XII.
UNDER THE KNIFE.
"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as Iwalked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was sparedthe deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of myintimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account oftheir duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a littlehumiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possiblyexceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped ofglamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from Haddon's house overPrimrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth: I perceived now thatour affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously tomaintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career: I supposeI 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 atthe loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotionalside of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feelsorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt aconcomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered offalong the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffereda sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I rememberednow 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 thecomplex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred tome that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping awayfrom the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, Itake it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that thehigher emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness oflove, are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simpleanimal: they are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And itmay be that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of actingdiminishes, this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity andaversion, whose interplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with thebutcher-boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over theRegent's Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the ZoologicalGardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a blackbarge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens anurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The treeswere bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained by the dustsof summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but broken by longwaves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove through. The breezewas 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 thatI 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 thatwas coming upon me. Was there any ground for the relief in thepresentiment of death? Did a man near to death begin instinctively towithdraw himself from the meshes of matter and sense, even before thecold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated--isolated withoutregret--from the life and existence about me. The children playing in thesun and gathering strength and experience for the business of life,the park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid, the nursing mother, the youngcouple intent upon each other as they passed me, the trees by the waysidespreading new pleading leaves to the sunlight, the stir in theirbranches--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 myfeet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and satdown on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had dozedinto a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision of theresurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought myselfactually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked out bybirds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the path andthe mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before thought ofRegent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees, stretching as faras eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves and heelingtombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: the rising dead appeared tostifle as they struggled upward, they bled in their struggles, the redflesh was torn away from the white bones. "Awake!" cried a voice; but Idetermined I would not rise to such horrors. "Awake!" They would not letme alone. "Wake up!" said an angry voice. A cockney angel! The man whosells 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 LanghamPlace. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts aboutdeath. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end ofLangham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, andwent on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It struckme that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death on themorrow had led to my death that day.
But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and thenext. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under theoperation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The doctorswere coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce worth whileto trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read my newspapers andthe letters that came by the first post, I did not find them veryinteresting. There was a friendly note from Addison, my old school-friend,calling my attention to two discrepancies and a printer's error in my newbook, with one from Langridge venting some vexation over Minton. The restwere business communications. I breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at myside seemed more massive. I knew it was pain, and yet, if you canunderstand, I did not find it very painful. I had been awake and hot andthirsty in the night, but in the morning bed felt comfortable. In thenight-time I had lain thinking of things that were past; in the morning Idozed over the question of immortality. Haddon came, punctual to theminute, with a neat black bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrivalstirred me up a little. I began to take a more personal interest in theproceedings. Haddon moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside,and, with his broad back to me, began taking things out of his bag. Iheard the light click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, wasnot altogether stagnant. "Will you hurt me much?" I said in an off-handtone.
"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 thepungent sweetness of the anaesthetic.
They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and, almostbefore I realised what was happening, the chloroform was beingadministered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensationat first. I knew I should die--that this was the end of consciousness forme. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for death: I had a vaguesense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. What was it I had not done? Icould think of nothing more to do, nothing desirable left in life; and yetI had the strangest disinclination to death. And the physical sensationwas painfully oppressive. Of course the doctors did not know they weregoing to kill me. Possibly I struggled. Then I fell motionless, anda great silence, a monstrous silence, and an impenetrable blackness cameupon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds orminutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I wasnot yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous sensationsthat come sweeping from it to make up the background of consciousness hadgone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of it all; for as yetsomething still held me to the poor stark flesh upon the bed--held me, yetnot so closely that I did not feel myself external to it, independent ofit, 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 andsaw. Haddon was bending over me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was alarge scalpel--was cutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. Itwas interesting to see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, withouteven a qualm. The interest was much of a quality with that one might feelin a game of chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his handsteady; but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that hewas feeling the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of theoperation.
Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's mannershowed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like bubblesthrough a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another inthe little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not help noticingand admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his envious quality andhis disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed. I was puzzled at myown condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but I was different in someway from my living self. The grey depression, that had weighed on me for ayear or more and coloured all my thoughts, was gone. I perceived andthought without any emotional tint at all. I wondered if everyoneperceived things in this way under chloroform, and forgot it again when hecame out of it. It would be inconvenient to look into some heads, and notforget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite clearlythat I was soon to die. This brought me back to the consideration ofHaddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, and saw that he was afraidof cutting a branch of the portal vein. My attention was distracted fromdetails by the curious changes going on in his mind. His consciousness waslike the quivering little spot of light which is thrown by the mirror of agalvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a stream, some through thefocus 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'spart, the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in theslow movement of the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spotshivering and spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through theflow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifterthan a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for thenext five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he wasgrowing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little pictureof a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain anotherpicture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was afraid: his dread ofcutting too little was battling with his dread of cutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a greatuprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling, andsimultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back with ahoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather in a swiftbead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the red-stainedscalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both doctors flungthemselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to remedy thedisaster. "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 Iperceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter than theyhad ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind with incredibleswiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only compare their crowdedclarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium. In a moment it wouldall be over, and I should be free. I knew I was immortal, but what wouldhappen I did not know. Should I drift off presently, like a puff of smokefrom a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an attenuated version ofmy material self? Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerablehosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria ithad always seemed? Should I drift to some spiritualistic _seance_,and there make foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblindmedium? It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colourlessexpectation. And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling asthough some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. Thestress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces werefighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. Thatfeeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling athousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across mythoughts in a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cutside, the little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speckof foam vanishes down an eddy.
I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, recedingrapidly,--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,--and as it receded,passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze ofsmoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways, stippledwith people and conveyances, the little specks of squares, and the churchsteeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it spun away as theearth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as it seemed) I was overthe scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the little Thames a thread ofblue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming uplike the rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And atfirst I had not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upwardcould mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider, andthe details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazyand pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more and more withthe blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows; and a littlepatch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more dazzlingly white.Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grewthinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first, grewdeeper and richer in colour, passing steadily through the interveningshades, until presently it was as dark as the blue sky of midnight, andpresently as black as the blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last asblack as no blackness I had ever beheld. And first one star, and thenmany, and at last an innumerable host broke out upon the sky: more starsthan anyone has ever seen from the face of the earth. For the blueness ofthe sky in the light of the sun and stars sifted and spread abroadblindingly: there is diffused light even in the darkest skies of winter,and we do not see the stars by day only because of the dazzlingirradiation of the sun. But now I saw things--I know not how; assuredlywith 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 ofblinding white light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live uponthe earth, but livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmedabout with a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting half-wayacross 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 wingedglobes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can rememberupon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had never seenanything 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 fallenvery far away from me. Field and town were long since indistinguishable,and all the varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform brightgrey, broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scatteredin flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England. For now I couldsee the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this Islandof Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, orwhere the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dullgrey, and darker than the land; and the whole panorama was rotating slowlytowards the east.
All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles orso from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I hadneither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neitheralarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for I hadalready left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of man; butit troubled me not. The sun's rays shot through the void, powerless tolight or heat until they should strike on matter in their course. I sawthings with a serene
self-forgetfulness, even as if I were God. And downbelow there, rushing away from me,--countless miles in a second,--where alittle dark spot on the grey marked the position of London, two doctorswere struggling to restore life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I hadabandoned. I felt then such release, such serenity as I can compare to nomortal delight I have ever known.
It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning ofthat headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was sosimple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thingthat was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter: allthat was material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space,held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, movingin its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planetson their vast march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia,feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter: where it parts from itsgarment of flesh, there it remains (so far as space concerns it anylonger) immovable in space. _I_ was not leaving the earth: the earthwas leaving _me_, and not only the earth but the whole solar systemwas streaming past. And about me in space, invisible to me, scattered inthe wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerablemultitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped likemyself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of thegregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder andthought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!
