looking out of the window, she could see him idling, as usual, in the
garden, ostensibly taking a lesson in English from a volunteer
professor, and in reality doing his best mildly to flirt with her. The
Directrice frowned and smiled at the same time. What an absurd, lovable
fellow he was! Thank Heaven, there was one of her "pensionnaires" whom
it was impossible to take tragically. She gave a few orders for the
disposition of the office work, wondered when she would ever have time
really to go over her accounts thoroughly, and went out again to
interview the head of a big wholesale groceries firm. In the old days,
when she and hers lived in a chateau, they bought _en gros_ their
supplies from this firm, and the head of it still had a respectful
attention for any one of her name. This time she looked at herself when
she put on her hat, looked very intently, rearranged her hair, noticed
with impatience, quite impersonally, that the gray was beginning to show
more every day, put on a little touch of powder and bit her lips to make
them red. Then she took a fresh pair of gloves and put on a crisp veil.
Thus accoutered, looking inimitably chic, the grande dame entirely in
spite of her few inches, she went forth to triumph. After a long
conversation with the big grocer, she extracted from him a promise to
try Philippe as a traveling salesman. She felt very young and almost
gay, as she brought back this news. "If Philippe cannot sell anything to
anybody, whether he wants it or not, I am much mistaken," she thought,
watching him out of the window, wheedle a would-be stern professor of
typewriting into lounging there instead of going back for the lesson.
Somehow, in the intervals of this day, which you will see to have been
reasonably full, she had worked out all the details with what device in
Braille Philippe could take down his orders, what kind of a typewriter
he could carry about him to copy them, how he could be met at the
station by such a volunteer to settle him in his hotel, and at the other
station by another--our Directrice had a network of acquaintances all
over France. Philippe came strolling into the room, very handsome,
showing only by the unmoving brightness of his clear dark eyes that he
was blind. "See here, Philippe," she said, pulling him into a chair
beside her as though he were a child.
"Yes, yes." Philippe agreed to the new plan. "_There_ is something
really sensible! That's a life that amounts to something! That is
something that a man can do and take an interest in! Thank Heaven, I
never need to take another English lesson as long as I live. I will go
at once and work hard at my typewriter! How soon before I can begin? You
know that I am engaged. I must earn enough to be married as soon as
possible." Yes, she knew, although she knew also that it was the third
time that Philippe had been engaged to be married since he was blinded!
She reflected how curiously little a temperament like his is changed by
any outward event.
Just at this moment of amused relaxation, when the Directrice was
looking young and carefree, she glanced out of her window and saw a very
handsomely dressed, tall woman descend from a very handsome limousine
and make ready to enter. Have I said that our Directrice can look very
cross and tired? She can also look terrifying, in spite of her small
stature.
She went rapidly down the steps and across the courtyard, giving the
impression of a very much determined mother-hen bristling in every
feather to defend her brood. On her side, the woman who came to meet her
gave the impression of a hawk, with a thin, white face, whitened to
pallor by powder, and with shallow, black eyes.
"Madame," said the Directrice, "you are not to enter here to-day, nor
any other day."
"You have no right to keep me out," said the other.
The Directrice did not deny this; but she repeated sternly: "You are not
to enter here, nor to see Auguste Leveau anywhere at all. He has a wife
and two children. He is not only blind, but as weak as water. But I am
not. You are not to enter."
The woman in the sables broke out into a storm of vulgar language, at
which the Directrice advanced upon her with so threatening an air that
she literally turned tail and ran back to her car, although she was
shouting over her shoulder as she fled. The small, erect figure stood
tense and straight like a sentry on guard until the car moved away, the
occupant shouting out of the window the direst threats of revenge.
A gleaming car came up from another direction, and another handsomely
dressed woman descended, greeting the Directrice in an affectionate,
confidential manner. She said: "Oh, my dear, I am so glad to find you
here. I always come to you, you know, when I am in difficulties! What
would happen to me without your good advice! A friend of mine from the
provinces, an engineer by profession, wants so much to come and see your
weaving workroom, because he is interested in machinery and thinks
perhaps he may do something for the blind in that part of France--not
_here_, you know, not the slightest idea of stealing your ideas and
duplicating your work here. When will you allow us to come, when he can
really look at the machinery without bothering the men?" That was what
she said, but this was what the Directrice understood very distinctly:
"My search for the Legion d'Honneur is getting on famously. If I can
only just add a weaving-room to my outfit before the Minister of the
Interior comes for his visit, I am sure I'll get the red ribbon, and
then I won't have to bother any more about these tiresome war-blind."
