CHAPTER XXVI
This is the next day. Mother Beckett is better, and I've been praised by the médecin major for my nursing. We've got our luggage from Compiègne, and may be here for days. We shall miss the pleasure of travelling to Amiens with the war correspondents, who must go without us, and we women will get no glimpse of the British front!
Now I'm going to tell you about the incident which has made me almost love Dierdre O'Farrell—a miracle, it would have seemed two weeks ago, when my best mental pet name for her was "little cat!"
When I wrote last night, I mentioned that the room Mother Beckett has in this little hotel had been intended for the wife of a French officer coming out of hospital. Another room was prepared for that lady, and it happened to be the one next door to Mother Beckett's. Through the thin partition wall I heard voices, a man's and a woman's, talking in French. I couldn't make out the words—in fact, I tried not to!—but the woman's tones were soft and sweet as the coo of a dove. I pictured her beautiful and young, and I was sure from her way of speaking that she adored her husband. The two come into my story presently, but I think it should begin with a walk that Brian and Dierdre (and Sirius, of course) took together.
With me shut up in Mother Beckett's room, my blind brother and Julian O'Farrell's sister were thrown more closely together even than before. I'm sure Julian saw to that, eliminating himself as he couldn't do when travelling all three in the Red Cross taxi! Perhaps Dierdre and Brian had never been alone in each other's company so long; and Brian found the chance he'd wished for, to get at the real girl, behind her sulky "camouflage."
He has repeated the whole conversation to me, because he wanted me to know Dierdre as he has learned to know her; and I shall write everything down as I remember it, though the words mayn't be precisely right. Never was there any one like Brian for drawing out confidences from shut-up souls (except you, Padre!) if he chooses to open his own soul, for that end; and apparently he thought it worth while in the case of Dierdre. He began by telling her things about himself—his old hopes and ambitions and the change in them since his blindness. He confessed to the girl (as he confessed to me long ago) how at first he wished desperately to die, because life without eyesight wasn't life. He has so loved colour, and beauty, and success in his work had been so close, that he felt he couldn't endure blindness.
"I came near being a coward," he said. "A man who puts an end to his life because he's afraid to face it is a coward. So I tried to see if I could readjust the balance. I fell back on my imagination—and it saved me. Imagination was always my best friend! It took me by the hand and led me into a garden—a secret sort of garden that belongs to the blind, and to no one else. It's the place where the spirits of colour and the spirits of flowers live—the spirit of music, too—and all sorts of beautiful strange things which people who've never been blind can't see—or even hear. They're not 'things,' exactly. They're more like the reality behind the things: God's thoughts of things as they should be, before He created them; artists' thoughts of their pictures; musicians' thoughts of their compositions—all better than the things resulting from the thoughts. Nothing in the outside world is as wonderful as what grows in that garden! I couldn't go on being unhappy there. Nobody could—once he'd found the way in."
"It must be hard finding the way in!" Dierdre said.
"It is at first—alone, without help. That's why, if I can, I want to help my fellow blind men to get there."
"Only men? Not women, too?"