Evan MacIan was standing a few yards off looking at him in absolute
silence.
He had not the moral courage to ask MacIan if there had been anything
astounding in the manner of his coming there, nor did MacIan seem to
have any question to ask, or perhaps any need to ask it. The two men
came slowly towards each other, and found the same expression on each
other's faces. Then, for the first time in all their acquaintance, they
shook hands.
Almost as if this were a kind of unconscious signal, it brought Dr.
Quayle bounding out of a door and running across the lawn.
“Oh, there you are!” he exclaimed with a relieved giggle. “Will you come
inside, please? I want to speak to you both.”
They followed him into his shiny wooden office where their damning
record was kept. Dr. Quayle sat down on a swivel chair and swung round
to face them. His carved smile had suddenly disappeared.
“I will be plain with you gentlemen,” he said, abruptly; “you know
quite well we do our best for everybody here. Your cases have been under
special consideration, and the Master himself has decided that you ought
to be treated specially and--er--under somewhat simpler conditions.”
“You mean treated worse, I suppose,” said Turnbull, gruffly.
The doctor did not reply, and MacIan said: “I expected this.” His eyes
had begun to glow.
The doctor answered, looking at his desk and playing with a key: “Well,
in certain cases that give anxiety--it is often better----”
“Give anxiety,” said Turnbull, fiercely. “Confound your impudence! What
do you mean? You imprison two perfectly sane men in a madhouse because
you have made up a long word. They take it in good temper, walk and talk
in your garden like monks who have found a vocation, are civil even to
you, you damned druggists' hack! Behave not only more sanely than any of
your patients, but more sanely than half the sane men outside, and you
have the soul-stifling cheek to say that they give anxiety.”
“The head of the asylum has settled it all,” said Dr. Quayle, still
looking down.
MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the doctor
with flaming eyes.
“If the head has settled it let the head announce it,” he said. “I won't
take it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering degenerate. Let
us see the head of the asylum.”
“See the head of the asylum,” repeated Dr. Quayle. “Certainly not.”
The tall Highlander, bending over him, put one hand on his shoulder with
fatherly interest.
“You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my position as
a lunatic,” he said. “I could kill you with my left hand before such a
rat as you could so much as squeak. And I wouldn't be hanged for it.”
“I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan,” said Turnbull with sobriety and
perfect respectfulness, “that you had better let us see the head of the
institution.”
Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and clumsy
presence of mind.
“Oh, certainly,” he said with a weak laugh. “You can see the head of the
asylum if you particularly want to.” He almost ran out of the room,
and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails. He knocked at an
ordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a voice said, “Come in,”
MacIan's breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest.
Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened the door.
It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a medical
library. At the other end of it was a ponderous and polished desk with
an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which was just sufficient
to show a slender, well-bred figure in an ordinary medical black
frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered with age, was bent over neat
piles of notes. This gentleman looked up for an instant as they
entered, and the lamplight fell on his glittering spectacles and
long, clean-shaven face--a face which would have been simply like an
aristocrat's but that a certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in
the chin made it look more like a very handsome actor's. It was only for
a flash that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head over
his notes once more, and said, without looking up again:
“I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and C.”
Turnbull and MacIan looked at each other, and said more than they could
ever say with tongues or swords. Among other things they said that
to that particular Head of the institution it was a waste of time to
appeal, and they followed Dr. Quayle out of the room.
The instant they stepped out into the corridor four sturdy figures
stepped from four sides, pinioned them, and ran them along the
galleries. They might very likely have thrown their captors right and
left had they been inclined to resist, but for some nameless reason
they were more inclined to laugh. A mixture of mad irony with childish
curiosity made them feel quite inclined to see what next twist would
be taken by their imbecile luck. They were dragged down countless cold
avenues lined with glazed tiles, different only in being of different
lengths and set at different angles. They were so many and so monotonous
that to escape back by them would have been far harder than fleeing from
the Hampton Court maze. Only the fact that windows grew fewer, coming
at longer intervals, and the fact that when the windows did come they
seemed shadowed and let in less light, showed that they were winding
into the core or belly of some enormous building. After a little time
the glazed corridors began to be lit by electricity.
