It’s been a month now, and I’ve not seen Margaret again, only two thin packets of her letters, the first retrieved from the gallery doorway by Reverend Jupp (a Methodist in for melancholy) before The Middleman returned for his spoils, the second by way of Alavoine thanks to The Schoolmaster—or should I say Haslam. With something more in his eyes than the usual desolation, Jupp slipped me the first packet two days after Margaret’s visit, as we passed in the gallery. The second was tossed onto my bed last week by the keeper Davies, our whistling postman from Hell.
Now that I’ve read Margaret’s letters, I know my own are a beggar-boy’s, whinging and cringing, and I wonder if this log of abuses is not my more manly love letter to a woman so dogged and strong. Judging from the few of hers Jupp’s kindness and Haslam’s justice have enabled me to see—thirty-four in all, the Jupp-saved written between March 4th and August 17th, 1804, the Haslam-provided between December 4th, 1808, and February 15th of this year, I mean 1809 (the narrow time span of the latter packet owing I should think to Haslam’s having no way to know how many Sir Archy’s held back)—Margaret’s letters in their own way are as lovingly rendered as this chronicle, and no more fit for public eyes. Documents of loss, humiliation, resolve, longing, lust, fury, despair—all at a pitch certain to outrage those for whom sanguine views promise every advantage of hope, prevalence, and comfort. You build your world on sunny principles, and lo and behold ain’t life sunny, except for how much you hate the guts of anybody who’d prick your bubble.
I was lying on my bed thinking these ungenteel thoughts while wondering if habeas corpus will deliver me back into the world wiser than to be a blind drummer for human nature, when Mr. Ailey, a promising mathematician until he strangled his mother, stopped by to report that the Quaker William Tuke was in the building, with another gentleman.
I sprang from my deathbed.
Tuke is founder of The Retreat, the private asylum that’s been making such a racket at York. Even the London papers have been full of it for years. By Ailey’s account, the purpose of Tuke’s visit to The Schoolmaster was to learn how we do things here. Tuke’s been reported as saying he was even more impressed by the second edition of Jack’s book than by the first. But you don’t need to find the Tuke approach a good one to consider his errand, if not a fool’s, more mysterious than it appears. Who can predict what strangeness will issue from a Quaker silence? Yet Tuke’s visit whether strange or not promised to reveal something of the prospects of our habeas corpus.
Reaching the lower gallery, I ducked down quick behind the lunatic Phippard, an old sailor in the habit of gleefully swagging on the spot while he scans the heaving main. Adjusting his position, I got him between me and The Schoolmaster’s back, close enough so I could hear what Tuke was saying. Though tall, Phippard makes poor cover, for every twenty minutes or so he stamps his foot and booms out something like, “God bless the King and all the admirals! I would fight up to my neck in blood for them!” before he returns to scanning. Such behaviour is apt to draw the attention of the unaccustomed. Fortunately, being moved by me a dozen feet failed to rouse Phippard from his anticipation of war at sea, and Tuke and The Schoolmaster remained locked in conversation.
By the pitch of The Schoolmaster’s shoulders, it was not one he was happy to be in. Beyond his right shoulder I could see Tuke’s ordinary, impatient face and the clipped movement of his pursed mouth with its chunks of yellow teeth. From the neck down, Tuke is a plain, drab-outfitted squab of the sort so intent on making his appearance unenviable that you can’t forget it. He’s exactly what you think of when you think of a Quaker merchant. Why does the nonconformist always have the best uniform? Yet I felt an immediate connexion to him and thought at first this must be because he’s made his fortune in tea, an ambition once my own, queer as it was just now to watch my hand letter the fact.
But there was something more in Tuke’s face than tea, and something of disguise in that Quaker outfit.
As to who the third gentleman was, owing to the position of The Schoolmaster, I couldn’t see. If it was Bryan Crowther (who’s an unabashed admirer of Tuke and his methods), Mr. Ailey would have known it, and if he didn’t, there’s the fact The Schoolmaster so loathes our surgeon it’s the rare occasion he’ll remain in the same room with him. For all Crowther’s eagerness to be a contributing part of things around here, he ain’t and never was and in his disappointment has too often retreated into drink, which has done nothing to enhance his prospects.
