"Restoration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tremain Rose)

Chapter Sixteen. The Scent of Flowers

The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to posses them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.

It has not rained here for some time and through the yellow crust on the mud of Whittlesea new grass is springing up and in the ditch outside the wall there are primroses and violets. Pearce seems most entranced by these flowers, as if he had never seen nor smelled any like them before. Not only does he pick them and examine them; I have observed him lie down on the edge of the ditch and stick his nose into a clump of primroses and not move for ten minutes at a time. I know from the vacant look in his blue eyes that his mind is at work on some experiment with regard to the flowers, but I have not asked him what it might be lest he infer from my interest in the thing a renewal of a more profound interest in biology.

Hannah and Eleanor are in the habit of thanking the Lord for giving us "kind weather", but I have come to the conclusion that to me such a springtime is cruel; in it I feel wanton and idle. I would prefer a return to hard skies and a clamped chill, these being a better accompaniment to the routine of my day, which is a most harsh one that affords me no leisure at all, but rather commits me to many hours of work of the most demanding kind I could imagine, namely work with my scalpel.

There is, adjacent to each of the main rooms of George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Harvey, a small ante-room, lit with oil lamps, in which patients are examined and cures and operations tried upon them. Before my arrival, Pearce and Ambrose were the only two physicians among the Keepers at Whittlesea and so to them fell the task of trying to alleviate madness with the knife. Now, I have been forced by Pearce to "render service to Whittlesea by placing such skill as you possess in the service of the common good", or in other words to join in the cutting and blood letting and to do it without complaint, for Pearce's eye is always upon me, watching and measuring. He knows very well how I recoil before this return to my former vocation. He knows also that were he and the other Friends to put me out from here, I would be at a loss to know in which to direction to ride.

Mercifully, I have not yet been required to perform any large operations, but there is, by those who study insanity, a great faith put in phlebotomy, and this we undertake daily. The degree of suffering felt by a man who must have his head held over a bowl while a scalpel opens a vein in his temple I cannot calculate, but if I am the one who must make the incision I always feel obliged to apologise to him beforehand, and often feel tempted to add (yet do not): "Forgive me, for I know not what I do," for since coming to Whittlesea I have seen not one cure worked by a phlebotomy. As well as from the forehead, we let blood from the cephalic vein and many patients bear in their arms wounds that have been reopened so many times they will not close. Ambrose says of the cephalic phlebotomies: "In the bright blood let by this means, I can smell the choler!" His faith in medical science is no less complete than his faith in Christ and with regard to both practices I know him to be an honest and honourable man. But I can perceive no miracle cure in the opening of the cephalic vein. Invariably, the patients (even those who are violent) are quiet for some hours after the cutting, but soon enough return to their habitual state, the pain of their wounds surely adding to their other sufferings? In short, I am somewhat critical of the methods we employ here. We spill blood and with its flow believe we release poisonous humours, but do not know beyond all question whether we do or not. I remain silent, however. For it can avail me nought (do you note the biblical cadences into which my language has fallen?) to condemn a thing when I have nothing better to put in its place.

I have noticed, however, that there is one shortcoming in our modes of treatment, which are based upon the unspoken thesis that lunacy is a liquid thing, which may, drop by drop, or in a sudden heaving torment, be coaxed out of the body in streams of blood, vomit or faeces. I do not know whether or not lunacy is a liquid thing but, were it to be so, I would try natural as well as unnatural means of bringing about the body's excretions. And this we do not do. I would cause the lunatics to weep (either with laughter or with sadness, it would not matter) and I would cause them to sweat. For the first, I would tell stories; for the second, I would play music and let them dance. Yet neither tears nor perspiration are encouraged. With those who do cry we are stern, telling them to cease their wailing and remember Jesus who never wept for himself, only for the sufferings of others. And of course there is no dancing. The only exercise taken by the inmates of our Hospital is the passing of the shuttle through the warp of the loom, the turning of the spinning wheels and the slow shuffling round the Airing Court. And this overlooking of two beneficial evacuations of nature has begun to worry me, so that it keeps bobbing to the surface of my mind. It bobs up, in truth, so frequently and persistently that I may soon be forced to disturb Pearce's reverie with his primroses by revealing to him my thoughts upon the subject.

Word that I was once at Court has reached the inmates of William Harvey. How it has traveled there I do not know, unless the hand of the King may still be felt in the ice of the scalpel blade. As Pearce has stated, most of those in WH have no remembrance of the word "Court", nor could imagine what manner of thing a Court might be. But there is one, calling himself Piebald, a mutineer on the Valiant Queen, who now takes great delight in telling me that all men on earth with a rank above midshipman are bringers of pox and pestilence and suffering, and should be slain – as he single-handedly slew three officers – "to rid this England of the stink of privilege". Because I was once a "Court Prick", he includes me among those he wishes to kill, and each week he devises a new means of death for me, death and violence being all that occupy his mind, day and night.

