524
PARTISAN REVIEW
then drove back in terror. After the rout, sweat streamed from her
face and soaked the neck of the coarse hospital shirt. To be sure, it
came usually of its own accord, running like a wild fire through all
the convolutions to fill with flame the small sockets and ravines and
then, at last, to withdraw, leaving behind a throbbing and an echo. On
these occasions, she was as helpless as a tree in a wind. But at the
other times when, by closing her eyes and rolling up the eyeballs in
such a way that she fancied she looked directly on the place where
her brain was, the pain woke sluggishly and came toward her at a
snail's pace. Then, bit by bit, it gained speed. Sometimes it faltered
back, subsided altogether, and then it rushed like a tidal wave driven
by a hurricane, lashing and roaring until she lifted her hands from
the counterpane, crushed her broken teeth into her swollen lip, stared
in panic at the soothing walls with her ruby eyes, stretched out her
legs until she felt their bones must snap. Each cove, each narrow in–
let, every living bay was flooded and the frail brain, a little hat-shaped
boat, was washed from its mooring and set adrift. The skull was as
vast as the world and the brain was as small as a seashell.
Then came calm weather and the safe journey home. She kept
vigil for a while, though, and did not close her eyes, -but gazing pac–
ifically at the trees, conceived of the pain as the guardian of her
treasure who would not let her see it; that was why she was handled
so savagely whenever she turned her eyes inward. Once this watch was
interrupted: by chance she looked into the corridor and saw a shaggy
mop slink past the door, followed by a senile porter. A pair of ancient
eyes, as rheumy as an old dog's, stared uncritically in at her and the
toothless mouth formed a brutish word. She was so surprised that she
immediately closed her eyes to shut out the shape of the word and the
pain dug up the unmapped regions of her head with mattocks,
ludicrously huge. It was the familiar pain, but this time, even as she
endured it, she observed with detachment that its effect upon her
was less than that of its contents, the by-products, for example, of
temporal confusion and the bizarre misapplication of the style of one
sensation to another. At the moment, for example, although her brain
reiterated to her that
it
was being assailed, she was stroking her right
wrist with her left hand as though to assuage the ache, long since
dispelled, of the sprain in the joint. Some minutes after she had
opened her eyes and left off soothing her wrist, she lay rigid experienc–
ing the sequel to the pain, an ideal terror. For, as before on several oc–
casions, she was overwhelmed with the knowledge that the pain had
been consummated in the vessel of her mind and for the moment the