The Directrice answered guardedly: "Why, yes; come into my office, and I
will see what will be the best time."
As she walked across the courtyard with her visitor, chatting about the
difficulties of war-time housekeeping in Paris, she was thinking: "Yes,
she only wants it to make a temporary show in order to get the Legion of
Honor. But what of that! Let her have it. But if she opens a
weaving-room, she must have blind there to operate the looms, and if she
takes them up only to drop them, what will become of them? Let me see
what I can do about that. Perhaps this is the way to get her to pay for
the installation of a new weaving-room. As soon as she gets what she
wants out of it, we could perhaps take it over and add the men to the
number we care for here. I wonder if the American Committee would be
willing to send more money for that. Yes, it's worth taking the risk."
But nothing of this elaborate calculation appeared in her smooth,
affable manner as, having come to her decision, she announced, after
gravely looking through a card catalogue, that Thursday afternoon at a
certain hour would be the best time to see the looms. "And if you don't
mind, Mrs. Wangton," she said, "I am just going to treat you like an old
friend of the institution and let you and your engineer wander about at
your pleasure, without anybody bothering to escort you." That was what
she said. What she thought was: "There, that will give them a chance to
steal the names of the makers and the dimensions of the looms as much as
they please."
Her visitor confounded herself in effusive expressions of gratitude and
friendliness, which the Directrice received with a smile. She went away,
sweeping her velvet gown over the stone steps and looking down with
anticipatory eyes on that spot of her well-filled bosom where she hoped
to pin the coveted red ribbon. The Directrice let her go with almost an
audible sniff of contempt, and turned again to work.
This time it was a plan to be worked out whereby the blind could learn
certain phases of the pottery trade at Sevres. It involved a number of
formalities and administrative difficulties which only one who has been
in contact with French bureaucratic methods can faintly imagine. Our
Directrice plunged into it headlong, and did not stir from her desk
until she saw with a start that it was dinner time. And she had not yet
looked over her accounts, the complicated accounts of a big, expensive,
many-arteried institution. However, long ago, all her friends had
stopped asking her to go to dinner or to go to hear music. They had
learned that she rarely spent the evening in any other way than
finishing up what work she had not found time to do during the day. She
was assured of several hours more of quiet.
She went out to dinner (one meal a day in the company of many mutilated
and blinded men is as much as one woman can stand) and had a solitary
meal in a quiet restaurant, turning her glass about meditatively between
the courses and wondering if she dared ask enough from the philanthropic
American manufacturer to settle Benoit in the country. With his tendency
to tuberculosis, that was the only safe life for him and his family. She
made a mental calculation of what his pension would come to, and how
much he could earn by his trade. Then, if he kept chickens, and a
garden, and rabbits, and if he could get a house for six thousand
francs ... by the time she had finished her dinner she had thought out a
plan and a definite and businesslike proposition to put to the
well-disposed American. Out of the depth of her experience with
philanthropic people, she said to herself as she walked out: "I think
I'd better tell him that we will put a bronze plaque on the house
announcing that it is his gift to one of the war-blind. _That_ ought to
settle him."
At her office the evening passed very rapidly, between her account books
and the sauntering in and out of one and another of the blind men. At
ten o'clock, tired to the marrow of her bones, she stood up, dreading
the effort to get home and get to bed, and yet looking forward to sleep
as the one certain blessing of life. As she went out of the door she saw
two shadowy forms standing in the summer starlight, and recognized two
of her charges. "Come, come, children," she said; "it is bedtime. You
must get to bed and sleep and get back your strength."
"But we _can't_ sleep," one of them told her. "We go to bed and lie
awake and get the '_cafard_' worse and worse." The other one suggested
timidly: "We thought that perhaps, before you went home, you might take
us for a little turn about the lake in the park?" Our Directrice
accomplished the last violent action of her violent day. There was not
an instant's hesitation before she said cordially: "That's an excellent
idea! Just what I would like to do myself. One always sleeps so much
better for a bit of a walk in the fresh air."
