To state the facts baldly: when the bandages were lifted, Dicky Aldous, born blind, could see out of his new right eye. The left remained sightless; but with the right the child could clearly discriminate objects. The lady reporter made quite a piece out of his first recognition of the color blue.
The Sunday supplement man, in whose bosom still rankled Dr. Holliday’s rudeness, wrote an article suggesting that the delicate tissues of the human eye might be seriously altered by the tremendous shock of electrocution which, since it involves the entire nervous system, necessarily affects the optic nerve.
Dr. Holliday, after a few outbursts, became silent. It was noted that he was frequently found to be in consultation with the English brain specialist, Mr. Donne, and Dr. Felsen, the neurologist. Paragraph by paragraph the case of Dicky Aldous dropped out of the papers.
It was simply taken for granted that it was possible to graft a living eye. Other matters came up to occupy our attention—Russia, the hydrogen bomb, Israel, the World Series—and the fly-trap of the public mind closed upon and digested what once it had gapingly received as “The Dicky Aldous Miracle.”
But this is far from being the end of the story. As an old friend of Richard Aldous and his family I was privileged to witness subsequent events. And since, now, it can do no harm and might do some good, I feel that I have the right to offer the public a brief account of these events.
Richard Aldous was a third-generation millionaire; genteel, sensitive, a collector of engravings. His wife, whom he had met in Lucca, was an Italian princess—finely engraved herself, and almost fanatically fastidious. Tourists used to wonder how it was possible for a sensitive, highbred Italian aristocrat to live in a palazzo surrounded with filth. Actually there is nothing to wonder at—the explanation is in the three wise monkeys, procurable at any novelty store. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil—and there you are, divorced from humanity. In extreme cases stop your nose, having previously sprinkled yourself with strong perfume.
As you can imagine, therefore, little Dicky Aldous in his fifth year was a child who was being brought up by his mother in complete ignorance of the ugliness that exists in the world. The servants in the Aldous house had been selected rather than simply employed—examined, as it were, through a magnifying glass—generally imported from Europe, expense being no object. Dicky’s nurse was a sweet-natured English gentlewoman. From her he could have heard nothing but old-fashioned nursery songs—sung off-key, perhaps, but kindly and innocuous—and no story more dangerous than the one about the pig that wouldn’t jump over the stile. The housekeeper was from Lucca; she had followed her mistress six years previous, with her husband, the butler. Neither of them could speak more than two or three phrases in English. Mrs. Aldous’s maid, Beatrice, also was an Italian girl, a wonderful needlewoman and hairdresser but totally ignorant of the English language. Indeed, she seldom spoke any language at all—she preferred to sing, which the little boy liked, being blind.
Here were no evil communications to corrupt the good manners of poor Dicky Aldous.
Yet one day, about a month after the sensational success of Dr. Holliday’s operation had been fully established, the English nurse came down from the nursery to make the required announcement that Master Dicky was asleep, and there was something in her manner which made the father ask, “Anything wrong, Miss Williams?”
Rachel Williams, the English nanny, didn’t like to say, but at last she burst out—that somebody must have been teaching little Dicky to use bad language. She could not imagine who might be responsible. Closely pressed, she spelled out a word or two—she could not defile her tongue by uttering them whole—and Aldous began to laugh. “Tell me now, Miss Williams, what is the name of Mrs. Aldous’s maid?”
“Beatrice,” said Miss Williams, pronouncing the name in the Italian style.
“And what’s the diminutive? How does Mrs. Aldous generally address her?”
“Bici,” said the nurse.
“When Dicky first saw the light, bless his heart, where did you tell him it came from?”
“Why, Mr. Aldous, from the sun.”
“Work it out, Miss Williams, and I think you’ll arrive at the origins of most of this so-called ‘bad’ language.”
All the same, when the nurse was at supper, Mr. Aldous went to the nursery where his son lay sleeping. On the way into the room he met his wife hurrying out, evidently on the verge of tears. She said, “Oh Richard, our boy is possessed by a devil! He just said, in his sleep, ‘For crying out roud, cease, you rousy sandwich!’ Where did he ever hear a word like ‘cease’?”
Her husband sent her to bed, saying, “Why, darling, little Dicky has had to suffer the impact of too many new sensations, too suddenly. The shock must be something like the shock of being born. Rest, sweetheart.” Then he went into the nursery and sat by the child’s crib.
After a little while, stirring uneasily in his sleep, speaking in the accents of the gutters of the West, Dicky Aldous said quite clearly, “Ah, shup! Aina kina guya rat!”—distinguishable to his father as: ‘Ah, shut up! I ain’t the kind of guy to rat!’
Then, tossing feverishly from side to side and talking through his milk teeth, his face curiously distorted so that he spoke almost without moving his lips, Dicky Aldous said, in baby talk with which I will not trouble your eyes or distract your attention by writing it phonetically: “. . . Listen, and get it right, this time, you son-of-a . . .” He added a string of expletives which, coming from him, were indescribably shocking. Perhaps horrifying is the better word because you can understand shock, being aware of its cause; but horror makes no sense. That is why it is horrible—there lies the quintessence of nightmare, in the truth divorced from reason.
Typically, the first thing Richard Aldous thought of was Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw.” How could this innocent child be saying words he could not possibly have heard in his tiny life? Now Mr. Aldous began to suspect the doctors, who are notoriously loose of language off the record among themselves. But presently, in a tense whisper, while the entire face of the child seemed to age and alter, Dicky said, “Dom, you take the big .45; Mac, take the cut-down, snub-nose, blue-barrel .38. What for? Because I’m telling you. A big gun looks five times bigger on a runt like Little Dominic. Get me? And a blue belly-gun looks twice as dangerous in the mitt of a big lug like Mac. Me, I take the Luger, because one look at a Luger, you know it’s made for business. . . . But empty, I want ’em empty. . . . C’mon, let’s have a look at that magazine, Dom. . . . Mac, break me them barrels. . . . Good! . . . You got an argument, Dom? Okay, so have I. I ain’t got no ambition to graduate to be Number One, and in Montana, brother, they hang you up. . . . Okay, okay, call it unscientific, but you’ll do as I say; because, believe me, this job’ll be pulled using those things just for show. My weapon is time. Cease, Dominic. . . . Gimme a feel of that .45. Empty. Good, let it stay like that. . . . Okay, then, I want this straight, I want this right from the start. We’ll go over this again. . . .”
Then Dicky Aldous stopped talking. His face reassumed its proper contours, and he slept peacefully.
Mr. Aldous met Miss Williams on the stairs. “It’s worrying me to death,” she said. “I cannot for the life of me imagine where Dicky-darling picked up the word ‘cease.’ ”
Mr. Aldous said, “I think, just for a few nights, Miss Williams, I’ll sleep in his room.”
And so Mr. Aldous did. To be accurate, he lay down on the nurse’s bed, and stayed awake, listening. He made careful notes of what poor Dicky said in his sleep—and many of the things the child said were concerned with visual memory, which the boy could not have had, since he was born blind.