A Month Without Candles

by Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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"You will tell me the truth, Rachel," my father said, on the morning of the operation. "Whatever they tell you. You will not manage me."

He said it in the hired cab, between the railway station and the lodging, with his hand flat on his knee and his face turned to the window, through which he could see, by then, very little but a greyish brightness with shapes moving in it. I said that I would. I said it as one says such things, readily, out of love, without the least notion of what it would cost; as a child promises to be good for ever on a Sunday evening, and finds on Monday morning that for ever has begun.

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We had come down from Scarth Moor to Manchester in the last week of August, 1846, because my father was going blind and there was a surgeon there who was said to be able to cut a cataract out of a man's eye and give him back the use of it. My father was sixty-eight. He had been incumbent of Scarth for thirty-one years. For two of those years his curate, Mr. Bairstow, had read the lessons for him, and for one year had preached for him too, while my father sat in the reading-desk below with his face lifted towards a pulpit he could no longer see, and listened with an expression I could not bear to watch: the expression of a man hearing his own house described to him by a stranger.

The lodging was in a street off the Oxford Road: a narrow brick house among other narrow brick houses, all the colour of a wet hearth. I had been born on a moor and had never lived in a town. I had imagined Manchester, from the newspapers, as a kind of furnace, roaring and red; I found instead a great grey quiet, a smoke that did not rise but lay along the streets like a fog off a tarn, so that at noon the sun stood over the chimneys as round and dull as a penny, and one could look straight at it. The very rain came down dirty. I washed my collars every night and they were grey again by the evening.

The surgeon came on the Tuesday with two young men and a case of instruments, and did what he had come to do in a quarter of an hour, in the front bedroom, with my father in a chair by the window and the blind drawn up to the top. I was sent out of the room. I sat on the stairs. I heard nothing, which I had not expected; I had braced myself to hear him cry out, and he did not, and the silence was worse. Then the door opened and the surgeon went past me down the stairs, wiping his hands, and said over his shoulder, "Very satisfactory. Mr. Lomax will attend him," and was gone; and one of the two young men stood in the door and looked down at me where I sat.

"You are Miss Kitson," he said. "Your father has borne it very well. You may go in. You must not open the shutters, and you must not bring a candle. You must not let him sit up, nor stoop, nor laugh, nor weep, nor be read anything that will move him. For a month he is to lie on his back in the dark and think of nothing, and you are to help him do it." He looked at me a moment longer. "It is harder than it sounds."

That was Mr. Lomax.

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I will set down the room, since I lived in it for a month and know it better than any room I have lived in since, though I cannot be said to have seen it.

The shutters were closed and barred, and a blanket was nailed over them. The bed stood with its head to the window wall, and my father lay in it on his back with a bandage across both his eyes, and his hands folded on the sheet. There was a chair at the bed's foot, where the nurse sat by night, and another at the side, which was mine by day. A fire was not allowed. There was no light in the room at all, except what came round the door when it was opened from the landing, where a single candle stood on a bracket under a tin shade; and that was let in as little as possible, and for no more than a breath at a time.

One learns the dark. The first day I could do nothing in it but sit. By the third day I could find the water jug and the spoon and the basin without groping, and knew the bed by the creak of it, and my father's breathing, sleeping or waking, as one knows the voice of a beck at home by its change in a dry week. By the end of the first week I had stopped trying to see, and found that I could hear a great deal: the cabs in the Oxford Road, the bell of a church I never discovered, the landlady's cough on the kitchen stair, a woman calling to a child three houses down, the long hiss of rain on the slates. And I found that a room with no light in it seemed to have no walls, and that my father and I lay and sat in a great soft blackness like the inside of a hill, where time did not go forward so much as accumulate, the way snow does on the moor, without a sound.

He bore it well. He was a man who had walked the boundaries of his parish every Rogationtide for thirty years and could not be kept indoors in a hard frost, and now he lay on his back hour upon hour and did not complain. He asked me to say the psalms for the day, morning and evening, and I said them, low, from memory; when my memory failed he supplied the verse. He asked me what the weather was doing, and I told him: smoke, rain, smoke. He asked me, every morning, as soon as Mr. Lomax had gone down again, what Mr. Lomax had said.

