among them, more gifted than all the poets; their ideas were never reduced to paper, they flowed from a heart which beat outside realities, on which they feu like alien conquerors. Privateers know the straightest way to the El Dorados of this world.

Since he had belonged to them and given himself wholly to their constructions, he no longer cared for polite literature. In novels you always found the same thing. Earlier he had read with passion, and had taken great pleasure in new turns given to old phrases which he had thought to be unchangeable, colourless, worn out and without meaning. Then words had meant little to him. He asked only academic correctness; the best novels were those in which the people spoke in the most cultured way. He who could express himself in the same way as all writers had done before him, was their legitimate successor. The task of such a writer was to reduce the angular, painful, biting multifariousness of life as it was all around one, to the smooth surface of a sheet of paper, on which it could pleasantly and swiftly be read off. Reading was fondling, was another form of love, was for ladies and ladies' doctors, to whose profession a delicate understanding of lecture intime properly belonged. No baffling turns of plot, no unusual words, the more often was the same track traversed, the subder was the pleasure to be derived from the journey. All fiction — a textbook of good manners. Well-read men are obsessed with politeness. Their participation in the lives of others exhausts itself in congratulations and condolences. George Kien had started as a gynaecologist. His youth and good looks brought patients in crowds. At that period, which did not last long, he gave himself up to French novels; they played a considerable part in assuring his success. Involuntarily he behaved to women as if he loved them. Each in turn approved lus taste and accepted the consequences. Among the little monkeys a fashion for being ill spread. He took what fell into his lap and had difficulty in keeping up with his conquests. Surrounded and spoilt by innumerable women, all ready to serve him, he lived like Prince Gautama before he became Buddha. No anxious father and prince had cut him off from the miseries of the world, but he saw old age, death and beggars in such abundance that he no longer noticed them. Yet he was indeed cut off, by the books he read, the sentences he spoke, the women who were ranged round him in a greedy close-built wall.

He found the way to the wilderness in his twenty-eighth year. On a visit which he had bestowed on the wealthy and persistent wife of a banker who was ill whenever her husband was away, he met the banker's brother, a harmless lunatic whom the family kept at home for reasons of prestige; even a sanatorium would have seemed to the banker to undermine his credit. Two rooms in his absurd villa were reserved for the use of his brother, who lorded it in them over his nurse, a round widow thrice over betrayed and sold to him. She was not to eave him alone, she was to submit to him in everything, and she was to announce herself to the world as his secretary, for he was given out to be an artist and an eccentric, who had little attention left for the human race, but was secretly working on a gigantic opus. Just this was known to George Kien as the doctor attending on the lady of the house.

To protect himself from her slobbering courtesies, he asked her to show him over the art treasures of the villa. Heavy and consenting, she got up off her sofa. The pictures of nude beautiful women — her husband collected only these — would form, she hoped, a bridge to him. She raved over Rubens and Renoir. 'In these women,' she repeated her husband's favourite phrase, 'pulses the orient dye.' He had once dealt in carpets. For just such an effect of the orient he took every kind of opulence in art. Madame observed Dr. George full of sympathy. She called him by his Christian name because he might nave een 'her little brother'. Wherever his eyes rested, there too rested hers. Soon she thought she had discovered what he wanted. 'How you suffer!' she said, as they do on the stage, and glanced down at her bosom. Dr. George would not understand. He had such sensitive feelings. 'The clou of the whole collection is in my brother-in-law's room! He is quite harmless.' She promised herself better results from that really shameless picture. Since educated people had taken to coming to the house, her husband had been compelled — while bellowing that he was master in his own house — to banish to his sick brother's apartments the real picture of his heart and the first that he had succeeded in buying cheap (on principle he only bought cheap and for ready money). Dr. Kien showed no great inclination to meet the lunatic. He thought he would find an imbecile version of the banker himself. Madame assured him that the picture there was more valuable than all the others taken together; she meant artistic value but in her mouth that word had the one meaning, which, like all else, was acquired from her husband. In the end she offered herself his arm, he obeyed and followed. Familiarities while walking seemed to him less dangerous than while standing.

