The Disease of Duodiapsychosis

Enid Windrush was a human being; a very human being. She had several shades and different degrees of indignation, only on the present occasion she had them all at once. She was angry because a visitor turned up at that time of night and entered by the window instead of the door; she was angry that a person for whom she had felt some regard should behave like a cat-burglar; she was angry that her father's wishes should be scornfully disregarded; she was angry at being frightened, and more angry at seeing no sense even in the occasion of the fright. But she was human, and was perhaps most angry of all at the fact that the intruder did not even answer or acknowledge any of her expressions of anger. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clutching his bursting temples, and it was long before there came from him even the impatient reply: "Can't you see I'm thinking?"

Then he jumped up in his energetic way and ran to one of the large, unfinished pictures and peered into it. Then, equally feverishly, he examined another and then another. Then he turned on her a face about as reassuring as a skull and cross-bones, and said:

"I am greatly grieved to say it, Miss Windrush. In plain words, your father is suffering from Duodiapsychosis."

"Is that your notion of plain words?" she asked.

He added in a low, hoarse voice: "It began as an example of Arboreal Atavism."

It is an error for the man of science to lapse into being intelligible. The last two words were sufficiently familiar, in an age of popular science, to cause the lady to leap up like a leaping flame.

"Have you the impudence to suggest," she cried, "that my father ever wanted to live in a tree like a monkey?"

"What other explanation is there?" he said gloomily. "This is a very painful business; but the hypothesis clearly covers the facts. Why should he wish always to be alone with the tree, unless his dealings with it were more grotesque than seemed suitable to his social dignity?—you know what this suburb is like! For that matter, his own horror of the suburb, his own quite exaggerated horror of towns, his quite feverish and fanatical yearning for woodlands and wild country—what can all this mean except the same Arboreal Atavism? For that matter, what else can explain the whole story—the story of how he found the tree and fixed on the tree? What was the nature of that ungovernable craving that first surged up in him at the very sight of the tree? An appetite as powerful as that must have come out of the depths of nature, out of the very roots of the evolutionary origin of man. It can only have been an anthropoid appetite. It is a melancholy but most convincing example of Doone's Law."

"What is all this nonsense?" cried Enid. "Do you imagine my father had never seen a tree before?"

"You must remember," replied the other in the same hollow and hopeless voice, "the peculiar features of the tree. It might have been designed to stimulate the faint memories of the original home of man. It is a tree that seems all branches, of which the very roots are like branches, and invite the climber with a hundred footholds. These primary promptings or fundamental instincts would have been plain enough in any case but unfortunately the case has since grown more complex. It has developed into a case of Semi-Quadrumanous Ambidexterity."

"That's not what you said before," she said suspiciously.

"I admit," he said, with a shudder, "that it is in a sense a discovery of my own."

"And I suppose," she said, "you are so fond of your horrible discoveries that you would sacrifice anybody to them—my father or me."

"Not sacrifice you. Save you," said Judson, and shuddered again. Then he mastered himself with an effort, and went on in the same maddening mechanical tone like that of a lecturer.

"The anthropoid reaction carries with it an attempt to recover the use of all the limbs equally, in the monkey fashion. This leads to experiments in ambidexterity like those he himself admitted. He tried to draw and paint with both hands. At a later stage he would probably attempt also to paint with his feet."

They stared across at each other; it measures the horror of that interview that neither of them laughed.

"The result," went on the doctor, "the really dangerous result lies in a tendency to separation between the functions. Such ambidexterity is not natural to man in his existing evolutionary stage and may lead to a schism between the lobes of the brain. One part of the mind may become unconscious of what is attempted by the other part. Such a person is not responsible . . . and really should be under supervision."

"I will not believe a word of all this," said the lady angrily.

He lifted one finger and pointed in a sombre manner at the sombre canvases and frames of brown paper that hung above them, on which were traced in vortical lines and lurid colours the visions of the ambidextrous artist.

"Look at those pictures," he said. "Look at them long enough and you will see exactly what I mean—and what they mean. The tree-motive is repeated again and again like a monomania; for a tree has a radiating and centrifugal pattern that suggests the waving of both hands at once, with a brush in each. But a tree is not a wheel—there would be less harm in a wheel. Though a tree has branches on each side, they are not the same on each side. And that is where the curse and the creeping peril begins."

