London nowadays is one great dark shop that grows more sprawling, crowded, and foul-aired by the hour. The hackney cab I rode in that Wednesday morning to the home of Lord Liverpool carried me down the centre aisle—Cheapside, Ludgate, Fleet, Strand, Cockspur, Haymarket, Piccadilly—with glimpses left and right of bejewelled showcases of goods, while on the pavement everybody was all mixed up together, shopper and hawker alike. What democratic zeal a hunger for lamps, wine, gloves, gold, maps, cheese, soap, hats, knives, toys, fans, tea, bread, and silk brings out in people—or a hunger to grow rich by selling them. Such daily public commotion! Such hotch-potch surgings of colour in the fog! There must have been ten thousand lamps ablaze out there, and this was nine-thirty in the morning. Thanks to the King’s carriage stopped for some reason in Holywell Street, it took us an hour to pass through the City gates into The Strand. But it’s always like this, whether the King’s abroad or no. Who would guess last year’s harvest was stubble? Who if they never saw a newspaper would know this was a country at war?
Who for that matter would have predicted, now that Christianity’s grown too enfeebled to inspire yet another century of mass slaughter, that a mere political idea could set armies marching? But how mere really is republican égalité, that has every French soldier convinced his country belongs to him and the only reason he’s marching against other countries is to hand them over to their own people? Could this deluded wretch in his motley strength be a harbinger of what’s to come in Britain, as it has in America and France? Was what I viewed from my carriage that morning human order and confidence in its new, prevailing incarnation, or was it sheer outright confusion confounded, the rush before closing time?
You travel from desperate Moorfields to gracious Mayfair with its splendid squares (Hanover, Berkeley, Grosvenor), or cross the slough of the Tyburn Road to new-built Marylebone, to Cavendish Square, or Portman, and it’s a voyage east to west, old to new, low to high, poverty and lunacy to wealth and privilege. The farther west you go, the fewer the hawkers and beggars and the quieter the streets, until by the time you reach St. James Square you have left the shop. Out here, the stables and amenities are close by but hid, and the stately silence of gentle lives conducted inside homes and private gardens leaks through stone walls and spreads along the broad streets. Here the air is breathable. Here death is unlikely and when it happens, seemly. Here is where you move your family when your stake in the shop has paid off. Here is where everybody wants to be.
Lord Liverpool lived in a house that came with his second wife. It was a handsome four-story structure designed by Robert Adam, faced in Bath stone, in Hertford Street at Hyde Park. Liverpool’s granting by next-day’s post my request for an interview on the subject of Matthews I took for a positive sign. The matter must have weighed a long time on his Lordship’s mind, I reflected, and how grateful he must be for a chance to lift it off. When he answered his door in person, things seemed more propitious still—though strange. A roll-necked morning-gown hung askew on his clumsy frame, the sash half untied and sleeves rolled back. An ebony cane shook under his hand.
“Mr. Haslam,” he said, his breath very bad, for he leaned heavily forward on the cane as the dull rays of his eyes passed through me, scanning the street as if for one of Matthews’ assassins. “A pleasure—No end of respect for the work you’re doing—Come in, come in—”
So I did, and found myself in a hallway floored in black marble and with walls oak-panelled to twice my height. Some distance ahead, a staircase went up, with railings in Chinese fret. To the side of that, a door, through which I was directed, opened into the deeper glooms of a study, my host hobbling after.
“You must excuse the wretched state you find me in, Haslam—A rheumatism of the knees—”
He was a tall man, old and ugly, heavy-torsoed, with long, unsteady legs. He was one of those who carry about with them their own prickly climate, by which they transform entire rooms to worlds of unease. High-born, that’s all, in the old style, but in this day and age too clumsy and irascible not to seem as ill-bred as his visitor must have struck him.
I apologized if my visit had him on his feet when he shouldn’t be.
“Were you not invited—?” he wondered abstractedly, indicating a settee I should sit on, as with difficulty he lowered himself into an easy chair and groped for a bell set a-top a book on a little ormolu table. We then sat in virtual darkness while he spoke gravely of his days as war minister and the long nuisance of our colonies in America. I must say I sympathized with his Stoic acceptance of a career spent mostly carrying out his superiors’ orders with no more say than concurrence. Silently I vowed to bear my Monro yoke with a dignity as seemly. He then castigated the French and the disaster of republicanism there. Like his friendship with the King, these views he was well known for, ever since things went horribly wrong across the Channel. It was an impressive note of moral indignation he struck, marred only by an unfortunate lapse now and then into a vacant grin. But when he fumbled for the book on the ormolu table and held it up and said, “It’s genius, Haslam. I never read anything so fascinating on the subject of insanity,” I knew this was a true-blue gentleman, the kind it behooves a man not born one to learn from. “I swear I don’t know what to admire more,” he declared, “your compassion for those wretched sufferers or your devotion to improvement of their care.”
“Thank you, my Lord,” I said, my face ablaze. “I do my best.”
“I know you do. This nation is in your debt.”
Now a Negro dwarf entered carrying a tea-tray, which he set on a mahogany tea-stand that he wheeled between us.
His cup rattling noisily as he returned it to its saucer, Liverpool said, “But enough of you and me. What news of our madman?”
