After that, I don't remember anything.
They might have killed me, after all. I lay in darkness. I did not dream. I did not think.
You could not say I was myself, for I was no-one. Perhaps I never was to be quite myself, again. For when I woke, everything was changed. They put me back in my old gown and my old boots and took me back to my old room, and I went with them just like a lamb. I was covered in bruises and burns, yet hardly felt them. I did not weep. I sat and, like the other ladies, looked at nothing. There was talk of putting canvas bracelets on me, in case I should break out in another fit; but I lay so quietly, they gave the idea up. Nurse Bacon spoke with Dr Christie, in my behalf. Her eye was black where I had butted it, and I supposed that, getting me alone, she would knock me about— I think that, if she had, I would have taken the blows, unflinching. But it seemed to me that she was changed, like everything else. She looked at me oddly; and when that night I lay in bed and the other ladies had closed their eyes, she caught my gaze. 'All right?' she said softly. She glanced at the other beds, then looked back at me.
'No harm— eh, Maud? All fun, ain't it? We must have our bit of fun, mustn't we? or we should go mad . . .'
I turned my face away. I think she still watched me, though. I did not care. I cared for nothing, now. I had kept up my nerve and my spirit, all that time. I had waited for my 284
chance of escaping and got nowhere. Suddenly, my memories of Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, of Gentleman, even of Maud, seemed to grow dim. It was as if my head were filled with smoke, or had a fluttering curtain across it. When I tried to go over the streets of the Borough in my mind, I found I lost my way. No-one else in that house knew those streets. If
the ladies spoke of London ever, they spoke of a place they remembered from when they were girls, in Society— a place so different from the city I knew, it might as well have been Bombay. No-one called me by my own name. I began to answer to Maud and Mrs Rivers; sometimes it seemed to me I must be Maud, since so many people said I was. And sometimes I even seemed to dream, not my own dreams, but hers; and sometimes to remember things, from Briar, that she had said and done, as if I had said and done them.
The nurses— all except Nurse Bacon— grew cooler than ever with me, after the night I was plunged. But I got used to being shaken and bullied and slapped. I got used to seeing other ladies bullied in their turn. I got used to it all. I got used to my bed, to the blazing lamp, to Miss Wilson and Mrs Price, to Betty, to Dr Christie. I should not, now, have minded a leech. But he never brought one. He said my calling myself Maud showed, not that I was better, but only that my malady had taken a different turn, and would turn back. Until it did, there was no point in trying to cure me; so he stopped trying. I heard, however, that the truth was he had gone off cures altogether: for he had cured the lady who had spoken like a snake, and done it so well her mother had taken her home; and what with that, and the ladies who had died, the house had lost money. Now, each morning, he felt my heart-beat and looked into my mouth, and then moved on. He did not stay long in the bedrooms at all, once the air grew so close and so foul. We, of course, spent most of our time there; and I even got used to that.
God knows what else I might have got used to. God knows how long they would have kept me in that place— maybe, years. Maybe as long as poor Miss Wilson: for perhaps she— who knows?— was as sane as I had been, when her brother first put her in. I might be there, today. I still think of that and shudder. I might never have got out; and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and Gentleman, and Maud— where would they be, now?
I think of that, too.
But then, I did get out. Blame Fortune. Fortune's blind, and works in peculiar ways.
Fortune sent Helen of Troy to the Greeks— didn't
it?— and a prince, to the Sleeping Beauty. Fortune kept me at Dr Christie's nearly all that summer long; then listen to who it sent me.
This was five or six weeks, I suppose, after they had plunged me— some time in July.
Think how stupid I had got by then. The season was still a warm one, and we had all begun to sleep, all the hours of the day. We slept in the mornings, while we waited for the dinner-bell to be rung; and, in the afternoons, you would see ladies all over the drawing- room, dozing, nodding their heads, dribbling into their collars. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing to stay awake for. And sleeping made time pass.
I slept as much as anyone. I slept so much that when Nurse Spiller came to our room one morning and said, 'Maud Rivers, you're to come with me, you've a visitor', they had to wake me up and tell me again; and when they had, I didn't know what they 285
meant.
'A visitor?' I said.
Nurse Spiller folded her arms. 'Don't want him, then? Shall I send him home?' She looked at Nurse Bacon, who was still rubbing her knuckles and wincing. 'Bad?' she said.
'Like scorpions' stings, Nurse Spiller.'
Nurse Spiller tutted. I said again,
'A visitor? For me?'
She yawned. 'For Mrs Rivers, anyway. Are you her today, or not?'
I did not know. But I rose, on shaking legs, feeling the blood rush from my heart— for if the visitor was a man then I could only think that, whether I was Maud, or Sue, or whoever I was, he must be Gentleman. My world had shrunk to that point, that I only knew that I had been harmed, and that he had done it. I looked at Miss Wilson. I had an idea that I had said to her, three months before, that if Gentleman came I would kill him. I had meant it, then. Now the thought of seeing his face was so unexpected, it made me sick.
Nurse Spiller saw me hesitate. 'Come on,' she said, 'if you are coming! Don't mind your hair.'— I had put my hand to my head. 'I'm sure, the madder he knows you to be, the better. Saves disappointment, don't it?' She glanced at Nurse Bacon. Then: 'Come on!'
she said again; and I gave a twitch, then stumbled after her into the passage and down the stairs.
It was a Wednesday— that was luck, though I did not know it yet, for on Wednesdays Dr Christie and Dr Graves went off in their coach to drum up new lady lunatics, and the house was quiet. Some nurses, and one or two men, were standing about in the hall, taking breaths from the open door; one of the men held a cigarette and, when he saw Nurse Spiller, he hid it. They did not look at me, however, and I hardly looked at them. I was thinking of what was to come, and feeling sicker and stranger by the second.
'In here,' said Nurse Spiller, jerking her head towards the door of the drawing- room.
Then she caught my arm and pulled me to her. And you remember: none of your fibs.
The pads are nice and cool, on a day like this. Ain't been used in a while. My word's as good as a man's, while the doctors are away. You hear me?'
She shook me. Then she pushed me into the room. 'Here she is,' she said, in a different voice, to the person waiting there.
I had expected Gentleman. It wasn't him. It was a fair- haired, blue-eyed boy in a blue pea-jacket, and in the first second of my seeing him I felt a rush of mixed relief and disappointment so sharp, I almost swooned away; for I thought him a stranger, and supposed that there had been a mistake, he must have come for someone else. Then I saw him looking over my features in a bewildered sort of way; and then at last, at last— as if his face and name were slowly rising to the surface of my brain, through mists or cloudy water— at last I knew him, even out of his servant's suit. He was Charles, the knife-boy from Briar. He looked me over, as I have said; then he tilted his head and looked past me, and past Nurse Spiller, as if he thought that Maud must be 286