Sketch to Illustrate the Passions: Treachery

1853

There was a new physician given to Bedlam in 1853.

Dadd was taken by Brigham to see him: a walk along the galleries and down a staircase. Past the pump room, where a vast cast-iron boiler was rattling behind the doors. He would have liked to stop and listen to the sound, the choke of steam echoing along the steps and tiled walls. But he was not allowed to stop.

They carried on—small high square windows cast smaller squares of ocher on the red floor edged with blue tile, as if streams ran along the edges—until they reached Mr. Hood’s room.

Dadd painted him soon after. The physician was sitting on a chair without a desk before him, sitting facing the door, very composed, hands laced in his lap. He had a very solid gaze; he wore a dress coat of black, a black waistcoat and trousers, a starched shirtfront and black stock.

Remembering him, Dadd painted him in a garden, for Hood’s demeanor and his office were gardenlike, he thought; none of the airlessness and suspicion of other men. He painted him sitting on a blue bench with a back made of entwined branches and ivy curling between his feet, and a puzzle of a leaf lying on his shoulder.

Whenever he thought of it, Dadd would smile to himself. No one had noticed it, the fact that the leaf—a large thick sunflower leaf—looked as if it might be both behind and in front of Mr. Hood. The perspective was twisted. It looked as if it might be behind the man’s figure if you studied the head and shoulder; but the leaf tip actually lay over the nearest branch that formed the backrest of the seat. Mr. Hood carried the upsurging plant on his shoulders; it hung over him like a green umbrella. Pure foolishness, worthy of a lunatic left to his own dreams and devices for ten years.

In the background, the mountains and cedars of Lebanon; in the foreground, the iron lawn roller of an English garden. On the seat beside Hood, a Turkish fez, and that all-obscuring piece of cloth that hung over the face of the man in The Child’s Problem.

Cloth had properties, he told Hood that first day. Properties of substance and flexibility. It could ripple and fall. It could be starched into ruffs that enclosed necks. Over and over again, he painted great folds of shawls; pleats in skirts; sculptural drapes that almost—almost, but not quite—covered feet, or faces, or hands. Inside the folds, what was hidden? Merely the cloth itself, perhaps. Or perhaps the depths of other things—the cocoon and wrappings of sleeping vices.

He painted Cupid and Psyche this year. Cupid had fallen in love with the king’s daughter, but leaves her when she steals a look at him. The two are caught in a kiss; but he had not taken that right. He could not get the woman’s face. The finished portrait was strange; her hair would not fall past her throat. The breasts and the curve of the shoulder and stomach belonged to some other, larger woman. And under the folds of the material, above which her own feet are balanced, came another foot, the foot of the chair: a griffin’s claw, scales and bone.

You never knew what was hidden in commonplace objects, or commonplace minds.

“Mr. Dadd,” Hood had said, standing up, and holding out his hand. “I’m very honored to meet you.”

It was probably five years since anyone had formally shaken his hand.

Dadd received it with interest, this touch of another flesh. The hand was cool and sanguine, without much pressure. It was a disappointment to him. He resisted the urge to inspect it, as he often inspected his own fingers that had been responsible for etching his commands on other skin, and on canvas and paper.

“Tell me,” Mr. Hood asked when they were both seated, “what have you been painting this year?”

It was difficult. Dadd recalled Dymphna Martyr, but he didn’t wish to tell Mr. Hood of that watercolor. Dymphna had been the daughter of an Irish pagan king and a Christian mother. After her mother’s death, her father had wanted to marry her, his own flesh and blood. She fled to Gheel, where the king caught up with her and beheaded her, spilling what had sprung from him on the ground.

No, not to tell that. And not to tell The Death of Richard II: four figures wrestling on the edge of eternity. Not to tell of Hatred.

“I have painted a watercolor,” he said quietly. “It is called A Hermit. It is peaceful. There is an hourglass and a book.”

Mr. Hood nodded. “Do you have anything to read?” he asked.

“Mr. Brigham brought me a Bible.”

Hood nodded approvingly at the attendant. “Would you like something else?”

Dadd considered. “Shakespeare,” he said. “Poetry.”

In his case notes that year, Hood would write: “A very sensible and agreeable companion, a mind once well educated and thoroughly informed …”

The interview was soon over. Mr. Hood was very busy, Dadd was told.

He was busy, it transpired, with all kinds of improvements. Every single window in the hospital was enlarged that year, flooding Dadd’s sleeping cell with an unexpected brightness late in the morning, when the sun came at a particular angle. Busy with other changes, too: unheard-of things. Every ward had an aviary of singing birds.

Men crowded to them. Some tried to take the birds, but were defeated by the height of the cages and the welded doors. Others, like Dadd, could not bear the new voices. The birds sang at twilight and at first light. It seemed to him unbearably mournful. They had been imprisoned for no crime, and all they could do was call, and call, and call.

He struggled with his rages. He swore rambling oaths at Brigham. He spat his food on the floor.

When Mr. Hood next visited, he found that Dadd had begun a great raft of sketches of the passions. Poverty, and Splendour and Wealth, and Idleness, and Gaming and Treachery.

Hood examined the last watercolor closely.

“It is three Chinese,” he said.

Dadd hardly took his eyes from the paper. “We are at war with China,” Dadd said. “That is why they are treacherous.”

“We were at war with China until twelve years ago,” Hood murmured.

Dadd did not pause. “All wars and trickery have the same root,” he said.

Hood looked at the painting: a flight of steps, an open door. A man on the steps relays some secret to another, hiding below. The long curved blade in the man’s right hand waits for the unsuspecting figure stepping out of the house.

“The Chinese dress is very well drawn,” Hood told him.

“It is not correct,” Dadd told him. “It hangs wrongly from the waist.”

“I can see no fault,” Hood told him truthfully.

And Dadd finished it in that moment, writing his name and the date along the bottom step in the picture.

“Not all faults are visible,” he murmured. He thought of his father, retching in the evening darkness on a public path, unable, even then, to let go of his trust. Falling, one hand clutched to his collar, looking about him for the murderer who could not be his own son, and his eyes finally resting on Richard in disbelief. That had been his last expression: blank disbelief.

“Treachery in those who suppose to love us,” Dadd said, wiping the paintbrush on the corner of the paper.