.
He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of the surprising world
again, that his courage has been broken upon the wheel, that energy is
desolation, and sleep true beauty. To another this return is a
marvellous and superb experience. It is like the vivid re-awakening of
youth in one who is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of
brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a glorious substitution of
Eden for the outer courts where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It
will be supposed that I found myself in the first category, a
terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when the fever gave me up to the
world again. For the world had always been cruel to me, because I was
afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this was not so. My
convalescence was like a beautiful dream of rest underneath which riot
stirred. A simile will explain best exactly what I mean. Let me liken
the calm of my convalescence to the calm of earth on the edge of Spring.
What a riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is preparing
beneath that enigmatic, and apparently profound, repose. In the simile
you have my exact state. And I alone felt that, within this womb of
inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing silently, but
inexorably, day by day. This knowledge was my strange secret. It came
upon me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight, shed by a
carefully shaded lamp over my bed. Rain drummed gently against the
windows. There was no other sound. By the fire, in a great armchair, the
trained nurse, Kate Walters, was sitting with a book--"Jane Eyre" it
was--upon her knees. I had been sleeping and now awoke thirsty. I put
out my hand to get at a tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my
pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought, was with me. My hand
had grasped the tumbler and lifted it from the table; but, instead of
bringing my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly extended, the tumbler
poised on my palm as upon the palm of a juggler.

"How long my arm is!" that was my thought, "and how strong!" Formerly it
had been short, weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness, my arms
would naturally be nerveless, useless things. The odd fact was that now,
for the first time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An absurd
and puny act, you will say, I daresay. What of that? With it came a
sudden stirring of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my arm
extended for full five minutes by the watch t