XVII. THE IDIOT
Evan MacIan was standing a few yards off looking at him in
absolute silence.
He had not the moral courage to ask MacIan if there had been
anything astounding in the manner of his coming there, nor did
MacIan seem to have any question to ask, or perhaps any need to
ask it. The two men came slowly towards each other, and found the
same expression on each other's faces. Then, for the first time
in all their acquaintance, they shook hands.
Almost as if this were a kind of unconscious signal, it brought
Dr. Quayle bounding out of a door and running across the lawn.
"Oh, there you are!" he exclaimed with a relieved giggle. "Will
you come inside, please? I want to speak to you both."
They followed him into his shiny wooden office where their
damning record was kept. Dr. Quayle sat down on a swivel chair
and swung round to face them. His carved smile had suddenly
disappeared.
"I will be plain with you gentlemen," he said, abruptly; "you
know quite well we do our best for everybody here. Your cases
have been under special consideration, and the Master himself has
decided that you ought to be treated specially and--er--under
somewhat simpler conditions."
"You mean treated worse, I suppose," said Turnbull, gruffly.
The doctor did not reply, and MacIan said: "I expected this." His
eyes had begun to glow.
The doctor answered, looking at his desk and playing with a key:
"Well, in certain cases that give anxiety--it is often
better----"
"Give anxiety," said Turnbull, fiercely. "Confound your
impudence! What do you mean? You imprison two perfectly sane men
in a madhouse because you have made up a long word. They take it
in good temper, walk and talk in your garden like monks who have
found a vocation, are civil even to you, you damned druggists'
hack! Behave not only more sanely than any of your patients, but
more sanely than half the sane men outside, and you have the
soul-stifling cheek to say that they give anxiety."
"The head of the asylum has settled it all," said Dr. Quayle,
still looking down.
MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the
doctor with flaming eyes.
"If the head has settled it let the head announce it," he said.
"I won't take it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering
degenerate. Let us see the head of the asylum."
"See the head of the asylum," repeated Dr. Quayle. "Certainly
not."
The tall Highlander, bending over him, put one hand on his
shoulder with fatherly interest.
"You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my
position as a lunatic," he said. "I could kill you with my left
hand before such a rat as you could so much as squeak. And I
wouldn't be hanged for it."
"I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan," said Turnbull with sobriety
and perfect respectfulness, "that you had better let us see the
head of the institution."
Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and
clumsy presence of mind.
"Oh, certainly," he said with a weak laugh. "You can see the head
of the asylum if you particularly want to." He almost ran out of
the room, and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails.
He knocked at an ordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a
voice said, "Come in," MacIan's breath went hissing back through
his teeth into his chest. Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened
the door.
It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a
medical library. At the other end of it was a ponderous and
polished desk with an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which
was just sufficient to show a slender, well-bred figure in an
ordinary medical black frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered
with age, was bent over neat piles of notes. This gentleman
looked up for an instant as they entered, and the lamplight fell
on his glittering spectacles and long, clean-shaven face--a face
which would have been simply like an aristocrat's but that a
certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in the chin made it
look more like a very handsome actor's. It was only for a flash
that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head over
his notes once more, and said, without looking up again:
"I told you, Dr. Quayle, that these men were to go to cells B and
C."
Turnbull and MacIan looked at each other, and said more than they
could ever say with tongues or swords. Among other things they
said that to that particular Head of the institution it was a
waste of time to appeal, and they followed Dr. Quayle out of the
room.
The instant they stepped out into the corridor four sturdy
figures stepped from four sides, pinioned them, and ran them
along the galleries. They might very likely have thrown their
captors right and left had they been inclined to resist, but for
some nameless reason they were more inclined to laugh. A mixture
of mad irony with childish curiosity made them feel quite
inclined to see what next twist would be taken by their imbecile
luck. They were dragged down countless cold avenues lined with
glazed tiles, different only in being of different lengths and
set at different angles. They were so many and so monotonous that
to escape back by them would have been far harder than fleeing
from the Hampton Court maze. Only the fact that windows grew
fewer, coming at longer intervals, and the fact that when the
windows did come they seemed shadowed and let in less light,
showed that they were winding into the core or belly of some
enormous building. After a little time the glazed corridors began
to be lit by electricity.
At last, when they had walked nearly a mile in those white and
polished tunnels, they came with quite a shock to the futile
finality of a cul-de-sac. All that white and weary journey ended
suddenly in an oblong space and a blank white wall. But in the
white wall there were two iron doors painted white on which were
written, respectively, in neat black capitals B and C.
"You go in here, sir," said the leader of the officials, quite
respectfully, "and you in here."
But before the doors had clanged upon their dazed victims, MacIan
had been able to say to Turnbull with a strange drawl of
significance: "I wonder who A is."
