In his new cell there was a school-teacher. Because he had such a nice way of talking, he told him his story. 'What's your name?' asked the teacher. 'Jean Prcval.' 'Nonsense! Your name's Vulcan! You squint and limp. You are a blacksmith. A good blacksmith if you limp. Catch your wife!'
'Catch her?'
'Your wife's called Venus and the sergeant is called Mars. I'll tell you a story. I'm an educated man. I've only stolen.'
And Jean listened, with starting eyes. What a bit of news, she can be caught! It's not difficult. An old smith did it once. His wife deceived him with a soldier, a strong young fellow. When Vulcan the smith went off to work, that handsome young devil Mars slipped into the house and slept with his wife. The household cock saw it all, was indignant and betrayed them to his master. Vulcan made a net, a delicate piece of work, invisible, those old smiths knew a thing or two, and put it cleverly round the bed. The two crept in, the wife and the soldier. The cock flew off to its master and crowed: 'They're together at home.' Quick went the smith and called all his relations and the whole village. 'I'm giving a party to-day, wait outside, wait!' He crept into the house, up to the bed, saw his wife and the devil; he nearly cried. Twenty-three years they'd been together and he never thrashed her once! The neighbours waited outside. He drew the net tight, drew it tight, tight, they were prisoners, he had her, his wife. He let the devil go, everyone in the village fetched him a swipe on the snout. Then they all came in and asked: 'Where's your wife?' The smith had hidden her, she was ashamed, he was happy. ' That's the way to do it!' said the school-teacher. 'It's a true story. In remembrance they've called three stars after those people: Mars, Venus and Vulcan. You can see them in the sky. You need good eyes for Vulcan.'
'Now I know,' said Jean, 'why I snapped for the stars.'
Later they took him away. The teacher stayed behind in the cell. Jean found a new friend instead. He was beautiful. A man you could talk to. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Jean caught his wife. Sometimes he managed it. Then he was happy. But often he was sad. Then his friend would come into the room and say: 'But Jean, she's in the net, don't you see her?' He was always right. His friend opened his mouth and look, his wife was there. 'You squint, you do,' she said to Jean. He laughed and laughed and threatened her: Til show you who's master! As sure as my name's Jean!'
This blacksmith who had lived nine years in the Institute was by no means incurable. The inquiries of the director for his wife were fruitless. Even if she could have been found — who could have forced her to come back to her husband? George pictured to himself how the scene in which the blacksmith took all his pleasure would end in reality. He would set up the bed and the net in his own house; at last the wife would turn up. Jean would come softly in and gather up the net. The two would say the old familiar words to each other. Jean would become more and more excited. The net and nine years would fall aside together. 'Oh! if only I could get hold of that woman!' sighed George.
Every day he helped Jean to find her. He wanted her presence so much, that he could hand her over to him as if he carried her about with him. His assistants, the apes, supposed there was some kind of secret experiment behind it all. Perhaps he was going to cure him with these words. If one of them was alone in the room, he never missed making use of the magic formula. 'But Jean, she's in the net, don't you see her?' Whether Jean was happy or sad, whether he was listening or had stopped his ears, they flung their master's cordial words at him. If he was asleep, they waked him up, if he seemed stupid they shouted at him. They shook him and pushed him, reproached him with stupidity and despised his recollections of his wife. The one sentence was transformed to a thousand tones of voice, according to their characters and their moods, and when nothing came of it — the blacksmith was totally indifferent to them — they had yet another reason for laughing at the director. For years that ass had been repeating his simple experiment and still believed that he could cure an incurable with a single sentence!
George would gladly have sacked the lot; but contracts made by his predecessor bound them to him. He knew they meant the patients no good and feared for their fate, in case he should die suddenly. Their petty sabotaging of his work, which he believed to be selfless and which even in their limited view seemed useful, he could not understand. Little by little he would surround himself with people who were artists enough to help him. After all these assistants whom he had taken over from his predecessor were fighting for their lives. They guessed that he would be able to do nothing with them and swallowed his hints simply so that as soon as their contracts were concluded they might at least get jobs somewhere as his pupils. He had a fine sensitivity for the reactions even of men who were too simple, heavy and well-balanced from their very birth to be able to go out of their minds. When he was tired and wanted a rest from the high tension with which his distracted friends filled him, he would submerge himself in the soul of one of his assistants. Everything that George did, he did in the character of someone else. Even his rest; but here he found it with difficulty. Strange discoveries provoked him to laughter. What for instance did these blinkered hearts think of him? Doubtless they sought for some explanation of his success and for the clear-sighted devotion which he showed to his patients. Learning had rooted into them the belief in causes. Conventionally minded, they held fast to the customs and beliefs of the majority in their period. They loved pleasure, and explained each and all in terms of the search for pleasure; it was the fashionable mania of the time, which filled every nead and explained little. By pleasure they meant, of course, all the traditional naughtiness, which, since animals were animals, have been practised by the individual with contemptible repetition.
