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He was blind.

He could be seen almost any day of the year sitting in a wooden arm-chair in the middle of a lunette-shaped excavation beside the London-Brighton road. On his left stood a red petrol pump, on his right a wooden table, and upon it a very large book, and one of those hand-bells that associate themselves with Victorian dinners. Around him spread a squalor of cinders. Opposite him, on the other side of the tarred road, a beech wood stood embattled in its beauty. Behind him a cheap new bungalow painted white, with a roof like a raw wound, squatted at the top of a clay bank. A shed thrust into a recess in this same yellow ramp bore over its double doors the mystic word “Garage.”

There were notice-boards:

“Pull In Here.” “Teas.” “Free Parking.”

The whole poor, shoddy improvisation was known as The Rainbow Garage and Tea Rooms, though what the rainbow had to do with it God knows, for the place had a hopelessness.

He was one of Mr. Lloyd George’s heroes, a brown and bearded man in a dastardly hat. He had the appearance of an apostle wearing—in chilly weather—an old army great-coat. Often he had that big book on his knees, the Bible in Braille, and some wag had called him The Blind Prophet.

The world on wheels flowed at his feet, and sometimes a lorry driver and his mate who knew the road would nudge each other and grin.

“Look at Holy Moses.”

“Yus, ’is ’at looks a bit greener than last year.”

But if John Tredgold’s eyes were sightless, his hearing had become extraordinarily acute. He knew when a car was slackening to pull in for petrol or oil, or for a shilling tea. His right hand would reach for the bell.

Clang—clang—clang.

“Mary—Bessie—garage.”

He had a voice with an edge to it. It was urgent, imperative, tyrannical. And if there happened to be delay he would go on ringing that bell until someone would appear at the top of the steps leading down from the bungalow.

“All right, father.”

It was as though he pulled a string and a little door opened, and obedient and flurried figures appeared. He was a man broken in the war, and his little world tried to humour him and to remember—that he was blind—and no tyrant.

It was not easy.

Up above on that tortured little plateau that was supposed to be a garden other activities displayed themselves, the rather unkempt products of two women who never managed to get Father Time by the forelock. There were weedy paths, and an attempt at floweriness, and six rickety tables and a dozen chairs, and a little drying-ground where the Rainbow’s linen saluted Sussex. Its stance was as precarious as its livelihood.

“O, damn that ruddy wind! It’s broken the clothes-line again.”

Mrs. Mary might have much sympathy for her daughter’s language, and clothes-lines—like most other things in the hero’s home—were cheap and rotten, but Mrs. Mary was afraid of her hero.

“Your father will hear you.”

“Let him. Do him good. Didn’t ruddy old Jehovah curse? Besides, we’ve got to wash those damned table-cloths again.”

Bessie was a darkly turbulent young thing aged nineteen, with an eye for a man and very modern ideas as to parenthood. She might be afraid of her father, and if she had remained under the edge of the Rainbow it was because of some queer primitive feeling for her mother.

“I don’t call this life. It’s cinders.”

Mrs. Mary said, “Don’t. Oh, do be quiet. Some things can’t be helped. I’ll do the table-cloths.”

“Oh, no, you won’t. You’re tired.”

Mrs. Mary was always tired, and her weariness was more of the soul than the body. She had been a pretty creature, cream and jet, with a face rather like a pansy, and a capacity for affection that was ready to fetch and carry. She was one of those women who, given one caress a day, will flutter about happily like a bird.

“I do hope it won’t be wet this week-end.”

Bessie knew that a wet week-end meant no teas, and butter and milk wasted, and the Rainbow’s profits a minus quantity.

“Must be fine—this next one.”

Also she knew that her father would sit out obstinately in the rain as though his soaking figure could persuade the world on wheels to pull in and pay. He was like some grim relic of the war, a chunk of battered English oak saved from the trenches, and the world had forgotten the war.

He sat there at the receipt of custom, for it was part of the Rainbow ritual that all takings were handed to him. When his womenfolk sold petrol they passed him the money, and his sense of touch was as delicate as his hearing.

