That ladies’ side had for me all the odd fascination of the unknown. It occupied half the large house; and there was a little colony of ladies besides in a pretty little house with a soft poetic name, in the grounds hard by. The native gallantry of the doctors appeared to keep them constantly on the ladies’ side. If ever I asked for one of them, he was always there, and would see me when he came back. My friend the officer penetrated the mysteries, and described the little card-parties and musical evenings as something very strange. I could not be induced to go, and the record is lost. But I met the poor women in my daily walks, and about the grounds, and learned to know many of their lack-lustre faces. One of them, in a Bath-chair, accosted me once suddenly in the public road as we crossed, with one of the worst words in the English language, and sent me dazed and dreaming ‘home.’ The female warders accompanied them; smart young women with a setting of earrings, many of them, who might have been contracted for in the gross by Spiers and Pond; who would exchange many a friendly wink and sign with their counterparts of the male side as they passed. From what ranks they are recruited I do not know, and have no special wish to ask. The sadness of the thing was very deep; for, knowing what we men bore, I speculated much what these caged women might have to bear. The law for us is the law for them. The nervous maladies which attack us, attack tenfold their more delicate organisation; and they are no safer from wrong or selfishness than we. How many times over, to name one danger alone, may the fancies of puerperal fever be miscalled madness, and treated—in these places and among these companions—so? Our wives and our sisters are not very safe from the Bastille, as things now are.
My time went on. During the bitter winter months the asylum was in the hands of workmen, under repair. The great echoing corridors were being papered and painted, the rooms renewed, the chapel decorated in the approved fashion. The workmen were at work by night as well as by day; and the patients slunk about the passages in greatcoats, and warmed themselves at casual fires. I thought that a better time might have been chosen, perhaps; and the confusion seemed to me worse confounded; but that is no affair of mine. ‘Would God it were night!’ I thought in the morning; and ‘Would God it were morning!’ at night—when the warders returned with a rush from their hour out, filled the passages with talk and noise and oaths, and with much ceremony brought bed-candles at ten. The plate was beautiful; and some of the candlesticks so big that I used sometimes to wonder whether my keeper for the nonce—they were told off to different rooms every night, to prevent us from growing too dependent upon anybody, I suppose—was going to precede me backwards to my bedroom. The common breakfast began at eight, and the common dinner was at one. There were two or three different mess tables for those who lived in common; and the rest ate apart, each in his own room. For a long time I used the last privilege; but I gathered at length a sort of desperate courage, and thought it better to face my kind as much as I could. Besides, at the common table there was, on the whole, enough to eat; while the private meals I found singularly Barmecidal and scraggy. I suppose that, like Oliver Twist, I might have asked for more. But I was afraid of everything and everybody, and, fearing a similar result, refrained. The faces at the board changed little; for ours was practically a place for incurables. Kindly Death changed them sometimes, as I have said. Some of those whom I remembered during my first period had changed visibly for the worse, like the poor singer of the beer-song, who seemed to me always struggling with a sense of wrong, which he could not speak. In the public asylums, I am told, cures are many. They were not so with us. There were times when patients were removed to some other asylum—for the worse, it may be; for I have said that Pecksniff Hall has the best of testimonials from the Commissioners; but, with the exception of the friend of whom I wrote, I remember no case of liberation but one. There was a clergyman confined among us, whose wife took lodgings in the village by. She was with him every day, watched him every day, walked with him every day, and never seemed to me to leave him till she took him away. Brave little woman, how I honoured her! for her nerve must have been tried enough. If these papers of mine make one relation think, as much as I can hope to do will have been done. The Master claimed much credit with me for this cure. May he deserve it! for he must need something to write upon the credit side.
The Commissioners I saw once during my second confinement. They came down, like a wolf on the fold, unexpected. Their approach is, I believe, always concealed from the patients, for fear of upsetting their minds. They came with return-tickets from town, good for one day. They made a sudden incursion into my room—two or three, I forget which, but one was a short lame gentleman who asked questions: Was I comfortable? Had I headaches?—(well, I had that day, from the paint)—and did I hear voices? My chair-covers were being removed at the time, and I had no space to think, much less speak. Twice in the day afterwards I begged of the warders to be allowed to see them again, but neither them nor doctor of course did I see. I say that I was never mad; and there is not an honest reader of this story who will not believe me. And that is all I saw of her Majesty’s Commissioners in Lunacy. Was I wrong in calling this a farce? I have nothing to suggest to them. Where work is ill done, criticism may do good. Where it is not done at all, criticism is silent. ‘Où il n’y a rien, le roi perd ses droits.’ I wrote afterwards, when I was free, to one of them, who had been once a friend of my own, as I thought it my duty to write. He was then functus officio certainly, and well out of it. But he never answered my letter; which I have no doubt he put complacently by, as a madman’s nonsense. It must be a comfortable berth enough where officers and doctors and lawyers and relatives are all in a tale, and, in the world below here, there are few to find you out.
