1874: A secret
A strange comfort attaches itself, in these indifferent times, to the regularity of a Thursday. One may despise the world, doubt one’s parishioners, or lose faith in both doctrine and diagnosis, yet there comes always the same mild afternoon, the same pewter light over Holborn, and the same odd trio assembling at the edge of St. Luke’s pond: a clergyman, a physician of the mind, and a duck of evidently philosophical temperament.
They arrange themselves as custom dictates—Reverend Smythe upon his wicker chair (borrowed indefinitely from the church hall), Dr. Pemberton on an upturned crate, and the duck upon whatever small patch of grass remains unoccupied by either theology or psychiatry.
The subject of this week’s discourse—“the definitive meaning of insanity”—arose after the Reverend’s curate had attempted to baptise a cat. The ensuing reflections were mixed with sighs, and a faint odour of damp bread from Smythe’s pocket.
Dr. Pemberton, who believed himself impartial on nearly all imaginable topics except the insufficiency of bishops’ salaries, began:
“Insanity,” said he, “is the departure from reality measurable by the consensus of the sane. The madman has not lost reason, you see; he has only misplaced his receipt for it.”
This pronouncement was received with mild reverence. The Reverend leaned forward, resembling a man on the verge of confession.
“Whereas I,” said Smythe, “have long suspected that insanity is simply sin under another name—sin relieved of its moral wardrobe. If the soul may be polished, so may it also be cracked.”
Dr. Pemberton smiled in the condescending manner peculiar to secular healers confronted with earnest faith. The duck, meanwhile, eyed a discarded crust.
When the moment came for the third opinion, all decorum shifted toward the bird. “And you, sir,” asked the Reverend, who by now felt the presence of genuine mystery about their companion, “what say you of insanity?”
The duck turned one amber eye—the eye, it seemed, of Aristotle in exile—and said, after a pause weighted like a sermon:
“It’s a secret.”
The pronouncement prompted silence of such fullness that even London’s omnibuses seemed to move with apologetic discretion. The Reverend looked troubled, the Doctor intrigued, and the pond notably calm.
“It cannot be wholly secret,” muttered Pemberton, consulting his notebook as though hypnosis might unveil the duck’s schema. “Surely it is a classificatory phenomenon—either of mind, or of context!”
The duck only preened a wing, as if smoothing down the very folds of epistemology.
Smythe whispered, “A secret—yes!—for only God knows the boundary between sense and its undoing.”
But Pemberton objected gently: “If that be the case, Reverend, then the definition of sanity depends upon concealment, not reason. We name the secret to prove we do not share it.”
To which the duck, unable to bear such misuse of stillness, gave a brief, dismissive quack. The sound was not unlike laughter compressed into syllable. All three present understood, though none could have explained what they had understood.
The meeting concluded without resolution. Pemberton gathered his notes with professional hopelessness; Smythe crossed himself out of habit; the duck departed toward the centre of the pond where all questions are unanswerable by design.
Later, as the bells of evening dragged their old ropes through the dusk, Reverend Smythe remarked to his colleague that next Thursday’s topic should be “The Nature of Certainty.” Pemberton agreed. But the duck, if overhearing, gave no sign—merely the faint sound of water parting, as though secrecy itself were paddling home.
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