And at night, alone in my linen cupboard, I can sometimes feel mortally afraid of this Piebald. Yet quite often during the day I find myself lingering in his pen, his ways of death being so ingenious that I find solace in them for my imagination. That I do this is, of course, most strange. Yet I find myself wondering, do many men of a cowardly disposition not secretly long to meet face to face that other who, without fuss or deliberation, will instantly take their lives from them? Is it uncommon to feel glad to have found him?

Piebald, My Redeemer

This evening, after the Meeting, I took up a piece of parchment to my room and wrote in a pretty script these blasphemous words.

On the morning of the twenty-first of April, finding myself once again staying awhile in WH to listen to Piebald, then noticing, on emerging from the place, that Pearce was walking across the Airing Court holding a bunch of kingcups to his nose, I came suddenly to the conclusion that we two might ourselves be going mad and that it would be possible to recognise in our behaviours – mine with Piebald, Pearce's with the flowers – the first footsteps of our madness. And no sooner had I addressed this possibility than I came stumbling upon a truth about the fate of the insane which had hitherto remained hidden not only from me but I believe from all the Keepers at Whittlesea. And it is this:

The man who is merely ill will seek out, at the first sign or "footstep" of that illness, the services of a physician to help him to a cure; the insane man, on the contrary, is not taken into any Bedlam or Hospital until his "disease" of madness is so far advanced that it may be beyond cure. In other words, though illness may be arrested early, madness never is – for the only reason that all men learn and know what the footsteps of illness may be, but who can say in each or any case what the footsteps of lunacy are?

Though it was almost dinnertime and the smell of broth in the kitchen brought on a little pain of hunger, I forced myself to go to my room and lie down upon my narrow bed and look very squarely at my supposed truth, following Fabricius's motto: "Let certainty be tempered with disbelief." And I imagined the great anatomist's gaze upon me.

At dinner, I was very quiet and pensive, so that Eleanor enquired: "Are you quite well today, Robert?" I replied that I was well enough but had discovered much, that morning, with which to occupy my mind. Ambrose looked at me benevolently and asked me to share my thoughts with the six Friends "if it may bring you help". I thanked him and said: "Alas, Ambrose, there is so little of the philosopher in me that it is very often the case that my mind is furiously at work upon some supposed great matter which, as soon as I try to put it into words, has the habit of flying out of the window." Edmund smiled. Daniel rose and ladelled a second helping of broth into our bowls. Pearce, dabbing at his thin lips with a coarse napkin, cast in my direction a look of disdain. (It has become a humiliating fact of my life at Whittlesea that, no matter what my mood is, Pearce behaves to me as if he were a mind reader, always knowing precisely what I am thinking.)

In the afternoon, it was the turn of the women of Margaret Fell to make their monotonous perambulation round the oak tree and I and Hannah were their overseers, walking round and round with them and conversing with them "on subjects that will gladden their hearts, such as the coming of spring and the sowing of the Whittlesea House vegetable plot with new lettuce and scarlet beans."

I fell into step beside Katharine and asked her how she regarded the oak, whether it was a thing of beauty or comfort to her, and she replied that she found it to be "quite full of a green death".

"What is this 'green death?" I said.

"It is in nature," she answered, "sometimes in a part of a thing and sometimes in all."

"Do you see it in people? Do you see it, now, in me?"

"No," she said. "In you I see a waft of death. But it is not green."

"What colour might this waft be, then?"

She stopped and regarded me, thus causing the women behind us to knock into us. I gently took her elbow and led her on. I assumed that, after she had thought about it a while, she would reply to my question, but she did not. Her mind had moved away from the subject and onto the thing which torments her night and day, her desertion by her husband while she was sleeping. She began to recount to me – for the twelfth or thirteenth time – how, if he had been a small man he would not have got away without causing her to wake, but being very tall was able to step over her body with one giant stride. And so she began to imitate him, lifting up her skirts and taking great huge awkward steps, causing some of the women to stop walking and watch her and laugh at her and point, as at a lying mountebank. I let her stride on. She calls this imitation of the man who betrayed her a "Leaving Step". She says every man on earth has his own Leaving Step and I often try to calm her rage by agreeing with her and telling her that the King, being very plagued by fools from whom he wishes to walk away, has perfected his Leaving Step into a walk of unsurpassed elegance. Several times, she has asked me to "show the walk" to her. But to make a poor imitation of the King is something I cannot bring myself to do.

