“We’re getting more civilized about these things,” said Archer. “It’s just like public executions. Why we used to hang a man before a huge crowd of people; but now the thing is done more decently.”

“All the same,” grumbled Murrel. “We should be rather annoyed if our friends and relatives began disappearing quietly; and whenever we’d mislaid a mother or couldn’t put our hands on a favourite niece, we heard that our poor relation had been taken away and hanged with perfect delicacy.”

Murrel knew that Hendry was being taken to such an interview; and listened grimly to his medical monologue in the cab. Hendry was a hopelessly English lunatic, he reflected, in having thus taken refuge in a hobby and a theory instead of a grievance and a vendetta. He had been ruined as Hendry of the secret of medieval pigments. Yet he was almost happy in being Hendry of the secret of diseased eyesight. Dr. Gambrel, curiously enough, also had a theory. It was called Spinal Repulsion and traced brain trouble in all those who sat on the edges of chairs, as Hendry did. Dr. Gambrel had collected quite a large number of poor people off the edges of chairs; fit symbol of the insecure ledge of their lives. He was quite prepared to explain this theory in the court, but he had no opportunity of explaining it in the cab.

There was something macabre about the progress of the cab crawling up the steep streets of that grey seaside town. From infancy he had felt the phrase “a crawling cab” had a touch of nightmare; as if the cab crept after its fares and swallowed them with its yawning jaws. The horse had an angular outline: the dark woods inlaying the cab the hint of a coffin. The road grew steeper, the street rearing against the cabhorse or the cabhorse against the cab. But they came to a standstill before a porch with two pillars between which they saw the grey-green sea.

CHAPTER X

WHEN DOCTORS DISAGREE

The house with the pillared porch to which the crawling cab eventually crawled, had little to distinguish it from a prosperous private house. For the policy of all recent legislations and customs had been in the direction of conducting public affairs in private. The official was all the more omnipotent because he was always in plain clothes. It was possible to take people to and from such a place without any particular show of violence; merely because everybody knew that violence would be useless. The doctor had grown quite accustomed to taking his mad patients casually in a cab; and they seldom made any difficulty about it. They were not so mad as that.

This particular branch of the new Lunacy Commission had been only recently established in the town; for the distribution of such bureaus through the smaller places had been an after-thought. The attendants who lurked quietly in the vestibule or opened the gates and doors were new, if not to their job, at least to their neighbourhood. And the magistrate who sat in an inner room, to consider the cases as they came, was the newest of all. Unfortunately, while he was new he was also old. He had done the same work in many other places; and so formed into the habit of doing it smoothly and rapidly and dangerously well. But he was beginning to be a little old to do anything. His sight was not what it was; his hearing was not what he thought it was. He was a retired army surgeon of the name of Wotton. He had a carefully trimmed grey moustache, and a rather sleepy expression; he had reached a rather sleepy stage both of that day’s work and of his life’s work also.

He had a number of papers on his desk, among which was a note of certain appointments that afternoon in connection with the Commission in Lunacy. In his deep and comfortably padded room he naturally did not hear the crazy cab crawl up to the door; still less the rapid and quiet movement by which a gentlemanly person assisted the two occupants to alight and, with many polite phrases, managed to hustle them into the outer room of the building. The person was so very gentlemanly that nobody thought for the moment of questioning his right to act as intermediary; the official attendants accepted him as being obviously a highly polished part of machinery, and even the official doctor permitted himself to be courteously waved into a side room to the left of the magistrate’s sanctum. Perhaps if they had looked out of the window a moment before, and seen the gentlemanly person fall off the top of the cab, they might have been more disturbed. As it was, the official doctor began to be very decidedly disturbed when the gentlemanly person (whom he had seen only dimly on a dark staircase and hardly begun vaguely to recognise) not only closed the door behind him with a courtly bow, but suddenly locked it.

Of all this the magistrate heard nothing; since it was carried out with quiet swiftness amid that momentum of routine that sleeps like a spinning top. The first notification he had was a knock at the door and a voice saying “This way doctor.” It was the regular practice in such cases for the medical man responsible for the segregation to interview the magistrate first; who then had an interview (generally much briefer) with the victim. On that particular afternoon Mr. Wotton hoped that both interviews would be very brief indeed. He did not look up from his papers, but merely said:–“It is Case No. 9,871, isn’t it; a case of conspiracy mania, I think.”

Dr. Hendry inclined his head in his most graceful manner. “Conspiracy is, of course, a symptom rather than a cause,” he said. “The cause is purely physical . . . purely physical,” he coughed in a refined manner. “We don’t need to be told at this time of day that the distortion of the sense reacts upon the brain, eh? In this case I have the strongest reason for supposing that the trouble arose originally from a very common malady of the optic nerve. The process by which I reached this conclusion is rather interesting in itself.”

At the end of about ten minutes, it became apparent that Mr. Wotton did not think so. His head was still bowed over his papers and consequently did not study directly the figure before him. If he had he might have been moved to some suspicion by Dr. Hendry’s remarkably shabby clothes. As it was, he only heard Dr. Hendry’s remarkably cultivated voice.

“I don’t think we need go into all that,” he said at last, after his visitor had gone into a good deal of it, and seemed alarmingly capable of going into a good deal more. “If you’re sure it’s a case of that sort, a case of really dangerous mania, I suppose it’s all right.”

“In all my experience,” said Dr. Hendry solemnly, and with a full sense of responsibility, “I have never known a clearer one. This optical question is becoming grave, sir. It is becoming menacing. Even at this moment, while I speak, persons unquestionably mad are wandering about the world, and even delivering authoritative opinions on scientific subjects. Only the other day–.”

At this moment his melodious and persuasive voice was drowned for an instant in very remarkable sounds from the next room. The noise resembled that of some huge and heavy body being hurled against the door; and in the silence that followed something like guttural imprecations, as if hoarse and faint with fury, could be heard through the thick partition.

“Good heavens!” cried Mr. Wotton, awakening with a start and looking up for the first time. “What on earth was that?”

Dr. Hendry wagged his head with a beautiful sadness, but he continued to smile.

“Ours is a melancholy occupation,” he said. “Dealing with the weaker and the wilder aspects of our fallen nature . . . the body of our humiliation, I think it is in the Greek Testament . . . the body of our humiliation. It sounds only too like the struggle of some unfortunate whom society finds it a sad necessity to restrain.”