Diary Entry 1

Diary Entry 1 

My name is Katherine Saltwalk, It isn't very often that ordinary couples like Kai and myself secure a cabin mountain retreat for a foggy winter getaway. A proper, well furnished cedar wood cabin with an open fire. I would say it looked like a typical haunted mountain retreat, but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about this place. Else, why should it be let to us so cheaply? Why has it stood so long unattended? Kai laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. At least from time to time. Kai is very practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he denies openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. In other words my husband is the opposite to an artist. In fact Kai is a physician which sort of counters my last statement about being artistic but, PERHAPS�"(I would not say it to another living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)�"PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with his wife but temporary nervousness or manic depression or a slight hysterical tendency. What is one to do? My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing. So do I take on board the possibility of two doctors being undeniably wrong? Or do I exercise the fact that something is wrong with me? Personally, I disagree with their ideas. I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do? I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good amount having to be so undercode about it, or else be met with severe opposition. I sometimes fancy that my condition would be less debatable if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus from a caring husband but Kai says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it makes me feel strange. So I will leave it alone and talk about this cabin. The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the edge of the mountain, quite three miles from the nearest town. It makes me think of places that you read about, for there are forests and fogs and gates that lock, and lots of separate little cabin like houses for the gardeners and guests. There is a garden full of Lilies, I never saw such a garden so large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long arbores of grapevines with seats under them. There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now. There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the owners and co-owners; anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostly tale, I am afraid, but I don't care there is something strange about the cabin I can feel it and no I do not have gas. I even said so to Kai one moonlit evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window. 

I get unreasonably angry with him sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this manic depression he claims I suffer from. But Kai says if I feel so, I should learn to control my emotions so I take the medication he gives me to control myself, and that makes me very tired. I don't like our bedroom one bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the front porch, I like to watch the mist wave over the other surrounding mountains but Kai wouldn't hear of it. He said there was only one window and no room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another. He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me belch without any direction. I have a scheduled prescription for each hour in the day; he takes care of me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he "After all air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the cabin, it is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and sunroom; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boy had used it. It is stripped off in great patches all around the head of the bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room. I never saw worse wallpaper in my life. 

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke a methodical study, and when you follow the uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit a suicide plunge off outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphuric tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room for too long. There comes Kai, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word about him or his medical diagnosis. We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since the first day. I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious bedroom with the yellow wallpaper and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.