‘What if I die under it?’ The thought recurred again and again, as I
walked home from Haddon’s. It was a purely personal question. I was
spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few
of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on
account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps
a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few
could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came
before me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk
from Haddon’s house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my
youth: I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we
foregathered rather laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals
and helpers of my later career: I suppose I had been cold-blooded or
undemonstrative--one perhaps implies the other. It may be that even the
capacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been a
time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of
a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of my
imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my
friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt
a concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered
off along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I
had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of
death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had
drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation,
a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions
and tendernesses and all the complex moral interplay of a man had
reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of
this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain
guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, as
thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher
emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love,
are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal:
they are the harness in which man’s mental freedom goes. And it may be
that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes,
this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose
interplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with
the butcher-boy’s tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the
Regent’s Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the Zoological
Gardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black
barge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens
a nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The
trees were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained by
the dusts of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but
broken by long waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove
through. The breeze was stirring; but it did not stir me as the spring
breeze used to do.
Was this dullness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was
curious that I could reason and follow out a network of suggestion
as clearly as ever; so, at least, it seemed to me. It was calmness
rather than dullness that was coming upon me. Was there any ground
for the belief in the presentiment of death? Did a man near to death
begin instinctively to withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and
sense, even before the cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely
isolated--isolated without regret--from the life and existence about
me. The children playing in the sun and gathering strength and
experience for the business of life, the park-keeper gossiping with a
nursemaid, the nursing mother, the young couple intent upon each other
as they passed me, the trees by the wayside spreading new pleading
leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their branches--I had been part of
it all, but I had nearly done with it now.
Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that
my feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and
sat down on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I
had dozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision
of the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought
myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked
out by birds. ‘Awake!’ cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the
path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before
thought of Regent’s Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees,
stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing
graves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble; the
rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they bled in
their struggles, the red flesh was torn away from the white bones.
‘Awake!’ cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to such
horrors. ‘Awake!’ They would not let me alone. ‘Wike up!’ said an angry
voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,
demanding my penny.
I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,
feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham
Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts
about death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end
of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab,
and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It
struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death
on the morrow had led to my death that day.
But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and
the next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the
operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The
doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce
worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read
my newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did not
find them very interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison,
my old school-friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies and
a printer’s error in my new book, with one from Langridge venting
some vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. I
breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive.
I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it
very painful. I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but in
the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain thinking
of things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question of
immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute with a neat black
bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little.
I began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon
moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his
broad back to me, began taking things out of his bag. I heard the light
click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was not altogether
stagnant. ‘Will you hurt me much?’ I said in an off-hand tone.
‘Not a bit,’ Haddon answered over his shoulder. ‘We shall chloroform
you. Your heart’s as sound as a bell.’ And as he spoke, I had a whiff
of the pungent sweetness of the anæsthetic.
They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and,
almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being
administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating
sensation at first. I knew I should die--that this was the end of
consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for
death: I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. What
was it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothing
desirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclination
to death. And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Of
course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me. Possibly
I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous
silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds
or minutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that
I was not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous
sensations that come sweeping from it to make up the background of
consciousness had gone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of
it all; for as yet something still held me to the poor stark flesh
upon the bed--held me, yet not so closely that I did not feel myself
external to it, independent of it, straining away from it. I do not
think I saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all that was going
on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bending over me,
Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was a large scalpel--was cutting
my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interesting to
see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm. The
interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a game of
chess between strangers. Haddon’s face was firm and his hand steady;
but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that he was feeling
the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.
Mowbray’s thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon’s
manner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like
bubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after
another in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not
help noticing and admiring Haddon’s swift dexterity, in spite of his
envious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed.
I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but
I was different in some way from my living self. The gray depression,
that had weighed on me for a year or more and coloured all my thoughts,
was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all. I
wondered if every one perceived things in this way under chloroform,
and forgot it again when he came out of it. It would be inconvenient to
look into some heads, and not forget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite
clearly that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the
consideration of Haddon’s proceedings. I looked into his mind, and
saw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My
attention was distracted from details by the curious changes going on
in his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering little spot of
light which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughts ran
under it like a stream, some through the focus bright and distinct,
some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just now the little glow
was steady; but the least movement on Mowbray’s part, the slightest
sound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow movement of
the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering and
spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of
thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than
a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,
fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for
the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements.
And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a
little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from
his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was
afraid: his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of
cutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a
great uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling,
and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back
with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather
in a swift bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the
red-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both
doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived
efforts to remedy the disaster. ‘Ice!’ said Mowbray, gasping. But I
knew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.
I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I
perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter
than they had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind
with incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only
compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose
of opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. I
knew I was immortal, what would happen I did not know. Should I drift
off presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of
half-material body, an attenuated version of my material self? Should
I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, and
know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?
Should I drift to some spiritualistic _séance_, and there make foolish,
incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was a
state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And then
I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge
human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and
grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For
one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of
falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand
times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in
a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the
little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam
vanishes down an eddy.
