“But supposing he fails?”
“Well, there’ll be one less newspaper man in the world. I suppose The Times will have to find a new star reporter. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Dr. Levin is like fate. In his hands is the knife that will kill or restore my sight. I think it’s worth the gamble. You have your eyes, so you don’t realize what sight means. I know. When I first came to they had a bandage over my eyes and I thought I was totally blind. And believe me, I cried like a kid. When they told me that one eye would probably be all right and perhaps the other, I didn’t believe it.
“I thought of all the beautiful things I had seen—sunrises and sunsets, mountain peaks, the ocean, Lake Michigan in the morning, you know how it is, with the sun dripping red and gold. There were things I had forgotten—paintings and statues, and faces. They all came back to me. I saw my mother, my dad, members of the family, old friends. And colors. Did you ever see Paris on Bastile day? An impressionistic painting after Monet, with daubs of color all over it—brilliant reds and blues and yellows and greens. Or a wood in Illinois in autumn. And shadows. Foggy, drizzling nights with everything in shadow, but the reflection from the pavement, and friendly stabs of color from windows and street lamps. And moonlit nights on river banks. And—but what’s the use.”
They were silent for a moment.
“But I thought you could see just as well with one eye,” ventured Hamilton.
“Almost. Well, I’ve gotten used to it and I could get along as well with one eye if—if I knew I could always have that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, as the tissue forming the nerve running to my left eye shrivels up, it may—it might affect the other eye. Those things happen. It might take two years, it might take ten years, but sometime in the future there is always that possibility, that chance of going blind altogether.
“I’m a gambler. I’d risk everything to keep my sight. You don’t know. It’s worth everything!”
As the two friends discussed the advisability of the operation, Dr. Levin loomed in their minds like a personification of fate. The surgeon remembered McCall as a feature writer for The Times and took a particular interest in him. He would come to the two friends, as they sat together, and join their conversation. They talked pleasantly of art, literature, the effects of the war, the terms of the treaty and women. At other times all three played cards.