ADVENTURES IN
SILENCE

BY
HERBERT W. COLLINGWOOD

Distributed by

THE RURAL NEW YORKER
333 WEST 30th STREET
NEW YORK

Copyright, 1923
By HERBERT W. COLLINGWOOD

Printed in U. S. A.

TO E. W. C.
WHOSE RARE SYMPATHY AND
SISTERLY UNDERSTANDING HAVE
HELPED ONE DEAF MAN THROUGH
THE SILENCE.

INTRODUCTION

There are in this country about 75,000 people who were never able to hear. There are also about half a million who have lost all or part of their hearing, and more than one million in addition who must use some contrivance to aid their ears. This army, nearly as large as the one sent overseas, is forced to live a strange and mysterious life, which most normal persons know nothing about, even though they come into daily contact with the outposts. The ordinary deaf man is usually regarded as a joke or a nuisance, according to the humor of his associates. This social condition is largely due to the fact that he has found no place in literature; he occupies an abnormal position because his story has never been fairly told. The lame, the halt and the blind have been driven or gently led into literature. Poem, essay and story have described their lives, their habits, their needs; as a result the average person of reasonable intelligence has a fair notion of what it is like to be crippled or blind. But no one tells what it is like to be deaf. No one seems to love a deaf man well enough to analyze his thought or to describe the remarkable world in which he must live apart, although he may be close enough to his companions to touch them and to see their every action. Very likely this is our own fault; perhaps we have no right to expect the public to do for us what we should do for ourselves. I have long felt that we are sadly handicapped socially through this failure to put our life and our strange adventures into literature—the deaf person must remain a joke or a tragedy until he has made the world see something of the finer side of his life in the silence. This is why I have attempted to record these “adventures.” I am aware that it is rather a crude pioneer performance. Beginnings are rarely impressive. Much as we respect the pioneer of years ago, very few of us would care to house and entertain him today. It is my hope that this volume will lead other deaf persons to record their experiences, so that we may present our case fully to the public. The great trouble is that we find it so easy to make a genuine “tale of woe” out of our experience; it is hardly possible to avoid this if we record honestly. Perhaps we “enjoy the thought of our affliction” so thoroughly that we do not realize that the reading public has no use for it. My own method of avoiding this has been to turn the manuscript over to my daughter and to walk away from it, leaving her entirely free to cut the “grouch” out of it with the happy instruments of youth and hope and music. With us the great adventure of life is to pass contentedly from the world of sound into the world of silence and there strive to prepare ourselves for the world of serenity which lies beyond.

H. W. COLLINGWOOD.

CONTENTS

ADVENTURES IN SILENCE

CHAPTER I
Terrors That Are Imaginary

The World of Silence Uncharted—Two Initial Incidents, Darkness in the Tunnel, and at Home—Imaginary Terrors of the Deaf—When John Harlow Thought He Was a Murderer.

For some years I have considered writing a book concerning the life of the deaf or the “hard of hearing.” It is hard to understand why our peculiar and interesting life in the silent world has not been more fully recorded. We read of adventures in strange lands, far away, yet here is a stranger country close by, with its mysteries and miseries uncharted. Having lived in this silent world for some years, I have often planned to make an effort to describe it. However, like many other writers, I could not get going. I was not able to start my story until two rather unusual incidents spurred me into action.

Those of you who know industrial New York understand how the vast army of commuters is rushed to the city each day and rushed home again at night. From New Jersey alone a crowd of men and women larger by far than the entire population of the State of Vermont is carried to the banks of the Hudson from a territory sixty miles in diameter. Once at the river bank there are two ways by which these commuters may reach the city. They may float over in the great ferryboats, or they may dive under the river in rapid trains driven through a tube far below the water. This submarine travel is the quicker and more popular way, and during the rush hours the great tunnel makes one think of a mighty tube of vaseline or tooth paste with a giant hand squeezing a thick stream of humanity out of the end.

I reach the Hudson over the Erie Railroad. At this point the underground tube makes a wide curve inland, and in order to get to the trains we must walk through a long concrete cave far underground. The other morning several trains arrived at the Erie station together, and their passengers were all dumped into this cave like grain poured into a long sack. There was a solid mass of humanity slowly making its way to the end. The city worker naturally adapts himself to a crowd. He at once becomes an organized part of it. Take a thousand countrymen, each from the wide elbow room of his farm, and throw them together in a mass and they would trample each other in a panic. The city crowd, as long as it can be kept good-natured, will march on in orderly fashion; but let it once be overcome by fear, and it will be more uncontrolled than the throngs of countrymen.

This cave is brilliantly lighted, and we were moving on in orderly procession, without thought of danger. We would move forward perhaps 50 feet and then halt for a moment—to move ahead once more. During one of these halts I looked about me. At my right was a group of giggling girls; at my left a white-faced, nervous man; behind, a lame man, and in front two great giants in blouse and overalls. I was close by the change booth. A slight, pale-faced young woman sat within; the piles of money in front of her. A husky, rough-looking man was offering a bill to be changed. I saw it all, and as I looked, in an instant the lights flashed out and left us in inky darkness.

I have been left in dark, lonely places where I groped about without touching a human being, but it was far more terrifying to stand in that closely packed crowd and to realize what would happen in case of a panic. I reached out my hand and could touch a dozen people, but I could hear no sound. Suppose these silly girls were to scream; suppose this man at my elbow were to yell “Fire!” as fools have often done in such crowds. Suppose that man at the booth reached in, strangled the girl and swept the money out. At any of these possible alarms that orderly crowd in the dark might change to a wild mob, smashing and trampling its way back to the entrance, as uncontrollable as the crazy herds of cattle I had seen in Western stampedes. The deaf man thinks quickly at such times, and in the black silence dangers are magnified. The deaf are usually peculiar in their mental make-up; most of them have developed the faculty of intuition into a sense, and they can quickly grasp many situations which the average man would hardly imagine.

But there was no scream or call of alarm. After what seemed to me half an hour of intense living, the lights flashed back and the big clock at the end of the cave, solemnly ticking the time away, showed us that we had been less than 50 seconds in darkness. With a good-natured laugh the crowd moved on. Those girls had had no thought of screaming. They were more interested in the group of young men behind them. That nervous man, whom I had thought trembling with fright, had been laughing at the joke. The rough-looking man, whom my fancy had painted as a possible murderer and thief, had been standing before that money like a faithful dog on guard. There had been danger of a panic, and I had sensed it, but most of my companions had thought of nothing except the joke of being held up for a moment. They were happier for their lack of imagination.