As the man to whom I was now to owe my freedom said, this must soon have led to softening of the brain. The strain had become terrible. The belief in the existence of a system of organised pillage among this undisciplined crew, which might well have possessed a stronger head than mine was then, was wearing me out, though I tried to argue myself out of it. Some of the men played on it, as I said. And I was becoming too thoroughly ill and nerveless under this trial to be much more than a sort of automaton. I even began to have a sort of feeling that this was my home, and that I might be turned out to wander again when they grew tired of me. When the relation of whom I have spoken came to stay in a neighbouring town—not at the asylum, happily for me—I was allowed to spend the day like a boy with an exeat, and even in my illness resented the house-doctor’s objections to giving me too much leave from school. Conscious of fair powers of heart and brain, the paltry unworthiness of the whole thing jarred me even more than greater sins; and it does so still. How ill I was may be judged from the fact that I did not press, scarcely even wish, for my removal. But the skilful doctor who came to see me—I have reached nearly the last in my story now—who had rescued others besides me, practically insisted upon it; and one morning I received at the asylum the news that I was to go. I could not believe it—could not take it in; thought myself permanently ‘on the establishment.’ The doctors grinned sardonic disgust; intimated that a serious danger was threatening society, and hinted an au revoir. So did the warders, smiling generally, and holding out expectant hands. I had been allowed a little pocket-money when I was good, but had not much to give. I have not been inclined, upon reflection, to be lavish of donations since. The last report of the ‘attendants’ was—whether in connexion with this tightness of my purse-strings or not I cannot say—that they had never seen me worse. So the ‘treatment’ had done me no good, at all events. My new guardian took me to his house by the sea, and, with his wife and daughter, gave me for a time a real home, and was something more than kind. He had not much assistance. From one near relative abroad he received an abusive letter; from the Master of Pecksniff Hall an angry warning that he was taking into his house ‘a suicidal and homicidal patient, the most dangerous in his establishment.’ But a few days before the man had made me his guest at his own tea-table, alone with his wife and young daughters. How does he reconcile the two things? The charge was cruel, and nearly robbed me of the hard-won home. My rescuer believed no word of it; but his wife was naturally frightened, and for a night or two a new watcher slept at my door, and I had to submit to a new cross-examination from two more doctors for the edification of the Commission. They said that my eye wandered, and drew up such a certificate that I, who saw it, succeeded in having it sent back to them. Without seeing me again, they mildly drew up another in quite different terms, which must be the last document recorded and docketed in my case. But my sanity now vindicated itself, and I was free, in spite of the protest which, by the side of the valuable opinion of the warders, robs Pecksniff Hall of all title to my ‘cure.’
I had still much to bear. For a long time, as I have said, I was represented as under ‘delusions’ about my relatives. The fact that they put me in an asylum, I presume, is scarcely one. Circumstances were as much against me as ever, and light-headedness would still threaten to recur, while asylum-dreams, of course, haunted me still more. They have left me at last; but I had to fight them down, and did this time—in Whose strength I have ventured, as I am bound, to say. I travelled again, and grew better, forcing myself to new interest in the scenes and people about me. At last, and in a happy hour for me, I married; though I had almost made up my mind that I never could. One relative wrote me an impertinent letter about this ‘extraordinary step;’ which is, as the young lady says in the comedy, ‘a thing of frequent occurrence in the metropolis.’ Another wrote to me within a week of my marriage to threaten me with the possibility of being shut up again. It frightened my young wife for some time, she has told me since; but she is a brave woman, and held her tongue. I next found myself charged with ‘intemperate habits’—about as near the mark as forgery; and the silliness took away the sting. But it was not nice. It is better to atone for wrong than to excuse it by worse, I think; but it is a matter of taste.
‘Liberavi animam meam.’ My tale is told, as it was my clear duty to tell it, at the cost of some pain. Let those whose duty it is to mend this wickedness do theirs, or at their peril leave it undone. ‘Mr. Hardress Cregan,’ says Miles, in the ‘Colleen Bawn,’ ‘I make you the present of the contempt of a rogue.’ And, with infinite disgust and scorn, and small hope of better things, I dedicate this true story of the Bastilles of merrie England to all whom it may concern.
‘L’ENVOI.’
If the readers of this true history will imagine for themselves a number of hospitals for typhus fever, where any one of them, man or woman, may be shut up among the worst cases upon the first symptoms of a cold in the head—with moral, social, and physical consequences beyond man’s power of description—they will know something of the meaning of private lunatic asylums, and our ‘lunacy-law.’ If they will further reflect upon the chances which they would then have of escaping the infection, they will not wonder that private lunatic asylums are not famous for cures. The matter concerns them more than it does me; for forewarned is forearmed, and I am not afraid of falling into the trap again. But I am not going to shrink, on any comfortable theory of ‘letting things alone,’ of ‘bygones being bygones,’ &c., from setting down what I think and what I know. I will be of some help to others if I can. If everybody thumb-twiddled under injuries we should not advance much. I need not to apologise for the directly personal character of the account which I have written; for it is only as a directly personal account that it can be of any value. The imputation of insanity will not trouble me much longer. To those who know me, it is absurd; with those who do not, or who, knowing me, care to repeat it, I am in nowise concerned. If I write this short postscript at all, it is because I have heard, to my great amusement, that since the publication of this history some of my critics have done me the honour to speak of it as in itself a proof of insanity! I can only say with Theodore Hook, if it was he who said it—‘Sir, if you can believe that, you’ll believe anything.’ But they do not believe it. It is the old question of honesty and dishonesty, and concerns me not. I suppose that I am either mad not to hold my tongue, or mad to think they can believe me—anything for a sneer, from time immemorial the safety-valve of dulness or of ill-nature. It is difficult for anyone to believe in such wanton wrong. That is the defence of those who, without the shadow of excuse, have branded me with the most cruel brand that can be stamped on any man. The thing was done. Magna est veritas, in the end: though I think it is growing much more uncommon.