But harkee, Tuke was talking.
“There is much analogy, don’t you think, Mr. Haslam, between the judicious treatment of children and that of insane persons? As the most disruptive lunatic, one might say, has much in common with a two year old?”
“An insane two year old—?” was The Schoolmaster’s murmured response.
Having the dogged, no-nonsense air of a man with a sizable store of pronouncements to get through, Tuke didn’t seem to hear what The Schoolmaster said. Or perhaps Jack smiled as he spoke, and Tuke, thus cued, made the mental note jest, only himself omitting to smile, as one does who, having no sense of humour, assumes any sign of one betrays a tendency to instability best not encouraged.
As for the third gentleman, he shifted his weight like a man uncomfortable with a joke. But he didn’t speak, and he didn’t shift far enough to afford a view of who he was. Perhaps, I thought, it was only Tuke’s son—or even grandson. Old Tuke’s no spring foal.
“Which is not to say,” Tuke continued unflapped, “we should address them in a childish or domineering manner.”
“By no means ought we to domineer,” The Schoolmaster drawled, as if half asleep. “When it’s always been quite enough to dominate.”
Now Tuke shot Jack the scrutinizing look of one to whom it’s just occurred the other could be vibrating at a frequency different from the one he thought. Just to be sure, and revealing the obtuse confidence of fifty years’ freedom from doubt, he waded in deeper. “Dominate, Mr. Haslam? I wonder if we ought to use even a word like dominate.”
“Well,” The Schoolmaster answered, practically in a yawn, “only for Truth’s sake—” Picking up speed, he continued, “Two things, Mr. Tuke. One, these people are indeed in a condition of domination. Their confinement, however mild its acceptation, as at your celebrated house—” bowing—“amounts to an incarceration equal to that of the inhabitants of the King’s Bench, or Newgate Gaol. You do after all require they keep their madness to themselves. Ha-has, so to speak, are fences too. So why should not the manner and discourse of their dominators fit the circumstance?”
Before Tuke could make answer to this, Jack went on. “Two, thinking now of our own personal comportment as it must encourage in our patients that rational calm we agree is our common goal: Unless we’d be self-defeating hypocrites, surely we ought to display the authority invested in us and not, by pretending to be like them (as all too often happens), out of our own sheer lack of self-control in an insidious environment, sink to a level grotesque and dreadful as theirs and so lose their awe and respect altogether.” Here he meant Crowther, but Tuke had no way to know it. “Mind you,” again cutting him off, “if our concern here is only words—because your house employs strait-waistcoats as much as the next, but how in this day and age can anybody expect to attract paying customers with talk of shackles and severity—then I do sympathize, for such meal-mouthedness is only an understandable consequence of lunatic advisors turning hoteliers and so transforming human suffering to a business.”
This attack was vintage Schoolmaster, and I was curious how Tuke would take it—which was slow and deliberate, as he marshalled enough control of himself to make a generous-seeming, let’s-get-back-to-why-I’m-here response. “What I most value about your book, Mr. Haslam, is the impression you convey in it of your energy in doing what’s necessary to initiate a fraternal rapport with each patient. Like the great Pinel—” by a stiffening of his neck you could see how little The Schoolmaster relished the comparison—“you inquire into the particulars of his case, how he acts, how he’s come to be in hospital, and so forth. It’s my belief, as I know it must be yours, that if we would seek to cure—”
“Cure?” The speed with which this syllable shot back at Tuke streaming sarcastic incredulity was remarkable.
“Yes, sir,” Tuke returned, practically as fast. “Cure. Cure of their insanity.”
“Ah, cure,” The Schoolmaster replied, this time like one too innocent not to be a little slow to grasp a point of such diabolical cunning. “Tell me, Mr. Tuke, would this be more politics? They do better if they imagine their time with you well spent? A profitable investment on their part, is that it?”
