I
FREQUENTERS of lunatic asylums are familiar with the person who, being
convinced that he is a poached egg, continually demands to be put on
hot toast, and is continually unhappy because nobody will put him on
hot toast. This man is quite harmless; he is merely a bore by reason of
a ridiculous delusion about the fulfilment of his true destiny being
bound up with hot toast; in character he is one of the most amiable
individuals that ever lived, amiable even to the point of offering
himself for consumption to those of his fellow-patients who are hungry,
and who happen to fancy a poached egg with their tea. Nevertheless, on
the score of his undeniable delusion he is segregated from ordinary
society, and indeed imprisoned for life. Such may be the consequence of
a delusion.
But not all deluded people are treated alike. A lady went for the
week-end to stay in a country cottage. Now, this lady was accustomed to
smoke a cigarette in her bath of a morning.
Let there be no mistake. She was a perfectly respectable lady. In
former days respectable ladies neither smoked cigarettes nor took
baths. The one habit was nearly as disreputable as the other. In the
present epoch they do both with impunity, and though possibly a section
of the public may consider that while for a woman to smoke a cigarette
is quite nice, and for a woman to have a bath is quite nice, to smoke a
cigarette in a bath is not quite nice for a woman, that section of the
public is in a very small minority and should therefore be howled down.
Anyhow the lady in question was everything that a lady ought to be. She
was in fact a well-known social worker and writer on social subjects.
On the Sunday morning a terrible rumour was propagated throughout the
country cottage. The lady did not smoke merely a cigarette in her
bath--she smoked a special brand of cigarette in her bath. And she
had forgotten to bring a due supply of the special brand, and her
cigarette-case had been emptied on the previous night. It became known
that she was in a fearful state, and would not be comforted. The brand
was Egyptian. At first none but the brand would do for her, but after a
period of agony she announced that she was ready to smoke any Egyptian
or Turkish cigarette. The cottage, however, was neither Egyptian nor
Turkish, but a Virginian cottage. She could not be induced to try a
Virginian cigarette, and the cottage was miles from anywhere, and the
day was the Sabbath.
She came downstairs miserable, unnerved, futile, a nuisance to herself
and to her hosts. She could not discuss important social matters,
which she had come on purpose to discuss. She could do naught except
sympathise with herself, and this she did on a tremendous scale. In the
afternoon a visitor called who possessed Egyptian cigarettes. The lady
got one, and at the first puff was instantly restored to her normal
condition. The hot toast had been brought to the poached egg.
The lady, I maintain, was suffering from a delusion at least as
outrageous as the poached egg delusion, the delusion that her body and
brain could not function properly--in other words that her destiny
could not be fulfilled--unless she took into her mouth at a certain
time a particular variety of gaseous fluid scarcely distinguishable
from a thousand other similar varieties of gaseous fluid. Her physical
perceptions were not at all delicate. Like most women, for example,
she could not tell the difference between tea stewed and tea properly
infused. If a Virginian cigarette had been falsely marked in an
Egyptian manner she would have smoked it with gusto. And if she had
been smoking in the dark she could not have told whether her cigarette
was in or out--unless she inhaled.
The delusion was nothing but a delusion. Her mind, by a habitual
process, had imagined it, and she had ended by being victimised by
it. She had ended by seriously believing that she was physically and
spiritually dependent upon a factor which had no appreciable power
beyond the power mistakenly and insanely attributed to it by her morbid
imagination.
But, did any one suggest that she ought to be confined in a lunatic
asylum? Assuredly not. If ever she goes to a lunatic asylum it will
be as a visitor, to smile superiorly at the man whose welfare depends
utterly on hot toast. From the moral height of a cigarette she will
pity hot toast.
Far from scheming to get the lady into a lunatic asylum, her hosts were
extraordinarily sympathetic, and even when they were by themselves the
worst thing they said was:
‘Poor thing! She’s rather fussy about cigarettes.’