Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

My brother and I had a male cousin who had been interned there for many years and whom we had never visited. Indeed, many of Bedlam’s residents had lived (if life it be) in that sad but purportedly indispensable facility for just as long as he. The clearly insane, who would do grave injury in close company with other inmates, were confined within separate isolated quarters; yet the number of patients overall, and the scarcity of space available for their segregation from sound-minded society, required a mingling of the imbecilic with the overly nervous and overwrought, those who imagined themselves (with some innocuity) to be famous personages interposed amongst the birdish chatterers and the palsied and the feebleminded and dodderingly senile.

Young Bevan Dabber was not alone in his affliction. His imbecility, as his father explained it to me on our walk to Bedlam, whilst quite singular in the manifestation of its symptoms, was shared by a number of other inmates of various ages. There was a lack of intellectual apprehension and cerebral engagement in the afflicted, but there were also other traits that marked the disease, as well: a tendency to rock and sway the body, to caw at times as would a crow, and to cover the ears as if they should be muffed, to sit with the fingers straight and held apart one from another, and, when sleeping, to keep the limbs splayed outwardly in rigid fashion, even though the room may be cold and the need to curl and coddle the appendages self-evident. Interestingly, noted Dabber — for he had studied the case files of other patients who resembled in this unique form of imbecility his son Bevan — there was such a consistency and uniformity in the manifestation of the symptoms that a Dinglian doctor several decades earlier was able to give a name to the condition: Rokesmith’s rigoritis, taken from the doctor’s own name, but not with any measure of pride, for Dr. Rokesmith never succeeded in devising a cure.

Rokesmith’s rigoritis was, as I recall from last year’s Medical Review report, the third most prevalent of afflictions to visit Dingley Dell, the first and second being, respectively, consumption, whose sufferers were tended either in their homes or as patients within the aptly named “Lung” Hospital, and “Terror Tremens,” the most disturbing of all possible names to be affixed to that disease of the mind that targets those who leave the Dell and then return in a thoroughly demented state.

For years, the Petit-Parliament had spoken of making improvements that would reduce this unfortunate quartering within Bedlam that required the co-mixing of the various aberrants. But nothing had been done.

There was a desk in the front hall of Bethlehem Hospital upon Highbury Fields, at which visitors were required to stop and register to gain a few tidbits of time with those loved ones who resided there. Upon our arrival Sir Dabber and I found ourselves at the end of a long and slowmoving queue.

Nearing the point of finally addressing the registrar, we could not help overhearing the following exchange taking place betwixt that selfsame gentleman and the woman who held the spot in the queue directly in front of us. Her name was Jemima Pilkins. She was the wife of Dan Pilkins, a Milltown mason. Mrs. Pilkins was a tall and somewhat brittle-looking woman who reminded me of a willow bending stiffly in the wind. She had been put into a state of great agitation from the moment of gaining the registrar’s desk for the purpose of seeking visitors’ tickets both for herself and her two daughters, each of whom stood quietly at her side wearing looks of great expectation, due to the following unwavering presentation of recalcitrance on the part of the registrar:

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pilkins. It just isn’t possible. Not possible at all.” The registrar, whose name was Howler, though the name did not fit (for the man rarely raised his voice above an audible whisper), was all calmness and equanimity, even as the expression of the woman standing before him turned pinched and sour.

“But you wouldn’t let us see my brother last month either. Nor the time before that,” replied Mrs. Pilkins, stating a fact that both certainly knew.

“You’re correct on both counts, Madam.” Howler had not left off shaking his head, perhaps to enforce more fully his disallowance, though the words and the motion of the head would now appear to the casual observer to be incongruously matched.

“Nor even the time before that. And the time before that one. Indeed, Mr. Howler, you have yet to grant permission to my daughters and me for a single visit with my brother Walter, ever since the day of his return from the Terra Incognita a full four months ago!”

This was true. Mrs. Pilkins’ brother, Walter Skewton, was the most recent adult Dinglian to venture beyond the valley, and then to return. Mr. and Mrs. Pilkins had welcomed the young man with open, loving arms upon the moment of his late-night appearance on their doorstep. They, like all of those who were present for the joyous homecoming of Jemima Pilkins’ younger brother, were bold in refusing to subscribe to the general fear that every Returnee to Dingley Dell (after whatever interval of time abroad) posed such a dire risk to the general population as a potential carrier of that dreaded infectious disease of the brain that he should be thoroughly shunned and certainly never touched!

I was familiar with the incident from having reported on it for the Dingley Delver. Dr. Towlinson had been summoned by circumstances to the Pilkins cottage along with Dr. Fibbetson, Sheriff Muntle, and Lord Mayor Feenix (who, in addition to being Minister of Justice, was also Minister of Health) for the express purpose of removing the young man to Bedlam, to be examined and thoroughly evaluated. The transport was swift and uncontested, the situation deemed grave, the disease in the quickly-rendered medical opinion of doctors Towlinson and Fibbetson having spread throughout the young man’s brain and into his heart and limbs, thus necessitating his permanent immurement in that hospital, in a form of isolated confinement that disallowed visitation even by close family members.

“Mrs. Pilkins, the order, which placed your brother into quarantine, has yet to be rescinded. Contact with him would be inadvisable even should there be no such order, his having contracted one of the worst cases of Terror Tremens that Dr. Towlinson has ever had the unhappy office to diagnose. Yet you continue to come hither with maddening regularity, possessed of some wild hope that circumstances will miraculously change, despite the fact that there is absolutely no precedent for improvement in your brother. He remains more ill to-day than he was upon the first day of his confinement. The visit is nearly always a waste of your time and mine, and frankly, madam, I don’t understand why you continue to put us all through it.”

Jemima Pilkins lowered her head and said with quiet determination, “It is my profound hope, Mr. Howler, that Walter will one day improve.”

“It is naturally our hope that each victim of this unfortunate disease will prove the exception to the general prognosis. But such a thing has yet to occur. Pray go along, so that those standing behind you in the queue may receive their visitor tickets before the day is done.”

Yet Mrs. Pilkins was not in an obliging mood. “I spent an hour with him on that first night — the night of his return. My husband, our daughters, several neighbours — all of them as well. I kissed his cheek and he held me in his arms and stroked my head and could not stop speaking of every wonderful thing that he saw in his voyage abroad. He appeared to me clear-headed and quite hale upon that night.”

“Then your eyes and ears have deceived you, madam. For whatever wonderful things were spoken of that evening, they could not possibly have been anything but the ravings of a lunatic mind. It’s the pattern, Mrs. Pilkins — a pattern with which we’ve become quite familiar.” The registrar’s voice gave no animation. The tones produced were dull and laboured and unsympathetic. Mr. Howler, it was quite apparent to even the most casual observer, did not enjoy his offices; when he was not turning away men and women such as Mrs. Pilkins with a dismissive bureaucratic hand, he was putting visitors’ tickets into the hands of other men and women who more closely resembled Sir Dabber — those who came to visit their loved ones under the onerous weight of filial or maternal or paternal obligation. There were sick people in Dingley Dell, to be sure, plagued by afflictions of the brain, or given brains at birth that did not function as they should, brains reduced in capacity that would never improve, or which had been knocked insentient from a fall from a horse, for example; or strangulation in the womb; or, in the case of one philandering Dinglian spouse, by the swing of his wife’s retaliatory rolling pin. It was all rather trying for every family member to see his kin in such a diminished state, but still there was a duty to be borne.