Turnbull made an automatic struggle before he allowed himself to
be thrown into the cell. Hence it happened that he was the last
to enter, and was still full of the exhilaration of the
adventures for at least five minutes after the echo of the
clanging door had died away.
Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and
a half hours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end
of his life. He was hidden and sealed up in this little crack of
stone until the flesh should fall off his bones. He was dead, and
the world had won.
His cell was of an oblong shape, but very long in comparison with
its width. It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully
extended with the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left
wall, very dusty. It was, however, long enough for a man to walk
one thirty-fifth part of a mile if he traversed it entirely. On
the same principle a row of fixed holes, quite close together,
let in to the cells by pipes what was alleged to be the freshest
air. For these great scientific organizers insisted that a man
should be healthy even if he was miserable. They provided a walk
long enough to give him exercise and holes large enough to give
him oxygen. There their interest in human nature suddenly ceased.
It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefit of
exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty. They had not
entertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of the
advantages of the open sky. They administered air in secret, but
in sufficient doses, as if it were a medicine. They suggested
walking, as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk. Above all,
the asylum authorities insisted on their own extraordinary
cleanliness. Every morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep
on his iron bedstead which was lifted half-way up the wall and
clamped to it with iron, four sluices or metal mouths opened
above him at the four corners of the chamber and washed it white
of any defilement. Turnbull's solitary soul surged up against
this sickening daily solemnity.
"I am buried alive!" he cried, bitterly; "they have hidden me
under mountains. I shall be here till I rot. Why the blazes
should it matter to them whether I am dirty or clean."
Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong
cell, and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of
perfectly cooked lentils and a big bowl of cocoa. He was not
underfed any more than he was underexercised or asphyxiated. He
had ample walking space, ample air, ample and even filling food.
The only objection was that he had nothing to walk towards,
nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever for drawing the
breath of life.
Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him. It was a
long, narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and
ought to have had a flat wall at the other; but that end was
broken by a wedge or angle of space, like the prow of a ship.
After three days of silence and cocoa, this angle at the end
began to infuriate Turnbull. It maddened him to think that two
lines came together and pointed at nothing. After the fifth day
he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner. After
twenty-five days he almost broke his head against it. Then he
became quite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like
a sort of Robinson Crusoe.
Almost unconsciously it was his instinct to examine outlets, and
he found himself paying particular attention to the row of holes
which let in the air into his last house of life. He soon
discovered that these air-holes were all the ends and mouths of
long leaden tubes which doubtless carried air from some remote
watering-place near Margate. One evening while he was engaged in
the fifth investigation he noticed something like twilight in one
of these dumb mouths, as compared with the darkness of the
others. Thrusting his finger in as far as it would go, he found a
hole and flapping edge in the tube. This he rent open and
instantly saw a light behind; it was at least certain that he had
struck some other cell.
It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient",
which means mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at
all they go entirely wrong. There is no power of retrieving a
defeat, as in simpler and more living organisms. A strong gun can
conquer a strong elephant, but a wounded elephant can easily
conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian monarchy in the
eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army merely by
making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent
possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their
enemies than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities
so long as it is quite solid means a general safety, but if there
is one leak it means concentrated poison--an explosion of deathly
germs like dynamite, a spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that
excellent machinery which is the swiftest thing on earth in
saving human labour is also the slowest thing on earth in
resisting human interference. It may be easier to get chocolate
for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic machine.
But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic
machine would be much less likely to run after you.
Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with
the cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum. He had been
shaken by many spiritual states since the instant when he was
pitched head foremost into that private cell which was to be his
private room till death. He had felt a high fit of pride and
poetry, which had ebbed away and left him deadly cold. He had
known a period of mere scientific curiosity, in the course of
which he examined all the tiles of his cell, with the gratifying
conclusion that they were all the same shape and size; but was
greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end, and also
about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a
period of mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but
only by those few dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal
huntsman to hunt down and humiliate human nature. This also
passed, but left behind it a feverish distaste for many of the
mere objects around him. Long after he had returned to sanity and
such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on a desert
island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above
all, he had a hatred, deep as the hell he did not believe in, for
the objectless iron peg in the wall.
