Chapter CXCIV: Section 4: Such was the mood in which she went to her strange

experience. She liked the hospital-room, tiny, but immaculately clean; she liked the nurses, who seemed to her to be altogether superior and exemplary beings--moving with such silence and assurance about their various tasks. She slept soundly, and in the morning they combed and plaited her hair and prepared her for the ceremony. There came a bunch of roses to her room, with a card from Mr. Harding; and these were exquisite, and made her happy, so that, when the doctor arrived, she went almost gaily to the operating-room.

Everything there aroused her curiosity; the pure white walls and ceiling, shining with matchless cleanness, the glittering instruments arranged carefully on glass tables, the attentive and pleasant-faced nurses, standing also in pure white, and the doctor in his vestments, smiling reassuringly. In the centre of the room was a large glass table, long enough for a reclining body, and through the sky-light the sun poured a pleasing radiance over all. “How beautiful!” exclaimed Corydon; and the nurses exchanged glances, and the old doctor failed to hide an expression of surprise.

“I wish all my patients felt like that,” said he. “Now climb up on the table.”

Corydon promptly did so, and another doctor who was to administer the anaesthetic came to her side. “Take a very deep breath, please,” he said, as he placed over her mouth a white, cone-shaped thing that had a rather suffocating odor. Corydon was obedience itself, and breathed.

In a moment her body seemed to be falling from her. “Oh, I don’t like it!” she gasped.

“Breathe deeply, and count as far as you can,” came a voice from far above her.

“Stop!” whispered Corydon. “Oh, I don’t want--I want to come back!”

Then she began to count--or rather some strange voice, not hers, seemed to count for her; as the first numbness passed, farther and farther away she seemed to dissolve, to become a disembodied consciousness poised in a misty ether. And at that moment--so she told Thyrsis afterwards--the face of Mr. Harding seemed to appear just above her, and to look at her with a pained and startled expression. It was a beautiful face, she thought; and she knew that everything she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding’s mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; “their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient world after some cataclysm.

“I always knew that about us,” thought Corydon, and she realized that the face before her understood, even though at the moment it, too, was dissolving. “I wonder why”--she mused--“why--” And then the little spark went out.

Two hours later the doctor was bending over her, anxiously scrutinizing her passive face. “Nurse, bring me some ice-water,” he was saying. “She takes her time coming to.” And sharply he struck her cheek and forehead with his finger-tips; but she showed no sign.

Deep down in some mysterious inner chamber, beneath the calm face, there was being enacted a grim spirit-drama. Corydon’s soul was making a monstrous effort to return to its habitation; Corydon felt herself hanging, a tortured speck of being, in a dark and illimitable void. “This may be Hell,” she thought. “I have neither hands nor feet, and I cannot fight; but I can _will_ to get back!” This effort cost her inexpressible agony.

A strange incessant throbbing was going on in the black pit over which she seemed suspended. It had a kind of rhythm--metallic, and yet with a human resonance. It began way down somewhere, and proceeded with maddening accuracy to ascend through the semi-tones of a gigantic scale. Each beat was agony to her; it ascended to a certain pitch in merciless crescendo, then fell to the bottom again, and began anew its swift, maddeningly accurate ascent. Each time it ascended a little higher, and always straining her endurance to the uttermost, and bringing a more vivid realization of agony. “Will you stop here,” it seemed to pulsate. “No, no, I will go on,” willed Corydon. “You shall not keep me, I must escape, I must _get out_.” But it kept up incessantly, ruthlessly, its strange, formless, soundless din, until the spirit writhed in its grasp.

Finally it seemed to Corydon that she was getting nearer--nearer to something, she knew not what. The blackness about her seemed to condense, and she found herself in what was apparently the middle of a lake, and some dark bodies with arms were trying to drag her down. “No, no,” she willed to these forms, “you _shall_ not. I do not belong here, I belong up--up!” And by a violent effort she escaped--into sensations yet more agonizing, more acute. The vibrations were getting faster and faster, whirling her along, stretching her consciousness to pieces. “Will it never end?” she thought. “Have mercy!” But after an eternity of such repetition, she found a bright light staring at her, and a frightful sense of heaviness, like mountains piled upon her. Also, eating her up from head to foot, was a strange, unusual pain; yes, it must be pain, though she had never felt anything like it before. She moaned; and there came a spasm of nausea, that seemed to tear her asunder.

The doctor was standing by her. “She gave me quite a fright,” he was saying. “There, that’s it, nurse. She’ll be sleeping sweetly in a minute.” The nurse hurried forward, and Corydon felt a stinging sensation in her side, and then a delightful numbness crept over her. “Oh, thank you, doctor,” she whispered.