Blindness

by Henry Green

  Later—What an odious superior fellow I am now! It is my mood tonight. Sometimes I think it is better to be just what one is, and not be everlastingly apologizing for oneself in so many words. To be rude when you want to be rude—and how very much nicer it would make you when you wanted to be nice. I am sure it is all a matter of relative thought. You think you are working hard by your standards, and to another man you don’t seem to be working at all. Don’t you work just as hard as the other really? Because, after all, it is only a mental question. I shall expound this to J. W. P. I have already done so to Gale with rather marked success. It is a very good principle at Noat.

  11 MARCH

  I wish the world was not so ugly and unhappy. And there is so much cynicism. And why does Science label and ticket everything so that the world is like a shop, with their price on all the articles? There are still a few auction rooms where people bid for what they think most worth while, but they are getting fewer and fewer. And people love money so, and I shall too I expect when I have got out of what our elders tell me is youthful introspection. But why shouldn’t one go through something which is so alive and beautiful as that? But they only say, smiling, “Yes; I went through all that once; you will soon get over that.” I shall fight for money and ruin others. Down with Science. Romanticism, all spiritual greatness is going. Soon music will be composed by scientific formulae; painting has been in France, and look how photography has put art back. Oh, for a Carlyle now! Some prophet one could follow.

  15 MARCH

  Spent a whole afternoon at work on the marionette stage. I carpentered while tinkered up the scenes he has painted. Between us we got through surprisingly little in a surprisingly long time.

  My story in the new Noat Days will appear shortly. I read the proofs of the story at extreme speed and thought I had never read anything worse or feebler. The paltry humour sickened me, though the end did seem to have some kick in it.

  19 MARCH

  The marionette show becomes more and more hectic. One hardly has time to breathe. There is a performance on Saturday: the day after the day after tomorrow. Nothing done, of course, and the Studio a scene of hysterical budding artists, mad enough in private life, but when under the influence of so strong and so public an emotion surpass themselves in do-nothing-with-the-most-possible-noise-and-trouble.

  1 APRIL

  The marionette play continues to be an immense pleasure. We give a children’s performance tomorrow at three. Answers from mothers pour in: I am afraid it may be too full. How well do little children see? They are so very low down when they sit. I think the life of a stage manager must be one of the most trying on this earth.

  GOOD FRIDAY

  On a Pretty Woman, “And that infantile fresh air of hers” (from Browning).

  “If you take a photograph of a man digging, in my opinion he is sure to look as if he were not digging” (Van Gogh). Have been reading Van Gogh’s letters. They are the hardest things I have ever taken on. He is so very much in earnest, and so very difficult to understand. I think I have got a good deal of what he means.

  A wonderful postcard from B. G. in Venice:

  We are here till Thursday, wondering who has won the Boat Race, the National, the Junior School Quarter-Mile and the Hammersmith Dancing Record.

  Read a little Carlyle to a few of the House. What else could it be but incomprehensible to them? “Mad,” they called it. Anything of genius is “mad” in a Public School. And rightly so, I suppose.

  4 APRIL

  One day more to the end of the term. How nice it will be to be back, to start life again for a day or two. The holidays are disgustingly short, though, only three weeks and a bit.

  We have just given our third and last performance of the marionette play. It has been a wild success and should, if possible, be repeated. But the light in the summer would be too strong and everyone leaves at the end of next summer, so I don’t suppose we shall have enough people to get one up next winter.

  Oh, for tomorrow to go quickly!

  HOLIDAYS: 10 APRIL

  Back again to peace, even if it is cotton wool and stagnation, but very pleasant all the same. Am reading George Moore’s Ave with considerable relish and amusement. He is so very witty.

  My reports have come in and are uninteresting: no one very enthusiastic, which is not to be wondered at.

  20 APRIL

  “Polygamy is a matter of opinion, not of morality.” Montague Glass is undoubtedly the greatest comedian of letters. Potash and Perlmutter is superb.

