The curtain was no longer drawn.
Lerne and his assistants, grouped round the operating table, were busy about something which their grouping hid from me—probably the cleaning of instruments.
Through the wide-opened door, one could see the park, and hardly twenty yards away, a corner of the paddock, where the cows were ruminating and lowing.
Only, I might have imagined myself transported into the most revolutionary picture of the impressionist school. The azure of the sky, without losing its limpid depths, had changed into a fine orange dye. The paddocks—the trees—instead of being green seemed to me to be red. The buttercups of the meadow, starred vermilion grass with violets.
Everything had changed color, except, however, the black and white things. The dark trousers of the four men obstinately remained as before, as also their overalls, but those white overalls were marked with green stains.
Green stains were also shining on the ground, and what could this liquid be except blood, and what was there astonishing in its appearing green, since greenery gave me the sense of red?
This liquid exhaled a pungent smell, which would have driven me far away, if I had been capable of budging, and yet, the smell was not that which I had been accustomed to associate with blood.
I had never smelt it, any more than those other perfumes, or any more than my ears remembered having heard sounds like these.
It was strange that the aberration of my senses had not been dissipated along with the vapors of the ether. I endeavored to fight against this feeling of numbness. No use! They had stretched me out on a litter of straw, of purple straw.
The operators kept their backs turned to me, except Johann.