Of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, in to the mass, and to lose themselves in it so completely as to forget that one man ever existed, they had no idea. For they were educated men, and education is in itself a cordon sanitaire for the individual against the mass in his own soul.
We wage the so-called war of existence for the destruction of the mass-soul in ourselves, no less than for hunger and love. In certain circumstances it can become so strong as to force the individual to selfless acts or even acts contrary to their own interests. 'Mankind' has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal. In spite of its age it is the youngest of the beasts, the essential creation of the earth, its goal and its future. We know nothing of it; we live still, supposedly as individuals. Sometimes the masses pour over us, one single flood, one ocean, in which each drop is alive, and each drop wants the same thing. But it soon scatters again, and leaves us once more to be ourselves, poor solitary devils. In memory we can hardly conceive that we were ever so great, so many and so much one. 'Disease,' says one overburdened by intelligence; 'the beast in man' soothes the lamb of humility, and does not guess how near to the truth is its mistake. In the meantime the mass within ourselves is arming for a new attack. There will come a time when it will not be scattered again, possibly in a single country at first, eating its way out from there, until no one can doubt any more, for there will be no I, you, he, but only it, the mass.
For one discovery alone Georges flattered himself, and it was precisely this: the effects of the mass on history in general and on the life of individuals; its influence on certain changes in the human mind. He had succeeded in proving it in the case of some of his patients. Countless people go mad because the mass in them is particularly strongly developed and can get no satisfaction. In no other way did he explain himself and his own activity. Once he had lived for his private tastes, his ambition and women; now his one desire was perpetually to lose himself. In this activity he came nearer to the thoughts and wishes of the mass, than did those other single people among whom he lived.
His assistants explained his activity in a way which meant more to them. Why did the director
admire his idiots so? they asked themselves. Because he s one himself, though only half. Why does he cure them? Because he can't get over it that they're better idiots than he is. He envies them. Their presence gives him no rest. They are considered something special. He has a morbid desire to draw as much attention to himself as they do. The world thinks of him as a normal man of learning. He'll never get any further than this. As director of the institute perhaps he'll grow quite sane and — what a hope — die soon. I want to be mad! he screams like a little child. This ridiculous wish must obviously arise from some experience of his youth. He ought to be mentally examined some time. But a request to make use of him as the object of such an examination, he would naturally turn down. He's an egocentric; it's best to have nothing to do with such people. The image of a madman must have been bound up with his sexual experiences from early youth. He has a morbid fear of impotence. If he could only convince himself he were mad, then he would never be impotent. Every lunatic gives him more pleasure than he can give to himself. Why should they get more out of life than I do? he complains. He feels completely at a discount. He suffers from a sense of inferiority. Out of envy he goes on plaguing them until he cures them. One would like to know his feelings, every time he lets another come out. It doesn't occur to him there are new ones coming in as well. He lives on the petty triumphs of die moment. There's your great man, whom the world admires! —
— To-day, on the last round, they even omitted the outward appearance of servility. It was too hot, the sudden change of weather in the last days of March weighed heavy on their torpid souls. They felt like the despised inmates of the place. Established assistants, each one had their own barred window somewhere and could press their heads against it. They were exasperated at the inexactitude of their sensibilities. Usually some ran on ahead and competed to open the doors, that was if no nurses or patients got there first. To-day they followed George at a little distance, with wandering, distrustful minds, cursing their boring work, their director and all the sick people in the world. They would rather, to-day, have been Mohammedans, seated each one alone in a small well-furnished paradise. George was listening to the familiar noise. His friends watched him from the windows, and remained as indifferent as his enemies behind him. A sad day, he said sofdy to himself; approbation and hatred passed him by, he breathed only in the stream of other people's feelings. To-day he could feel nothing around him, only the heavy air.
In the rooms a hateful quiet reigned. The patients were careful not to quarrel in front of him. They remained eager to get to the windows. Scarcely was the door closed behind him than they were pushing and squabbling. The women asked him — but without giving up their places — imploringly for his love. He could find no answers. All sound and healing thoughts had abandoned him. One of them, as ugly as sin could never be, screeched: 'No, no, no, I won't give you a divorce!' Others shouted in chorus: 'Where is he?' A girl blubbered delighted: 'Leave me go!' Jean, good-natured Jean, was threatening to give his Jeanne a box on the ear. 'I had her in the net, I was going to take hold of her; she's gone!' he wailed. 'Hit her over the head, said George, he was fed up with that thirty-two years of faithfulness. Jean hit her hard and did her crying for her. In another room all of them were wailing because it was already dark. 'They're all mad to-day,' said the male nurse. One of the many Gods Almighty said: 'Let there be light !' and raged at the disrespect with which he was treated here. 'He's nothing but a little bank clerk,' the man in the next bed whispered confidently to George. Another asked, 'Is there a God?' and wanted his address. A dapper looking gentleman, whose brother had ruined him, was complaining of how bad business was to-night. 'As soon as I've won my case, I shall lay in a stock of shirts for approximately fifteen years!' 'And why should people go naked?' his best friend asked him profoundly; they understood each other perfectly.