As Bessie said to her particular young man, “If it wasn’t for mother I couldn’t stick it. He seems to think we’re just a pair of slaves.”

The lad did say that being blind might make a man funny.

“Funny! There’s nothing funny about father.”

There wasn’t. And that was John Tredgold’s tragedy. He could not laugh, and even if he listened to the wind laughing in the beech trees, he did not hear it as laughter. Almost he was Cromwellian, an old Ironside. Such voices as he heard in the darkness were the various voices of a grim and saturnine God.

He had not seen the face of his wife for ten years, and the face of his daughter had remained for him the face of a child, a child to be chastened and kept in order. He had never seen the Rainbow bungalow, with all its pathetic makeshifts and improvisations. Like Jehovah, he sat and brooded.

He had said, “Let there be a livelihood. Let there be tea-shop and a garage by the roadside,” and all this had happened. He had had no active share in it. The burden had rested on the shoulders of his wife.

The Blind Hero.

Possibly he believed that his sacrifice sufficed. He had given his eyes to the future. He was a kind of landmark to be respected, and ringed round with posts and chains like one of those derelict tanks posed on a piece of greensward and presented to the nation.

He rang his bell.

“Bessie—Mary, garage.”

Possibly he was afraid of softness. He had known one patch of dreadful emotion when the truth had been told him about his eyes; he had floundered in it, wept in it, and then dragged himself out. Terror. There can be terror in such emotion, a hint of madness, and deliberately he had chosen to be hard. He would not pity himself, but in refusing to pity himself he had become blind to the frailties of others.

But in him were other gropings, fears, doubts, and he suppressed them, and the very repression made him more tyrannical. He forbade that which he feared, all jocund things, laughter and fooling, for these things menaced him. They might grimace at him and he could not see. He was playing a game of blind-man’s-buff with life, but it was a game without laughter.

For he had one dreadful and secret fear, the dread of being left utterly alone, and it made him as jealous as Jehovah. There were other men who could see, men who could filch from him the little that he had, for that was his illusion. He thought of the little instead of the much. He did not realize how much was given him. It might be so much less or so much more.

He sat and brooded and listened, and it was this deadness that provoked his daughter.

“He might try and do things. It would be better for him if he did things. Look at St. Dunstan’s. But he won’t try.”

Bessie could have found him jobs. He could have cut fire-wood; he could have taught himself to wash cups and saucers. Yes, women’s jobs perhaps. And, in secret, she accused him of being the graven image of a hero. He would not or could not bend to the little trivial things.

Her mother was more compassionate.

“A man’s hands aren’t a woman’s hands, my dear. Men are made different, or some of them. He always was for the big things. He liked to show his strength.”

Bessie shrugged her shoulders.

“He can’t forget his old God and his Bible. He ought to have been Moses or Elijah. I sometimes wish——”

But she checked herself. She had been about to say that she felt moved on occasions to burn her father’s Bible, yes—“shove it in the furnace under the copper and let it assist in the Monday washing.”

Every day a particular van pulled up outside the Rainbow. It was the baker’s van from Four Oaks delivering the bread that was needed for the Rainbow teas, and it was driven by a cheerful, florid, jocund man named Smith. He was a widower aged three and forty, with two small children and a sister who kept house for him, and Mr. Smith had the reputation of being something of a Juan, for he had a good skin, a fair moustache, and very neatly gaitered legs.

“Morning, Mr. Tredgold.”

Invariably he was cheerful, and somehow his cheerfulness was an offence to the blind man. He would hear Mr. Smith go whistling up the steps to the bungalow, and make bright conversation for the ladies. He was full of persiflage. He called Bessie by her Christian name.

“Hallo, Bess. How are the boys?”

He was more polite to Mrs. Mary.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tredgold. Same as usual, is it? Yes, we’ve got Maurice on the pictures. Coming to see him? Yes, you should. He’s a lad.”

