The Warlow Experiment

by Alix Nathan

  ‘I pride myself on the enlightened nature of the asylum. Indeed, Mr Powyss, we have that love of reason and scientific investigation in common, do we not? We are both men of the enlightenment.’

  Books, busts, shadowy portraits. Learned papers, impressive titles: Moral Management. Powyss recognises it all. The man sits before him, a smaller, unshakeable version of the self he once was.

  ‘Of course I shall show you round the house and gardens, though it would not be wise for you and Warlow to meet, so I shall not ask you to dine with us as, on a previous occasion, I asked Mrs Croft. She had a most enjoyable meal with us. Has she told you about it?’

  ‘A little.’ If only he were sitting in her kitchen with her now rather than here!

  ‘I see. However, I should like you to observe how Warlow behaves with others in a formal situation, so I suggest that you watch him during a meal. I have an excellent device, at present in our dining room: a screen in which I have had small eyeholes made, completely concealed by the intricate pattern painted on the outward side. It can be moved anywhere in the house, according to whom I wish to observe. I am extremely proud of this invention and intend to patent it.

  ‘Now, when you stand behind the screen you may be able to spy on Warlow and at the same time hear everything that is said with ease and without causing the least suspicion.’

  * * *

  —

  HE FINDS HIMSELF oddly unmoved by what he sees in Kinnersford House. Dr Grew secretes him into the dining room by the door through which the butler and footmen bring the dishes. Grew’s screen is a dramatic object, a piece of chinoiserie, painted with elaborate scenes of ladies with sunshades walking over bridges, past pagodas and waterfalls, of fishermen in pleasant boats. Birds and insects fly over these watery episodes and two perfectly placed holes have been drilled into the heads of a pair of storks, flying like spears through the sky. A second set of holes has been drilled lower down through a weeping tree. This is for Grew, who is short, when he himself wants to observe behaviour on other occasions, unseen, prior to writing up the results in a learned paper.

  Powyss watches Warlow, whose eating is rapid and voracious, and listens to the conversations that teeter on the edge of chaos. The food smells good and he shifts from foot to foot, hungry, bored, his back aching, exhausted by his interview with Grew. Forces himself not to cough. Warlow is quite transformed from the matted beast Powyss had last seen, and stares down at his plate the whole time, ceaselessly forking his food. Except once when he seems to lock eyes with Powyss during a pause in the mad talk. He looks up, stares at the screen for several seconds, grunts and then resumes eating. He can’t possibly have seen me, Powyss thinks, especially with those dark lenses.

  * * *

  —

  IT WERE! A thing did move. I did hear a sound. Breathin. I did hear breathin. Hear it. It were. It were. Yes, it were! Somebody!

  He stands in his room not moving. Thinking.

  I did hear. When nobody did talk. Behind the painted trees. Them panels all painted. Trees and birds and that. Gold and red, gold birds flyin in a black sky.

  It were him. Him. Listenin! Listenin. Weren’t that…? That were listenin afore. Where I did live in that place afore. Years afore. I did hear him listen. Did I? Then. Did I? Dark it were dark there. This place where I live’s not dark. But him’s listenin, him’s still listenin to me!

  Now? Be him listenin now? Here? He holds the oil lamp along the walls of his room, as once he did years ago. Feels the surface. All smooth, no holes. Up on a chair to the ceiling and down. Takes chair to the next bit. Up, down. Drags chair. Up. Down. Walls not like. Not like walls…He lies on his bed with his clothes on. Dreams he’s in a pit in the ground, him’s there leanin over the pit. Pokin him with a spade. A fork, a hoe.

  ‘I can hear everythin. I know everythin. You cannot get out, Warlow!’

  He grabs the end of the hoe, pulls, to pull him into the pit, I’ll kill him, kill him, I’ll kill him, but he wakes up. All a sweat. Cat jumps off the bed.

  Him!

  He were called…Called P…P…What’s he called? I can go there. I did go there. Did I? I did. I can. I knows the way.

  ‘Good night, John!’ Grew on his rounds.

