Of what followed for the next few days I cannot say much; for my head was
then so thoroughly weakened that I had almost lost all count of time. It
was a very merciful weakness, for without it I do not think that a
sensitive brain could have borne a succession of shocks such as I
described at the end of my last chapter. There was a very large number of
madmen in the place, which was avowedly regarded as an asylum chiefly for
'incurables,' whence I conclude that it was thought convenient in my case
to take the extremest view of matters at once. So little was I myself able
to realise that resort could have been had with me to such a step as this,
that, strange as it may seem, some months passed before I knew that I was
the inmate of an asylum. I thought, in the dazed state of trance in which
I contrived to exist from hour to hour, that I was in some sort of
establishment devoted to nervous patients, whence I should be removed in
due course of time; though, in the vague and dreamy speculations which
occupied my days, I was wont inwardly to wonder what possible effect for
good those broken nerves of mine could derive from constant association
with a variety of people who were 'nervous' to such a very marked degree.
Their ailments used at times to cause me much inward perplexity. One of
them used to rush wildly about the passages of the house--generally with a
file of old numbers of the 'Times' under his arm, in all sorts of
wonderful costumes, which he was very fond of changing, an Inverness cape
and a velvet cap being his garments of choice--shouting out scraps of song
in a discordant voice. Another always wished to shake hands with me, and
recite medical prescriptions at hazard; at supper, when a number of us
sate down at a long table to consume some incredible beef-sandwiches as a
wholesome prelude to quiet sleep, he would finish by crossing himself and
eating the parsley. Tobacco he was rather fond of eating, too, poor
fellow. He is dead now, thank God for it; for even in his vagaries and in
my illness he impressed upon me with singular force the idea that he was
exceptionally a 'gentleman,' and a good one. A few days before his end--he
died of Bright's disease, good reader; and he wanted something more, I
think, than asylum treatment--I remember his expressing his dislike to
sitting down at dinner in a lady's company without being properly dressed.
One of the 'matrons' was in charge of us at the time; a kind-hearted,
clear-headed woman, to whom I was to owe my first release (I was condemned
_twice_ to my fate). From her first I learned exactly where I was, and the
sort of net that had immeshed me; and, after she had talked to me once or
twice for five minutes, 'This,' she said, 'is a cruel and a shameful
thing. You have no business to be here. Your friends should remove you
instantly.'
But I am anticipating a little. I met this lady, happily for me, at a
seaside 'house of ease,' to which some few of the patients were
periodically sent from the 'Establishment,' as the asylum was
euphemistically called (we were very refined and Pickwickian altogether,
and our warders were our 'attendants'), for change of air. To obtain even
that slight relief, an order from the magistrates, who execute justice and
maintain truth--and in this case were connections or near neighbours of
the head of the establishment--is considered necessary. No loophole for
escape was left us which the law can sew up. For five fearful months I
lived at head-quarters in the asylum, the whole _morale_ of heart and mind
being more played upon and shattered every day. I have described the ways
of two of my companions. Another, with an abnormally large head of hair,
had a way of skipping about the house with startling entreaties for
'baccy,' or singing to himself a favourite little song, which ran thus:
'Hey-diddle-diddle, I want some more beer.' Yet he could be consecutive
sometimes, too, when one talked with him; and under the care of the same
matron he sensibly improved, as, when I met him again afterwards--how
shall in due course be told--he had sensibly deteriorated. He was mad, no
doubt, quite mad, but very gentle; and I ask all good and reasonable
people, on every good and reasonable principle, how such a malady as his
can be bettered by constant association with other mental maladies of
every sort and kind? For myself--I say it again--my physical weakness
saved me, with the consequent incapacity of the brain to receive immediate
impressions strongly. But the impressions were made, deep and enduring;
and they come out afterwards in the light of health and freedom, as the
photograph takes form and strength under the action of the chemicals. Now,
happy and free, the horrors that were like dreams at the time seem to
shake me as I write; and strongly balanced as I know my brain to be, I
doubt if the companions who in sickness but vaguely frightened me, in
health would not break me down. There is a very fearful responsibility
somewhere for what was done to me.