At home I started to tell our people about it. The baby sat on my knee. She had my knife in her hand, paring an apple. Mother sat by the table sewing, and the children were scattered about the room. Suddenly the lights snapped out. I put up my hand just in time to catch the knife as the baby swung her arm at my face. And there we sat, waiting for the lights to return. There was no fear, for we knew each other. There was faith in that darkness; there could be no panic. I could hear no sound, yet the baby curled up close to me and all was well. Darkness is the worst handicap for the deaf. Give them light and they can generally manage; but, in the dark, without sound, they are helpless, and unless they are blessed with strong faith and philosophy, imagination comes and prints a series of terror pictures for them which you with your dependable hearing can hardly realize.

These incidents gave me my start by bringing to my mind the story of John Harlow, curiously typical of the imaginary terrors of the deaf and the folly of giving way to them. John Harlow was a New England man. He had all the imagination and all the narrow prejudice of his class; he had never traveled west of his own corner of the nation, and he was deaf. The man who carries this combination of qualities about with him is booked for trouble whenever he gets out among new types of people. Part of the Harlow property was invested in land lying in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, and it became necessary for John to go there, to look up titles and investigate agents.

About all the average New Englander of that day knew of that mountain country was that it seemed to be the stage on which bloody family feuds were fought out. The Atlantic Monthly had printed stories by Charles Egbert Craddock, and they were accepted as true pictures of mountain life. John Harlow should have known that the New Englanders and the mountaineers are alike the purest in real American blood, and that they must have many traits in common; but he went South with the firm conviction that life in the mountains must be one long tragedy of ambuscades and murders.

When a deaf man gets such ideas in mind, imagination prints them in red ink, because the deaf must brood over their fears and troubles. They cannot lighten the mind with music or aimless conversation. So when Harlow left the train at a little mountain hamlet he was not surprised to find his agent a tall, solemn-eyed man, with a long gray beard; a typical leader in the family feud, as the Boston man had pictured it. Harlow mounted the buckboard beside this silent mountaineer, and they drove off into the mountains just as the dusky shadows were beginning to creep down into the little nooks and valleys. As soon as this man found that John was deaf he drove on in silence, glancing at his companion now and then with that kindly awe with which simple people generally regard the deaf.

It was quite dark when they reached a small “cove” or opening in which stood a large house, with the usual farm buildings around it; the forest crept close to the barn at one point. It struck John that the buildings were arranged in the form of a fort, but what a chance had been left for the enemy to creep up through the woods and suddenly fall upon them! After supper John stood at the window watching the moon lift itself over the mountain and go climbing up the sky. There came to his mind the description of just such a moonrise, from one of Craddock’s stories, where a group of mountaineers came creeping over the hill to fall upon the home of their enemy. As he stood there he became aware that the whole family was making preparations for what seemed to him like defense. The women came and pulled down the curtains, and one of the boys went out and closed the heavy shutters. His host came and tried to explain, but Harlow was nervous, and it is hard to make the deaf hear at such times. All that he could catch were scattered words or parts of sentences. “We are waiting for them.” “They will be here by nine o’clock.” “There is a pistol for you.” “They have done us great damage.” “We must kill them tonight.”

Then the lights were put out, and even the great fire in the fireplace was dimmed; a rug was thrown over the crack under the door, and they all sat there—waiting. John Harlow, the deaf man, will never forget that scene. The little splinter of light from the fire revealed the stern old man and his three sons waiting, gun in hand, and the women sitting by the table, knitting mechanically in the dimness—all listening for the coming of the enemy. By the door lay two large dogs, alert and watchful. And Harlow, pulled from a comfortable place in Boston and suddenly made a part of this desperate family quarrel, did not even know what it was all about. He started twice to demand an explanation in the loud, harsh tones of the deaf, but the older man quickly waved him to silence.

How long they sat in that dim light Harlow cannot tell. He never thought to look at his watch. Suddenly the dogs lying by the door started up with low growls and bristling hair.

“Here they are,” said the old man; “now get ready.”

He thrust a pistol into John’s hand and took him by the arm as the boys silently opened the door and passed out with the dogs. John found himself following. In the moonlight they crept along the shadow of the buildings out to the point where the woods crawled in almost to the barn. There the old man crept off to one side. For the moment the moon was obscured by a passing cloud. Then its light burst upon them, and John from his hiding-place distinctly saw three forms crawling slowly across the grassy field to the back of the barn. In the clear moonlight he could distinguish three white faces, peering through the deep grass. They would move slowly forward a few feet, and then halt, apparently to listen. The deaf man in this strange, lonely place, thought he saw three desperate men making their way to the barn buildings. This very thing had been described in one of the stories he had read; three mountaineers had crawled slowly through the grass to set fire to the barn. And it came to John’s mind that these three white-faced fiends were creeping up to burn down this home and then shoot down its occupants by the light from the burning! The nearest crawler came slowly to within two rods of John and raised his head to look about him. As viewed in the moonlight it seemed a hideous face, hardly human in its aspect.

John Harlow was a man of peace, and he had been cursing himself for having been brought into this neighborhood quarrel. It was none of his business, he told himself, but the sight of this cowardly wretch crawling up like a snake to fire the buildings was too much for Boston reserve, and John raised his pistol, took aim at that hateful white face and pulled the trigger. The figure seemed to throw itself in the air at the shot, and then it lay quiet, the ghastly face still in the moonlight.

As John fired there came a sharp volley from the other buildings, and the two other shapes lay still. A cloud passed over the moon, and through the darkness, feeling himself a murderer, John found his way back to the house, where the women were waiting with eager faces. They lighted the lamps once more and the men came tramping back, to hang their guns on the wall. They were all in great spirits, and the old man came to John’s chair and with much shouting and waving his hands, made the deaf man understand.

“You made a great shot. Got him right between the eyes. We got them all laid out on the grass—come out and see them.”

But John did not want to see these dead men! He was a murderer. He had killed a man, perhaps an innocent stranger who had never done him wrong. It was frightful, but even the women insisted that he come, so with his eyes shut John permitted himself to be drawn out to the hateful spot where those dead bodies were lying.

“There’s the one you got!” roared a voice in his ear.

“You must be a dead shot—look at him; see how white he is!”

And Harlow opened his eyes, expecting to see a picture which could never be erased from memory. There were the dead bodies on the grass before him in the lantern light. There were three big skunks with more than the usual amount of white about their faces and backs!

Harlow gazed at them, and his paralyzed mind slowly came back to normal working order. And then the light came. He had not taken part in any family feud. No one had tried to kill him. The people of that section were as kindly neighbors as any he had ever had in Boston. For some weeks the skunks had been stealing chickens, and the family had organized this successful defense. It was not the white face of a man that John had seen in the tangled grass, but the white head and back of a skunk. He was not a murderer—he was only a skunk-killer!

