“Even if the individual shell-burst is not that powerful, perhaps it is the cumulative impact of many of them,” said Easton.
I coughed awkwardly. Beltov smiled and nodded for me to go on.
“Begging your pardon, Dr Easton,” I said, “but I have some small personal experience of blows to the head, as well as cases of shell shock. I’ve seen men get hit in the head far more than is good for them, without suffering mental problems. I’ve also seen shell shock in men not exposed to artillery, who have only been shot at by prolonged machine-gun fire.”
“Mr Stubbs has the makings of a clinician,” said Dr Beltov. “He presents cases which destroy your hypothesis from both sides! Perhaps this ‘shell shock’ of yours is nothing at all to do with impact, as I was suggesting.”
Easton blew his cheeks out to express that there was no point in arguing with anyone who chose to deny such obvious facts and who has no knowledge of medicine. I bowed to them, embarrassed in case I should be called on to make further comments, and moved away.
“Railway spine, caused by impact, is an established condition in British medical literature,” said Easton. “I can’t help feeling that anyone who looks at the clinical notes will wonder how we can be so obtuse as to not connect cause and effect. Perhaps a provisional diagnosis…”
“Not simply for the sake of respectability,” said Beltov. “You want Ross’s case to be classified as shell shock because that will make him one of the blesse de guerre, a hero of the war. I will not allow this without your presenting concrete evidence. No supposition and inference.”
That was typical Beltov. He was always playing devil’s advocate and shooting down the diagnoses proposed by the others. “A good clinician claims to know nothing,” was one of his sayings.
I worked hard to stay in Beltov’s good books. He was the master of the place, and a word from him would see me dismissed. Perhaps I succeeded too well and volunteered too conspicuously. Beltov seemed bemused by my determination to help, I realise now he must have sense an ulterior motive from the start. Donnelly laughingly called me Beltov’s stooge.
The lofty lords of bedlam have their own scientific system of classification for the various forms of madness, and you can listen to them arguing about it for hours. The thing is though, it never makes the blindest bit of difference what the exact technical term is. We attendants our own system of classification which is a deal more pragmatic and of much more useful application.
There are the sullen mad, who rarely move or speak and give little trouble. Then there are the talkative ones, who want to tell you all about it and are harmless enough. Of course there are a few raving ones, and it’s no-holds-barred with them—watch your fingers, because they bite like mastiffs. The most dangerous, though, are the sly mad, the ones who are clever enough to act normal most of the time.
“What does it matter what the Latin name is for it?” I asked Donnelly one day. He had been an attendant for ten years and had been most helpful in showing me the ropes. Miller was a pal, but tended to forget the details when explaining things. “It’s not like they can cure any of them.”
“Ah, that’s a fine metaphysical question,” said Donnelly. He was an Irishman who had a fondness for discoursing at length on obscure matters that nobody else had ever considered. He might have looked and sounded like an illiterate navvy, but Donnelly had a surprising fund of knowledge and could reel off poetry by the yard. If you ever wanted to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Donnelly was your man. Not that he would ever give an exact answer, but he liked to chew on the question.
“The way I see it, the doctors are doing the same job as the priests in the old days—casting out demons. And to get power over a demon, the first thing they always asked was its name. ‘Dementia praecox’ even sounds like the name of a demon, doesn’t it, now?”
“Why does the name matter, though?”
“She’ll never guess my name is Rumpelstiltskin,” said Donnelly. “My name is Legion. His name is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon. Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd never fell from heaven. The power is in the name.” His eyes seemed to twinkle, and as usual with Donnelly, I could not tell if he was having me on, or just enjoying his flight of fancy.
“At least you can trick a demon into telling its name,” he went on. “But with this crowd”—he stuck out his lips and flicked them with a finger—”bl-bl-bl-bl-bl. It’s nothing but nonsense.”
“I suppose putting a name to a physical disease makes a difference,” I said.
“For five hundred years, the doctors were bleeding and purging and making up Latin names for conditions without doing a blind bit of good,” said Donnelly, echoing one of Beltov’s favourite sayings. “The wonder is that the trade lasted long enough for them to work out how to treat anything. This lot have about another four hundred to go.”
Dr Beltov was the senior physician, but by no means the top of the chain of command. That honour went to the superintendent, a man who I had seen precisely once. He answered only to the Board of Trustees, a vague and distant body which met infrequently. For all intents and purposes, the superintendent was the supreme power. I gathered that he was only in his office one or two days a week, and he did not generally concern himself with the running of the place. Apparently, he was to be found at the North Surrey Golf Club on most days. But he did insist on interviewing the staff personally, and after I submitted my application to take up the post of attendant, I was summoned to his presence.
The superintendent enjoyed a grand office on the third storey, which was to say the top of the building, with two walls lined with what I took to be medical textbooks. The ceiling was high, and windows took up the entire height. What caught my eye were the double glass doors, which opened onto a large balcony. You could stand on that and look out across the quadrangle, defined by the three sides of the hospital, like a king. The afternoon I met him was as warm and golden as melted toffee, and the doors were open to catch the faintest breath of wind. Paperweights—gorgeous things of polished stone with coloured veins running through them—held down each of the stacks of paper on the superintendent’s desk.