Patients there were of other and of many kinds. There was one black
gentleman from India who never spoke; but who used ever and anon to glare
at me, and make one or two steps towards me as if meditating a rush. Then
he would lick his lips with a very red tongue, sit down opposite me,
calmly pull off his boot and stocking, and nurse his foot. I think that he
had for me the greatest fascination of any of them; and I remember being
at times under the impression that he was a wild animal in disguise. One
poor creature there was whom I dimly but firmly believed to be an ape;
truly, for my desire in writing these papers is neither to extenuate nor
set down aught in malice. He was in truth, I have been assured, a
gentleman of large private fortune; but never have I seen humanity so
fearfully lowered. He was very ape-like, small and muscular. His chief
employment was to sit over old volumes of the 'Illustrated London News,'
which periodical was weekly sent to his address and taken in for him; to
lick his fingers, and turn the pages rapidly over, crooning the while some
horrible gibberish to himself in a voice quite inhuman, without two
consecutive syllables or one ray of reason; to tear out little bits or
whole pages of the volume, and throw them away with a triumphant yell,
which curdled all my blood and improved the nature of my dreams, watched
over as they were by two or three keepers, who would report me the next
morning as having had 'a bad turn' if I awoke in the night, utterly
nerve-shaken, under the influence of this living nightmare. This hapless
youth was known by the name of 'Jemmy,' and was a standing jest with the
warders, who delighted in playing in every possible way upon his ghastly
idiotcies. For he was lower than a madman, far; he was a raving idiot. He
would jump at times from his seat, mount on a chair, and play hideous
symphonies upon the window-pane to the accompaniment of his own voice;
once or twice, I am thankful to say, nature had its way, and he would
strike a warder violently between the eyes. When he dealt out this
measure, as once he did in my presence, to the servant whom I have
described as with me in the forest, who conveyed me to the asylum, and
there took service as a keeper--no doubt of personal affection to me--I
was, I confess, inwardly but intensely gratified.
This was the worst of my companions, certainly; but there were others
scarcely less uncanny. There was one poor old man, hopeless and harmless,
who wandered constantly from room to room, or up and down the long
dining-room, where it was the custom to herd some of us together,
murmuring to himself odds-and-ends which I presume to have been original,
snapping his fingers and making dreadful faces. His favourite burden was
this--which, in spite of all I can do to drive it away, has taken a firm
hold on my memory:
Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a louse;
Gibbs is a pig, and the pride of the house.
The second verse of the ditty running thus:
Gibbs is a beauty, and Gibbs is a bear;
Gibbs has no cap on the top of her hair.
This he would follow up by a delighted laugh over 'the Dowager Gibbs, the
Dowager Gibbs!' and add, in a tone of pointed regret, 'A woman without a
cap--it's indecent!' 'Miss Lloyd was a fine woman, a very fine woman,' was
another of his favourite meditations as he tramped ceaselessly up and
down. He had a younger friend in the house--he must himself have been well
over sixty--to whom I contracted an intense aversion; a poor fellow who
had a certain liberty about the place, and invested himself with imaginary
dignities, acting as postman and bringing our newspapers to our rooms in
the morning; superintending the work of the gardeners with an air of
personal responsibility, and always reeking of very bad tobacco, and
thrusting his confidences under one's nose accordingly. Among other duties
he was allowed to score at our daily cricket-matches in the summer; and
well do I remember how when I, weak of head and body, and with no business
out of bed, but having yet some cunning at the game, joined in it at this
evil place for the first time, I grew puzzled and angry at the astounding
arithmetical results of my innings--I could scarcely stand, and the
'attendants' bowled a fast round hand at my legs--and failed altogether to
appreciate the humour of the thing. I confess that, in the retrospect, I
fail to appreciate the especial form of humour now. The postman and marker
is dead too,--thank God for him again, and may the peace be with him that
man denied him here! He and the poor old man I spoke of were, as I said,
sworn friends; and their friendship showed itself in a series of hearty
slaps and kicks cheerfully administered by the younger performer, the two
apparently fancying themselves schoolboys, with the loud and sympathetic
applause of the warders. The elder had been a University man and a
scholar, and was still, at his better moments, full of odd scraps of talk
and knowledge, and, in his Shakespeare especially, rather deeply read. And
next friends and Commissioners and the law nursed his old age like this.