Taking one on one arm and the other on the other, she set off, the two
men towering above her little upright figure. At first they talked as
they strolled beside the little lake. Then, as the Directrice had hoped,
the enchantment of the hot, still night fell on them all. The men walked
silently, breathing in the good smell of the stirred earth and watered
paths. Their blind eyes looked steadily into the blackness, no blacker
than their every day; their scarred, disfigured faces were hidden by the
darkness.
The Directrice looked up at the stars, and, for the first time in all
that long day, thought for an instant of herself. The night brought to
her a sudden stabbing recollection of another night, before the war,
before the end of the world, when the starlight had fallen white on the
clear road leading her straight and sure to her heart's desire. The
road before her feet now seemed as black as that before her blind men.
But she stepped out bravely and held her head high.
The blind men leaned on her more and more. She could feel by the touch
of their hands on her arms, that they were relaxing, that the softness
of the night air had undone the bitter tension of their nerves. Now was
the time to take them back. Now they would sleep well.
"Come, my friends," she said, and led them back to their door, through
which, the next morning, she would enter early to another such day as
the one she had just passed. And after that another, and then
another....
* * * * *
In her bed, that hot night, in the stuffy little Paris bedroom, she was
quite too tired to sleep, and so, knitting her forehead in the
blackness, she wondered how she could best place Brousseau, he who had a
weak heart, and three little children dependent on him.
THE FIRST TIME AFTER
The little newspaper in his home town put the matter thus: "Our young
fellow-citizen Louis Vassard has returned from the hospital to his home.
He received a bad head-wound in the battle of Verdun and unfortunately
has lost his eyesight."
Of course the family meant to keep from him this casual method of
announcing the end of his world, as they meant to keep everything from
the newly blinded man, but he overheard the item being read aloud in the
kitchen, and took a savage pleasure in its curt brevity. He liked it
better, he told himself disdainfully, than the "sympathy" which had
surrounded him since his return home. He cast about for an adjective
hateful enough, and found it: "snivelling sympathy"--that was the word.
He rejoiced in its ugliness, all his old sensitive responsiveness
curdled into rage.
The hospital had been hell, nothing less, intolerable physical agony
constantly renewed; and of course home, where he was petted and made
much of and treated like a sick child, home was not hell; but sickened
and embittered, resenting with a silent ferocity the commiserations of
those about him, he felt sometimes that hell was the better place of the
two.
The most galling of all his new humiliations was that he was never
allowed to be alone. His ears, sharpened like all his other senses by
the loss of his sight, heard the silly whispering voices at the door. "I
can't stay any longer," whispered his aunt, who for an hour had been
stupefying him with her dreary gabble; "come, it's your turn," and he
heard the dragging step of his old cousin advancing with a stifled sigh
to do his duty by their martyred hero. Or it was the light irregular
step of his little sister, irritated at being forced to do what would
have been a pleasure if she had been left free.
He dared not protest against this as hotly as he felt, because, his
self-control hanging by a thread, he knew that if he let himself go at
any point he would be lost, would be raving and shrieking to be killed
like the man in the bed next him at the hospital. He swallowed down his
rage and his humiliation and only said coldly: "You don't need to mount
guard on me like that, all the time. I'm blind, I know, but I'm not an
imbecile ... yet!" He shocked them by his brutal, outspoken use of the
word, and they drove him frantic by beating about the bush to avoid it,
always saying to others that he "had had a bad head-wound and his eyes
were affected." He said once sternly: "Why should you think I'm ashamed
to hear the word? You don't suppose it's any doings of mine, being
blind!"
But no matter how brusquely or roughly he spoke he could never anger
them. He felt often and often that if only he could hurt them, startle
them into irritability, he would be relieved. But they never varied from
the condescending amiability one shows to children and sick people. He
sickened and shivered at the thought of the glances of pitying
comprehension with which they probably accompanied those never-varying
soft answers.
