I shuddered and slowed my step, then almost stumbled. The india-rubber boots were hard to walk in.
'Come on,' said Nurse Spiller, giving me a prod.
'Which do we want?' asked the other nurse, looking at the doors.
'Fourteen. Here we are.'
All the doors had little plates screwed to them. We stopped at one of them, and Nurse Spiller gave a knock, then put a key to the lock and turned it. The key was a plain one, shined from use. She kept it on a chain inside her pocket.
The room she took us into was not a proper room, but had been made, by the building of a wooden wall, inside another.— For, as I said, that house had been all chopped up and made crazy. The wooden wall had glass at the top, that let in light from a window beyond it, but the room had no window of its own. The air was close. There were four beds in it, along with a cot where a nurse slept. Three of the beds had women beside them, getting dressed. One bed was bare.
'This is to be yours,' said Nurse Spiller, taking me to it. It was placed very near the nurse's cot. 'This is where we puts our questionable ladies. Try a queer trick here, Nurse Bacon shall know all about it. Shan't you, Nurse Bacon?'
This was the nurse of that room. 'Oh, yes,' she said. She nodded and rubbed her hands.
She had some ailment that made her fingers very fat and pink, like sausages— an unlucky ailment, I suppose, for someone with a name like hers— and she liked to rub them often. She looked me over in the same cool way that all the other nurses had, and she said, as they had,
'Young, ain't you?'
'Sixteen,' said the dark nurse.
'Seventeen,' I said.
'Sixteen? We should call you the child of the house, if it weren't for Betty. Look here, Betty! Here's a fresh young lady, look, almost your age. I should say she can run very quick up and down a set of stairs. I should say she's got neat ways. Eh, Betty?'
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She had called to a woman who stood at the bed across from mine, pulling a gown on over a great fat stomach. I thought her a girl at first; but when she turned and showed her face, I saw that she was quite grown- up, but a simpleton. She looked at me in a troubled sort of way, and the nurses laughed. I found out later that they used her more or less as they would a servant, and had her running every sort of chore; though she was— if you could believe it— the daughter of a very grand family.
She ducked her head while the nurses laughed, and cast a few sly looks at my feet— as if to see for herself how quick they might be, really. At last one of the other two women said quietly,
'Don't mind them, Betty. They seek only to provoke you.'
'Who spoke to you?' said Nurse Spiller at once.
The woman worked her lips. She was old, and slight, and very pale in the cheek. She caught my eye, then glanced away as if ashamed.
She seemed harmless enough; but I looked at her, and at Betty, and at the other woman there— a woman who stood, gazing at nothing, pulling her hair before her face— and I thought that, for all I knew, they might be so many maniacs; and here was I, being obliged to make a bed among them. I went to the nurses. I said,
'I won't stay here. You can't make me.'
'Can't we?' said Nurse Spiller. 'I think we know the law. Your order's been signed, ain't it?'
'But this is all a mistake!'
Nurse Bacon yawned and rolled her eyes. The dark nurse sighed. 'Come, Maud,' she said. 'That's enough.'
'My name ain't Maud,' I answered. 'How many times do I have to tell you? It ain't Maud Rivers!'
She caught Nurse Bacon's eye. 'Hear that? She will speak like that, by the hour.'
Nurse Bacon put her knuckles to her hips and rubbed them.
'Don't care to speak nicely?' she said. Ain't that a shame! Perhaps she'd like a situation as a nurse. See how she'd like that. Spoil her white little hands, though.'
Still rubbing her own hands against her skirt, she gazed at mine. I gazed with her. My fingers looked like Maud's. I put them behind my back. I said,
'I only got hands so white through being maid to a lady. It was that lady that tricked me. I— '
'Maid to a lady!' The nurses laughed again. 'Well, don't that take the cake! We got plenty girls suppose themselves duchesses. I never met one that thought herself a duchess's maid! Dear me, that's novel, that is. We shall have to put you in the kitchen, give you polish and a cloth.'
I stamped my foot.
'For fuck's sake!' I cried.
That stopped them laughing. They caught hold of me, and shook me; and Nurse Spiller hit me again about the face— upon the same spot as before— though not so hard. I suppose she thought the old bruise would cover up the new. The pale old woman saw her do it and gave a cry. Betty, the idiot girl, began to moan.
'There, now you've set them off!' said Nurse Spiller. 'And here's the doctors due, any 262
minute.'
She shook me again, then let me stagger away so she might put straight her apron.
The doctors were like kings to them. Nurse Bacon went to Betty, to bully her out of her tears. The dark nurse ran to the old woman.
'You finish fastening your buttons, you creature!' she said, waving her arms. And you, Mrs Price, you take your hair from out your mouth this instant. Haven't I told you a hundred times, you shall swallow a ball of it, and choke? I'm sure I don't know why I warn you, we should all be glad if you did . . .'
I looked at the door. Nurse Spiller had left it open, and I wondered if I might reach it if I ran. But from the room next to
ours— a n d t h e n , f r o m a l l d o w n t h e c o r r i d o r , f r o m a l l t h e o t h e r r o o m s w e h a d passed— there came, as I wondered, the sound of doors being unlocked and opened; and then the grumbling voices of nurses, the odd shriek. Somewhere, a bell was rung.
That was the signal that meant the doctors were coming.
And I thought, after all, that I should make a far better case for myself in standing and talking quietly with Dr Christie, than in running at him in a pair of rubber boots. I moved close to my bed, putting my knee to it to keep my leg from trembling; and I felt for my hair, meaning to tidy it— forgetting, for the moment, that they had stitched it to my head. The dark nurse went off, running. The rest of us stood in silence, listening out for the sound of the doctors' footsteps. Nurse Spiller shook her finger at me.
'You watch your filthy tongue, you trollop,' she said.
We waited for about ten minutes, then there was a stir in the passage and Dr Christie and Dr Graves came walking very quickly into the room, their heads bent over Dr Graves's note-book.
'Dear ladies, good morning,' said Dr Christie, looking up. He went first to Betty. 'How are you, Betty? Good girl. You want your medicine, of course.'
He put his hand to his pocket and brought out a piece of sugar. She took it, and curtseyed.
'Good girl,' he said again. Then, moving past her: 'Mrs Price. The nurses tell me you have been giving in to tears. That is not good. What will your husband say? Shall he be pleased to think you melancholy? Hmm? And all your children? What shall they think?'
She answered in a whisper: 'I don't know, sir.'
'Hmm?'
He took her wrist, all the time murmuring to Dr Graves, who finally made some note in his book. Then they walked to the pale old lady.
'Miss Wilson, what complaints have you for us today?' asked Dr Christie.
'None but the usual ones,' she answered.
'Well, we have heard them many times. You need not repeat them.'
'The want of pure air,' she said quickly.
'Yes, yes.' He looked at Dr Graves's book.
'And of wholesome food.'
'You will find the food wholesome enough, Miss Wilson, if you will only sample it.'
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'The frigid water.'
'A tonic, for shattered nerves. You know this, Miss Wilson.'