“Why, what more profitable to a man, Mr. Haslam, than his sanity back?”
“Funny, I thought you’d say soul.” And before Tuke could pick himself off the floor after that one, The Schoolmaster concluded, in a long-suffering voice, something like a fond nephew’s as it finally dawns on him his favourite uncle is a jabbering idiot, “So you do believe you can cure the insane.”
“I do. Here’s why. At The Retreat we see monthly occurrences of it. Weekly occurrences.”
“As do I, even in this poor place.”
“Well then—?”
“Perhaps the difference between us, Mr. Tuke, is you’ve discovered how it’s done. Your innocence of medical rigmarole has afforded you insight unavailable to those of us still fettered by Hippocratic scruples.”
Now, this was going pretty far, even for The Schoolmaster, whose world fame (ever since Pinel, in the book he wrote after he was here, as good as called him the greatest English mad-doctor that ever lived) has for some unaccountable reason done little to curb the effects of his insecurities. It’s as if he’s more impatient than ever with people slow to appreciate how right he is. Yet I wondered if that unease wasn’t blinding him to what he’s up against in the mighty Tuke. Sometimes you’ll half pity a man his crackpot beliefs, and yet what indomitable courage they may be all the while affording him. Enough easily to destroy you and everything you ever stood for.
“I’ll tell you how it’s done, Mr. Haslam.”
As he said these words, Tuke shot a glance at the third gentleman. It was a quick one, the kind by which a man will deflect attention from himself while he frames what he’s going to say next. But for me it told everything. Because even as Tuke glanced at his companion, he (Tuke!) continued to gaze hard at The Schoolmaster.
At first I thought this must be my imagination, yet I knew what I’d seen and so knew it could mean only one thing: Tuke’s been taken over. That connexion I felt to him, what I was seeing in his face, was tea all right, but more essentially it was this: He’s in the power of the gang.
But which agent? If you think I watched him close before—
“The way it’s done, Mr. Haslam, is simple. We must love them.”
A silence ensued from these words, the gentleman next to Tuke once more shifting his weight from one foot to the other, this time (I imagined) in nervous approval, as Tuke’s eyes continued to bore away into The Schoolmaster’s face while The Schoolmaster’s head remained bent. What expression was on The Schoolmaster’s face I had no way to see and couldn’t guess if he’d be bold enough to be meeting Tuke’s gaze.
“Love them—” The Schoolmaster murmured at last, in a doubting tone.
“Yes, sir. Love them. Only by love can this most devastating of human pestilences be cleansed from the face of the earth.”
“Love,” The Schoolmaster repeated again, this time in such a way as to produce an animal sound you would not believe any human language had been vulgar enough to distinguish with meaning. If cure was a term The Schoolmaster found incredible, then love from his mouth was a loathing, unsignificant grunt.
“Love them, sir,” Tuke insisted once more, and added, “for the troubled sinners they are.”
And there it was, as The Schoolmaster had all along known it would be. Even from a Quaker, the sick-sweet incense of priestcraft.
Now I looked at Tuke, who kept his eyes fixed hard on The Schoolmaster as if he would stare him down. At that moment I was struck by how much he resembled the late Sir William Pult-ney. A certain Roman aspect to the nose, and the sunk cheeks, though admittedly from a coarser mould. And then, by an association I at first assumed superficial, I found myself thinking of Dr. DeValangin, Old Benevolence, as we used to call him, who treated no man as a sinner, troubled or not. The resemblance was not with Tuke himself, but—Uh-oh.
Stop right there. Now I knew. And a good thing it was I had Phippard to hold tight to, because the knowledge, when it hit me, buckled my knees.
The truth of the matter is this: The agent currently in charge of the Quaker William Tuke is none other than the leader of the Air Loom gang himself, that archvillain of murderous deceit, the one who’s never been observed to smile except at chess: Bill the King.
May God have mercy on us all.