be only the snow, and the ice, and
the cold ...

* * * * *

Three days later I entered John's Hospital with Alice on my arm. All my
affairs--and they were few enough--were in order. I had insisted that
Alice wait until I had come safely through the operation, before she
submitted to it. I had been carefully starved for two days, and I was
lost in an unreal world of white walls and white clothes and white
lights, drunk with my dreams of the future. When I was wheeled into the
operating room on the long, hard table, for a moment it shone with
brilliant distinctness, a neat, methodical white chamber, tall and more
or less circular. Then I was beneath the glare of soft white lights, and
the room faded into a misty vagueness from which little steel rays
flashed and quivered from silvery cold instruments. For a moment our
hands, Sir John's and mine, gripped, and we were saying good-bye--for a
little while--in the way men say these things. Then I felt the warm
touch of Alice's lips upon mine, and I felt sudden painful things I
cannot describe, that I could not have described then. For a moment I
felt that I must rise and cry out that I could not do it. But the
feeling passed, and I was passive.

Something was pressed about my mouth and nose, something with an
ethereal smell. Staring eyes swam about me from behind their white
masks. I struggled instinctively, but in vain--I was held securely.
Infinitesimal points of light began to wave back and forth on a
pitch-black background; a great hollow buzzing echoed in my head. My
head seemed suddenly to have become all throat, a great, cavernous,
empty throat in which sounds and lights were mingled together, in a
swift rhythm, approaching, receding eternally. Then, I think, there were
dreams. But I have forgotten them....

I began to emerge from the effect of the ether. Everything was dim, but
I could perceive Alice beside me, and Sir John.

"Bravely done!" Sir John was saying, and Alice, too, was saying
something, but I cannot remember what. For a long while we talked, I
speaking the nonsense of those who are coming out from under ether, they
teasing me a little solemnly. But after a little while I became aware of
the fact that they were about to leave. Suddenly, God knows why, I knew
that they must not leave. Something cried in the back of my head that
they _must_ stay--one cannot explain these things, except by after
events. I began to press the