A Pocketbook of Insanity. Part V
=April Thursday 15th=
I’ve written a fair amount about my flatmate here for two reasons. Firstly my life is currently so hum-drum that a broken coffeepot, a new pack of tobacco, or ruckus over a cab in the street rates as sensational news. Secondly, Holmes is quite fascinating. He’s intelligent, peculiar, startling, insouciant about a good deal he shouldn’t be, entertaining, and irritating like nothing I’ve ever known - I should doubtless make note of him even were my social calendar full and my life fit to bursting.
He’s the sort of fellow one mentions.
Despite living with him and his antics (which yes, have recently included nonsensical rants and sitting on window ledges) I really - I didn’t think that he - I - I was actually horrified by what transpired.
(And I’m still procrastinating. Get on with it, John. The memory and record of such cannot cause more harm than the event itself.)
I had gone out to Kensington to be fitted for a new suit; I had the tin for Jermyn St, but I’m trying to drop expensive habits, not start them. I’ve been making do with clothes both ill-fitting and poor, I rather hoped that a decent wardrobe might inspire me to further order my life.
On my way back I stopped in at Lock & Co - that was certainly a luxury, but I can’t regret the Cambridge-styled bowler I left with. It is smart, serviceable and rakish, all depending on the angle.
I returned to Baker Street in the early afternoon, a little tired but in fine humour... until I noticed the blood on the stairs. There wasn’t much of it, but the spots showed crimson-bright atop the dark-polished wood of the treads, a pattern of stains leading upwards. There was a small puddle on the landing outside the sitting room. I remember thinking that Mrs H would have a fit - she has enough to do without soaking out bloodstains. I called for Holmes, wishing to know what happened so when our landlady’s ire fell upon us we could be united in our defence.
There was a muffled crash from his room. I left my purchases and made a nuisance of myself at his door. There was silence followed by erratic sounds suggesting someone making their way across the room via every obstacle possible. At last the door opened to show a sliver of ashen face, a shock of dark hair and a single wide and panicked eye. We stared at each other in silence; he taut, I expectant.
“There’s blood on the stairs - is everything all right?”
“Capital. You can tell such to the Literati and their Shivering Jemmy reprobates - Tilly Matthews didn’t know the half of it.” He was imperious - distracted - broken. But what terrified me, terrifies me still every time I call it to mind, was when he looked at me.
Scientifically, the pupil of the eye is simply a hole, the circumference of which changes as dictated by the muscles of the iris, allowing more or less light to filter through the cornea lens onto the film of the retina. Spiritually, the eye contains a light and character all of its own, linked closely to the owner’s nature - windows of the soul and all that. I’ve seen the eyes of the living and the eyes of the dead, watched as one made the transition to the other, and there is a marked difference. Trite as it sounds there is a light, an anima, present in the eyes of the living, a flame which gutters and dies with their last breath - and one is able to observe it do so.
I have seen eyes of all different hues and character, but I have never seen one living with the stare of the dead. There is a flatness to such a stare, a dull void where a spark should be: the pupil no longer a soul-window, just a hole for light to pass through unacknowledged. That was how Holmes’ eyes appeared: too wide, too empty - too dead. I recoiled.
He turned from the door with a ragged wave of his arm; his movements made me think of faulty clockwork, of tangled puppets. It was as if whatever made him a person had fled, and there was just a body left, grossly animate, perversely alive. “They did for him in the end you know - Matthews...” His voice matched the rest of him, raw, flat, unreal. As he retreated further into the room I saw what the door had masked: blood, thick ribbons of it. “Of course the air-loom was a barely competent prototype - clumsy, clumsy...” He gestured as he spoke and I heard the vermillion storm of droplets leave his body and fall heavily to the floor. His arm was a mess. “But they’ve had time to refine everything. It’s devilishly smart now...” With that he swayed and crumpled ponderously to the floor.
I don’t have the will to relate in narrative detail all that happened after. I had in my rooms a small medico’s field kit from my stint in Maiwand and I lost no time in using it. Holmes had caught the interosseous vein of his left arm in a single decisive straight-razor slice. He was fortunate not to have damaged the muscles nor to have severed the nerves. The cut was done with almost clinical precision - a fact that didn’t please me in the least. It required seven stitches.