Madame was for ever gazing at the picture. Geoige was grateful to her for this. One word from her would have broken down his politeness at last. He himself could find no words. If only the gorilla would speak again! Before this single wish all his thoughts of time-wasting, duties, women, success had vanished, as if from the day of his birth he had only been seeking for that man, or that gorilla, who had made up his own language. His crying interested him less. Suddenly he stood up and bowed low and reverently to the gorilla. He avoided French sounds, but his face expressed the greatest respect. The secretary accepted this recognition of her lord with a friendly nod. Then the gorilla stopped crying, fell back to his talking and permitted himself his oiiginal vehement gestures. Each syllable which he uttered corresponded to a special gesture. The words for objects seemed to change. He meant the picture a hundred times and called it each time something different; the names seemed to depend on the gesture with which he demonstrated them. Expressed and accompanied by his whole body no sound appeared indifferent. When he laughed he spread his arms out wide. He seemed to have a forehead at the back of his head. His hair had been rubbed away there as though, in the hours of his creative labour, he was for ever passing his hands over it.

Suddenly he sprang up and threw himself with passion on the floor. George noticed that it was strewn with earth, probably a thick layer. The secretary caught at his clothes as he lay there, but he was too heavy for her. Imploringly, she asked the visitor to help. She was jealous, she said, so very jealous! Together they raised the gorilla. Hardly was he seated again when he began to recount his experiences down below. From a few powerful words, hurled into the room like living tree trunks, George guessed at some mythical talc of passion, which shattered him with fearful doubts of himself. He saw himself as an insect in the presence of a man. He asked himself, how could he understand things which came from depths a thousand feet deeper than any he had ever dared to plumb. How could he measure himself, sitting at the same table with a creature such as this, he a creature of custom, of favours, with every pore of his soul stopped with fat, every day more fat, a half-man in all practical uses, without the courage to be, since to be in our world means to be different, a plaster cast, a tailor's dummy, set in motion or put to rest by gracious chance, entirely dependent on chance, without the slightest influence over it, without a spark of power, strumming always the same empty phrases, always understood at the same safe distance. For where is there a normal man, a man who determines, alters and forms his neighbour; The women, who had stormed George with love and who would give their lives for him, especially when he was making love to them, were afterwards just die same as they had been before, smoothly groomed skin-worshippers, busied about cosmetics or men. But this secretary, in her origin doubtless an ordinary woman, just the same as any other, had grown under the powerful will of the gorilla into an original creature, stronger, more passionate, more devoted. While he was singing his adventures with the earth, she grew restive. She threw jealous glances and words into the midst of his story, fidgeted helplessly hither and thither on her chair, pinched him, smiled, put out her tongue; he took no notice.

For some months he came every day. His admiration for the gorilla grew from visit to visit. With infinite pains he learnt his language. The secretary did not help much; if she dropped back too often into her native French, she felt discarded. For her treachery to the man, to whom she clung without reservations, she deserved punishment. To keep the gorilla in a good temper George renounced the short cut of learning through any other language. He learnt like a child, who is being taught by words the relation of things to each other. Here their relation was the essential; the two rooms and their contents were dissolved in a magnetic field of passions. Objects — in this his first impressions had been correct — had no special names. They were called according to the mood in which they floated. Their faces altered for the gorilla, who lived a wild, tense, stormy life. His life communicated itself to them, they had an active part in it. He had peopled two rooms with a whole world. He created what he wanted, and after the six days of creation, on the seventh took up his abode therein. Instead of resting, he gave his creation speech. All that was round him proceeded from him. For the furniture which he had found here and the rubbish which little by little had been passed on to him, had long since carried the marks of his activities. The foreigner, who had suddenly descended on to his planet, he treated with patience. He could forgive back-slidings of his guest into the language of a worn-out and faded past, because he had himself once been a man. And he noticed clearly the progress the stranger was making. At first little more than his shadow, he grew in time to be his equal and friend.

George was learned enough to publish a thesis on the speech of this madman. A new light was thrown on the psychology of sounds. Vigorously disputed problems of learning were solved by a gorilla. His friendship with him brought fame to the young doctor who had known hitherto only success. Out of gratitude he left him in the condition which made him happy. He renounced any attempt at a cure. He believed indeed, since he had learnt his language, that he had the skill to change him back from a gorilla into the disinherited brother of a banker. But he resisted the temptation to commit a crime, a temptation provoked alone by the sense of a power which he had gained over night, and instead became a psychiatrist out of admiration for the greatness of the distracted to whom his friend was so closely akin, and with the firm principle that he would learn from them but would heal none. He hacf had enough of polite literature.