This time there was a deadly silence, which he himself broke by going on with the lecture.

"The attempt to render the variation of branches by simultaneous ambidextrous action leads to a dissociation of cerebral unity and continuity, a breach of responsible moral control and co-ordinated consecutive conservation—"

In the black storm of her mind she had a lightning blaze of intuition and said:

"Is this a sort of revenge?"

He stopped in the very middle of a polysyllable and turned pale to the lips.

"Have you come to the end of your long words, you liar and quack and mountebank?" she cried in a tempest of indescribable fury. "Do you think I don't know why you're trying to make out my father isn't responsible? Because I told you he could turn you out of the house . . . because . . ."

The pale lips seemed to move as if with a grin of agony: "And why should I mind that?"

"Because," she began and then stopped dead. An abyss had opened in herself into which she did not look. For a moment he sat on the sofa stiff as a corpse and then suddenly the corpse came to life.

"Yes!" he cried, leaping up. "You are right! It is you. It is you all the time! How can I leave you alone with him? You must believe me! I tell you the man is mad." He cried out suddenly in a new and ringing voice: "I swear to God I am afraid he will kill you! And how should I live after that?"

She was so astounded at this burst of passion after all the pedantry, that for the first time something broke or wavered in her hard voice and she could only say: "If it is me you are thinking about, you must leave him alone."

And with that a sort of stony detachment suddenly settled back upon him and he said, in a voice that seemed a hundred miles away: "You forget that I am a doctor. I have in any case a duty to the public."

"And now I know you are a skunk and a scoundrel," she said. "They always have a duty to the public."

And then, in the silence that followed, they both heard the sounds which could alone, perhaps, have aroused them from their dumb mutual defiance. A long, light and swinging step was heard down the corridors, and the light humming of some post-prandial song, told Enid with sufficient clearness who had returned, and the next moment Walter Windrush stood in the room, looking festive and rather magnificent in evening dress. He was a tall and handsome old gentleman, and before him the figure of the sullen doctor looked not only square but almost squat. But when the artist looked across his studio, he saw the windows open and the festivity faded from his face.

"I have just walked through your garden," said the doctor in a soft voice.

"Then you will kindly walk out of my house," said the artist.

He had turned pale with anger or some other passion, but he spoke clearly and firmly. After a silence he said: "I must ask you to cease from any communications with me and my family."

Judson started and stepped forward with a violent gesture which he checked as he made it. But his voice broke out of him like something beyond his control.

"You say I am to go out of this house. I say it is you who shall go out of this house!"

Then, as if grinding his teeth, he added with what seemed inconceivable intellectual cruelty: "I am going to have you certified as a lunatic."

He walked furiously out of the room towards the front door, and Windrush turned to his daughter. She was staring at him with wide eyes, but her colour was such that he thought, for the fraction of an instant, that she was dead.

Of the next frightful forty-eight hours in which the threat was carried out with all its consequences, Enid could never remember many details. But she remembered some nameless hour of night or morning that seemed but a part of a sleepless night, when she stood on the doorstep and looked wildly up and down the street, as if expecting her neighbours to rescue her from a house on fire. And there crept upon her the cold certainty, more cruel than any fire, that in this sort of calamity there was no hope from neighbours, nor any appeal against the machine of modern oppression. She saw a policeman standing near the next lamp-post, outside the next house. She thought of calling to the policeman, as if to save her from a burglar, and then she realized that she might as well call to the lamp-post. If two doctors chose to testify that Walter Windrush was mad, they turned the whole modern world with them—police and all. If they chose to testify that it was an emergency case, he could be taken away at once, under the eye of any policeman, and it seemed that he was being taken away at once. Nevertheless, there was something about the policeman planted at that particular spot, where she had never seen one before, that riveted her eye. And even as she gazed, the next-door neighbour, Mr. Wilmot, came out of his front door with a light suitcase in his hand.

