XXVIII
Forseveral months Brandon heard nothing of John Smith. Not able to write himself, he had not the courage to dictate a letter. In such circumstances there was nothing to be said which did not seem an impertinence, yet many times he was possessed by an intense desire to communicate. Day by day the man himself remained at the root of Brandon’s thoughts.
In their last interview John had said that he had a great work to do. Although his fate had even then been foreshadowed, he had made that declaration; moreover, he had expressed a serene confidence that grace would be given for his task.
From the first Brandon had had a great curiosity as to what that task could be. Believing implicitly in the full mental and moral responsibility of his friend, he would not permit a doubt of his capacity. And yet it was only too likely that the conditions in which his life was now passed would paralyze a wonderful mind. Brandon had done all that lay in his power to lighten its lot; he had not spared money toprovide reasonable comfort, reasonable amenity of surroundings; books and papers had gone to Wellwood from time to time; all that could be done by a friend’s devotion had been done to sustain John Smith and keep his soul alive.
At last the silence was broken. Brandon received a letter from Wellwood, expressing deep gratitude for this solicitude. But it also expressed far more. It disclosed a penetration of thought, a power of vision, above all a real nobility of temper whose only parallel in the mind of Brandon was that of Socrates in similar but less degrading circumstances.
Somehow Brandon was comforted. The transcendent qualities he had long perceived in this man were here in their fullness. Amid the Stygian glooms of a world ever groping in darkness, a great light shone. In Brandon’s opinion it was better to be immured with John Smith in Wellwood Sanatorium than to enjoy the sanctions of human freedom.
In the course of a full letter, which Brandon read again and again, John Smith referred to a work upon which he was engaged. He was going forward with his task, and with the help of others it was nearing fulfillment. He did not disclose what the task was, nor did he refer to “the others” specifically.
Weeks passed. Visibly helped by John Smith’sletter, Brandon, to the joy of his friends, regained much of his mental poise. The dark clouds of a few months back were slowly dispersed, but in body he remained inert, and now without hope of cure. And then one morning at the beginning of December there came a second letter from Wellwood.
It merely contained these words: “Come soon. I need you.”
Such authoritative brevity was for Brandon a command which he felt he must obey. But he was at once aware that he could only get to Wellwood in the teeth of a junta. Wife, doctor, nurse, all had very strong reasons to urge against a journey of nearly twenty miles in the middle of winter to such a place on such a pretext. To them the summons itself was the caprice of an unsound mind, the wish to obey it the whim of a sick man.
But in this, as they were to learn, they underrated the forces now at work. Fully set on obeying the summons, Brandon would brook no refusal. In vain Millicent dissuaded, in vain Joliffe and the nurse issued a ukase. Come what might he must see John Smith; if the heavens fell he must go to Wellwood.
Opposition raised Brandon’s will to such a pitch that at last his guardians had to consider the question very seriously. And they reluctantly saw that beyondthe amount of trouble involved there was no real reason why he should not have his way. Prejudice, it was true, also entered into the matter; doctor and nurse agreed that it could not be good for a sick man to visit such a place as Wellwood. But the sick man declared he alone must be judge of that; and as a growing excitement threatened a return of fever, consent was reluctantly given for a letter to be written to the chief medical officer at Wellwood for permission to see John Smith.
Millicent Brandon wrote the letter at the invalid’s dictation, devoutly hoping the while that its purpose would fail. Alas for the frailty of human hopes in the scale of official perversity! By return of post came full permission to visit the patient at any time. In the presence of this bombshell nothing was left but to submit with a good grace to the inevitable.
Accordingly, in the gray of a December afternoon, Brandon made the journey to Wellwood by motor. It hardly took an hour. Little of the landscape was visible in the winter half-light, and the place itself was unable to reveal the beauties of its setting. Run on modern lines with accommodation for a hundred patients, it had the comforts of a home to offer and a very great deal in the way of human kindness. To one in John Smith’s rank of life it was a place ofluxury; to those whose lot had been cast on more liberal lines there was little to complain of in regard to food, housing, reasonable recreation. Yet to each and all of its inmates, from the most open and amenable to the most sullen and defiant, it had one truly dreadful drawback. They were not there of their own free will, but were held by the order of the State.
