Authors: Doris Lessing
Here they suggested that they did not want to take up more of his time than was necessary; he must be very busy. For surely the director of such a large hospital could not possibly afford to devote so much time to every foreign doctor who wished to see over it? Or
could it be his devotion to Britain that made him so ready to devote his time to them?
At any rate, he seemed disappointed at being reminded of what they had come for. He even sighed and sat silent a little, so that Dr Anderson, out of politeness, mentioned the paper he had received from him so that they might, if Dr Kroll wished it, discuss the subject of their research. But Dr Kroll merely sighed again, and said that these days he had very little time for original work; such was the penalty one must pay for accepting the burdens of administration. He rose, all his animation gone, and invited them to step into the other room beyond the glass panel where he would collect his keys. So the three of them went into the inner drawing room, which was an office because of the desk and the telephone; and there Mary Parrish’s attention was drawn to a picture on the wall above the desk. At a distance of six or eight feet it was a gay fresh picture of a cornfield painted from root-vision, or field-mouse view. The sheaves of corn rose startlingly up, bright and strong, mingled with cornflowers and red poppies, as if one were crouching in the very centre of a field. But as one walked towards the picture it vanished, it became a confusion of bright paint. It was finger-painted. The surface of the canvas was as rough as a ploughed field. Mary Parrish walked up to it, into the bright paint, took a few steps back, and back again; and, behold, the picture recreated itself, the cornfield strong and innocent, with something of the sensual innocence of Renoir’s pictures. She was so absorbed, that she started when Dr Kroll dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder and demanded, Was she fond of painting? Instantly both she and Hamish assured him that they were enthusiastically fond of pictures.
Dr Kroll dropped back on the surface of his very neat desk – so neat one could not help wondering how much it was used – the very large black bunch of keys he had removed from it; and he stood in front of the cornfield picture, his hands on Mary’s shoulder.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is what I am really interested in. Yes, yes; this, you must agree, is more interesting than medicine.’
They agreed, since they had just understood that this was the
artist in person. Dr Kroll proceeded to take out from a large cupboard set into the wall a thick stack of pictures, all finger-painted, all with the rough staring surface of thick paint, all of which created themselves at ten paces into highly organized and original pictures.
Soon both rooms were full of pictures that leaned against chairs, tables, walls and along the sliding glass panels. Dr Kroll, his fine hands knotted together in anxiety because of their possible reception of his work, followed them around as they gazed at one picture after another. It became evident that the pictures separated themselves into two categories. There were those, like the cornfield, done in bright clear colours, very fresh and lyrical. Then there were those which, close up, showed grim rutted surfaces of dirty black, grey, white, a sullen green and – recurring again and again – a characteristic sullen shade of red – a dark, lightless, rusty red like old blood. These pictures were all extraordinary and macabre, of graveyards and skulls and corpses, of war scenes and bombed buildings and screaming women and houses on fire with people falling from burning windows like ants into flames. It was quite extraordinary how, in the space of a few seconds, these two conventional and pretty rooms had been transformed by these pictures into an exhibition of ghoulishness, particularly as the scenes of the pictures were continually vanishing altogether into areas of thick paint that had been smeared, rubbed, piled, worked all over the canvas an inch or so thick by the handsome fingers of Dr Kroll. Standing at six feet from one picture, the proper distance to view the work of Dr Kroll, the picture they had been examining five moments before, and which they had now moved away from, lost its meaning and disintegrated into a surface of jumbled and crusted colour. They were continually stepping forward or stepping back from chaos into moments of brief, clear, startling illumination. And they could not help wondering if Dr Kroll was gifted with a peculiar vision of his own, a vision perhaps of his fingertips, which enabled him to
see
his work as he stood up against it, rubbing and plastering the thick paint on to the canvas; they even imagined him as a monster with arms six feet long, standing back from his canvas as
he worked on it like a clambering spider. The quality of these pictures was such that, as they examined them, they could not help picturing the artist as a monster, a maniac, or kind of gifted insect. Yet, turning to look at Dr Kroll, there he stood, a handsome man who was the very essence of everything that was conservative, correct, and urbane.
