528
PARTISAN REVIEW
The doctor paused a moment and the surgical nurse wiped her mouth.
He returned to her with another pack, pushing it with his bodkin
doggedly until
it
lodged against the first. Stop! Stop! crie!f all her
· nerves, wailing along the surface of her skin. The coats that covered
them were tom off and they shuddered like naked people screaming,
Stop! Stop! But Dr. Nicholas did not hear. Time and again he came
back with a fresh pack and did not pause at all until one nostril was
finished. She opened her eyes and saw him wipe the sweat off his
forehead and saw the dark interne bending over her, fascinated.
Miss Kennedy bathed her temples in ice water .and Dr. Nicholas
said, "There. It won't be much longer. I'll tell them to send you
some coffee, though I'm afraid you won't be able to taste it. Ever
drink coffee with chicory in it? I have no use for it."
She snatched at his irrelevancy and, though she had never
tasted chicory, she said severely, "I love it."
Dr. Nicholas chuckled. "De gustibus. Ready? A pack, Miss
Kennedy."
The second nostril was harder to pack since the other side was
now distended and the passage was anyhow much narrower, as
narrow, he had once remarked, as that in the nose of an infant. In
such pain as passed all language and even the farthest fetched analo–
gies, she turned her eyes inward thinking that under the obscuring
cloak of the surgeon's pain, she could see her brain without the
knowledge of its keeper. But Dr. Nicholas and his aides would give
her no peace. They surrounded her with their murmuring and their
foot-shuffling and the rustling of their starched uniforms, and her
eyelids continually flew back in embarrassment and mistrust. She was
claimed entirely by this present, meaningless pain and suddenly and
sharply, she forgot what she had meant to do. She was aware of
nothing but her ascent to the summit of something; what it was she
did not know, whether
it
was a tower or a peak or Jacob's ladder.
Now she was an abstract word, now she was a theorem of geometry,
now she was a kite flying, a top spinning, a prism flashing, a kaleido–
scope turning.
But none of the others in the room could see inside and when
the surgeon was finished, the nurse at the foot of the bed said, "Now
you must take a look in the .mirror. It's simply too comical." And
they all laughed intimately like old, fast friends. She smiled politely
and looked at her reflection: over the gruesomely fattened snout,
her scarlet eyes stared in fixed reproach upon the upturned lips, grey
with bruises. But even in its smile of betrayal, the mouth itself was
