Blind?—Blind? But his eyes fitted his brain so perfectly it was through them all knowledge came to him. They were the world's great channel to his mind. It was through his eyes he knew his fellow beings. The lifting of an eyebrow, a queer twist to a smile—those things always told him more than words. And—but here he staggered. The mind could get this, as it had all else, but on this the heart broke. Ernestine!—that smile—the love lights in her eyes—the glints of her dear, dear hair—The tube fell from his hand. His head sank to the table. He was buried now under an agony beyond all power to lift.
Whether it was minutes or hours which passed then, he never knew in the days which followed. Time is not measured by common reckoning on the hill of Calvary.
The thing which brought him from under the blow at last was a blinding rage. He wanted to take a revolver and blow his brains out, then and there. He—a man supposed to have a mind! He—counted a master of those very things! And now, what? Manhood, power, himself gone. Stumbling through his days! Useless!—a curse to himself and everyone else. Groping about in the dark—a thing to be pitied and treated well for pity's sake! Cared for—looked after—helped! That beat down the bounds of control. He did things then which he never remembered and would not have believed.
It all rushed upon him—the birthday night—the crafty, insidious mockery through every bit of it, until everything to which he had held tottered about him, and goaded beyond all power to bear there came a slow, comprehending, soul-deep curse on the world and all that the world had done. And then, out of the darkness, through the blackened, dizzying, tottering mass—a voice, a face, a smile, a touch, a kiss, and the curses gave way to a sob and things steadied a little. No, not the world and everything it had done, for it was a world which held Ernestine, a world which had given Ernestine to him for his.
He fought for it then: for his faith in the world, his belief in the things of love. It was the fight of his life, the fight for his own soul. Come what might in the future, it was this hour which held the decisive battle. For if he could not master those things which were surging upon him, then the things which made him himself were gone for all time. And when sense of the underlying cunning of the blow brought the surrendering laugh close to his parched lips it was held back, held under, by that ever recurring memory of a touch, a voice, a face. It was Ernestine, their love, fighting against the powers of damnation for the rescue of his soul.
Even in the battle's heat, he had full grasp of the battle's significance, knew that all the future hung upon making it right this hour with his own soul. His face grew grey and old, he concentrated days of force into minutes, but little by little, through a strength greater than that strength with which men conquer worlds, a force greater than the force with which the mind's big battles are won, by a force not given many since the first of time, he held away, beat back, the black tides ready to carry him over into that sea of bitterness from which lost souls send out their curses and their jeers and their unmeetable silences.
He tried to see a way. He tried to reach out to something which should help him. Standing there amid the wreck of his life, he tried to think, even while the ruins were still falling about him, of some plan of reconstruction. It was like rebuilding a great city destroyed by fire; the brave heart begins before the smoke has cleared away. But that task is a simple one. The city destroyed by fire may be rebuilded as before. But with him the master builder was gone. Out of those poor, scarred, ungeneraled forces which remained, could he hope to bring anything to which the world would care to give place?
He could see no way yet. All was chaos. And just then there came a knock at the door.
He paid no heed at first. What right had the world to come knocking at his door? What could he do for any one now?
The knock was repeated. But he would not go. If it were some student, what could he do for him? He could only say: "I can do nothing for you. Go to some one else." And should it be one of his fellow professors, come to counsel with him, he could only say to him: "I have dropped out. Go on without me. I wish you good luck."