  At dinner tonight Mamma informed me in one of her rare pronouncements on myself, that I always kept people at arm’s length. It sounds an awful thing to write, but I seldom meet anyone who interests me more than myself: my own fault, I suppose.

  We have acquired a gramophone, and Strauss’ “Last Waltz” has bewitched me. It is such a lovely thing.

  NOAT, 4 MAY

  Back to it again: good old Noat, bloody place! Have just seen a book entitled Up Against it in the Desert, which sufficiently describes my feelings at the moment.

  It is so hot as to make writing impossible as my pen and style testify. I shall play no cricket this term, but will just read. I can get off the cricket on the score of health, which becomes increasingly bad. Last holidays we went from doctor to doctor. They look on one as an animal of a certain species, those people, than which nothing is more irritating.

  5 MAY

  The weather continues to be quite lovely. I pass the afternoon watching the cricket, with a book. It is the nicest thing to do I know. This evening I went on the river. What is it that is so attractive in the sound of disturbed water? The contrast of sound to appearance, perhaps. Water looks so like a varnished surface that to see it break up, move and sound in moving is infinitely pleasing. Also it is exhilarating to see an unfortunate upset.

  I must work hard at writing. There are all sorts of writers I have never read; Poe, for instance, the master of the suggestive. I think my general reading is fairly good, but I have such an absurd memory.

  2 JUNE

  Two portraits of me in the Noat Art Society Summer Exhibition. Not very good, but both striking.

  29 SEPTEMBER

  Many things have come to pass since I last wrote in this. A distinguished literary gent has been kind enough to pay me a little praise for my efforts at literature. I am in the Senior too, now, and in the middle of writing a play that I cannot write. It is sticking lamentably. One last thing. They have given me a different room, and have put a new carpet into the new room for luck. And this smells rather like a tannery. Consequently I am being slowly poisoned. “Ai vai!”

  12 OCTOBER

  Really, Noat is amazing. Last night the President of the Essay Society, who is a master, wrote to ask me to join it. I refused; I am sick of Societies. This evening J. W. P. sends for me, and tells me he has heard about it and that I must join. Compulsion. Think of it—being made to join! Of course I can’t go now. I shall join formally and never look at it. It is extraordinary.

  Am reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoievsky. What a book! I do not understand it yet. It is so weird and so big that it appals me. What an amazing man he was, with his epileptic fits which were much the same as visions really.

  20 OCTOBER

  About a week ago I finished Crime and Punishment. It is a terrible book, and has had a profound effect. Technically speaking, it is badly put together, but it cuts one open, tragedy after tragedy, like a chariot with knives on the wheels. The whole thing is so ghastly that one resents D. harrowing one so. And then it ends, in two pages. But what a finale! Sonia, too, what she suffered. And the scene when she read the Bible.

  I have tried to read The Idiot, and have finished Fathers and Sons, by Turgeniev, but it was a dream only. It is a most dreadful, awful, supremely great book, this Crime and its Punishment. And the death scene, with her in the flaming scarlet hat, and the parasol that was not in the least necessary at that time of day. With the faces crowding through the
door, and the laughter behind. What a scene! And the final episode, in Siberia, by the edge of the river that went to the sea where there was freedom, reconciliation, love.

  What a force books are! This is like dynamite.

  Extract from a letter written by B. G. to Seymour.

  SAT., 7 APRIL

  Dear Seymour,

  An awful thing has happened. John is blinded. Mrs. Haye, his stepmother, you know, wrote a letter from Barwood which reached me this morning. The doctors say he hasn’t a chance of seeing again. She has asked me to write to all his school friends and to you. It is a terrible story. Apparently he was going home after Noat had ‘gone down,’ on Thursday, that is. The train was somewhere between Stroud and Gloucester, and was just going to enter a cutting, A small boy was sitting on the fence by the line and threw a big stone at the train. John must have been looking through the window at the time, for the broken glass caught him full, cut great furrows in his face, and both his eyes are blind for good. Isn’t it dreadful? Mrs. Haye says that he suffers terribly. It is a tragedy. Blindness, the most . . .

  etc.

