The Asylum

by John Harwood

  Standing at the infirmary window, with the rain still falling steadily, I sought to coax my memory beyond those drab autumn days in my uncle’s shop. I could recall, vividly enough, feeling that another winter in Gresham’s Yard would be more than I could bear, and thinking that as soon as Aunt Vida’s estate was settled—it seemed to be taking Mr. Wetherell an unconscionably long time—I could draw out the two hundred pounds Mama had left me and travel abroad: in Rome, or Naples, it would at least be warm . . .

  Shivering, I returned to bed and tried to make up my mind about leaving, until Bella arrived with a knowing look and the news that, though it was only half past eight, “Mr. Mardent” would be pleased if I would join him for breakfast in the sitting room.

  He was pacing about the room when I arrived, looking even paler than he had the day before, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. But his face lit up when he saw me, and I felt my breathing quicken in response.

  “Miss Ferrars, I am delighted to see you looking so much better.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mordaunt. I slept extremely well. And you?”

  “Not so well, I’m afraid; I am—not one of the world’s great sleepers. But no matter.”

  There was a short silence while we settled ourselves by the fire.

  “Tell me, Miss Ferrars, have you decided?—about returning to London, I mean.”

  “I thought—perhaps by this afternoon’s train,” I replied, realising, as his face fell, that I was not at all sure it was what I wanted.

  “I’m afraid there is no afternoon train on a Sunday. It would have to be this morning at eleven, which would leave you very little time; and in such vile weather . . . Why not wait for Dr. Straker?”

  Rain spattered against the window; I thought of how bleak and cheerless Gresham’s Yard would seem on such a day—and all the fogbound, wintry days to follow. Of course, I could leave first thing tomorrow, but to depart only hours before Dr. Straker returned would seem even more pointed.

  “I should be very happy to wait for Dr. Straker,” I said, “if you would be kind enough to send another wire to my uncle, just to make sure that—that he knows I am here.”

  “I am sorry, Miss Ferrars, but that is impossible; the telegraph office is closed on Sundays. Of course, we could wire in the morning, but I doubt the reply would be here before Dr. Straker.”

  “Then I think I should . . .” Instinct prompted me to say “take the first train home tomorrow,” but Frederic had given me his word, and I was here as their guest, with Bella, seemingly, as my personal maid; they would have every right to be offended. But still the idea of waiting for Dr. Straker prompted a cold, clutching sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  “I shall stay until tomorrow,” I said at last. “As you say, the weather is too wet for travelling.”

  Frederic’s hands, which had been tightly clasped on his knees, relaxed, and his face brightened again. “It rained like this for a week before we lost our house,” I added by way of distraction, forgetting I had not mentioned the landslide. He looked suitably startled and begged me to continue. No one—except my mother—had ever listened so attentively, or for so long. Frederic scarcely spoke, beyond murmurs of sympathy or encouragement, and yet his attention never wavered. When I described my ordeal on the path that night, he shivered unconsciously; I found myself speaking more and more openly as I went on, even disclosing what I had meant to conceal, my misery at Gresham’s Yard, and my dread of another winter there.

  A small silence followed, in which we sat contemplating the remnants of a breakfast I scarcely remembered eating.

  “I wonder,” said Frederic tentatively, “if that—your unhappiness in London, I mean—might explain your presence here. You say that, in the last days you can recall, you were thinking of wintering abroad. Let us suppose that you actually did set out on a journey of some length; we don’t know when, or where, but you told your uncle not to expect you back until the new year, let us say.

  “And then—this is only my hypothesis, you understand—you suffered an accident, or a severe shock, lost your memory—all of it, I mean—and hence your luggage, though you must have retained some money. You outfitted yourself as best you could; perhaps in Plymouth, perhaps before you arrived there. Why you chose to call yourself Lucy Ashton we don’t know—a subliminal awareness, perhaps, that your mind had been badly shaken. It was at Plymouth, I suspect, that you consulted a physician, who in turn recommended you to us. The courage and determination you displayed so abundantly that night on the cliff brought you all the way here, but then the strain caught up with you, in the form of a seizure, which restored most, but not all, of your memory. As I think I mentioned yesterday, if the initial shock was—well, exceptionally frightening—that could explain why there is still a gap in your memory.

