'Help! Help!' I cried. My voice sounded strange. 'Oh, help! They have put me in here, thinking I'm mad! Call Richard Rivers!' I coughed. 'Help! Doctor! Help! Can you hear me?' I coughed again. 'Help! Can you hear me— ?'
And so on. I stood and called, and coughed, and beat upon the door— only stopping, now and then, to put my ear to it, to try to tell if there might be anyone near— for I can't say how long; and no-one came. I think the padding was too thick; or else, the people that heard me were used to lunatics calling, and had learned not to mind. So then I tried the walls. They were also thick. And when I had given up banging and shouting, I put the blanket and the little tin pot together in a heap beneath the window, and climbed on them, trying to reach the glass; but the tin pot buckled, and the blanket slithered and I fell.
At last I sat on the oil- cloth floor and cried. I cried, and my own tears stung me. I put my finger-tips to my cheek and felt about my
swelling face. I felt my hair. The woman had pulled it to take the pins out, and it lay all about my shoulders; and when I took up a length of it, meaning to comb it, some of it came away in my hands. That made me cry worse than ever. I don't say I was much of a beauty; but I thought of a girl I knew, who had lost her hair to a wheel in a workshop— that hair had never grown back. Suppose I should be bald? I went over my head, taking out the hair that was loose, wondering if I ought to keep it, perhaps for making a wig with later; but there was not much of it, after all. In the end I rolled it up and put it in a corner.
And as I did that, I saw something, pale upon the floor. It looked like a crumpled white hand, and it gave me a start, at first; then I saw what it was. It had fallen out of my bosom when the nurse had got the gown off me, and been kicked out of sight.
There was the mark of a shoe upon it, and one of its buttons was crushed.
It was that glove of Maud's, that I had taken that morning from her things and meant to hold on to, as a keepsake of her.
I picked it up and turned it over and over in my hands. If I had thought myself funked, 256
a minute before— well, that funking was nothing to what I felt now, looking at that glove, thinking of Maud, and of the awful trick that she and Gentleman had played me.
I hid my face in my arms, for very shame. I walked, from one wall to another, and from that to another: if I once tried to be still, it was as if I was resting on needles and pins— I started up, crying out and sweating. I thought of all my time at Briar, when I had supposed myself such a sharper, and been such a simpleton. I thought of the days I had spent, with those two villains— the looks the one must have given the other, the smiles. Leave her alone, why don't you? I had said to him, feeling sorry for her. And then, to her: Don't mind him, miss. He loves you, miss. Marry him. He loves you.
He will do it like this . . .
Oh! Oh! I feel the sting of it, even now. Then, I might really have been demented. I walked, and my bare feet went slap, slap, slap on the oil-cloth; and I put the glove to my mouth and I bit it. Him I suppose I expected no better of. It was her I thought of most— that
bitch, that snake, that— Oh! To think I had ever looked at her and taken her for a flat.
To think I had laughed at her. To think I had loved her! To think I had thought she loved me! To think I had kissed her, in Gentleman's name. To think I had touched her!
To think, to think— !
To think I lay on the night of her wedding with a pillow over my head, so I should not hear the sound of her tears. To think that, if I had listened, I might have heard— might I? might I?— the sound of her sighs.
I could not bear it. I forgot, for the moment, the little detail of how, in swindling me, she had only turned my own trick back on myself. I walked, and moaned, and swore, and cursed her; I gripped and bit and twisted that glove, until the light beyond the window faded, and the room grew dark. No-one came to look at me. No-one brought me food, or a gown, or stockings. And though I was warm at first, from all the walking, when at last I grew so tired I found I must lie upon the blanket or drop, I became cold; and then I could not get warm again.
I did not sleep. From the rest of the house there came, every so often, queer noises— shouts, and running feet and, once, the blowing of the doctor's whistle. At some hour of the night it began to rain, and the water went drip against the window. In the garden, a dog barked: I heard that and began to think, not of Maud, but of Charley Wag, of Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby— of Mrs Sucksby in her bed, the empty place beside her, waiting for me. How long would she wait?
How soon would Gentleman go to her? What would he say? He might say I was dead.
But then, if he said that, she would ask for my body, to bury.— I thought of my funeral, and who would cry most. He might say I was drowned or lost in marshes. She would ask for the papers to prove it. Could those papers be faked? He might say I had taken my share of the money, and cut.
He would say that, I knew it. But Mrs Sucksby wouldn't believe him. She would see through him like he was glass. She would hunt me out. She had not kept me seventeen years to lose me now, like this! She would look in every house in England, until she found me!
That's what I thought, as I grew calmer. I thought I must only speak with the doctors 257
and they would see their mistake and let me go; but that anyway, Mrs Sucksby would come, and I should get out like that.
And when I was free, I would go to wherever Maud Lilly was, and— wasn't I my mother's own daughter, after all?— I would kill her.
You can see what little idea I had of the awfulness of the fix I was really in.
Next morning, the woman who had thrown me about came back for me. She came, not with the two men, Mr Bates and Mr Hedges, but with another woman— nurses, they called them there; but they were no more nurses than I was, they only got that work through being stout and having great big hands like mangles. They came into the room and stood and looked me over. Nurse Spiller said,
'Here she is.'
The other, who was dark, said,
'Young, to be mad.'
'Listen here,' I said, very carefully. I had worked this out. I had heard them coming, and had got to my feet and put my petticoat straight, and tidied my hair. 'Listen here.
You think I am mad. I am not. I am not the lady you and the doctors suppose me to be, at all. That lady, and her husband— Richard Rivers— are a pair of swindlers; and they have swindled you, and me, and just about everybody; and it is very important that the doctors know it, so I may be let out and those swindlers caught. I— '
'Right in the face,' said Nurse Spiller, speaking across my words. 'Right here, with her head.'
She put her hand to her cheek, close to her nose, where there was the smallest, faintest mark of crimson. My own face, of course, was swollen like a pudding; and I dare say my eye was almost black. But I said, still carefully,
'I am sorry I hurt your face. I was only so thrown, to be brought in here, as a lunatic; when all the time it was the other lady, Miss Lilly— Mrs Rivers— that was meant to come.'
Again they stood and looked me over.
'You must call us nurse when you speak to us,' the dark one said at last. 'But between you and me, dear, we would rather you didn't speak to us at all. We hear that much nonsense— well. Come along. You must be bathed, so that Doctor Christie may look at you. You must be put in a gown. Why, what a little girl! You must be no more than sixteen.'
She had come close, and made to catch at my arm. I drew away from her.
'Will you listen to me?' I said.
'Listen to you? La, if I listened to all the rubbish I heard in this house, I should go mad myself. Come on, now.'