no pain. And he lies still, without pain. I will--or I pray--that he
shall sleep without morphia. And he sleeps (I think that in spite of his
extreme discomfort, he must have slept the best part of the night). And
because it seems to work, I will--or I pray--that he shall get well.

There are many things that obstruct this process as fast as it is begun:
your sensation of sight and touch; the swarms and streams of images that
your brain throws out; and the crushing obsession of your fear. This
last is like a dead weight that you hold off you with your arms
stretched out. Your arms sink and drop under it perpetually and have to
be raised again. At last the weight goes. And the sensations go, and the
swarms and streams of images go, and there is nothing before you and
around you but a clear blank darkness where your will vibrates.

Only one avenue of sense is left open. You are lost to the very memories
of touch and sight, but you are intensely conscious of every sound from
the bed, every movement of the sleeper. And while one half of you only
lives in that pure and effortless vibration, the other half is aware of
the least change in the rhythm of his breathing.

It is by this rhythm that I can tell whether he is asleep or awake. This
rhythm of his breathing, and the rhythm of his sleeping and his waking
measure out the night for me. It goes like one hour.

And yet I have spent months of nights watching in this room. Its blond
walls are as familiar to me as the walls of rooms where I have lived a
long time; I know with a profound and intimate knowledge every crinkle
in the red shade of the electric bulb that hangs on the inner wall
between the two beds, the shape and position of every object on the
night table in the little white-tiled dressing-room; I know every trick
of the inner and outer doors leading to the corridor, and the long grey
lane of the corridor, and the room that I must go through to find ice,
and the face of the little ward-maid who sleeps there, who wants to get
up and break the ice for me every time. I have known the little
ward-maid all my life; I have known the night nurse all my life, with
her white face and sharp black eyes, and all my life I have not cared
for her. All my life I have known and cared only for the wounded man on
the bed.

I have known every sound of his voice and every line of his face and
hands (the face and hands that he asks me to wash, over and over again,
if I don't mind),