C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Old Jane in the Insane Ward
By William De Morgan (1839–1917)
T
You know, perfectly well, how when the image of anything you anticipate seeing has taken up space in your mind, you expect the thing, when it comes, to fill up as large a space in the room (or, for that matter, the district) in which you find it. Old Jane had filled up so much of Alice’s and Lady Johnson’s minds, that they could hardly believe that little white still thing on the bed was really she. What they saw seemed a small mask with white hair on a pillow, the head it belonged to encased in a covering that made it more like the sarcophagus than its contents. The body it belonged to was just manifest, no more, through its coverlid. The likeness to a graven image was the greater that it hardly, if at all, suggested Death.
The operation had only just been completed, and all sign of it removed except the head bandages, when Alice and Peggy came into the ward. Mr. Isaacson the surgeon stood by the bed, his eyes fixed attentively on the face. His intensely Egyptian features suggested a Pharaoh standing over his mummied mother. He took no notice of the new arrivals. Sir Rupert went to him, and they stood talking, sotto voce, side by side. Then Isaacson raised his voice.
“I don’t believe she’ll speak. I can’t. But if she does, it will be within a week; either speak or try it on. I must be off.” He dropped his voice again and Alice fancied she heard him say he had to remove a kidney at three. So like a late lunch, thought Alice! He wished Lady Johnson and Miss Kavanagh good morning, but reluctantly, as if he scorned to be ungenerous, but had very little heart in his wishing. However, he made up for it by the cordiality with which he wished them a whole good-day a minute later. But then, mind you, the first wish was that of a detained, the second of a released man.
And then Alice and Peggy, at Sir Rupert’s wish, made up their minds for a long vigil. It was two o’clock, and they were not to be at liberty till eight; not even then if old Jane broke out in speech. “But it’s what she says first I want,” said Rupert; “and if it doesn’t come very soon it won’t be for some time. Still, it’s worth the chance of her speaking for you to be here.”
So he departed and left them sitting on. They could chat with the nurse, and hear about Cases.
“I didn’t know you had any male patients on this side,” said Alice.
“We haven’t any. Why?”
“Because of that poor fellow we saw, whose wife had come to see him.”
“She hadn’t come to see him. He’d come to see her. He’s all right! She’s as mad as a March hare.”
“Is it possible? She looked so absolutely sane.”
“She put the baby in the fire, to purify it from Sin. Has to be watched constantly, or she’d kill herself. Because she’s too bad to live! Only been married a couple of years.”
“Was she”—Alice nodded towards the bed—“always quite still and silent, like this?”
“Not quite like this: that is, she has never spoken since she came here. Before we were born. But she has always moved slightly—enough to show she was alive. A nurse who was here before her husband died told me that once she was thought to have moved and tried to speak. They sent for her husband, who used to live here, in case anything changed. But it turned out a mistake. They had better have waited till they were sure.”
Poor Verrinder! Fancy how he came round in response to the summons! Fancy how he went back! So thought Alice to herself.
“She told me too,” continued the nurse, whose name was Gaisford, Alice learned, “that after that he got so sleepless at night that he took to chloral and chloroform. It had to do with his death in the end.”
As Alice and Peggy remained watching by the motionless figure for over five hours, and Alice talked almost all that time with the nurse, you may be sure she heard a great deal about Insanity in all its phases. But we cannot write it all down here, and need not, as she wrote it all down herself afterwards. If you recollect her story of ‘Ann Carlyon,’ you will see how she made use of the girl who counted her fingers. Ann (you may remember) was betrothed to a man who was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude for forgery. In the first year she got into the habit of counting her ten fingers continually; in the second she counted to the ninth, and so on. If spoken to she always counted to her limit before answering. At the end of the fifth year came the news that he had died in prison. After that she never ceased counting as far as the fifth finger, and became a hopeless lunatic. Peggy said she had a great mind never to speak to Aunty Lissy again when she wrote this: “You wicked A. K.,” said she; “how ever can you do such things, with that innocent blue-eyed look all over your face, I can’t think!” And Alice looked ashamed, and answered: “But I did cry over it, Mother Peggy dear, and real tears too!” And, as she said it, the little six-year-old Alice, “Alice the kid,” came back—oh, so strongly—to her questioners’ mind. But all this has nothing to do with the story.