The superintendent himself cut a majestic figure with a full head of silver hair, looking much as I imagined a high-court judge or a Roman senator would appear. His eyes were heavy lidded, and he spoke slowly and deliberately, but his gaze was keen, and every word was selected carefully.
“Your references speak very highly of you,” he said, holding down two letters on the expanse of walnut before him. He did not say it as though it impressed him. “Dr De Vere and… Mr Rowe.”
Estelle De Vere was a qualified psychologist, but she was young, female, glamourous, and American, all of which probably counted against her. She had considerable powers of charming, but she had not charmed him. The other referee was Mr Rowe, of Latham & Rowe, a legal gentleman and my former employer.
“Do you understand what sort of job you’re taking on?” he asked. “Boxing credentials mean nothing. There’s to be no hitting people here, no punching. We don’t want a thug.”
I did not know it then, but the attendants were generally older men who were more steady and reliable. Seeing my background, as well as my physique, the superintendent had formed a premature conclusion.
“I understand that perfectly, sir,” I said. “No violence at all. Restraint, yes, but only as and when necessary. It should be used, as you might say, with restraint.”
“It seems to me that you’re a combative fellow,” he said, having apparently not heard me. “If somebody strikes you—and they most certainly will—are you going to turn the other cheek? Have you, in fact, ever done so? Because I should like to hear about it.”
The sun through the tall, leaded windows marked out a cross-grained pattern on the parquet floor. I looked at it as I answered.
“Without getting technical, sir, I suspect I can take a punch better than any man in the building. Rolling with the punch is not just
a figure of speech. It’s an important skill for a pugilist.” I explained briefly about how even a slight movement can have the effect of thick padding, extending the moment of contact the same way a block of rubber would do. “That is, if I can’t block it or dodge it, which is generally what happens with amateurs. As for responding, well, I’d always hold a man rather than hit him,” I said, aware that I had been talking rather freely about fighting.
“Is that so?” His eyes were on my hands, which I had raised involuntarily during my reply. They were twice the size of his own.
“You see, sir, the advantage of having an abundance of physical force at my disposal is that I can apply techniques, such as pinning the arms to the sides, which are not available to others. I can restrain where another man would not be able to.”
“But surely you soften them up a bit first to make it easier?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh no, sir. That would be a beginner’s error. Once you go down that road you’re buying no end of trouble. When you’re in the debt-collecting line, which I was for some time, hitting a man is a terrible mistake.”
“Oh? How so?” He sounded genuinely curious to hear my logic.
“If you hit him, he can’t very well pay up without looking like he’s been beaten. Whereas, if you simply grab him, and explain that he owes—well, he might swear a bit, but you’ve got him focused on the matter at hand, his schedule of repayment, and not grieving about being attacked. His resentment is channelled on his situation, or his creditor, and not on the agent of collection. That’s the psychology of it.”
The superintendent smiled to himself. I had enriched his knowledge of the world, be it ever so slightly. “A fair point. A fair point.” He turned over sheets of paper, pausing to read a line here and there. Evidently, he was rebalancing his opinion of me, looking at the evidence again with a more open mind. “You’ve never been in trouble with the law, and your army service is exemplary. But tell me, what do you know about mental illness?”
What I knew about mental illness was effectively nothing. While I had met my fair share of lunatics and odd cases along the way, and had made the most of that in my application, I was in no position to generalise. All I had were odd scraps of learning, and I groped for one, obscure and irrelevant as it might be. “Paracelsus said we should not mistreat the mentally ill,” I said. “They are not possessed by evil spirits, but rather are our brothers, who are victims of a malady. That seems about right to me.”
Paracelsus was a physician, alchemist, and lord-knows-what-else back in the fifteenth century. He kept cropping up in connection with cases, and consequently, I had read some of his works. My conclusion had been that he was right about most things, though few people understood half of his writings.
The superintendent nodded slowly. “Paracelsus, eh? His stock doesn’t stand too high with some people, but I’m very much inclined to agree. Yes, though it took the rest of the world three centuries to catch up with the old alchemist, you’ve about hit the nail on the head.”
The name “Paracelsus” might have been a secret code word, given how rapidly my uttering it seemed to change the superintendent’s mood. The rest of the interview seemed like a formality. “Why do you want to work here?”
“I want to put my talents to use where they will do some good,” I said. “And, as you may be aware, the employment market is in somewhat of a slump at present.”
“That’s as honest an answer as I’ve heard,” he said drily. “I get a lot of flannel from men who think that they’ll get an easy job here. I don’t think you’re one of those. I think we can try you for six weeks’ probation. Do a decent job, and you’ll stay on.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” I said.
The superintendent leaned back, the main portion of the interview concluded, and steepled his fingers to address me.
“You have to understand, this place is an asylum in the true sense of the word, a place of refuge from the world. Consider that every one of those men is Christ—’I was a stranger, and ye took me in.’ It is a sanctuary, literally a sacred place—it is sacred to them, and we are the keepers of a sacred trust to look after them.”