  ‘Night, Mr Grew!’

  * * *

  —

  ‘THE WARLOWS’ cottage has been razed,’ Powyss says to Catherine.

  ‘The villagers pulled it down because of the murder. Kempton was angry at losing rent; he said someone else could have lived there.’

  ‘Maybe I should pull down Moreham House, too.’

  ‘I think you should not be hasty!’

  ‘I have watched you with George, Catherine. A strange, absent boy. You’re not his mother, yet you are kind. Patient.’

  ‘That’s easy. I borrowed Bewick’s Fables from your shelves. When I was a girl my teacher lent it to me. I love reading it with him.’

  ‘If I don’t pull down the house I’ll sell it and give the money away. To whom shall I give it, Catherine? What do you think?’ He is adrift. He might say anything.

  ‘I dare say there are good people who would use your money well. The house could become an orphanage maybe. But don’t be hasty. Let me help you think what’s best, Herbert.’

  He looks at her but doesn’t speak.

  Oh, he’ll try her patience quite as much as George does! But she’ll help him, for he is a poor, wrecked creature. Yet pity is not enough. It is a dead end, she thinks, does nothing but warm the pitier. If she could make that lopsided face smile at her!

  That there’s talk about them in the village only encourages her the more. Let them prattle about the mad Powyss who once took a labourer’s wife into his bed, and is now consoled by his housemaid. Let them prattle!

  They don’t know that the consolation is all in the form of words, kind gestures, of neatly hemmed shirts, eggs carefully collected, bread baked with fondness. Don’t know how often her thoughts turn to the man.

  * * *

  —

  CATHERINE IS RIGHT. It would be pointless to destroy Moreham House. Thinking of her, remembering how she exclaimed: ‘No one is punished forever, sir!’ he is cheered, his spirits lift. In a moment he knows that he no longer wants to live in the house, perhaps not in Moreham at all.

  He rides to Hereford. Puts the task to Streeter, his lawyer, to arrange the sale of the house and find somewhere else for him to live.

  ‘You will wish to reside in London, I don’t doubt, Mr Powyss?’

  ‘Certainly not. Somewhere the other side of Hereford. A much smaller place than Moreham.’

  ‘Moreham will sell eventually because of its timber, even if you have neglected to maintain coppicing, Mr Powyss, and despite the poor condition of the house. However, bankruptcies are rife. You have only to read the lists in the newspapers.’

  He stops at Picard’s, the instrument-maker, and buys a pocket telescope. He’ll give it to Catherine before he leaves, to help her with the Herschel Star Catalogue. It’s the first time he’s entered a shop, the first time he’s assessed an object for its mechanical and aesthetic qualities for years. The first time he’s ever bought a beautiful thing for someone other than himself.

  * * *

  —

  SHE IS SURPRISED, delighted by his smile as he hands her the telescope.

  ‘What is this that covers it?’ she asks, stroking the green and white.

  ‘It’s rayfish skin. Let me show you what to do.’ She fetches the Star Catalogue.

  ‘It is small enough for the children to use,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I thought of that.’

  ‘Thank you, Herbert.’ She holds his glance, but he has other things on his mind.

  ‘I saw Streeter, you know, the lawyer who supplied you with money while I was away. He has always handled the estate affairs. I have decided to
sell Moreham House and have instructed him.’

  ‘But this is hasty, Herbert.’

  ‘No, not really. Talking to you has made my mind clear.’

  She’d wanted to help him, not send him away!

  ‘Where will you go?’ She dreads to hear.

  ‘I have asked Streeter to find a smaller house somewhere outside Hereford.’

  ‘Oh Herbert, I shall miss you.’

  He looks at her. Is suddenly aware.

  Embarrassed, she adds: ‘I mean I shall miss your company. Even Tom will be puzzled.’

  ‘Yes. Ah yes.’

  She has wondered whether to warn him of the local gossip, to protect him. It would be better he hear it through her than through indirect hostility or direct impertinence.