More than once during the long vigil by the bedside one of the three watchers fancied she saw a movement of the still features. It always turned out to be a mistake due to nervousness. At least, if movement there had been, it was not confirmed and repeated. There was a great difference between the susceptibility to nervous impressions of the three; the nurse being by far the least impressionable, while Lady Johnson towards the end of the time was quite upset in her judgment by the constant strain of fixed attention. “I’m sure I saw the lips move then,” she would say at intervals. But she was always wrong. Both she and Alice were glad when the clock gave them leave to go.
And when Peggy arrived at home, and went to her own room, tired and disconcerted, she felt quite sorry for her husband, and the report she had to give. “I’m afraid you’ll be so disgusted, darling,” she began. But Sir Rupert, who was in his dressing-room, only asked if they had brought back Fludyer in the carriage with them. “I told him to come,” he said. “Is anyone else coming? No one else. Then I shan’t dress, it’s so late—oh! there’s his knock. I thought he’d come.”
“But it is disgusting, dear, isn’t it?”
“Yes! The old lady ought to have looked alive! But—better luck next time!”
As it turned out, it was as well that they did so. For a fortnight after the operation Old Jane, quite suddenly, spoke. We have to rely for the particulars of her first utterances on Mrs. Gaisford, the nurse who was with her at the time, and on Dr. Fludyer, who was at once summoned. Stated briefly, the facts appeared to have been as follows:—
Since the operation the only noticeable change in the patient had been that the slight appearance of a distinction between a sleeping and a waking state had become intensified, so that it was no longer a matter of opinion which predominated. On this occasion the nurse’s attention was aroused by a more definite aspect of healthy sleep than she had seen hitherto. It may have been only her fancy that the color of the face had changed, but she had no doubt of the fact that the lips moved once or twice without giving any sound, in a way that seemed to suggest an effort to speak. She at once sent word to Dr. Fludyer, who arrived from his own residence about an hour later. Her impression must have been strong about the movement of the lips, as it was well past midnight and there was a heavy downpour of rain. It was not an occasion to bring even a doctor out of his bed into the streets, except for cause shown.
On his arrival he found that nothing further had occurred; but he noticed the change in the appearance of the patient, and remarked to the nurse that had he known nothing of the case, he should have supposed her to be in a healthy sleep, making of course due allowance for her age. The sleep of very old people when not stertorous has an appearance of torpor, often enough. He remained watching by the bedside for the slightest movement, occasionally touching the patient’s pulse, but observed no change of any sort. At last, despairing of anything, and hearing a slight lull in the steady torrents of rain which had continued for more than two hours without intermission, he got up to go.
“Send for me again,” said he to the nurse, “if you see any movement whatever, or think you do. Never mind if it is fancy. I would sooner be brought here fifty times by mistake than miss seeing the return of consciousness—if ever there is any. Possibly you were, as you think now, mistaken this time. But never mind! Send again.” And the nurse promised to do so, though evidently disconcerted at her mistake.
Dr. Fludyer put on the overcoat he had taken off on coming into the ward, and his hat. He took one more look at the almost inanimate white figure on the bed before him, the head enclosed in a close-fitting black coif that protected without oppressing the seat of the operation. He touched the pulse of the motionless hand on the coverlid once more, and finding no fluctuation of the slow beat that had for sixty years registered the vitality of a living tomb, turned to go, leaving the nurse to her dreary vigil in the silence, broken only by the sound of the falling rain, and now and then the groan, or, almost worse, the laugh of some distant patient. As he walked out into the corridor a door slammed and the echoes reverberated through the building. The sound of a discussion or altercation, that was part of the door-slamming incident, mixed in with another sound that had caught his attention and made him stop. The voice of a woman, not the nurse, coming from the ward he had just left.
Yes, it came quite distinctly from that room, and was not the voice of the nurse, for her voice followed it immediately—entirely different.
“Oh—Dr. Fludyer! come—come at once!” And as he returned, in response to the agitated summons, the first voice came again, with the startled sound that was in it before, showing a growth towards terror. “What is it?” and again, “What is it?” And the louder accent suggested the sort of utterance of one who, anxious to warn a suspected evil-doer, betrays his own apprehension in the attempt.
Dr. Fludyer afterwards told Sir Rupert that at this point he felt dumb-struck—and could not find a word. The nurse was more prompt; perhaps readier in the class of fiction with which patients are soothed and silenced.
“The docter says you are not to move, Mrs. Verrinder, but to lie quite still till he comes.”
