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Fact Box Level: 5.656 Tokens: 406 Types: 197 TTR: 0.485 |
The Blind Girl
A band plays in Lumley Park every Sunday afternoon. I often attend these open-air concerts if the weather is fine, because I find it a very restful way of passing the time, and because the band plays my kind of music: dance music, marching music, anything with a tune that you can whistle—you know what I mean.
One Sunday, there was a blind girl in the front row of the audience, just behind the band leader. She must have been about fourteen or fifteen years of age, I should think. She had been sitting down until about halfway through the programme, when this blind girl stood up and began waving her arms about in time to the music, just as the band-leader himself was doing.
After a while, I could see that more and more members of the band were watching the blind girl instead of the band-leader. And the leader must have noticed this himself, because he turned round and watched her, and saw that she was keeping perfect time. He was a very thoughtful man, that band-leader; I took my hat off to him. He moved to one side little by little, so that the band could see the blind girl better, and after a while he stopped conducting altogether. The band knew the piece quite well, of course, so things weren't likely to go seriously wrong. But she kept time beautifully, and she made it clear when she wanted certain passages to be loud or soft, just as the band leader himself had done. Since then, to be quite honest, I've never heard The Blue Danube played better anywhere.
I have seldom heard an audience clap more loudly than that audience, when the music was over. I should think they must have heard the noise on the other side of the town. When the blind girl sat down, even from where I was sitting, I could see that there were tears running down her face.
"And she wasn't the only one in that audience who was crying, I can tell you."
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