There was no outward sign – there was no disciplined attempt to reach any particular standard in Schloss Salvator. If a patient wanted to remain in bed, when he was told to get up, no one insisted on it. His breakfast was put on the table, but he need not eat it. The ward was washed out, the door stood open to the outer world, no one hurried him into it. Even Ida, the visiting doctor, showed no regularity in her visits and exacted no sort of attention from her patients. Her appearances were never timed, they seemed fortuitous, yet if an attendant raised his voice or showed impatience towards a patient, he often found Ida’s cold eyes raking him with a terrible gleam far more disconcerting than a blow. If a patient lost his small share of control or sank away from decency, or yielded to the more serious of his compulsions, it would be at that moment that he encountered Ida. There were no general rules applicable to all the patients at all times. Each patient’s rules were his own limitations and these were always kept open to meet the slightest progress. Patients in the more limited wards knew that they could and would be moved into a less limited one, the moment they could control their own actions sufficiently for the severer limitations to be lessened. Ida spoke 121to them about their difficulties, as a workman speaks to a fellow workman about the imperfection of some tool they both needed to mend in order for it to execute a common task. ‘When you have got over this illness.’ ‘When you can eat your meals like that.’ ‘When it is not necessary for you to be so angry,’ she would carefully explain – ‘then you can do so and so – or you can go freely here and there.’ The sickness of the soul, Ida treated with the same respect and care as the sickness of the body; but though this was a hospital where improvement was expected, it was also a re-training in moral values. This was the one path towards recovery. Each patient had offered him, some for the first time, the chance to acquire habits of decency; and the instinct of contributing towards a community which largely provided for its own needs. From the moment a patient arrived, his skill or the possibility of developing skill in one or other of the activities of the Schloss was looked for in him and brought out into the light of the patient’s own consciousness. From the moment he could recognize that he had this power, a new hope was born in him. Sometimes the hope was there before the patient discovered it – a glow-worm in the dark unaware of the light it was carrying.
It was strange to Mark, who was both harder and less elastic in his code, and more sentimental in his expectations of a human being’s innate capacity to carry out his duties, to see that Ida neither showed nor welcomed affection as part of her treatment.
It was not devotion that she roused, nor personal attention that she challenged in any of her patients. Yet when she came into a ward something dynamic happened. Every patient in it became slowly aware, if it were only for a few moments, of something other than themselves. It was like the opening of a window in an airless room. 122
Mark puzzled for some time as to the cause of this awakening; he even (though his hostility to Ida had not decreased) felt it in himself. He came at last to the conclusion that it was a sort of hidden relief – because Ida never for an instant accepted the taint of a patient’s inability to be normal. For Ida, insanity as a fate (unless the organ of the brain itself was structurally degenerate) did not exist. To be mad was merely a patient’s unfortunate choice; not a doom; and for a moment – a brief, wistful, ecstatic moment – the wind of their freedom to behave like other people swept over each patient’s consciousness.
Steinbosch had a mania to destroy women. In a bad mood, and he was liable to such moods several times a day, he would try to attack Ida. She would circumvent or divert him from his violence, and then almost immediately she would succeed in making him feel that she had found something in him to agree with. He wanted to destroy something? Very well, then, a great many things did need to be destroyed – let them find out together why he wanted to destroy her. What had made him feel she was the thing that had to be destroyed? Something certainly was troubling him and in a strange rush of shame, confusion, self-pity and bitter rage, out would come, sometimes in a torrent, the long history of Steinbosch’s resentment. Listening to this frequently told and lengthy tale, Ida showed unending patience.
She would sit beside him wreathed in smoke, or walk up and down by the open door, her hands in her pockets, her eyes attentively considering the stream of his self-justification – for it was really himself, she knew, that he wanted to kill. A homicidal maniac is only a man who wishes to wipe out his debt to life, by destroying life itself, instead of by paying his debt. Since it would be painful for 123him to remove his own life, he has to find someone else to take his place, and who better than a woman, for presumably it was his mother who had brought him into the world and during the period of his dependence on her had failed to show him how to pay his debt. It must be, his maddened senses cried, someone else who made his life so insufferable, it could not be that he was causing this dreadful havoc in his soul himself. His whole being was concentrated upon the blotting out of the masked enemy who sat within his brain, obstructing his every movement towards escape.