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Mr. Lomax came twice a day. He would knock very softly; I would go out to him on the landing, closing the door behind me; and we would stand under the shaded candle while he asked me how the night had been. Then he would go in alone, with the candle in his hand and his own body between the flame and the bed, and lift the bandage, and look; and come out, and tell me.

I have said that he was one of the surgeon's young men. He was not so very young: thirty, perhaps. He was a thin, dark, brief man with a mouth that turned down at one side when he was amused, which was seldom, and a way of standing very still while he listened that made me feel I had been asked a question in an examination. He came from Rochdale. His father had been a fustian-cutter; he told me so on the third evening as though to have it out of the way, looking at me sharply, as if he expected me to draw back my skirts. I did not draw them back. I told him my father's father had been a hand-loom weaver at Heptonstall, which was true; and the corner of his mouth went down.

After that we talked a little, on the landing, each evening, when he had looked at the eye. It was not much. He had no time, and I had no conversation, having spoken to nobody but my father and the nurse for a week. But he had read more than any man I had met, and read it angrily, as I had always read, quarrelling with the page; and when I said a thing he thought foolish he said so, plainly, and when I said a thing he had not thought of he stood still under the candle and looked at me for the space of a breath, as a man looks at a glass he had taken for common window-stuff, and finds, holding it to the light, that it has been ground true. He lent me a book: a treatise on the structure of the eye, with plates. I read it at the landlady's kitchen table by her lamp, in the half-hour I was allowed each evening for my supper, and in that half-hour each evening I lived more, I think, than in all the hours that remained.

I will not pretend about this. I am not writing a history in which I come out better than I was. I was thirty-one years old, plain, a clergyman's daughter out of a moorland parish where the only men under fifty were farmers and Mr. Bairstow, who was married; and for a fortnight I walked out of a room without light, twice a day, into the small circle of a candle where a man waited who talked to me as one mind talks to another. There is a heather that grows on our moor which looks dead all the year, brown and wiry to the root, and in August, in one week, it is purple to the sky's edge. I knew what was happening to me. I did not stop it. I did not see that I was obliged to.

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The nurse was a Mrs. Openshaw, a large quiet widow from Ancoats who smelled of peppermint and slept, I am nearly certain, through a good part of every night in her chair at the bed's foot, though she always denied it. On the eighth morning, when I came in to relieve her, she stood up and went past me to the door with less than her usual deliberation; and on the landing she caught at my sleeve.

"He's been talking," she said.

"In his sleep?"

"Not asleep. He asked me who the lady was."

I asked her what lady.

"In the chair. My chair. He said there was a lady in grey sitting in it, sewing. He said he could see her plain, through the bandage, and the light on her work. I told him there were nobody but me, and he said, 'No, no, not you, Mrs. Openshaw; the lady,' very patient, as if I were slow." She let go my sleeve. "I don't hold with such things, miss. But there's no light in that room to sew by. I'd like that known."

I went in. My father was awake. I asked him how he did, and he said very well, and then, after a while, in an ordinary voice, as he might have asked whether it was raining, "Has the woman gone who was sewing?"

I said there had been no one but the nurse.

He was quiet. Then he said, "No. I suppose not. Yet I could see the stitches, Rachel. She was putting a hem in something grey. I could see the needle go in and draw out." And then, in a lower voice, "I have not seen anything so clearly these three years."

I told Mr. Lomax that evening. He was not disturbed. He said the blind very often saw such things, and the newly operated more often than any; that the eye, deprived of its proper work, would make work for itself; that a Swiss naturalist had described it in his own grandfather some eighty years ago, people and carriages and patterned stuffs; that it was no more than the nerve dreaming. I was comforted by this, and said so. Then I asked him how it accounted for the needle.

"What needle?"

"I heard it," I said. "Last night, when I sat up the first part of the night, before Mrs. Openshaw came. I heard thread drawn through cloth, at the foot of the bed. Several times. Slowly."

He looked at me under the candle, in his still way.

"Did you see anything?"

"There was nothing to see by."

