No More Learning

We'll go to the Park to think it out. "

They headed for a certain tree that Dick knew well, and they sat down to
think, because his legs were trembling under him and there was cold fear
at the pit of his stomach.

"How could it have come without any warning? It's as sudden as being
shot. It's the living death, Binkie. We're to be shut up in the dark in
one year if we're careful, and we shan't see anybody, and we shall
never have anything we want, not though we live to be a hundred! " Binkie
wagged his tail joyously. "Binkie, we must think. Let's see how it
feels to be blind. " Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and
Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids. Yet when he looked across the
Park the scope of his vision was not contracted. He could see perfectly,
until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his
eyeballs.

"Little dorglums, we aren't at all well. Let's go home. If only Torp
were back, now!
"

But Torpenhow was in the south of England, inspecting dockyards in the
company of the Nilghai. His letters were brief and full of mystery.

Dick had never asked anybody to help him in his joys or his sorrows. He
argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated
with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were
blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him. "I can't
call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me. I must pull
through this business alone," he said. He was lying on the sofa, eating
his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the night would be
like. Then came to his mind the memory of a quaint scene in the Soudan.
A soldier had been nearly hacked in two by a broad-bladed Arab spear.
For one instant the man felt no pain. Looking down, he saw that his
life-blood was going from him. The stupid bewilderment on his face
was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and
unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the
man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish
grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their
feet. Dick laughed again, remembering the horror. It seemed so exactly
like his own case.

"But I have a little more time allowed me," he said. He paced up and
down the room, quietly at first, but afterwards with the hurried feet of
fear.