My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum / By a Sane Patient

by Herman Charles Merivale

VII.

As I look back at the first chapter of this story of mine, and see that I wrote down that my experience had nothing in it especially painful, I wonder at the aptitude of human nature to forget and forgive, where it is only permitted. Now that I have brought my mind to bear upon the details, they seem to me fraught with a quite exceptional pain. It needed time and thought for me to measure, in anything like its depth and height, the wrong that was done to me. Oblivion alone shall remain when this my closing chapter is finished; for forgiveness has in my case been made impossible, since.

Si l’effort est trop grand pour la faiblesse humaine
De pardonner les maux qui nous viennent d’autrui,
Épargne-toi du moins le tourment de la haine:
À défaut du pardon, laisse venir l’oubli!

When I was first imprisoned among madmen, after the piece of childish folly which had in it no object, if it had any at all, but to make those come and nurse me whose clear duty it was to do so, I was so ill and broken that, had he been in my case,

Mine enemy’s dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.

The second time it was perhaps more cruel still. And the thing was done under cover of the lunacy-laws. If they protect mere heartlessness so, what must they do in cases where purposes directly evil are to be served?

The sadness of this story is affecting me in spite of myself, and makes me anxious to bring it to an end. The second sentence was the same thing over again, except that I knew that I was in an asylum, and resigned myself to feel that I had no chance of escaping. Nobody cared. Why should I escape? I had a few visitors the first time. When they came, a well-set luncheon-table and a good bottle of wine replaced the garbage which we were too often expected to consume, and the unwalled grounds and pretty gardens of Pecksniff Hall were suggestive of a country house in the olden time. My lawyer came to see me and eat mutton—a good fellow, of whom it is pleasant to think, in the bitterness which will mix with my ink as I go on. He happened to bring with him the first copy of the ‘World’ that I had seen, and left it with me as an odd link with its forgotten godmother. I, with a warder, saw him off by the train, and wondered rather why I should not go too. I had not realised the asylum, and talked to him only of money-matters which had been troubling me. The second time I was too far gone; I wanted no visits, and cared for none, though day after day I woke from my troubled dreams—not all bad now, but some singularly beautiful—with a feeling that surely somebody would rescue me before night. How ill I was after that opium-journey, and whether dying or not, I do not know. The master said that I was, and after the gagging and drugging it is very probable. It was on a hot night in June that I lay down in that evil place again, in the farthest room in a remote wing of the building, between two keepers, who threw themselves one on each side of me, and held me close between them the hot night through, snoring out their own heavy sleep, or waking to hold me closer if I tried to stir. I happened to light afterwards upon the ‘notes’ of one of them upon this night, in which he reported me as having had some ‘bad turns’—of violence, I suppose—in pain as I still was from my fall, and from the gag; opium-dazed and desolate, weaker than a child. For days and nights this went on with a constant change of warders more or less rough and hard. They were told off to watch me three or four at a time, because of my dangerous qualities, and my stupid efforts to get free from them. Among themselves they laughed at it, knowing my weakness; and the smallest boy among them—for there was a stock of small and ugly boys on the staff—would lead me about with his little finger. But sometimes a detachment of them would carry me to my bedroom or keep me down in bed, tearing my clothes in the process. To account for deficiences in my wardrobe (of which each of us had a list, like a schoolboy’s) it was said in the ‘notes’ that I tore them up myself—a ‘well-known sign of insanity!’ How I dreaded that ‘north room’! It was in the oldest corner of the house, cold and hot, and rat-haunted; and much as Mrs. Gamp and her friend must have seemed to their dying-charge, the keepers seemed to me, as they crooned in the corners through my semi-delirium.