Most deaf men go through these “adventures in silence.” Many of them are not particularly thrilling, but they are sometimes exciting enough to let the imagination run away with us. In what follows I shall try to make it clear that most of our fears are imaginary—thin ghosts, stuffed lions, scarecrows (or skunks!) which stand beside the road to frighten us. For the deaf should know from experience that the only safety in life is to go on, no matter what dangers croakers or cowards may predict just around the curve.

CHAPTER II
On the Road to Silence

The Nature of the Journey to the Silent Country—Substitutes for Perfect Silence—Sounds of Nature Companionable—The Direct Attack—“Just As I am”—Compensation in Idealized Memories—“Cut Out the Bitterness”—Reasons for Writing the Book—A Matter of Point of View, Concerning John Armstrong’s Possessions.

I think life has given me a certificate which qualifies me to act as guide and interpreter on the journey to the Silent Land. For forty years I have been traveling along the road to silence. I have seen some unfortunate people who were suddenly deprived of their hearing, as it seemed without warning. Fate did not give them even a chance to prepare for the death of sound. It was as if some cruel hand had suddenly dragged them into a prison, a form of living death through which the poor bewildered wretches must wander aimlessly until they could in some feeble way adjust themselves to the new conditions which we shall find in the world of silence. Happily my journey was not made in that way. I have wandered slowly and gently along the road, each year coming a little nearer to silence, yet working on so easily and unobtrusively that the way has not seemed hard and rough. I know every step of the road, and I can point out the landmarks as we pass along. You may be compelled to travel over the same route alone some day. Perhaps your feet are upon it even now, unknown to you. Take my advice and notice the milestones as you pass them.

Let’s not hurry. Let our journey be like one of those happy family wanderings in the old farm days, long before the age of gasoline. On a Sunday afternoon we would all start walking, on past the back of the farm. Father, mother and the baby, all would go. We could stop to drink from the spring, to rest under the pines, to stand on the hill looking off over the valleys. The beauty of the walk was that time was no object; our destination was nowhere in particular, and we always reached it. No one hears of those family trips in these days. We “go” now. The family, smaller than of old, will crowd into a car and go rushing about the country in an effort to cover as many miles as possible, and to do as little sight-seeing as may be during the rush. Now, we shall not hurry, and there will be no great objection to our leaving the road now and then to gather flowers or bright stones, or to watch a bird or a squirrel. We shall need all the pleasant memories we can think of when we arrive.

Very likely you have before now entered into a “solitude where none intrude,” and have thought yourself entirely alone in the silence. But you had not reached the real end of the road. You missed some of the familiar sounds of your everyday life, but there were substitutes. There was always the low growl of the ocean, the murmur of the wind among the trees, the cheerful ripple of the brook, the song of the birds, or some of the many sweet sounds of nature. It was not the silence which we know, nor were the voices which came to you harsh or distorted. They were clear and true, even though they were strange to you.

I did not realize how largely the habits of our life are bound up in sound until some years ago we hired a city woman to come and work in our farmhouse. We live in a lonely place. This woman spent one night with us. In the morning she came with terror in her eyes and begged to be taken back to New York.

“It’s so still here; I can’t sleep!”

It was true. Her ears had become so accustomed to the harsh noises of the city that every nerve and faculty had been tuned to them. The quiet of the country was as irksome to her as the constant city noises are annoying to the countryman, just from his silent hills. Perhaps you have awakened suddenly in the night in some quiet country place, let us say in the loneliness of Winter in the hill country. You looked from the window across the glittering snow to the dark pines which seemed to prison the farm and house. You fancied that you had finally reached the world of silence, and you were seized by a nameless terror as you imagined what would happen to you if sight were suddenly withdrawn. Then you heard the timbers of the house creak with the cold, the friendly wind sighed through the trees and around the corner of the house. There came faint chords of weird music as from an æolian harp when it passed over some wire fence. Or perhaps there came to you the faint step of some prowling animal. Then the terror vanished before these sounds of the night. For this is not the world which I ask you to enter with me. We are bound for the world of the deaf. I tell you in advance that it is a dull, drab world, without music or pleasant conversation, into which none of the natural tones of the human voice or the multitudinous sounds of nature can come. You must leave them all behind, and you will never realize how much they have meant to you until they are out of your reach. Could you readjust your life for a new adventure in this strange world?

The deaf man must carry this world of silence about with him always, and it leads him into strange performances. I know a deaf man who went to a church service. He could hear nothing of the sermon, but he felt something of the glory of worship, and when the congregation stood up to sing my deaf friend felt that here was where he could help.

“Just as I am, without one plea,” announced the preacher, and the deaf man’s wife found the place in the hymn book. He sang along with the rest and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, one of the penalties of the Silent Country is that its inhabitants can rarely keep in step with the crowd. My friend did not realize that at the end of each verse the organist was expected to play a short interlude before the next verse started. There has never seemed to me to be any reason for these ornamental musical flourishes; they merely keep us from getting on with our singing.

The deaf man knew nothing of all this. He was there to finish the singing of that hymn. It is a habit of the deaf to go straight to the end, since there is no reason why they should stop to listen. So he started in on the second verse as all the rest were marking time through that useless interlude, and he sang a solo:

“Just as I am, and waiting not!”

He sang with all his power, he was in good voice and his heart was full of the glory of the service. He was never a singer at best, and the voice of a deaf person is never musical. This hard, metallic voice cut into that interlude much like the snarl of a buzz saw. His wife tried to stop him, but he could not quite get the idea, and he sang on. It is rather a curious commentary on the slavery to habit which most intelligent human beings willingly assume that this one earnest man, just as little out of step, nearly destroyed the inspiration of that church service. The unconscious solo would have taken all the worship from the hearts of that congregation had it not been for the quick-witted organist.

Some human beings have risen to the mental capacity of animals in understanding and conveying a form of unspoken language. It may be “instinct,” “intuition,” or what you will, but in some way they are able to convey their meaning without words. I have found many such people in the world of silence. The organist possessed this power. Before the deaf man had sung five words she had stopped playing her interlude, had caught the time of what he was singing, and was signaling the choir to join her. By the time they reached the end of the second line at “one dark spot” the entire congregation was singing as though nothing had happened. The minister, too, sensed the situation, for at the end of the verse, before the deaf man could make another start, he said:

“Let us pray.” And the incident was happily closed.

As I look about me in the world of silence and see some of the sad blunders of my fellows, I feel that in their poor way they illustrate something of the life tragedy which often engulfs the reformer. The deaf man does not know or has forgotten that those who are blessed with good hearing do not and cannot go straight to the mark. Much of their time is wasted on useless “interludes” or ornamental flourishes which mean nothing in work or worship. This man at the church, while his heart was full, could only think of getting that hymn through, earnestly, lovingly, and without loss of time. He may have had more true worship in his heart than any other member of the congregation, but he dropped just a little out of form, and he quickly became a ridiculous nuisance. The truth is, if you did but know it, that some of your clumsy efforts to keep step with so-called fashionable people make you far more ridiculous than those of us who fall out of step. Nature never intended your big feet for dancing, but, because others dance, you must try it.

