'It's this, or cut it,' the dark nurse said when I struggled; 'and no skin off my nose either way.'
'Let me see to it,' said Nurse Spiller. She finished it off— two or three times, as if by accident, putting the point of the needle to my scalp. That is another place that don't show cuts and bruises.
And so, between the two of them, they got me ready; and then they took me to the room that was to be mine.
'Mind, now, you remember your manners,' they said as we walked. 'Start going off your head again, we shall have you back in the pads, or plunge you.'
'This ain't fair!' I said. 'This ain't fair, at all!'
They shook me, and did not answer. So then I fell silent and, again, tried hard to study the way they took me. I was also growing afraid. I had had an idea in my head— that I 260
think I had got from a picture, or a play— of how a madhouse should be; and so far, this house was not like it. I thought, 'They have got me in the place where the doctors and nurses live. Now they'll take me to the mad bit.'— I think I supposed it would be something like a dungeon or a gaol. But we walked only down more drab-coloured corridors, past door after drab-coloured door, and I began to look about me and see little things— such as, the lamps being ordinary brass ones, but with strong wire guards about the flames; and the doors having fancy latches, but ugly locks; and the walls having, here and there, handles, that looked as though they might, if you turned them,
ring bells. And finally it broke upon me that this was the madhouse after all; that it had once been an ordinary gentleman's house; that the walls had used to have pictures and looking- glasses on them, and the floors had used to have rugs; but that now, it had all been made over to madwomen— that it was, in its way, like a smart and handsome person gone mad itself.
And I can't say why, but somehow the idea was worse and put me in more of a creep than if the place had looked like a dungeon after all.
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