Free The Lightning Cage by Alan Wall Page B

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    Shall charity at least permit the adder his venom?
    He had gone out and searched the grounds for adders, but had found none. That night as he lay in his bed with his hand on his wife’s stiffening nipple, he said, ‘He’s a sot as well as a madman. Still, why should we complain? I daresay it’s easier than entertaining princes.’
    â€˜Some princes are sots and madmen too, my love.’
    *   *   *
    Pelham refilled his glass. What, he was asking himself, do the teeth of desire finally close on? An apple or a grape? If a grape, then by drinking the juice from the grape the need for mastication can be avoided. Then wine could take the teeth out of desire, and all the sharpness from the heart’s affections. Surely some ancient source had somewhere noted this down? Surely somewhere in Lord Chilford’s library there must be an account of this? He took himself back up the stairs to search.
    Inside the study, he stopped momentarily at the curious transparent effigy mounted on its own little plinth by the door. Two figures, one kneeling, one supine, the hands of the one plunged into the torso of the other. His lordship had informed him it was a present from his wife and was meant to signify love, but for the poet it looked closer to surgery.
    â€˜It’s a whimsy-glass, Pelham, a frigger, no more,’ Lord Chilford had called one day, as he saw him eyeing it defensively.
    Many of the books from antiquity which Chilford had acquired Pelham had already examined. After a half-hour, it suddenly struck him that his lordship might himself have penned some thoughts on the subject, so he did what he had never done before: he turned the key to Lord Chilford’s desk drawer and started rustling through the papers inside. He found nothing on the teeth of desire, but he did find a pile of sheets with this title: Mr Richard Pelham, Lunatic. And with his back against the wall, and his haunches on the cold floor, he began to read.
    Mr Richard Pelham was brought to my home at Twickenham in May of this year from the Chelsea Asylum, with the full cooperation of Dr Thomas Parker.
    As will probably be known to the Society’s members, Pelham had made a name for himself with some volumes of verse, whose skill and aptitude were matched by a most acute observation of the minutiae of Nature. Pelham was thought to be destined for a life of literary accomplishment, but this was not to be.
    Instead the progress of his years has evidenced acute debauchery followed by a descent into madness. At present the lunacy itself is in remission, though signs of it re-emerge frequently, not in noisome exhibitions, or physical tantrums, but in a kind of waking delirium which seems frequently to afflict him. His writings these days consist of little more than a glossography of this delirium. While his mind has lost none of its acuteness in local and specific observation, it appears governed entirely, if governed at all, by incoherent passions. In his writings, fantasies of religious victimhood are often expressed as identification with the Messiah. The expressions of religious belief which I have gleaned from him would make even the wildest Enthusiasts on makeshift outdoor pulpits sound like epiphanies of the Rational Mind. Wit at its most facetious has overrun judgement entirely.
    In pursuit of my own theories regarding the retention of memories by the melancholic type, I administered opium to Pelham over a number of weeks. His ravings were lyrical and of some interest. There was also, unless I’m mistaken, a heightened sensibility in regard to sound. There was not, however, the disembarkation of clotted remembrance; I was disappointed in the hoped-for effect of alleviating this pressure of congealed chronology upon the normal mental functions. The same patterns of over-excitement followed by paralysing sloth are also observable, though much less pronounced than previously.
    We have so far been treated to