and then there happened one of those crises of dread and apprehension and pain that are like a ploughing of the heart. it was brought home to me that you might die even before the first pages of this book of yours were written. you became feverish, complained of that queer pain you had felt twice before, and for the third time you were ill with appendicitis. your mother and i came and regarded your touzled head and flushed little face on the pillow as you slept uneasily, and decided that we must take no more risks with you. so soon as your temperature had fallen again we set about the business of an operation.
we told each other that nowadays these operations were as safe as going to sleep in your bed, but we knew better. our own doctor had lost his son. "that," we said, "was different." but we knew well enough in our hearts that you were going very near to the edge of death, nearer than you had ever been since first you came clucking into the world.
the operation was done at home. a capable, fair-complexioned nurse took possession of us; and my study, because it has the best light, was transfigured into an admirable operating-room. all its furnishings were sent away, every cloth and curtain, and the walls and floor were covered with white sterilized sheets. the high little mechanical table they erected before the window seemed to me like an altar on which i had to offer up my son. there were basins of disinfectants and towels conveniently about, the operator came, took out his array of scalpels and forceps and little sponges from the black bag he carried, put them ready for his hand, and then covered them from your sight with a white cloth, and i brought you down in my arms, wrapped in a blanket, from your bedroom to the anæsthetist. you were beautifully trustful and submissive and unafraid. i stood by you until the chloroform had done its work, and then left you there, lest my presence should in the slightest degree embarrass the surgeon. the anæsthetic had taken all the color out of your face, and you looked pinched and shrunken and greenish and very small and pitiful. i went into the drawing-room and stood there with your mother and made conversation. i cannot recall what we said, i think it was about the moorland to which we were going for your convalescence. indeed, we were but the ghosts of ourselves; all our substance seemed listening, listening to the little sounds that came to us from the study.
then after long ages there was a going to and fro of feet, a bump, the opening of a door, and our own doctor came into the room rubbing his hands together and doing nothing to conceal his profound relief. "admirable," he said, "altogether successful." i went up to you and saw a tumbled little person in the bed, still heavily insensible and moaning slightly. by the table were bloody towels, and in a shallow glass tray was a small object like a damaged piece of earthworm. "not a bit too soon," said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for my inspection. "it's on the very verge of perforation." i affected a detached and scientific interest, but the prevailing impression in my mind was that this was a fragment from very nearly the centre of your being.
he took it away with him, i know not whither. perhaps it is now in spirits in a specimen jar, an example to all medical students of what to avoid in an appendix; perhaps it was stained and frozen, and microtomized into transparent sections as they do such things, and mounted on glass slips and distributed about the world for curious histologists to wreak their eyes upon. for a time you lay uneasily still and then woke up to pain. even then you got a fresh purchase on my heart. it has always been our custom to discourage weeping and outcries, and you did not forget your training. "i shan't mind so much, dadda," you remarked to me, "if i may yelp." so for a day, by special concession, you yelped, and then the sting of those fresh wounds departed.
within a fortnight, so quickly does an aseptic wound heal up again, you were running about in the sun, and i had come back, as one comes back to a thing forgotten, to the first beginnings of this chapter on my desk. but for a time i could not go on working at it because of the fear i had felt, and it is only now in june, in this house in france to which we have come for the summer, with you more flagrantly healthy than i have ever known you before, that my heart creeps out of its hole again, and i can go on with my story.
