My first acquaintance with the warder whom I regarded--I do not very well
know why--as a sort of master-gaoler among his fellows, was made upon my
road to the asylum. I was escorted to London from the forest by my
adhesive body-servant, and by the young doctor whose charge I was leaving,
who had formally certified my insanity. As I have said, he told me when we
parted that he held the step taken to be wrong, and wished it to be
avoided. I was ill, he thought, and needed care. I fail to see, under
these circumstances, how he was justified in signing the certificate. He
was young, unskilled, a stranger to me but a week or two before, and I had
lived with his wife and family. Whether any pressure was put upon him I
do not know, and had rather not enquire. It is enough for my purpose
quietly to state that I am to this hour in the dark as to the details of
the business, and that I was consigned to a madhouse, against his will, on
the order of a doctor who did not believe me mad. Three authorities on
lunacy had stated but a short time before that I was in no danger of being
so. Nor was I--till the madhouse made the danger. Such is the law.
He escorted me to London, and we parted there. At the terminus the
confidential warder met us from the asylum, and took his place. The last I
saw of him was that, as he ran fast along the platform, he 'washed his
hands with invisible soap,' expressively, as of me and my concerns. He
guessed something of what he had done, I suppose, though I hope not all;
and thought that I was going forth into the outer darkness for evermore.
My companions were well fitted to conduct me there. The forbidding
personality of my special servant is still at times a presence in my
thoughts; and the other afterwards was to haunt me still more. He was a
rough, red-bearded, well-looking fellow enough--an old colonial
squatter--and, as I remember him, very sufficiently good-natured and
good-hearted. He was very fond of beer, and great at collecting shilling
novels from all quarters. When in the latter days of my imprisonment he
was told off to keep a special watch over me, I grew to shrink from and to
dread him, in my very weakness, like a whipped child. He was kindly, but
too big, and I was afraid of him. How many fears of the same sort must
harass and perplex all those darkened lives is another of the sealed
mysteries of the English Bastilles. I associated him so closely with my
first coming; I remembered with a vision at once so dim and clear how he
had curiously examined me from the opposite seat of the carriage as the
train sped on in the darkening winter evening, through what country I knew
not, to what destination I had no care to ask. When the doctor whom I had
left had hinted where I was to go, I had failed to understand him. Had he
told me in more direct words, I could not have believed in such a thing
being done; I could not have believed in its possibility, as on looking
back it baffles my understanding now. I have read many tales and many
histories which turn upon the abuse of _lettres de cachet_ in the famous
ante-Revolutionary days. Will anybody tell me the difference? It seems to
me that all that could be done by their means can be done 'under
certificates' here and now, and legally justified afterwards over and over
again. The Bastille itself could scarcely hold its prisoners more closely
than the 'establishment' wherein I lived; and scarcely harder could it
have been for any echo of complaint or suffering to reach the outer
world. Buried and forgotten we lay there, like dead men out of mind. Of
the farcical visits of inspection made by her Majesty's Commissioners I
shall have something presently to say. Their manner of discharging their
solemn duty is, to my mind, in the whole round of wrong the worst feature
of all.
Whilst I was being thus spirited away through the heart of London, with
scores of warm-hearted friends within unconscious hail who would have
raised a riot to save me if they had known anything of the truth, I knew
as little of the fate before me as the inconvenient kinsman on his road to
the old Bastille. Had I known, weak as I was, I should have resisted; and
with what result? What is the result to those who do righteously resist?
