The Crooked Path

1886

They told him strange things that year.

Dadd had many visitors, encouraged by the stories that he had become calm. They brought the world with them, the teeming world with its myriad complications, its populous thoughts, the taint of its cities.

They told him that, flooded with migrants, London was now twice the size that it had been when he was first confined to Bedlam; its immensity was famous the world over, by far the largest city on Earth.

It had more Irishmen than Dublin, more Roman Catholics than Rome; it had spread out into Highbury and Hornsey, Brixton and Balham. Places that Dadd would have known, in his youth, in the time of his initiation into the Clique, as elegant and a place for gentlemen were now slums: Holloway, Islington; Soho and the Strand. Holloway had become a wasteland of marshaling yards for the railways, and on the empty grounds between the lines Hell was reenacted daily; here, bones were boiled, rags sorted, and contractors brought their piles of dust.

The railway, thought a great blessing, was also the city’s blight. Until ten years before, the fields of Gospel Oak and Kentish Town and Chalk Farm were cattle pastures and watercress beds; but then came the North London railway, the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction railway and the Midland railway, turning all the fields into shunting yards drifting with steam coal smoke. Primrose Hill, which Dadd had known as secluded from a city as anything in the distant reaches of the countryside, had a huge cutting for the Euston railway slicing it in two.

Dadd listened to the pictures his visitors painted. He had not liked the railway on the one occasion that he had ridden on it. It was not simply the noise, after the silence of his life. It was the surrender to all things mechanical, physical and seen. It seemed to him that each man put his faith in only what could be quantified. God had become a Gothic mockery. There was no more room for the small and uncelebrated detail. He preferred the retreat of his own world, and was glad that he was not forced to take part in the other, which men called reality, outside Broadmoor’s walls.

The one story that he had been told that truly haunted him was that of the underground rail. The new District line in London ran from Paddington to South Kensington; then east to Blackfriars. Then it began to burrow. They were beginning to start what they called deep-hole boring, where the carriages would be cable cars. Already they had gone beneath the city and Stockwell, like rats in drains and sewers, running greased along their tunnels, silent under the feet of those swarming above.

There was one particular feature, one particular horror, that invaded Dadd’s sleep.

It was the single tube tunnel under the Thames between Tower Hill and Vine Street, on the south side. It had already been open for fourteen years when Dadd came to hear of it; 1,400 feet long and only seven feet in diameter, lined with cast-iron sections. When it was opened, a small passenger car ran on a little two-foot track, hauled on one endless cable by a steam engine on the south side of the river.

He kept thinking of the little car, crammed with passengers. The car would rattle, straining at the weight of its load over the narrow track. A man could reach out and touch the sides of the shadowy tunnel. There would be a sensation of being encased in a long iron pipe, the rivets passing within eighteen inches of the body. Rivets and sections that kept out the enormous width and weight of the water above.

This was Hell alive in the world. This was the place of the wide-eyed demons that he had seen for years. A man-made coffin, stinking of wet and smoke and the sweating bodies of others.

But the funicular carriage had only lasted three months. After that time, the car was removed and the tunnel opened to pedestrians. Lit by gaslight, and having to step between the still-existing train tracks, one million people a year crossed the river underground.

He thought of those people. The million faces lit by the gas; the hundred million breaths exhaled in the fetid air. He thought of descending the timber staircases every day, with barely room to descend with any ease. He thought of what might happen in the case of fire or flood. Water filling the iron pipe; flames rolling along its length, and only the timber staircase left as a route to the daylight.

In an effort to climb out of the thoughts, he began to paint precipices. Mountains soaring above water; paths curling between breathy heights. He began to dream of standing on the very top of the highest mountains, where even the colors had dropped away.

He painted The Crooked Path in September, a dry month after a dry summer. Vertical lines ran down the right-hand side of the picture, sheer rock faces. On the highest, balanced somehow on the narrowest of ledges, two soldiers from different millennia were engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Directly below them, three figures sat gazing away from the battle, out across the open country. Two were hunched and veiled, the third seemingly indifferent.

He wanted to show that they did not care about the struggle happening above them; enclosed in their stony corner, there was nothing to show how they had found their way to the spot. He called it The Crooked Path but there was no path. There was no route or road through. Those that battled above had nowhere to go with their eventual victory; those who sat below would never make the attempt to go on, or go back. Isolated, stranded, every figure was in the prolonged act of breathing his last.

Two visitors came from the Chalcographic Society. Dadd did not remember their names.

“Where is the path leading?” one asked him. “I should say that the crooked path is a rather inaccurate description. There is no path to speak of.”

Dadd bore the comments with indifference; they did not see, despite their inspection. Perception was a craft. Opinion was a facile pretender.

“How many people have you drawn below?” the second man asked. “I count three bodies, but five faces.”

He looked at the man. The fifth face was well hidden, peering from the folds of the garment. The year before he had painted Fantasie de L’Hareme Egyptienne, and he had put a face there, just to the left of the center; shrouded in a cloak, the dark skin and eyes peer out, mere fingernail cracks in the whiteness of the scene, touches of charcoal in the gouache.

“There are witnesses in grains of sand,” he said. And he smiled broadly at them, waiting for their response.

But they did not see. In between the rocks, under the empty ledges, next to the feet of the soldiers, under the hand of the waiting travelers below, inscribed on the sheer faces of the mountain, were hundreds of eyes.

This was what came at the end of a journey: the watchfulness of the gods.

He took himself out of his room and asked to be allowed to walk on the terraces. There, for the rest of the day, he walked backward and forward, feeling the watching eyes upon him, looking at the earth as it dropped away.