‘I’m not!’

‘That’s splendid. It happens to the most competent men of affairs, sometimes, from exhaustion and worry. I’m quite sure that your hallucination about being an explorer is temporary. Quite a satisfactory prognosis, I should think. Your only real danger is the practical one that in your state . . .’

‘MY STATE?’

‘ . . . you might be led into extravagances that would dissipate your entire small fortune. But of course, my dear fellow, you’re not even sure that you want us to do our modest best for you, as yet. Do let me show you our place here — our “plant” you would no doubt call it.’

Fred had swung between amusement and exasperation till now, but he found nothing amusing at all in the four floors and roof which made up the sanatorium. The bedrooms, though small, were bright enough with red-and-yellow upholstery, and there were no bars on the windows, but the corridors smelled of drugs, and he saw a male attendant, a shaved gorilla, standing in a niche, watchfully looking up and down a corridor — up and down, with surly slowness. His forearms, revealed by the cut-off sleeves of his white jacket, were strong and horribly well scrubbed.

Half a floor was given over to the workshop activities which Dr. Janissary called Occupational Therapy, Dr. Kamerkink called Hobbies, and the untutored Fred Cornplow called Tinkering. There was apparatus for basket making, model-boat making, carpentry and knitting, and there, most busily knitting, was, to Fred’s embarrassment, an aged gentleman with a white beard.

‘Knitting?’ said Fred.

‘Yes, it’s so soothing. Very recreational. Last year we had an ex-United States senator here, seventy years old, and he knitted a sweater for his wife.’

‘What she do with it? Give it to her gigolo or to the Salvation Army?’ said Fred.

In the light of Sara’s look of affliction, Janissary’s look of pain, he warned himself he was nothing but an upstate hick and mustn’t annoy these sophisticates with his rustic American jeers. He wanted to, but didn’t, ask whether men patients got well because they knitted, or got sick in the first place because they were the kind that would knit.

He fell into low humour once more when Dr. Janissary had showed them the roof of the building, which he called the ‘recreational garden’. As a garden, it wasn’t so much, thought Fred. Besides the gravelled roofing, parallel bars and a few deck-chairs, forlorn under December sky, it exhibited no entertaining features save a view of the Hudson and a brewery across it, and a high woven-wire fence. Before Fred could check his unfortunate humour, he had demanded, ‘What’s fence for? Keep the nuts from jumping off?’

Dr. Janissary did not answer, but so queerly did he glance at Sara that Fred felt boorish. He looked about the roof, trying to think of something agreeable to say.

A few feet behind him, the same male attendant was standing, rigid, his arms folded.

(Now the truth is that the attendant was not following Fred. He had sneaked up to the roof for an illegal cigarette. But it is a principle known to soldiers that it is as bad to be frightened to death as it is to be killed.)