The Warlow Experiment Read online

  They tell each other he’s eccentric and keep their ears open for reports of delectably odd behaviour. Is it really true he’s been living in a sheep shelter all this time? Those who do come across him find that smile of his odd. It takes time for someone to announce that it isn’t a smile at all but a look of extreme pain. His silences are the worst, they say, with that terrible rasping breathing. Has he taken a vow, perhaps? Become religious? Does he want to be a hermit? It’s hard to know how to treat him. Quite soon, to his great relief, they stop trying.

  Catherine’s first impulse is to give him food and drink, which he accepts. Her other impulse, strong in her nature, is to cheer, even to amuse, but this she suppresses. She sees that she can expect little from him yet. That he is, and again comes the same analogy, that he’s like a tree. Struck by lightning, its core destroyed, a fragile, dried-out shell, its centre blackened. But alive. Such trees can live for years.

  He comes to collect bread and milk from her, sometimes eggs, thanks her but rarely stops to talk. He’s lived with no one but sheep for company for so long; words have sunk like silt. She knows there’s a water pump in the kitchen of Moreham House and probably a plate or cup remains. Her child Tom peers round corners at the strange man. Hides.

  The nights become cold. She longs to offer him bedding, of which she has plenty now that three Warlow children have left home, but doesn’t press him, thinks he might ask in time. She sees him push a barrow through the orchard into the wood and return with branches of fallen trees.

  Tied   tied can’t get  can’t get my    arms

  Got in  bats got in got in  Couldn’t get ’em out.   all them bats all them bats got in got in my head black in my head    black

  Them did come. Them, some o’ them. ‘John Warlow, what you doin here?’ Locked me up.

  Once afore I were locked in my place. Were I? Hammered nails in the door. That were my place.

  John Warlow, what you doin here? Can’t come here, John Warlow. Go back, you lunatic!

  Master said: John Warlow, we must punish you for running away.

  Runnin away? I niver. I were. I did take I did take beans

  I were I were goin

  Tied tied  tied  tied down  tied down can’t get  can’t beat ’em can’t  can’t

  Master did tie me hisself. John Warlow, we must punish you. Can’t get my arms    John Warlow, what you doin?

  Them should niver have took me out

  Get ’em out. Them’s in my head     can’t  can’t get my arms

  Can’t beat ’em off  beat  beat ’em out   can’t beat ’em out o’ my head want to beat my head beat it can’t get my arms

  black     black black

  Arms tied    them’s tied my arms    can’t     them’s tied     tied    them’s tied

  * * *

  —

  CATHERINE HEARS that Warlow was found on the edge of the village, bellowing and banging his head on the ground, was taken to the lock-up and the following day returned to Kinnersford. The village hums with the news, though it’s unlikely to reach Powyss since he talks to no one except her. She decides not to tell him yet, but to find out for herself how it happened. So once more she journeys on foot and by chaise, once more meets the disagreeable Dr Grew.

  Warlow was tied to a chair in the cellar, Grew says, and fed bread and water for a week.

  ‘Like a child,’ Grew tells her eagerly. ‘He was punished as we punish a child. Gently, of course,’ he says, noticing her alarm. ‘We never use chains, but nevertheless the action was emphatic. I talked to him, Mrs Croft. I talked for a long time and reasoned with him. He has calmed.’

  She supposes she must believe him, but she doesn’t trust him, seeing that so much seems done for effect.

  ‘I am delighted you have come.’ He leers at her briefly. ‘To prevent a further occurrence it could help if you talk to him yourself. Then he might be satisfied. For it was you he was coming to see, I gathered from his garbled words.

  ‘Come this way. I shall be present in the background, should you need to call for help.’

  It is a strange meeting. They sit on a bench near the house, the sun low in the sky. Catherine feels both annoyed and amused at the thought of Grew peeping out at them from behind a shutter. She’d rather be alone with John Warlow, who she’s certain would never attack her. He seems bemused, perhaps listening to inner sounds. They hardly speak. What can they say to each other?

  Catherine remembers the cat, so they talk about that.

  Grew reappears after a very short time and she watches Warlow shamble away. Grew extracts a promise from her that she will return.

  * * *

  —

  AT NIGHT POWYSS wakes every two hours. He gathers up straw left by the French prisoners and uses their blankets left behind when they were re-arrested. It isn’t the cold that drives him to wake, nor is it moonlight, for the shutters have not been torn off. It’s the habit of listening to the wind, sensing shifts in temperature, frost’s claws, the bite of hail. Once, he reluctantly recalls, he would rise each morning to check the weather through his window from the warmth of the library.

  He calls on Catherine.

  ‘I shall arrange to raise the payment to you, Catherine, now that I am taking food from you. Do you have pen and paper?’ He writes, sands and folds the letter with directions to Mr Streeter, Hereford. ‘And please could you deliver this to Aaron, Bloor’s shepherd?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She doesn’t ask why. ‘Should you like me to help in the house, Mr Powyss?’

  ‘No. I have found what I need.’

  ‘I saw you getting wood.’

  ‘Yes, I’m making a store. Several trees have fallen in the storms. Some wood is already seasoned. It just needs to dry out.’

