Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  I gathered from the others that previously there had been spare capacity and empty beds in the asylum. Recently, they were cramming beds in everywhere—in one of the dormitories, you could see ceiling decorations indicating it had once been a billiards room. In other wards, the beds had been moved closer together to accommodate ever-larger numbers.

  Naturally, after what Ryan had told me, I kept my ears open for any indication of what was producing this influx of mentally afflicted patients. Among the attendants, the increase was variously put down to a desire for greater profits by the board, and to a shift in changes in the municipal boundaries of the boroughs of Lambeth and Croydon. Those who had been there longer said that it was because of the war: admissions had dropped to practically nothing from ‘14 to ‘18, but after that, they had rebounded sharply, as though people had been putting off going mad until after the war. Since then, the numbers had been steadily on the increase. Many of the new admissions were cases of shell shock, which had not come about until years after men had returned from the front.

  The doctors did not express any very definite views. From what I gleaned from the journals left lying around their common room, there was a multitude of clashing schools of thought. Some thought that it was the manifestation of a degeneracy in Britain, that our mental well-being had been corroded by decadence and the influx of poor racial stock, and that if we looked hard enough, the inmates would all be found to be the result of poor breeding some generations back. They did not blame the Jews in so many words, but that was the import.

  Others blamed the influence of modernism, a term which I confess I was driven to look up because it was thrown around so freely without the slightest explanation. Modernism, it seems, is a movement in the arts, which started around the year 1900. It abandons traditional values and techniques, and instead places importance on individual experience and revels in nihilism and absurdity, placing no value on traditional morals or religion. Modernism destroys the moral fibre of those exposed to it.

  That hardly seemed plausible. I supposed that some of the inmates might have been exposed to the works of Picasso or Stravinsky or T.S. Eliot, as there is little accounting for taste, but it could not be a significant fraction. Other commentators argued, more cogently to my mind, that modernism was more of a symptom of the madness of modern life rather than a cause of it.

  The diversity of patients, both in their backgrounds and their symptoms, did not seem to support the idea of a common cause. If there was an infectious agent, a Typhoid Mary of madness, it was well hidden. Certainly, Beltov’s brain dissections had yielded little. And Ryan’s tiger lay concealed in the undergrowth.

  “The whole world is going mad,” was Donnelly’s straightforward conclusion. “They’ll have to build another wing.”

  The officiating cleric was a vicar from Dulwich in a dog collar so bright it was almost luminous. Some vicars liked to pretend that they were like any other man, and others liked to pretend that they were not. This vicar had settled into the role so that it completely enveloped him. He was probably every bit a vicar in the evenings with his wife, peppering his table talk with fragments of gospel.

  It was a full house for Sunday service in the main hall. There was no other entertainment to be had, and any novelty was very welcome. The vicar spoke to Dr Beltov with the slight condescension of one talking to a foreigner.

  “My words today come from a greater pen than mine,” he said to reassure the doctor. “I’m abridging a sermon from Mr Spurgeon.”

  Even Beltov had heard of Charles Spurgeon; you could hardly avoid it, given the presence of Spurgeon’s College down the road. He was one of the top preachers in the country back in the Sixties, and his sermons still came around regular as clockwork. Not that they were really to my taste.

  I have never been a great one for church services. I’m sure it does you good, and there is always something fine about belting out hymns, but the sermons are too long for my liking. The only time I ever thought I might actually want to go to a service was after I received a letter from an American boxer, a coloured gentleman.

  My manager had been in correspondence with his, on the grounds of the similarities in the monikers under which we were promoted—I was the “Norwood Titan,” and so was he, hailing as he did from the town of Norwood in the state of Massachusetts. As both of us seemed likely to break into the international scene, there was some issue over which of us had prior claim to the title. My idea was that we might settle it with a fight. My manager thought that was far-fetched.

  However, the correspondence was terminated when my American counterpart declared that he was leaving competitive boxing. He wrote to me personally to explain that he had a higher calling.

  “When the Lord wants you, that’s a fight you cannot win!” he wrote in a bold, flowing hand, very free with his capital letters and exclamation marks. “You can duck and dodge, but He sees every move before you make it. You think you’re Strong, but your punch is less than a feather-tap, you may be a Heavyweight to Men, but He is a Mountainweight! His jabs are faster than the Lightning, his crosses are Thunderbolts, and his Right Hand is a Landslide. He is Champion of Champions, and the match is over before the opening bell. You cannot resist. Your arm’s too short to box with God!”

  I wished him luck in his new career. I would dearly love to have been in a revival tent to see him waving his fists and stirring up the crowd with tales of his bouts with Satan. The Church of England is an important institution, but for verve and character, and a sheer ability to keep people awake in their pews, I felt the former Norwood Titan could do better than any of them.

  At Beltov’s insistence, half a dozen attendants had been turned out, and we lined the walls as though we were ushers. Beltov stood by me, arms folded, as the vicar moved to the front, escorted by Miller—an unlikely, gap-toothed choirboy—and cleared his throat.