George did not hear the answer to this question until he was in the next room. A bachelor was showing the others how he had been caught in flagranti delicto with his own wife. 'I pull offher fleas from her, only she wasn't wearing any. Then her father-in-law poked his head through the key-hole and asked for his grandchild back.' "Where? Where?' giggled the spectators. They were all busy at the same thing; they got on very well. The warders did not mind listening. An assistant, who was also a journalist, made a note of the atmosphere of the evening in significant words. George noticed it without looking; in his own thoughts he was doing the same thing. He was a walking wax tablet on which words and gestures made their impression. Instead of working over things or going to meet them, he received them mechanically. But the wax tablet was melting. 'My wife bores me,' he thought. The patients seemed foreign to him. Those secret doors which led into their strongly walled citadels, those doors which were usually ajar, whose passage was trusted to him alone, remained to-day fast locked. Break them open? Why? Best break off for to-night, to-morrow unfortunately always comes. I shall find each one of them in the right room, all my life I shall always find eight hundred patients. Perhaps my fame will make the institute even bigger. In time we may have two to ten thousand. Pilgrimages from every land will fill my cup of happiness. A commonwealth of all the world is to be expected in about thirty years. I shall be People's Commissar for Lunatics. Travels over all the inhabited earth. Inspections and reviews of an army of a million deranged minds. The mentally defective on the left, the over gifted on the right. Foundation of research laboratories for exceptionally gifted animals. Breeding of deranged animals into men. Imbeciles who recover will be discharged from my army with shame and disgrace. My friends are closer to me than my supporters. Petty supporters are called important. How petty my wife is. Why don't I go home? Because my wife's there. She wants love. Everyone to-day wants love.
The wax tablet weighed heavy. The things impressed on it were weighty. In the penultimate room, his wife appeared suddenly. She had run.
'A telegram!' she called and laughed in his face.
'Is that why you hurried so?' Politeness had grown on him like a second skin. Often he wished he could cast it; this was the height of his rudeness. He opened it and read: 'Am completely crackers. Your brother.' Of all possible news, this was what he had expected least of all. A bad joke? A mystery? No. One word disproved these possibilities: 'crackers'! Such expressions his brother never used. If he used such a word, something must be wrong. He blessed the telegram. A journey was essential. He could justify himself. He could not have wished more for anything.
His wife read it. "Who is this, your brother?'
'Haven't I ever told you about him? The greatest living sinologist. On my desk you'll find some of his latest works. It's twelve years since I saw him.'
"What will you do?'
'Take the next express.'
'To-morrow morning!'
'No, to-night.'
Her face fell.
'Yes, yes,' he said thoughtfully, 'it's a question of my brother's welfare. He must be in the wrong hands. How could he otherwise have sent off a telegram like this?'
She tore the telegram into little pieces. Why hadn't she torn it up at once? The patients scrambled for the fragments. They all loved her, they all wanted a souvenir of her; some of them ate the bits of paper. Most put them next their hearts or up their trousers. Plato the philosopher watched with dignity. He bowed and said: 'Madame, we live in the world!'
CHAPTER IV
ROUNDABOUT WAYS
George had slept for a long time; suddenly the train stopped. He looked up; numbers of people were getting in. His compartment, with the Winds drawn, remained empty. At the last moment — the train had started — a couple asked him if there were seats. He moved politely to one side. The man collided with him and did not apologize. George, who found the least sharpness in a society of well-bred monkeys refreshing, contemplated him in surprise. The woman misinterpreted his look and, they had hardly sat down before she apologized in her husband's stead: he was blind. 'I would not have thought it,' said George, 'he moves with astonishing assurance. I mus
t explain, I am a doctor and have many blind patients.' The man bowed. He was tall and spare. "Will it disturb you if I read aloud to him?' asked the woman. The timid devotion on her face had charm, doubtless she lived for this blind man alone. 'On the contrary! But you must not take offence either if I should fall asleep.' Instead of the sharpness he had longed for, courtesies fluttered to and fro. She took a novel out of her travelling bag and read aloud in a deep, flattered voice.
Peter must look rather like this blind man by now, rigid and gnawed. What could have got into Peter's calm mind? He lived alone and without a care; he had not the least contact with any individual. That he should have become distracted by the impact of the world on him — it sometimes happened with sensitive minds — was not to be thought of in his case; his world was his library. He was distinguished by a colossal memory. Weaker heads might come to ruin through too much reading; but with him each syllable that he acquired remained clear-cut from the next. He was the opposite of an actor, always himself, only himself. Instead of dividing himself among others, he measured them from the outside against himself, and he knew himself only from the outside and through his head. In tliis way he had escaped the very great dangers which must undeniably arise from preoccupation with the culture of the east, pursued in solitude and over many years. Peter was safe from Lao Tse and all the Indians. Out of his own austerity he leaned towards the moral philosophers. He would have found his Confucius in one place or another. What then could have come over him, a creature almost sexless?