THE INTERIOR CASTLE
531
unreal, she gave the surgeon her permission.
He had now to penetrate regions that were not anaesthetized
and this he told her frankly, but he said that there was no danger at
all. He apologized for the slip of the tongue he had made: in point
of fact, he had not been near her brain, it was only a figure of speech.
He began. The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured
the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the
scalpels chipped off bone.
It
was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were
being cut dexterously, one by one; the pain writhed spirally and came
to her who was a pink bird and sat on the top of a cone. The pain
was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was
the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak, the fastest force,
the furthest reach, the newest time. It possessed nothing of her but
its one infinitesimal scene: beyond the screen as thin as gossamer,
the brain trembled for its life, hearing the knives hunting like wolves
outside, sniffing and snapping. Mercy! Mercy! cried the scalped
nerves.
At last, miraculously, she turned her eyes inward tranquilly.
Dr. Nicholas had said, "The worst is over. I am going to work on the
floor of your nose," and .at his signal she closed her eyes and this time
and this time alone, she saw her brain lying in a shell-pink satin case.
It was a pink pearl, no bigger than a needle's eye, but it was so
beautiful and so pure that its smallness made no difference. Anyhow,
as she watched, it grew. It grew larger and larger until it was an enor–
mous bubble that contained the surgeon and the whole room within
its rosy luster. In a long ago summer, she had often been absorbed by
the spectacle of flocks of yellow birds that visited a cedar tree and she
remembered that everything that summer had been some shade of
yellow. One year of childhood, her mother had frequently taken her
to have tea with an aged schoolmistress upon whose mantelpiece there
was a herd of ivory elephants; that had been the white year. There was
a green spring when early in April she had seen a grass snake on a
boulder, but the very summer that followed was violet, for vetch
took her mother's garden. She saw a swatch of blue tulle lying in a
raffia basket on the front porch of Uncle Marion's brown house.
Never before
had~the
world been pink, whatever else it had been. Or
had it been, one other time? She could not be sure and she did not
care. Of one thing she was certain: never had the world enclosed her
before and never had the quiet been so smooth.
For only a moment the busybodies left her to her ecstasy and
then, impatient and gossiping, they forced their way inside, slashed at