It seemed to the blind man down below that the fellow’s voice had an insinuating slyness. He was too familiar, too confoundedly pleased with himself. He swaggered.

“Morning, Mr. Tredgold. Feeling the sun nice and warm, aren’t you?”

Patronizing brute! And during the war he had been somewhere at the base driving a lorry. To Tredgold the fellow’s daily call became something more than an unpleasant incident, and about it the blind man’s mistrust of the other world began to crystallize. He hated this fellow who careered cheerfully about the country and who behaved as though the sun and the green trees and the sky were his.

Tredgold’s blindness had made him suspicious. Was it necessary for that van to call every day? Had the fellow cast eyes upon Bessie?

He spoke to his daughter. It was a June evening, and she had come down the steps and was waiting for a red bus to take her up to Four Oaks.

“Bessie.”

“Hallo.”

“Where are you going?”

“Pictures.”

“Who with?”

She bridled. What was it to do with him? She had been working hard all day and she had her life to live.

“Guess.”

“That fellow Smith.”

She broke into laughter.

“Try again. An old fellow like that! Why, he’s got two kids. No, if you must know—it’s Peter.”

“Peter. Peter who?”

The red bus was coming up the hill, and she stood forward to signal to the driver.

“I suppose you expect me to get married some day, dad. You and mother did it.”

He was angry. She was not treating him with proper respect.

“Yes, but I expect to see the lad.”

“Well, you couldn’t see him, could you, if I——?”

The words had slipped out, and she regretted them.

“Sorry, dad. I didn’t mean that. I’ll tell Peter to drop in some evening.”

The bus carried her away, and Tredgold sat and gloomed. It was as though youth had mocked him, and then fobbed him off with a casual apology. Yes, he was of no account, a kind of Samson fooled by the Philistines. His right hand went out and touched the handle of the bell; he rang it.

His wife appeared at the top of the steps.

“Yes, John?”

“Come down here.”

“What is it? There’s no car.”

“The girl’s gone to Four Oaks.”

“Yes.”

“To meet a man.”

She had come down the steps and was standing beside him.

“Yes. Young Holland of Holland’s Garage.”

“No one told me.”

“I thought Bessie had told you. He’s quite a nice lad.”

His fingers rapped on the arms of the chair.

“No one tells me anything. The girl goes gadding about——”

Mrs. Mary’s tired face winced.

“Don’t, Jack. What do you expect? She’s young; it’s only natural.”

“Natural!”

His voice was harsh.

“I may be blind, but I’m not a fool. I don’t hold with a girl gadding about alone.”

“But they all do it, Jack, these days. Life’s freer than it was when we were kids.”

“Free and easy, what? No morals. You ought to be ashamed——”

Her pale face flushed, but she restrained herself.

“I don’t believe in playing the tyrant.”

“I’m the tyrant, am I?”

She put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t, John. My dear, I know it’s hard for you, and sometimes—it’s a little hard for us. You can’t keep the girl shut up.”

He moved his body away from her hand.

“Oh, yes, you’re a couple of martyrs, aren’t you? Why don’t you go up to the pictures? Damned sobstuff—and sex. The whole world is going to the devil.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but he could not see her tears. She was beginning to be afraid of his God, for sometimes his God was a devil.

“No, John, it isn’t as bad as that. Don’t let your blindness get you down.”

His head gave a kind of jerk.

“Well, don’t blame me if anything happens.”

During those summer days John Tredgold’s mistrust of life seemed to increase. He sat and listened. He grew morose and silent. He began to be attacked by monstrous and preposterous suspicions, as though voices whispered to him that the invisible world deceived him. For, shut up in the dark world of his own imaginings, he became a creature of self-created fears and fallacies, like a man in a cave watching vague shadows on the wall.

He began to suspect his wife.