Later, when he was working his way through hundreds of experiences, he learnt to distinguish between madmen and madmen. In general his enthusiasm remained alive. A burning sympathy for those men who had so far separated themselves from others as to pass for mad, overcame him with every new patient. Many of them offended his sensitive love, particularly those weak natures who, struggling from attack to attack, pined for the lucid intervals —Jews yearning for the flesh pots of Egypt. He did them the service, and led them back into Egypt. The ways he had found to do so were no less wonderful than those of the Lord when he set free his people. Against his will, methods of approach which he had intended for particular cases were employed also in others, others which he — full of respect and gratitude to his gorilla — would never have meddled with. What he suggested, spread. The director of the institute in which he worked rejoiced at the noise which his school was still making in the world. People had got used to regarding his life-work as finished. And now how it flowered again with his pupil!

When Georges walked along the streets of Paris it sometimes happened that he met one of his cures. He would be embraced and almost knocked down, like the master of some enormous dog coming home after a long absence. Under his friendly questions he concealed a timid hope. He spoke of general health, profession, plans for the future and waited for just one such little comment as 'Then it was nicer !' or 'How empty and stupid my life is now!' 'I wish I were ill again!' 'Why did you cure me?' 'People don't realize what wonderful things there are in their heads!' 'Being sane is a kind of retarded development!' 'You ought to be put out of business! You've robbed me of my most priceless possession!' 'I value you as my friend. But your profession is a crime against humanity.' 'Be ashamed, you cobbler of souls!' 'Give me back my madness!' 'I'll have the law on you!' 'Sane rhymes with bane!'

Instead, compliments and invitations rained on him. His ex-patients looked plump, well and common. Their speech was in no way different from that of any passer-by. They were in trade or served behind a counter. At best they minded machines. But when they had still been his friends and guests, they were troubled with some gigantic guilt, which they carried for all, or with their littleness which stood in such ridiculous contrast to the hugeness of ordinary men, or with the idea of conquering the world, or with death — a thing which they now felt to be quite ordinary. Their riddles had flickered out; earlier they lived for riddles; now for things long ago solved. George was ashamed of himself, without anyone having-suggested that he should be. The relations of his patients idolized him; they counted on miracles. Even when physical deficiencies had been proved, they knew he would manage a cure somehow. His colleagues admired and envied him. They pounced at once on his ideas, they were simple and illuminating, like all great ideas. How was it no one had thought of them before! They hastened to break offlittle fragments of his fame, by proclaiming indebtedness to him and applying his methods to the most different cases. He was bound to get the Nobel Prize. He had long been in the running for if, on account of his youth it seemed better to wait a few years.

So he had been outwitted by his new profession. He had begun from his own feeling of impoverishment, begun with the utmost reverence for the gulfs and precipices which he was to investigate. And in a little while he was a saviour, surrounded by eight hundred friends, and what friends, the residents of the institute; adored by thousands whose nearest and dearest had been reborn through him. For without the existence of nearest and dearest — to be tormented and loved — nobody feels that life is worth living.

Three times a day when he went on his rounds through the rooms he received an ovation. He had grown accustomed to it; the more enthusiastically they ran to greet him, the more violently they crowded about him, the more certainly did he find the words and actions which he needed. The sick were his public. Before he came into the first room he was listening for the familiar hum of voices. Scarcely had one of them seen him from the window than the noise gained direction and order. He waited for this revolution. It was as if they had all begun to applaud. Involuntarily he smiled. Countless parts had become second nature to him. His spirit hungered for rapid transformations. A round dozen assistants followed him, to learn. Some were older, most of them had been in the profession longer than he. They regarded psychiatry as a special field of medicine, and themselves as the administrators of the mentally diseased. Whatever touched on their subject they had acquired with industry and hope. Sometimes they even pretended to agree with the crazy ideas of the patients, just as it said they should in the text books from which they drew their knowledge. One and all they hated the young director, who impressed on them daily that they were the servants and not the beneficiaries of the patients.