  “And, if I’m right, we can even account for the telegram Dr. Straker received from your uncle, who, you say, is very much absorbed in his business and—er—not the most observant of men. What he meant to convey was ‘Your patient can’t be Georgina Ferrars because she is travelling abroad’—assuming he knows nothing of the accident, or its aftermath—but to economise on words, as one does with telegrams, he put ‘Georgina Ferrars here,’ with the most unfortunate results. Of course, it is only a theory, but it seems at least plausible, does it not?”

  “It is more than plausible,” I said with a deep sigh of relief. “I am sure you are right. I have been thinking myself that the reason I went to Plymouth is because it is near Nettleford; if, as you say, I had lost all of my memory, instinct might still have drawn me to the place where I was born. Thank you, Fr—Mr. Mordaunt; that is such a relief to my mind.”

  Our eyes met; I was suddenly, acutely, conscious of his hand resting on the arm of his chair, only a foot away from mine. I lowered my gaze, but my awareness of his hand remained. My breathing faltered; blood rushed to my face. His fingers spread across the fabric, seeming to reach toward mine of their own volition.

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Frederic hastily withdrew his hand, even though it had not moved beyond the arm of his chair. I clasped my own hands in my lap and stared at them, willing my colour to subside and looking, I am sure, as guilty as if Bella had caught us in the most flagrant embrace, while she cleared away the dishes, pointedly averting her eyes. Frederic made some banal remark about the weather, to which I replied in kind, addressing myself to the fireplace. It seemed an age before Bella withdrew and I dared to glance in Frederic’s direction, only to catch him glancing at me, looking every bit as flushed and discomfited as I felt. He stirred uncomfortably in his chair, as if preparing to make his excuses and depart.

  “Tell me,” I said, casting around for a topic, “I realise I know nothing of what an asylum is really like—how you cure your patients, I mean.” The words had scarcely left my mouth before I remembered that his father had been confined and died here; but then, he had chosen to work as Dr. Straker’s assistant.

  “The truth is, Miss Ferrars, that for the most part we don’t cure our patients; all we can do is provide them with the conditions most favorable to recovery. Dr. Straker has come to believe that for the afflictions we commonly see in our voluntary patients—melancholia, nervous exhaustion, inanition, morbid anxiety, and the like—the conventional treatments are largely ineffective. He says that trying to relieve melancholia with mercury, or hydropathy, is like shooting blindfold at a target; if you fire often enough, you are bound to hit it sooner or later, but only by chance. Whereas clean air, kindness, nourishing food, exercise and occupation—and, above all, respite from the cares of everyday life—can only be conducive to healing.

  “What we practise here is a form of moral therapy: we encourage every patient to take responsibility for his or her own cure. In my own case, for example, when I feel a bout of melancholia coming on, I know that there is nothing I can do—nothing anyone can do—to forestall it. I can take a glass of wine to ease the oppression, but then I am tempted to take another glass, and anot
her; I can drug myself with opiates, but then I am fit for nothing. My only desire—in so far as I am capable of desiring anything—is to stay in bed and pull the blankets over my head, as I have done all too often, even though I know that it will only make things worse.”

  We had recovered our composure while he was speaking, and I ventured to ask him whether melancholia was like grief, only worse, or quite different.

  “It is different from grief because grief is a living emotion—to grieve, you must have loved—whereas melancholia is at once the worst pain imaginable—worse than any physical pain I have experienced—and the negation of feeling. It is like a leaden blanket of darkness—darkness and fear, because you are possessed by dread: a universal dread that clamps like a limpet onto every passing thought. In the depths of an attack, I wake each morning feeling as if I have committed a capital crime and been sentenced to hang. The overwhelming temptation is to seek oblivion, and at the worst, the thought of the ultimate oblivion is always with you.

  “But I also know, even in those depths—and this is where I am fortunate—that the darkness will pass, and that if I can drag myself out of bed, and face whatever the day requires of me, the oppression will diminish somewhat. And that, if you like, is the essence of moral therapy. I have Dr. Straker to remind me that I will be better if I get up, but only I can do it. He could drag me out of bed—which is what happens in less enlightened asylums—but I would not benefit in the slightest.”

