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'Hold her tight,' said Dr Christie. He had brought out a thing like a great flat spoon, made of horn. He came to my side and held my head, and put the spoon to my mouth, between my teeth. It was smooth, but he pushed it hard and it hurt me. I thought I should be choked: I bit it, to keep it from going down my throat. It tasted bad.
I still think of all the other people's mouths it must have gone in, before mine.
He saw my jaws close. 'Now she takes it!' he said. 'That's right. Hold her steady.' He looked at Dr Graves. 'To the soft room? I think so. Nurse Spiller?'
That was the woman that held me by the throat. I saw her nod to him, and then to the men in the cuffs, and they turned so that they might walk with me, further into the house. I felt them do it and began to struggle again. I was not thinking, now, of Gentleman and Maud. I was thinking of myself. I was growing horribly afraid. My stomach ached from the nurse's fingers. My mouth was cut by the spoon. I had an idea that, once they got me into a room, they would kill me.
'A thrasher, ain't she?' said one of the men, as he worked for a better grip on my ankle.
'A very bad case,' said Dr Christie. He looked into my face. 'The convulsion is passing, at least.' He raised his voice. 'Don't be afraid, Mrs Rivers! We know all about you. We are your friends. We have brought you here to make you well.'
I tried to speak. 'Help! Help!' I tried to say. But the spoon made me gobble like a bird.
It also made me dribble; and a bit of dribble flew out of my mouth and struck Dr Christie's cheek. Perhaps he thought I had spat it. Anyway, he moved quickly back, and his face grew grim. He took out his handkerchief.
'Very good,' he said to the men and the nurse, as he wiped his cheek. 'That will do.
Now you may take her.'
They carried me along a passage, through a set of doors and a room; then to a landing, another passage, another room— I tried to study the way, but they had me on my back: I could make out only so many drab-coloured ceilings and walls. After about a minute I knew they had got me deep into the house, and that I was lost. I could not cry out.
The nurse kept her arm about my throat, and I still had the spoon of horn in my mouth.
When we reached a staircase they took me down it, saying, 'To you, Mr Bates,' and,
'Watch this turn, it's a tight one!'— as if I might be, not a sack of feathers now, but a trunk or a piano. Not once did they look me in the face. Finally, one of the men began to whistle a tune, and to beat out the time of it, with his finger-ends, on my leg.
Then we reached another room, with a ceiling of a paler shade of drab; and here they stopped. 'Careful, now,' they said.
The men put down my legs. The woman took her arm from my neck and gave me a push. It was only a little push and yet, they had so pulled and shaken me about, I found I staggered and fell. I fell upon my hands. I opened my mouth and the spoon fell out. One of the men reached, quick, to take it. He shook the spit from it. 'Please,' I said.
'You may say please, now,' said the woman. Then she spoke to the men. 'Gave me a crack with her head, upon the steps. Look here. Am I bruised?' 'I believe you shall be.'
'Little devil!'
She put her foot to me. 'Now, does Dr Christie have you here to give us all bruises?
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Eh, my lady? Mrs What- is- your- name? Mrs Waters, or Rivers? Does he?'
'Please,' I said again. 'I ain't Mrs Rivers.' 'She ain't Mrs Rivers? Hear that, Mr Bates?
And I ain't Nurse Spiller, I dare say. And Mr Hedges ain't himself. Very likely.'
She came closer to me, and she picked me up about my waist; and she dropped me.
You could not say she threw me, but she lifted me high and let me fall; and me being just then so dazed and so weak, I fell badly.
'That's for cracking my face,' she said. 'Be glad we ain't on stairs, or a roof. Crack me again— who knows?— we might be.' She pulled her canvas apron straight, and leaned and caught hold of my collar. 'Right, let's have this gown off. You may look like thunder, too. That's nothing to me. Why, what small little hooks! And my hand's hard, is it? Used to better, are you? I should say you are, from what I've heard.' She laughed.
'Well, we don't keep ladies' maids, here. We has Mr Hedges and Mr Bates.' They still stood, watching, at the door. 'Shall I call them over?'
I supposed she meant to strip me bare; which I would rather die first, than endure. I got on to my knees and twisted from her.
'You may call who you like, you great bitch,' I said, in a pant. 'You ain't having my dress.'
Her face grew dark. 'Bitch, am I?' she answered. 'Well!'
And she drew back her hand and curled her fingers into a fist, and she hit me.
I had grown up in the Borough, surrounded by every kind of desperate dodger and thief; but I had had Mrs Sucksby for a mother, and had never been hit. The blow knocked me almost out of my head. I put my hands to my face, and lay down in a crouch; but she got the gown off me anyway— I suppose she was used to getting gowns off lunatics, and had a trick for it; and next she got hold of my corset and took that. Then she took my garters, and then my shoes and stockings, and finally my hair-pins.
Then she stood, darker-faced than ever, and sweating.
'There!' she said, looking me over in my petticoat and shimmy. 'There's all your ribbons and laces gone. If you chokes yourself now, it'll be no business of ours. You hear me? Mrs Ain't-Mrs-Rivers? You sit in the pads for a night, and stew. See how you care for that. Convulsions? I think I know a temper from a fit. Kick all you like in here. Put out your joints, chew your tongue off. Keep you quiet. We prefers them quiet, makes our job nicer.'
She said all that, and she made a bundle of my clothes and swung them over her shoulder; and then she left me. The men went with her. They had seen her hit me, and done nothing. They had watched her take my stockings and stays. I heard them pull off their paper cuffs. One began to whistle again. Nurse Spiller closed the door and locked it, and the whistling grew very much fainter.
When it had grown so faint I could no longer hear it, I got to my feet. Then I fell down again. My legs had been pulled so hard they shook like things of rubber, and my head was ringing, from the punch. My hands were trembling. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, properly funked. I went, on my knees, to the door, to look at the key- hole.
There was no handle. The door itself was covered in a dirty canvas, padded with straw; the walls were covered in padded
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canvas, too. The floor had oil- cloth on it. There was a single blanket, very much torn and stained. There was a little tin pot I was meant to piddle in. There was a window, high' up, with bars on. Beyond the bars were curling leaves of ivy. The light came in green and dark, like the water in a pond.
I stood and looked at it all, in a sort of daze— hardly believing, I think, that those were my cold feet on the oil-cloth floor; that it was my sore face, my arms, that the green light struck. Then I turned back to the door and put my fingers to it— to the key- hole, to the canvas, to the edge, anywhere— t o t r y a n d p u l l i t . B u t i t w a s t i g h t a s a clam— and, what was worse, as I stood plucking at it I began to make out little dints and tears in the dirty canvas— little crescents, where the weave was worn— that I understood all at once must be the marks left by the finger-nails of all the other lunatics— all the real lunatics, I mean— who had been put in that room before me. The thought that I was standing, doing just what they had done, was horrible. I stepped away from the door, the daze slipped from me, and I grew wild with fright. I flung myself back, and began to beat at the padded canvas with my hands. Each blow made a cloud of dust.