The figure that had half-moved, and still seemed to struggle to move, fell back passively. Then the voice came again, only with less of strain and tension.
“But you will tell me what it is? What is it?”
The nurse replied with what struck Dr. Fludyer as a good deal of readiness and tact, “I am only just come. The doctor will be here soon.” The patient appeared to attach full meaning to these words.
“Will you,” she said, still with bewilderment and apprehension in her tone, “be so kind as to ring the bell, or call the girl. Call ‘Elizabeth’ over the stairs, and she will come.” And then, as though she mistrusted the carrying out of these instructions, she began to call herself, “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” No response following, she went on, “The girl must have gone out.” And then suddenly, “Where is Mr. Verrinder?”
The nurse replied as before, “I have only just come, Ma’am,” and then looked enquiringly at Dr. Fludyer. He understood her, and nodded; she continued, “The doctor has just come—but he begs you will lie still and not try to talk.”
“That is quite right, Mrs. Verrinder,” said he; “you lie quite still and try not to talk.” This slightly varied way of putting it seemed to have its effect, for the patient appeared to acquiesce. Dr. Fludyer said afterwards to Sir Rupert that from this moment he made up his mind to behave exactly as he should have done had the suspension of consciousness been sixty hours instead of sixty years. He found, he said, that by adhering blindly to this rule, difficulties that seemed insuperable vanished.
He sat down by the bedside, and put his finger on the pulse.
“That is right,” he repeated, “lie quite quiet and we shall do nicely.” Then anticipating that her next speech would be a repetition of her last, he thought it safest to forestall it. He had made up his mind that some falsehood would be inevitable, and felt it would be safest to be beforehand.
“Mr. Verrinder has been obliged to go away,” he said. “We have not heard from him.” And then conscious that it was absolutely necessary to touch some new point, little matter what, that would arrest the current of enquiry, he added, “I am Dr. Fludyer.” He could not at the time analyze his reasons for believing this would answer the purpose, but it seemed to do so. Maybe it carried a suggestion that more would come without being asked for; and he thought it safest, having procured a pause, to follow on in it at once, and choose his own line of explanation.
“You have had a most dangerous illness, Mrs. Verrinder, and have been for a long time unconscious. You are not in your own home, but in a Hospital. You were moved here at your husband’s wish, as he knew you would be far better nursed here than would have been possible at home.”
“And is he gone away, leaving me here?” The old lips, that did not know how old they were, twitched and worked about; and the old eyes, that probably saw little and thought the cause was darkness, went nearer to turning round and looking at the doctor than they had done yet.
“He was obliged to go. He had no choice.”
“What could oblige him to go? He had told me nothing.” The doctor felt he was at dangerously close quarters with his difficulty, and he must retreat.
“You must remember, Mrs. Verrinder, that I have only very lately taken charge of you, and I cannot give you all the information I should like to give. The nurse also is new, and knows even less than I do. It is now three in the morning, and she sent for me quite suddenly a couple of hours since, having seen signs of consciousness returning.”
“Oh, dear! I am so sorry. I could have waited. I fear you had to get up to come to me.”
“That,” said Fludyer afterwards to Sir Rupert, “was the worst of all. There was an awful unearthly feel about it that her civil speech was really an apology made in the beginning of the century. It felt as though it were not the old woman who had come back like a ghost into the present time, but that I was being dragged back into the past. The colloquial, everyday character of her speech was so intense.” But he persevered in the course he had laid down for himself, and glued his mind to the fiction of the three days’ torpor.
“We doctors get used to this sort of thing, Mrs. Verrinder,” he said, cheerfully. And the recumbent figure replied, in the same voice of appreciative civility, “You are very good.”
“I think it right to tell you, Mrs. Verrinder,” he continued, “that your accident made an operation necessary”—he hesitated a moment.
“I cannot understand,” she said; “have I had an accident?—oh, if I could only understand!” The distress in her voice was intensely painful to her hearers, accustomed as both were to every incident of mental disease. Dr. Fludyer thought he saw his way clearer.
“Is it possible, Mrs. Verrinder,” said he, speaking with studious gentleness, “that you do not remember your fall—on the stairs?” She seemed to think a minute. “Yes, I do remember that I fell on the stairs,” said she, “but that was just now.” The doctor saw his way clearer still.
