“Back in line there!” the guard bellowed. St Bernard paid no attention.
“White Fang! Brüderlein, bist du’s?” His arms closed about me in a brotherly embrace of irresistible force.
“Help! Guard!” I shouted. “Arrest this madman! Get him off of me! Throw him into prison, into solitary!”
St Bernard’s friendly features clouded with perplexity. As the guard pulled him away, I tried, with a mime show of winks and grimaces, to tell him that he had nothing to fear.
“If you want this guy in solitary, shall I put Mosely somewhere else?” the guard demanded.
“No! Leave Mosely alone. Surely you can find someplace to stick this one till I have a chance to cross-examine him. I know—lock him in my room and post a guard outside the door. And—” (whispering in the guard’s ear) “—don’t be too rough with him. I want him fresh when I get to him. Then I’ll by-god make him wish he’d attacked somebody else.
“Goddamned pets,” I grumbled, returning to Quilty, whose bewilderment might at any moment, I feared, change to suspicion. “I think they must all be crazy.”
Which seemed a pretty weak explanation for that last episode with St Bernard, but happily it contented Quilty. He even waxed enthusiastic. “Insanity—that’s exactly my theory, Major! If you had the time, there’s a case I’ve been studying which I’d like you to see. The most extreme example of its type. The classic symptoms of psychosis. A beautiful compulsion neurosis. It would only take a moment. Then, if you wanted to, we could come back to see the ovens.”
“Take me to Bedlam, Doctor. Let’s see all your lunatics. A day of watching madmen should be much more entertaining than a peek into the ovens.”
“Splendid. But let us walk more slowly, if you please, Major. My feet seem to hurt more every minute.”
I should explain somewhere along here that, though this was my third day at the St Cloud Women’s Reformatory (such had been its purpose only a short time before and such has become its purpose again), I had not attempted in the interim to make contact with St Bernard or Clea. Until such time as I could effect their rescue it would have been an empty—and a dangerous—gesture to have disclosed my presence to them. Dangerous, because it was quite probable that Palmino would learn of their special significance to me and thus have additional resources for blackmail—or betrayal. I dreaded to think to what actions his cruel and lascivious nature would lead him were he to discover Clea was my mother! Already it had taken all my persuasive gifts to make him spare Mosely’s life, and, even so, I could not prevent Palmino’s nightly interrogations of the unfortunate lieutenant (for which the general opinion held me responsible), though the piteous nocturnal cries arising from the solitary cell caused me to weep tears as I waited out the torturous hours concealed in the radio shack.
I tried as much as possible to escape Palmino’s baleful influence by spending my time with the other officers—either exercising a restraining influence upon Captain Frangle’s avarice, or accompanying the Reverend Captain or Doctor Quilty as they went about their rounds, baptizing and healing. Between those two men, the latter was more to my taste, a favoritism that Quilty reciprocated.
“Like you, I’m a skeptic. Cogito, ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I am. That’s Descartes.” Quilty had made this declaration in the middle of a discussion of the Reverend Captain’s rather roughshod missionary tactics. “I believe, with the immortal Sigmund Freud, in the power of reason. I don’t suppose that you military men get to study much about psychology? All that depth stuff must be a terra incognita to you guys.”
“Unless you’d count military strategy in that category, I guess I haven’t studied much psychology.” That, I felt sure, was exactly the sort of thing a genuine Major would say.
“Yes… Well, that’s a very special branch of the subject. Along more general lines, however, you’ve probably read very little except The Life of Man. You must know that by heart though—eh, Major?”
“Oh…” (I’d never heard of the book) “… parts. Other parts I only remember vaguely, indistinctly.”
“You’re probably surprised to hear me speak of it as a book of psychology—and yet it’s one of the profoundest examinations of the subject ever written by the pen of man. Yet it’s also eminently practical.”
“I’ve never heard it expressed quite this way, Doctor. Do go on.”
“You know where he says: ‘When the gods are malign, men worship at the feet of demons.’ Now the Reverend Captain would probably interpret that in a strictly religious sense—and of course he would not be entirely wrong. But those words also express an important psychological insight. Oh, my feet!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, only a twinge. I was just trying to make a point, and that is—what the Reverend Captain calls baptism is actually a venerable therapeutic tool in the history of psychology. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“Actually, no.”
“Yes. We psychologists used to call it shock treatment.
“Here they are, Major. The nuts—in this whole cellblock you won’t find anything else. And these, I should point out, are only the worst, the most hopeless cases. ‘Autism’ is the technical word that we psychologists use to describe their condition.”
“I like it. It’s far more restful here than in the other cellblocks. It rather reminds me of a beehive—that humming sound.”
“It’s so restful that we don’t even have to use guards for this building. They sit like that all day long, mumbling their sick nonsense, or listening to other sick nonsense from somebody else. Impossible to understand them. They eat a bit of porridge in the morning and drink a bowl of broth at night—and even that has to be put in their hands. Otherwise they’d just sit there and starve to death. Pets!”
“How do you explain their condition, Doctor?”
“Insanity, that’s my theory. The shock of S-Day—” (this was the Dingoes’ name for the day on which the sunspots had blown the Masters’ fuseboxes) “—was a traumatic experience for them. Consequently, they retreated into themselves until…” (the Doctor finished his sentence with a sweeping gesture that included all five tiers of cells) “… this happened.
“Of course,” he continued, in a somewhat chastened tone, “it’s only a theory.”
“It seems quite sound to me, Doctor. I wouldn’t apologize.”
“Do you like it? Come then, I want to show you my most interesting patient. This one is for the textbooks. If only Professor Freud were alive today! How he would have enjoyed this one!”
We climbed up a metal staircase to the third tier of cells and down a long corridor that took us farther and farther from what little sunlight sneaked into the building through the dirty skylights. There, standing in the center of a group of puppies and young dogs who were attentive to the point of being hypnotized, swaying in time to the incantatory rhythms of his own speech, was my brother Pluto. I recognized what he was reciting immediately: it was A Prayer for Investments from his latest Book of Ceremonies. This brief work is meant to be sung by two antiphonal choirs of fifty voices each, supported by chamber orchestras. While the Celebrant dresses (or “invests”) himself in the three “sacred” articles of clothing. It can be an awesome spectacle, but in these reduced circumstances it could inspire only pathos or derision. For an alb Pluto had a begrimed undershirt; his chasuble was a floursack stolen from the bakery; his ring was a rusty bolt. Yet for all the ridiculousness of his appearance, Pluto was not entirely a figure of fun. The nobility of the prayer itself—which I transcribe from memory—went far to redeem him: