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C h a p t e r F i f t e e n
Until then, however, I didn't trouble myself to wonder; for I still supposed I should get out. Even when a week went by, and then another, I supposed it. I only understood at last that I must give up my idea that Dr Christie would be the man to release me— for if he believed that I was mad when I went in, then everything I said as time went on only seemed to serve to make him think me madder. Worse than that, he still held firm to his idea that I should be cured, and know myself again, if I might only be made to write. 'You have been put too much to literary work,' he said on one of his visits, 'and that is the cause of your complaint. But sometimes we doctors must work by paradoxical methods. I mean to put you to literary work again, to restore you. Look here.' He had brought me something, wrapped in paper. It was a slate and chalk. 'You shall sit with this blank slate before you,' he said, 'and before this day is done, you shall have written me out— neatly, mind!— your name. Your true name, I mean.
Tomorrow you shall write me the start of
an account of your life; and you shall add to it, on each day that follows. You shall recover the use of your faculty of reason, as you recover your facility with the pen And so he made Nurse Bacon keep me sitting with the chalk in my hand, for hours at a s t r e t c h ; a n d o f c o u r s e , I c o uld write nothing, the chalk would crumble to a powder— or else, grow damp and slippery from the sweating of my palm. Then he'd come back and see the empty slate, and frown and shake his head. He might have Nurse Spiller with him. 'Ain't you wrote a word?' she'd say. And here's the doctors spending all their time to make you well. Ungrateful, I call that.'
When he'd gone, she'd shake me. And when I'd cry and swear, she'd shake me harder.
She could shake you so, you thought your teeth were being rattled out of your head.
She could shake you until you were sick.— 'Got the grips,' she'd tell the other nurses then, with a wink; and the nurses would laugh. They hated the ladies. They hated me.
They thought that when I spoke in the way that was natural to me, I did it to tease them. I know they put it out that I got special attentions from Dr Christie, through pretending to be low. That made the ladies hate me, too. Only mad Miss Wilson was now and then kind to me. Once she saw me weeping over my slate and, when Nurse Bacon's back was turned, came over and wrote me out my name— Maud's name, I mean. But, though she meant it well, I wished she hadn't done it; for when Dr Christie came and saw it, he smiled and cried, 'Well done, Mrs Rivers! Now we are half-way there!' And when, next day, I again could make nothing but scribbles, of course he thought me shamming.
'Keep her from her dinner, Nurse Bacon,' he said sternly, 'until she writes again.'
So then, I wrote out: Susan, Susan— I wrote it, fifty times. Nurse Bacon hit me. Nurse Spiller hit me, too. Dr Christie shook his head. He said my case was worse than he had thought, and needed another method. He gave me drinks of creosote— had the nurses hold me, while he poured it into my mouth. He talked of bringing a leech- man in, to bleed my head. Then a new lady came to the house, who would speak nothing 275
but a made- up language she said
was the language of snakes; and after that he passed all his time with her, pricking her w i t h n e e d l e s , b u r s t i n g p a p e r b a g s b e h i n d h e r e a r , s c a l d i n g h e r w i t h b o i l i n g water— looking for ways to startle her into speaking English.
I wished he would go on pricking and scalding her for ever. The creosote had almost choked me. I was frightened of leeches. And his leaving me alone, it seemed to me, would give me more time for sitting and planning my escape in. For I still thought of nothing but of that. It got to June. I had gone in there some time in May. But I still had spirit enough to learn the lie of the house, to study the windows and doors, looking out for weak ones; and every time Nurse Bacon took out her chain of keys, I watched, and saw which did what. I saw that, as far as the locks on the bedroom and passage doors went, one key worked them all. If I could slip that key from a nurse's chain, I could make my escape, I was certain of it. But those chains were stout; and each nurse kept her keys very close; and Nurse Bacon— who was warned I might be crafty— kept hers closest of all. She gave them up only to Betty when she wanted something got out from her cupboard; and then she took them back at once, and dropped them into her pocket.
I never saw her do it, without trembling in a hopeless rage. It seemed too hard that I— of all people in the world!— should be kept so low, so long, from everything that was mine, by a single key— a single, simple key! not even a fancy key, but a plain one, with four straight cuts upon it that, given the right kind of blank and file, I knew I should have been able, in half a moment, to fake up. I thought it, a hundred times a day. I thought it as I washed my face, and as I took my dinner. I thought it as I walked the little garden; as I sat in the drawing- room, hearing ladies mumble and weep; as I lay in my bed, with the nurse's lamp blazing in my eyes. If thoughts were hammers or picks I should have been free, ten thousand times over. But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.
It was a dull sort of sickness, not like the sharp panic that had gripped me and made me sweat, in my first days there. It was a kind
of creeping misery, that crept so slow, and was so much a part of the habits of the house— like the colour of the walls, the smell of the dinners, the sound of weeping and shrieks— I did not know it had gained upon me, until too late. I still said, to everyone who spoke to me, that I was quite in my right mind— that I was there, through a mistake— that I was not Maud Rivers, and must be let out at once. But I said it so often, the words grew soft— like coins losing their faces through being too much spent. One day at last, I walked with a lady in the garden and said it again; and the lady looked at me in pity.
'I thought the same thing, once,' she said kindly. 'But you see, I'm afraid you must be mad, since you are here. There is something queer about us all. You need only look about you. You need only look at yourself.'
She smiled— but, as before, she smiled in a kind of pity; then she walked on. I stopped, however. I had not thought, I could not say in how long, of how I must look, to others. Dr Christie kept no looking- glasses, for fear they should get smashed, and it s e e m e d t o m e n o w t h a t t h e l a s t t i m e I h a d g a z e d a t m y o w n f a c e w a s a t M r s 276
Cream's— was it at Mrs Cream's?— when Maud had made me put on her blue silk gown— was it blue? or had it been grey?— and held up the little mirror. I put my hands to my eyes. The gown was blue, I was certain of it. Why, I had been wearing it when they got me into the madhouse! They had taken it from me— and they had taken, too, Maud's mother's bag, and all the things that were in it— the brushes and combs, the linen, the red prunella slippers
I never saw those again. Instead— I looked down
at myself, at the tartan dress and rubber boots. I had grown almost used to them. Now I saw them again for what they were; and wished I might see them better. The nurse who had been set to watch us was sitting with her eyes closed, dozing in the sun, but a little to the left of her was the window that looked into the drawing- room. It was dark, and showed the line of circling ladies, clear as a mirror. One of them had stopped, and had her hand at her face.— I blinked. She blinked. She was me.
I went slowly towards her, and looked myself over, in horror.
I looked, as the lady had said, like a lunatic. My hair was still sewn to my head, but had grown or worked loose from its stitches, and stood out in tufts. My face was white but marked, here and there, with spots and scratches and fading bruises. My eyes were swollen— from want of sleep, I suppose— and red at the rims. My face was sharper than ever, my neck like a stick. The tartan gown hung on me like a laundry bag. From beneath its collar there showed the dirty white tips of the fingers of Maud's old glove, that I still wore next to my heart. You could just make out, on the kid-skin, the marks of my teeth.