  Yet if she does, it might propel him away more quickly, and the idea of a deeper friendship, if it has not occurred to him, might straightaway die. She has begun to yearn.

  ‘It may take months to sell the house, Catherine. Remember, the country has been at war for seven years. Streeter tells me it may not be easy.

  ‘In any case I am not yet ready to leave. There is one final thing I must do. The other day I remembered the afternoon the experiment began. I was ebullient. Just before he was locked in, I said to Warlow with a terrible cheerfulness: “Good luck, Warlow! We meet again in 1800.” Oh, I can hear my voice! And it is 1800 now.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s better that you do not meet him, Herbert. Why do so just because you said that, then? John Warlow is comfortable, reasonably well looked after. Leave him, Herbert.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, quite right about that. However, I want to know what he went through down there.’

  ‘Oh why? What is the need? Was it not enough to endure two winters on Yarston Hill?’

  ‘Not the same! On Yarston Hill there was daylight, I had the company of sheep and birds, and once in a while, Aaron and his dog. I was free to go home even though I did not do so. Warlow was locked in the dark and had nobody.’

  ‘But why do it yourself?’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘For how long will you stay there? Surely not for years? Shall I send you down delicious meals and wind up your chamber pot?’ She tries to joke him out of it.

  ‘Of course not for years, and you need do nothing, Catherine.’

  ‘How long, then?’

  ‘Give me a fortnight or so.’

  ‘Will you promise me that once it’s over, you will put everything behind you? Will think less and less about the past?’

  ‘You always speak good sense.’

  ‘Then promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  * * *

  —

  POWYSS’S MEMORY of the apartments is of how they were when he arranged them in 1793, when he enjoyed a week there himself, charmed by the organ and amused by the dumb waiter lift, pleased by the large number of books and papers he’d read without distraction. He knows nothing was done to the apartments after Warlow was lured out. Their condition will be bad.

  At first he can’t understand why so much broken wood lies at the bottom of the steps outside the door, imagines the invaders of the house destroyed the furniture when they found there were no racks of bottles.

  But of course: the barricade. Warlow had shut himself in. And Price, in order to get in and coax the man out, had dismantled it.

  In the main room, table and chairs have gone, mirror and paintings are shattered pools of glass. Two pieces of furniture remain. The wing chair by the fireplace extrudes stuffing, its frame, arms, bones. The chamber organ stands tall against the wall, one door off, the other askew, empty of pipes, its keyboard hanging down, for all like a dying man he’d once seen in a London street, brutally stabbed, his guts exposed. The terrible look of dismay on his face.

  The door to the lift has gone but the pulley seems intact: he could wind down some wood and kindling. He takes his lamp to the bedroom where nothing is broken, but the bedding smells as foul as anything he’s encountered. Sheep muck is sweet by comparison. Warlow must have lived in the bed for days at a time, succeeded since then by vermin, and now all is overlaid with the stench of mould, of rot.

  Upstairs he loads fuel, his own bedding into the shelves of the lift and for a second load, bread, milk and cold bacon to last some days. Catherine has made him a small plum cake. There are candles in his pockets and he takes down a blank journal and pencils.

  He makes up a fire. Tongs and poker are still there, unbroken, unbreakable. One large candlestick, one small one. He props up a two-legged table on a pile of rubble, places his blankets on the chair by the fire upon which he can both sit and sleep.

  What on earth went through Warlow’s mind when he lived amid destruction? Hatred: he must have hated me as I hated him. Regret, self-accusation, that he’d been foolish enough to take this on? Surely at first he may even have enjoyed the place? He was warm – warmer than he is now – had good food, clean bedding, clothes, books, organ. Oh, what point is there in listing it? The man was stuck, confined in this low space with no light: day and night merged into perpetual darkness.

  The clock is a heap of splinters. He’s left his watch upstairs. There is no possibility of measuring the time.

  He lays out his writing materials on the small, madly leaning table. When he first called on Catherine she’d given him letters that had arrived during his absence. He destroyed them all except one, from Fox, which he now finds among his things, unread.