For there must be some who do. On my second apprehension, which I shall
describe in its place, I should have known. But I was drugged by
authority, as effectually and deliberately as ever was heroine of a
novel, and brought back to my prison from the North of England under the
influence of opium. More of this in time. Let me return to my first
journey. There were my warders winking and blinking; my private domestic
pouring into the ears of the other, who listened with the indifference of
a man accustomed to the ways of nameless beings like me, his own version
of my private history, and making grabs at me in the dark when we came to
a tunnel, to create a prejudice in my favour. I remember dimly wondering
what it was about, expecting the men to handcuff me, vaguely dreaming of
the charms of bed and of a 'home,' speculating somewhat why I had none. Of
that journey I remember little more, except eating savoury jelly at
Waterloo Station--so oddly do trifles impress one in the most critical
moments of life. The next turn of the kaleidoscope pictures me seated in
an armchair, just before the episode of the pudding-eater, I suppose,
interviewed by the ancient head of the asylum, who, having me there under
certificate from my family, had no opinion to pronounce on my mental
condition, but simply to accept me as a madman, worth a round sum a year
to him, and be thankful. But for a certain episode which I shall in due
course relate, I might not have found the man out. He was quite stupid,
and had so muddled his venerable brain with the contemplation--I will not
say the study--of insanity, that, after five minutes' conversation, any
two apothecaries from anywhere would have 'certificated' him at once. He
knew nothing on earth about me; saw me for the first time under conditions
not perhaps exactly favourable to an impartial judgment; and afterwards,
as I have before told, paid me occasional flying visits, which he spent
chiefly in nodding and winking at me in a knowing manner, and treating the
few words which fell from me as so many excellent jokes. He had heard
that I was theatrically given, and humoured my shattered intelligence by
taking every opportunity of telling me that he had once taken his
daughters to the Adelphi to see 'Martin Chuzzlewit' or 'Nicholas
Nickleby'--I forget which--followed invariably by a little anecdote of one
Grossmith, an old 'entertainer,' who was wont to imitate Charles Mathews
(whose loss we are regretting now) so well that when Mathews once met him
in the train and heard him talk he said, 'If you are not Mathews, you must
be Grossmith.' I think that was the story; but I grew rather addled over
it at last, and am not quite sure. Grossmith the younger, who has since
that time made for himself some name upon the stage, came twice from
London to 'entertain' us. An old stage-lander, I seldom remember feeling
so severely critical. 'Hyperæsthesia,' I think, is the medical alias for
the quickening of the nervous perceptions which so curiously accompanies,
and yet contrasts with, the odd sense of unreality with which
bloodlessness of brain invests everything. I listened to the performer's
humours like a man in a dream, with a bitter sense of unconscious revolt
as I recalled many happy evenings at the play, and went drearily to bed,
wondering more than usual how it was all to end. By an odd flicker of the
old flame, I remember feeling as if it were incumbent upon me to go
'behind the scenes' and present myself, but could not make up my mind to
it. What would the actor have thought had he come behind the scenes with
me that night, I wonder! Some months afterwards I was watching him from a
stage-box through the oddities of the 'Sorcerer,' and it brought back to
me with a shock the fearful place where I had seen him last, and made me
throw an involuntary look round me to see if any warder was on the watch.
The feelings of fear and shame--for it has in one's own despite a sort of
shame about it--that the experience left behind, died slow and hard. And a
chance association like this would curiously awake them.
But I am keeping my old doctor waiting. He looked and moved, and I dare
say tried to believe himself, the absolute incarnation of respectable
Benevolence. The frock-coat, dark suit, and white cravat in the initial
stage of strangulation, which are to so many people a sort of badge of a
doctor's degree in divinity, law, or medicine, and the hall-mark of a good
heart, carried out the illusion. He began to do good-natured things at
intervals; I suppose from a spasmodic sense that he might as well try to
cure a patient sometimes, instead of leaving them all entirely to the
salutary effects of association. He once proposed to go through a course
of Greek Testament readings with me, and we accomplished an entire
chapter, but dropped the cure at that point. My power of reading Greek at
sight appeared to impress him much, as by force of contrast with his
insane patients it well might. But it failed to incite him to further
efforts for my recovery and release. The Grossmith anecdote, to be taken
at intervals, was an easier prescription. Though he had taken very kindly,
however, to the work which he had accepted in life, he yet never gave me
the impression of being altogether 'undisturbed by conscientious qualms,'
and of having been able to silence the monitor which must have pleaded at
times so loudly within him. He was one of those men who never look one
straight in the face. And though he had constructed a little chapel in the
establishment, where services were held on Sunday evenings, he did not
attend those services himself. Perhaps he may have feared that prayers for
'prisoners and captives,' and the solemn appeals to Him 'who helpeth them
to right that suffer wrong,' might stick in his throat like Macbeth's
'Amen.' He was happier in his own little house, at some distance from the
asylum, where he lived, with none of the unfortunates under his immediate
eye. He pottered about among a large variety of baby greenhouses, which he
had constructed on patterns of his own, or made geological investigations
under his fields, where he had hit upon a vein of quartz--or pintz, or
something--of which great things were to come. Little quarries were
scattered all over the place, and much lunacy must have been necessary to
support them. He was a great inventor, the doctor, and was much distressed
by the evident want of mental power that I once showed by wandering
helplessly from the point when he was expounding to me a plan for some
stove which was to give heat without light, or light without heat, or both
or neither. I betrayed after a time an utter unconsciousness of what he
was saying, which I fear must have outweighed in the balance my mastery of
the Greek Testament. Human nature is a parlous thing. In moments even
more confidential he explained to me how he had been an inventor from his
youth, and how one of the greatest discoveries of Simpson of Edinburgh had
in fact been made by him, and by him confided to his ungrateful colleague.
