“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 the 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 and the
faintest 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 tenderness 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 a
butcher-boy’s tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the
Regent’s Park Canal which runs parallel with the bridge in the
Zoölogical 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 dulness 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 dulness
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 nurse-maid, 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 tattered 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 black 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 now) 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 grey 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, but 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 upward rush 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 grey 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 their light by day 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 halfway 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 grey, 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 grey, 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, 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 grey 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 earthly 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 garment 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 newborn 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 great; 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 shrunk,
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 Polestar 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 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 a world of 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 haze. 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 of 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
luminous 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 the black 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. Even 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 the 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 forever, 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 other 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.