'You see, gentlemen,' he would say to them when they were alone together, 'what miserable single-track creatures, what pitiful and inarticulate bourgeois we are, compared with the genius of this paranoiac. We possess, but he is possessed; we take our experiences at second hand, he makes his own. He moves in total solitude, like the earth itself, through his own space. He has a right to be afraid. He applies more acumen to the explanation and defence of his way of life, than all of us together do to ours. He believes in the images his senses conjure up for him. We mistrust our own healthy senses. Those few among us who have faith still cling to experiences which were lived for them by others thousands of years ago. We need visions, revelations, voices — lightning proximities to things and men — and when we cannot find them in ourselves we fetch them out of tradition. We have to have faith because of our own poverty. Odiers, still poorer, renounce even that. But look at him! He is Allah, prophet, and Moslem in one. Isa miracle any the less a miracle because we have labelled it Paranoia chronica?  We sit on our dück-headed sanity like a vulture on a pile of gold. Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding. If there is a life purely of the mind, it is this madman who is leading it!'

With feigned interest die assistants listened to him. When their promotion was at stake they were not above play-acting. Far more important to them than his general reflections, about which diey had their own private jokes, were his specialized methods. They noted down every word which, on the happy inspiration of the moment, he threw out to a patient, and vied with each other in the use of it, in the firm conviction that they were achieving just the same with it.

An old man who had lived for nine years in the institute, a village blacksmith, had been ruined in his home district by the coming of motor cars. His wife, after a few weeks of acute poverty, could no longer endure her life with him and ran off with a sergeant. One morning when, as soon as he woke, he was beginning to lament their ill-fortune, she had no answer for him: she had gone. He looked for her through all the village. Twenty-three years he had lived with her; as a child she had come to his house, in the first bloom of her youth he had married her. He looked for her in the neighbouring town. On his neighbours' advice he asked at the barracks for Sergeant Delbocuf, whom he had never seen. He had disappeared three days ago, they told him; gone abroad for sure because he'd be for it as a deserter if they got him. Nowhere did the blacksmith find his wife. He stayed the night in the town. His neighbours had lent him money. He went into every café, poked his head under every table and whimpered: 'Jeanne, are you there?' She wasn't even under the benches. When he leant over the bar people screamed: 'He's after the cash box!' and drove him away. From a child up everyone had known he was an honest man. Since he had married her, he hadn't thrashed her once. She had her joke at him, because he squinted with his right eye. He didn't mind. All he said was: 'As true as my name's Jean, I'll show you who's master!' That was how he treated her.

In the town he told everyone his misfortune. They all gave him good advice. A dirty cobbler said some people didn't know when they were lucky. He nearly killed him. Later he met a butcher. He helped him to look, because he liked walking about at night; he was a very fat man. They gave the alarm to the police and sniffed the river to see if there was a corpse in it. Towards morning they found a woman's, but she belonged to some other man. There was a thick fog and Jean the blacksmith wept when he saw it wasn't his. The butcher cried too and was sick into the river. Early in the morning he took Jean to the shambles. Here everyone knew and greeted him. The calves lowed, there was a smell of pigs' blood, the pigs squealed, Jean wailed even louder: 'Jeanne, are you there?' and the butcher bellowed —no one could hear the calves any more — 'The blacksmith's my friend! His wife's been brought here. Where is she?' The men shook their heads. So his wife's lost, raged the butcher, you've slaughtered her by mistake. He looked among the pigs who were hung up in a long row. 'Here's the old sow!' he bellowed. Jean looked at her from all sides, he smelt at her, he hadn't tasted a blood sausage in years, he loved them better than anything. When he had smelled his fill, he said: 'But this isn't my wife. ' Then the butcher lost his temper and swore : ' Go to hell, you fool ! '

Jean limped to the station, his wife was his lame leg, his money was all gone. He whimpered: 'How shall I get home?' and lay down on the railway lines. Instead of a railway engine a good Samaritan came along, who found him and gave him a railway ticket on account of his wife. In the train the ticket was bad. 'But he gave it to me!'said Jean, 'My wife's left me!' He hadn't a penny in his pocket and at the next station the police took him. 'Is she there? Where is she?' sobbed Jean and threw his arms round the policeman's neck. 'Here she is,' said the policeman, pointed to himself and took him away. He was locked up in a cell, where he raged several days, and his wife was lost for good. He would have found her, surely.

All of a sudden they let him go home. Maybe she's come back, he thought. The bed had gone, the table had gone, the chair: had gone, everything had gone. His wife would never come home to an empty house.