Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  “He has money,” I pointed out. “I’m not saying he’s not a good man, Jim, but he can afford to be liberal. Also, remember this: He’s just visiting. He won’t be here to suffer the consequences of his actions.”

  “What do you mean—?” Jim cried.

  “He’s returning to England, at the end of the month—”

  “And never coming back?”

  “He promises he is but can’t be sure when.”

  “But he only just got here!”

  “I know. I’ll miss him too.”

  So will the Negroes, though the uncomfortable fact is (as Mr. Scrubbs never tired of telling everybody as he packed) two weeks after Mr. Lewis’s

  arrival our production of sugar fell from thirty hogsheads per week to twenty-three. Now we’re at seventeen. Who knows how little Mr. Lewis’s kindnesses will have them producing if he stays longer?

  Human nature is more mysterious than all our intentions, isn’t it, Jamie? But I think that’s something you and I learned pretty well a long time ago.

  Your loving

  Margaret

  LAST TOUR

  Aside from precipitating what I shall call my nervous collapse, Matthews’ revelations had two effects I could immediately recognize. First, I now knew he must not be transferred with the rest to New Bethlem, that I must do everything in my power to resuscitate Crowther’s initiative and smooth his way to a new life in a private madhouse in the country. Second, he had warned me the truth would hobble me, and it did, far more even, I would say, than he intended, because all on my own I took it further, by convincing myself I wasn’t hobbled at all. To do this, I thought of Matthews’ story of treasonous intentions by dead politicians and of how he was right, it was less a story now likely to do anybody any good than the events of it, whatever they had been, to go on sowing darkness down the generations. When I thought of myself, it was first and foremost as one more victim of such-and-such former evil. But that’s what happens when you have too much invested. You say to yourself, This isn’t going to do anybody any good, when what you mean is, There’s nothing to be done. You say, The bastards, when you mean, It was never my fault. And yet at the same time, I knew that in the end it did come back to me. They could not have used me without what Matthews once called the insensibility of my own ambition. This was the deeper understanding of the matter that in order to get to they would first need to grasp the shallower. For me, meanwhile, the deeper remained a pull-back position, and I had not yet pulled back. Not yet.

  If this seems strange logic, it is. But it, along with what I construed as the catharsis of my collapse, must be why I approached my last time on the stand so strangely collected. Sometimes you’re dreading a public appearance, and then a crisis in another part of your life or some touch of illness (a megrim will do) provides merciful ballast, and lo and behold you sail through with ease. So too when you go in with the right kind of secrets, the overshadowing kind. They give you power, they make you a better actor. This was the sort of advantage I believed I would have on the stand. Even if the reason Matthews was in was not what this investigation was about, the fact was, I now knew enough from what the man himself had told me to know why he was in. They didn’t and never would. He thought he’d hobbled me. I thought I knew better.

  Matthews had slipped me my trumps on a Friday and Saturday. My last time to testify was on the Monday. On the Sunday between, at that hour when hardly a glow illuminates the eastern horizon, when the air can be almost clear, I made a gift to myself of a ramble round the periphery of my devastated dominion. It began with a stroll out the front door to the front gate, with a wide skirt of the slope of rubble now spreading across the courtyard from westward, the direction there was no longer any building at all.

  (The reason I was at Bethlem before dawn on a Sunday was I’d been sleeping on a cot in my office all month while we worked to move out the last of the male patients before the demolishers started on their rooms. I didn’t mind. Returning home at the end of a thirteen-hour day to a cold kettle on the hob and a piece of Mrs. Clark’s cake in a biscuit tin was become more loneliness than I could bear. All there was at home for me was sporadic letters from my son John, now a surgeon with the Navy in the North Sea, and though they arrived months apart, they were what I lived for.)

  The front gate was chained, but I came to it armed with rings of neatly labelled keys pressed upon me by our new porter, Mr. Hunnicut. Like Wallet and Forbes, Hunnicut is a clean, efficient representative of the modern age, but his finicking method of labelling the keys only confusing me, I needed to try them one by one, now and then pausing to crack my neck. That’s how I noticed how bereft the old gates seemed without Melancholy and Raving Madness sprawled a-top.

  Free at last, I set out on my ramble. To judge from the energy shown by the demolishers—English workingmen taking down the English Bastille—if I didn’t do it this morning, the next chance I had there’d be nothing visible above the wall but sky.

  My route took me first westward along the front wall toward Moorgate. At each of the open, barred panels, provided to give citizens complimentary views of lunatics being aired in the days when they didn’t just wander out unattended, I stopped to peer in at level nothing: a choppy terrain of bricks and splintered boards. What remained of the building was a good distance to my left, looking like a ship torn in half by its own weight on its plunge to the bottom. The half visible to me had landed upright on the ocean floor, its interior compartments rising in ragged terraces, all in shadow now that the sun (to confound the metaphor) was rising behind it. But if I concentrated, I could determine pretty well which roofless, ragged compartment had been which in that former reality.