  PART TWO

  Chrysalis

  1. NEWS

  OUTSIDE it was raining, and through the leaded window panes a grey light came and was lost in the room. The afternoon was passing wearily, and the soft sound of the rain, never faster, never slower, tired. A big bed in one corner of the room, opposite a chest of drawers, and on it a few books and a pot of false flowers. In the grate a weary fire, hissing spitefully when a drop of rain found its way down the chimney. Below the bed a yellow wardrobe over which large grain marks circled aimlessly, on which there was a full-length glass. Beyond, the door, green, as were the thick embrasures of the two windows green, and the carpet, and the curtains.

  The walls were a neutral yellow that said nothing, and on them were hung cheap Italian crayon drawings of precocious saints in infancy. The room was called the Saints’ Room. Behind the glass of each were hundreds of dead flies, midges, for the room had a strange attraction for these things in summer, when the white ceiling would be black with them by sunset. With winter coming on they would creep away under the glass to dine on attendant angel lips. Perhaps the attraction was rather the hot-water cistern that was under the roof just above, and which gave a hint of passion to the virgin whitewash.

  He lay in bed, imagining the room. To the left, on the dressing-table by the bed, would be the looking-glass that would never stay the right level. It would be propped up with a book, so that it gazed blandly up at the ceiling, mimicking the chalky white, and waiting for something else to mimic. On the chair between table and bed was sitting the young trained nurse, breathing stertorously over a book.

  There came quick steps climbing stair carpet, two quick steps at the top on the linoleum, and the door opened. Emily Haye came in. She was red, red with forty years’ reckless exposure to the sun. Where neck joined body, before the swift V turned the attention to the mud-coloured jumper knitted by herself, there glowed a patch of skin turned by the sun to a deeper red. She was wearing rough tweeds, and she was smelling of soap, because it was near tea-time.

  He turns his head on the pillow, the nurse rises, and Mrs. Haye walks firmly up the room.

  “Well, how are you?”

  “All right, thanks.”

  “I’ll sit by him for a bit, nurse, you go and get your tea. It’s rainin’ like anything outside. I went for a walk, got as far as Wyleman’s barn, and there I turned and came back. Stepped in and saw Mrs. Green’s baby. It’s her first, so she’s making a fuss of it; beautiful baby, though. Have you been comfortable?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Get any sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Is it hurting you much now?”

  “Just about the same.”

  “It’s too wretched for you, this thing comin’ right at the beginning of the holidays. I should be very angry, but you seem to be takin’ it calmly; you are always like that, you know, John, always hiding things. I was talking with the specialist just as he was going—and he says that you probably will not be able to go back to Noat next term. So you will miss your last term, which is so important they tell me. It means so much to you in after-life, or something. I know Ralph always used to say that it had meant a great deal to him, the responsibility and all that. But I expect you’re glad.”

  “Of course. Father may have had some responsibility, but they would never have given any to me, however long I stayed there. I was too incompetent. Can you imagine me enforcing authority?”

  “I think that you would be excellent in authority, I do really. But as Mabel Palmer was saying at tea the other day, you never seemed to have any of the ambition of ordinary boys—to be captain of football or cricket, and so on. I did so want to be a boy when I was a girl. I wanted to be good at cricket, and they never let us play in those days.”

  “You would have made a fine cricketer, Mamma. But I don’t think you would have thought much of school life, if you had gone there. You wouldn’t have been as wretched as I was, but you would have seen through it, I think. You don’t judge people now by their goodness at games, do you?”

  “You know you weren’t wretched, and—oh, well, we mustn’t argue. John, what’s it like with that thing in front of your eyes so that you can’t see anything? What’s it feel like?”

