Until then, however, I didnt 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 uood 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, thehing 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 plaint. But sometimes we doust work by paradoxical methods. I mean to put you to literary wain, to restore you. Look here. He had brought me something, ed 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 writte—ly, mind!—your name. Your true name, I mean. Tomorrow you shall write me the start of
an at 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 Ba keep me sitting with the chalk in my hand, for hours at a stretch; and of course, I could write nothing, the chalk would crumble to a powder—or else, gro and slippery from the sweating of my palm. Then hed e bad see the empty slate, and frown and shake his head. He might have Nurse Spiller with him. Aint you wrote a word? shed say. And heres the doctors spending all their time to make you well. Ungrateful, I call that.
When hed gone, shed shake me. And when Id cry and swear, shed 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, shed tell the other hen, 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 Bas back was turned, came over and wrote me out my name—Mauds name, I mean. But, though she meant it well, I wished she hadnt do; for when Dr Christie came and saw it, he smiled and cried, Well done, Mrs Rivers! Now we are half-way there! And whe day, I again could make nothing but scribbles, of course he thought me shamming.
Keep her from her dinner, Nurse Ba, he said sternly, until she writes again.
So then, I wrote out: Susan, Susan—I wrote it, fifty times. Nurse Ba 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 ing a leech-man in, to bleed my head. Then a new lady came to the house, who would speak nothing but a made-up language she said
was the language of snakes; and after that he passed all his time with her, prig her with needles, bursting paper bags behind her ear, scalding her with boiling water—looking for ways to startle her into speaking English.
I wished he would go on prig and scalding her for ever. The creosote had almost choked me. I was frightened of leeches. And his