That simple but terrible fact galled one and all like a chain. And few cherished any real hope of ever getting free. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” might have been engraved above the pleasant portals of this polite prison. Once behind those doors, the young and the old alike felt themselves caught in the meshes of a deep-laid conspiracy, of a darkness and a subtlety beyond belief. Every attempt at freedom was a struggle against fate, every effort to break the fetters of the law riveted them more securely. From time to time the patients were visited by doctors, magistrates, clergymen, commissioners in lunacy, but these came as a concession to the wisdom and humanity of an abstract conception. Insight, hope, healing, came not in their train.
Brandon felt a sudden chill of soul as he was lifted by his chauffeur and his valet from the car and carried into the light and the suffocating warmth beyondthose ornate, nail-studded doors. The place was overheated, yet to Brandon it had an effect of sudden immersion in icy water. There was something in its atmosphere which struck right down to the roots of his being. It was so subtle yet so deadly that a nausea came upon him. And yet, as he was soon to realize, this emotion had its source in his own weakness, in his own state of extreme mental tension.
Brandon was carried into a private room and was there received by the chief medical officer, Dr. Thorp, to whom he was known by hearsay. And it was his privilege to have a conversation with a humane and enlightened man, which interested him profoundly.
Dr. Thorp stood very high in his profession, and his many years’ experience of mental cases was wide and deep. For him the subject with which he dealt, terrible as it was, had an all-absorbing interest. It offered to the researches of science a boundless field; moreover, this expert had a power over himself, and was therefore able to keep a sane, cool, balanced judgment in the midst of perils which too often overthrew his fellow workers. In a word, he could detach the part from the whole and so prevent the mind from being subdued to that in which it worked.
In Dr. Thorp’s cozy room, under the bust of Æsculapius, Brandon had a talk in which he learned manythings. The chief medical officer spoke with a frankness, a fair-minded desire to be impartial, which Brandon somehow had not looked for. To begin with he did not hesitate to describe the case of John Smith as quite the most remarkable that had ever come into his ken. And the fact that Brandon had known him intimately for many years, that he had always been his friend and champion, and that grievously stricken as he was, he had come to see him now, appeared in the eyes of Dr. Thorp to give this visitor an importance altogether unusual.
“I welcome you here, Mr. Brandon, for several reasons,” he said. “Apart from the fact that you pay John’s bills every quarter, and that he always speaks of you in the most affectionate terms, I am hoping that you will be able to add to our knowledge of the dear fellow himself.”
Somehow Brandon was a little startled by the epithet. It had an odd sound on official lips. He would have expected it to fall almost as soon from the governor of a jail. The doctor met Brandon’s look of surprise with a smile. “It’s the only way to describe him,” he said. “But he is a great puzzle to us all. And if in any way you can help us to solve him we shall be much in your debt.”
“There is little I can tell you,” said Brandon, “thatyou don’t already know. And that little I’ll preface with a simple statement which I hope will not annoy you too much. It’s my unshakable belief that John Smith ought not to be here.”
A perceptible shadow crossed the alert face of Dr. Thorp. “It is my province to disagree with you,” he said very gravely. “Not for a moment could I allow myself to hold anyone here against his will if I thought him entirely sane, normal, rational.”
“I readily understand that,” said Brandon with his air of charming courtesy. “But may I ask what means are open to you in an institution of this kind of forming an impartial judgment?”
Dr. Thorp answered the question with a frankness which greatly prepossessed Brandon in his favor. “I readily admit that for us here an impartial judgment is hardly possible. John Smith has been certified insane in the particular way that the law requires, and we are only able to approach his case in the light of that knowledge.”
“Yes, that I quite understand. But may I ask this question? Had John Smith not been certified as a lunatic when he came here, had he, let us assume, come here on probation, could you conscientiously certify him by the light of your present knowledge?”
“You have asked a most difficult question, but Iwill answer it as well as I can. As a private individual, although he shows certain symptoms which sooner or later are bound, in my judgment, to lead to serious mental derangement, he is not likely at present to do actual harm; in fact he is capable of doing positive good; but of course, in a time like this he has to be considered as a political entity, and it is on these grounds I understand that he is here to be taken care of until the war is over.”
“Prima facie, that is true,” said Brandon. “In other words, a man of pure and noble genius is the victim of a shallow, sectarian ignorance which deserves to be the laughing-stock of the universe.”
The words were extravagant, and a certain violence of gesture accompanied them, but the reaction of Dr. Thorp was serious, even troubled. “You are bent on involving me in the most difficult problem of my experience,” he said, after a pause.
“I am. And perhaps—who knows?—in the most difficult problem the civilized world has yet had to face.”