For, one wet and windy evening, when Bessie was out and Tredgold was sitting in the bungalow’s porch, he thought he heard footsteps go down the path to the steps leading to the road. Someone had slipped out by the back door, and that someone could only be his wife. He listened. He was sure that he could hear voices, and one of the voices was a man’s. Perhaps a car had pulled in, and he hadn’t noticed it, but the man’s voice was familiar, and suddenly he recognized it. His wife had gone out to speak with that fellow Smith.

The suspicion became like a horrible and sinister face. It grinned at him, and the evil spirit in him beheld the false face of his God.

He heard the footsteps return and go round to the back door. Did she think he had not heard? These two women, his daughter and his wife, one had gone out to meet her lover, and the other——! Treachery! Was he just a blind fool in a chair, a kind of idiot child to be spoken to soothingly and kept in ignorance of the secret happenings in that other world?

He sat there consuming the bitterness of his own thoughts. He was not quite sane, for insanity can be nothing but an exaggeration of man’s natural reactions and the emotions that emerge. He was like a blind prophet beholding in the darkness of his inward world a fantastic and terrible travesty of life.

He heard his wife moving in the house. She came to the porch door and opened it.

“Supper’s ready, Jack.”

He said nothing. He raised himself from the chair and groped his way in, and when she laid a hand upon his arm he shrugged her off.

“Don’t mess me about. I can manage.”

He could not see the wounded look she gave him. She stood off and watched him go blundering towards a little table upon which she kept a few poor ornaments, photos and little silver things.

“Jack—stop!”

But he walked blindly into the table and overturned it, but managed to save himself. She rushed to him, and then held back.

“Damn you! Why do you want to leave things about like that?”

She stood voiceless, like a woman overtired and weary, whose patience was near breaking point. And then sudden pity sustained her. She loved him—in spite of everything, poor, blind, bitter soul.

She spoke softly.

“I’m sorry. No, nothing’s broken. Here’s your chair, dear. I’ll pick the things up.”

His face looked all twisted.

“Oh, yes, nothing’s broken. That’s all right, then.”

And in the darkness of his clouded consciousness he thought that she was just humouring him, fooling him, and his unhappy rage concealed itself behind a dreadful dumbness. He would keep his ears open and his mouth shut—until he was sure. Yes, until he was sure.

The weather changed its temper, and a succession of still, warm days brought more custom to the Rainbow Garage, and Tredgold would sit in the sun listening to the world of wheels upon the road, and ready to ring his bell, and every day the baker’s van from Four Oaks brought bread to the bungalow. To Tredgold it became more and more the bread of sinister bitterness.

“Morning, Mr. Tredgold. You want a nice yellow umbrella over that chair of yours.”

Facetious fool! Tredgold’s sightless eyes glared. His jealousy was becoming an obsession like some evil animal tethered to his chair, and up above Mr. Smith indulged in harmless badinage, and behaved like a gay lad. It is possible that he did loiter longer than was necessary, but he loitered outside other doors where the women had looks, for he was that sort of man.

Tredgold heard his wife and daughter laughing. They never laughed in his presence, and he supposed that the world would say that the fault was his.

He was like some human vessel simmering on the fire. The crisis was very near, and later, when it arrived, the air was close and oppressive and working up for a storm. Bessie was out, or rather Tredgold imagined that she was out, and that his wife was alone in the bungalow, for it was about seven in the evening and the tea hour had passed. Tredgold heard a car glide up quietly and stop. Footsteps crossed the cinders and went up the steps. There were voices up above, his wife’s and a man’s, and they seemed to him secret and surreptitious. He recognized the man’s voice.

So the fellow had sneaked by him, had he?

Tredgold rang his bell, and its jangle was angry. He heard a man’s boots crunching across the cinders. The engine of the van was started up suddenly, and the vehicle sheered off.

Tredgold’s bell kept up its clangour.

“What is it, Jack?”

Did she think he was so innocent? He shouted:

“Come down here.”

She came. She was frightened. His blind face was flushed and furious.

“You’re carrying on with that fellow. Think I don’t know, do you? It’s got to stop.”

“John!”

“Yes, at your age, and with a girl——”

She looked white, horrified.