Your reformer broods over his mission until it becomes a part of his life, a habit which he cannot break. He reaches a position where he cannot compromise, sidestep or wait patiently. He goes ahead and never waits for “interludes,” which most of us must put in between efforts at “reform.” The rest of the world cannot follow him. He becomes a “crank,” a “nut,” or an “old stick,” because he cannot stop with the crowd and play with the theory of reform, but must push on with all his soul. It seems to us who look out upon the aimless procession moving before us that an average man feels that he cannot “succeed” unless he stops at command and plays the petty games of society; he has sold himself into the slavery of habit and fashion, though he knows how poor and trivial they may be. This is bad enough, but it is worse to see scores of people fastening the handcuffs on their children. Now and then the organist has visions which show her what to do, and she swings the great congregation to the deaf man’s lead. Unhappily there are few such organists.

It is strange, indeed, when you come to consider it, that two worlds, separated only by sound, lie side by side and yet so far apart. You cannot understand our life, and perhaps at times you shudder at the thought of how narrow our lives have been made. We who have known sound and lost it have learned to find substitutes, and we often wonder that you narrow your own lives by making such trivial and ignoble use of sound as we see you doing. Fate has narrowed our lives, and we have been forced to broaden them by seeking the larger thoughts. You, it often seems to us, straiten your own lives by dwelling with the smaller things of existence.

The deaf have one advantage at least. They have explored the pleasant roads and the dark alleys of both worlds. If they are of true heart, in doing so they have gained at least a glimpse of that other dim, mysterious country which lies hidden beyond us all. To the blind, the deaf, or to those who carry bravely the cross of some deep trouble, there will surely come vision and promise which never appear to those who are denied the privilege of passing through life under the shadow of a great affliction. But these visions do not come to those who pass on with downcast eyes, permitting their affliction to bear them down. They are reserved for those who defy fate and march through the dark places with smiling faces and uplifted eyes.

Someone has said that the deaf man is half dead, because he is unable to separate in his life the living memory or sound from the deadness of the silence.

“I must walk softly all my days in the bitterness of my soul.”

That was the old prophet’s dismal view of life, and how often have I heard hopeless sufferers, half insane with the jangle of head noises, quote that passage.

“Cut out the bitterness, and I’ll walk softly with you,” was the comment of one brave soul who would not subscribe to the whole doctrine. I have had two deaf men quote that and tell me that their condition reminded them of what they had read of prison life in the Russian mines. Formerly, in some of these mines, men were chained together at their work below ground. Sometimes, when one member of the hideous partnership died, the survivor did not have his chains removed for days! One of my friends told me that he felt as though his life was passed dragging about wherever he went the dead body of sound, and what it had meant to his former life. Unless he could keep his mind fully occupied there would rise up before him the dim picture of the prisoner dragging his dead partner through the horrors of their underground prison. The other man who made the comparison had a happier view of life. He told me that he had read all he could find on the subject, and that when these men were released from their hateful prison and brought up into the sunlight, they seemed to know much about the great mystery into which we all must enter. So he felt that he was not carrying the dead around with him, but rather the living, for the spirit of the old life, the best of it in memory and inspiration, remained with him. So we deaf are like you of the sound-world in that some of us sink under our afflictions, while to others of us they are stepping-stones.

I have come to think that of all the human faculties, sound is the most closely associated with life. The blind man may say that light means more than sound; I do not know how the question can be fairly argued, but I think in most cases deafness removes us further from the real joy of living. You will notice that the blind are usually more cheerful than the deaf. But at any rate, all the seriously afflicted have lost something of life and are not on terms of full equality with those who are normal. Their compensations must come largely from another world.

Most people pass through life associating only with the living, and thus give but little thought to any world beside their own. The great majority of the people to whom I have talked about the other life are Christians, more or less interested in church or charitable work, yet they have no conception of what lies beyond. Many of them dimly imagine a dark valley or a black hole in the wall through which they will grope their way, hopeful that at some corner they may come upon the light. The law of compensation must give those of us who have lost an essential of human life a greater insight into that other shadowy existence. For us who have entered the silence there must somewhere be substitutes for music and for the charm of the human voice. Most of the deaf who formerly heard carry with them memories of music or kindly words, legacies from the world of sound. These are treasured in the brain, and as the years go by they become more and more ideal. Just as the chemist may by continued analysis find new treasures in substances which others have discarded, the man whose ears are sealed may find new beauties in an old song, or in some word lightly spoken, which you in your wild riot of sound have never discovered. And perhaps out of this long-continued analysis there may come fragments of a new language, a vision which may give one a closer view or a keener knowledge of worlds beyond. Who knows? Again, one may not only add the beauty of brightness to the past, but one may, if he will, summon the very imps of darkness out of the shadows for their hateful work of destroying faith and hope in the human heart. The Kingdom of Heaven or the prison of hell will be built as one may decide—and his tool is the brain.

“For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he!”

It is my conviction that this proverb was written by a deaf man, who had thoroughly explored the world of silence!

While the inhabitants of every locality are usually anxious to increase their population, I am very frank to say that some of the recruits wished upon us are not a full credit to our community. The world in which we must live is naturally gloomy, where canned sunshine must be used about as canned fruit is carried into the northern snows. It is no help to have our ranks filled with discontented, unhappy beings who spend the years which might be made the best of their lives in bemoaning their fate and reminding the rest of us of our affliction. What we are trying to do is to forget it as far as we can. The deaf man does not want the world’s pity. That is the most distasteful thing you can hand him, even though it be wrapped in gold. For the expressed pity of our friends only leads to self-pity, and that, sooner or later, will pit the face of the soul like a case of moral smallpox. The most depressing thing I have to encounter is the well-meant pity of friends and acquaintances. I know from their faces that they are shuddering at the thought of my affliction, and I see them discussing it, as they look at me! Why can they not stop cultivating my trouble? All we ask is a fair chance to make a self-respecting living and to be treated as human beings. This compassion makes me feel that I am being analyzed and separated like an anatomical specimen; there will come to me out of the distant past of sound the bitter words of a great actor, who said as Shylock:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”

I was brought up among deaf people. They seemed rather amusing to me, and I could not imagine any condition which could put me in their place. I now see that I should have profited by a study of their life and habits. I could have been better prepared to live the life of a prisoner in the silent world. Would I have struggled for greater power and wealth? No, for they are not, after all, greater essentials here than in your world. Were I to go over the road again, I should fill my mind and soul with music, and should strive with every possible sacrifice to fill out my life with enduring friendships, the kind that come with youth. It seems to be practically impossible for the deaf man to gain that friendship which is stronger than any other human tie. My aurist once told me that at least sixty per cent of the people we meet in everyday life have lost part of their hearing. They cannot be called deaf, but the hearing is imperfect and deafness is progressive. Many of you who read this may be slowly traveling toward our world, without really knowing it. There are in the country today about sixty thousand deaf and dumb persons. If we include these, my estimate is that there are at least half a million persons who have little or no hearing, while over one million are obliged to use some kind of a device for the ears. So we may safely claim that our world is likely to become more thickly settled in the future, and we may well prepare to number the streets and put up signboards.