“No, dear Mrs. Verrinder. That is where your mistake is. It was not just now, but some time since. I will not tell you how long. You have been insensible for a long time.” He paused, but the puzzled look on the old face seemed not to intend speech—only to wait to hear more. He went on:
“Your fall on the stairs resulted in concussion of the brain and as a consequence you fell into a state of insensibility. A recent operation has relieved the depression of the skull which caused this insensibility, but has left behind it the pain you are now feeling in the back of your head. You have not spoken of it, but I know it is there.” The patient murmured, “Oh yes—great pain,” but spoke more drowsily than before. Evidently the exertion of her recent speech was telling.
“Until that pain subsides, Mrs. Verrinder, I wish you—I most earnestly beg of you—to be patient and not try to talk.” He stopped again, for the nurse had conveyed to him by a sign that she thought no more need to be said then. “She’ll be quiet awhile now,” she said.
What had struck the doctor as strangest in all this was the way in which the speech and manner of the patient had lent itself to the fiction that she had only been two or three days insensible. If he could have felt certain of a result he was inclined to anticipate—namely, reaction and collapse—he would have assured her that this was no fiction at all. But he was handicapped by the thought of explanations to come. He was fortified by scientific certainty of her extinction in case of death, and no unsettling new scientific certainties happened to have been recently demonstrated; so, to put it briefly, if she died, fibs wouldn’t matter. If you happen to belong to any of the many schools of philosophy that condemn his view, as well as each other, be good enough to recollect that he had no thought but for the patient. After waiting the best part of an hour, both nurse and doctor became convinced that the excitement and exertion of speech had produced their natural effect, and that poor old Jane had collapsed into a deep sleep or its equivalent in her condition. They were mistaken; for as the doctor was departing, he was a second time recalled by a voice from the bed. Its self-command was extraordinary: taken apart from the abnormal state of the speaker. It was perfectly normal in itself.
“Is the gentleman gone—that was here just now?”
“No, Ma’am! Dr. Fludyer is here.”
“Dr. Fludyer. I did not catch your name before. I have something, Sir, I wish to ask you. But I speak with difficulty. Something catches. And I have no feeling except the head-pain. Will it go?”
“Oh yes! We must have patience, and lie quiet. Do you feel my hand on yours? Now!”— He raised and replaced his hand on the inanimate one on the coverlid, once or twice.
“Yes, I think I do. But my head prevents my feeling anything. Is this good woman touching my other hand?” The nurse had done so. She drew her hand down the body and legs. “Did you feel that?” said she.
“Oh yes! I felt you touch my chest.” The doctor and nurse glanced at each other.
“We must not talk too much,” said he. “There was something you said you wished to ask me, Mrs. Verrinder.”
“Yes. My baby was to come in September. Will this—will this——?”
The doctor beckoned the nurse away from the bed, and they spoke together in a whisper. They had taken for granted that the patient would not be conscious of their doing so. It was a mistake.
“Is it something I am not to hear?” The terrified inflection of the voice was painful beyond expression.
“You shall hear directly, Mrs. Verrinder.” The doctor said this, and again spoke to the nurse, under his breath, but emphatically. She shrugged her shoulders very slightly, and raised her eyebrows, as in protest, and then went again to the patient. When she spoke, her effort in doing so was audible in her voice.
“Dr. Fludyer wishes me to tell you, Mrs. Verrinder, your baby was born, and did not live.” She could get no further. Yet she was manifestly not a soft character—no mere dweller on the sentimental side of the terrible dramas she saw daily. She was a thorough mad-house nurse, chosen as specially worthy of reliance. But this case staggered her.
“What she tells you is true,” said Dr. Fludyer, firmly, but quietly. “Your baby—a little girl—was born prematurely in consequence of the accident. It could not have been reared, in any case.”
“Did she say anything articulate after that?” asked Rupert. Fludyer shook his head.
“Hardly a word!” he replied. “She began saying, ‘Oh, what will my—’ or ‘What will he—’ and got no further. After that she became almost silent, and has remained so, except for short beginnings, such as ‘I must get—’ or ‘Will you send—?’ She seems to be weaker than at first, and to half-capture thoughts and let them slip.”
“Get some food, Fludyer; you must want it. And afterwards we can talk of what’s to be done next.” For this was in Harley Street, whither Dr. Fludyer had gone as soon as the hour was plausible. He need not have been so scrupulous, for the great physician was at the end of a very early breakfast when he was shown in. “Jane has spoken!” said he. And then he used the last energies a wearisome night had left in him to give a conscientiously detailed account of the amazing revival.