  “How can you call yourself fortunate,” I asked, “when you endure such anguish?”

  “Because, for much of the time, I am free of it, whereas for some of our patients, the darkness never lifts. And because my father and grandfather were so much more grievously afflicted; I have been spared, thus far, from mania.”

  These last words had been accompanied by one of his expansive gestures, but then his expression changed; he looked suddenly stricken, and averted his eyes.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I did not mean to stir such painful memories.” It struck me as I spoke that he had very little but painful memories to draw upon.

  “It is not that,” he replied, “only . . . But you were asking me about cures. There are some conditions that can be cured: phobias, for example. Dr. Straker has had remarkable success with a technique he calls dramatic therapy, in which the patient is gradually brought face to face with the thing he fears most. We had a patient who was morbidly afraid of serpents. Dr. Straker began by bringing him into a room in which there was a stuffed cobra in a glass case, well away from the door. The man was gently encouraged to approach a little closer each time until he was able to stand right next to the case; then to watch Dr. Straker reach in and grasp the snake, and finally to handle it himself.

  “For the next stage of the cure, Dr. Straker replaced the stuffed cobra with a live one, whose fangs had been drawn, and repeated the sequence—which took a good deal longer—until the man was able to handle a living serpent without any sign of fear, and even to acknowledge that the creature had a certain beauty about it.

  “He—Dr. Straker—has had equally good results with several other phobias, and so he naturally wondered if the technique might be extended to more serious cases. A couple of years ago we had a patient who was firmly convinced that he had heard the voice of God commanding him to assassinate Mr. Gladstone; I remember Dr. Straker saying that many perfectly sane men might be tempted to do likewise, without divine instruction. He was actually arrested on his way to the Houses of Parliament with a pistol in his pocket, but because his family were wealthy, he ended up here rather than in Bedlam. Dr. Straker wanted to see if he could cure a patient of monomania by allowing him to act out his obsession under controlled conditions—like drawing fluid off the brain, or lancing a boil—and this man, whose name, appropriately enough, was Isaiah Gadd, seemed an ideal subject for the experiment.

  “Dr. Straker began by getting the attendants to say to one another, within the man’s hearing, that Mr. Gladstone would shortly be visiting Tregannon House. Gadd was in a locked ward, but he wasn’t closely confined; on any subject other than Gladstone he seemed quiet and sensible. He sat and read his Bible, did what he was told without argument, was polite to his fellow patients, and seemed to understand perfectly well why he was confined. And as you might expect, he was greatly agitated by the news of Gladstone’s visit.

  “As it happened, we had an elderly attendant who looked remarkably like the great man; I am sure he cultivated the likeness. Dr. Straker said that if we hadn’t found anyone on the staff, he’d have engaged an actor. On the morning of the supposed visit, Gadd was told that we were moving him to another wing, where he would be locked up until Mr. Gladstone had left.

  “He was taken to a cell on a badly lit corridor in the old wing, got up to look like a Hogarth engraving: a bare stone floor, with an iron door and vertical iron bars, far enough apart to get your arm through, right along the front. Dr. Straker and I were in the room opposite, with the door standing open and the light arranged so that we could see Gadd, but he couldn’t see us.

  “He was left alone for an hour, growing more and more agitated, pacing up and down like a wild animal. Then a couple of attendants came running down the corridor, shouting that Mr. Gladstone would be coming this way, and to be sure to bring the guards up first.

  “By this stage, Gadd was in a state of uncontrollable excitement, clutching the bars with his face pressed against them. Then a man in a warder’s uniform, with a pistol stuffed into his belt, came up and stationed himself right outside Gadd’s cage, as it effectively was.

  “Gadd’s eyes fell on that pistol, and he grew very still; you could see his mind racing. Very slowly, he let his hands fall to his sides and edged along until he was just to the left of the guard, who was standing rigidly to attention, looking straight ahead of him. There was a tramping of feet; two more warders marched past, and then Gladstone appeared. My heart was thumping wildly; in that electric atmosphere, anyone would have sworn he was the Prime Minister.

