§ 7
It was on the afternoon of the following day that two strangers came to see Sargon. He was taken to them and they talked a little with him, and then chiefly with each other. Higgs was off duty but Jordan hovered in the background.
Neither of these gentlemen explained their business with Sargon to him. One of them was a short man in a black coat; he wore a gold watch-chain and a rich-looking tie with a jewelled pin; he had a gold pince-nez, a little pointed nose, a fat, clean-shaven white face, and a mouth like an oblique spade-thrust in a lump of dough. He spoke with something between a sniff and a lisp, and he was evidently rather in a hurry and annoyed at having been called in to see Sargon. The other was large and grey and worn-looking; he impressed Sargon in some indefinable way as being a medical man who had private troubles. He seemed to consider himself in charge of the conversation, and would occasionally refer upon some point of fact to the hovering Jordan.
“Understand,” said the pasty-faced man, “you wanted to give some sort of dinner party to all sorts of people. Eh?—at the Rubicon. I suppose it came on you sort of sudden like. Eh?”
“I wished to confer with certain people,” said Sargon. “It may have been a mistake on my part.”
“No doubt it was a mistake, Mr.—Mr.——”
“Won’t ’ave a Mister to it,” said Jordan from the background. “Calls ’isself Sargon.”
The doctor became very acute in his manner. “Now isn’t that some sort of historical name?” he asked with a sideways searching look.
“It is,” said Sargon.
“But it isn’t your name, you know.”
“Possibly not. I mean—It is my only name.”
“That’s a bit of an answer, that is,” said the pasty-faced man. “My word!”
“What is your real name?” asked the doctor persuasively.
“Sargon.”
“Not Mr. A. E. Preemby?”
Sargon started and stared, possibly with a certain wildness in his eyes. “With God’s help, No!” he said.
“Was it ever Mr. Preemby?” asked the doctor.
“That does not matter now. That is of no importance now.”
“It may be of some importance,” said the pasty-faced man.
“And now you’re a King or a Lord or something and you own the world?” said the doctor.
Sargon made no answer. He felt he was in a net.
The doctor turned to Jordan and beckoned him in a whisper. Only one sentence came to Sargon’s ears. “’Iggs ’eard it,” said Mr. Jordan.
“Aren’t you called Sargon the Magnificent?” asked the doctor.
Sargon bent his head in sorrow. “Better were it to call me Sargon the Unworthy. For in many things I have failed.”
The pasty-faced man looked at the doctor. “Haven’t we had about enough of this?”
“My conclusions are clear,” said the doctor. “In fact, I have the certificate ready.”
“If you’re satisfied, Dr. Manningtree, I am. If I’m to see those other fellers.”
“I’ve got all the papers in my room,” said the doctor.
“Right-o,” said the pasty-faced man.
“It’s very good of you to come to-day. I wouldn’t have bothered you until to-morrow but we are really getting overcrowded here. One chap’s decidedly dangerous. The attendants here don’t like the look of him. You need only just see him for a moment. Or any of them. All clear cases for summary reception orders.”
They spoke now as if Sargon were not present or as if he were an inanimate object. And indeed for them he had become so; he had passed for them already out of the comity of mankind.
“Why have you been talking to me?” asked Sargon suddenly with a vague fear of what had been said and done developing in his mind.
The doctor’s manner altered. He spoke to Sargon as one might speak to a small child. “You’ll be going back to bed now,” he said. “Jordan!”
“But I want to know.”
“Go with Mr. Jordan.”
“What are these papers you speak about?”
The doctor turned his back on Sargon without an answer and the man with the pasty face opened the door to depart. Sargon made a step towards them, but Jordan laid hold of his arm.
And while Sargon was being steered back to bed, firmly rather than gently, in the grip of Jordan, the justice and the doctor filled in and signed the forms that were necessary to deprive him of nearly every right he possessed as a human being. For there is no trial by jury and no writ of habeas-corpus in Britain for the unfortunate charged with insanity. He may not plead in public and there is no one to whom he may appeal. He may write complaints but they will be neglected; his most urgent expostulations will be disregarded in favour of any dull attendant’s asseverations. He is handed over to the nearly autocratic control of under-educated, ill-paid, ill-fed, and overworked attendants. Every night and every day seems endless to him at first, and then the nights and days fall into a sort of routine and become unimportant and pass away more and more rapidly. He is almost always kept in a state of bodily discomfort, always rather ill from the ill-prepared and sometimes tainted food, and much incommoded by clumsy drugging and particularly by the administration of violent purgatives. In croton oil alone are our asylums truly generous. He has excellent reason for fearing many of his fellow inmates and for a servile obedience to the attendants in charge of him. A medical superintendent hovers in the background; a medical staff with no special training in mental science. They pass through the wards at the appointed times, avoiding trouble, seeing as little as possible.
And, after all, what can they do? They cannot raise the expenditure upon food or increase the number or salaries of the attendants. They are appointed to save and not to spend the ratepayers’ money. The attendants work together and protect each other; they must hang together; many of them go in fear of the violent cases. Occasionally, after due notice, a visiting magistrate will pay a formal visit to the asylum. Everything is put in order for the occasion. The inmate with a grievance dares not accost him or does not know how to accost him nor how to frame his complaint. The attendants are at hand to interrupt, embarrass, and explain. So, with no possibility of redress, the poor half-lunatic will be roughly handled, badly fed, and coarsely clothed, and night and day he will have no other familiar company than the insane. It is bad enough for the sane to be afflicted by the vagaries, the violence, the exasperating mechanisms, the incoherences of the truly demented, but what must it be for those upon whom the penumbra of that same shadow has fallen? They have no privacy; no escape from those others; no peace. Our world herds these discards together out of sight, walls them up, spends so little upon them that they are neither properly fed nor properly looked after, and does its brave hopeful best to forget all about them.
And our Sargon, who even in the outer world of usage and freedom was sometimes a little at a loss, must now go on into this dark underworld. For two days more he will be kept in the Gifford Street Observation Ward awaiting the convenience of the authorities; then in the company of four other prisoners he will be sent to a still bleaker and more desolate and hopeless confinement within the clustering buildings and walls and railings of Cummerdown Hill.
So he passes now for a time out of sight of everyday mankind, and so also for a time he shall pass out of this story. It would be insufferable to tell with any fulness his daily tale of discomfort and indignity.