And always they stayed with him! Even when for a few moments they
pretended to go away and leave him, he heard the breathing and the
imperceptible stirrings of some one left on guard. Or he imagined that
he heard them, and scorned to grope his way to see. Instead he sat
motionless, his mask of pride grimmer and harder than ever.
Next after their always being there, he hated their efforts to cheer him
up. That had been the phrase of the doctor at the hospital, when they
went there to take him away: "Now he must be cheered up. He mustn't be
left to brood. He needs cheerful company about him." Of course there was
his mother ... and he was so young that only a few years of intense
growth separated him from the time when he ran to his mother for
consolation. Certainly his mother could not be accused of attempting too
much to cheer him up, the poor mother who, try as she might, had not yet
mastered herself so that she could command her voice when she looked
into the tragic sightless face of her son. Himself poised on the brink
of hysteria, he dreaded more than anything in the world the sound of
that break in his mother's voice. Oh yes, he realized it perfectly, it
was not their fault, it was not that they did the wrong things, it was
only that he hated everything they did, if they spoke cheerfully or
wept, were silent or laughed. He was like a man all one raw sore, to
whom every touch is torture.
He often woke up in the morning feeling that he could not go on another
day, that he _could_ not.... Every one about him commented on his
remarkable quiet. "He never complains, he talks about all kinds of
things, he has the newspaper read to him every morning," they reported
to visitors. They did not see the sweat on his forehead as he listened.
* * * * *
One day they had taken him out of doors, on the bench at the end of the
garden. It was his little sister's turn to "be with poor Louis," the
little sister who would have been so unconsciously droll and diverting
if she could have been natural. He said to her: "Oh, go and play, Celia!
Why don't you bring your hoop out here? Or your jumping-rope?" But the
conscientious, sensitive child, drugged by the thick fumes of
self-sacrifice which filled the house, was incapable of being herself.
She sat on the bench beside her big brother, holding his hand, talking
affectedly, with an artificial vivacity, in as close an imitation as
possible of her elders. The man to whom she chattered, winced, shrugged
his shoulders, and fell into a morose silence.
But Celia, after all, was only eight years old, and at that age honest
human nature is hard to stifle. Over across the road in the meadow was
Jacques with his new net, hunting butterflies. And ... she stood on
tiptoe to see ... yes, he seemed to have caught ... oh, could it be
that blue and black variety they hadn't yet found? She darted away, ran
back, caught her brother's hand: "Louis, just a minute! I won't be gone
but just a moment!" she cried, and was off, her little feet pattering
down the path to the road.
* * * * *
Why, he was alone! It was the very first time since ... he did not
finish the sentence, shrinking away in terror from the word, now that
there was no need for bravado.
He stood up wildly. He must get away at once, to find some hidden spot,
to be more and yet more alone. He knew that from the house they could
not see the bench ... oh, he knew every inch of the ground around the
house from having played all over it from his childhood. He knew too
that on the other side of the hedge there was an open field with a big
clump of chestnut-trees, further along, opposite the hole in the hedge
where you could scramble through.
He started down the path. It was the first time he had taken a step
without having some one rush to lead him. His heart beat fast.
He followed the path, feeling his way with his cane. There was the hole
in the hedge. Somehow, he was through, and walking on sod, soft, soft,
under his feet; no, something round and hard was there. He fumbled,
picked it up; a chestnut. He must be near the clump of trees. Alone he
had found the way!
He turned to the left. In the old days there was a little hollow where
the brook ran, a little hollow all thickly overgrown with ferns just
large enough to hide a boy who was playing robbers. If he could only
find that place and lie down in the ferns again! Scorning to put out his
hands to grope, he stepped forward slowly into the black infinity about
him. After a few steps, something brushed lightly against his hanging
hand. He stooped and felt in his fingers the lace-like grace of a
fern-stalk. The sensation brought back to him with shocking vividness
all his boyhood, sun-flooded, gone forever.
He flung himself down in the midst of the ferns, the breaking-point come
at last, beating his forehead on the ground.... It was the first time
that he could throw aside the racking burden of his stoicism. At last he
was alone, entirely alone in the abyss where henceforth he was to pass
his days and nights. Dreadful tears ran down from his blind eyes upon
the ferns. He was alone at last, he could weep. At last this was not
rage, this was black, black sorrow.