  At ground level there jutted a row of tiny ceilingless compartments with doorways like notches in the wall that faced the lower gallery, now ceilingless too. These had been the rooms of the female patients. At the edge of the second-level terrace, by counting along, I determined the one that for three decades had served as home to Peg Nicholson. East of Peg’s room on that level, farther back, I could see half the upper central hall. From where I stood, it appeared one could take the main staircase from the hall outside my still-extant office and, were the barred door at the top of the west side not chained shut with padlocks that not even Mr. Hunnicut had keys for, step out onto what was now a rubble-strewed open balcony, to a prospect of the City and Westminster to rival—or so it looked from here—the one from the dome of St. Paul’s.

  It’s interesting to stand before a part-demolished building of any kind—not just a prison or madhouse—and look up at its drab-or garish-painted or -papered compartments exposed in cross-section to merciless daylight and know that the only way its residents could have tolerated such vile, cramped spaces was they were already dwelling deeper, inside the compartments of their own thoughts. And know that only the human animal, that is blessed and cursed with a brain strong enough to discover freedom in phantasms of hope, dream, and memory, can find comfort in such narrow miserable pens as most people in cities must spend the majority of their lives inside.

  I rounded the corner and continued south. No Bethlem to see from Moorgate: No building remained at that end, and if it did, no barred panels entertained pedestrians along there, only a tattered chaos of flyers and scrawled desecrations of a higher wall.

  At London Wall I turned east and started down the building along its rear side, or what remained of it. At my left hand, once I passed the corner entrance (unused since before my time), was the wall itself of London Wall, which, though in places the rag-stone has crumbled sufficiently to host shrubbery, still rises a good eight feet above the pavement, and being eight feet thick has had erected on top of it at the far side, beyond more bushes growing high-up there, another, tessellated wall, the Bethlem wall proper, and beyond that, across a narrow yard, would be the building itself, except that for half this walk you now saw nothing above the Bethlem wall but northern sky, the building gone, and you saw the Bethlem wall—I mean more than its
parti-glazed, stone-coped battlements—only if you walked at sufficient distance from the first to risk being trampled by a gig in the street.

  But once you came as far east as the part of the building still standing, there it was, hulking above you the same soot-blackened pile it always was. And yet though objects of human significance (a weathered blanket, a windmill on a stick, a dead bouquet, a glove with the thumb torn out) dangled from the window ledges; though you knew there were still men in there, because the jingling of their chains and their constant coughing had woke you early enough to get you out here before sunrise; and though you’d just passed the window of James Matthews, Emperor of the Universe, which you knew by the shape of its broken glazing and the cant of its shutter—despite all these signs of human habitation, the building emanated pure desolation. This was because public faith in it had been withdrawn months ago, for deposit at St. George’s Fields. Also, its former inhabitants, having lived so long inside, departed as its epitomes, and so carted off its existence as they went, leaving behind a gutted shell. But look! Here comes a medical officer of the place now, in final orbit before he follows the rest out, the last epitome of an institution that every single soul that ever knew it, whether in his right mind or out, would sooner had never existed at all.

  Now I’d come as far as opposite the convalescents’ airing grounds, or so we used to call them. A huddled rubbish-strewn pen without even a bench to sit on. After that I was opposite where the men’s airing grounds used to be before they tore down half the east wing along with my house and office, the infirmary, the Dead House, and laundry building. Again I could see the north sky, and my trip was shorter than it once would have been. I made the turn north then left into the Common Passage and so back to the gates.

  Another grapple with keys and locks, curse Hunnicut to Hell, and safe inside once more.

  OLD CORRUPTION

  Monday I suffered my last time on the stand.

  The one way I earned the esteem of just about every lunatic I met with in twenty years was the perfect discipline of myself. My assault on Matthews told me what Sarah used to: It was also how I distinguished myself from them. My intention Monday was to float up there the soul of equanimity, but though I could tell myself my collapse was a healing catharsis, it was also a sign of things to come. For soon as I opened my mouth in answer to a perfunctory and-what-are-your-duties-at-Bethlem-again? question, I could feel the clench in my jaw that told me the emotion ran too deep for containment even here.

  When the real questions started, no more than on my previous four excursions to the stand did any concern Matthews. But this was too much like readers presuming to know the diarist from his diary, and for me it was easy to go from anxiety about being asked anything about Matthews to outrage at being asked nothing. Now I think—as Jerdan had hinted and Matthews knew it would be—this was my own conscience at work. For though I communicated every outward sign of an amiable attitude, I self-destructingly neglected to provide the sentiments appropriate to it, characterizing Bryan Crowther, for example, as when not drunk so insane as to require a strait-waistcoat, which though true (and who doesn’t now and then need a little strait-waistcoat time? ha ha) must have sounded chilling when delivered as a casual comment on a nineteen-year-colleague just lowered into the ground. This impression of icy distance (though inside I was anything but cool) I confirmed by another, not-so-casual statement I made when asked what general agreement there existed among the Bethlem faculty as to the advantage of emetics in cases of insanity.