As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the blackheavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being hadbegun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regardsthis world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a humanlife. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, likethe moon when she nears her full, but very large; and the silvery shape ofAmerica was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as it seemed) little Englandhad been basking but a few minutes ago. At first the earth was large, andshone in the heavens, filling a great part of them; but every moment shegrew smaller and more distant. As she shrank, the broad moon in its thirdquarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for theconstellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and theLion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous,tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun andearth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomableblackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star wasoverhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And awaybeneath and beyond the shining corona of the sun were strange groupings ofstars I had never seen in my life--notably a dagger-shaped group that Iknew for the Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they hadshone on earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone nowagainst the setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudeshad done, while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory andcolour. Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed toone point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily:they did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had anadamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness, noatmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of theseacute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I lookedagain, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled andturned as I looked, until in a second's space (as it seemed to me), it washalved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in the oppositedirection, a little pinkish pin's head of light, shining steadily, was theplanet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy, and, without a trace of terroror astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic dust we call the world fallaway from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that mymind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between eachseparate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun onceround the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion ofMars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thoughtand thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years was buta moment in my perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the blackbackground of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the groupof stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion andAldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart. Flashing suddenlyout of the darkness there came a flying multitude of particles of rock,glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintlyluminous cloud. They swirled all about me, and vanished again in atwinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright spot of light, thatshone 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 andlarger it grew, swallowing up the heavens behind it, and hiding everymoment a fresh multitude, of stars. I perceived its flattened, whirlingbody, its disc-like belt, and seven of its little satellites. It grew andgrew, till it towered enormous; and then I plunged amid a streamingmultitude of clashing stones and dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies,and saw for a moment the mighty triple belt like three concentric archesof moonlight above me, its shadow black on the boiling tumult below. Thesethings happened in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The planetwent by like a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out thesun, and there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patchagainst the light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could nolonger see.
So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar systemfell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amidthe multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in theconfused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a denizen of thesolar system: I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed to grasp andcomprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly the stars closedin about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished in a phosphorescenthaze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass ofnebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant blackness, andthe stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as if I moved towards a pointbetween Orion's belt and sword; and the void about that region openedvaster and vaster every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness intowhich I was falling. Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, ahurry of whirling motes at last, speeding silently into the void. Starsglowing brighter and brighter, with their circling planets catching thelight in a ghostly fashion as I neared them, shone out and vanished againinto inexistence; faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks ofmatter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundredmillions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling withunimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire,through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like adusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starlessspace, the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarterof the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellaruniverse closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gatheredtogether. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven bythe wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the vacantblackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like aswarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and thedarkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side. Soonthe little universe of matter, the cage of points in which I had begun tobe, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of luminous glittering, and nowto one minute disc of hazy light. In a little while it would shrink to apoint, and at last would vanish altogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelmingterror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe, apassionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there othersouls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was Iindeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into somethingthat was neither bei
ng nor not-being? The covering of the body, thecovering of matter, had been torn from me, and the hallucinations ofcompanionship and security. Everything was black and silent. I had ceasedto be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal dotof light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, andfor 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 ofmatter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side ofthat the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it seemed tome, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly moredistinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud of thefaintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but the thingsgrew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change. What wasunfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the interminablenight of space?
The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lowerside 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 Icould not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then the realisationrushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alone in space, alonewith this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole Universe of Matter laylike an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed as though I watched itthrough vast periods of time. On the forefinger glittered a ring; and theuniverse from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the ring'scurvature. And the thing that the hand gripped had the likeness of a blackrod. Through a long eternity I watched this Hand, with the ring and therod, 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 ofits import. Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon somegreater Being? Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, andthose again of another, and so on through an endless progression? And whatwas I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gatheringabout me came into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filledwith impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.
Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint, asif infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings ofdarkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence betweeneach stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw farabove the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dimphosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing; andat the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard anoise of many waters. But the black rod remained as a great band acrossthe sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts ofspace, spoke, saying, "There will be no more pain."
At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, andI 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 ofthe clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was standing at thefoot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers; andthe hands of my clock on the mantel over his shoulder were claspedtogether over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing something in a basinat the octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that couldscarce be spoken of as pain.
The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the dullmelancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.