“How can you men like to slash and kill each other? Just think, if that cut had been only a finger’s breadth lower—you would have lost your eyes, and oh! it is better to be dead than blind. When all the world is bright not to be able to see it; what must that be! The whole earth in darkness so that you see nothing—no one; neither the sky, nor the lake, nor the boat, nor even me.”
“That would indeed be a pity,” said the prefect with a laugh and a shrug.
“A pity!” exclaimed Dada. “As if it were nothing at all! I should find something else to say than that. It gives me a shudder only to think of being blind. How dreadfully dull life can be with one’s eyes open! so what must it be when they are of no use and one cannot even look about one. Do you know that you have done me not one service only, but two at once?”
“I?” said the officer.
“Yes, you. But the second is not yet complete. Sit down awhile, I beg—there is a seat. You know it is a fatal omen if a visitor does not sit down before he leaves.—That is well.—And now, may I ask you: do you take off your helmet when you go into battle? No.—Then how could a swordcut hurt your forehead?”
“In a hand to hand scuffle,” said the young man, “everything gets out of place. One man knocked my helmet off and another gave me this cut in my face.”
“Where did it happen?”
“On the Savus, where we defeated Maximus.”
“And had you this same helmet on?”
“Certainly.”