It seemed to Mark as if he could sometimes see Ida put the key into the madman’s hand – but at the last moment he would not turn the key, but threw it fiercely away. Yet he had held it; he knew she had given it to him and his eyes followed her, as a child’s eyes follow his mother when she leaves him, full of accusation and of hope.
The depressives, among whom Mark watchfully presented himself before her, Ida treated with antiseptic humour. They might sulk, weep, sink into abysmal silence, be so passive that they would do nothing for themselves, and barely consent to breathe, but Ida knew – and showed that she knew – that they were just as much alive as they really wanted to be. Their trouble was that they suffered from an inordinate anticipation of what life was prepared to give them. They wanted a universe on the cheap – the expectations of a spoiled child had made them believe that they could always have the smooth with the rough. But such expectations are not met by Life. Very well then, they would pay life out. They would meet no call upon them whatever – least of all the call of their own self-respect. They wouldn’t shave, feed themselves, wash or speak. Theirs was the sit-down strike against living. As Ida sat down with them, her eyes gleamed with the humour of the game they were playing. Helpless 124were they? Why they were stronger than life itself! They knew they were stronger – so did Ida. No one could make them do the simplest human duty – they were having a wonderful time – crying their eyes out, so that they wouldn’t have to put them to any better use. Ida would sit down beside them, talk for them, tell them what they were up to and share the desert they made of the universe with them. She would do anything with them except pity them.
It seemed to Mark, as if the depressives did not altogether dislike this treatment. They reacted to Ida in a way they reacted to no one else. Once, at one of Ida’s sharpest home-thrusts, Herr Putznagel actually laughed. Herr Winkel followed her about, in his sly secretive way like a dog, a fond dog, that might however bite the heel of the person he was fondest of if she didn’t occasionally notice just how near he had crept. Ida noticed, but she liked Herr Winkel. She saw in him the decent little human being he might quite well still become, if he really knew, or could be made to guess, he was one. Meanwhile he had so little courage that it would really have pleased her, and perhaps have relieved him of a good deal of bullying had he summoned up sufficient pluck occasionally to bite.
It was only Herr Heinel, the pervert, who hated her. For the indecent and the vicious – those like Herr Heinel, who tormented themselves and others by their dirty vices, Ida had the kindly tolerance of a nurse who sees a child eating the mud pie it has made. Ida provided something better than mud for Herr Heinel. She washed his face, took away the dirt and if necessary even put him where he couldn’t daub himself – and others. But what she often failed to do – in spite of trying – was to give him and the other perverts less virulently concentrated on their vices than he was – something more useful than mud – some idea – some work 125which, if they could master it, would soon seem to them more entertaining and more worth their while.
She tried, but often in vain, to save and resurrect the embittered pride that had let them sink into a desire for mud. This desire was, she knew, but the agonized malice of a discouraged mind. Herr Heinel had found in his wretched vice something he could at last do himself that would create notice and annoy – if not control – others. He could conquer through being disgusting – very well, if there were no other way to triumph, he would take that one, and find strength through cruelty. A sadist is only a person, Mark discovered, who perhaps by a turn of the brain has decided that to be a genius is too hard for him.
It struck Mark, watching Ida’s method with Herr Heinel, that perhaps the whole German nation had taken this direction, because its genius – its music, poetry and art – had felt itself baffled by what it felt to be – perhaps mistakenly – the greater attainments of others. Why did Beethoven and Brahms have to go to Vienna to produce their best music? Did this sense of inferiority in their own country daunt even their musical genius?
Why did Herr Heinel, out of the whole ward, so hate and resent Ida? He knew that she saw through him. He could neither wound nor degrade her; he could not even convince her that he was himself wounded or degraded. She simply saw him as he was – a nice little man who had decided to be nasty, because no one took enough notice of him to satisfy his vanity, when he was being nice.
She was different, Mark noticed, in the Idiots’ garden, into which one day, as it was larger and he was, Johann said, now quiet enough, he found himself allowed to wander.
The Idiots’ garden had no high walls round it. There was, indeed, an open gate that led direct into the pinewoods. Ida 126was with the idiots in the garden, and for them, Mark saw, she felt pity, and showed pity.