He remained semi-conscious and far from lucid throughout. As I worked he explained how and why he had done such a thing. (I don’t have the heart to set it all down, it was more about siren songs, Thomas Carlyle, the infection of art in the blood and the perfection of the air-loom machine into a printing press that produced diabolical texts.) He also assured me he would behave so again if need be - he had no fear of death, only of the artistic pathogens and of the soul-stealing books. If his mind could not be his and his alone, it would better be destroyed.
It was at that point I had to admit to myself Holmes wasn’t suffering from some temporary malady, but of a full and irrefutable disintegration of reason - dementia praecox most likely.
I sat with him all night - he had a mortal fear of my leaving his side - and tried to persuade him to seek aid and a rest-cure. Even in madness he was shrewd enough to know damn well I meant an asylum.
I am no great advocate of asylums. They fulfil a much needed function, but do so badly and with ill-grace. Still, even I recognise my nerves and knowledge are not up to the strain of becoming Holmes’ watcher, carer and keeper when a minute’s absence may prove his destruction.
We argued. Funny how his thoughts still seemed to run in lines of logic even if the reason was rotten to the core. I managed to persuade him his salvation and triumph over his persecutors lay in seeking help from those who knew best about such things. (A thousand blessings upon Professor Ormond Sacker, a tyrannical but impassioned teacher of philosophy and public speaking at school. I’ve never needed his lessons before but by god did I need them then.)
He agreed at last to go to Parkhouse, a privately run hospital in Richmond by the river, headed by Doctor Edmond Tobias, someone Holmes had met previously and had the highest confidence in. (I’d not heard of the man, even with my recent forays to the Library I’m hopelessly out of date. He, like I, was apparently a natural antidote to the siren songs. Marvellous.)
He swore to go if I would take him, although it was more begging than oath as he clung at my wrists, dead eyes struggling for focus, thoughts and words hanging on to lucidity by the fingernails. It was a long night and an uncomfortable one, holed up in a corner beside the wardrobe. Holmes slept fitfully and only when exhaustion quite undid him. In the meantime he talked, telling me about the air-loom, the artistic pathogen, chromatic and anti-aetherical scales, James Tilly Matthews (18th century Bedlamite) and more besides, his injured arm held protectively against his chest, the other clutched firmly around mine as if I was a spar of wood that might save him from drowning.
I promised to make all the necessary arrangements on the morrow.
I’ve always been a man of my word.
The journey to Richmond was uneventful. I telegrammed ahead first thing and we travelled by train in the early afternoon after I’d done my best to ensure he’d eaten something, his arm was bandaged and he looked half-way presentable. (I leant him my blue waistcoat, his grey one was ‘riddled with contagion’ that could not be brushed out as it was ‘soaked in the weave’.)
Holmes was... biddable, which if I hadn’t enough evidence already showed me quite how unwell he was. How many times had I wished in exasperation that my flatmate might be a little less impossible, a little more peaceable? Sitting in the carriage compartment with him so uncommonly neat and still beside me, I had cause to bitterly regret such wishes and acknowledge I had become not only accustomed but fond of Holmes’ personal idiom and all the brash chaos it entailed.
It was a short walk across the Green to the river; Parkhouse was on the other bank with generous grounds and a clear view of the Thames. In different circumstances I would have found it pleasant.
I have little experience of asylums (Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress always comes to mind), but my impression of Parkhouse was of a calm, secure, well run country house, and I was thankful for it.
We were greeted personally by Dr Tobias, who did his best to extend every courtesy. He is young for his position, perhaps four years my senior, but was quick enough to grasp facts and alight upon detail. He perceived that I was also a medical man, and, from the restless and particular movements of his fingers that Holmes played an instrument.
I have never felt so discomfited as I did sitting in the Superintendent’s study, Holmes next to me twitching and fretting imaginary scales upon the arm of the chair, whilst I was forced to explain all that had transpired. When one talks over the head of a fellow, one expects a sharp reprimand - it’s frankly disturbing to speak so candidly of a fellow and have him appear insensible to it; Holmes’ attention was for the ceiling, his waistcoat buttons, anti-aetherical scales and occasional wary glances at the doctor’s library.
The papers were signed within the hour; Holmes was admitted under the name ‘Sheridan Hope’, something he had insisted upon the previous night to ‘outwit the air-loom’. I obliged, not to pander to his delusions but because it would keep his own name off the registers of a madhouse; when he recovers I fancy it might be a kindness he’ll thank me for.
But then, as now, I feel far from kind.
Next...