The Head-shakers have a formal vocabulary of their own, which, after a certain experience, one begins to know by heart. It is constructed on the simple principle of giving a bad name to everything. This story has been called ‘sensational,’ when it is simply true. When a direct description of things as they are is sensational, things as they are are not things as they should be. I am told, too, that the story shows much disregard for people’s feelings. It certainly does for mine, which are sensitive enough, and have been outraged beyond belief. When men condescend to think a little less of their own feelings, and a little more of theirs whom they shut up alive, we shall be on the road to amendment. Meanwhile, if anything I have written has at all hurt the natural sensitiveness of any who has suffered as I have, I am very sorry for it. To other feelings in the matter I am less than indifferent. ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.’

These chapters are not intended to be read as what my friend of the pamphlet calls them—an onslaught on the medical men engaged in lunacy practice. They are an onslaught on a crying national sin, and all who favour it. Among the men in lunacy practice are men who abhor the system on which any man may be writ down mad. Among them I have myself found one of the best friends I have had. He was one of old standing. He saw me when I was nearly at my worst; but he did not shut me up. He took me to his own house, and poured in oil and wine, like the good Samaritan he is. After a few days’ entertainment with his own family, and at his own table—and he would never have of me one penny for his infinite pains—he assured me, and my friends too, that I was only a hypochondriac bound to get well. He would have made me so, if I would have consented to stay with him, in spite of a certain faith in hydrate of chloral, which I wish he would abandon. ‘Hell in crystals,’ my defining friend has called it. (Perhaps I may add here that the relation who should know me best testified to my sanity with as little variation.) I well remember how this warm-hearted doctor carried me off under his own protest to see an eminent dietist whom I would consult, so completely had the occult qualities of eggs and cold mutton been worried into me, and almost shouted as he left the room, in answer to the stereotyped, ‘I hope you are very particular about his diet,’ ‘Diet be strong-worded; why, the man is dying of inanition!’ So I was. But I was restlessly bent on my own ruin, it would seem; and ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ was the burden of my earliest asylum-dreams. The rolling stone would only stop in the breakers at the bottom of the cliff; and I found no Sisyphus to roll it up again till I played both stone and Sisyphus myself. Why, however, I was thus hastily shut up without any reference to so skilled a friend, and without my seeing him, I do not know. It was of him that I was thinking when I suggested what I believe to be one of the most important and easiest of necessary reforms—that no man should be ‘certificated’ without the assent of at least one valuable authority who knows him well, after careful personal examination.

I have gone back again in my story, and a breath of sea-air will do it good. Imagine me with the matron again. The change from the asylum and its associations to the little house by the seaside was very good in its effects. It was so for others than me; for the madmen there, poor fellows, seemed to me gentler and better in every way than they were when I saw them in the larger place. The warders were there to watch them, but had to be quiet and suppressed in a private house, and simply lived down-stairs as servants live. The breakfasts and dinners at the neat table, pleasantly presided over by a womanly hostess, were a relief indeed after my previous experience. That they should have proved so, when only she and I held consecutive conversation, and the other guests either kept silence or distracted us by strange words and antics enough to unnerve anybody, shows partially, I think, what the life which they ‘relieved’ must have been. The poor singer of the ‘Hey-diddle-diddle’ beer-song was in the house, and his way of carving his bread with his knife and fork ‘intrigued’ me much till the matron told me where I was. There, too, was the good parsley-eater, who died of Bright’s disease; and it was there, just after I left the house, that he died. Only two or three days before he had to sit down to dine with us; and I remember the kindness with which the matron made him lie down upon the sofa, seeing the suffering of which he knew not how to speak, and sent him to his bed. A short time before he had calmly looked me in the face across the table, and pledged me in the vinegar-cruet, which he emptied. His brother, a clergyman, dined with us on a visit, and looked at me, I thought, with some curiosity. What was I doing dans cette galÈre struck more than one. Seen among the associations and scenes of the asylum, I believe that any one might perhaps have thought me unfit to be removed, so completely ignorant was I, in common phrase, whether I was on my head or my heels. Twice a day, in the regular course of things, were the seven or eight lunatics who composed the seaside colony marched out for a constitutional walk, with a pack of warders at their heels, in the direction opposite to the town and streets. Those walks were trying enough; at the asylum, among the country roads and lanes, they had been fearful. The matron saved me from them as much as possible, as I have said, with the most thoughtful and considerate kindness. She took me with her to hear the band upon the pier, and to stroll about with her, a prisoner on parole, among the holiday-makers of the popular watering-place; and those diversions, which seem dull enough in ordinary life, appeared to me quite exceptionally delightful. It was better when we talked of books and things and people; and what she said and wrote of me I have already told. In the evening she would rescue me from the rest to let me sup quietly with herself, when I did not go next door to supper or whist with the young doctor and his pleasant wife, who were in command of a detachment of female patients there. They, too, gave their opinion; and in the face of many remonstrances from quarters where I might least have expected them—in the face of the principal’s opinion that I was a very dangerous person; in the face of her Majesty’s admirable Commissioners, not one of whom I had to my knowledge so far seen, but who were well armed with the ‘notes’ of the warders—I was taken for the time away, and made a free man again. O spirit of Mr. Justice Stareleigh! ‘Nathaniel, sir? How could I have got Daniel on my notes, unless you told me so, sir?’ If the soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, of the establishment had it down in their notes that I was mad, having been told so, to begin with, by their employers (who dilate on the delicacy of brain cases, yet trust the reports of ignorant men), how the deuce could I be anything else? Yet there was more than one of them, for all that, who did not believe it, and had the courage to say so. I will give no clue to their identities; for they might be dismissed retrospectively, if they are still in harness, for such a breach of duty. It would be the best thing that could happen to them, perhaps. The hardest part of the whole snare to me was, that I, who would not hurt a dog if I could help it, was represented as ‘violent’ when I was weaker than any dog. It was enough to deter any but the bravest and kindliest from trying to help me; and I have no choice but to suppose that that was the object.

