“Take his other arm,” said the old man to Vincent.
They held the boy down on the bed, but his ravings rang out for over an hour. Finally, exhausted, his words sank to a jarred mumbling and he dropped off in a feverish sleep. The older man came around to Vincent’s side.
“The boy was studying for the bar,” he said. “He overworked his brain. These attacks come on about every ten days. He never hurts anyone. Good night to you, Monsieur.”
The older man returned to his bed and promptly fell asleep. Vincent went once again to the window that overlooked the valley. It was still a long time before sunrise and nothing was visible but the morning star. He remembered the painting Daubigny had made of the morning star, expressing all the vast peace and majesty of the universe . . . and all the feeling of heartbreak for the puny individual who stood below, gazing at it.
2
THE NEXT MORNING after breakfast the men went out into the garden. Beyond the far wall could be seen the ridge of desolate, barren hills, dead since the Romans first crossed them. Vincent watched the inmates play lackadaisically at bowls. He sat on a stone bench and gazed at the thick trees covered with ivy, then at the ground dotted with periwinkle. The sisters, of the order of St. Joseph d’Aubenas, passed on their way to the old Roman chapel, mouse-like figures in black and white, their eyes drawn deep into their heads, fingering their beads and mumbling the morning prayers.
After an hour at mute bowls, the men returned to the cool of their ward. They sat about the unlit stove. Their utter idleness appalled Vincent. He could not understand why they did not even have an old newspaper to read.
When he could bear it no longer, he went again into the garden and walked about. Even the sun at St. Paul seemed to be moribund.
The buildings of the old monastery had been put up in the conventional quadrangle; on the north was the ward of the third-class patients; on the east Doctor Peyron’s house, the chapel, and a tenth century cloister; on the south the buildings of the first and second-class inmates; and on the west, the courtyard of the dangerous lunatics, and a long, dead-clay wall. The locked and barred gate was the only exit. The walls were twelve feet high, smooth and unscaleable.
Vincent returned to a stone bench near a wild rose bush and sat down. He tried to reason with himself and get a clear idea of why he had come to St. Paul. A terrible dismay and horror seized him and prevented him from thinking. In his heart he could find neither hope nor desire.
He stumbled towards his quarters. The moment he entered the portico of the building he heard the queer howling of a dog. Before he reached the door of the ward, the noise had changed from the howl of a dog to the cry of a wolf.
Vincent walked down the length of the ward. In the far corner, his face to the wall, he saw the old man of the night before. The man’s face was raised to the ceiling. He was howling with all the strength of his lungs, a bestial look on his face. The cry of the wolf gave way to some strange jungle call. The mournful sound of it flooded the room.
“What sort of a menagerie am I a prisoner in?” Vincent demanded of himself.
The men about the stove paid no attention. The wails of the animal in the corner rose to a pitch of despair.
“I must do something for him,” said Vincent, aloud.
The blond boy stopped him.
“It is better to leave him alone,” he said. “If you speak to him, he will fly into a rage. It will be over in a few hours.”
The walls of the monastery were thick, but all through lunch Vincent could hear the changing cries of the afflicted one straining through the vast silence. He spent the afternoon in a far corner of the garden, trying to escape the frenetic wails.
That night at supper, a young man whose left side was paralyzed, grabbed up a knife, sprang to his feet, and held the knife over his heart with his right hand.
“The time has come!” he shouted. “I shall kill myself!”
The man on his right side rose wearily and gripped the paralytic’s arm.
“Not today, Raymond,” he said. “Today is Sunday.”
“Yes, yes, today! I won’t live! I refuse to live! Let go of my arm! I want to kill myself!”
“Tomorrow, Raymond, tomorrow. This isn’t the right day.”
“Let go of my arm! I shall plunge this knife into my heart! I tell you, I’ve got to kill myself!”
“I know, I know, but not now. Not now.”
He took the knife from Raymond’s hand and led him, weeping in a rage of impotence, back to the ward.
Vincent turned to the man next to him, whose red-rimmed eyes were watching his trembling fingers anxiously as he tried to carry the soup to his mouth.
“What is the matter with him?” he asked.
The syphilitic lowered his spoon and said, “Not a day has passed for a whole year that Raymond has not tried to commit suicide.”
“Why does he try it here?” asked Vincent. “Why doesn’t he steal the knife and kill himself when everyone has gone to sleep?”
“Perhaps he does not wish to die, Monsieur.”
While Vincent was watching them play bowls the following morning, one of the men suddenly fell to the ground and went into a convulsive paroxysm.
“Quick. It’s his epileptic fit,” shouted someone.
“On his arms and legs.”
It took four of them to hold his arms and legs. The writhing epileptic seemed to have the strength of a dozen men. The young blond reached into his pocket, pulled out a spoon, and thrust it between the prostrate man’s teeth.
“Here, hold his head,” he cried to Vincent.
The epileptic went through a rising and falling series of convulsions, their peaks mounting ever higher and higher. His eyes rolled in their sockets and the foam lathered from the corners of his mouth.
“Why do you hold that spoon in his mouth?” grunted Vincent.
“So he won’t bite his tongue.”
After a half hour the shuddering man sank into unconsciousness. Vincent and two of the others carried him to his bed. That was the end of the affair; no one mentioned it again.
By the end of a fortnight, Vincent had seen every one of his eleven companions go through his own particular form of insanity: the noisy maniac who tore his clothes off his body and smashed everything in sight; the man who howled like an animal; the two syphilitics; the suicide monomaniac; the paralytics who suffered from excess of fury and exaltation; the epileptic; the lymphomaniac with a persecution mania; the young blond who was being pursued by secret police.
Not a day went by without some one of them having a seizure; not a day passed but that Vincent was called to calm some momentary maniac. The third-class patients had to be each other’s doctors and nurses. Peyron looked in but once a week, and the guardians bothered only with the first and second-class residents. The men stayed close together, helped each other in the moments of affliction, and had endless patience; each of them knew that his turn was coming again, soon, and that he would need the help and forbearance of his neighbours.
It was a fraternity of fous.
Vincent was glad that he had come. By seeing the truth about the life of madmen he slowly lost the vague dread, the fear of insanity. Bit by bit he came to consider madness as a disease like any other. By the third week he found his comates no more frightening than if they had been stricken by consumption or cancer.
He often sat and chatted with the idiot. The idiot could only answer with incoherent sounds, but Vincent felt that the fellow understood him and was pleased to be talking. The sisters never spoke to the men unless it was imperative. Vincent’s portion of rational intercourse each week consisted of his five minute conversation with Doctor Peyron.