The day was very brilliant and warm and we kept the women walking around the tree for longer than the allotted hour. When Katharine had tired of doing her Leaving Step, she came beside me again and after a while put out her hand and touched my shoulder and told me that the colour of the waft of death she saw in me was white. Had she said scarlet, which is a colour that affects me very much, as you will already have noticed, I would have been perturbed by the revelation.

But white was of no significance to me and so I immediately put the thing from my mind.

I did not know that on the evening of the twenty-first of April I was going to break my silence at the Meetings. Though very fascinated by the "truth" I had stumbled upon about the world's inability to try any cure upon the lunatic until he is -in all but a few cases – incurable, I had not planned to offer any discourse upon the subject until I had pondered what practical measures might be taken to remedy this situation. Still less had I plotted within myself to reveal to the Keepers my all-too-Merivelian ideas about the efficacy of weeping and sweating in the treatment of poisonous humours.

And yet, all these things came out of me. And the manner of their coming out was most memorable and strange.

I was seated at one edge of the little semi-circle we make at Meetings round the parlour fire. Near me, on an oak table, was a wooden bowl into which Pearce had put posies of primroses. There was utter silence in the room except for the crackling and spitting of the fire, and there is something about a Quaker silence which is absolute, as if Eternity were then and there beginning.

And in this quiet, I heard myself breathing in the smell of the flowers and after some minutes a certainty stole upon me that this perfume was slowly, with each breath of it that I took, being drawn up into my brain and there being alchemised into syllables and words. And it was not long before my brain seemed to be so full of words – as crammed with them as was the bowl with the primroses – that it began to hurt, and I put my head in my hands to try to get the hurt away. But it would not go. And so I opened my mouth and I began to speak, starting with the phrase, "It has come to me from the Lord," and in a perfectly logical fashion I set forth my argument, saying that madness may be born of many things but yet for all except those who are lunatic from their births there was a Time Before, a time when there was no madness in them and that this would be followed by a Growing Time or a Sickening Time, when the madness was coming upon them, precisely as all disease has a Growing Time. "And we," I said, "we the Keepers of those who are very far gone into a mad sickness, do we not all recognise that the men and women of William Harvey are much further from any help or cure than those in the other two houses? Likewise, is it not our daily fear to find an inhabitant of George Fox or Margaret Fell descended into an uncontrollable mad state, so that we would be forced to chain him up and put him in a pen in William Harvey? Thus we daily admit that madness is not a static thing but, just as all things in the world are changeful, so is madness and, like them, may change for the better or for the worse. But what we do not ask, dear Friends, is what were the Footsteps of each case of madness, in other words how it came there and when and in what manner it first showed itself, yet I, when I was a physician, was taught by the great medical minds of our age that few cures are likely to succeed unless each stage and symptom of a malady is understood. And this is what the Lord has revealed to me, that we should try with each one of those in our care to look back into past time and ask them to try to remember how it was to be in the Time Before and what thing or calamity came about to put them into the Sickening Time. And in this way we might discover the imprint of the steps to madness, there just under the surface, as the imprints of past ages lie under the surface of the earth…"

As I delivered myself of this long speech, I was not aware of how the others regarded it or me, but only of my need to get it out so that my brain would be free of it and no longer hurting in the press of words. I deliberately paused at this point and took in several great breaths and once more the scent of the primroses ascended to my brain and recommenced its alchemy and so I talked on, now making proposals, all of which, I said, had "come to me from Jesus Christ", for the questioning of all inmates of Whittlesea by the Keepers so that the Time Before might become visible to us. And I was entirely held now by my words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river. So into the stream now poured all my outlandish things, my fantastical things, my cures by weeping and my cures by dancing, my suggestions for story-telling and the playing of music. As I spoke on these matters, I began to feel a merciful diminution of the pain in my head and so I lifted it up and talked on, staring at the fire, and in the flames of the fire I could see a most wondrous picture of Daniel, attired in the clothes of summer, playing a fiddle, and all the women of Margaret Fell skipping and dancing round him, seeming happy like children. And then the pain left me entirely and the picture vanished and I was silent.

I was very boiling hot. I took off my wig and wiped my face and my head with my handkerchief. I felt the eyes of the others upon me, but no one spoke. A full ten or fifteen minutes passed and the time allowed for the Meeting came to an end and Ambrose put his hands into his prayer steeple and mumbled: "Thank you, dear Lord, that in our presence Robert was moved to speak." And this is all that was said.

Mercifully, it was not my turn that night to take part in a Night Keeping, for as soon as we rose from our circle by the fire, I felt a shivering in my knees and a pain of exhaustion in my belly and I went to my bed and slept a deep, thick sleep from which I did not stir till morning.