At last, when they had walked nearly a mile in those white and polished
tunnels, they came with quite a shock to the futile finality of a
cul-de-sac. All that white and weary journey ended suddenly in an oblong
space and a blank white wall. But in the white wall there were two iron
doors painted white on which were written, respectively, in neat black
capitals B and C.
“You go in here, sir,” said the leader of the officials, quite
respectfully, “and you in here.”
But before the doors had clanged upon their dazed victims, MacIan had
been able to say to Turnbull with a strange drawl of significance: “I
wonder who A is.”
Turnbull made an automatic struggle before he allowed himself to be
thrown into the cell. Hence it happened that he was the last to enter,
and was still full of the exhilaration of the adventures for at least
five minutes after the echo of the clanging door had died away.
Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and a half
hours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end of his life. He
was hidden and sealed up in this little crack of stone until the flesh
should fall off his bones. He was dead, and the world had won.
His cell was of an oblong shape, but very long in comparison with its
width. It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully extended
with the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left wall, very dusty. It
was, however, long enough for a man to walk one thirty-fifth part of a
mile if he traversed it entirely. On the same principle a row of fixed
holes, quite close together, let in to the cells by pipes what was
alleged to be the freshest air. For these great scientific organizers
insisted that a man should be healthy even if he was miserable. They
provided a walk long enough to give him exercise and holes large enough
to give him oxygen. There their interest in human nature suddenly
ceased. It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefit
of exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty. They had not
entertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of the
advantages of the open sky. They administered air in secret, but in
sufficient doses, as if it were a medicine. They suggested walking,
as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk. Above all, the asylum
authorities insisted on their own extraordinary cleanliness. Every
morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep on his iron bedstead
which was lifted half-way up the wall and clamped to it with iron, four
sluices or metal mouths opened above him at the four corners of the
chamber and washed it white of any defilement. Turnbull's solitary soul
surged up against this sickening daily solemnity.
“I am buried alive!” he cried, bitterly; “they have hidden me under
mountains. I shall be here till I rot. Why the blazes should it matter
to them whether I am dirty or clean.”
Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong cell,
and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of perfectly cooked
lentils and a big bowl of cocoa. He was not underfed any more than he
was underexercised or asphyxiated. He had ample walking space, ample
air, ample and even filling food. The only objection was that he had
nothing to walk towards, nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever
for drawing the breath of life.
Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him. It was a long,
narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and ought to
have had a flat wall at the other; but that end was broken by a wedge or
angle of space, like the prow of a ship. After three days of silence and
cocoa, this angle at the end began to infuriate Turnbull. It maddened
him to think that two lines came together and pointed at nothing. After
the fifth day he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner. After
twenty-five days he almost broke his head against it. Then he became
quite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like a sort of
Robinson Crusoe.
Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and he
found himself paying particular attention to the row of holes which let
in the air into his last house of life. He soon discovered that these
air-holes were all the ends and mouths of long leaden tubes which
doubtless carried air from some remote watering-place near Margate.
One evening while he was engaged in the fifth investigation he noticed
something like twilight in one of these dumb mouths, as compared with
the darkness of the others. Thrusting his finger in as far as it would
go, he found a hole and flapping edge in the tube. This he rent open and
instantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had struck
some other cell.
It is a characteristic of all things now called “efficient”, which means
mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely
wrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more
living organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a
wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian
monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army
merely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent
possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies
than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it
is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means
concentrated poison--an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a
spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the
swiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowest
thing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier to
get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic
machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic
machine would be much less likely to run after you.
Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with the
cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum. He had been shaken
by many spiritual states since the instant when he was pitched head
foremost into that private cell which was to be his private room till
death. He had felt a high fit of pride and poetry, which had ebbed
away and left him deadly cold. He had known a period of mere scientific
curiosity, in the course of which he examined all the tiles of his cell,
with the gratifying conclusion that they were all the same shape and
size; but was greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end,
and also about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a period of
mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but only by those few
dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal huntsman to hunt down and
humiliate human nature. This also passed, but left behind it a feverish
distaste for many of the mere objects around him. Long after he had
returned to sanity and such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on
a desert island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above all, he
had a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for the objectless
iron peg in the wall.