Mary, at least, was feeling a little giddy. She sought out the battling blue eyes of her partner, Hamish, and understood that he felt the same. For this was an exact repetition of their encounter with Dr Schröder with his scarred face that demanded compassion. In saying what they thought of his work to Dr Kroll, they must remember that they were speaking to a man who gallantly and bravely volunteered to hand the keys of sanity over to a subordinate and retired into madness for six months of the year, when, presumably, he painted these horrible pictures, whose very surfaces looked like the oozing, shredding substance of decomposing flesh.
Meanwhile, there he stood beside them, searching their faces anxiously.
They said, in response to his appeal, that this was obviously a real and strong talent. They said that his work was striking and original. They said they were deeply impressed.
He stood silent, not quite smiling, but with a quizzical look behind the fine eyes. He was judging them. He knew what they were feeling and was condemning them, in the same way as the initiated make allowances for the innocent.
Dr Anderson remarked that it must be admitted that the pictures were rather strong? Not to everybody’s taste, perhaps? Perhaps rather savage?
Dr Kroll, smiling urbanely, replied that life tended sometimes to be savage. Yes, that was his experience. He deepened his smile and indicated the cornfield on the wall behind his desk and said that he could see Dr Anderson preferred pictures like that one?
Dr Anderson took his stand, and very stubbornly, on the fact that he preferred that picture to any of the others he had seen.
Mary Parrish moved to stand beside Dr Anderson and joined him in asserting that to her mind this picture was entirely superior to all
the others; she preferred the few bright pictures, all of which seemed to her to be loaded with a quality of sheer joy, a sensuous joy, to the others which seemed to her – if he didn’t mind her saying so – simply horrible.
Dr Kroll turned his ironical, dark gaze from one face to the other and remarked: ‘So.’ And again, accepting their bad taste: ‘So.’
He remarked, ‘I am subject to fits of depression. When I am depressed, naturally enough, I paint these pictures.’ He indicated the lightless pictures of his madness. ‘And when I am happy again, and when I have time – for, as I have said, I am extremely busy – I paint pictures such as these …’ His gesture towards the cornfield was impatient, almost contemptuous. It was clear that he had hung the joyous cornfield on the wall of his reception room because he expected all his guests or visiting colleagues to have the bad taste to prefer it.
‘So,’ he said again, smiling dryly.
At which, Mary Parrish – since he was conveying a feeling of total isolation – said quickly, ‘But we are very interested. We would love to see some more, if you have time.’
It seemed that he needed very much to hear her say this. For the ironical condemnation left his face and was succeeded by the pathetic anxiety of the amateur artist to be loved for his work. He said that he had had two exhibitions of his paintings, that he had been misunderstood by the critics, who had praised the paintings he did not care for, so that he would never again expose himself publicly to the stupidity of critics. He was dependent for sympathy on the understanding minority, some of them chance visitors to his hospital; some of them even – if they did not mind his saying so – inmates of it. He would, for two such delightful guests as his visitors from England, be happy to show more of his work.
With this he invited them to step into a passage behind his office. Its walls were covered from floor to ceiling with pictures. Also the walls of the passage beyond it.
It was terrifying to think of the energy this man must have when he was ‘depressed’. Corridor after corridor opened up, the walls all covered with canvases loaded with thick, crusted paint. Some of the
corridors were narrow, and it was impossible to stand far enough back for the pictures to compose themselves. But it seemed that Dr Kroll was able to see what his hands had done even when he was close against the canvas. He would lean into a big area of thick, dry paint from which emerged fragmentarily a jerky branch that looked like a bombed tree, or a bit of cracked bone, or a tormented mouth, and say: ‘I call this picture “Love”.’ Or Victory, or Death; for he liked this kind of title. ‘See? See that house there? See how I’ve put the church?’ And the two guests gazed blankly at the smears of paint and wondered if perhaps this canvas represented the apotheosis of his madness and had no form in it at all. But if they stepped back against the opposite wall as far as they could, and leaned their heads back to gain an extra inch of distance, they could see that there was a house or a church. The house was also a skull; and the dead grey walls of the church oozed rusty blood, or spilled a gout of blood over the sills of its windows, or its door ejected blood like a person’s mouth coughing blood.
