Titus Awakes

28

Among the Dead Men

TITUS AWOKE EARLY in a rather drab little room and for a moment had no idea where he was. Slowly he remembered the various events of the last few days, and he wondered what now lay in store for him. There was a tap on the door.

Peregrine entered the room. He was dressed in a white overall, and over his arm there was a second one. In his other hand he held a mug of steaming liquid.

‘Here you are, Titus. When you’re dressed, put this overall on, and we’ll go and have breakfast; then I’ll take you to the super and show you the ward. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

Titus dressed. It did not take him long, as his clothes were scanty. He drank the hot tea and put on his white robe of office, and as he finished it another tap came on the door and Peregrine entered once again.

They went down several flights of stone stairs, their shoes signalling their descent with an echoing clatter, until they came to a vast hallway, with a skylight illuminating it, to its great disadvantage.

On both sides of the hall were double glass doors and Peregrine turned right when they reached the bottom of the stairs. Titus followed him as he pushed open the glass door, and was amazed to see a corridor that stretched endlessly from where they stood to the horizon. As they began to walk down it, their footsteps once again striking the stone floor like knells of doom, desultory figures appeared, seemingly going nowhere. Some turned into doorways on the left of the corridor; they knocked, and after some seconds and a sound of keys jangling, the disconsolate figures would disappear behind the door, and the grating of keys in locks could be heard again.

There was a common denominator in the people who passed Titus and Peregrine. Of all shapes and sizes, of both sexes and all ages, yet their gazes were turned inward. They did not see where they were, or who was there. Some sloped, some dragged their feet, some shuffled, some almost ran, some would take a few paces, then stand still, looking but not seeing. Some were holding irate conversations with themselves; others shouted obscenities. There was an anarchic lack of order, but Titus reflected that in the world outside these thick walls he had seen people behaving in the selfsame way. That he was in a hospital for people who were mentally disturbed he knew, but of the scores of people whom he had met in his wanderings there were few whose strange quirks would not have qualified them for a place in this institution. He pondered, what is sanity, what is normal? He was unable to reach any conclusion: the immediate present called for something other than intellectual activity. In fact, as he was to learn, it was better to suspend that side of himself in favour of preserving unlimited physical strength and as much imaginative insight as possible. These thoughts were passing through Titus’s mind as he walked the endless corridor.

At the end of the corridor Peregrine said, ‘Well, here we are, Ward 12’ and as he spoke he took out a large bunch of keys and, fitting one into the lock, pushed open the door. The first thing Titus noticed was the smell. It reminded him a little of the stench that had permeated the cellar where he had met Mick and his fellow vagrants. It was sickly and heavy and, although he had a strong constitution, his stomach turned.

‘I’ll take you to meet the super first. A few formalities, you know. We don’t want any trouble from the others. Just casual work, yours. They’re a bit touchy.’

Behind the locked door were screens that hid most of the interior of the large room, so that Titus could not see, only smell, where he was to work. Peregrine ushered him into a small office, cluttered with papers, timetables on the walls, a desk at which a rather anonymous white-coated man sat. He acknowledged the two men with an unsmiling nod and made no effort to put them at their ease.

‘This is Titus Groan. He is a traveller. He’s willing to help out at the moment for a few weeks. There’ll be no trouble from him, I’ll vouch for that. What d’you say?’

‘Any experience?’

‘A great deal,’ answered Titus, with a truth that was not quite to the point.

‘We could do with another pair of hands, there are three off now. We’ll take you on for a stated time, with conditions. If you break them, out you go.’

Titus was given conditions that restrained him from any kind of interference and he would answer to Peregrine for his work, and a certain small sum of money by way of remuneration.

He had during his wanderings met many such nameless people who rejoiced in their own sense of power, in however small a sphere: narrow, set and unyielding to any human frailty of feeling.

‘Well, let’s get on now.’

They left the office and turned into the main room behind the screens. It was a large room. Down the centre were ranged, practically touching each other, white iron beds, with only a small enough space between each to house a little table, and room for the occupant to remove himself.

Titus could see that some of the beds were occupied, while others had been made and were empty. At the end of the room, in a large alcove, were chairs of every description, some with restraining bars, which formed a circle at the wall’s edge. Most of the chairs were occupied by dormant human beings. The lack of animation was the most noticeable aspect. Not even the eyes showed any sign of life. Each man was an island. Each island was too remote to link with any other. Mist, fog, a moonless night separated island from island, and the vegetation, which at one time might have been receptive to cultivation, was barren; no future could be seen, even if it had been possible to coax the tiniest particle of life into being.

But among these sad remnants, who were still, there were some who could not stop moving. One stood in a corner of the room, jumping up and down with the tirelessness of a child and with as little purpose. Another, obsessed by perpetual motion, walked at great speed round and round the ward and, if the french windows on to the garden were open, made his lolloping way anticlockwise, passing little groups moving with the help of male nurses at the pace of a tortoise.

Titus noticed one man, who shiftily walked up the ward and drank from the bottles beside any occupied bed.

Peregrine showed him what his tasks would be. Titus had never had very much to do with children, and his own childhood, which had been unlike any other, gave him very little clue as to how a child’s mind worked. He imagined that these men he now saw had entered the second stage of juvenilia, but the resemblance ended there, as he was to learn later.

The duties Titus was to undertake were menial. The washing and shaving of those whose limbs or faculties were beyond such a daily exercise. Dressing and undressing those who could not or would not help themselves. Feeding others who had no fancy to eat, or if they had, were not capable of doing so, so that their clothes gave off a sickly odour from the food that had been dropped. In two or three of the beds, Titus was told, were men, old soldiers who had been in them for nearly fifty years, their young manhood smothered for ever by a gas that had taken the whole sweetness of life from them, in a war forgotten by nearly everyone. Another man, upright like a soldier, stood all day issuing commands to a ghost platoon. Unlike the others, he was clean and almost as young looking as on the day that whatever had happened to stultify his hopes and expectations had happened. Only he, among these lonely men, seemed happy and carefree in his own isolated world.

The days went by with a lack of hope and very little laughter, but Titus found friendship with the other men who worked with him. There seemed to be no world outside, and he confined himself to what he had to do. To think of what he was doing was at this time mentally beyond him, for strong as he was, by the end of each day he was physically exhausted. But later in his life he was to ask himself the reasons, to try to discover if there was anyone to blame for such meaningless destruction of so many human beings. He was nauseated by a great deal of what he had to do; to see the loss of dignity in men who at one time had been both loved and desired.

One day a man was brought to the ward on a stretcher and put to bed. He had been drugged to quieten him. His wife had come with him, and Titus watched as she brought out from a suitcase some books and pencils, some food and a few clothes, which she put in the small cupboard by the side of the bed.

There was something in the man that drew Titus to him, although he was in a deep, drugged sleep, and as she left to go the wife turned to him and said, ‘Look after him, please. I will be down in two days’ time.’