And I will admit another reason for telling you about this quiet country. It concerns our own people, for whom I speak. I would gladly do what I can to make life easier for the deaf. Their lot is usually made harder through the failure of others to understand the affliction, and to realize what it means to live in the silence. In my own case I can make no complaint. I am confident that society has treated me better than I deserve, given me more than I have returned. I have been blessed with family and friends who have made my affliction far easier than it might have been. I realize that it is not easy for the ordinary person to be patient and fair with the deaf. We may so easily become nuisances. I presume that there is no harder test of a woman’s character and ability than for her to serve as the wife of a deaf man, to endure his moods and oddities and suspicions with gentleness and patience and loving help. A woman may well hesitate to enter such a life unless the man is of very superior character.

Now and then I meet deaf people who complain bitterly at the treatment which society metes out to them. In most cases I think they are wrong, for we must all admit squarely the foundation fact of our affliction, which is that we may very easily become a trouble and a nuisance socially. We represent perhaps two per cent of the nation’s population, and we can hardly expect the other ninety-eight per cent always to understand us. I have had people move away from me as though they expected me to bite them. Some sensitive souls might feel that they were thus associated with mad dogs, but it is better to see the humor of it. For my part, I have come to realize that I am barred from terms of social equality with those who live in the kingdom of sound. I have come to be prepared for a certain amount of impatience and annoyance. I am often myself impatient with those dull souls who depend so entirely upon their ears that they have failed to cultivate the instinct or the intuition which enables us to grasp a situation at a glance. But I do ask for our people a fair hearing, if I may put it that way. While we are deprived of many of your opportunities and possibilities, we think we have developed something which you lack, perhaps unconsciously. We can turn our experience over to you if you will be patient.

Do not fear that I shall corner you to make you listen to a tale of woe. The truth is that I often feel, in all sincerity, exceedingly sorry for you poor unfortunates who must listen to all the small talk and the skim-milk of conversation.

“I saw a smith stand with his hammer—thus,

The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,

With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news!”

It is so long since I have been able to chatter and play with words that I forget what people talk about. Some of them at least seem to have talked their tongues loose from their brains. I often ask intelligent people after this chatter what it was all about, and whether their brains were really working as they babbled on. Not one in ten can give any good reason for the conversation or remember twenty words of it. Do you wonder that we of the silence, seeing this waste of words, pick up our strong and enduring book and wander away with the great undying characters of history, rather thankful that we are not as other men, condemned to waste good time on such trivial exercise of ears and tongues?

That is the way we like to think about it, but there is a worm in this philosophy after all. I have reasoned things out in this way fifty times; the logic seems perfect, and yet my mind works back from my book to the story of John Armstrong and his New England farm.

John was a seedling, rooted in one of those Vermont hill farms. The Psalmist tells of a man who is like “a tree planted by the rivers of water”; such a tree puts its roots down until it becomes well-nigh impossible to pull them out of the earth. There had been a mortgage howling at the Armstrong door for generations. Not much beside family pride can be grown on these hillsides, and John would have spent his life cultivating it to the end, if his lungs hadn’t given out. The country doctor put it to him straight; it was stay on the hills and die, or go to the Western desert and probably live. In some way the love of life proved strongest. John bequeathed his share of the family pride to brother Henry and went to Arizona. There he lost the use of one lung, but filled his pockets with money. He secured a great tract of desert land, and one day the engineers turned the course of a mountain stream and spread it over John’s land. At home in Vermont the little streams tumbled down hill, played with a few mill wheels, gave drink to a few cows and sheep, and played on until they reached the river, to be finally lost in the ocean. In Arizona the river caused the desert to bloom with Alfalfa, and wheat, and orchards, thus turning the sand to gold.

And one day John stood on the mountain with his friends and looked over the glowing country, all his—wealth uncounted. All his! Worth an entire county of Vermont, so his friends told him.

“You should be a happy man,” they said, “with all that wealth and power taken from the sand. A happy man—what more can you ask?”

“I know it,” said John. “I know it—and yet, in spite of it all, right face to face with all this wealth, I’d give the whole darned country for just one week in that Vermont pasture in June!”

And so, unmolested in my world of silence, free from chatter and small talk, able to concentrate my mind on strong books, I look across to the idle gossipers and know just how John Armstrong felt. I would give up all this restful calm if I could only hear my boy play his violin, if I could only hear little Rose when she comes to say good-night, if I could only hear that bird which they say is singing to her young in yonder tree.

CHAPTER III
Head Noises and Subjective Audition.

Head Noises—The Quality Probably Depends on the Memory of Sounds Heard in Youth—The Sea and the Church Bells—“Voices” and Subjective Audition—Insanity and the Unseen—The Rich Dream-Life of the Deaf.

Deafness is not even complete silence, for we must frequently listen to head noises, which vary from gentle whispering to wild roars or hideous bellowing. There is little other physical discomfort usually, though some exceptional cases are associated with headache or neuralgia. There is, however, an annoying pressure upon the ears, which is greatly increased by excitement, depression or extreme fatigue. Unseen hands appear to be pressing in at either side of the head. The actual noises are peculiar to the individual in both quantity and quality; there are cases of the “boiler-maker’s disease,” where the head is filled with a hammering which keeps time with the pulse. I have known people to be amazed at the “uncontrolled fury” of the deaf when their anger is fully aroused—perhaps by something which seems trivial enough. They do not realize how a sudden quickening of the heart action may start a great army of furies to shouting and smashing in the deaf man’s brain!

Again, the roaring and the pounding will start without warning, and then as suddenly fade to a dim murmur. It appears to diminish when the victim can concentrate his mind upon some cheerful subject, so I take it to be more of a mental or nervous disorder—not essentially physical. Many times I have observed that these noises become more violent and malignant whenever the mind is led into melancholy channels. They appear to be modified and softened in dreams, so I am thankful that I have been able to train myself into the ability to lie down and sleep when the clamor becomes unendurable. I meet people who pride themselves on their ability to go without sleep, and I shudder to think of their fate should they ever be marooned in the silence, since they appear to regard extra hours of sleep as a form of gross negligence at least! These night-owls tell me that they are the “pep” of society—its greatest need. I am not so sure of their mission. As I see it, the world has already too much “pep” for its own good. We need more “salt.”

