The telegram came after an interval of two hours, two hours which had been devoted to a rambling dispute with Fay about the Shoreham difficulty. The message ran as follows: “Has your father turned up he escaped at dawn this morning in slippers and dressing-gown and nothing seen of him since if not appeared meet me Victoria two-seven for Cummerdown telephone Gerrard 0247 if there.”
§ 11
But Mr. Preemby did not turn up anywhere. He just vanished.
Christina Alberta, in a state of incredulous astonishment at this fresh disappearance, went down with Devizes to Cummerdown. They found a Medical Superintendent by no means so amazed as they were. Sargon had been missing at breakfast time; everything seemed to point to his just walking out of the Asylum. That sort of thing had happened before. It showed a certain sleepy negligence on the part of one or two attendants, and they would be reprimanded. But as for wonder, the Medical Superintendent refused to wonder. Lunatics often stray or escape, and unless they are dangerous the authorities made no great commotion about it. They kept it out of the newspapers as far as it was possible to do so.
“This place isn’t Portland,” said the Medical Superintendent. “They get back all right. I give him a day. He’s probably coming back now. He may be hiding up a mile away. I’m chiefly anxious about his catching cold. Pneumonia is the standard death of a lunatic. But it’s wonderfully warm for the time of year. I’ve never known such an October.”
He was much more desirous to talk to Devizes about lunacy reform, and convince him that he was a highly progressive and able Medical Superintendent than to discuss the special case of Mr. Preemby. “We do what we can,” he said, “but we’re fixed by the extreme economy we have to practise. Low-grade attendants and not enough even of them. The public indifference to lunatics is monstrous. Everybody—even the people with insane relations—wants to forget all about them.”
“But how could Preemby have got out of the grounds?” asked Devizes. “Aren’t there walls all round?”
“Like everything else about lunacy law, the back is not as good as the front,” said the superintendent. “But here we have got at least a complete wall of sorts all round. The original building used to be a private mansion with a walled park. For a time—in the eighteenth century—it was a boys’ school.”
He showed them from his window over the roofs of a clump of outbuildings the limits of the garden and farm at the back, dropping towards a streamlet and defined by a roadside wall and old thorn and oak trees. “For my own part,” said the Medical Superintendent, “I admit the urgency of very drastic reforms.”
“I wonder if Cousin Widgery can throw any light on this,” said Devizes.