"Then you heard the nurse's chair, or a mouse in the wainscot, or your own sleeve," he said; and then, more gently than I had heard him speak, "You are very tired, Miss Kitson." I said that I was, and that it was very likely my sleeve. I did not believe it. I do not believe it now. I set it down as it was, and I set down beside it that the nerve dreams, and I have never been able to make the two lie closer together than that.

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On the ninth day the eye inflamed.

I knew it before Mr. Lomax told me, because my father would not eat, and turned his head from side to side on the pillow in the forenoon, which he had never done, and said once, sharply, as if somebody had touched it, that it burned. When Mr. Lomax came out to me that evening he did not stop under the candle but walked to the head of the stair and stood with his back to me, looking down it.

"It is the iris," he said. "I feared it on Saturday. I shall bring leeches in the morning and put six to the temple, and we shall lower his diet. If it comes down in three days, he will see. If it does not, the eye is lost."

"And the other?"

"The other is as it was. We should not operate on it now; not this year." He turned round. "He is to know nothing of this."

I thought I had not understood him. I said so.

"He is to know nothing of it," Mr. Lomax said again, very evenly. "He will feel the leeches; you may tell him they are a precaution, which they are. He will ask you what I said; you will tell him that I am satisfied with his progress. If he is told the truth he will lie awake and fret. His pulse will rise. He will very likely weep, which is the worst thing in the world for an inflamed eye, and he will hold his breath and strain, as people do who are afraid; and every one of those things will feed the inflammation as surely as if I put a coal against it. Do you understand me? If you wish to give your father the best chance of seeing his parish again, you will tell him a lie, Miss Kitson, every morning and every evening for a week, and you will tell it well."

I stood on the landing in the little light and felt the floor go out from under me, as the ground goes from under one's feet on the moor where it is bog under the heather: no warning, and no bottom.

"I promised him," I said. "Before the operation. He asked me never to manage him."

"Then you made a promise you had no business to make."

"He had business to ask it."

"He is my patient," said Mr. Lomax.

"He is my father," I said. "And he is a man before he is either. He is not an eye. You have looked at his eye twice a day for nine days; I have sat beside the whole of him. He has stood at more deathbeds than you have, sir, and he has told me what he saw at them: the families whispering in the passage, and coming in smiling, and telling the dying man he looked better; and the man knowing, and lying there alone with it, because nobody would let him say so. He told me that is the cruellest kindness there is. It was the one thing he asked of me. He did not ask me to make him well. He asked me to let him meet whatever was coming with his own face."

"Then you would trade his sight," Mr. Lomax said, "for your conscience."

I have heard many hard things said to me in my life, and some of them were true. That was the hardest, because I could not tell whether it was. I stood there with my hands shut and could not answer him; and he saw that I could not, and pressed it, not unkindly, but as I have seen him press the dressing on a wound, firmly, because it must be done.

"It is not your conscience that will be dark for twenty years," he said. "It is not your conscience that will be led up to the reading-desk on a curate's arm. Be honest. Which of you is the promise for?"

Then something rose in me which I had not known was there, or had known only as one knows there is fire under the hearthstone in a house where the turf is banked all night: by the warmth of the stone, never by the flame.

"You think I have not asked myself that," I said. "I have asked myself nothing else since you began speaking. And I will tell you what I find. I find that if I do as you say, and he sees, I shall have bought him his eyes with a lie, and he will thank me for the bargain, perhaps, and never know what he paid. And if I do as you say, and he does not see, he will have lost his sight and his daughter in the same week, and the second loss will be the worse, for he will never again know when I am telling him the truth: not about the weather, not about his parish, not about his soul. He will be blind and alone. You may know the eye, Mr. Lomax. You do not know him. He is not a child to be humoured nor a sheep to be dosed. He has as good a right to his own darkness as you have to your daylight, and I will not take it from him and hand it back to him in pieces, sugared, every morning, so that he may not fret. Let him fret. Let him be afraid, if he must; he has a God to be afraid in front of, and he would rather do it with his eyes open, even if they will not see."

I stopped. My heart was going in me like a flail on a barn floor. Below us on the kitchen stair I heard the landlady stop coughing, and knew she had heard, and did not care.