“It isn’t true. John, how can you——?”

“Not true, is it? You’ll swear by this book——”

He grabbed the big Bible from the table. He held it out to her.

“Put your hands on the book and swear. I’m not going to have secret and slimy sin in my home.”

But they were not alone. Bessie was on the steps, and her dark and turbulent young face was ablaze. She swept down on them; she snatched the book from his hands, and flung it in front of the wheels of a lorry that came thundering by.

“How dare you?”

She stood over him. She ignored her mother’s appeal.

“Your god’s a brute, a blind beast. You and your Bible! The sin’s in you, and not in us. Sitting there and thinking vile things while she—— Why, she’s a saint, and you don’t know it. She’s been a saint to you for years.”

He sat strangely dumb under the lash of her young anger, but Mrs. Mary was out in the road, recovering that battered book. She smoothed its pages out as well as she could. She was weeping. She came and placed the book upon his knees.

“You’ll be sorry, John.”

She stood there helplessly, to be caught by the arm and dragged away by her daughter.

“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off. He’s not a man, he’s a——”

“Bessie!”

“Let him hear. I’m off, and you’re coming too. Oh, yes, you are. I’ve heard of a job at Tanbridge. You’ll come along with me.”

Now, whether Mrs. Mary was swept off her feet by her more impetuous and turbulent child, or whether Mother Eve entered into the heart of woman, Mary Tredgold allowed herself to be coerced by Bessie. She climbed the steps cut in the clay bank, and when she saw that little white hutch with its raw red lid she shivered.

“I have tried so hard all these years. I can’t stand any more of it.”

“I should think not,” said the daughter. “Let him sit and do a little thinking.”

Her mother looked very helpless.

“I can’t leave him like this, Bess.”

“Oh, yes, you can. You’ve got to. We can catch the eight o’clock bus to Tanbridge. We have twenty minutes to pack.”

At that critical moment she dominated her mother. She lugged out a couple of old suit-cases and stuffed a few necessaries into them. If you were leaving a few things behind, what did that matter? She got Mrs. Mary and the suit-cases down into the road and past that fatal figure in its chair. She held on firmly to her mother’s arm, and compelling her down the road to the bus halt at Lavender Lane, she confronted Fate. They stood there side by side with the suit-cases at their feet.

Mary Tredgold felt faint.

“I can’t go, Bess—I can’t—really.”

“You’ve got to. Let him sit and think.”

“There is going to be a storm.”

“Oh, he’ll find his way in. He’s done it before. That’s what he deserves, a good old crash-up.”

“My dear, you’re hard.”

“Hard! Well, I like that! If a man accused me, I should jolly well think it good to be hard. You’ve been too soft with him, mother.”

The bus stopped for them, and Tredgold’s daughter pushed her mother into it, and passed up the suit-cases to the conductor.

“You look hot, miss.”

Hot, indeed! Well, why not, with thunder in the air and a mother who had made a doormat of herself and a father who was more jealous than ten Jewish Jehovahs! She sat down on the cushioned seat beside her mother and allowed herself to contemplate that blind figure left derelict beside the road. She had inherited some of her father’s fanaticism. Let him and his old god have it out together. Yes, and a storm would be just the right accompaniment.

Meanwhile, John Tredgold sat with the Bible on his knees and the useless bell beside him. He could not curse with book or bell, and perhaps the spirit of condemnation was passing from him. His fingers fribbled with the leaves of the book and found no comfort in it.

He rang the bell, but less loudly than usual, and no one answered it. He sat and listened and wondered, and suddenly he was afraid.

Had they left him? It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t possible.

Cars passed him occasionally, but they were mere sound and wind in the sultry twilight. He began to be more and more afraid, more conscious of the darkness about him, and of a dreadful loneliness.

He called to his wife.

“Mary, Mary.”

Still the same silence, an ominous, sultry hush. He heard in the distance the crumpling of thunder like the voice of an angry God. He shivered, and in the branches of the beech trees across the way an answering shudder made itself felt. A sudden gust of wind blew down the road, and the wood was full of rustling fear.