I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding
rapidly--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward--and as it receded,
passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze
of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways,
stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares,
and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it
spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as
it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the
little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and
the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin, far away and faint
with haze. Up I rushed. And at first I had not the faintest conception
what this headlong rush upward could mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,
and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and
more hazy and pale and indistinct, a luminous gray was mingled more
and more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows;
and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more
dazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and
outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime
blue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily
through the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as
the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of
a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had ever
beheld. And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable
host broke out upon the sky: more stars than any one has ever seen from
the face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky is the light of the
sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffused
light even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars
by day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I
saw things--I know not how; assuredly with no mortal eyes--and that
defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun was incredibly
strange and wonderful. The body of it was a disc of blinding white
light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but
livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a
fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting half-way across
the heavens from either side of it and brighter than the Milky Way,
were two pinions of silver white, making it look more like those winged
globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can
remember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had
never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly
life.
When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it
had fallen very far away from me. Field and town were long since
indistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merging
into a uniform bright gray, broken only by the brilliant white of the
clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the
west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of
France and Ireland, and all this Island of Britain, save where Scotland
passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or
obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull gray and darker than the land;
and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.
All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles
or so from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I
had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt
neither alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for
I had already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of
man; but it troubled me not. The sun’s rays shot through the void,
powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in their
course. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I
were God. And down below there, rushing away from me--countless miles
in a second--where a little dark spot on the gray marked the position
of London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poor
hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned. I felt then such release,
such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known.
It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of
that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was
so simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the
thing that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from
matter: all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling
away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the
earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and
with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But
the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for
matter: where it parts from its garments of flesh, there it remains (so
far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. _I_ was not
leaving the earth: the earth was leaving _me_, and not only the earth
but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space,
invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey,
there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself
of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual
and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences,
things of new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange
release that had suddenly come on them!
As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black
heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had
begun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regards
this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a
human life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly
gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large; and
the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as
it seemed) little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At
first the earth was large; and shone in the heavens, filling a great
part of them; but every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As
she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over
the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of
Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered,
were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky
Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion
shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite
quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear
hung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond the
shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had never
seen in my life--notably a dagger-shaped group that I knew for the
Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone on
earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against the
setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done,
while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour.
Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one
point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily: they
did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had an
adamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness, no
atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of these
acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently when I looked
again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled
and turned as I looked, until in a second’s space (as it seemed to
me), it was halved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in
the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin’s head of light, shining
steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy, and,
without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic
dust we call the world fall away from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that
my mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each
separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once
round the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion
of Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between
thought and thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand
years was but a moment in my perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black
background of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the
group of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while
Orion and Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart.
Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitude
of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and
encompassed in a faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about me,
and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a
bright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, was
growing very rapidly larger, and perceived that it was the planet
Saturn rushing towards me. Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up
the heavens behind it, and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of
stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disc-like belt,
and seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered
enormous; and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing
stones and dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment
the mighty triple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above
me, its shadow black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened
in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The planet went by like
a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out the sun, and
there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch against the
light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no longer see.
So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence the solar
system fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere
star amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost
in the confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a
denizen of the solar system: I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed
to grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly
the stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished
in a phosphorescent haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance
of a whirling mass of nebulæ, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps
of vacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed
as if I moved towards a point between Orion’s belt and sword; and
the void about that region opened vaster and vaster every second, an
incredible gulf of nothingness into which I was falling. Faster and
ever faster the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at last,
speeding silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter,
with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as
I neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint
comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying
light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or
so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity,
shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black,
enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught,
sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the
vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of the
heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar
universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered
together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o’-lantern driven
by the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the
vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed
only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably
remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me
on every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points
in which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of
luminous glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In a
little while it would shrink to a point, and at last would vanish
altogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelming
terror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe,
a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there
other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness?
or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being
into something that was neither being nor not-being? The covering
of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the
hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and
silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only
that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained
myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite
silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of
matter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side
of that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it
seemed to me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly
more distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud
of the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but
the things grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change.
What was unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the
interminable night of space?
The cloud’s shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower
side into four projecting masses, and, above, it ended in a straight
line. What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen that figure
before; but I could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then
the realisation rushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alone
in space, alone with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole
Universe of Matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed
as though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefinger
glittered a ring; and the universe from which I had come was but a spot
of light upon the ring’s curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped
had the likeness of a black rod. Through a long eternity I watched this
Hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing and waiting
helplessly on what might follow. It seemed as though nothing could
follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand and the
thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was the whole
universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being? Were our
worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another,
and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeed
immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into
my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable
suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.
Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint,
as if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings
of darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence
between each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And
I saw far above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle
of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came
throbbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had
come, and I heard a noise of many waters. But the black rod remained
as a great band across the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run
to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, ‘There will be no more
pain.’
At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon
me, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black
and shining, and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle
was the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was
standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors
on his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over his
shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was
washing something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side I
felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.
The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the
dull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.