  “I don’t know, everything’s black, that’s all.”

  What was it in the air? Why were they talking in long sentences, importantly?

  “I should go mad if I were like that, not to be able to see where one is going. John dear, you are very patient, I shouldn’t be nearly as good as you.”

  “I can quite imagine that. But it won’t be for so very long?”

  Why had he ended with a question?

  “Well, we must be practical. And the specialist was telling me it would be quite a long time before—before you would be up and about again. But doctors always exaggerate, you know. And there’s your poor face to get well besides.”

  “But how long will it be before I shall be able to take this damned head-dress off in daylight? It was all very well when the old fool took it off in the darkened room so that I couldn’t see anything, nor he either. His breath did smell nasty, too.”

  “My dear boy, I never notice people’s breath.”

  “ ‘May be the sign of a deep-rooted disorder.’ ‘Even your best friends won’t tell you.’ ‘Halitosis is an insidious enemy,’ and so on. And an American firm has got the only thing on God’s earth that will cure you. He ought to take it, really.”

  “John, I do wish you would not swear like that. The servants would be very shocked if they knew, and it is such a bad example to the village boys.”

  “But, heavens above, they don’t hear me swear.”

  “No, but they hear of it, don’t you see.”

  —Must talk. “Rather an amusing thing has happened. You know Doris, the third housemaid. Well, she is little more than a child, and hasn’t got her hair up. When she came, of course I insisted that she should put it up, which upset her terribly. Now, when she takes the afternoon off she puts it into a pigtail again. Silly little thing.”

  “What’s that in your voice? You aren’t angry with her, are you? Because I think it’s rather nice. I like pigtails, don’t you? Do you know that bit of Browning, Porphyrias’ Lover? But when shall I be able to see a pigtail again, that’s the point?”

  “What’s that thing, John, a poem, or what?”

  “He makes her lover strangle her with her own hair, done in a pigtail. I don’t know what it means, no one knows, only I am quite sure I should like to do it. Think—the soft, silken rope, and the warm, white neck, and . . .”

  “Now, don’t be silly. I don’t understand.”

  “But when shall I be allowed to take this off? It will be fun seeing again. I suppose he gave some idea of a date?”

  “Yes, but he was not very definite, in a way he was rather vague. You see, it is a long busine
ss. Eyes are delicate things.”

  Dread.

  “How long?—three months? I only thought it would be one, but it can’t be helped.”

  “Longer than that, I am afraid. Much longer, he said.”

  “Six months?”

  “Dear boy, we must be practical. It may take a—a very long time indeed.”

  “In fact, I shall be blind for life. Why didn’t you tell me at once? No, no, of course I understand.”

  So he was blind.

  She looks out of the window into the grey blur outside. Drops are having small races on the panes. The murmur fills the room with lazy sound. Now and then a drop falls from an eave to a sill, and sometimes a little cascade of drips patter down.

  His heart is thumping, and there is a tightness in his throat, that’s all. She had not actually said that he was blind. It wasn’t he. All the same she hadn’t actually said—but he was blind. Blind. Would it always be black? No, it couldn’t. Poor Mamma, she must be upset about it all. What could be done? How dreadful if she started a scene while he was lying there in bed, helpless. But of course he wasn’t blind. Besides, she hadn’t actually said. What had she said? But then she hadn’t actually said he wasn’t. What was it? He felt hot in bed, lost. He put out a hand, met hers, and drew it away quickly. He must say something. What? (Blind? Yes, blind.) But . . .

  “We must be practical, John darling, we must run this together.”—Darling? She never used that. What was she saying? “. . . bicycles for two, tandems they’re called, aren’t they? Work together, let me do half the work like on a tandem bicycle. Your father and I went on a trip on one for our honeymoon, years ago now, when bicycles were the latest thing. I wish he was here now, he was a wonderful man, and he would have helped, and—and he would have known what to do.”