<h2><SPAN name="UNDER_THE_KNIFE" id="UNDER_THE_KNIFE">UNDER THE KNIFE</SPAN></h2>
<p class="cap"><span class="upper">“What</span> 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</SPAN></span>
myself, nor feel sorry for my friends, nor conceive of
them as grieving for me.</p>
<p>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 tendernesses 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?</p>
<p>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 that in the
Zoological Gardens. The boy in blue had been
looking over his shoulder at a black barge advancing<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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;<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</SPAN></span>
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 (<em>how</em> I know not) that he was feeling the
gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct
of the operation.</p>
<p>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 everyone 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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">séance</i>,
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.</p>
<p>I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End
of London, receding rapidly,—for I seemed to be<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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 anyone has ever seen from<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</SPAN></span>
darker than the land; and the whole panorama was
rotating slowly towards the east.</p>
<p>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 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 mortal delight I have ever
known.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</SPAN></span>
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 <em>me</em>,
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!</p>
<p>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 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,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</SPAN></span>
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 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.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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. <em>It was a clenched Hand.</em> 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<p>The operation had not killed me. And I perceived,
suddenly, that the dull melancholy of half a
year was lifted from my mind.</p>
<hr class="l1" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</SPAN></span></p>
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