He laid the letter to one side and looked grave.
“He’s going to have an operation—a serious operation—on his eye. It’s going to take place tomorrow morning and he writes about it as though it were a joke!”
“Well, dear, maybe it’s not so serious as you think. Surgeons can do such marvelous things nowadays. Don’t you think you’d better finish your breakfast? Did he get it in the war?”
Robert nodded.
“Yes. I never told you the details. I was afraid it might—upset you, but Bill was wounded while trying to save me.”
Briefly he sketched the account of his rescue, minimizing as much as possible the danger to himself. His mother covered her face with her hands.
“If I had known it at the time I couldn’t have stood it, Robert.”
She took a seat beside him, placed her arm about his shoulders and rested her head against him. Mammy Chloe’s dark face appeared for a moment in the swinging door leading to the kitchen, a steaming plate of corn fritters in her hand, but she did not enter. Robert took his mother’s hand and was conscious of innumerable little details of color and form.
“Just think,” he said, “not to be able to see anything!” Not to be able to see, he thought, the sun gleaming through a window and falling in bands of gold across the blue rug, with tiny dust motes dancing in them. Not to see snowy linen or shining silverware or glittering glass. Not to see the warm glow of polished rosewood and the cheerful glow of ivory woodwork. Not to see one’s mother or one’s own face in the mirror. He shut his eyes for a moment.
“And to think that I can’t do anything,” he said at length. “That I can’t even talk to him. And he writes about ‘going over the top once more.’”