But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he
never really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and as
hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos of
his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of
our scientific civilization. He no more expected rescue from a medical
certificate than rescue from the solar system. In many of his Robinson
Crusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome
school-fellow who had long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cell
when he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to
write them down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled
to discover how much they had changed. Then he remembered the Beauchamp
Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the wall, and
discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing could be either
drawn or carved. Then for an instant there hung and broke above him like
a high wave the whole horror of scientific imprisonment, which manages
to deny a man not only liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.
In the old filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in
the rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing
witness. The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a beetle
strayed out of a hole. Here the unpierceable walls were washed every
morning by an automatic sluice. There was no natural corruption and
no merciful decay by which a living thing could enter in. Then James
Turnbull looked up and saw the high invincible hatefulness of the
society in which he lived, and saw the hatefulness of something else
also, which he told himself again and again was not the cosmos in which
he believed. But all the time he had never once doubted that the five
sides of his cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and
it gave him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through
the aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had forgotten how close
efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily, therefore, a
pipe here or there may leak.
Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managed
to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came up
from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall
from some hole or window higher up. As he was screwing his eye to peer
at this grey and greasy twilight he was astonished to see another human
finger very long and lean come down from above towards the broken pipe
and hook it up to something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly
blackened and blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something
human spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.
“Who is that?” asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet wary and
quite resolved not to spoil any chance.
After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong
Argyllshire accent:
“I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?”
Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him for a
space just long enough to be painful. Then he said with his old gaiety:
“I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to murder the first man I
have met for ten million years.”
“I know what you mean,” answered the other. “It has been awful. For a
mortal month I have been alone with God.”
Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer: “Alone
with God! Then you do not know what loneliness is.”
But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: “Alone with
God, were you? And I suppose you found his Majesty's society rather
monotonous?”
“Oh, no,” said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; “it was a great deal too
exciting.”
After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: “What do you really
hate most in your place?”
“You'd think I was really mad if I told you,” answered Turnbull,
bitterly.
“Then I expect it's the same as mine,” said the other voice.
“I am sure it's not the same as anybody's,” said Turnbull, “for it has
no rhyme or reason. Perhaps my brain really has gone, but I detest
that iron spike in the left wall more than the damned desolation or the
damned cocoa. Have you got one in your cell?”
“Not now,” replied MacIan with serenity. “I've pulled it out.”
His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.
“I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head,” continued the
tranquil Highland voice. “It looked so unnecessary.”
“You must be ghastly strong,” said Turnbull.
“One is, when one is mad,” was the careless reply, “and it had worn a
little loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I can't discover
what it was for. But I've found out something a long sight funnier.”
“What do you mean?” asked Turnbull.
“I have found out where A is,” said the other.
Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up communications
which made his meaning plain. By that time the two captives had fully
discovered and demonstrated that weakness in the very nature of modern
machinery to which we have already referred. The very fact that they
were isolated from all companions meant that they were free from all
spies, and as there were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to
be baffled. Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells;
that machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual suggestion,
opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to let in a small
man, in the exact place where there had been before the tiny ventilation
holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into MacIan's apartment, and his first
glance found out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket,
and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind.
But for this MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long
oblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that short
oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That individual looked at
it with a puzzled face.
“What is in there?” he asked.
MacIan answered briefly: “Another cell.”
“But where can the door of it be?” said his companion, even more
puzzled; “the doors of our cells are at the other end.”
“It has no door,” said Evan.
In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling
crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion of
the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity
which one has when something horrible is half understood.
“James Turnbull,” said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, “these people
hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man
feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in order
to capture us and wipe us out--in order to kill us. And they have killed
us, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins. But though this
hatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and
more plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet
it is not we whom the people of this place hate most.”
A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's spine;
he had never felt so near to superstition and supernaturalism, and it
was not a pretty sort of superstition either.
“There is another man more fearful and hateful,” went on MacIan, in his
low monotone voice, “and they have buried him even deeper. God knows how
they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered
through any opening above. I expect these iron handles that we both hate
have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up. He is there.