He went on more in the same vein. To him, the place was a way station for lost travellers until they could get back on their feet. They were not kept there to keep the world safe from them, but to keep them safe from the world. Out there, they would be victimised and bullied, and they had been outcast from their families. It was our Christian duty to tend them and look after them.
I could only admire the old man’s lofty ideals. I did not need to visit the wards below to know that to those incarcerated, and to those holding them, the reality would not be quite so benign. But what mattered was that I get that job, and with a little help from Paracelsus, I was in. It was my first job working undercover.
I phoned Miss De Vere’s answering service to give her the news and found the line was dead. With no means of contacting her, and no instructions on what I was supposed to be doing, I was on my own.
Chapter Four: The Book of Job
Much of our time was spent escorting patients around or watching over them and occasionally telling them off or physically restraining them. We sometimes supervised their craft sessions, mainly basket weaving—or “making nests for cuckoos,” as Donnelly put it—and their somewhat ineffectual attempts at gardening and cleaning. Thankfully, little time was spent handling what Donnelly called “amateur theatricals” from the inmates. We were waiters and porters and cleaners, ever busy with carbolic soap and scrubbing brushes. The job had many of the less-attractive features of being a lavatory attendant at a railway station.
One day, I was clearing up the remains of an incident with a bucket of sawdust when I felt Grogan’s eyes on me. Grogan was effeminate, sometimes flagrantly and brazenly so. Officially, there is no bullying here, but Grogan often sported bruises. Some people took exception to him. I myself was not entirely comfortable under his gaze, which may have had something lascivious about it. That is no excuse to hit a man though, not in my book.
“You look like Hercules cleaning the Augean stables,” he said. “Funny seeing a big strong man like you mopping up.”
“I’m sure Hercules had his reasons, too,” I said.
“Oh, he did,” said Grogan. “My friend was a painter, and he told me all about it. Hercules had to do penance.”
I squeezed out the mop, wondered if I could call it a day at that, but decided the floor needed another go-over.
“He painted Hercules looking just like you, except only wearing a Nemean lion skin,” said Grogan.
“What’s a Nemean lion?” I asked. Mythology seemed like a safer topic than his artist friend or the semi-clad Hercules.
“It terrorised the people of Nemea,” said Grogan. “Its skin was impervious to swords or arrows.”
“If its skin was impervious,” I said, squeezing out the mop again, “how did Hercules manage to skin it?”
“With the lion’s own claws,” said Grogan. “They were the only thing that could cut it.”
“A paradox,” I said. “The only thing you can kill it with are its own claws, and you can’t get them without killing it first. Makes you go round in circles.”
“Hercules found a way,” said Grogan, tossing back his head. “He had big, brawny hands like you, and he strangled it to death. Like Gillespy was strangled.”
Before the conversation could progress further, Dr Beltov and Dr Easton rounded the corner, arguing loudly, and Grogan slipped away. The issue at point was Sunday service, which had been discontinued some time ago, but which seemed likely to be revived.
“You think a vicar can cure patients by a laying-on of hands or casting out demons?” complained Beltov, stopping in front of me as if at a traffic signal. “This service will be a disturbance—not good for mental hygiene.”
“Think of it as a new type of therapy,” said Easton.
“Pah. One that has failed for two thousand years.”
“But surely, even you wouldn’t deny the patients the consolations of their religion?” Easton knew he was on the winning side, and he moved to a more conciliatory tone. “Can we ignore the spiritual aspect of their malaise?”
Beltov’s expression suggested that he would be more than happy to do so. He was suspected of being an atheist, or at the very least a Bolshevik. Religion might well have been one of those delusions he was trying to cure, but he knew which way the wind blows. “You cannot cut people off from a being who is everywhere,” Beltov said. “Let them talk to God if they wish. There is no obstacle.”
“Now, now,” said Easton. “We can’t interfere there. Science has nothing to say about God.”
“On the contrary. Science has found God, but he is ‘not such a God as men would wish to worship,’” said Beltov. “That was William James, whom you all seem to admire so much.”
I knew nothing of William James, but Beltov often invoked him as an unscientific influence who was poisoning psychology. Beltov’s heroes were surgeons and chemists, men with facts and figures and nothing supernatural about them.
“I can’t speak for William James,” said Easton. “But you accept the need for a Sunday service?”
“I accept that my views on the matter have been overruled by the superintendent’s order, thanks to your interference,” said Beltov. “The decision is out of my hands. The vicar can hold his Sunday service, and they can sing hallelujah. But no communion.”
“No communion?” Easton might have been a child who had been denied pudding.
“I have professional experience with religious manias,” said Beltov. “‘Drink my blood and eat my flesh’? It is not well to encourage cannibalism to men with disturbed ideas. No communion.”
“As you wish,” said Easton complacently. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results a sound Anglican vicar can produce on a body of patients.”
“We can only hope so,” said Beltov.
There was no question that the number of patients was increasing. I had been taken on not to fill a vacancy left by a departing member of staff, but as an addition to swell the ranks. The number of patients had been steadily rising.
Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4) Page 4