He put the Bible on the table beside him, and his hands trembled. What should he do? He became conscious of his sin, the sin of blasphemy against the spirit of love. It was as though his inward eyes had opened. He saw—— Good God! what had he said to her? How had the evil thing come to swell in him? Thunder, wind, shuddering trees!

The blackness about him became overwhelming. How helpless he was! Yes, and he deserved to be helpless. He had driven her away, the one creature who cared for him through all these years; he had blasphemed against her compassion and her patience. He began to see, to understand how he had tried her, vexed her with his eternal grumblings. He—a hero? Assuredly the heroism had been hers.

The thunder came nearer. There were flashes in the sky, but he could not see them. It was like the end of the world, his world. And then, suddenly, he felt the rain. It came at first in a few scattered heavy drops that struck his knees and his hands and his head. It gathered and thickened into a downpour that hissed on the tarred road. He sat there and let it soak him. He wept.

Presently the downpour ceased; the storm had passed over him and away along the hills. He was wet through, but he continued to sit there as though the mere flesh had ceased to matter. He could hear the moisture dripping from the beech trees across the road, but the road itself was silent and deserted. He put out a hand and touched the Book on the table beside him, and the thing was almost as sodden as he was.

Revelation!

What had he and the Book been saying to each other all through these years?

What could it say to him now?

What could he say to himself?

He sat and listened to the dripping leaves and in the darkness a new revelation of life came to him. He suffered, and he surrendered to his suffering, and in surrendering became like a man reborn.

Time seemed to have lost all significance for him. He did not know how long he had been sitting there in the darkness, and, strangely enough, he was not conscious of his wet clothes. The hour might be any hour of the night, and two solitary cars passing on their way south proved to him that the other world still survived. So utterly alone was he for the moment that he might have been the last man left alive on earth.

The storm had rumbled itself out, and the stillness was supreme, and in the far distance he heard a clock striking. It was the Four Oaks church clock striking midnight, and he was glad of the sound. The beginning of another day, but what could the new day bring him? What was he going to do? Find his way to the steps and up to the cottage? But he would be more helpless there than a small child, utterly and significantly helpless.

He began to feel chilled, and he was telling himself that he must make some effort when he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the road. The rhythm was both irregular and hurried, and they struck him as being the footsteps of someone who was very tired. A tramp? No, they were a woman’s footsteps, and somehow familiar. He was conscious of feeling a strange pang at the heart. He sat rigid, not knowing that a moon was shining, and that he was sitting there in a patch of moonlight.

The footsteps were very close to him now, and suddenly they seemed to quicken. The darkness became breathless. He was acutely conscious of a familiar presence.

“O, John—my dear——”

She dropped her suit-case on the cinders. He felt her hands on his shoulders.

“O, my dear, you’re all wet. You haven’t been sitting out here all through that storm?”

His hands went up and clasped hers.

“Mary, you’ve come back?”

“Of course. Do you think——? I’m sorry, John. Forgive me.”

And suddenly he had his face in her bosom.

“O, Mary, mother—I’ve found myself out. I’ve been a blind beast to you. It’s you who must try to forgive.”

She held his head in her arms.

“There, John, there. You’ve been so unhappy, I know. And I have always tried——”

Both of them were weeping, and he said, “Yes—I know. I’m not blind any longer, not in that way. I made everyone unhappy. But it is going to be different now. I’m going to read in another kind of book. Not that the book’s wrong, Mary. I read my poor blind self into it—that’s all.”

She kissed him.

“That’s all right, John, that’s all right.”

But his hand was groping for some object, that blatant bell. He grasped it by the handle.

“Just a moment, Mary.”

She drew aside, and with a sweep of the air he flung the thing across the road into the ditch below the beech wood.

“Let it rot there.”

A sudden breeze stirred the beech leaves. They seemed to utter an approving and applauding murmur.