THE OPERATION
§ 1

While Sir Alpheus grumbled loudly at the unpreparedness of everything, Mr. Huss, with the assistance of Dr. Barrack, walked upstairs and disrobed himself.

This long discussion had taken a very powerful grip upon his mind. Much remained uncertain in his thoughts. He had still a number of things he wanted to say, and these proceedings preliminary to his vivisection, seemed to him to be irrelevant and tiresome rites interrupting something far more important.

The bed, the instruments, the preparation for anæsthesia, were to him no more than new contributions to the argument. While he lay on the bed with Dr. Barrack handling the funnel hood that was to go over nose and mouth for the administration of the chloroform, he tried to point out that the very idea of operative surgery 201was opposed to the scientific fatalism of that gentleman. But Sir Alpheus interrupted him....

“Breathe deeply,” said Dr. Barrack....

“Breathe deeply.”...

The whole vast argumentative fabric that had arisen in his mind swung with him across an abyss of dread and mental inanity. Whether he thought or dreamt what follows it is impossible to say; we can but record the ideas that, like a crystalline bubble as great as all things, filled his consciousness. He felt a characteristic doubt whether the chloroform would do its duty, and then came that twang like the breaking of a violin string:—Ploot....

And still he did not seem to be insensible! He was not insensible, and yet things had changed. Dr. Elihu was still present, but somehow Sir Eliphaz and Mr. Dad and Mr. Farr, whom he had left downstairs, had come back and were sitting on the ground—on the ashes; they were all seated gravely on a mound of ashes and beneath a sky that blazed with light. Sir Alpheus, the nurse, the bedroom, had vanished. It seemed that they had been the dream.

But this was the reality, an enduring reality, this sackcloth and these reeking ash-heaps outside the city gates. This was the scene of an 202unending experiment and an immortal argument. He was Job; the same Job who had sat here for thousands of years, and this lean vulturous old man in the vast green turban was Eliphaz the Temanite, the smaller man who peered out of the cowl of a kind of hooded shawl, was his friend Bildad the Shuhite; the eager, coarse face of the man in unclean linen was Zophar the Naamathite; and this fist-faced younger man who sat with an air of false humility insolently judging them all, was Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite of the kindred of Ram....

It was queer that there should have ever been the fancy that these men were doctors or schoolmasters or munition makers, a queer veiling of their immortal quality in the transitory garments of a period. For ages they had sat here and disputed, and for ages they had still to sit. A little way off waited the asses and camels and slaves of the three emirs, and the two Ethiopian slaves of Eliphaz had been coming towards them bearing bowls of fine grey ashes. (For Eliphaz for sanitary reasons did not use the common ashes of the midden upon his head.) There, far away, splashed green with palms and pierced between pylons by a glittering arm of the river, were the low brown walls of sun-dried brick, the 203flat-roofed houses, and the twisted temple towers of the ancient city of Uz, where first this great argument had begun. East and west and north and south stretched the wide levels of the world, dotted with small date trees, and above them was the measureless dome of heaven, set with suns and stars and flooded with a light.

This light had shone out since Elihu had spoken, and it was not only a light but a voice clear and luminous, before which Job’s very soul bowed and was still....

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

By a great effort Job lifted up his eyes to the zenith.

It was as if one shone there who was all, and yet who comprehended powers and kingdoms, and it was as if a screen or shadow was before his face. It was as if a dark figure enhaloed in shapes and colours bent down over the whole world and regarded it curiously and malevolently, and it was as if this dark figure was no more than a translucent veil before an infinite and lasting radiance. Was it a veil before the light, or did it not rather nest in the very heart of the light and spread itself out before the face of the light and spread itself and recede and again expand in a perpetual diastole and systole? 204It was as if the voice that spoke was the voice of God, and yet ever and again it was as if the timbre of the voice was Satan. As the voice spoke to Job, his friends listened and watched him, and the eyes of Elihu shone like garnets and the eyes of Eliphaz like emeralds, but the eyes of Bildad were black like the eyes of a lizard upon a wall, and Zophar had no eyes but looked at him only with the dark shadows beneath his knitted brows. As God spake they all, and Job with them, became smaller and smaller and shrank until they were the minutest of conceivable things, until the whole scene was a little toy; they became unreal like discolourations upon a floating falling disc of paper confetti, amidst greatnesses unfathomable.

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

But in this dream that was dreamt by Mr. Huss while he was under the anæsthetic, God did not speak by words but by light; there were no sounds in his ears, but thoughts ran like swift rivulets of fire through his brain and gathered into pools and made a throbbing pattern of wavelets, curve within curve, that interlaced....

The thoughts that it seemed to him that God was speaking through his mind, can be put into 205words only after a certain fashion and with great loss, for they were thoughts about things beyond and above this world, and our words are all made out of the names of things and feelings in this world. Things that were contradictory had become compatible, and things incomprehensible seemed straightforward, because he was in a dream. It was as if the anæsthetic had released his ideas from their anchorage to words and phrases and their gravitation towards sensible realities. But it was still the same line of thought he pursued through the stars and spaces, that he had pursued in the stuffy little room at Sundering-on-Sea.

It was somewhat after this fashion that things ran through the mind of Mr. Huss. It seemed to him at first that he was answering the challenge of the voice that filled the world, not of his own will but mechanically. He was saying: “They give me knowledge.”

To which the answer was in the voice of Satan and in tones of mockery. For Satan had become very close and definite to Job, as a dark face, time-worn and yet animated, that sent out circle after circle of glowing colour towards the bounds of space as a swimmer sends waves towards the bank. “But what have you got in the way of a vessel to hold your knowledge if we gave it you?”

206“In the name of the God in my heart,” said Job, “I demand knowledge and power.”

“Who are you? A pedagogue who gives ill-prepared lessons about history in frowsty rooms, and dreams that he has been training his young gentlemen to play leap-frog amidst the stars.”

“I am Man,” said Job.

“Huss.”

But that queer power of slipping one’s identity and losing oneself altogether which dreams will give, had come upon Mr. Huss. He answered with absolute conviction: “I am Man. Down there I was Huss, but here I am Man. I am every man who has ever looked up towards this light of God. I am every one who has thought or worked or willed for the race. I am all the explorers and leaders and teachers that man has ever had.”

The argument evaporated. He carried his point as such points are carried in dreams. The discussion slipped to another of the issues that had been troubling him.

“You would plumb the deep of knowledge; you would scale the heights of space.... There is no limit to either.”

“Then I will plumb and scale for ever. I will defeat you.”

“But you will never destroy me.”

“I will fight my way through you to God.”

207“And never attain him.”...
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