But the ‘violence,’ and the rest of it, was too palpable a lie. The deliverance came. Over the months which followed before I came to be imprisoned again, matron and young doctor gone—good plants flourish ill in such a soil as that—I wish to pass as lightly as possible. They would have chiefly to do with home matters which have no place in such a story as this, and only concern consciences to which I would have nothing to say. I have done with them—let them alone. The period of my freedom lasted ten months. I spent the time in aimless wandering from place to place—among the bathers of Trouville and the playgoers of Paris, in the hotels and streets of London—in a fashion which would make a story by itself, were this the place to set it down. The shock with which I had learned what had been done to me had shaken to the centre what nerve the ‘treatment’ had left me. Night after night I did nothing but dream, dream, dream of the asylum and its terrors. The warders, whose faces I knew so well, were always behind me; the antics of the madmen were re-acted with merciless fidelity. The sense of utter helplessness in the hands of mad-doctors, which the experience had left upon my mind, would leave me neither night nor day. A traveller’s chance allusion in my hearing to ‘Bedlam let loose,’ or a whimsical song about ‘Charenton’ in a French vaudeville, would drive me out of the station or the theatre in helpless fear of I knew not what. If a gendarme accosted me at night in the streets, I shook all over in the expectation of being removed to a French asylum. If I saw an advertisement relating to an asylum in a casual newspaper, it was to lay it down in terror. There seemed to me but one power in the world—the power of the lunacy ‘law.’ Such is the confidence which our vaunted system, which professes to know no wrong without a remedy, could inspire in one who needed its protection so sorely as I. In one respect its might was certainly vindicated, for, abroad and at home, I thought that it could reach me anywhere. I kept these fears of mine as much as I could to myself; for to talk of them might be, under the circumstances of my life, to be shut up at once again. But it was a fearful trial. I was utterly cowed and frightened, and I was afraid to face anyone; for I thought I read in every face a knowledge of my story. Except by an occasional desperate effort, I could force myself to meet no one. But ill as I was then, and full of fancies, not one of the old friends who saw me imagined in me a trace of insanity. That I know. In Paris especially I found one old literary friend, to whose rooms—from that odd thing called sympathy, I suppose—I was able to go more often than anywhere else, though seldom enough, Heaven knows! I have often wondered since what are his real thoughts in the matter. In theatres and hotels, in streets and in cafÉs, seldom allowing myself to sleep more than one or two consecutive nights in the same place, from the fear of being ‘taken,’ and, when I did stay, afraid of going to my room and then of leaving it—I dreed this dreary weird chiefly alone. And by the odd irony of the whole thing, this was the time when I was indeed nearest to madness, and really required careful watching; not that of warders or of repression, be it understood, but of the affection which is unhappily not made to order. I had been called suicidal and homicidal when I was no danger to anybody. Now thoughts of suicide did indeed take shape and form in my mind. In that there was no madness, for the impulse which madness supplies to carry these wretched thoughts into effect failed me always, and so saved my life. Yet there was not a day at last when I did not leave the house with the intention—if I could only find the needed courage—of bringing this impossible existence to an end. I knew that I was not going to die; but I believed that, after the line of treatment so shamefully adopted once, to save trouble, there was little chance of escaping a second condemnation if I did not die. And the event proved me miserably right. Have I not cause to say that I have no special call to spare the susceptibilities of others? I have no respect left for Pickwickian feelings—none.

