Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“But here is a silver lining to it all,” said Sir Dabber through a wheeze, for the mould and must within the room were taxing his respiration. “My son has been returned to me! After ten years you and I are again truly united in mind and spirit, father and son. And I cannot help celebrating, even if it be in private fashion, my wonderful good fortune.”

Sir Dabber imprinted a kiss upon Bevan’s dingy forehead and struggled to rise. The tremendous gravity of what had been told, the shock of seeing his son without the splayed and stiff limbs, nor rocking back and forth, nor cawing like a rook — every aspect of the few preceding moments had weighed so heavily down upon him that he could hardly return himself to his feet. I rose quickly to take his arm when it appeared likely that he might topple over or faint away.

“Rest assured: we won’t betray your trust,” said I to Bevan, who remained upon the cot. Yet I dissembled. I had to tell Sheriff Muntle, and now all of the members of the delving Poetry League. They had every right and reason to know. These were important pieces for the mosaic they were putting together. But the young man must not be troubled on this account.

So I dissembled.

“You fear for the well-being of this young woman?” asked Sir Dabber of his son.

Bevan nodded. “Frightfully so.”

“Is it because you love her?”

Bevan smiled. “She has resurrected me.”

Now Bevan paused. “And she is beautiful.”

And finally, Bevan blushed.

I had now received the answer to at least one nagging question from that pivotal week: to whom had Ruth Wolf given her heart? And there he sat — a boy, several years younger than herself, fully dependent upon her, literally resurrected by her. Had she healed him because she loved him first, or did she come to love the man he became under her cure? These speculations made me feel guilty, intrusive. I backed away from them. I vowed to release Ruth Wolf from my heart to pursue this path she had wisely or unwisely chosen for herself. Indeed there was love here that no one had a right to judge or define — least of all Frederick Trimmers, for whom love in the abstract remained elusive and capricious.

“When may I come to see you again?” asked Sir Dabber of his son. “On the next visiting Sunday?”

“We must not raise suspicions by too frequent visits, Papa.”

“But this deplorable room — you must be removed from it at the earliest possible moment.”

“That time will soon come, Papa, for Ruth tells me that there have been other complaints about the conditions down here, and so the renovation is now moving along more quickly upstairs. But it serves me to remain in this dungeon. Down here I am seldomly observed. Here Ruth may come to see me without worry of interlopers or keyhole peepers. With each visit, my darling Ruth feels more and more at ease to tell me things. And there is so much more to tell — a world of things.”

Sir Dabber nodded. A moment later we stood before the heavy iron door, listening to the clink and click of its latch. As the door creaked open, pushed by the youthful hand of Oscar the attendant (“Turnkey” would be a more appropriate appellation), Bevan Dabber resumed his previous state. His stare became glossy and he began to rock. The hands went up to the ears. He cawed.

“He’s telling you goodbye,” chuckled Oscar. “That’s his crow-like way of saying ‘ta’! Somebody should put these boys upon a stage. It would be a true hilarity to see it — at least for those who don’t got to clean they’s stinking dovecote each and every bloody day.”

The statement drew no response from either Sir Dabber or myself. It was safest to leave Oscar’s odious opinion unchallenged.

his day of revelations was not done. As Oscar conducted Sir Dabber and me to the beshadowed staircase that would deliver us from this dark dungeon of human abjection and mental affliction, I stopt before the door to one of the cells, which had been left so widely open as to give a full view of its interior. Although the cell was empty, yet it captured the eye nonetheless for what had been put upon its black walls. All four had been chalked with such a riotous display of arithmetical equations that one might take it for the oddest sort of black and white wallpaper. It was as if one of the room’s former occupants had sought to use the cell’s flat black surfaces as instructional chalkboards (and even so, could not successfully fit upon them all that he wished to convey). I could not take my eyes from the patterns of mathematical chalkings and stood looking into the room through the dim and dusty light that filtered through an ivy-shaded window near the ceiling.

“Ain’t it too amazin’!” exclaimed our conductor, the attendant Oscar. “Was just a coupla-three weeks ago we had the obsessitor of all obsessitors in here: Jeremiah Chivery. Down in this hole for all of two day and two night, and lookee what he done wrought!”

I remembered when Chivery had been admitted to the asylum. Though the mental infirmity that so characterized him had taken hold many years earlier, it was only in recent months that the affliction had been marked by a disturbing acceleration in its progression.

“Now I don’t know what all them mathematical scratchings adds up to,” Oscar continued, happy to play the role of our cellar cicerone, “since it spilt itself out of the most lunaticky brain as ever was squeezed inside a human head. But could be they add up to some earth-shaking theory or such. Could be all them madman’s numbers and symbols hold the very key to the whole blooming universe! But they ask me to erase it all away when they take him upstairs from this temporary lodging. And I aim to do it. I do. But just not yet. It’s too pretty I think. Look it all over, gentlemen. It’ll cost you only half a florin for the privilege. It’s quite a picture. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Sir Dabber and I nodded to young Oscar, appreciative of his only marginally-avaricious generosity in allowing us to inspect (for a small price) the walls that had once enclosed the “obsessitor of all obsessitors”: one Jeremiah Chivery. Until his conventional life came to an abrupt end with his transportation to Bedlam, Chivery had been professor of mathematics at the College of Dingley Dell (informally denominated “Oxbridge” and sometimes “Camford” to conflate the names of those two illustrious English institutions of higher learning, neither of which bore any resemblance whatsoever to the CDD).

Professor Chivery was a peculiar gentleman, driven to put down numerical equations that may have had some importance or may only have been the pencilled (and chalked) ravings of a genuine madman through the medium of mathematics (at least these were the competing perceptions at the time). Chivery’s colleagues at the college were never able to decipher any of the notebooks he had left behind — had been unsuccessful in making any sense of anything that he put into mathematical formula, outside the equations that the school’s curriculum required him to impart to his students. It was concluded by most that this obsessitor was everything that Dr. Towlinson had concluded him to be: a certifiable lunatic who spoke his own language of numbers — numbers that had no bearing upon anything practical and could never be translated, for they lived only within his abstruse thoughts.

Yet standing before this most extraordinary display of numerical graffiti, one could not help being impressed by the sheer beauty of its presentation. There was poetry in chalk upon those walls, and it should be a sad day, I thought, when Oscar would finally have to accede to the wishes of his employer and scrub it all away.