The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | Page 2

Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems strangely easier in
mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he
thought any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room,
but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door
the patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill April
breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the
dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had
caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the
telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite called in
person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or
complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the
senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for
general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no trace of the
missing madman has been unearthed.
Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the
venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of
his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his
devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial
architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his
sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness;
for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its

superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to
modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though
outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning;
so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age through
some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer
interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them
through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering
those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably
expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to
hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and
conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life
and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to
have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of our own
time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired range of data, the
escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the dominant
opinion being that he is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting position till his stock
of modern information can be brought up to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the
eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the
Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of
the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's
altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and
among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor
named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the
panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was
known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of
1919-20 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general
antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at
home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's grave.
From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict on his
close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations and
discoveries which he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left
their mark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles
when he tries