Under the Knife / H.G. Wells

"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I

walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared

the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my

intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of

their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little

humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly

exceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped of

glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from Haddon's house over

Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth: I perceived now that

our affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously to

maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career: I suppose

I 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 at

the loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional

side of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel

sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.

I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt a

concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered off

along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered

a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I remembered

now 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 the

complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to

me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away

from the pleasure-pain guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I

take it, as thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the

higher emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of

love, are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple

animal: they are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it

may be that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting

diminishes, this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity and

aversion, whose interplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?

I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with the

butcher-boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the

Regent's Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the Zoological

Gardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black

barge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens a

nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The trees

were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained by the dusts

of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but broken by long

waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove through. The breeze

was 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 that

I 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 that

was coming upon me. Was there any ground for the relief in the

presentiment of death? Did a man near to death begin instinctively to

withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and sense, even before the

cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated--isolated without

regret--from the life and existence about me. The children playing in the

sun and gathering strength and experience for the business of life,

the park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid, the nursing mother, the young

couple intent upon each other as they passed me, the trees by the wayside

spreading new pleading leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their

branches--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 my

feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and sat

down on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I had dozed

into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision of the

resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought myself

actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked out by

birds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the path and

the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before thought of

Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees, stretching as far

as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves and heeling

tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: the rising dead appeared to

stifle as they struggled upward, they bled in their struggles, the red

flesh was torn away from the white bones. "Awake!" cried a voice; but I

determined I would not rise to such horrors. "Awake!" They would not let

me alone. "Wake up!" said an angry voice. A cockney angel! The man who

sells 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 Langham

Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts about

death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end of

Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab, and

went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It struck

me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death on the

morrow had led to my death that day.

But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the

next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the

operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The doctors

were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce worth while

to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read my newspapers and

the letters that came by the first post, I did not find them very

interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison, my old school-friend,

calling my attention to two discrepancies and a printer's error in my new

book, with one from Langridge venting some vexation over Minton. The rest

were business communications. I breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my

side seemed more massive. I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can

understand, I did not find it very painful. I had been awake and hot and

thirsty in the night, but in the morning bed felt comfortable. In the

night-time I had lain thinking of things that were past; in the morning I

dozed over the question of immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the

minute, with a neat black bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival

stirred me up a little. I began to take a more personal interest in the

proceedings. Haddon moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside,

and, with his broad back to me, began taking things out of his bag. I

heard the light click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was

not altogether stagnant. "Will you hurt me much?" I said in an off-hand

tone.

"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 the

pungent sweetness of the anaesthetic.

They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and, almost

before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being

administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation

at first. I knew I should die--that this was the end of consciousness for

me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for death: I had a vague

sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. What was it I had not done? I

could think of nothing more to do, nothing desirable left in life; and yet

I had the strangest disinclination to death. And the physical sensation

was painfully oppressive. Of course the doctors did not know they were

going to kill me. Possibly I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and

a great silence, a monstrous silence, and an impenetrable blackness came

upon me.

There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds or

minutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I was

not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous sensations

that come sweeping from it to make up the background of consciousness had

gone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of it all; for as yet

something still held me to the poor stark flesh upon the bed--held me, yet

not so closely that I did not feel myself external to it, independent of

it, 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 and

saw. Haddon was bending over me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was a

large scalpel--was cutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It

was interesting to see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without

even a qualm. The interest was much of a quality with that one might feel

in a game of chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hand

steady; but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that he

was feeling the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the

operation.

Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon's manner

showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like bubbles

through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another in

the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not help noticing

and admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of his envious quality and

his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed. I was puzzled at my

own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but I was different in some

way from my living self. The grey depression, that had weighed on me for a

year or more and coloured all my thoughts, was gone. I perceived and

thought without any emotional tint at all. I wondered if everyone

perceived things in this way under chloroform, and forgot it again when he

came out of it. It would be inconvenient to look into some heads, and not

forget.

Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite clearly

that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the consideration of

Haddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, and saw that he was afraid

of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My attention was distracted from

details by the curious changes going on in his mind. His consciousness was

like the quivering little spot of light which is thrown by the mirror of a

galvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a stream, some through the

focus 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's

part, the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in the

slow movement of the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot

shivering and spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the

flow of thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter

than a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,

fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for the

next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements. And he was

growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a little picture

of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from his brain another

picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was afraid: his dread of

cutting too little was battling with his dread of cutting too far.

Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a great

uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling, and

simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back with a

hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather in a swift

bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the red-stained

scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both doctors flung

themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived efforts to remedy the

disaster. "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 I

perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter than they

had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible

swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only compare their crowded

clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium. In a moment it would

all be over, and I should be free. I knew I was immortal, but what would

happen I did not know. Should I drift off presently, like a puff of smoke

from a gun, in some kind of half-material body, an attenuated version of

my material self? Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerable

hosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it

had always seemed? Should I drift to some spiritualistic _séance_,

and there make foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind

medium? It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless

expectation. And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as

though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The

stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were

fighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That

feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a

thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my

thoughts in a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut

side, the little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck

of foam vanishes down an eddy.

I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding

rapidly,--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,--and as it receded,

passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze of

smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways, stippled

with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares, and the church

steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it spun away as the

earth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as it seemed) I was over

the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the little Thames a thread of

blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up

like the rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And at

first I had not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upward

could mean.

Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider, and

the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazy

and pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more and more with

the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows; and a little

patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more dazzlingly white.

Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew

thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first, grew

deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily through the intervening

shades, until presently it was as dark as the blue sky of midnight, and

presently as black as the blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last as

black as no blackness I had ever beheld. And first one star, and then

many, and at last an innumerable host broke out upon the sky: more stars

than anyone has ever seen from the face of the earth. For the blueness of

the sky in the light of the sun and stars sifted and spread abroad

blindingly: there is diffused light even in the darkest skies of winter,

and we do not see the stars by day only because of the dazzling

irradiation of the sun. But now I saw things--I know not how; assuredly

with 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 of

blinding white light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon

the earth, but livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed

about with a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting half-way

across 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 winged

globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can remember

upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had never seen

anything 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 fallen

very far away from me. Field and town were long since indistinguishable,

and all the varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform bright

grey, broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scattered

in flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England. For now I could

see the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this Island

of Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, or

where the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull

grey, and darker than the land; and the whole panorama was rotating slowly

towards the east.

All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles or

so from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I had

neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neither

alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for I had

already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of man; but

it troubled me not. The sun's rays shot through the void, powerless to

light or heat until they should strike on matter in their course. I saw

things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I were God. And down

below there, rushing away from me,--countless miles in a second,--where a

little dark spot on the grey marked the position of London, two doctors

were struggling to restore life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I had

abandoned. I felt then such release, such serenity as I can compare to no

mortal delight I have ever known.

It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of

that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was so

simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thing

that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter: all

that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space,

held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving

in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets

on their vast march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia,

feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter: where it parts from its

garment of flesh, there it remains (so far as space concerns it any

longer) immovable in space. _I_ was not leaving the earth: the earth

was leaving _me_, and not only the earth but the whole solar system

was streaming past. And about me in space, invisible to me, scattered in

the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable

multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like

myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the

gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder and

thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!

As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black

heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had

begun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regards

this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a human

life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly gibbous, like

the moon when she nears her full, but very large; and the silvery shape of

America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as it seemed) little England

had been basking but a few minutes ago. At first the earth was large, and

shone in the heavens, filling a great part of them; but every moment she

grew smaller and more distant. As she shrank, the broad moon in its third

quarter crept into view over the rim of her disc. I looked for the

constellations. Only that part of Aries directly behind the sun and the

Lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous,

tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and

earth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable

blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was

overhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And away

beneath and beyond the shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of

stars I had never seen in my life--notably a dagger-shaped group that I

knew for the Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had

shone on earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now

against the setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes

had done, while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and

colour. Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to

one point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily:

they did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had an

adamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness, no

atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of these

acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I looked

again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled and

turned as I looked, until in a second's space (as it seemed to me), it was

halved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in the opposite

direction, a little pinkish pin's head of light, shining steadily, was the

planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy, and, without a trace of terror

or astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic dust we call the world fall

away from me.

Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that my

mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each

separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once

round the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion of

Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thought

and thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years was but

a moment in my perception.

At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black

background of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the group

of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and

Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart. Flashing suddenly

out of the darkness there came a flying multitude of particles of rock,

glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a faintly

luminous cloud. They swirled all about me, and vanished again in a

twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a bright spot of light, that

shone 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 and

larger it grew, swallowing up the heavens behind it, and hiding every

moment a fresh multitude, of stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling

body, its disc-like belt, and seven of its little satellites. It grew and

grew, till it towered enormous; and then I plunged amid a streaming

multitude of clashing stones and dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies,

and saw for a moment the mighty triple belt like three concentric arches

of moonlight above me, its shadow black on the boiling tumult below. These

things happened in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The planet

went by like a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out the

sun, and there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch

against the light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no

longer see.

So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solar system

fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere star amid

the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost in the

confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a denizen of the

solar system: I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed to grasp and

comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly the stars closed

in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished in a phosphorescent

haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass of

nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of vacant blackness, and

the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as if I moved towards a point

between Orion's belt and sword; and the void about that region opened

vaster and vaster every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness into

which I was falling. Faster and ever faster the universe rushed by, a

hurry of whirling motes at last, speeding silently into the void. Stars

glowing brighter and brighter, with their circling planets catching the

light in a ghostly fashion as I neared them, shone out and vanished again

into inexistence; faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of

matter, eddying light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred

millions of miles or so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with

unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire,

through that black, enormous night. More than anything else it was like a

dusty draught, sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless

space, the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter

of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar

universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered

together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by

the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the vacant

blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a

swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the

darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side. Soon

the little universe of matter, the cage of points in which I had begun to

be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of luminous glittering, and now

to one minute disc of hazy light. In a little while it would shrink to a

point, and at last would vanish altogether.

Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelming

terror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe, a

passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there other

souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was I

indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something

that was neither being nor not-being? The covering of the body, the

covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the hallucinations of

companionship and security. Everything was black and silent. I had ceased

to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only that infinitesimal dot

of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained myself to hear and see, and

for 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 of

matter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side of

that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it seemed to

me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly more

distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud of the

faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but the things

grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change. What was

unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the interminable

night of space?

The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower

side 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 I

could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then the realisation

rushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alone in space, alone

with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole Universe of Matter lay

like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed as though I watched it

through vast periods of time. On the forefinger glittered a ring; and the

universe from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the ring's

curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped had the likeness of a black

rod. Through a long eternity I watched this Hand, with the ring and the

rod, 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 of

its import. Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some

greater Being? Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and

those again of another, and so on through an endless progression? And what

was I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering

about me came into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled

with impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.

Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint, as

if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings of

darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence between

each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw far

above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dim

phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing; and

at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard a

noise of many waters. But the black rod remained as a great band across

the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts of

space, spoke, saying, "There will be no more pain."

At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, and

I 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 of

the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was standing at the

foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers; and

the hands of my clock on the mantel over his shoulder were clasped

together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing something in a basin

at the octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that could

scarce be spoken of as pain.

The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the dull

melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.