Depression again weighed on the pair who, following after the dignified back of Dr Kroll as he led them into yet another picture-filled corridor, instinctively reached for each other’s hands, reached for the warm contact of healthy flesh.
Soon their host led them back into the office, where he offered them more coffee. They refused politely but asked to see his hospital. Dr Kroll carelessly agreed. It was not, his manner suggested, that he did not take his hospital seriously, but that he would much rather, now he had been given the privilege of a visit from these rarely sympathetic people, share with them his much higher interests: his love for their country, his art. But he would nevertheless escort them around the hospital.
Again he took up the great bundle of black keys and went before them down the corridor they had first entered by. Now they saw that the pictures they had noticed then were all by him; these were the pictures he despised and hung for public view. But as they passed through a back door into a courtyard he paused, held up his keys, smiling, and indicated a small picture by the door. The picture was of the keys. From a scramble of whitey-grey paint came
out, very black and hard and shining, a great jangling bunch of keys that also looked like bells, and, from certain angles, like staring eyes. Dr Kroll shared a smile with them as if to say: An interesting subject?
The three doctors went across a courtyard into the first block, which consisted of two parallel very long wards, each filled with small, tidy, white beds that had a chair and a locker beside them. On the beds sat, or leaned, or lay, the patients. Apart from the fact that they tended to be listless and staring, there was nothing to distinguish this ward from the ward of any public hospital. Dr Kroll exchanged brisk greetings with certain of his patients; discouraged an old man who grasped his arm as he passed and said that he had a momentous piece of news to tell him which he had heard that moment over his private wireless station, and which affected the whole course of history; and passed on smiling through this building into the next. There was nothing new here. This block, like the last, had achieved the ultimate in reducing several hundred human beings into complete identity with each other. Dr Kroll said, almost impatiently, that if you had seen one of these wards you had seen them all, and took off at a tangent across a courtyard to another of these regular blocklike buildings which was full of women. It occurred to the British pair that the two buildings on the other side of the court had men in them only; and they asked Dr Kroll if he kept the men in the line of buildings on one side of the court, and the women on the other – for there was a high wire fence down the court, with a door in it that he opened and locked behind him. ‘Why, that is so,’ said Dr Kroll indifferently.
‘Do the men and the women meet – in the evenings, perhaps?’
‘Meet? No.’
‘Not at social evenings? At dances perhaps? At some meals during the week?’
Here Dr Kroll turned and gave his guests a tolerant smile. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘sex is a force destructive enough even when kept locked up. Do you suggest that we should mix the sexes in a place like this, where it is hard enough to keep people quiet and unexcited?’
Dr Anderson remarked that in progressive mental hospitals in Britain it was a policy to allow men and women to mix together as much as was possible. For what crime were these poor people being punished, he inquired hotly, that they were treated as if they had taken perpetual vows of celibacy?
Dr Parrish noted that the word ‘progressive’ fell very flat in this atmosphere. Such was the power of Dr Kroll’s conservative personality that it sounded almost eccentric.
‘So?’ commented Dr Kroll. ‘So the administrators of your English hospitals are prepared to give themselves so much unnecessary trouble?’
‘Do the men and women never meet?’ insisted Dr Parrish.
Dr Kroll said tolerantly that at night they behaved like naughty schoolchildren and passed each other notes through the wire.
The British couple fell back on their invincible politeness and felt their depression inside them like a fog. It was still snowing lightly through the heavy grey air.
Having seen three buildings all full of women of all ages, lying and sitting about in the listlessness of complete idleness, they agreed with Dr Kroll it was enough; they were prepared to end their tour of inspection. He said that they must return with him for another cup of coffee, but first he had to make a short visit, and perhaps they would be kind enough to accompany him. He led the way to another building set rather apart from the others, whose main door he opened with an enormous key from his bunch of keys. As soon as they were inside it became evident that this was the children’s building. Dr Kroll was striding down the main passage, calling aloud for some attendant who appeared to take instructions.