The Country of the Blind

For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind to the world around him.  Then, one Tuesday, when I called I met old Davidson in the passage.  “He can see his thumb!” the old gentleman said, in a perfect transport.  He was struggling into his overcoat.  “He can see his thumb, Bellows!” he said, with the tears in his eyes.  “The lad will be all right yet.”

I rushed in to Davidson.  He was holding up a little book before his face, and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.

“It’s amazing,” said he.  “There’s a kind of patch come there.”  He pointed with his finger.  “I’m on the rocks as usual, and the penguins are staggering and flapping about as usual, and there’s been a whale showing every now and then, but it’s got too dark now to make him out.  But put something there, and I see it—­I do see it.  It’s very dim and broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint spectre of itself.  I found it out this morning while they were dressing me.  It’s like a hole in this infernal phantom world.  Just put your hand by mine.  No—­not there.  Ah!  Yes!  I see it.  The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff!  It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling sky.  Just by it there’s a group of stars like a cross coming out.”

From that time Davidson began to mend.  His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing.  Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the real world about him.  The patches grew in size and number, ran together and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes.  He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again.  At first it was very confusing to him to have these two pictures overlapping each other like the changing views of a lantern, but in a little while he began to distinguish the real from the illusory.

At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to complete his cure by taking exercise and tonics.  But as that odd island of his began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in it.  He wanted particularly to go down into the deep sea again, and would spend half his time wandering about the low-lying parts of London, trying to find the water-logged wreck he had seen drifting.  The glare of real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out everything of his shadowy world, but of a night-time, in a darkened room, he could still see the white-splashed rocks of the island, and the clumsy penguins staggering to and fro.  But even these grew fainter and fainter, and, at last, soon after he married my sister, he saw them for the last time.