“I suppose there never was another case like it,” said Rupert. “See that Dr. Fludyer gets plenty to eat, Handsworth. You’ll excuse me, Fludyer, I must run up and tell Lady Johnson this.” For the hallucination we chronicled long ago of a young House Physician, of a strange wireless current between himself and that handsome eldest daughter of old Heath in Hyde Park Gardens, was still as active as ever. And for all that he was so great and distinguished, he was just as conscious now, wherever he was, of the locus of Harley Street and Lady Johnson in it, as ever he was of “the Gardens” and their relation to Miss Margaret Heath. Only he had got used to it, you see! In the present case Dr. Fludyer’s tale was firstly to be passed on to Peggy, and secondly to excite its full interest as soon as she was qualified to share it. It was rather a tit-bit to him, but he wasn’t going to turn it over in his mouth until she was helped. There was a gleam of satisfaction on his face as he half-opened the bedroom door. He went straight to the point.
“She’s spoken! May I come in?”
“Yes, come in! Who’s spoken? Oh dear, I had fallen asleep again.”
“Old Jane, of course. But it’s only just eight.”
“You don’t mean it? How did you get here?”
“Fludyer has come. Spoke at three o’clock this morning. Seems coherent too.” Sir Rupert made no concealment of his triumphant feeling. He had scored.
“I’ll get up at once. Pull that bell hard, and then run away and don’t hinder, that’s a ducky! That’s right!” And Sir Rupert, anxious not to hinder, is retreating downstairs, when the door he has just closed is opened to tell him to mind and not let Dr. Fludyer go till the speaker comes.
(We could have put this little conversation into much more logical order. But the fact is, that’s the way people talk, and it can’t be helped.)
Sir Rupert could not have been more than four minutes on the stairs—because he only had a short interview with Lucy about what sort of literature young ladies-of-fourteen governesses have a right to say they are not to read; and as for Phillips and Alice he brought them down, one over each shoulder. Nevertheless he found when he got back to the breakfast-room that Aunt Lissy was interviewing Dr. Fludyer, and knew all about it.
“I’m going straight away to see her,” she said. And she had clearly made up her mind. We believe we have made it understood that when Alice decided on a course of action, opposition was useless. Besides, Dr. Fludyer was only too glad that she should do as she wished.
“It will be very kind of you to come,” he said. “I have no fault to find with Gaisford, nor the others. But their employment gives them a certain tone—they can’t help it. This poor old—curiosity—is, remember, not insane now in any sense. And probably no human creature ever needed consolation and sympathy from a fellow-woman more.”
“Mamma will want to go too,” remarked Sir Rupert, using this epithet in acknowledgment of the two little people he was unloading from his shoulders. “At least I suppose so.”
“I’m not sure Mamma had better come.” Thus Alice, thoughtfully. “Won’t there be rather too much of us, doctor?”
“I would just as soon she didn’t go,” said Sir Rupert. “She does take things to heart so terribly. Not that you’re an unfeeling beast, Aunt Lissy. But you have a sort of buoyancy.”
“Listen to Papa trying to get out of his difficulties, Lucy.”
“Why mustn’t I go?” says Miss Lucy. And Papa observes in an undertone to Dr. Fludyer that he has brought an old house about his ears. Lucy, however, is reduced ad absurdum by a claim from Alice that she shall do too.
When Peggy came down ten minutes later, she found the matter settled by council, and enforced by circumstance. For Alice had hurried through her own breakfast in order to depart at once with Dr. Fludyer in his responsible brougham, which had been waiting all this while. Appealed to as Mother Peg, darling, to be reasonable, she surrendered her wish to come too, especially as time was passing, and she couldn’t get her breakfast and see Snaith, the housekeeper, in less than half-an-hour. So Alice went off with Dr. Fludyer. “Just like an elopement,” said she as she took her seat in the carriage. “Sorry about Mrs. Fludyer,” said the doctor. “Also you’re sixty if you’re a minute!” said Alice, the rude, unladylike girl!
“And what’s so intensely shocking to me,” she went on, her laugh dying abruptly, “is that the poor old curiosity we are going to is my age only; so far as the living of life goes!”
“And mine into the bargain,” said the doctor, “as far as the passage of time goes. And I’m afraid it goes furthest in the long run.”
The carriage went responsibly along the proper side of the way, with two silent people in it, thinking.