“Simply this, my Lord—” As I started to speak, I noticed I sat forward on my seat, elbows planted on knees, hands framing air. It was an attitude intended apparently to convey that I would come direct to the point and not waste his Lordship’s time with distracting details, such as our madman’s frequently professed eagerness to murder him as a diabolical traitor. “Matthews is a lunatic but hardly dangerous. Normally by the time they’ve been in a year, we return ones like him to their family and friends.”
“You have many like him—?”
“As harmless, yes. Few so acute of intellect. None for so long, unless—”
“Acute of intellect, yes, go on—”
“In this case too, his wife’s made it clear she wants him back and will undertake full responsibility for his actions—as, for that matter, will I. So it does seem a needless expense for Camberwell and for us, and certainly a most painful detention for his family.”
“Painful, perhaps. But not needless—By no account needless.”
I nodded, waiting to be enlightened.
Instead he said, “And—?”
“My Lord?”
“Continue.”
“I confess I have no more to say. My point is simply he’s not the kind we usually keep.”
“Well, Haslam, you surprise me. I was rather expecting you’d travel all the way from Moorfields only if you had some particular piece of intelligence from him to impart. Something—ah—telling, even useful—”
“No, nothing like that, your Lordship. The man’s a lunatic.”
“So he is,” Liverpool murmured and seemed to reflect. Then he said, “Here’s how things stand. There’s what you have determined—or haven’t—about Mr. Matthews and what I have. And it’s by reason of what I have that you’ve got him.”
“Perhaps, my Lord, if you were to indicate, in general terms, what it is you have, it might assist us in our treatment—”
This irritated him too much to conceal it. “To the deuce with your treatment, sir. It’s not your treatment you’ve come about, it’s how to be rid of him. But allow me to tell you where this begins and ends: Your Matthews is a dangerous fellow. More dangerous than you can begin to conceive.”
“Has he made a threat against your life, my Lord?”
“Nothing so trivial, I assure you. I’m not a coward, Haslam, if that’s what you’d imply—”
“Not at all, my Lord—”
“Because a Hawkesbury shall not be shot like a dog, Mr. Haslam. A Hawkesbury laughs at death. And if you’re thinking, what harm can a peaceable madman do, remember that the radical fever that has gripped this nation for nearly a decade now is itself a state of collective mental illness. Madness is not an extenuation, Haslam, it’s the problem.”
Before I could reply to this, he started pitching about in his seat. When I saw it was a struggle to stand, I sprang forward to help. He batted me off. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
Something nudged at my hip. It was his little black man, to escort me out.
As I reached the study door, Liverpool said, “Haslam—?” He was standing in the half-light like a stricken wraith, one arm across his stomach as if that part pained him as much as his knees.
“Yes, my Lord?”
“If he says anything interesting, you’ll let me know.”
“It is mostly lunacy, my Lord. Delusions of greatness, counterfeit letters found on the ramparts at Lisle hinting plots against him, money owed him and never paid, agents on all sides. That sort of thing.”
“Yes, of course—But you know what I mean.”
“Not yet.”
“What’s bothering you, Haslam? The fact I’d expect sense from a man you’ve been asked to keep as a lunatic? Is that it?”
“Something like that, my Lord.”
“Did you never hear of such a thing as a lucid interval?”
“I did. I consider it a medical fiction propagated by private mad-doctors to encourage spurious classification of the mad, to engender false hope in their families, for the purpose of extorting money to have them kept longer.”
“Once mad, always mad, in your books, is that it?”
“Until recovery.”
“So why argue a madman’s convictions?”
“Lunatics are not unacute, my Lord—”
“You said that a few minutes ago about this one and have hammered the general point in your book. It’s the same thing I’m saying to you. Matthews-a-harmless-lunatic don’t pass muster with me, Haslam. I thought I’d made that clear.”
Here I might have stammered out a response, but he doubled back. “I take it recovery’s not also a fiction of your profession?”
“I see patients get better under our care, my Lord. In some months, nearly one in three. I don’t know how or why.”
“No, of course not—” Now, still in shadow, his back to the window, which was half shuttered, he said in a reflective tone, “These assertions, Haslam, coming from one in a position of public responsibility I confess I find astonishing. Tell me this. What if he does recover? What then?”
“Then we’ve got a Ministry that would keep a sane man locked up in a madhouse. But if you want him lucid, my Lord, you should know his recovery will be likelier out of Bethlem than in.”
“Will it? In that case, sir—” and he started out in such a slow, quiet voice I thought, At last, accession to my request. Birth will out. This gruffness has been my trial by fire, the resentment what any practised politician must feel at acceding to anything. It’s only a facet of his strength. The plain fact is, if he wants to know what Matthews knows, he wants him lucid.
Alas, I was mistaken. “I ask myself—” he continued, his voice rising steadily in volume and temper, “when patients are likelier to get better out of it than in—” shouting now—“if Bethlem should be a public hospital at all!”
In the silence that followed this outburst, he lurched sideways to wipe spittle from his chin with shaking fingers.
“If I might, my Lord, be permitted—”
I was not. A flick of his glistening hand and I was dismissed.