  ‘At least you have books to read.’

  Perhaps he doesn’t hear her. ‘I once told you I could not live in the house.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘I was wrong. I must live there.’

  She tries to understand. ‘You have surely made amends by now.’

  ‘Hannah is dead. I can never make amends to her.’

  ‘But you have provided for the welfare of John Warlow and his children.’

  ‘That was easy. I have money.’

  ‘You have punished yourself for more than two years, Mr Powyss.’

  ‘It is nothing. A shadow in time.’

  ‘It’s the whole life of my boy Tom.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘No one is punished forever, sir!’

  ‘Catherine, please call me by my first name. You are kind and far too wise to be a servant.’

  He seems tired out and leaves. She’ll tell him about Warlow when the right moment comes.

  * * *

  —

  BEDS ARE COVERED IN MUCK. Onions. Rhubarb crowns. Potatoes pulled for winter. He cleans cold frames, scrubs down greenhouse benches, scours flowerpots. Only ever digged, ploughed. In the time afore.

  ‘Good work, Warlow,’ Grew says. Not on a horse, Grew. Once he were. Were he? Tell him do this do that. Who were that? Master on a horse were some dream.

  Says next year them’ll show him how to prune grapes! If he don’t run away again. I niver – I did niver.

  Them’ll show me to pinch out tomatoes. Good. I likes tomatoes. Work in the greenhouse never so hard like ploughin. Even like hoein in hot summer. Easier nor scythin down nettles. Easier nor writin down words.

  Who were that? Made me writ words. Read books! Who? I’ll I’ll…

  The woman Catherine comes again. Sits on a bench with him in the flower garden. Asks him about his cat, what he gives her to eat. Brings him fruit tarts. Apple.

  ‘Yes, J
ohn, I made these. Do you remember the tarts in Moreham House?’

  ‘Moreham?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Moreham. Hah! More ham. But we niver.’

  ‘Never what, John?’

  ‘Niver got more ham! Joke!’

  ‘I expect your schoolteacher wanted you to learn how to spell it correctly. Anyway do you remember those little gooseberry tarts? Very delicate they were. I didn’t make those.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Annie.’

  ‘Oh. Oh.’ A bat flits through his mind. He eats the tarts quickly lest. Lest.

  ‘Do you remember Polly, John?’

  ‘Polly.’

  ‘Your youngest child.’

  ‘Polly. Be her kind like you?’

  ‘Oh yes! She lives with us, John. She’s growing up, but her face is still round, her smile like sunlight. A sweet girl. To be truthful, she is my favourite.’

  ‘Oh!’ Round face. Sweet. Smile.

  Later, Grew says to him, ‘She won’t come often, but you must be satisfied with that. Not often must be enough, Warlow.’

  ‘Her have children. Her be married. Catherine.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Grew had never believed she was married. ‘There are women we cannot have, John.’

  Her says one day her will bring Polly. But not yet.

  * * *

  —

  SHE TELLS POWYSS about Warlow walking all the way to Moreham, collapsing there.

  ‘Catherine, why didn’t you say so at the time?’

  ‘I thought it would upset you. You were not fit to hear it, Herbert. And now I can tell you because it’s over, he’s back at Kinnersford and he’s calm.’

  ‘It’s good of you to think of me. I shall go and see the place.’

  ‘It were surely best you don’t talk to John. There would be danger in that.’

  ‘No, of course. But I’ll speak to Dr Grew. You say they treat the people well, there.’

  ‘They do, though I’m afraid Dr Grew punished him cruelly. Bound him to a chair in a cellar and fed him bread and water. I cannot see the necessity…’

  He writes to Kinnersford and receives an immediate reply. Dr Grew will be pleased to see him, suggests a particular day and encloses some information that he hopes Mr Powyss will have time to read before his arrival.

  The enclosure is a pamphlet, designed as an informative advertisement without mentioning fees, though Powyss now knows these to be considerable. The establishment is new, opened three years before the end of the century. Warlow must have been one of the first to be treated by Dr Grew’s humane methods.

  Perhaps there’s an attempt to dazzle with names and terms, Powyss thinks, but he’s struck by this section:

  We understand from the late, learned and celebrated Dr William Battie that ‘Consequential madness’, as opposed to ‘original madness’, is assuredly capable of remedy, since it involves what he calls the ‘deluded imagination’. Put another way by the great philosopher John Locke in his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ‘madmen do not appear to have lost the faculty of reasoning but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths, and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles’.

  They err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. His own fatal decision on Cold Hill with the encouragement of Fox’s letter: that the happiness of six children and one woman, and himself of course, far outweighed the misery of one man was surely a perfect example of arguing right from wrong principles. He’d seen it as the application of cool reason, of impartial, scientific calculation. Had deluded himself from the start of the experiment that his actions would produce something good, a significant contribution to science, when what they’d produced was hideous destruction. Light had brought forth darkness.