  “It went off like clockwork. Gladstone paused in front of the cell; Gadd reached through the bars, seized the pistol, and shot him through the heart. Even though I knew it was a trick, I cried out in horror when Gladstone clapped a hand to his chest and it came away drenched in what looked like blood. Gladstone sank to the ground and gave a most convincing death-rattle; Gadd dropped the pistol at the warder’s feet and cried in a loud voice, ‘Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.’

  “Dr. Straker had hoped that Gadd would be overwhelmed by horror at his bloody deed and shocked back into sanity by the realisation that his delusion had made a murderer of him. Gadd would be left to steep in his own remorse (under covert watch to make sure he didn’t attempt suicide) until Dr. Straker judged the time was right to tell him that Gladstone had survived the attack. That, with luck, would prompt an equal and opposite reaction of relief—‘I am not a murderer after all’—and then, if Gadd showed no sign of a relapse, another visit from ‘Gladstone’ would be arranged to test him. Last of all, Gadd would be told that the whole thing had been staged for his benefit, and if all went well, he would be discharged as cured.

  “But when Dr. Straker went into his cell that evening, and taxed him with murdering the Prime Minister and bringing disgrace upon the asylum, Gadd replied that he was very sorry for Mr. Gladstone’s family, and for all the trouble he had caused, but the Lord had commanded, and he had obeyed, and he would go to the gallows with a clear conscience, knowing that his reward awaited him in heaven. Dr. Straker left him to stew in solitude for a few days but found him quite unchanged. When Gadd was told that Gladstone had survived the bullet, he replied calmly, ‘It seems my task is not complete; I must await another opportunity.’ He’s still here, in one of the closed wards; spends a lot of his time painting. His watercolours—they’re mostly of flowers—are very fine. I suppose if Gladstone dies before him, he may be released one day.”

  “Dr. Straker must have been very d
isappointed,” I said.

  “Well no, not at all; he wrote an account of it for a learned journal. He often says that negative results can be just as useful as positive.”

  “Has he tried such an experiment again?”

  “Not that I know of; he doesn’t always tell me what he is working on. He has a private workroom in the old chapel, which he calls the temple of science: no one else is allowed there. His interests are extraordinarily diverse; he has made studies of everything from grafting fruit trees—not only to improve the fruit, but to see how many different varieties will thrive on a single tree—to the mathematics of gambling. At present, he is engaged in electrical research, though I have no idea where it is leading. A couple of years ago he visited Cragside—Lord Armstrong’s estate in Northumberland—to see the hydraulic dynamo there, and he immediately commissioned one for us. It is powered by the stream that runs down from Siblyback Water; he says that one day the whole estate will be lit by electric lamps.

  “And yet with all this, and a vast establishment to run, he still has time for individual patients—like the man who was terrified of snakes—even the hopeless cases. There was one, only last year . . . but I ought not say more . . .”

  “Do his family live here as well?” I asked.

  “He has no family, Miss Ferrars; he is a bachelor, like my uncle, and lives only for his work.”

  At the mention of his uncle, a shadow crossed his face. Outside, the rain was still falling. He rose, added more coals to the fire, and made a show of consulting his watch.

  “I am sorry, Miss Ferrars, but I have duties to attend to. Might I join you again for luncheon, in an hour or so?”

  “I should like that very much.”

  “Then I shall return as soon as I can.” He smiled, but his eyes were still troubled, and I feared I had driven him away.

  He seemed, however, entirely recovered when he returned an hour later. “I have said quite enough about myself,” he insisted, “and I want to hear more about you, and your childhood at Niton.” My childhood seemed so commonplace and uneventful compared to his, but I sensed that our quiet domestic life was for him a vision of paradise. I told him about the mirror, and my fascination with Rosina, and its aftermath on the cliff, which led somehow to religion, and how Aunt Vida and Mr. Allardyce used to argue. My aunt was a declared agnostic, but I felt that they were essentially on the same side. Mr. Allardyce used to say that faith couldn’t be commanded; so long as you acted as if you believed, all would be well. They were both contemptuous of spiritualism: when I expressed curiosity about it, my aunt suggested with a perfectly straight face that we try a method of spelling out messages with a glass and a circle of cut-out letters, and the glass spelled out “Spiritualism is bunkum.”