"MISSING." T HE inquest on the body of the late Miss
Hickman, the lady doctor who mysteriously disappeared just over two months ago, and whose body was accidentally discovered on Sunday last in a plantation in Richmond Park by some boys who were gathering chestnuts, has not yet concluded. Judging, however, from the evidence given, it is probable that the history of the movements of this unhappy lady, from the time when she left the doors of the Royal Free Hospital, Will never be known, though, of course, plenty of theories, none of them easy of acceptance, have been and will be put forward to explain the mystery. Theories divide themselves naturally into two main groups, involving either an external agency which actually compassed the death, or at least made death preferable to life; or you must imagine some irresistibly strong internal impulse which drove the mind with immense momentum to a step which ended all things. The rest can be nothing more than mere conjecture.
It is more often than not the case that a coroner's jury, when bringing in a verdict in cases different from the case of Miss Hickman, in that it is certain that the deceased met death by his or her own hand, add to their verdict of " Suicide " the words "during temporary insanity." Since many men and women have been temporarily insane— have had their mental equilibrium upset--at some time or other during their lives, the words have no particular significance ; except that they reflect the strong, wholesome belief, deeply rooted in the mind of Western civilisation, that a man may not rightly take his own life, and that if he does so without an insistent reason, such as horrible fear or shame, he cannot be in full possession of his senses. That is a belief which is one of the funda- mental props of most men's morality ; but, of course, it is not historically true that all sane men have thought it necessarily an act of insanity to commit suicide. "Nay, we read," wrote Bacon, "after Otho the Emperor had slain himself, Pity (which is the tenderest of affections) provoked many to die, out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers. Nay Seneca adds niceness and satiety." " Think," Seneca's Latin runs, "for how long you have been doing the same things. It is not only the brave man or the wretched man who is able to desire death. It is the fastidious man also,"—the Latin word is hard to translate, but it conveys a sense of boredom mixed with aloofness, contempt, and fine feeling. "A man would die," the passage continues, "though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over." Is it so certain that a good many men, accounted perfectly sane to-day, would not gladly " die " to-morrow in the sense of getting rid of the life they are leading ; or, perhaps rather, getting rid of the nuisance of the lives of other people round them ?
It is not very difficult to imagine the case of a man bound by no particular ties of family affection, with no particular interest in his work—if he does any work—with no alluring prospects before him, and with very little ambition, fascinated by the idea of suddenly changing everything. He has done the same thing "so oft over and over" ; every day brings round the same set of trivial tasks to be performed, the same commonplace or exasperating people to be met and talked to and considered ; to-morrow and the day after • to. morrow will be the same as to-day. Such a man need not necessarily be supposed to be afraid of anybody; he need not have committed a crime which he fears will be found out; he need not be in debt—though, of course, if he stood. in any or all of these predicaments he would have the stronger reason for wishing to "die," that is, to change his surround- ings—in short, to disappear, to be reported in the newspapers as "missing." But—the great difficulty is that he cannot fulfil his desire. He cannot disappear. He cannot be reported "missing,"—not, at least, for many weeks together. The newspapers, the telegraph wires, the police force, the ticket- collector, the printing-machine uttering its thousands of handbills, the eyes of hundreds wherever he goes anxious to spy out a reward,—all are against him. He is in a huge live prison, with men for stone walla and iron bars, from Which he can escape only, if at all, by the most careful and thorough thought and circumspection. Just imagine him confronted with the problem. "Here am I, a bachelor, with no relations who care for me particularly, with (per- haps) money at the bank which I cannot move quickly, in large sums, either from my bank to my pocket, or from one bank to another, without chronicling something against myself. I must leave, at all events, the bulk of my money behind me ; and without money how am I going to make my 'next life' much more tolerable than the life I am leading now P " There is one of the great difficulties : no man can move about in the world unnoticed and un- identifiable if he is spending money. If it is true of men about to die that "we brought nothing into the world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out," it is equally true of the man who wants to "disappear." He must go alone; he can take nothing with him ; his body and brain alone must suffice,—even his clothes may track him down. He is brought inevitably to that conclusion; and, of course, since a "next life" without money and the comforts that money can buy is no better alternative for the man who is merely " fastidiosus "—satiated with his present condition—he stays where he is. But if he is more than merely urged by "niceness and satiety" to try a "next life," if, that is, he is impelled by horror or shame to leave the life he is leading, what, even then, can he do ? In this case the possession of money has no attractions for him. He merely wants to go, to get rid of it all. But even so he has to consider his qualifications for starting afresh; he will have to realise that to keep alive he must work, that the man who pays him will want to know who he is, and that he must possess very great powers of self-restraint and of acting a part not to let others into his secret. Perhaps he would be wisest to seek, not the unfrequented countryside, where, if the great world sees very little of him, a small world sees everything of him; he had better sink himself in the eddies of a teeming population, where men are so furiously intent on their own business that they have no time to trouble about anybody else's. He chooses, then, the seething, changing life open to the penniless immigrant at the great port of London; but even there—"if Igo down into Hell, Thou—the Being, the Law that demands work as the price of life—Thou art there also." He must work to live, and his work will betray him. It is the law of the open life of the community that each member of the community must be able to show references, and those are just what he cannot show. That terrible Thou fronts him and thwarts him at each despairing turn.
It is true, no doubt, that even in the course of the last fifty or sixty years, since the telegraph and cheap communication added a still finer mesh to the net that civilisation has thrown round all its members, there have been many instances of men who have somehow managed to escape. But the opportunity of escape has nearly always been a chance throw of fortune's dice. There has been some great accident, a huge fire, or a collision, or a wreck at sea—the Regent's Park skating catastrophe of many years back will occur to some as an occasion when, it is said, not all those who were at first reported missing were actually accounted for by the Coroner's jury, though their deaths were apparently taken for granted —and immediately afterwards some one has been found to be absent from home or work. Days and years have gone by, and the community, which at least has had the excuse that search might prove fruitless, has acquiesced in the suppo- sition that So-and-so perished in the great fire, or the wreck of the steamer. Yet perhaps it has happened before now that the supposed death never took place; that, in contrast to Mr. Kipling's "Gentlemen-rankers," who live on—
Till an alien earth enfolds us,
And we die, and none can tell Them where we died," the " dead " man has merely entered on a "next life," full though it must have been of the insistent remembrance, "Thou art there." Somewhere, in the bush of Australia, in the roar of the machinery of Chicago, on the veld of South Africa, in the purlieus of Paris—even, perhaps, saddled with sandwich-boards in the Strand—there are to be found those *horn fear or shame, or it may be, in the case of the wilder liven, " niceness and satiety," have driven from the life in which so much has to be done "so oft over and over." Has the " neit life" ever proved happier than the last? Those alone can answer who know; the community, at least,
probably with wisdom—wisdom learnt by striving after safety —has settled that for any of its members to enter with ease upon a "next life" shall be impossible. The community asks "Who is he ? "—and "he" must find an answer.
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