But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he
never really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and
as hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless
cosmos of his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and
inexhaustible resources of our scientific civilization. He no
more expected rescue from a medical certificate than rescue from
the solar system. In many of his Robinson Crusoe moods he thought
kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome school-fellow who had
long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cell when he died a
rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to write them
down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled to
discover how much they had changed. Then he remembered the
Beauchamp Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the
wall, and discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing
could be either drawn or carved. Then for an instant there hung
and broke above him like a high wave the whole horror of
scientific imprisonment, which manages to deny a man not only
liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage. In the old
filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in the
rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing
witness. The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a
beetle strayed out of a hole. Here the unpierceable walls were
washed every morning by an automatic sluice. There was no natural
corruption and no merciful decay by which a living thing could
enter in. Then James Turnbull looked up and saw the high
invincible hatefulness of the society in which he lived, and saw
the hatefulness of something else also, which he told himself
again and again was not the cosmos in which he believed. But all
the time he had never once doubted that the five sides of his
cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and it gave
him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through
the aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had forgotten how
close efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily,
therefore, a pipe here or there may leak.
Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last
managed to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light
that came up from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect;
it seemed to fall from some hole or window higher up. As he was
screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was
astonished to see another human finger very long and lean come
down from above towards the broken pipe and hook it up to
something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and
blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something human
spoke down the tube, though the words were not clear.
"Who is that?" asked Turnbull, trembling with excitement, yet
wary and quite resolved not to spoil any chance.
After a few indistinct sounds the voice came down with a strong
Argyllshire accent:
"I say, Turnbull, we couldn't fight through this tube, could we?"
Sentiments beyond speech surged up in Turnbull and silenced him
for a space just long enough to be painful. Then he said with his
old gaiety: "I vote we talk a little first; I don't want to
murder the first man I have met for ten million years."
"I know what you mean," answered the other. "It has been awful.
For a mortal month I have been alone with God."
Turnbull started, and it was on the tip of his tongue to answer:
"Alone with God! Then you do not know what loneliness is."
But he answered, after all, in his old defiant style: "Alone with
God, were you? And I suppose you found his Majesty's society
rather monotonous?"
"Oh, no," said MacIan, and his voice shuddered; "it was a great
deal too exciting."
After a very long silence the voice of MacIan said: "What do you
really hate most in your place?"
"You'd think I was really mad if I told you," answered Turnbull,
bitterly.
"Then I expect it's the same as mine," said the other voice.
"I am sure it's not the same as anybody's," said Turnbull, "for
it has no rhyme or reason. Perhaps my brain really has gone, but
I detest that iron spike in the left wall more than the damned
desolation or the damned cocoa. Have you got one in your cell?"
"Not now," replied MacIan with serenity. "I've pulled it out."
His fellow-prisoner could only repeat the words.
"I pulled it out the other day when I was off my head," continued
the tranquil Highland voice. "It looked so unnecessary."
"You must be ghastly strong," said Turnbull.
"One is, when one is mad," was the careless reply, "and it had
worn a little loose in the socket. Even now I've got it out I
can't discover what it was for. But I've found out something a
long sight funnier."
"What do you mean?" asked Turnbull.
"I have found out where A is," said the other.
Three weeks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up
communications which made his meaning plain. By that time the two
captives had fully discovered and demonstrated that weakness in
the very nature of modern machinery to which we have already
referred. The very fact that they were isolated from all
companions meant that they were free from all spies, and as there
were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to be baffled.
Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells; that
machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual
suggestion, opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to
let in a small man, in the exact place where there had been
before the tiny ventilation holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into
MacIan's apartment, and his first glance found out that the iron
spike was indeed plucked from its socket, and left, moreover,
another ragged hole into some hollow place behind. But for this
MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long oblong
ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that
short oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That
individual looked at it with a puzzled face.
"What is in there?" he asked.
MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."
"But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even more
puzzled; "the doors of our cells are at the other end."
"It has no door," said Evan.
In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister
feeling crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself.
The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of
half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is
half understood.
"James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these
people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more
than any man feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy
and galloping in order to capture us and wipe us out--in order to
kill us. And they have killed us, for you and I have only made a
hole in our coffins. But though this hatred that they felt for us
is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and more plain and
practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet it is not
we whom the people of this place hate most."
A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's
spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and
supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition
either.
"There is another man more fearful and hateful," went on MacIan,
in his low monotone voice, "and they have buried him even deeper.
God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor
window, nor lowered through any opening above. I expect these
iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned
machinery for walling him up. He is there. I have looked through
the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him long, because
his face is turned away from me and he does not move."
Al Turnbull's unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their
outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown
room.
It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that
it was doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted
a large black A like the B and C outside their own doors. The
letter in this case was not painted outside, because this prison
had no outside.
On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares
had maddened Turnbull's eye and brain, was sitting a figure which
was startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous
head was ringed with hair of a frosty grey. The figure was
draped, both insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like
the remains of a brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of
cocoa stood on the floor beside it, and the creature had his big
grey head cocked at a particular angle of inquiry or attention
which amid all that gathering gloom and mystery struck one as
comic if not cocksure.