You have doubtless noticed deaf people who go about with a weary, half-frightened expression, and have wondered why they have failed to “brace up” and accept their lot with philosophy. You do not realize how these discordant sounds and malignant voices are driving these deaf people through life as a haunted man is lashed along the avenues of eternal doom. Of course his will frequently becomes broken down, and his capacity for consistent and continuous labor is practically destroyed. Do you know that if you were forced to remain for several hours in a roaring factory you would come back to your friends showing the same symptoms of voice and manner which you notice in the deaf?

In my own case these noises have not been greatly troublesome, since I have persistently refused to listen to them. It is not unlikely that they are largely imaginary—although you are free to experiment by taking a double dose of quinine, which should give you a fair imitation of what many deaf people live with. The chief noise trouble that I have had is a sort of low roaring or murmuring, at times rising to an angry bellow, and then again dying to a low muttering. The deaf usually remember common noises heard in their youth, although I fancy that as the years go on our memory of sound changes with them. My private demonstration reminds me of the old sound of the ocean, pounding on the shores of the seaport town in New England where I was born. It seems to me now that the ocean was never quiet, except at low tide, and even then there came a low growl from the bar far out at the harbor entrance. I can remember lying awake at night as a child, listening to the pounding of the surf or the lap of the waves against the wharf. With a gentle east wind there was a low, musical murmur, but when the wind rose and worked to the north it seemed to me like a giant smashing at the beach, or like a magnified version of the Autumn flails pounding on barn floors far back among the hills. It seems to me now that I can hear and distinguish all those variations of sound in the noises within my head; I have often wondered if such memories ever come to those who have perfect hearing.

Poets and dreamers have enlarged upon the romantic quality of “the sad sea waves.” I once knew a woman who wrote very successful songs about the “shining sea,” though she never saw the ocean in her life. Those who live in the interior, far from the ocean, with never a view of any large body of water, are easily led to believe that the sounds of the sea are delightful companions. I often wish I could share my part of the performance with them! I would gladly exchange my constant sound companion for ten minutes of wind among the trees. Bryant says:

“There is society, where none intrude,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

True; but Bryant was not deaf. No doubt as a child he held a sea shell to his ear and listened to its murmuring with delight. But he could lay it aside when it became tiresome! One speaks from quite another point of view when incased for life within the shell. I think I know just how the Apostle John felt when, looking out from every direction from his weary island, he saw only the blue, rolling water. He wrote as part of his conception of heaven:

“There shall be no more sea!”

I agree with him fully, and yet I know people whose conception of heaven includes Byron’s apostrophe to the ocean. How can we all be satisfied?

Other curious sounds come to us as we sit in the silence. Some are interesting, a few are strange or delightful. I frequently seem to hear church bells gently chiming, just as they did years ago when the sound came over the hills of the little country town where I was a boy. The sound now seems to start far away, dim in the distance; gradually it comes nearer, until the tones seem to fall upon the ear with full power. They are always musical, never discordant; they go as suddenly and as unexpectedly as they come. And where do they come from? Can it be that dormant brain cells suddenly arouse to life and unload their charge of gentle memories? Or it may be—but you are not interested in what the deaf man comes to think of strange messengers who enter the silent world. You would not believe me were I to tell you all we think and feel about them.

When I asked my aurist about this he wanted to know if any particular incidents of my childhood were connected with the ringing of bells. I could remember two. It was the custom, years ago, for the sexton of the Unitarian Church to come and strike the bell when any member of the community died. There was one stroke for each year of their age. That was the method of carrying the news. The sexton did not pull the rope, but climbed into the belfry and pulled the tongue of the bell with a string. It was my duty to count the strokes, and thus convey the news to my deaf aunt. In that community we knew each other so well that this tolling the age gave us as much about it as one would now get over the telephone. And then the bell on the Orthodox Church over in the next valley! That always rang on Sunday, before our bell did, and I heard it softly and musically as the sound floated over us. I had been taught to believe that the Orthodox people had a very hard and cruel religion, and I used to wonder how their bell could carry such soft music. When I spoke of this the aurist smiled understandingly and said it fully explained why these musical sounds now come back to my weary brain.

Actual voices come to us at times. I have had words or sentences shouted lustily in my ears. In several cases while sitting alone at night reading or writing this conversation of the unseen has seemed so clear and natural that I have stopped and glanced about the room, or even moved about the house, half expecting to find some visitor. As a rule the sentences are incoherent, and are not closely connected with everyday life; they sometimes refer to things which have preyed upon my mind in previous days. Deaf friends have told me of direct and important warnings and suggestions they have received in this way, but I have known nothing of the sort. It does seem to me, however, that this shouting and incoherent talking usually refers to matters which I have deeply considered at times of depression, fatigue or strong excitement. I consider that, as in the case of the bells, it may mean the sudden stirring of brain cells which have stored up strongly expressed thoughts, and are in some way able to give them audible rendition to the deaf.

My aurist offers an ingenious explanation. He says that I can hear my own voice, and undoubtedly it is at some times clearer than at others. I may unconsciously “think out loud”; that is, go through the interesting performance of talking to myself without knowing that I am doing it. Perhaps if he were deaf himself he would not be quite so sure of his theory—nothing is so convincing as a fact. I remember that at one time my dentist was trying to persuade me that I ought to have a plate.

“But that is merely your theory,” I said. “You tell me that you can make a plate which will enable me to eat and talk in a natural manner. How do I know? I think a dentist, to be entirely successful, should be able to prove such statements from his own experience.”

For answer he gravely took a good-sized plate out of his own mouth. I had no idea that he had one! I have often wished that some of our skilled aurists might graft their theory of head noises upon practical experience.

Scientists and psychologists refer to these noises as subjective audition. I shall attempt no scientific discussion of the matter, as this book is intended to be a record of personal or related experience. All students of deafness seem to agree that we can hear sounds, definite noises and even words that are purely subjective. Certainly in some forms of insanity the victims hear voices commanding them to do this or that. I have known several persons apparently sane in all other matters who insist that unseen friends talk to them and give advice.

Some years ago I was permitted to make a careful study of members of a small religious community which was established near my farm. Its members were ordinary country people, for the most part of rather low mentality and narrow thought, yet with a curiously shrewd power of intuition. They were fanatics, and among other practices or “self-denials” they refused to eat anything which had to do with animal life. Thus they limited their diet to grain, vegetables and fruit. One man, who called himself “John the Baptist,” found this restriction a rigorous punishment, for he “liked to eat up hearty!” He wrestled in spirit for weeks, and finally told me that he had received an unanswerable argument straight from the Lord. In a moment of depression he had heard a voice from Heaven saying very distinctly:

“John, look at that big black horse!”

“I can see him right now!”