  He skips to the paragraphs about treatment:

  The ‘deluded’ or ‘errant’ madman may be corrected, or, at least, helped from his delusions by the skill of the physician. Since the condition of each patient is unique there can be no general cures such as those used in treatment in former times and listed by Dr Battie as: bleeding, blisters, caustics, rough cathartics, the gumms and foetid anti-hysterics, opium, mineral waters, cold bathing and vomits.

  Moral Management in Place of Medicine can be the only dictum for those who treat insane persons as we begin a new and humane century. Gone are shackles and the whip! Gone is terror! Instead, as Dr John Ferriar has written most recently, ‘a system of mildness and conciliation is now generally adopted, which, if it does not always facilitate the cure, at least tends to soften the destiny of the sufferer’.

  Thus Grew promotes himself, Powyss thinks, though he hopes the man believes it, too. If he really does practise in the ways described, then Warlow is well off, though he’ll ask about tying the man up for a week. Even if cure were possible, Tharpe had told him that the trial judge had stipulated Warlow never be released.

  Powyss borrows a horse from a man in the village.

  The journey to Kinnersford is not a long one, twelve or so miles to the south-east of the county on rutted, unkempt roads usable by wheel only in summer. The country is not much different from that around Moreham, which Powyss imagines is probably good for Warlow, who can never have known anything different. He finds he’s thinking quite easily about the man, as if he were a boy he’d known at school. Recalls, as in a bad dream, how he’d hated him uncontrollably.

  Eventually, he passes through grand gates, the columns of which are surmounted by stone lions, salient, and broken chains.

  Men stacking tree trunks in great piles by the road stop to watch as he passes. Parkland turns into fields, which to all appearances have had a good harvest despite what he’s heard about a poor spring.

  Further along are vegetable gardens. Labourers wheel barrows, weed neat rows of plants, roll gravel paths, scare birds off late raspberries.

  The men are all dressed the same, in black breeches and stockings, white waistcoats, black coats, unnervingly like the clothes he used to wear himself, once. Sober, decent, gentlemanly. You’d never guess these men are lunatics.

  Flower gardens succeed vegetables and once more men in black and white stop to gaze. Yet another well-dressed patient helps him to dismount. Holding the reins, he bows and declares: ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’

  Powyss bows in answer. Suddenly recalls a phrase: ‘We may yet find balm in Gilead.’ The patient clears his throat, tuts, shakes his head and leads the horse away.

  Powyss is ushered into Grew’s book- and bust-filled study and they shake hands.

  ‘Mrs Catherine Croft has been visiting, Mr Powyss. Are you aware of that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ He opens a book on his desk and begins to scribble in it. ‘I know the whole of Warlow’s story.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘The experiment, the imprisonment.’

  ‘Not imprisonment, Dr Grew.’

  ‘I have read the report of the court proceedings and spoken many times to John Warlow.’

  ‘Of course. Please tell me what you are doing to help his mental state. More immediately, why did he get out a few weeks ago?’ Powyss shifts the attack back at Grew, but reddens, gasps with the effort. ‘I pay large fees per annum for Warlow’s keep…It is reasonable to expect…that he be prevented from running away.’

  Grew clears his throat. Scratches at a particular place on his leg. How much more does he prefer discussion with a woman!

  ‘Have you read my pamphlet, Mr Powyss? If so you will comprehend that for the physician to correct each patient’s errant thoughts, or to relieve his deluded imagination, he must know everything possible about the patient’s life before the onset of what we are pleased to call “consequential madness”.’

  ‘Indeed. Have you
begun the correction?’

  ‘I’m sure you will understand the full extent of the humanity and gentleness we employ in our treatment of those who live here. Moral Management, Mr Powyss. No one is imprisoned.’

  Infuriating, this Grew! Powyss rushes to his own defence.

  ‘Warlow was the willing subject of my experiment, he was not imprisoned. When the experiment broke down and he was allowed to leave, he wouldn’t do so.’ He coughs heavily, forces himself on.

  ‘And I hear that you imprisoned him yourself in a cellar on his return from Moreham, putting him on something worse than a prison diet.’

  ‘Oh, merely a light punishment as one might punish a child. Have you children, Mr Powyss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will have experienced it yourself as a child, most surely.’

  ‘I did not.’ Dislike of this complacent, well-dressed doctor brings on a fit of coughing. Grew fiddles noisily with objects on his desk as he waits for Powyss to pull himself together.

  ‘Dr Grew. It seems there are times when your practice contradicts your theory. Perhaps at other times you are too humane, for who knows what Warlow might have done in Moreham the other day had he not been discovered.

  ‘I’ve come to assure myself that he lives comfortably but also that he will not escape again. I trust you’ll show me your establishment.’

  Grew grinds his teeth, controls his impatience. He sees that Powyss, for all his coughing and wheezing, is determined; yet while he feels strongly resistant to the dominance of this man who can afford to pay but is dressed like a beggar, it is, after all, Powyss who is paying. He decides it’s time to raise the fees.

  ‘As far as Warlow’s escape, as you put it, is concerned, it will not happen again. We use neither locks nor chains here, rather wise counsel and kindness. Only occasionally is a patient bound. When the need is pressing, we may, perhaps, resort to the use of laudanum. Just as you might do yourself.