“Why do you say so? Why shouldn’t they be much worse?”
“Why, because they just aren’t.” She stopped, suddenly conscious that her Pollyanna saying had no truth in it, that it was the sort of thing adults use to pacify children. She thought of her own mother, who had gone to the hospital, fearing an appendectomy-which her friends and loving family privately diagnosed as hypochondria-there to die, of cancer.
No, the facts were frequently worse than our most nervous fears.
Still, she could not agree with him. “Suppose we look at it in the worst possible light,” she suggested. “Suppose you have been doing something criminal, while in your memory lapses. No court in the State would hold you legally responsible for your actions.”
He looked at her wildly. “No. No, perhaps they would not. But you know what they would do? You do, don’t you? Have you any idea what they do with the criminally insane?”
“I certainly do,” she answered positively. “They receive the same treatment as any other psycho patient. They aren’t discriminated against. I know; I’ve done field work at the State Hospital.”
“Suppose you have-you looked at it from the outside. Have you any idea what it feels like from the inside? Have you ever been placed in a wet pack? Have you ever had a guard put you to bed? Or force you to eat? Do you know what it’s like to have a key turned in a lock every time you make a move? Never to have any privacy no matter how much you need it?”
He got up and began to pace. “But that isn’t the worst of it. It’s the other patients. Do you imagine that a man, simply because his own mind is playing him tricks, doesn’t recognize insanity in others? Some of them drool and some of them have habits too beastly to tell of. And they talk, they talk, they talk. Can you imagine lying in a bed, with the sheet bound down, and a thing in the next bed that keeps repeating, ‘The little bird flew up and then flew away; the little bird flew up and then flew away; the little bird flew up, and then flew away-‘ ”
“Mr. Hoag!” Randall stood up and took him by the arm. “Mr. Hoag-control yourself! That’s no way to behave.”
Hoag stopped, looking bewildered. He looked from one face to the other and an expression of shame came over him. “I . . . I’m sorry, Mrs. Randall,” he said. “I quite forgot myself. I’m not myself today. All this worry-”
“It’s all right, Mr. Hoag,” she said stiffly. But her earlier revulsion had returned.
“It’s not entirely all right,” Randall amended. “I think the time has come to get a number of things cleared up. There has been entirely too much going on that I don’t understand and I think it is up to you, Mr. Hoag, to give me a few plain answers.”
The little man seemed honestly at a loss. “I surely will, Mr. Randall, if there is anything I can answer. Do you feel that I have not been frank with you?”
“I certainly do. First-when were you in a hospital for the criminally insane?”
“Why, I never was. At least, I don’t think I ever was. I don’t remember being in one.”
“Then why all this hysterical balderdash you have been spouting the past five minutes? Were you just making it up?”
“Oh, no! That . . . that was . . . that referred to St. George Rest Home. It had nothing to do with a . . . with such a hospital.”
“St. George Rest Home, eh? We’ll come back to that. Mr. Hoag, tell me what happened yesterday.”
“Yesterday? During the day? But Mr. Randall, you know I can’t tell you what happened during the day.”
“I think you can. There has been some damnable skulduggery going on and you’re the center of it. When you stopped me in front of the Acme Building-what did you say to me?”
“The Acme Building? I know nothing of the Acme Building. Was I there?”
“You’re damned right you were there and you pulled some sort of a shenanigan on me, drugged me or doped me, or something. Why?”