“Look at him! He is big and strong and can pull a plow all alone. Does he eat meat? No, he lives on grain and hay—the grass of the field! Now if that big horse can keep up his strength without meat, you can do the same, John!”

And John fully believed that he had held direct conversation with the Lord. No man could shake his faith in that. Undoubtedly it was a case of that subjective audition similar to what the deaf experience. John heard the conversation, or at least imagined that the words were spoken; they followed or grew out of his thought.

I myself have had enough experience along this line to make me very charitable with those who give accounts of this sort of thing. It is a question, however, as to just how much of the unseen one can hear and not be considered insane! While some of the deaf lack the imagination to carry out this strange experience, others realize that the public draws no distinct boundary between “oddity” and insanity, and are wary of repeating all the strange messages which come to them. I think it is beyond question that primitive people, Indians, isolated mountaineers or ignorant folk living in lonely places have this subjective side of their hearing greatly developed. This I believe to be also true of educated thinkers who are largely influenced by imagination. It seems perfectly evident to me that some persons of peculiar psychic power may really develop abilities unknown to those who possess the ordinary five senses. As I have stated elsewhere in this book, I predict that the study of this strange power is to develop during the next century, and that the afflicted are to lead in its investigation.

Speaking of head noises and imaginary voices, I have an idea that there are deaf men who took these things too seriously and came to think that such noises appear to all. This led to a condition which made it something of a trial to live with them. They have been railroaded off to some “sanitarium” or asylum, even though they may be entirely sane. I have met deaf men who realize all this, and therefore, as they express it, they “will not tell all they know.” I am convinced that for this reason much that might be valuable to the psychologist is lost to the world.

Another strangely interesting point in this connection is that the deaf hear perfectly in dreams. Even considering dream psychology, this is to me the most curious phenomenon of the condition. In dreams I seem to meet my friends just as in waking hours, and I hear their conversation, even to a whisper. I also hear music, but it is entirely of the old style which I heard as a young man, before my hearing failed. Unfortunately (or otherwise) the modern “jazz” and rag-time tunes mean nothing to me; I have never heard a note of them. In dreams I hear grand operas and songs of the Civil War and the following decade; these last are plaintive melodies for the most part, for New England, when I was a young man, was full of “war orphans,” who largely dictated the music of the period. But even in sleep, listening as easily as anyone to this old music or to the voices of friends, the thought comes to me constantly that I am really deaf, and that all this riot of music and conversation is abnormal. The psychological explanation that here is a dream struggle between a great desire and the fact which thwarts it in real life sounds plausible enough, but the deaf man still must ponder on the profound mystery of his dream-life. I do not know just how common this dream music or sleep conversation may be among the deaf. I am told that some deaf people rarely, if ever, have this experience, while others tell very remarkable stories of what comes to them in sleep. It must be understood that I am merely giving my own personal experience, without trying to record the general habit of the deaf.

Physicians relate some curious experiences in this line. In one case a deaf and dumb man, utterly incapable of hearing when awake, was made to hear music and conversation when asleep. On the other hand, a deaf man who could hear music and conversation in dreams could not be awakened even by loud noises close to his ear. He showed a mechanical response to the vibration by a slight flicker of the eyelids, but protested that he heard nothing of the racket. In most cases of hysterical deafness arising from nervous trouble or shell shock during the war the patient seemed to have forgotten how to listen. If he could be made to listen intently he usually made some gain in hearing. Mind control or the use of some hypnotic influence is actually helpful in many cases.

I feel confident that this subjective hearing and these strange voices are responsible for the reverence or fear with which the Indians and other ignorant people usually regard the deaf. It is not unlikely that the famous “voices” which inspired Joan of Arc resulted from a form of subjective audition. Seers or “mediums” probably have developed this quality until it gains for them the respect and awe of their constituents; this would account for their great influence with primitive peoples. I have even had evidence of a remarkable attitude of wonderment toward myself on the part of strange people among whom I have traveled.

I take it that all this subjective audition arises from thoughts and emotions filed away by memory somewhere in the mind. Business men run through their dusty files and find letters or documents that were put there years ago and forgotten. Here at last they are brought to recollection, and the memories associated with them start a train of ideas which may affect the mind like a joyous parade or a funeral procession. The deaf, lacking the healing or diverting influence of sound, live nearer to this subconscious stratum of memories and can more easily call them up; in time of worry or great fatigue they can more easily come to us. Much of the curious foolishness of intoxicated persons results from this rising of the subconscious.

I have no doubt that the original deaf man, far back in history, when men lived in caves without light or fire, was considered a gifted and highly favored individual. I think it likely that the voices and strange noises which come to us through subjective audition were considered by these primitive people as communications from the strange, mysterious powers which changed light into darkness, and brought cold, hunger and storm. Probably the original deaf man was given the warmest corner in the cave and the first choice of food, in order to propitiate the spirit which communicated with him. The modern deaf man, however, can take little pride in the good fortunes of his original representative, for he is made aware every day that his fellows no longer class him as a necessity in the world’s economy, unless perchance he is able to lend them money or cater to their necessities.

It has been clearly shown that the play of our emotions has a physical influence on the body. The working of such emotions as fear, anger or worry is destructive; joy or quiet pleasure helps to build up rather than to break down. The happier emotions are nearly always influenced or guided by sound—music, or gentle tones of the voice. Thus we may see how the deaf, deprived of this healing or harmonizing influence, except in dreams, may easily become fearsome and morbid. Once a woman loathed dishwashing with a hatred too bitter for this world. She was obliged to do it, and she was able to largely overcome her emotion of disgust by playing selections from the operas on the victrola while at her work. That music influenced the counter emotions of joy and beauty until they overcame the loathing. Her hands were in the dishwater, but her mind was in glory—and then what did her hands matter? We can all remember similar cases where music has filled the soul with a great joy and has lifted the body out of menial tasks or humiliation. But music is not for the deaf; we are shut away from it, and can find no substitute. We must work out our mental troubles as best we can.

CHAPTER IV
Facing the Hard Situation

The Beginnings of Deafness—The Cows in the Corn—Re-adjustments—The “House of the Deaf”—Spirits of the Past on Our Side—The Course in Philosophy—The Reverence of the Ignorant Herder—The Slave and the King.

Every deaf man will tell you that for months or years he was able to convince himself that there was no real danger of losing his hearing. Then, suddenly made evident by some small happening, Fate stood solidly in the road pointing a stern finger—and there was no denying the verdict: “You are on the road to silence!” How foolish and dangerous to fight off the disagreeable thought when most cases of deafness could be cured or greatly helped if taken in time! It is safe to say that if the first symptoms of defective hearing were as uncomfortable as a cinder in the eye, or as painful as an ordinary stomach-ache, the great majority of cases would be remedied before the affliction could lead its victims into the silent world. But deafness usually creeps in without pain or special warning; if it is caused by a disease of the inner ear there are probably few outward symptoms, and it will not be considered serious. Then suddenly it will demonstrate its strangle-hold upon life, and cannot be shaken off; it is like a tiger creeping stealthily through grass and brush for a spring upon the careless watcher by the campfire.