‘You see,’ she said to him, ‘these poor people really have something to complain of, though they do not complain! The actual organ of the brain is diseased in them or incapable by malformation of any further development. These are nature’s failures – they have no dignity to be reached – no captive to set free. For these victims of life you cannot do too much! In their ward I have the best and gentlest of all the attendants. I chose for them a matron who had lost her children through an epidemic. She gives them what they need, an unchangeable patience and kindness. As soon as they have learned how to be friendly, and this you would be surprised to find how quickly they learn from such an attendant, I allow them to wander about at will – in the pine forests or on the mountainside. To have sunshine and shadow, rain and wind and snow play with their broken senses is good for them. I find it better not to mix them with richer human beings for in a sense that weighs on them. With each other – or where they can watch – or perhaps only feel – the movements of nature, they are more at home. Sometimes they improve so much, we can find work for them in the garden or the fields; but we never push or strain them into making efforts, for what cannot grow must never be forced.’
‘And the Nazis?’ Mark asked her. ‘They allow you to use these methods without force?’
Ida looked round her without speaking – then she said, ‘Come to my office – I will give the order – in half an hour’s time. Go back now to your own ward until they bring you.’ Mark raised his eyebrows. There was no one within earshot of them, not even the idiots themselves. Yet Ida had spoke with such decision, that he obeyed her. 127
It was the first time, for over a week, that he had seen her alone. She spoke to him every day – sometimes often in the day in the open ward – as she spoke to all the other patients – but she had left him there.
To-day, when he had been taken by Johann, after the morning’s occupation, into the larger garden, he had felt a curious sense of relief, as if he himself were better of a sickness that weighed upon his spirit.
He did not want to go back into the more limited ward again so soon.
From the Idiots’ garden he could see the whole outline of the great Schloss, the Hunger tower, the high-hunched roof; and a curious eyeless wall that stretched down like a column – on the right side alone. An attendant walked back with him to his locked door, but he was hardly inside the ward before the message from Ida came.
Johann took him to a small office room that led almost directly off the ward.
There was nothing in Ida’s office but filing cupboards, a desk at which Ida sat, and a chair opposite it. ‘This is a sound-proof room,’ she told him, when the door had closed behind Johann, ‘and I keep it so empty that there is no chance for any hidden microphone. Now we can say what we like. Before it would have been unusual to single you out. Father Martin has been delayed – but he will come soon. You asked about the Nazis and my methods. Well, there are two systems here and it is wise for you to understand both of them. One is the system of the Nazis – it is represented by my father – by any visiting doctor – by Fisch the chief attendant and one or two others. When you come up against it you will know it. It is always the same. The truth can afford to be different – but a lie – well if you lie you are condemned to consistency – lies must 128match – they rest one upon the other. These two systems of ours are like a mountain stream in winter – my system like the water runs beneath an upper covering of static ice. The Nazis would no doubt destroy my system if they recognized it. But I appear an eager adherent of the Third Reich and since I produce food and farm produce and care for my hundred patients without further medical aid than that of Felix Mannheim and my own father, they leave my method uninvestigated. My father amuses himself by giving administrative orders occasionally but never touches any of the patients. From time to time the commandant at Innsbruck sends an inspector here. Well, we look after him. He is treated like a king and he gives us a good report. We go on as we were. I am a good manager. They get from me plus what I give my patients, eggs, milk, butter, vegetables and even pork. We ask no labour for these productions. Perhaps one day they may decide to liquidate us. But I think we are too useful for that. As regards their stomachs even the Nazis are intelligent. A goose that laid golden eggs they might kill, but not one that provided eatable eggs for the table. Probably we have spies among us. Fisch is perhaps one, another may be your Fritz to whom you gave a cabbage ear the night you arrived. I do not, however, much concern myself about spies. Anyone living under Nazi rule must know that you cannot have a household – let alone an institution – without a spy. What, however, can they report? I make no great secret of my system. “Surely,” I tell the inspector, “the Nazi system is pre-eminently one for the sane? A person who does not understand and respond to so perfect a system is of necessity insane, and when insane requires a quite different system.” It is so logical what I tell them that even an idiot, and all the inspectors sent to examine our Home have, so far, been idiots, can 129understand it! For the sane force – very well then – for the insane – persuasion. It is true that the world works the other way round but this the Nazis refuse to accept. That is why they are overturning the world – helped of course by all the Nazi-minded in every country, until it will be exactly – as I put it to the inspector – for the sane force and for the insane – well, very soon the insane will all be killed except those who do the killing!’
Mark frowned. ‘You put things as if they were very simple,’ he said. ‘I do not find them so, and I have studied the education of human beings all my life.’