It seemed to me that the doctors had wondrous little to say to it. They came to see me now and then, for a minute or two, in my bed. The house doctor, who so impressed my friend, had lived for years in the place, and seemed to have no ideas beyond it. He kept dreadful little things in bottles, and noted conscientiously, by a machine under my window—which looked like the desk of an orchestral conductor—the amount of daily and nightly rainfall. We must all of us do something, I suppose. In the summer he was a great archer, and strutted about with a bow and quiver. A few of the patients joined in the sport—a melancholy lord, who never spoke, but was ‘my lorded’ by everybody much after the fashion of saner circles, and one or two others. I tried it once, and was rather gratified to find that, though I had never used bow and arrow before, I scored better than the house doctor. But the man-monkey was allowed to try his hand too, and played hideous tricks with his arrows, and grimaced so that I could not face the amusement more. Of the cricket I had enough on my first visit, and would not run the gauntlet again. To some sort of distraction I was occasionally driven by despair; for the constitutionals round the mile-circuit of the grounds, or among the lanes and roads, were maddening. The Sunday walks were the worst; when the British villager was out on holiday, and gaped and wondered at us. In the winter months I made occasional attempts to follow the pack of harriers which was kept up for our benefit—which at all events amused the warders and country-siders a good deal. I was never fond of harriers, and this was not, perhaps, the place or time to acquire the taste. Half-an-hour of the muddy fields tired out the weak body and head, and aggravated my weary dreams. But it gave a brief space of comparative freedom; and I was able to associate more with a good young fellow who came to the place as companion to the man-monkey, and showed a decided preference for my society. His berth cannot have been pleasant; and he found in my room his only refuge from the general disorder of the house and attendants, though even there we could not escape from the one tune which one of them was always beating to death on an ancient piano in one of the public rooms, to the behoof of the broken nerves collected there. I had been removed from the north room then; I suppose in favour of some more violent newcomer. I found, too, another pleasant companion in an officer who had seen much foreign service, and liked talk. He wondered why he was there. He had been ill, he told me. We met first at the billiard-table, and he came up to me at once, and said that he knew my face, and must have met me at Carlsbad, as he had. He was well enough to shrug his shoulders over the matter, and even to find amusement in studying the delusions of the madmen, and talking them over. He had been knocked so much about the world, he said, that he cared little how it all ended; and he had no special desire to meet again the friends who had imprisoned him. I do not wonder. He may have been mad; but I saw him often, and his was the best imitation of sanity I ever saw. At all events it did him small good to be there. We followed the harriers and ate sandwiches together, and speculated why we had been singled out to be crushed by this tower of Siloam. Once, feeling a thought stronger, I wrote a letter to an old literary friend. It was very harmless, for I did not care to complain; but the friend was a member of a well-known legal family, and his name on the envelope caused a sensation. It was believed to be in my officer’s handwriting; and he was asked why he had been writing to a lawyer, and what about. Why the heads of an asylum should be afraid of their best friends the lawyers, I do not know. But it seems they are. However, I do not exaggerate. My letter was sent.

The lunatic harriers would make a chapter by themselves; but I have done with them. I began to believe at last that, in the confusion of the whole business, dogs, doctors, keepers, patients, and huntsmen were all going Hamlet’s road together. I would give a good deal—prejudice apart—to give some next friends and Head-shakers (the Marcelluses and Bernardos of society—‘We could, an if we would—’) a few turns with those unearthly hounds. How I passed my evenings, as how I passed my days, save in an occasional study of old novels, an occasional hour at lunatic billiards, an occasional game at draughts or chess with anyone with brains enough to know the moves, I do not know. I was too weak of head and too ill to study, as I have said, or to shake the burrs from off me. On the Sundays I had five o’clock tea with the Master—the only patient so privileged, I think; but he usually talked of one Dr. Blanc and the inferiority of French asylums, failing the elder Grossmith, and I was none the better. Twice did a younger doctor—one of the family and of the firm, for Pecksniff Hall was quite a fact in county society, and had been so for some generations—ask me to dine with him at his house, apart also from the asylum. I found him a good fellow enough, and his wife very kindly; and I despair in conveying to my readers how pleasant it was to dine like a gentleman at a pleasant table. No other patient came; and, as he phrased it, we ‘sank the shop.’ Did it never occur to him that the ‘shop’ and I were rather incongruous? He was fond of burlesques, and he was a good hand at billiards; and he looked like a straightforward heavy-cavalry officer. The principal informed me that he received me for the second time against the wishes of his family. I was ill and sentimental, and thought how kind the old man was, and how hard his family must have been to grudge me the only home which I seemed likely to get. I have hoped sometimes since that the family took a view of their own upon the case, and had no wish to make part with mine; but I do not know.

An entertainer, collaborating with a lady-novelist, brought a little play called ‘Cups and Saucers’ to be enacted in the dining-room. A merry little play, I thought, and the warders and servants liked it well enough. But when I had watched it for a time I retreated to my solitude, for it was more than I could bear. The lunatic next me dilated in a loud voice upon the price of potatoes, which was wide of the plot. He was a wealthy lunatic, and had taken me out for a drive a few days before, had bared his ‘biceps’ for my admiration—it was even less bicipitous than mine—and waxed very wroth because I asked for his ‘Daily Telegraph,’ when he said he had not done with it. Rumours of war were then in the air; and though it was before the days when Jingo had become a power, he was more intensely and demonstratively Jingo than the flower of the music-halls. If the Home Secretary has profited at all by the vials of scorn poured upon his head by Mr. Forbes, in his spirited ‘Fiasco of Cyprus,’ he must have enough to do just now in learning the geography of Persia and the Euphrates Valley; but he might yet find the time to do that imprisoned Jingo a good turn. Where is the Conservative watchfulness that leaves such a vote as this to be lost to humanity? There came a conjuror with a Greek name, whom I avoided; there came a child-harpist, with a concert, called little Ada Somebody, whom I would not go and hear; and there were various parties on the ‘ladies’ side,’ which I could not bring myself to face.