"Yes," he said, "the piano! D----d if they don't make me sick! Here they go--all the '_Berthas_'!"
He closed his eyes, screwed up his face dismally, and advancing, his hands before him, began moving them from left to right and back, as though they were on a keyboard. It was very ridiculous.
"And that's what they call blindness--playing the piano and tramping about as securely as anybody!"
Ah, ah! Mr. Owens, you did make a suggestion after all, though you did not mean to do it, but I found one all the same in that last contemptuous sentence, "_tramping about as securely as anybody_." It quickened my memory--I recalled the piteous uncertainty of movement in the blind; the dread hesitancy of the advancing foot, unless the afflicted one was on very familiar ground. I tried walking in the dark, tried walking with closed eyes. It was surprising how quickly my fears gathered about my feet. Instinctively I put out one hand now and then, but the fear of bumping into something was as nothing to the fear of stepping off or down, or falling through the darkness--oh!
Then I resolved to play _Bertha_ with open eyes. It was much the more difficult way, but I was well used to taking infinite pains over small matters, and believing that the open, unseeing eye was far more pathetic than the closed eye, I proceeded to work out my idea of how to produce the unseeing look. By careful experiment I found that if the eyes were very calm in expression, very slow in movement, and at all times were raised slightly above the proper point of vision, the effect was really that of blindness.
It was unspeakably fatiguing to keep looking just above people's heads, instead of into their faces, as was my habit, but where is the true actor or actress who stops to count the cost in pain or in inconvenience when striving to build up a character that the public may recognize? Says the ancient cook-book: "First catch your hare, and then--"; so with the actor, first catch your idea, your desired effect, and _then_ reproduce it (if you can). But in the case of blind _Bertha_ I must have reproduced with some success the effect I had been studying, for an old newspaper clipping beside me says that: "The doubting, hesitating advance of her foot, the timid uncertainty of her occasional investigating hand spelled blindness as clearly as did her patient unseeing eyes," and for my reward that wretched man amused himself by pulling faces at me and trying to break me down in my singing of "Auld Robin Grey," until I was obliged to sing with my eyes tight shut to save myself from laughter; and when the curtain had fallen he said to me: "I'll settle your hash for you some night, young woman, you see if I don't--you just wait now!" And the next season, in Cincinnati, in very truth, he did "settle my hash" for me, to his great delight and my vexation.