THE INTERIOR CASTLE
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puzzled: it reminded her that something had been left behind, but
she could not recall what it was. She was hollowed out and was as dry
as a white bone.
III
They strapped her ankles to the operating table and put leather
nooses round her wrists. Over her head was a mirror with a thousand
facets in which she saw a thousand travesties of her face. At her
right side was the table, shrouded in white, where lay the glittering
blades of the many knives, thrusting out fitful rays of light. All the
cloth was frosty; everything was white or silver and as cold as snow.
Dr. Nicholas, a tall snowman with silver eyes and silver fingernails,
came into the room soundlessly for he walked on layers and layers
of snow which deadened his footsteps; behind him came the interne,
a smaller snowman, less impressively proportioned. At the foot of
the table, a snow figure put her frozen hands upon Pansy's helpless
feet. The doctor plucked the packs from the cold, numb nose. His
laugh was like a cry on a bitter, still night: "I
will
show you now," he
called across the expanse of snow, "that you can feel nothing." The
pincers bit at nothing, snapped at the air and cracked a nerveless
icicle. Pansy called back and heard her own voice echo: "I feel
nothing."
Here the walls were gray, not tan. Suddenly the face of the
nurse at the foot of the table broke apart and Pansy first thought it
was in grief. But it was a smile and she said, "Did you enjoy your
coffee?" Down the gray corridors of the maze, the words rippled,
ran like mice, birds, broken beads: Did you enjoy your coffee? your
coffee? your coffee? Similarly once in another room that also had
gray walls, the same voice had said, "Shall I give her some whiskey?"
She was overcome with gratitude that this young woman (how pretty
she was with her white hair and her white face and her china-blue
eyes!) had been with her that first night and was with her now.
In the great stillness of the winter, the operation began. The
knives carved snow. Pansy was happy. She had been given a hypo–
dermic just before they came to fetch her and she would have gone to
sleep had she not enjoyed so much this trickery of Dr. Nicholas' whom
now she tenderly loved.
There was a clock in the operating room and from time to
time she looked at it.
An
hour passed. The snowman's face was melt–
ing; drops of water hung from his fine nose, but his silver eyes were as
