UNDER THE KNIFE.


"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I
walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared
the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my
intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of
their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little
humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly
exceed the conventional requirement. Things came before me stripped of
glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk from Haddon's house over
Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my youth: I perceived now that
our affection was a tradition, which we foregathered rather laboriously to
maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of my later career: I suppose
I had been cold-blooded or undemonstrative--one perhaps implies the other.
It may be that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique.
There had been a time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at
the loss of a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional
side of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel
sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.

I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt a
concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered off
along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I had suffered
a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I remembered
now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me,
leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a dreg of self-pity.
It had been weeks before the old ambitions and tendernesses and all the
complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to
me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away