I confess that, even in my sad condition of mental darkness, I ranked this
story with the class which at school we briefly summarised as 'little
anecdotes which ain't true.'
This acquaintance with my doctor and his ways was of a late date, when
kindly nature had given me enough of returning strength to be able to hold
my own in ordinary talk, with only occasional relapses into the
light-headedness which survived the first long delirium, when habit had
begun to dull the edge of my helpless fear, and robbed the hourly
associations of my life of something of their unspeakable horror. I was
then hopeless of escape, and had grown, I think, indifferent to it, as to
all who were supposed to care for me I had apparently become an object of
indifference. In the _morne désespoir_ which had utterly taken possession
of me, I knew of no one to whom to appeal. Only those who had consigned me
to the life could save me from it, and what was I to say to them? I was
ill when they did it; I was ill still. Why should they be anxious to
convict themselves of wrong, and of such wrong? And so in my misery I let
the days go by without wearing myself out still more by idle effort,
stupidly resigned
To drift on my path, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
The few visitors who fell to my lot had of course accepted their own
foregone conclusions about my condition, and every external appearance of
the place was comfortable to the view. Under the paternal care of such a
dear good old man, with such pretty scenes to look at, and such nice
gardens to walk about in, and an hotel-like sitting-room of my own, I was
obviously wicked if I was not very happy. Other visitors to that place
there were, who might have taken another view of things. Two friends of
mine, who had known me well in old days, came whilst I was there to see,
as it happened, other inmates of the asylum. Both knew that I was confined
there, and both desired to see me. One especially, who had his suspicions
in the matter, made, as I now know from himself, every effort to make his
way to me. But it was not permitted in either case, and I was given out as
'too ill' to see anybody. In the malady from which I was supposed to be
suffering, the sight of an old friend's face might well be thought one of
the best of possible prescriptions. I was not too ill. It was a lie. In
all the facts of this piece of autobiography, I know of none more damning.
The reports of my condition, and the changes of it, were to depend upon
the doctors who lived on us, and the ignorant warders who took their
first cue from them, and the three relatives who had taken upon
themselves the responsibility for my imprisonment.
My first impressions about the 'principal' were funny. As I have said, I
did not realise where I was. I did not know that I was in an asylum; I did
not understand what the curious people about me were; the only living soul
I knew in the place was the servant of whom I have spoken, whose presence
there was perhaps partially the reason for my failing to grasp the
situation. I had of course no ground for supposing that he was out of his
mind, or means for understanding why he should quarter himself in an
asylum. He assured me, I think, that where I went he would go, out of
personal devotion. But as he took the opportunity of enrolling himself
among the asylum-warders, and treated me with a curious brutality, happily
limited by inadequate physical means to carry out his views--I was myself
so wasted that a child might have maltreated me, and only a brute
would--I must have my doubts upon the matter. It was with a strange sense
of relief that one morn I missed him from the accustomed haunts, and
learned that he had departed for India in charge of the black gentleman,
who was translated _ad eundem_ elsewhere, I suppose, as some of us
occasionally were. It is a comfort to reflect that the black gentleman was
of a vigorous build, and capable of resenting impertinence. I hope that he
availed himself of his opportunity, as the man-monkey did, and employed
personal arguments. The fancies of my bewildered brain chased each other
like shadows. Sometimes I thought that this odious being was Judas
Iscariot (his surname remotely resembled the word 'Judas');
sometimes--when he had told me how fond he was of me, and I was trying to
dwell upon the pleasant fact--that he was a brother of mine who had died
in infancy, and come back to love me in the absence of anybody else.