  “We do not now feel the hand of God as once we did,” said the vicar. “Even a century ago, we were aware of Divine Providence, that special ordering of matters which reveals His intention in the world. I have day-books left by my predecessors, in which they recorded diligently every occasion when a man was saved by seeming luck, or when what appeared to be mischance proved to have a purpose. In the twentieth century, we have become blind even to providence. But every apparent misfortune has a purpose, as Scripture tells us. My text is taken from the Book of Job.”

  The vicar might have had conviction and certainly seemed to believe everything he said, but he lacked fire. I also wondered at his choice of text. The story, with which you are no doubt acquainted, is of a pious and successful man on whom God piles all sorts of suffering. It is not a cheerful tale.

  Rows of men in blue uniforms waited dully. Some mumbled to themselves, keeping up a commentary on something invisible to the rest of us. Some watched the vicar with the patient look they gave to raindrops running down the window. Like the raindrops, his words would pass without leaving a trace.

  “The path of sorrow has been trod by thousands of holy feet,” the vicar assured us. “You are not the first one to sit down and say, ‘I am the man that has seen affliction.’ You were not the first tried one, you are not the only one, and you will not be the last one. ‘Many are the afflictions of the righteous.’ So let this be some comfort to you—that you are one of the Lord’s suffering children, one of those who have to pass through rough roads and fiery places in the course of their pilgrimage to heaven.”

  There were a few nods and grunts of approval. This alerted the less attentive members of the audience that something worth listening to was being said. Heads turned, and eyes opened. It was shrewd to turn the misfortune of the inmates to the vicar’s advantage. While the superintendent might think that the place was a sanctuary, it bore more of the aspect of a prison, in which the occupants were unable to understand the crimes of which they had been convicted.

  The vicar, gaining strength, spun a potted version of Job’s sorry tale. God gave Satan licence to tortur
e poor Job to try his faith, and the Evil One had permission to do everything short of killing the man. Job’s goods were all stolen by bandits, and his sons and daughters were killed, before Job himself wound up a beggar covered in painful sores.

  This earned him sympathetic murmurs from the audience, each of whom had experienced a fall which was, to him, no less precipitous.

  “Interesting that God requires Satan to do his dirty work,” remarked Beltov in an undertone. “One might suspect that God did it himself, but wearing a different mask, one with horns.”

  Nevertheless, Job held on to his faith and refused to complain to God, or to kill himself. Job’s friends assured him that his divine punishment must have been the result of some misdeed, for which he needed to atone. They accused him of being a hypocrite, of having committed all sorts of concealed crimes. But Job—like the inmates of the asylum—was completely innocent.

  “And even now, some people think you must be a bad man because you have come down in the world.” The vicar’s gaze travelled from left to right and back. “It cannot be that you are the respectable person they thought you were, or you would not have lost your estate.”

  That much was true, and there was more nodding and agreement from the crowd. Everyone there had been abandoned by their friends and family, and their presence in the asylum was the consequence. If they had even one friend who could help them, they would not be so incarcerated.

  When I caught up with him again, the vicar was saying that it was necessary for some trials that God should withdraw the light of His countenance. For a bit, I was not sure if he was talking about Job or Jesus, as he certainly referred to the Saviour as one who had suffered, like Job, by God’s will.

  Having reached a low point, the vicar sought to elevate the audience. He began to speak in a tone of encouragement, as though telling a child about the wonders of Christmas. “Now, lastly, I want to speak concerning the tried believer’s consolation,” he said. “It is a very sweet consolation. ‘When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.’ No gold is ever injured in the fire.” His voice rose, getting ever louder as he worked up to the climax of his speech. “Stoke the furnace as much as you may, let the blast be as strong as you will—pile on more fuel, let another blast torment the coals till they become most vehement with heat—yet the gold is losing nothing. There is not a single particle of it that can be burnt. It is still there, all the better for the fiery trial!”

  He paused to gulp a breath then went on, growing even louder. “Corruption, earth, and worms shall but refine this flesh, ‘til my triumphant spirit comes to put it on afresh!”

  And with that promise of revival, or resurrection, or that perhaps, as Job did, they would have their property restored to them, the vicar came to a close. There was a scattering of applause, cheers, and shouted approval. They had been roused but did not know how to express themselves. Hooper stood on his chair to address the audience. Beltov nudged me, but I was already in motion.

  “Though I give all my goods to the poor, and my body to be burned, without madness it profiteth me nothing,” Hooper proclaimed.

  Before he could get out another word, I had picked him up bodily and turned him horizontal, a move so sudden that he stopped speaking. Vanstone and Miller were holding down an inmate on the other side of the room, and there was another disturbance at the back, with Donnelly separating two patients.

  “Peace,” said the vicar, holding up his hand in a sign of blessing, as though his word would miraculously calm the audience. He had little experience working with mental patients.

  I carefully placed Hooper down against the wall. “Hold your water,” I told him.

  He belched and blinked, but the urge to preach had left him. He had lost his thread. “Peace,” he said, holding his hand in blessing.