When I woke, however, I felt in me a lightness of heart, such I has not experienced since my casting out from Bidnold. I could not account for it, but was most grateful to find it there. (I have, since I arrived here, found myself pondering the thing we call happiness, for which, the King once told me I had a gift. I now recognise that my supposed "gift" was much less of a thing than, say, Hannah's and Eleanor's, they being two of the most contented women I have ever met.)

It was my task, that morning, to work in the vegetable garden with Pearce, together with some six or seven men from George Fox. (I report in passing that Pearce is so fond of this plot, so proud of its drainage ditches and of the infant pear trees he is trying to grow en espalier on its southerly wall, that he likes to oversee all work done there and becomes very vaporous with irritation if his seedlings are not planted in absolutely straight lines.) The sun was once again shining and I would have found my duty in the garden quite pleasant had it not been for Pearce's behaviour towards me that morning, which was most irksome. He acted as one who wished to have nothing to do with me whatsoever, separating himself from any task in which I was occupied and replying most curtly to all my attempts to speak to him. Watching him from a distance planting beans, swooping down on a freshly raked patch of soil like a long-necked bird, using his long white fingers as a dibbling-stick, burying each bean most lovingly and moving on, I remembered how on our angling expeditions near Cambridge this mood of dislike for me would sometimes come over him. Then and now, I find it most hurtful and difficult to endure, particularly as I can seldom fathom what it is I have done to offend him. On this morning, however, I could only conclude that my outpouring of the previous evening had not been to his liking. Some hours – or even days – would probably pass; then Pearce would dissect my thesis with his clever pecking mind and lay it in ruins before me.

Meanwhile, as I plucked weeds from the onion bed, I began in a low voice, lest Pearce hear what I was doing, to talk to the man called Jacob Lowe who was working alongside me and to enquire of him what thing he most clearly remembered before coming to Whittlesea and whether, in his past life, he had some trade or calling. He told me he was a butcher and slaughterer. He described to me the ease with which he could split a calf's head and take out the tender brains. "But I was killed by a whore," he whispered. "I died of her foul cunt. And this is my second life on earth."

I requested him to describe his "death" to me. And he told me that his testicles had swollen and burst "being full of the pox" and out through these burst cods had poured his life.

I looked up at Jacob Lowe. His face was ruddy, his musculature good, his nose prominent and not one whit decayed. From these external signs, I felt it possible to conclude that, if he had once suffered from the pox, he was now cured of it. Such cures are rare but where they occur they have depended – in all cases I have witnessed – on the giving of mecurius sublimate, of which the chief element is mercury itself, that capricious metal to which I once likened the King. And mercury is, if the dose is not most carefully measured, a poison. I saw a man at St Thomas 's die of mercury poisoning and he died screaming and raving, as if a madness had suddenly come upon him. I smiled to myself and looked over to Pearce's stooping back. In the time it had taken me and Jacob Lowe to weed the onion patch, I had retraced the primary footsteps to this one man's lunacy.

Neither at dinnertime nor during the afternoon did any of the friends make reference to my speech of the evening before and Pearce's lack of charity towards me seemed to confirm that he at least had been most displeased by it. I thus kept quiet to myself my conversation with Jacob Lowe and waited for the Meeting to see if Ambrose might pass judgement upon my theory. But he did not mention it, and I confess I felt somewhat cast down to think that what had appeared to me as a revelation appeared to the Keepers of Whittlesea as a thing of no consequence at all. It was only some days later that I was to discover that their way with knowledge is a quiet way. They do not snatch at it or gobble it down; they take it into themselves slowly like a physic and let it course a long time in their blood before making any pronoucement upon it.

Meanwhile, Pearce emerged from his state of foulness towards me and bade me go with him one morning in search of yet more flowers. Not far from the Whittlesea gate we came upon some pale, sweet-scented narcissus, which Pearce instructed me to pick.

"You see," he said, as I gathered the flowers for him, "I am in a most troubling state of unknowing, Robert."

"Are you, John?" I said.

"Yes. For I vowed that in this springtime I would find an answer to a question that has vexed me for many years, namely, what is the scent of flowers? Why is it there? Do plants exhale? Is the scent no more than this exhaled breath? And if there is no exhalation, then in what part of a flower resides the scent?"

"Why do you wish to know this, John?" I enquired.

"Why? Because I do not know it. There is undoubtedly some Divine lesson hidden in the mystery, but until I have unravelled the mystery itself, I am shut out from knowing what it might be."

I held out my bunch of narcissus to Pearce and he took it delicately from me, like a girl. I was tempted to say that the smell of the primroses had led me to knowledge I believed more useful than any he might derive from the study of flowers, but I did not.