I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him
long, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move.”
All Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet in
rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.
It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it was
doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large black
A like the B and C outside their own doors. The letter in this case was
not painted outside, because this prison had no outside.
On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares had
maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which was
startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous head
was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was draped, both
insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of a
brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floor
beside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particular
angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom and
mystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.
After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but called
out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The thing got
up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round offered the
spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge grey-and-white beard not unlike
the plumage of an owl. This extraordinary beard covered him literally to
his feet (not that that was very far), and perhaps it was as well
that it did, for portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off
whenever he moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but
this old man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and complex that
one could see five or ten different faces besides the real one, as one
can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And yet while his face seemed
like a scripture older than the gods, his eyes were quite bright, blue,
and startled like those of a baby. They looked as if they had only an
instant before been fitted into his head.
Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster spoke
that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had spoken. He
said something or nothing. And then he waited for this dwarfish voice
that had been hidden under the mountains of the world. At last it did
speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign accent that was neither
Latin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched out a long and very dirty
forefinger, and cried in a voice of clear recognition, like a child's:
“That's a hole.”
He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger, and then
he cried, with a crow of laughter: “And that's a head come through it.”
The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another sick
turn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling madmen who
trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens. But there was
something new and subversive of the universe in the combination of so
much cheerful decision with a body without a brain.
“Why did they put you in such a place?” he asked at last with
embarrassment.
“Good place. Yes,” said the old man, nodding a great many times and
beaming like a flattered landlord. “Good shape. Long and narrow, with a
point. Like this,” and he made lovingly with his hands a map of the room
in the air.
“But that's not the best,” he added, confidentially. “Squares very
good; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them. But that's not the
best.”
“What is the best?” asked Turnbull in great distress.
“Spike is the best,” said the old man, opening his blue eyes blazing;
“it sticks out.”
The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity. “Can't we do
anything for you?” he said.
“I am very happy,” said the other, alphabetically. “You are a good man.
Can I help you?”
“No, I don't think you can, sir,” said Turnbull with rough pathos; “I am
glad you are contented at least.”
The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed Turnbull with
a stare extraordinarily severe. “You are quite sure,” he said, “I cannot
help you?”
“Quite sure, thank you,” said Turnbull with broken brevity. “Good day.”
Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and whose
face, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that Evan had heard
the whole of the strange dialogue.
“Curse those cruel beasts!” cried Turnbull. “They've turned him to an
imbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a pin-point now.”
“You are sure he is a lunatic?” said Evan, slowly.
“Not a lunatic,” said Turnbull, “an idiot. He just points to things and
says that they stick out.”
“He had a notion that he could help us,” said MacIan moodily, and began
to pace towards the other end of his cell.
“Yes, it was a bit pathetic,” assented Turnbull; “such a Thing offering
help, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?”
“God Almighty guide us all!” said MacIan.
He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and staring
quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them up from the
sun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at the door likewise,
and then he also uttered an exclamation. The iron door was standing
about an inch and a half open.
“He said----” began Evan, in a trembling voice--“he offered----”
“Come along, you fool!” shouted Turnbull with a sudden and furious
energy. “I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of luck in the
world. You pulled out that iron handle that had screwed up his cell, and
it somehow altered the machinery and opened all the doors.”
Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the open
corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a half-darkened
window.
“All the same,” said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary
conversation, “he did ask you whether he could help you.”
All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the heart
of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour before the
fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world. They did not even
know what hour of the day it was; and when, turning a corner, they saw
the bare tunnel of the corridor end abruptly in a shining square of
garden, the grass burning in that strong evening sunshine which makes
it burnished gold rather than green, the abrupt opening on to the earth
seemed like a hole knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twice
in life is it permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from
outside, and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet
begun. As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth
they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn, of
being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth. They were
looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.
Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an earth-spurning
leap like that of one who could really spread his wings and fly. MacIan,
who came an instant after, was less full of mere animal gusto and fuller
of a more fearful and quivering pleasure in the clear and innocent
flower colours and the high and holy trees. With one bound they were in
that cool and cleared landscape, and they found just outside the door
the black-clad gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them;
and his chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.