  “What about the great serpent?” someone was shouting noisily, but he shut up when he saw me headed his way.

  The individual conflagrations were extinguished before they could spread, and the rest of the hall was not engulfed. The vicar had taken up an accordion, and started up with “All things bright and beautiful.” Perhaps music did have charms to soothe the savage breast, because by the end of the first verse, the audience were all singing along, and all the threat of a major disturbance was gone.

  It was a lesson to me. The inmates were a placid bunch, torpid even, but they could catch fire, and the fire could spread. When they were gathered together in a body, they were only one sermon away from a riot.

  Afterwards, I saw the vicar beaming and shaking hands with Beltov. From his perspective, the service had been a success. You could already see him working out how he was going to mention it in his next sermon. He could reap credit for coming to the asylum, and no doubt he would either depict the inmates as suffering the inevitable wages of sin, or he could issue a warning, like Job, for his parishioners not to get too high and mighty. I do not think he saw them as individuals who had been unlucky, and the vicar was careful to keep attendants between himself and the Lord’s suffering children.

  “I hope you found the sermon illuminating,” he told Beltov.

  “It shed valuable light on the psychopathology of Jehovah,” said the doctor.

  Chapter Five: The Phantom of the Cinema

  There was a note waiting for me at my lodgings, delivered by hand. “From your friend,” said my landlady, with a significant look. I did not need to ask which friend she meant. “She looked worried. I do hope it’s nothing serious.”

  She was fishing for information, and I did not reward her with so much as a word, however hungry she was for gossip. My relations with Sally were a private matter and most definitely not for the ears of anyone who was going to spread them around Norwood in every shop she visited in her weekly round.

  You could have called Sally my fiancée, but that would be presumptive. There was no formal agreement between us, just an unspoken understanding. I had certainly never made her an offer. Her personal situation—widowed, with a stain on her character from a time spent on the streets and a young son who had been placed with her sister—made it convenient for her to find a respectable husband who could provide for her. She had formed an attachment to me.

  Until not long before, I had never entertained the idea there could be anything between us, although I could hardly fail to be aware that she had taken a shine to me. Matters took an unexpected turn when, for reasons related to a case, I was obliged to take her home for lunch one Sunday. To my surprise—which in hindsight was not warranted—my parents warmed to her at once, and she to them. Afterwards, Ma spoke of Sally approvingly; of course, she knew only that Sally now worked at the pickle factory and had assisted me with some cases. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t see my parents without being asked about Sally, and there was an expectation hovering around her name.

  My mode of life was hardly conducive to the married state. More importantly, my mother would be shaken to the core if she ever found out about Sally’s past. It is a small world, and people know people. If my connection with Sally became an established fact, there was sure to be someone who knew of her previous existence, and it was a piece of gossip too juicy to miss. Sooner or later, word would get back to Ma, dropping from the lips of someone pretending to be a friend.

  “Sally? Not the Sally who used to bleach her hair, one of those girls hanging around the pub…?”

  Sally had repented her earlier life and been washed clean. Christian charity required us to accept repentant sinners and not hold their past against them. Except I didn’t know how often it worked that way in practice. To some people, Sally would always be dyed deep scarlet that would not wash off like hair colour.

  Equally troubling was the thought of what I might do if some man taunted me with the claim that he’d had her behind the pub for a shilling. I had grown resistant to most gibes, but that would be a hard one to bear.

  The ball was in my court, but I was not inclined to play it. I preferred to keep things on an unoffi
cial basis.

  So, for the time being, I was allowing things to take their course, willing to see how things turned out. Sally might lose interest, or latch on to another man; or some means might arise to make the thing feasible. I was not sure which of these alternatives I would find preferable.

  Sally and I continued to see each other, going to the pictures and walking out in the evenings. Very pleasant evenings they were, too. We had a surprising number of shared interests and passed the time pleasantly together. We went to the pictures and to musical soirees at the Crystal Palace. There was a Saturday afternoon picking raspberries in Musto’s Field, and afterwards Carnival Night at the Croydon Hippodrome, where we drank fizzy wine, wore paper masks, and danced, laughed and laughed about nothing that I can remember.

  I even met her little boy one Sunday morning. He was living with his aunt and uncle, but Sally was allowed to see him sometimes, and we went walking in Dulwich Park. He was a small, shy boy of four years, who clung to her side.

  I squatted down to his height and produced a bag of toffees.

  He shook his head emphatically. “Auntie says I’m not allowed.”

  I looked to the left as though checking to see if we were observed, then looked to the right. I popped a toffee in my mouth and proffered the bag again. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” I said.

  He snatched a sweet and disappeared behind Sally’s skirts. Later on, I stopped to point out an aircraft droning lazily by, a passenger flight. What a spectacular view they must have from up there, with all of England spread below them. He looked up in wonder, and I felt absurdly proud for having noticed it.

  The boy accepted another toffee as a parting gift, with a mumbled “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “He likes you,” she said afterwards. “He asked if you can teach him to box.”