She felt a sudden impulse to consult him, perhaps it was an impulse to consult anybody. But he had always seemed to be a man of many types of information, including the scientific, and she impulsively ran across and asked for a moment's interview. Mr. Wilmot seemed a little hurried, which was far from being his usual demeanour, but he politely bowed her back into his front parlour. When she got there, a rather inexplicable shyness or evasion overcame her. She felt a new and irrational reluctance to give away somebody or something, she knew not what. Moreover, there was something unfamiliar about the familiar face and form of Mr. Wilmot. He was wearing horn spectacles, through which his glance seemed sharper and more alert than of old. His clothes were the same, but they were buttoned up more neatly and all his movements were more brisk. He still had the wisps that looked like whiskers but the face underneath had so altered in expression that one might almost fancy the whiskers were part of a wig.

Dazed and doubtful in a new fashion, she felt impelled to put her point in a more impersonal way, and asked whether he could give any advice to a friend of hers, who had been warned of a disease called Duodiapsychosis. Could he tell her if there was such a disease, as she knew he knew a lot about those things?

He admitted that he knew a little about those things. But he still seemed hurried—courteously but convincingly hurried. He looked it up in a work of reference, turning the pages very rapidly; no, he doubted whether there was any such thing.

"It seems to me," he said, looking gravely at her through his spectacles, "that your friend may be the victim of a quack."

With that repetition of her suspicions, she turned homewards and he rather eagerly followed her into the street. The policeman saluted him; there was nothing much in that; policemen saluted her father and other well-known residents. But she did think it odd that he said to the policeman, as he went off: "There's one thing more I must make sure of. Unless I wire, things can go forward here as arranged."

When she came back to her own house, she knew it was something worse than a house of death. There was a black taxicab waiting outside it, which made her think of a funeral, almost with envy. If she had known who was already in the taxicab, she might have stopped and made a scene in the street. As it was, she burst into the house and found two grave, dark-clad doctors sitting in the light of the bow-window in front, with a table between them, covered with official documents and pen and ink. One of the doctors, who was just about to sign one of the documents, was a stately, silver-haired gentleman in a very elegant astrakhan overcoat; she gathered from the conversation that his name was Doone. The other doctor was the abominable John Judson.

She had paused an instant just outside the room and heard the tail-end of their scientific talk.

"You and I know, of course," Judson was saying, "how much the mere idea of subconsciousness, or horizontal division of the mind, has been superseded by vertical division of the mind. But the layman has hardly heard yet of the new double or ambidextrous consciousness."

"Quite so," said Dr. Doone in a level and soothing voice.

He had a very soothing voice, and with it he earnestly did his best to soothe Enid Windrush. He really seemed to be profoundly touched with the tragedy of her position.

"I cannot expect you to believe how much I feel for your misfortunes," he said. "I can only say that anything that can soften the shock for anyone involved will be done. I will not disguise from you that your father is already in the cab outside, under the care of tactful and humane attendants. I will not disguise from you that some deception, such as has to be used to the sick, has been employed in prevailing upon him, but I told him no more than the truth in saying that he was going with his best friends. These things are very terrible, my child, but perhaps we may all draw nearer to each other in—"

"Oh, sign the thing and be done," said Dr. Judson rudely.

"Be silent, sir," said Doone, with fine dignity and indignation. "If you have neither the manners nor the morals for dealing with people in misfortune, I, at least, have more experience. Miss Windrush, I am sorry."

He held out his hand and Enid stood hesitating and then retreated like one distraught; so distraught that she actually turned to Dr. Judson.

"Send that man away," she cried with the shrillness of hysteria. "Send him away! He is more horrible even than—"

"More horrible than— " repeated Judson, waiting,

She looked at him with a wild inscrutable stare and said:

"More horrible than you."

"Have you signed that damned thing yet?" said Judson, boiling with impatience. But, even as they had turned away from him, Doone had signed the paper and Judson snatched it up with furious haste and ran out of the house.

And then she saw something that finally put him beyond pardon. For as he ran down the steps, he seemed to give a sort of bound of cheerfulness, like a boy on a holiday; like a man who has at last got what he wanted. She felt she could have forgiven him everything except that last little leap of joy.

Some time after—she could not have said how long—she still sat staring out of the bow-window into the empty street. She had reached that state when the soul feels that nothing worse can happen in the world. But she was wrong. For it was only a few minutes later that two policemen and a man in plain clothes came up those steps and, after some apologies and uncomfortable explanations, announced that they had a warrant for the arrest of Walter Windrush on a charge of murder.