Elizabeth Gilbert and Her Work for the Blind

by Frances Martin

As the years wore on she was, however, to learn the privations that resulted from her loss of sight, although the loss itself was not, and could not be, intelligible to her.

Some day a gifted creature may tell us of the possession of an organ and a sense revealing a dimension absolutely incomprehensible. We may come to bewail our lower condition; but how without the organ or the sense will it be possible to realise the nature of the loss or the advantage of possession?

Bessie by means of fingers or ears could get at the meaning of a book. There is a third and quicker way, she is told, but how except through fingers and ears can she realise it? Up to a certain point she has gone hand in hand with sisters and brothers; if not indeed in advance of them. She reaches that point full of ardour and enthusiasm, eager to learn, to live, to work, and suddenly the way is barred. Blindness stands there as with a drawn sword, and she can go no farther.

The limitations of her condition touched her first on the side of pleasure. She could join in a quadrille at Chichester, could dine at the palace when there was a party, and "what she was to take" had been arranged in the morning. But in London there were no balls for her, no dining out except with a few very old friends, no possibility of including her in the rapid whirl of London life. She had many disappointments, and tried hard to conceal them. Only once, says a sister, did she see a swift look of passing pain, when telling Bessie about a ball from which in the early morning she had returned. It was there for an instant, recognised by the loving and beloved sister, but at once thrust away, and Bessie threw herself with more than ordinary interest into the account of the pleasures of the evening. Another sister tells how about this time Bessie began "to want to do impossible things," to go out alone in London, to go alone in a cab, and if she might not go alone, she wished to give her own orders to the cabman.

Reading and writing depended largely on the time that others could give her. Writing was a slow and laborious process. She could write in the ordinary way, but to do so she had to remember not the form of a letter but the movements of her own hand. Such writing had to be looked over in case a word should be unintelligible, and she could therefore have no private correspondents. Girls in Oxford and at Chichester had plenty of spare time, but when the family was divided, and those in London or at Chichester had the duties of their position as well as its pleasures to attend to, there grew up almost insensibly a different order of things. In childhood and youth the blind daughter was the centre of all activity and pleasure; but the blind woman inevitably recedes more and more. She no longer leads; she can with difficulty follow; and at a distance which increases as the years go on.

The five or ten years that elapse after she is twenty, form the turning point in the life of a woman, whether married or unmarried. During that period, when she begins to tire of mere pleasure, there will come either the earnest and serious view of life which shows it all golden with promise, as a gift to be used on behalf of others; or a settled drift towards the current of levity, frivolity, and self-seeking, which may carry her down to age, dishonoured and unloved.

That which caused Bessie the keenest grief at this time was the impossibility of achieving what she wished to make her life, and not the loss of its pleasures. But it was the loss of pleasure which preceded all other privations. Her tendency was, as it always had been, towards things that were noble, and high, and good. Without any fault of her own, without any change in her own condition, she discovered that blindness would be a permanent bar to activity. Sisters began to marry and be sought in marriage. A home of her very own, a beautiful life, independent of the family life, and yet united to it; fresh interests and added joy to all; the hope of this, which was her ideal of marriage, she had to renounce.

Work in the world, even a place in the world, there seemed to be none for her. Blindness, which had been a name, was becoming a stern reality. She asked about the blind around her, those who had to earn their bread; and the same answer came from all. She saw them led up to the verge of manhood and womanhood, and then, as it were, abandoned. They were set apart by their calamity, even as she was. Their sufferings were not less, but greater than her own. Poverty was added to them, and the enforced indignity of a beggar's life.