London was but a repetition of the story of Paris. I struggled to the theatre once or twice. One night I hid myself at the back of the pit to listen to a play of my own which had just been brought out with some success—written, of course, some time before. I thought publicity dangerous, and wondered stupidly if I had ever written such things myself. After some months in the country, where I tried to make a home-life in vain, and wore myself out more and more in long solitary walks, haunted by every kind of nervous fear, I went back again to London in despair, wondering if, as I had no courage to die, this would not in some way end itself by sheer force of exhaustion. It would not, for I was very full of life still. I let nobody know where I was, for I had no strength or care to write, and no one with whom I cared to communicate. Besides, I was afraid; and wandered from one hotel to another with a sort of hope of having become nobody. I had forfeited my individuality in the asylum; why want it back again? But I had to be accounted for, and one day at the Crystal Palace I found myself watched again by a ‘gloomy man’—not with a yataghan, but a newspaper. Of course I thought he was a keeper, as I had been expecting that for some time; but he was only a detective. He was not very unlike some whom I have seen in plays, for he allowed me to detect his mission in a moment; and it gave me a certain grim amusement to lead him all over the gardens on a very unpleasant day, taking the most obvious notes of me that I ever saw, in an obtrusive red pocket-book. I strolled to the verge of the salt flood at the bottom of the gardens (not deep), where the antediluvians dwell, lingered about, and looked as if I meant to jump in. He showed no intention of interfering, but watched with interest from the opposite shore, and nearly filled his pocket-book. Then I disappointed him, turned away from the precipice like Box the printer, went to the refreshment-room and ate an ice. This bothered him a good deal, but he noted it down. In the train he got into a carriage conspicuously remote from mine; met a mate in London to whom he communicated his ideas; and, after watching me partake of a melancholy dinner in Lucas’s comfortable coffee-room, while he dallied with buns and beer in the front shop, the two followed me to Mr. Hare’s pleasant little theatre—I had never dared, after the lowering effect of the associations of the ‘establishment,’ which seemed to sink me in my own esteem, to raise my eyes above the pit—sat behind me, and watched my conduct in respect of Gilbert’s ‘Broken Hearts’ with a regretful desire evident in their own minds for ‘something spicy;’ then saw me safe to my hotel for the nonce, and departed with a conscientious feeling of having done their duty detectively, and having entirely escaped my observation. Were they primary scholars in the work, I wonder? And which kept the more accurate notes, the watcher in his book or the watched in his head? Nothing surprises me more, as I think over all that dreary time, than the singular acuteness of observation in me, which no date or detail seems to have escaped. ‘HyperÆsthesia,’ I suppose, or derangement of the white matter. Perhaps it was an infarction.

Well, by the superhuman exertions of Inspector Bucket I had been tracked to my lair, and a doctor descended upon me the next morning, and asked me a few more questions. But he was the one of whom I have spoken as having given a worthy brain to earnest work, and having so signally condemned asylums and delusions. No man could have been more kind and wise. He might well have been deceived into thinking me mad, I think; for by this time, with voices, delusions, visions, and all the nonsense drummed into me, I had well-nigh begun to think myself so. I had hardly any clothes with me, as I wandered with the impression that there must be a full-stop somewhere near. I had not brushed my hair; I looked utterly dazed, and had taken refuge in the smallest room on the topmost story of one of our largest hostelries. If I had been charged as an escaped convict, answer had been difficult. He was not deceived, though, and ordered the rest of mind and body which is sometimes as vain a prescription as port wine and sea-air to the wasted pauper. Failing better roads to it, I was sent off to a hydropathic establishment in the north, once more in the charge of a body-servant, who was not to lose sight of me upon the road. Ay de mi! all the hopeless old story was coming on again.