* * * * *
Now they were shed, the tears, the great scalding flood of them had
fallen. The man lay on his face in the ferns like a dead body on a
battlefield, broken, drained dry of everything, of strength, of
stoicism, of suffering, even of bitterness. For the moment there was
nothing left ... nothing but the consciousness of being alone, empty and
alone in the blackness.
And yet was he alone, quite alone? Something in the black gulf stirred
and made a rustle of leaves high over his head. The little sound came
clear to his ears. Then three clear whistling notes dropped down to him,
a thrush trying his voice wistfully, dreaming of the summer past. The
angel-pure perfection of those notes sounded across the black gulf with
ineffable radiance. The prostrate man at the foot of the tree heard them
ringing out in the echoing, empty rooms of his heart. They seemed the
first sounds he had ever heard, the presage of something new, of
everything new. He did not stir, but he held his breath to listen.
The bird did not sing again. And yet there was no silence as he had
thought. Listening for the bird's note, he heard the delicate murmur of
the leaves, light arpeggios accompanying the singing voice of the little
brook, now suddenly quite loud in his ears. He felt the fern-stalks
stirring against his cheek and divined their supple submission to the
wind. The chestnut was still in his hand, unimaginably smooth, polished,
flawless. The breeze lifted his hair in a movement gentler than anything
human ... his blackened house was no longer empty of all things.
Presently his young body wearied of immobility. He found himself on his
back, stretched out on the good earth, his arms crossed under his head,
his eyes turned toward the sky he would never see again. His muscles
were all relaxed as they had not been for months, every taut nerve was
loosened. The wind blew softly among the leaves, across his forehead.
On a sudden caprice, the thrush again sent down its three perfect notes,
like an enchanted flute....
* * * * *
They ushered him into the moment he had inexpressibly longed for,
inexpressibly feared, the moment when he must stop hating and raging,
must stop pretending to be hard, when he must at last be honest with
himself, must face what there was to face, must say out the word he had
never dared to say in his heart, although his proud lips had brought it
out so many times, when he must announce to his terrified heart: "I am a
blind man. What does it mean to be blind?"
Above his body, infinitely tired, infinitely reposed by his paroxysm of
sorrow, his mind soared, imperious, eagle-like, searching. What was the
meaning of it? He looked squarely at it like a brave man, and knew that
he had the courage to look at it. With an effort of all his being, he
began to think; with all his force, with all his will, with all his
energy, to think. With the action he felt a stirring of life in all
those empty chambers of his being.
The moments passed. The thrush sang once, stirred in the trees, flew to
another, sang again, and was not heard. The blind eyes staring up at the
sky saw nothing material, and yet began to see. A dim ray glowed in the
blackness.
After a time he said hurriedly to himself, nervously anxious lest he
should let the clue out of his hand: "Our senses are not ourselves; we
are not our senses. No; they are the instruments of our understanding.
To be blind means that I have one less instrument than other men. But a
man with a telescope has one more than other men, and is life worthless
to them because of that?"
He paused breathless with the effort of the first thought of his own
since, since.... "And our senses, even the best of them are like an
earthworm's vague intuitions beside scientific instruments, a
thermometer, a microscope, a photographic plate. And yet with what they
give us, poor, imperfect as it is, we make our life, we make our life."
He took one more poor stumbling step along the path he divined open to
him: "A man with understanding, without a telescope, without a
microscope can see more than a fool with both instruments." Aloud he
said gravely, as though it were a statement of great value: "The use one
makes of what one has, that is the formula. That is my formula."
There was a pause, for him luminous. He told himself quietly, without
despair: "And as for understanding, for really seeing what is, aren't we
all groping our way in the dark? Am I blinder than before?" It seemed to
him that something within him righted itself, balanced, poised. His
sickness left him. He knew an instant's certainty ... of what? Of
himself? Of life? If so it was the first he had ever known in all his
life. Strange that it should come new, when....
Then all this fell away from him. He thought no more. He lay on the
earth now, not like a dead man on a battlefield, but like a child on its
mother's knees. He felt the earth take him in her arms, and he closed
his eyes, abandoning himself to her embrace.
* * * * *