Mr. Lomax did not speak for some time. He stood with his back to the stairhead and looked at me; and I looked back at him, and it came to me, in that little bad light, with the smoke of the whole city pressing on the window at the stair's end, that I was going to lose what had been beginning on that landing, and that I would rather lose it than have it on the terms he offered. It was a very quiet knowledge, and very cold, like the first breath off the moor at the top of the lane when one has come out of a warm kitchen. I did not know until then that such a thing could be known all at once.

"If the eye is lost," he said, "I shall not be able to tell you that you lost it. And I shall not be able to tell you that you did not. Nobody will. You must carry that."

"Yes," I said.

He took up his bag. At the stairhead he stopped, and I thought he would say something more, and I think he thought so too. But he only said, "Six leeches, at nine," and went down; and I heard the street door, and his step on the wet flags, very quick, and then the cabs.

---

I went in to my father. I sat down in my chair beside the bed. The dark was entire.

"Rachel," he said. "What did he say?"

I told him. I told him all of it: the iris, the leeches, the three days, the word lost. I did not tell him what had been said on the landing, which was mine. I kept my voice level, and I found that, in the dark, it was not so hard to do as it would have been in the light; there was no face to watch for the blow to land in, and no face of mine for him to read. When I had done there was a long silence. The bell of the church I never found struck nine somewhere over the roofs.

"Thank you," my father said.

He did not weep. He lay very still. After a while I heard his breathing change, and lengthen, and I thought he was falling asleep, and was glad; and then he spoke again, slowly, as a man speaks when he is reading something written very small.

"I was at Thorlby once," he said, "when old Greenwood was dying. You won't remember. They told him he had taken a turn for the better. He sent them all out of the room and asked me, and I told him. He said, 'Thank you, Mr. Kitson. Now I can get on.'" He paused. "I find that I can get on. Say me a psalm, Rachel."

It was not the psalm for the day. He asked me for the forty-sixth, and I said it. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea. He said the verses with me, in the dark; and when I came to Be still then, and know that I am God, he said it alone, and I heard him take a long breath after it, and let it out, and lie quiet.

Mrs. Openshaw came at ten. Before I went up to bed I stood a moment on the landing. The candle had burned down in its shade. Through the wall behind me I heard, or thought I heard, very faint and very slow, the sound of thread drawn through cloth. Then I heard Mrs. Openshaw shift in her chair, and it stopped.

---

The leeches were put on at nine the next morning, by the senior surgeon, who came instead of Mr. Lomax. He came again in the evening, and twice a day after that, for the rest of the month. He was a stout, cheerful, abrupt man who spoke to my father in a loud voice, as if blindness had made him deaf as well, and called me "the young lady." I did not ask after Mr. Lomax. On the twelfth day the burning in the eye abated. On the fifteenth the senior surgeon said, in his loud voice, that the inflammation was well down, and that we should see what we should see.

I do not know whether my telling him did harm. I do not know whether it did good. I have read since, in other books than the one I gave back, that physicians are divided upon the question, and I think they will always be divided upon it, because no man can be operated on twice for the same first time. My father believed that it was the forty-sixth psalm that brought the inflammation down. I know only that he lay still that night, and the nights after, as he had not lain still before.

On the last morning of September the shutters were unbarred and the blanket taken down, and the senior surgeon stood by the bed with his watch in his hand and let in the daylight by a hand's breadth at a time. I stood behind him. My father lay with his face towards the window and the bandage gone, and blinked, and his eyes ran, and he did not wipe them.

"Well, sir?" said the senior surgeon. "What do you see?"

My father was silent for a long time. Then he said, "Smoke." He turned his head a little on the pillow. "And the sun in it. Red. As round as a wafer. Rachel, is that the sun?"

I said that it was.

"I can look at it," he said, with great wonder. "I can look straight at it." And he lay and looked, with the tears running down into his ears, at the dirty Manchester sun hanging over the chimneys in its smoke; and I went and stood by the window, between him and the city, where he could see me against the light.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Carolā Brontë per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Charlotte Brontë, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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