The Country of the Blind

That was the beginning.  For three weeks this strange affection of Davidson’s eyes continued unabated.  It was far worse than being blind.  He was absolutely helpless, and had to be fed like a newly-hatched bird, and led about and undressed.  If he attempted to move, he fell over things or struck himself against walls or doors.  After a day or so he got used to hearing our voices without seeing us, and willingly admitted he was at home, and that Wade was right in what he told him.  My sister, to whom he was engaged, insisted on coming to see him, and would sit for hours every day while he talked about this beach of his.  Holding her hand seemed to comfort him immensely.  He explained that when we left the College and drove home—­he lived in Hampstead village—­it appeared to him as if we drove right through a sandhill—­it was perfectly black until he emerged again—­and through rocks and trees and solid obstacles, and when he was taken to his own room it made him giddy and almost frantic with the fear of falling, because going upstairs seemed to lift him thirty or forty feet above the rocks of his imaginary island.  He kept saying he should smash all the eggs.  The end was that he had to be taken down into his father’s consulting room and laid upon a couch that stood there.

He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole, with very little vegetation, except some peaty stuff, and a lot of bare rock.  There were multitudes of penguins, and they made the rocks white and disagreeable to see.  The sea was often rough, and once there was a thunderstorm, and he lay and shouted at the silent flashes.  Once or twice seals pulled up on the beach, but only on the first two or three days.  He said it was very funny the way in which the penguins used to waddle right through him, and how he seemed to lie among them without disturbing them.

I remember one odd thing, and that was when he wanted very badly to smoke.  We put a pipe in his hands—­he almost poked his eye out with it—­and lit it.  But he couldn’t taste anything.  I’ve since found it’s the same with me—­I don’t know if it’s the usual case—­that I cannot enjoy tobacco at all unless I can see the smoke.

But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in a Bath-chair to get fresh air.  The Davidsons hired a chair, and got that deaf and obstinate dependant of theirs, Widgery, to attend to it.  Widgery’s ideas of healthy expeditions were peculiar.  My sister, who had been to the Dogs’ Home, met them in Camden Town, towards King’s Cross, Widgery trotting along complacently, and Davidson, evidently most distressed, trying in his feeble, blind way to attract Widgery’s attention.

He positively wept when my sister spoke to him.  “Oh, get me out of this horrible darkness!” he said, feeling for her hand.  “I must get out of it, or I shall die.”  He was quite incapable of explaining what was the matter, but my sister decided he must go home, and presently, as they went uphill towards Hampstead, the horror seemed to drop from him.  He said it was good to see the stars again, though it was then about noon and a blazing day.

“It seemed,” he told me afterwards, “as if I was being carried irresistibly towards the water.  I was not very much alarmed at first.  Of course it was night there—­a lovely night.”

“Of course?” I asked, for that struck me as odd.

“Of course,” said he.  “It’s always night there when it is day here…  Well, we went right into the water, which was calm and shining under the moonlight—­just a broad swell that seemed to grow broader and flatter as I came down into it.  The surface glistened just like a skin—­it might have been empty space underneath for all I could tell to the contrary.  Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes.  Then I went under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes.  The moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green and dim, and fish, faintly glowing, came darting round me—­and things that seemed made of luminous glass; and I passed through a tangle of seaweeds that shone with an oily lustre.  And so I drove down into the sea, and the stars went out one by one, and the moon grew greener and darker, and the seaweed became a luminous purple-red.  It was all very faint and mysterious, and everything seemed to quiver.  And all the while I could hear the wheels of the Bath-chair creaking, and the footsteps of people going by, and a man in the distance selling the special Pall Mall.

“I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water.  It became inky black about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness, and the phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter.  The snaky branches of the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps; but, after a time, there were no more weeds.  The fishes came staring and gaping towards me, and into me and through me.  I never imagined such fishes before.  They had lines of fire along the sides of them as though they had been outlined with a luminous pencil.  And there was a ghastly thing swimming backwards with a lot of twining arms.  And then I saw, coming very slowly towards me through the gloom, a hazy mass of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer into multitudes of fishes, struggling and darting round something that drifted.  I drove on straight towards it, and presently I saw in the midst of the tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of splintered spar looming over me, and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing phosphorescent forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them.  Then it was I began to try to attract Widgery’s attention.  A horror came upon me.  Ugh!  I should have driven right into those half-eaten—­things.  If your sister had not come!  They had great holes in them, Bellows, and …  Never mind.  But it was ghastly!”