  Having already stated that I never believed in vomits but was obliged to administer them because Monro said I must (though he didn’t believe in them either but before this committee pretended he did), and heartily sick and tired of being made to appear negligent in matters I had no say in when I was the only one who ever did anything, and sick and tired too of a line of questioning designed to bugger me coming and going, for if I admitted I gave medicine then it must be to punish not cure, but if a patient wasn’t drenched in it then he must be sorely neglected, I replied as follows: “I confess, gentlemen, I am so much regulated by my own experience that I have not been disposed to listen to those who have less of it than myself.”

  This admission was no less true than my unfortunate characterization of Crowther in his last days, but the collective gawp it received gave me plenty of time to wonder what in God’s name I thought I was doing. Feebly I added, “I hope, gentlemen, you will excuse the appearance of vanity in that answer.”

  Would it were only vanity’s appearance.

  But at least this was their cue to ask me, finally, about Matthews.

  Their first question: “How often and for what periods was he shackled?”

  Matthews, I wearily acknowledged, was on his arrival handcuffed. Later, after a scuffle with a keeper, he was briefly legironed. In his case, I added, shackling was hardly the issue. Once it achieved its end—to curb his violence and break the pride that at first had him thinking he was too good to associate with other patients—he was so far from a violent patient as to be a positive peacemaker about the place, the one to whom all parties, whether employee or lunatic, made cases for redress.

  By this account, I was seen as attempting to draw a veil over my own cruelties. Why was he put in irons at all if he was innately peaceful?

  “While shackling a lunatic may at times be essential,” I patiently explained, “the committee must understand there is an absolute difference between that and severity of ordinary discipline in any hospital devoted to care of the mad.”

  This answer, whether they understood it or no, they didn’t much like.

  Several questions then addressed other aspects of Matthews’ treatment, such as the rumour he was not allowed the warmth of a fire during his enchainment, and that’s what accounted for the abscess in his back.

  To this I replied that someone’s facts must be amiss, for the abscess developed much later, probably as a result of Matthews’ constant stooping and digging in all weather in the plot of garden I allowed him. That this too failed to convince them was confirmed when they didn’t bother even to cross-examine. I then—too insolently, I fear—volunteered the reminder that no matter what anybody said, even at St. George’s Fields a certain amount of restraint would continue necessary, and if not restraint then depletory medicines and treatments of various kinds, at least until the day a cure for madness is found. But (just to rub it in) there was no reason whatsoever to assume restraint and depletion incompatible with every kindness and humanity. Meanwhile, my question for them was, “Why this condescension to him as an innocent, helpless, unwitting victim of an evil establishment when his journal has been your authoritative guide to the place for six weeks?”

  By their annoyed looks, they found this presuming. But it inspired one of them to ask how my Illustrations of Madness could be such a sympathetic account of Matthews’ delusions, when its purpose was to characterize him as a senseless lunatic. Why such loving care to so uncaring an end?

  I said I didn’t understand the question. I didn’t see my Illustrations as a loving account, only an honest and accurate one.

  “But surely, sir, one designed to defend the decision of the examining committee that he was wholly unfit to be released?”

  “No, I simply set forth his delusions and said the reader must exercise his own judgment of them.”

  Here Rose, chairman of the proceedings, a decent old man who knew the salient facts of Matthews’ case, spoke up. “Sir, you went further. In your book you explicitly defend the governors’ decision not to ‘liberate a mischievous lunatic to disturb the good order and peace of society.’ That’s your conclusion. Mr. Matthews’ illness has resulted in a dangerous loss of agency. I have your last page open in front of me.”

  I was sweating now. Could I really have said it so baldly? Could I really have forgot I had?

  “I was only defending the governors’ decision, your Honour, as it was my duty—”

  “Yes, yes, but what
did you yourself believe, Mr. Haslam?”

  “Privately, your Honour?”

  “If you wish. Or as apothecary to Bethlem Hospital, the place where you indicate you wrote your preface. I hope he holds the same view as yourself.”

  This was too close to home. My face was burning with an emotion lately familiar, and more than shame. “Sir, I believed then, and still believe, that Matthews is a lunatic. My purpose in writing the Illustrations was to publish an answer to those who, by claiming he was not, had cast aspersions upon Bethlem and the judgment of its governors and medical officers.”

  “To support, in other words, as you say here—” indicating my book—“the governors in having him kept. I don’t need to remind you, Mr. Haslam, the purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to seek the release of the one detained.”

  “The writ had already been rejected, your Honour. It was evident at the time there was no longer any chance of Matthews’ release.” Here I thanked God I’d earlier restrained myself from blurting to this committee the confusing circumstance of my late resolution to support Matthews’ transfer to a private madhouse. “My purpose in writing the Illustrations was to defend Bethlem against unfair charges by making the argument that a lunatic remains a lunatic whether he’s declared one or not.”

  “And this you sought to do by retailing the dangerous delusions of a madman.”

  “More laughable and pathetic, I would say, your Honour, than dangerous—”

  “Mr. Haslam, your superior, Dr. Monro, is on record as saying he’s heard Mr. Matthews utter too many threats against the royal family for him to say in conscience he should ever be at liberty. Does he still make these threats?”

  “When convinced he’s unacknowledged sovereign of the universe, he still makes them, your Honour, yes he does.”