‘In what way?’ Ida demanded with a wicked grin. ‘There was a book once – written I believe by a Frenchman – called The English – Are They Human? An Englishman is in a cloister from ten to twenty – do you call that human? From twenty to sixty he retains, in a certain portion of his brain, a one-sex world. But I did not bring you here to talk about sex – though I have no doubt it would do you good to talk about it. I brought you here to warn you – that you are far too intelligent. Felix Mannheim tells me that you do your work as a bookbinder, “far too well”. No one could be deceived into thinking you a real depressive in the workshop. The ward attendants are so far taken in by you – the patients do not observe you, because I purposely put you with the least sane patients – but Felix told me after your second day, “I do not ask you, Frau Doktor, why the new patient is here, but I assure you that it is not because he is insane!”’
Mark looked alarmed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I tried to bungle a lot. I thought I couldn’t very well be slower in handling my tools.’
‘No doubt you under-estimate the quicksilver qualities of your distinguished brain,’ Ida told him drily. ‘However it 130does not matter. Felix will keep his conclusions to himself. Do you happen to know anything about horses?’
‘I suppose I do, a little,’ Mark admitted. ‘I have always ridden.’
‘That is a comfort,’ Ida observed. ‘Your English upper-class habits come in well here, for I need a man who has ridden all his life. I will transfer you to a very secret part of my establishment that deals with horses. However they are not exactly horses – they are winged angels. Under the present régime unfortunately winged angels are out of place. They are looked upon even as outcasts. Perhaps you have heard in Vienna of the Spanish Riding School?’ Mark nodded.
‘I have often wondered,’ he said, ‘what happened to those horses!’
‘A good deal happened to them,’ Ida told him grimly, ‘or rather it was ordered to happen. Fortunately we Viennese have a certain smattering of brain power and anticipated those orders. It was ordered that sixteen of these horses – the pride of our riding school – the great geniuses – the leading dancers – should be destroyed.
‘The Third Reich thought that horses of such an unutilitarian character were an insult to the Intelligence of the New Man. The New Man, you see, is not to think and a horse that thinks might remind him of a former occupation of its own.
‘We smuggled eight of them to America; four into Hungary, and another four we could not get out of the country – it was too late; so we exchanged them for four less perfect of our scholars – and over-night they vanished! Only their understudies remained. Each horse was, however, still a Lippizaner – the only difference was that the horses we left behind us so deeply respected the new régime 131that they could not dance! The four that could not be got out of the country are in a small valley in the hills behind the Schloss. I took those horses by night and hid them safely in a barn, which we have turned into a riding school. There was a certain amount of confusion, while we were receiving the caresses of our beloved Herrenvolk in Austria, and no one knew anything of our little arrangement. Even if the horses are seen about here nobody knows that they can dance. I do not say no peasant knows that certain horses are to be seen at uncertain hours in the neighbourhood, that were not seen before. But our peasants accept anything that they do not understand quite easily – nor do they ever repeat anything that they observe, to a Nazi. The sun might fall out of the sky, and they would not report it; if possible they would hide it in a barn.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Mark; for some reason he felt a little confused and ashamed, and looked down at the ground. He was remembering Lisa.
Ida went on smoking as usual, but for a moment or two she also remained silent, then she said, ‘Well, it still exists, this little riding school, and those who attend to the horses are all anti-Nazi sure and sound. It is in fact our underground movement. Should we be discovered – well, I once rode in the Spanish Riding School. I even received a gold medal for my jumping. I should be, I think, forgiven. Scolded – perhaps fined, but certainly forgiven, and I do not think any of us – except perhaps the horses – would be accused of being anti-Nazi!’
‘Of course I will join your group,’ Mark agreed eagerly, ‘but how, from my strictly guarded ward, can I manage it?’
‘Johann is one of us,’ Ida told him. ‘The general is another. You will both be allowed out. Johann will accompany you – we call it working on the land. The general is a 132suicidal maniac. You can be very dangerous, as we know, but outdoor work, under supervision, is suitable for you both. It is as the Americans so aptly say a “Natural”. Now you have stayed in my office long enough. Please look restless and a little ferocious! I will ring the bell and Fritz will come, or should come in about thirty seconds – for you.’ Ida stood up and Mark mastered an impulse not to remain seated. He found that looking up at her, a ferocious expression came to him very easily.