  Dated months earlier, Fox, hearing something of Powyss’s troubles, had written that he understood why he’d not received a reply to his request to join Powyss in Moreham. After his own disaster, the trial, loss of house, money and friends, he was just at the point of despair, Powyss reads, when an old engraver offered him a room in his house in Walthamstow, where, well away from anyone he knew, Fox was earning his keep helping with the printing of trade cards and advertisements, theatre and lottery tickets.

  I frequently turn the star wheel of the printing press and amuse myself thinking of it as Fortune’s Wheel.

  Might they resume their correspondence, he asks. Promises Powyss that he’s not sold the new Flora Londinensis and hopes to give it to him before long.

  Powyss puts the letter to one side. He’ll deal with it later.

  He picks up his journal, should begin writing but is struck by the pointlessness of doing so. This is not an experiment. No one will read what he writes.

  He casts around for a book. Didn’t he once hear Warlow laughing at Voltaire? Oh, surely not! He must have been mistaken. And there aren’t any books now. Among heaps of broken glass and splintered wood on hacked boards are rips of pages from that terrible frenzy, shreds of paper as though for the nests of huge mice.

  But no, here’s something squeezed beneath the burst springs of the wing chair. One of Warlow’s journals, 1795, its binding scored by the springs and something else, Warlow’s talon-like nails.

  The pages are mostly blank or almost so:

  I   did eat

  and

  I hayt the  bat

  The man was not keeping up his diary, so important for the investigation. So, the experiment had already failed two years after it had begun.

  In the centre pages he finds wavering letters copied from Robinson Crusoe:

  THE

  LIFE

  AND STRANG   SUR PRIZIN  ADVENT URES

  OF

  JOHN

  WARLOW OF MOR HAM PLOW MAN

  Beneath this a stick man crossed out, but on the opposite page a face. A circle with eyes and nose and hair scrawled down both sides and over the whole of the lower half.

  The eyes look out at Powyss from the page. A disproportionate body holds a candle with a tiny flame.

  Except for the face,
the body, the candle, every bit of the page is scribbled over with black pencil. It must have taken time to create all that darkness. So much darkness.

  * * *

  —

  EATS A GOOD BREAKFAST. Sets out to the timber cutting along the avenue, to lop branches. Axed timber for Pulverbatch, didn’t he? After Christmas when them’d always drunk up them’s wages.

  Them shan’t see him go off. Him’s furthest away, down the road. Them’s gatherin or stackin, doin it all wrong, don’t know how. Thinks them’ll cut knots and knurls! Mad, them in this place.

  Strikes his short axe into a stump. ‘I do trust you with it, John Warlow,’ Grew did say. That place where he did live afore, no axe there. No knife. Were that so? No knife? Yes. No knife, no scissors. That’s it! He pats his pockets: bread, cheese, scissors. Changes his mind: tucks the axe into his belt beneath his coat.

  Wind is cold. Move on. Two coats, waistcoat, shirt, undershirt. Big gloves, hat, boots. Likes these clothes them gives him in this place.

  Now he’s goin to the other place. Where he was afore. Lived. His place it were. Going because of him. Him listenin. That’s it! Listenin and he never said.

  And fifty pound. Him never did give it me!

  Frost clings in cold hollows. Ground is hard. He wants to stop and eat, but the sky’s no longer clear, there’s no sun, no warmth. He bites as he walks, swallows down lumps, soon has hiccups which don’t stop.

  Two carts pass. Noise of wheels on frozen mud, carters shouting to each other hides the belching from within a clump of holly bushes.

  He’s a pain in his chest. Stone in his boot. He cheers himself, reminds himself. Him listenin, listenin, him, him, fifty pound, fifty pound. What did the other man say? What were it? ‘John,’ he did say, ‘Powyss…’ Ah! That were it! Powyss. Powyss were listenin! It were Powyss behind them panels. Damned Powyss. Spyin.

  He looks round; that him behind, spyin? Or in the wood? ‘John,’ he did say. ‘Powyss, he do…? Powyss, he do fuck…’ He hastens.