After six still seconds Turnbull could stand it no longer, but
called out to the dwarfish thing--in what words heaven knows. The
thing got up with the promptitude of an animal, and turning round
offered the spectacle of two owlish eyes and a huge
grey-and-white beard not unlike the plumage of an owl. This
extraordinary beard covered him literally to his feet (not that
that was very far), and perhaps it was as well that it did, for
portions of his remaining clothing seemed to fall off whenever he
moved. One talks trivially of a face like parchment, but this old
man's face was so wrinkled that it was like a parchment loaded
with hieroglyphics. The lines of his face were so deep and
complex that one could see five or ten different faces besides
the real one, as one can see them in an elaborate wall-paper. And
yet while his face seemed like a scripture older than the gods,
his eyes were quite bright, blue, and startled like those of a
baby. They looked as if they had only an instant before been
fitted into his head.
Everything depended so obviously upon whether this buried monster
spoke that Turnbull did not know or care whether he himself had
spoken. He said something or nothing. And then he waited for this
dwarfish voice that had been hidden under the mountains of the
world. At last it did speak, and spoke in English, with a foreign
accent that was neither Latin nor Teutonic. He suddenly stretched
out a long and very dirty forefinger, and cried in a voice of
clear recognition, like a child's: "That's a hole."
He digested the discovery for some seconds, sucking his finger,
and then he cried, with a crow of laughter: "And that's a head
come through it."
The hilarious energy in this idiot attitude gave Turnbull another
sick turn. He had grown to tolerate those dreary and mumbling
madmen who trailed themselves about the beautiful asylum gardens.
But there was something new and subversive of the universe in the
combination of so much cheerful decision with a body without a
brain.
"Why did they put you in such a place?" he asked at last with
embarrassment.
"Good place. Yes," said the old man, nodding a great many times
and beaming like a flattered landlord. "Good shape. Long and
narrow, with a point. Like this," and he made lovingly with his
hands a map of the room in the air.
"But that's not the best," he added, confidentially. "Squares
very good; I have a nice long holiday, and can count them. But
that's not the best."
"What is the best?" asked Turnbull in great distress.
"Spike is the best," said the old man, opening his blue eyes
blazing; "it sticks out."
The words Turnbull spoke broke out of him in pure pity. "Can't we
do anything for you?" he said.
"I am very happy," said the other, alphabetically. "You are a
good man. Can I help you?"
"No, I don't think you can, sir," said Turnbull with rough
pathos; "I am glad you are contented at least."
The weird old person opened his broad blue eyes and fixed
Turnbull with a stare extraordinarily severe. "You are quite
sure," he said, "I cannot help you?"
"Quite sure, thank you," said Turnbull with broken brevity. "Good
day."
Then he turned to MacIan who was standing close behind him, and
whose face, now familiar in all its moods, told him easily that
Evan had heard the whole of the strange dialogue.
"Curse those cruel beasts!" cried Turnbull. "They've turned him
to an imbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a
pin-point now."
"You are sure he is a lunatic?" said Evan, slowly.
"Not a lunatic," said Turnbull, "an idiot. He just points to
things and says that they stick out."
"He had a notion that he could help us," said MacIan moodily, and
began to pace towards the other end of his cell.
"Yes, it was a bit pathetic," assented Turnbull; "such a Thing
offering help, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?"
"God Almighty guide us all!" said MacIan.
He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and
staring quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them
up from the sun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at
the door likewise, and then he also uttered an exclamation. The
iron door was standing about an inch and a half open.
"He said----" began Evan, in a trembling voice--"he offered----"
"Come along, you fool!" shouted Turnbull with a sudden and
furious energy. "I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of
luck in the world. You pulled out that iron handle that had
screwed up his cell, and it somehow altered the machinery and
opened all the doors."
Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the
open corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a
half-darkened window.
"All the same," said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary
conversation, "he did ask you whether he could help you."
All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the
heart of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour
before the fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world.
They did not even know what hour of the day it was; and when,
turning a corner, they saw the bare tunnel of the corridor end
abruptly in a shining square of garden, the grass burning in that
strong evening sunshine which makes it burnished gold rather than
green, the abrupt opening on to the earth seemed like a hole
knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twice in life is it
permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from outside,
and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet begun.
As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth
they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn,
of being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth.
They were looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.
Turnbull was the first to leap into the garden, with an
earth-spurning leap like that of one who could really spread his
wings and fly. MacIan, who came an instant after, was less full
of mere animal gusto and fuller of a more fearful and quivering
pleasure in the clear and innocent flower colours and the high
and holy trees. With one bound they were in that cool and cleared
landscape, and they found just outside the door the black-clad
gentleman with the cloven chin smilingly regarding them; and his
chin seemed to grow longer and longer as he smiled.
