The Mind of Mr Soames by Charles Eric Maine

and welfare he will suffer certain restrictions of privilege. And we could set a time limit of, say a week.’
    ‘I still don’t like it,’ Mortimer protested. ‘We are treating this man as a prisoner rather than a patient. Consider it this way—in law we have no right to hold him whatever. He has not been certified, and indeed there are no grounds for certification at all. He could, if he knew the procedure, discharge himself from the Institute tomorrow—today, in fact.’
    ‘That would be rather dangerous, I think,’ Dr Wilson pointed out.
    ‘Dangerous, perhaps, but not illegal. Everyone from the Ministry down has tacitly overlooked the fact that we have no legal right to keep Mr Soames here if he doesn’t wish to be kept here.’
    Dr Breuer uttered a doubtful grunt. ‘I don’t think we need concern ourselves with the legal position as such. It is rather a question of responsibility, and it is our task to turn Mr Soames into a useful self-controlled citizen before granting him his freedom. I doubt if any lawyer would quibble with the essential rightness of our aims. Part of the educational process is to make the patient amenable to higher authority, and I think we might reasonably exert a certain degree of punitive discipline to that end.’
    There was a murmur of agreements among the doctors, with the exception of Mortimer, who remained silent.
    ‘I think we might begin by making it quite plain to Mr Soames that unless he obeys his tutors, male nurses and doctors, he will be confined to his room, and if he continues to be defiant, then his diet will be restricted. If that fails to have the desired effect, then we shall need to reconsider our policy.’
    ‘May we have this in writing as an official instruction?’ Mortimer asked.
    ‘Yes, you may,’ Dr Breuer said. ‘I will accept personal responsibility for the proposed measures. Does that satisfy you?’
    Mortimer indicated that it did.
    ‘In that case, I think we can bring this meeting to an end. We shall hold a further meeting in a week from now to see whether the new policy has produced any change in the patient’s behaviour.’
    Slowly the doctors left the room while, in his small annexe, Mr Soames sat happily on the side of his bed, fingers jammed tightly in his ears, ignoring the appeals of his weary tutor to attend to some elementary matters of geography.
    ❖
    Mr Soames could not have been less impressed by the implied threat to his liberty. Like a child, he seemed to live entirely in the present, with no thought for the future at all. It was possible, of course, that the abstract conception of the future as such, of time to come, was not yet clearly defined in his mind.
    As a matter of policy the ultimatum was delivered by each of the doctors in turn during his period of duty. It was thought that in this way any resentment the patient might feel would not be directed against any single individual. Mr Soames was quite unconcerned, however; he continued to cultivate his own brand of idle independence, attending to his tutor when it pleased him to do so, sometimes talking quietly to himself, as if lost in some grey inner world, and frequently staring fixedly through the window at the green fields and trees of the surrounding parkland.
    ‘Mr Soames,’ said Conway one afternoon, when it was becoming evident that Dr Breuer’s proposed disciplinary measures would have to be put into effect, ‘what are the things you like to do best?’
    Mr Soames stared at him blankly, his brown eyes devoid of expression. Sitting there, on a steel-tube chair near the window, he looked big and strong and amiable, wearing informal grey slacks and a white open-necked shirt. The swarthiness of his skin gave him a Latin appearance; he might have been a Sicilian peasant or a Cypriot or even a Turk. His face was impassive as nearly always, principally, Conway supposed, because he had not yet learned to connect outward expression with inner feeling; it was only when anger