Chance likenesses were enough to invest any of the weird faces round me
with a name and identity of my own making; and when at night thick-coming
dreams of the most vivid kind--through all of which, I am told, my sleep
seemed as placid as a child's--invested phantoms with such reality that I
was unable to separate mentally the visions of the night from those of the
day, the confusion of brain through which I lived may be imagined. I have
attempted to describe how, in their shocking lack of human
characteristics, some of my companions assumed for me the semblance of
animals. About my own identity I felt puzzled, and was a good deal
occupied in arguing out with myself who I might be, from various
insufficient data. The state is of course very common in delirium, and was
in my case very natural. A short time before, I had been the possessor of
home, family, name, and friends; and at the time when I needed all these
most, I suddenly found myself an unregarded cipher, a worn-out garment
cast aside, as unowned as 'Jo' at his crossing, and robbed of man's right
of freedom without the mockery of a trial, when imprisonment was a form of
cruelty which needs a new name. So completely was I forgotten, that when
at last I came to life again, it was to find a three years' arrear of
unopened letters piled up in my old chambers, for which no one during my
illness had even taken the trouble to inquire. They read to me then like
messages from another world. Some favourite pictures and my writer's
chair--the unambitious 'Law library' which I had once owned, and a set of
handsome and valued Harrow prizes, had vanished altogether, and 'nobody'
was to blame. It was the doing of a company, I suppose; but I had clearly
no business to reappear upon the scene. I did not like it, though.
Knowing myself in keep and hold, and not knowing why, it was natural that
I should invest the asylum with the attributes of a gaol. I have said that
I expected to be handcuffed in the train; and when on the first evening a
fierce-looking man rushed at me with a dark-blue ribbon, asked me what I
meant by not wearing one, and declared, with a sense of personal offence,
that I was 'not the least like my uncle,' I took him for the
master-gaoler, and mentally christened him, 'Rocco,' in the odd dramatic
vein which would run through my thoughts. This blue ribbon, worn in honour
of the University boat-race, and the fact that one of my first memories is
that I found a hot-cross bun placed by my bedside for breakfast, in
sympathetic honour of One who died to teach us love and mercy, are the two
things which enable me to fix with accuracy the date of my imprisonment as
about the Easter-tide, now nearly four years ago. The terrible probation
that followed seems to me now to have cut my life into two parts, as
completely as I am conscious to myself of its having changed my whole
character, and stamped and remoulded it in a new and other cast. Such
furnace-fires as these must do so. They make the common trials of our race
seem ludicrously small, and I find myself looking with a certain quaint
wonder at people who talk to me of their hard experiences of life. With
what a sense of gratitude I find myself unembittered--however justly and
strongly resentful, where other feelings would be out of place--regarding
my fellow-creatures from the pleasantest point of view, and the world
generally in the light of the laughing philosopher, I cannot say. Trials
are like pills. The taste depends upon how you take them.
I have been very frank with my readers about the strange fancies which
took possession of my brain. No one of them who has known what it is to
lie sick of a fever, or has ever seen others lying so, will be surprised
to read of them. But in a lunatic asylum these common signs of a common
illness are called 'delusions.' I was talking once, during my interval of
freedom, over the position in which I was placed, with one of the three
doctors who had vouched for my soundness of mind, who has justly won for
himself a great name among those who have in worthy earnest studied the
diseases of the brain, as far as it is given to man to study them. He
spoke to me of private asylums with shrinking and with dread; and in my
hypochondriac days had warned me as a friend of the dangers that might
await me. 'Travel,' he said; 'do anything rather than give way. If once
you find yourself in an asylum, Heaven help you!' And when I spoke to him
later of the things that had been said of me, 'I know that word
"delusions" too well,' said he, 'and the use that is made of it.' I did
not, then. But when, after my final deliverance, I found myself accused by
those who should have helped and shielded me in every way of being 'under
delusions' as to their conduct towards me, I learned to know. I discovered
this indirectly through others, and would not at first believe it. But it
is true, like the rest of the story, and like the rest of the story is so
set down. They say it everywhere, and they may be saying so still, and I
have long known that they did not scruple to say it. There let that part
of my subject end; for I sincerely trust that it lies outside of human
experience. But it is a possible consequence, remember, of this abuse of
law.
In the general state of confusion which, launched as I was into this very
novel state of existence, took possession of my faculties, and seemed
almost to supply a meaning and coherence to the old rhyme,
Supposing I was you,
And supposing you was me,
And supposing we all were somebody else,
I wonder who we'd be!
the _raison d'être_ of the old physician puzzled me exceedingly. Sometimes
I took him for a superior being in charge of the prison, sometimes for a
divine, sometimes for the Evil One, and sometimes for a butler. When
labouring under the last impression, I resented some question he thought
it his duty to ask me, and his attempt to bar my peaceful passage from one
room to another. I am afraid that I took him by the collar and put him
against the wall--perhaps, under the circumstances, a pardonable excess.
The assault was not dangerous. There was nobody living at that moment, I
think, who could not have knocked me down with his little finger. But from
that time I was regarded, and entered in the books, as 'homicidal.'