The visitor looked at his watch and said tentatively, ‘I'm afraid I haven't much time left. I think you were going to show me the paying block —?’
‘Yes, yes. The paying block. You must certainly see that before you go. We're very proud of our private wards.’
The swing doors clashed behind the two men, who lowered their heads against the attack of the wind. The wind leaped madly upon them, with malice, with joy, as they walked on the covered way that crossed the impersonal garden. In the empty flower-beds the earth lay saturated and black, the wintry-looking, acid-green grass rippled under the wind, the bare trees lashed their branches complainingly.
The two doctors walked briskly along side by side, the one tall, contemplative, reserved, ‘turned in upon himself against the onslaught of wind, the other with white hair blowing about and a look of determined good-nature which seemed to set the seal of his approval upon the rough weather.
The long brick building felt quiet as a vacuum after the windy tumult outside. The superintendent paused for a moment inside the door, smoothing his beautiful white hair with his fingers. He was slightly breathless.
‘Welcome to the palace of sleep,’ he said with his cheerful smile, speaking and smiling partly for the benefit of a young nurse who was passing by. ‘All the patients in this wing are having partial or prolonged narcosis,’ he went on in a more confidential tone as the girl disappeared through one of the many doors.
The wide corridor was coldly and antiseptically white, with a row of doors on the left and windows on the opposite side. The windows were high and barred, and admitted a discouraging light that gleamed bluishly on the white distemper like a reflection of snow. Some grey rubber composition which deadened sound covered the floor. A hand-rail ran along the wall under the high windows.
One of the doors further down the corridor opened, and a nurse emerged, supporting a woman in a red dressing-gown. The patient swayed and staggered in spite of the firm grip that guided her hand to the rail. Her head swung loosely from side to side, her wide-open eyes, at once distracted and dull like the eyes of a drunken person, stared out of her pale face, curiously puffy and smooth under dark hair projecting in harsh, disorderly elf-locks. Her feet, clumsy and uncontrolled in their woollen slippers, tripped over the hem of her long nightdress and threw her entire weight on the nurse's supporting arm.
‘Hold up, Topsy,’ the probationer said, in a tolerant, indifferent voice just perceptibly tinged with impatience, speaking as if to an awkward child. She hoisted her companion upright, and the pair continued their laborious progress towards the bathroom, the sick woman stumbling and reeling, and gazing desperately, blankly ahead, the nurse watchful, abstracted, and humming a dance tune under her breath.
‘That patient will finish her treatment in another day or two,’ the physician-in-charge told the visitor. ‘Of course, she won't remember anything that's happened to her during the period of narcosis. She's practically unconscious now, although she can manage to walk after a fashion.’
He continued to discuss technicalities as they moved together along the corridor. The young man listened and answered somewhat mechanically, his eyes troubled, disturbed by what they had seen.
A door opened as the two doctors were passing it, and the redfaced senior paused to speak to the nurse who was coming out, holding an enamel tray covered with a cloth from beneath which emanated the nauseous stench of paraldehyde. He noticed the other man's instinctive recoil, and his face wrinkled into its jolly folds.
‘Don't you like our local perfume, then? We're so used to the smell of P.R. here that we hardly notice it. Some of the patients say they actually get to like it in time.’
They went into the room, which was heavy with the same sickening odour. Under the white bedspread pulled straight and symmetrical, like the covering of a bier, a young woman was lying quite motionless with closed eyes. Her fair hair was spread on the pillow, her pale face was absolutely lifeless, void, with the peculiar glazed smoothness and eye-sockets darkly circled. The superintendent stood at the bedside looking down at this shape which already seemed to have forfeited humanity and given itself over prematurely to death. His face wore a complacent expression, gratified, approving; the look of a man well satisfied with his work.
‘She won't move now for eight hours, and then she'll come round enough to be washed and fed, and then we'll send her off for another eight-hour snooze.’
The visitor had come close to the bed and was also looking down at its occupant. The vague distress accumulating in his mind crystallized for some reason about this inanimate form which seemed, to his stimulated sensibilities, to be surrounded by an aura of inexpressible suffering.
‘I don't know that I altogether approve of such drastic treatment for psycho-neurotics,’ he was beginning: when suddenly a tremor disturbed the immobility of the anonymous face, the eyelids quivered under their load of shadows. The man watched, fascinated, almost appalled, as, slowly, with intolerable, incalculable effort, the drugged eyes opened and stared straight into his. Was it imagination, or did he perceive in their clouded greyness a look of terror, of wild supplication, of frantic, abysmal appeal?
‘She's not conscious, of course,’ the superintendent remarked in his benevolent voice. ‘That opening of the eyes is purely a reflex. She can't really see us or hear anything we say.’
Smiling, white-headed like a clergyman, he turned and walked across to the open door. The other doctor hesitated for a few seconds in the ill-smelling room, looking down at the patient, held by an obscure reluctance to withdraw his gaze from those unclear eyes. And when he finally moved away he felt uneasy and almost ashamed, and wished that he had not come to visit the hospital.
WHO HAS DESIRED THE SEA
THE late autumn sun came into the ward about two in the afternoon. There wasn't much strength in the sun which was slow in creeping round the edge of the blackout curtains so that it took a long time to reach the bed by the window.
He lay on the bed fully dressed and watched the sun clamber feebly from one empty bed to another all down the ward, rasping the folded dark army blankets with bristles of light. When it had investigated each iron bedstead the sun slipped down and stretched itself on the floor. The floor was polished and shiny, but where the sun lay a film of dust was revealed. Bars of shadow crossed the pale sun on the floor because of the paper strips pasted over the window. He noticed, as he had noticed on previous afternoons, how the horizontal lines looked like the shadows of prison bars. The association was vaguely unpleasant, and a vague uneasiness disturbed his preoccupation. There was no sense in the paper, anyhow, he thought. It wouldn't prevent the glass splintering if a bomb dropped anywhere near.
He turned his head to the window and the uneasiness disappeared. On the window itself the paper strips were translucent and honey coloured and no longer suggestive of prison bars.
Outside the window he could see the park with trees and grass and a drive curving through. There was a white board shaped like an arrow at the edge of the drive, pointing to the hospital with the words Neurosis Centre painted on it. The tall trees were practically leafless and their black branches swayed gravely and delicately in the wind. The short grass underneath was patched with tarnished brown-gold by the fallen leaves. In summer it would be an agreeable English scene; but now the dying autumnal leaves and the sea wind gave it some desolation.