“I do so love feeding ye, Master John, like I used to with the bottle. I remember . . .”
There would be red around her eyes, there would be a tell-tale weakness about her lips. He could see her looking at him with the smile he used to notice on parents’ faces in Chapel at Noat, while they were saying to themselves, all through the service, that they had been through just what the boy was going through now, though what it was they didn’t know. They were saying that they had read the book, years ago. And she was remembering him when he had hardly been alive, she was gloating that he was weak and helpless again. He would have to have her near him day after day, while she bombarded him with her sickening sentimentality. But what was he doing, eating like this, with this tragedy of darkness upon him? And the pain, the pain.
“No, no, take it away. I don’t want any more, I couldn’t.”
“Oh, Master John, don’t take on so.”
And the poor old face is falling in, and he hears her beginning to sob. Then she is groping for the chair, to sit, bowed, in it. This was terrible, it bordered on a scene, and he was helpless. He shrank and shrank till he was shrivelled up. The whole creed was strength and not giving way. He gives her his hand, which she takes in her skinny, trembling ones, and tears fall on it, one by one, with little sploshes that he feels rather than hears. Poor Nanny.
But of course she must have been crying in the servants’ hall before this, banking, minting on the fact that she had known him longer than anyone else there. The cook and Mamma’s maid had been most attentive and sympathetic, the kitchen-maid had wept with her. Only the trained nurse did not listen, she would have sat apart reading, for she knew what youth was, the others had forgotten it. He could see the scene, with Nan babbling on through her tears. That fatuous line of Tennyson’s, “Like summer tempests came her tears.” But there was coming a serious Tennyson revival.
The trained nurse understood youth from the way her hand caressed his bandages, they had not trained it out of her yet, nor had life. But everyone else was like that, everyone except B. G. He wanted B. G., who would understand, who was the only person who would feel what he was feeling, and who would sympathise in the right way.
She struggled to her feet, letting go of his hand.
“You mustn’t mind me, Master John, I’m only an old woman.”
And she went out slowly. So she had gone. But he was blind, everyone would be sorry for him, everyone would try to help him, and everyone would be at his beck and call; it was very nice, it was comfortable. And he would take full advantage, after all he deserved it in all conscience. He would enjoy life: why not? But he was blind. He would never be able to go out in the morning and recognise the sweep of lawn and garden again, and to wonder that all should be the same. He would never again be able to appreciate the miracle that anything could be so beautiful, never to see a bird again, or a cloud or a tree, or a horse dragging a cart, or a baby blowing bubbles at his mother! Never to see a flower softly alive in a field, never to see colour again, never to watch colour and line together build up little exquisite temples to beauty. And the time when he had gone down on his knees before a daffodil with Herrick at the back of his mind, how he had grown drunk before it. And then the thought of how finely poetic he must be looking as he knelt before a daffodil in his best flannel trousers. What a cynic he was! That was another of his besetting sins. What a pity, also, to be so self-conscious. The pain.