The Story of My Life, Helen Keller [e novels to read online .txt] 📗

watches, which have been given her. They are, I think, the only ones of their kind in America. The watch has on the back cover a flat gold indicator which can be pushed freely around from left to right until, by means of a pin inside the case, it locks with the hour hand and takes a corresponding position. The point of this gold indicator bends over the edge of the case, round which are set eleven raised points⁠—the stem forms the twelfth. Thus the watch, an ordinary watch with a white dial for the person who sees, becomes for a blind person by this special attachment in effect one with a single raised hour hand and raised figures. Though there is less than half an inch between the points⁠—a space which represents sixty minutes⁠—Miss Keller tells the time almost exactly. It should be said that any double-case watch with the crystal removed serves well enough for a blind person whose touch is sufficiently delicate to feel the position of the hands and not disturb or injure them.

The finer traits of Miss Keller’s character are so well known that one needs not say much about them. Good sense, good humour, and imagination keep her scheme of things sane and beautiful. No attempt is made by those around her either to preserve or to break her illusions. When she was a little girl, a good many unwise and tactless things that were said for her benefit were not repeated to her, thanks to the wise watchfulness of Miss Sullivan. Now that she has grown up, nobody thinks of being less frank with her than with any other intelligent young woman. What her good friend, Charles Dudley Warner, wrote about her in Harper’s Magazine in 1896 was true then, and it remains true now:

“I believe she is the purest-minded human ever in existence.⁠ ⁠… The world to her is what her own mind is. She has not even learned that exhibition on which so many pride themselves, of ‘righteous indignation.’

“Some time ago, when a policeman shot dead her dog, a dearly loved daily companion, she found in her forgiving heart no condemnation for the man; she only said, ‘If he had only known what a good dog she was, he wouldn’t have shot her.’ It was said of old time, ‘Lord forgive them, they know not what they do!’

“Of course the question will arise whether, if Helen Keller had not been guarded from the knowledge of evil, she would have been what she is today.⁠ ⁠… Her mind has neither been made effeminate by the weak and silly literature, nor has it been vitiated by that which is suggestive of baseness. In consequence her mind is not only vigorous, but it is pure. She is in love with noble things, with noble thoughts, and with the characters of noble men and women.”

She still has a childlike aversion to tragedies. Her imagination is so vital that she falls completely under the illusion of a story, and lives in its world. Miss Sullivan writes in a letter of 1891:

“Yesterday I read to her the story of Macbeth, as told by Charles and Mary Lamb. She was very greatly excited by it, and said: ‘It is terrible! It makes me tremble!’ After thinking a little while, she added, ‘I think Shakespeare made it very terrible so that people would see how fearful it is to do wrong.’ ”

Of the real world she knows more of the good and less of the evil than most people seem to know. Her teacher does not harass her with the little unhappy things; but of the important difficulties they have been through, Miss Keller was fully informed, took her share of the suffering, and put her mind to the problems. She is logical and tolerant, most trustful of a world that has treated her kindly.

Once when someone asked her to define “love,” she replied, “Why, bless you, that is easy; it is what everybody feels for everybody else.”

“Toleration,” she said once, when she was visiting her friend Mrs. Laurence Hutton, “is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.”

She has a large, generous sympathy and absolute fairness of temper. So far as she is noticeably different from other people she is less bound by convention. She has the courage of her metaphors and lets them take her skyward when we poor self-conscious folk would think them rather too bookish for ordinary conversation. She always says exactly what she thinks, without fear of the plain truth; yet no one is more tactful and adroit than she in turning an unpleasant truth so that it will do the least possible hurt to the feelings of others. Not all the attention that has been paid her since she was a child has made her take herself too seriously. Sometimes she gets started on a very solemn preachment. Then her teacher calls her an incorrigible little sermonizer, and she laughs at herself. Often, however, her sober ideas are not to be laughed at, for her earnestness carries her listeners with her. There is never the least false sententiousness in what she says. She means everything so thoroughly that her very quotations, her echoes from what she has read, are in truth original.

Her logic and her sympathy are in excellent balance. Her sympathy is of the swift and ministering sort which, fortunately, she has found so often in other people. And her sympathies go further and shape her opinions on political and national movements. She was intensely pro-Boer and wrote a strong argument in favour of Boer independence. When she was told of the surrender of the brave little people, her face clouded and she was silent a few minutes. Then she asked clear, penetrating questions about the terms of the surrender, and began to discuss them.

Both Mr. Gilman and Mr. Keith, the teachers who prepared her for college, were struck by