There are more things on earth, ye people of England who live at home at
ease, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. The less said, in this
connection, of the other place mentioned in that famous quotation, I think
the better. But nothing brings home the conviction of its reality so
strongly to those who have suffered, as the absolute necessity for some
other world; for some unerring court of appeal, before which the wrongs of
'the courts below' shall be signally and strangely righted.
The pudding-eater of my first evening, whom I introduced at the end of my
first chapter, proved one of the pleasant features of the place. I find
that I have written down the adjective seriously; let it stand. He was a
great sturdy North countryman, without a vestige of sense or connection in
his ideas, who was always occupied in imaginary architecture, discovering
at the corners of passages or in the middle of a field, or anywhere, the
most attractive sites for elaborate buildings, whose height and
proportions he would proceed to indicate. He was always laughing in the
heartiest and most infectious way; had a conscience and digestion
apparently alike without fault, and might be set down by an observer as
enjoying life without reserve under conditions which, I venture to think,
would have soured Mark Tapley. Everybody liked him and was pleasant with
him, as he was with everybody; and it is a matter for strange thought,
what could have brought so hard a visitation on so simple a soul. Is it
hard in such cases? Who can say? When I wrote in my first chapter that the
mad seemed happy enough, I suppose I was thinking of this man; for the
faces of most appear to me as I look back like a picture-gallery full of
varied expressions of human sorrow, and sorrow debarred from expressing
itself. I spoke once to a lawyer who was 'one of us,' who talked much to
himself in an undertone, and would sometimes answer a question with a
monosyllable, and asked him if he had been imprisoned long. 'Forty years,'
he said, and turned away. Forty years! The answer came upon me with a
shock no words can tell. I was feeling unusually well that day, or I
should not have mustered courage to speak to him. I was working out my
second sentence then, and knew where I was. And I did not believe in my
heart, for I knew something of the law's ways by that time, that earthly
power could free me. Nor did it, I think. I believed that I had forty
years of life in me. Was I, too, to live them out there, and so? How much
and how earnestly, if half unknowing, I prayed from my heart for death,
with that unconscious cry of the creature to the Creator which flies up in
spite of us in such straits as these, I do not know. I read the other day
of a poor fellow in a public asylum (which I believe to be better than
the 'private,' for the doctors have more the check of fear) who prayed
aloud for death under the warder's hands. How many tortured souls have so
prayed is written elsewhere, not here. From me the death that had been so
near was then receding, and I seemed to grasp vainly after it to woo it
back again. One day, led about the country roads weak and wretched, at a
warder's heels, for the morning's constitutional, to look right and left
of me for a deliverance that came not from the east or the west, to be
idly and curiously scanned by the passers-by, but looking restfully upon
every sane face that was not a keeper's,--I liked the mad faces better far
than theirs,--I threw myself once upon my knees in the middle of the
public road, with one silent heartfelt prayer--for what? For annihilation;
for every form of possible existence seemed then to me a curse. Mad
indeed, was it not? Nor need I say how mad I was then writ down. Yet it
was within a few weeks of that time that my prayer was answered, in spite
of myself almost, as I said before, and answered with life and freedom. Is
there any one, I wonder, amongst our men in power who will be shaken by
these words in the complacent selfishness of humanity, and be no longer
content to pass those who have so fallen among thieves by on the other
side?
