The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.
“Your principle?” Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.
Hilda’s cheek wore a glow of pardonable triumph. The great teacher had deigned to ask her assistance. “I judged by the analogy of Indian hemp,” she answered. “This is clearly a similar, but much stronger, narcotic. Now, whenever I have given Indian hemp by your direction to people of sluggish, or even of merely bustling temperament, I have noticed that small doses produce serious effects, and that the after-results are most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous, overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk with excitement—drive them into homicidal mania.”
Sebastian nodded his head. He needed no more explanation. “You have hit it,” he said. “I see it at a glance. The old antithesis! All men and all animals fall, roughly speaking, into two great divisions of type: the impassioned and the unimpassioned; the vivid and the phlegmatic. I catch your drift now. Lethodyne is poison to phlegmatic patients, who have not active power enough to wake up from it unhurt; it is relatively harmless to the vivid and impassioned, who can be put asleep by it, indeed, for a few hours more or less, but are alive enough to live on through the coma and reassert their vitality after it.”
I recognised as he spoke that this explanation was correct. The dull rabbits, the sleepy Persian cats, and the silly sheep had died outright of lethodyne; the cunning, inquisitive raccoon, the quick hawk, and the active, intense-natured weasels, all most eager, wary, and alert animals, full of keenness and passion, had recovered quickly.
“Dare we try it on a human subject?” I asked, tentatively.
Hilda Wade answered at once, with that unerring rapidity of hers: “Yes, certainly; on a few—the right persons. I, for one, am not afraid to try it.”
“You?” I cried, feeling suddenly aware how much I thought of her. “Oh, not you, please, Nurse Wade. Some other life, less valuable!”
Sebastian stared at me coldly. “Nurse Wade volunteers,” he said. “It is in the cause of science. Who dares dissuade her? That tooth of yours? Ah, yes. Quite sufficient excuse. You wanted it out, Nurse Wade. Wells-Dinton shall operate.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Hilda Wade sat down in an easy chair and took a measured dose of the new anaesthetic, proportioned to the average difference in weight between raccoons and humanity. My face displayed my anxiety, I suppose, for she turned to me, smiling with quiet confidence. “I know my own constitution,” she said, with a reassuring glance that went straight to my heart. “I do not in the least fear.”
As for Sebastian, he administered the drug to her as unconcernedly as if she were a rabbit. Sebastian’s scientific coolness and calmness have long been the admiration of younger practitioners.
Wells-Dinton gave one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian’s pale face, usually so unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw signs of anxiety.