I knew that palace of the water-cure well. I had known pleasant days there in happier times, when I thought I would go thither and bathe for no special reason, and had amused myself much with the whims and oddities of the place; all the people ‘going to Gravesend by water,’ as Sir George Rose used to say. It had been the property of a kindly Scotchman since gone, who has left me pleasant memories of his home-circle and his private stock of ‘whusky,’ which he administered to me freely at night, when the water-washers were gone to bed, after instructing me in the theoretic virtues of abstinence in his council-chamber in the morning. Now, like other places of the kind, it had lost its home-shape, and passed into the impersonal hands of a company. The presiding medical authority was now a different man. I wonder if he dreams of me sometimes? The first night after my reaching the place a crash came. I could bear this espial no longer; and the dreams of dead dear ones had become so vividly mixed with the nightmare horrors inherited from (what shall I call the asylum?) Pecksniff Hall, that I never knew half I was doing. The professional name for dreams, as I said before, is ‘visions.’ Dreaming that a warder was upon me, and that a ghost was telling me to run, I jumped up in my sleep and rolled over the nearest banisters. The fall was not severe, and the ‘desperate attempt’ failed; for I only broke a rib and stove in my breastbone, which proved afterwards handy for the warders to work upon. I was put to bed for a time and taken some care of; and before long was able to drive and stroll about again, and join in lawn-tennis. But the dream-fears and the daily terrors haunted me still; and I still shrank from everybody. At last came the realisation of my constant fear; and I fell into a fit of light-headed wandering, and began calling out at intervals various silly things. What should have been done was to nurse me and pour wine down my throat, and apply the common means of homely restoration. What was done was this: the stout bathmen and servants of the place were sent to hold me down; and I was gagged, and left gagged, till the blood ran down from my mouth. Then came two strange doctors as before, of whose names and faces I am ignorant, and were instructed by my ‘friends,’ I suppose, to sign a certificate. I was then given a strong dose of opium, and a summons was sent to the Master of Pecksniff Hall, who despatched two stout warders northward by the train, for the impounding of my Herculean frame. One was the good-natured colonial; the other a man whom I held in especial aversion, a fat ex-footman, who afterwards reported his work as ‘very good fun,’ and had a particular aptitude, when I was lying helpless in bed, for jumping on my breastbone and half throttling me. A fancied resemblance in his moony countenance to an historical face made me, when I was one day dreamily contemplating him from bed, connect him vaguely with the Orton family; and among the dramatis personÆ of my imagination I knew him as young Orton, and whiled away some of my hours by constructing romances about him and the Tichborne inheritance. There was another man, affectionately known to a circle of admiring friends as ‘Birdie,’ who was so like him that it made me rather angry not to be able to make up my mind which was the truer claimant. It was, at any rate, something to do. But ‘Birdie’ was good-natured also in his way, though fond of practical joking. I disliked his way of dipping my hairbrush in the basin in the morning, when I was too weak to remonstrate, and using it on his own bullet-head under my eyes; but I bear him no grudge. One of his amusements did me some harm; for he had a way of whipping up things in the room and running off with them—to puzzle me, I suppose, laughing all the time. He performed this feat once with a new antimacassar; and from that moment, coupled with the indescribable disorder and entire absence of all visible supervision over the attendants, which reigned in the big madhouse, it created in my mind a notion that there was more dishonesty in the place than might be. It was a ‘delusion,’ of course, and the ‘notes’ must have had much to say to it; the more as, when it became known, some of the men would play on it as on an instrument, as I fear they are but too apt to play in ignorance, having but too much opportunity so to do, on the weaknesses and fancies of the poor people in their charge. The thing is not worth many words, but it is a very fair instance of the way in which this abominable system tends to create the very things which it is supposed to cure. My reflections upon the Orton family—quite as much of a delusion as the other—are written in no notes but my own.

The warders’ faces met mine in the morning; and in a wild opium-trance, acting on the brain at its weakest, I was removed to my prison again. Once during the journey, I learn, I spoke, and once only, when the sight of my colonial indulging in a pot of beer woke the healthy British nature to solicit a drink I do not remember it; for I remember nothing but a confused succession of trains and platforms, till I woke to semi-consciousness in the asylum—to find myself lying on the ground on my back, with a doctor on one side and my old servant—returned from India in the interval—upon the other, contemplating me. This was described as a ‘fit’—vaguely. I must have been, like the Yankee of the story, ‘a whale at fits,’ for I had them of all kinds—epileptic; epileptoid—‘toid’ meaning nothing, but being substituted when the first ‘diagnosis’ revealed itself in its native silliness; paralytic (in the left arm, when I had lain on it in bed for some days and rather numbed it); and any others that came handy. I wish I could see those ‘notes;’ they must be wonderful. But as in the multitude of counsellors is wisdom, in the multitude of maladies is safety. So began my second term—of eight months’ imprisonment. Was ever such a story told? There shall be but very little more of it.