The lawyer was not the patriarch of the place; for there were some aged
men who had lived their lives there. One old gentleman, known as 'Daddy,'
and a favourite butt with some of the younger warders--good-naturedly
enough, perhaps; but I often felt that I should like to knock them
down--was there, I believe, in the last century, and is not quite sure
what George is on the throne. I was told that he never spoke at all for
many years, until one day--he had never smoked in his life--he was by some
means persuaded into a pipe. From that time tobacco became his solace and
delight; for that he would ask anybody, and for that alone. His little
'screw' became an institution. The silent members of our corporation were
very numerous; whether they were silent always, or whether by degrees the
habit crept upon them in that fearful mockery of companionship, will not
be known here. I have said that for the first few days of my first
imprisonment--to take up again the thread of my personal story--I was too
ill and weak to observe or to care for anything. I think that I must have
been in bed for a few days, dying alone; but that I do not remember. After
that immediate danger had passed, I must have been one of the silent for
some time; for I well remember the expression of astonishment which came
over the faces of some of the warders in attendance when a letter was one
day brought to me in the common room which had forced the passage somehow,
and I answered to my name. The correspondence of the prisoners is
conducted under difficulties. All letters, written or received, pass
through the doctor's hands, whether opened or not I do not know; and those
that they write go through him, not to those to whom they are addressed,
but to the persons responsible for their imprisonment. There lies another
royal road to the discovery of truth. A fellow-prisoner, who became a
friend of mine in prison (it is the shortest and truest word to use), who
was as sane as I, but, happily for him, stronger in health, conquered this
difficulty by writing letters to every quarter whence he thought help
might come, and posting them by various contrivances in the country
villages when he took his walks and drives abroad. He won his freedom; and
the first use he made of it was to bestir himself to win me mine. Does
this read like 'England in the nineteenth century,' I wonder? Or need we
go to the Alfred Hardys and Mrs. Archbolds of Charles Reade to tell us
again that fiction is not so strange as truth? He imagined; I describe.
Which is the stronger?
When I first broke silence on this communication from the outer world--it
was from a club friend, I remember, giving me some account of old literary
and dramatic mates, who seemed to have passed into another sphere for
me--I was stupidly observing my surroundings from the depths of an old
armchair. The 'Dowager Gibbs' was shuffling and chanting up and down the
room; the patriarch was puffing at his screw; the man-monkey was howling
and gesticulating, and tearing up the 'Illustrated;' the postman was
grinding out indecencies, which haunt me, in a harsh strident voice; the
good fellow, who is safe in harbour now, was muttering a series of
prescriptions of potassium, bromides, and iodides, and other kindred
horrors (he had been an eminent man in his time, I heard, and had suddenly
broken down--how I hated the warders for their patronage of him!); the
lawyer was making notes in a red pocket-book, or stealing from a plate
surreptitious gingerbreads, of which he was very fond; and the whole
Witches' Sabbath was in full play. The keepers told off to watch us were
holding more consecutive, but not more edifying, conversation about horses
and bets and races, which appear to absorb their faculties much as they do
those of many higher minds, varying it with local gossip and bad language,
and much rough horse-play at our crazy expense. I wonder sometimes what
effect it might have had upon them, if it had dawned upon them that among
their unconscious charges there was a 'chiel amang them takin' notes,'
quite involuntary, but photographic in truth at least.
I should have had no place in that common room, I believe, except when I
wished it; for I was on the footing of a 'first-class patient,' and had a
private room of my own. Those who had not had no choice but to grow worse
year by year from the enforced companionship that I have written down. But
I was too ill to have wish or power of my own. I was absorbed for the time
in the servant I have more than once mentioned, who was my master, and
knew and rejoiced in it. He was soon tired of his duty, which was to keep
me 'company' (Heaven save the mark!) in my room, and preferred to transfer
me to the larger, where he might consort with his mates, and I with mine.
The chief doctor, when I was at my worst, came to see me once a day. And I
well remember the threats with which my 'attendant' would deter me, ill
and broken as I was, from complaining of the life I had to lead. If he had
known my illness and powerlessness to the full, he would have had no need
to do it, for I did not know what I had to tell. But well do I remember
how some words seemed to be struggling within me for utterance during the
five minutes allotted me, to which I vaguely looked forward with a sort of
daily hope of something; something which came not--justice, I fancy. I was
tongue-tied by misery and illness, and my 'servant' stood behind the door
while the doctor was with me. And so the days went by. Here I must ask my
readers to remember that my brain was very weak, and that, as far as these
warders are concerned, I am trying to disentangle the literal facts from
my memory as exactly as I may. They are supposed to be the qualified
nurses of the sick; they are men of the most ignorant class, without one
single qualification for that duty--discharged soldiers, sailors, footmen.
And they are the absolute masters of these asylums (of which I, remember,
inhabited what has been called the best), and of the lives and liberties
imprisoned there.