“However, I shall make out. Mr. Harding is going to be in town for more than a week—he is attending a conference of some sort, and he has promised to come and see me in the hospital. I think he likes to do such things—he has the queerest professional air about it, so that you feel you are being sympathized with for the glory of God. But really he is very beautiful and good, and I think you have never appreciated him. I am happy to-day, almost exhilarated; I feel as if I were about to escape from a dungeon.”
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.