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.Julian Archer was instantly transformed into a knight-errant ready to cross Europe on her behalf, without any reference to the other five princesses who were not for the moment in the public eye.The type and the individual will be completely misunderstood, however, if we suppose that there was anything obviously unctuous or pharisaical in his way of urging these mutable enthusiasms.In each case in turn, Archer’s handsome and heated face had always been thrust across the table with the same air of uncontrollable protest and gushing indignation.And Murrel would sit up opposite him and reflect that this was what made a public man; the power of being excited at the same moment as the public press.He would also reflect that he himself was a hopelessly private man.He always felt like a private man, though his family and friends had considerable power in the state; but he never felt so hopelessly and almost pitiably private as when he thus remained like one small frozen object, still moist and chilly in the blast of a furnace.“You can’t be against it; nobody can be against it,” Archer had cried.“It’s simply a Bill to introduce a little more humanity into asylums.”“I know it is,” his friend had replied, with some gloom.“It introduces a lot more humanity into asylums.That’s exactly what it does do.You’ll hardly believe it, but there’s quite a lot of humanity still that doesn’t want to be introduced into asylums.” But he recalled the story chiefly because Archer and the newspapers had congratulated each other on another new feature rather relevant to the present case.This was the greater privacy of the proceedings.A special sort of magistrate would settle all such cases in an interview as private as a visit to a physician.“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 XWHEN DOCTORS DISAGREEThe 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]