“As you say, who knows?” said Dr. Thorp, a cloud growing on his sensitive face.
“In other words,” said Brandon, “you are ready to admit that a man of very profound and beautiful genius is being held here.”
“Those are big words,” was the reply of professional caution. “And genius is of many kinds. But speaking of John Smith as I have found him, I will make an admission which you are entitled to use as you think fit. We all bless the day he came here.”
A look of startled pleasure came into Brandon’s face. “One somehow expected to hear that,” he said.
“Whatever his mentality may be, and of its range I am not competent to judge, the man has what I can only call a largeness of soul which has an effect upon others. One of our old men, one of our deranged fine intellects, of whom we have several, and very pathetic they are, has christened him the Light-Bringer, and somehow we feel it is a title that he thoroughly deserves.”
“That is to say, he is a good influence among your patients?”
“Yes; in fact a moral force. The staff tell me that since he came here their work is less by one-half. As an instance of what I mean, let me give you a little anecdote which our head attendant told me only this morning. We have an old German professor, who has been here some time. He is apt to be very cantankerous and now and again gives a great deal of trouble. On his bad days no one can do anything with him. But it seems that John is now an establishedexception to the rule and that he can simply make him do anything. This morning it appears the Herr Professor had decided that he would no longer wear a tie. ‘Put it on at once,’ said Boswell, our head attendant. ‘I shall not,’ said the Herr Professor, ‘except by the command of God and the Emperor.’ ‘Very well,’ said the head attendant, ‘then I shall ask the Master to come to you.’ Well, the Master came—that, by the way, is the name the patients have given him. The head attendant stated his case and the Master said to the Herr Professor, ‘Put on your tie, my dear friend. It is the rule here in Elysium and you are bound to obey it. Otherwise the gods will turn you out and you may find yourself wandering in outer darkness for another hundred years or so.’”
“And did the Herr Professor put on his tie?” asked Brandon.
“He put it on at once,” said Dr. Thorp with a laugh. “Of course it’s a very trivial anecdote. But to me the whole thing is a remarkable piece of make-believe.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, you see, our friend John has persuaded the old fellow that he is Goethe, talks to him in German and treats him with a deference which raises a smile. And the odd side of the affair is that the poor oldchap now firmly believes himself to be Goethe and does his best to act up to his part.”
“I see,” said Brandon.
“And John Smith has taught us already that in the administration of a place of this kind, there is practically no limit to the power of suggestion. We have a hundred patients here, and his power over them is astonishing. There seems to be nothing he can’t make some of them do; and as he is a great upholder of law and order we bless the day he came among us.”
“As I understand your theory, this moral ascendancy has been gained over your patients by the power of suggestion?”
“Yes; to put it crudely the effect he has upon them is a kind of hypnotism of the imagination. For instance, a truly remarkable case is that of a man who might once have done great things in music. Another German by the way. But for years he has been mentally deranged. Yet in his case John Smith seems to have performed a miracle. By his power of sympathy he has hypnotized the man into composing some quite wonderful music. From time to time he plays it to us. The other day I got a friend of mine who really understands the subject to come and hear it. He says it had such a quality that he can only compare it to Beethoven.”
“Indeed!” said Brandon.
Dr. Thorp laughed. “And the oddest part of the whole matter is that the music only came to be written because John Smith was able to persuade our poor friend that he really was Beethoven.”
“Again the power of suggestion?”
“Undoubtedly. And one that deserves to become a classical instance of the power of sympathetic imagination rightly applied. I am not sure that John Smith is not a great thinker who has discovered a profound truth.”
“I am inclined to believe that he has discovered more than one.” A glow of excitement had begun to course in Brandon’s veins.
“At any rate,” said the doctor, “I defy anyone to see him here in the midst of our patients—very obscure and baffling mental cases, some of them are—without a feeling that he wields a quite remarkable power over certain types of his fellow creatures.”
“One is immensely interested to know that.”
“It is hardly too much to say that the atmosphere of the whole place has changed. Six months ago we could hope for nothing better than the sullen bickerings of Bedlam; today certain of our best cases are rising to a kind of high intellectuality which, I frankly confess, is amazing.”
“And this you attribute to the direct influence of John Smith?”
“It is the only way to account for it.”
“Can you put into words the precise form it takes?”
“In a few minutes I hope you will be able to judge for yourself. In the meantime perhaps you will join me in a cup of tea.” And in deference to the sudden arrival of a well-filled tray, Dr. Thorp suspended for a moment further consideration of the subject.