I first looked into the dim shadows of the silent country one night in Colorado. Our people had broken up a piece of raw prairie land, ditched water to it and planted corn. It was a new crop for the locality, but we succeeded in getting a good growth for cattle feed. In those days there were few fences, except the horizon and the sky, and cattle wandered everywhere, so as the corn developed we took turns guarding it. One night a small bunch of fat cattle on their way to market was herded about a mile from our cornfield. Feed was scarce on the range, and these steers were hungry. We could see them raise their heads and smell the corn. We knew they would stampede if they could break away. I was on guard; my duty was to ride my pony up and down on the side of the field nearest the herd.

Those who know the plains which roll away from the foothills of Northern Colorado will remember the brilliant starlit nights. The dry plains stretch away in rolling waves of brown to the east, while to the west the mountains lift their snow-caps far up into the sparkle of the starlight. It is a land of mystery. Any man who has ever lived there has felt at times that he would give all he possessed to be back there with the shapes that live in the starlight. Great dark shadows slip over the plains. You see them slowly moving and you wonder at them. How can they shift as they do when there are no clouds? That night, far over the prairie, I could see the fires which the herders had built; two or three horsemen were slowly circling about the bunched cattle.

It seemed entirely safe, and at one corner of the field I got off the pony and let him feed as I walked along the corn. The night was still, and I could hear nothing, but suddenly my little horse threw up his head, snorted and pulled at his picket pin. I fancied he sensed some sneaking coyote, until out of a shadow near the field I saw half a dozen black forms with white gleaming horns, running for the corn. Part of the herd had broken away, and as I mounted the snorting pony the sickening thought flashed in upon me that I could no longer hear them. Before we could turn back the herd forty or fifty steers had entered the corn. They went aimlessly, smashing and crashing their way through the stalks, and with the other riders I went in after them, but I could hardly hear them. I remember that in order to make sure I held my fingers to my right ear to shut out sound. In the shadow of the corn I ran directly into a steer! He was tearing his way along, but I did not know he was there until my hands touched him. Then for the first time I knew whither I was bound. Probably there is nothing quite so chilling to the heart, unless it be the sudden knowledge that some dear friend must soon walk down the road with death.

Deaf people who read this will recall incidents connected with the first real discovery of their affliction; up to that time they have been able to throw the trouble out of mind with more or less confidence. They could argue that it was due to a cold, or to some little trouble that would soon adjust itself; they were slightly annoyed, but soon forgot it. Then—perhaps they cannot keep up with the conversation; they seem suddenly to lose the noises which are a part of daily normal life. Neither their work nor their play can go on without a complete readjustment of their methods of communicating with others. Suppose society refuses to do more for them than they have ever done for the afflicted? Many a man has been made to realize how small a moral balance he has to draw upon when at last he knows that for the rest of his life he must depend largely upon the charity or indulgence of those with whom he associates. For this is really our condition in the silent world. A person of dominating power may push through life thinking himself a master, but we must live with the humiliation of realizing that our friends cannot regard us as normal. It is a staggering blow to the man or woman of fixed ambition, or of that warm personality which demands human sympathy and kindly companionship. The old life must be broken up.

My first thought was to seek “medical advice.” That is what we are always told to do. The air about the deaf man is usually vibrant with advice, and frequently the less attention he pays to it the better off he is. The local doctor in the nearest town was an expert with pills, powders and blisters, but he went no farther. Like many country doctors of that time, he was little more than an expert nurse, though if you had told him this he could have shaken a diploma in your face. I went to see him one evening after milking. He had a kerosene lamp with a tin reflector with which he illumed my ears; his report was that the trouble was caused by wax growing on the ear drum. If I would come in by daylight he would scrape it off with a small knife. There was nothing to be alarmed about; I would outgrow it. As a precaution he would advise me to blister the ears—or that part of the skull immediately behind them—and——

“My charge is two dollars!”

Since then several famous aurists have peered into my nose and ears; they told me the truth, and charged more than this doctor did for his wild guess.

Later I shall describe some of the local treatments to which my poor ears have been subjected. It would make a volume in itself were I to tell all, and it would record the experience of most country people who go down the silent road. Frequently the city man may obtain expert advice from aurists who fully understand that they are dealing with an interior nerve or brain disease. Most of us who were “brought up” in the country fell into the hands of physicians who appeared to think deafness is what they call a “mechanical disease,” much like the sprain of the knee or wrist. That country doctor saw only the wax on the ear drum, when the real trouble was far inside. So we are blistered and oiled and irrigated—and the real seat of the trouble is not reached. Of course I should have found some one competent to treat my case. That is easily said, but the great majority of young men in my day were without capital, quite incapable of taking advice, and they labored under the conviction that any public admission of serious disease would be considered a weakness that was like a stigma.

I have been singularly unsuccessful in obtaining original impressions from deaf people in trying to learn from them just what were their sensations when it became evident, past all argument, that they were to walk softly through ever-increasing silence. It would seem that they rarely have great imagination; perhaps silence, and a lack of the stimulant of sound, destroys that faculty. Psychology estimates that of all the senses hearing has the greatest influence over the emotions and the morals. I fancy that the violent effort to readjust life habits to a new existence bewilders most of us, so that the mind is incapable of working in exactly the old way. Apparently many of the deaf fall into a morbid, hopelessly despondent frame of mind, which does not permit any reasonable and useful research into the habits and landmarks which characterize a strange country. I know how useless it is to tell the ordinary deaf man that it is a rare privilege to know and to study the ideas which special messengers bring to us in the silent world. I know that what I tell him is true, yet I am forced to agree with him when he says that he would give it all for the privilege of hearing a hand-organ playing on a street corner. Still, it is a part of the game for us to believe that in many ways the deaf are the favored of the Lord.

As far as my own experience goes, I know that I went about for some time in a daze. In spite of the verdict of the country doctor I realized that my hearing was surely failing, and I remember that I began to take stock of my mental and physical assets for the great game of life that was opening up before me. When a man does that fairly he will realize how industry and skill are changing all lines of life. When I was a boy playing ball we always put the poorest, most awkward player in right field. That was the jumping-off place in baseball. As the game is now played right field offers opportunity for the best player of the nine. After standing off and looking at myself fairly I was forced to conclude that I was not fitted to enter the silent world with any great hope of making more than the most ordinary living there. Try it yourself. Cast up your personal account, giving a fair valuation to the things you can do really well, and then tell me what sort of a living you could make for your family if tomorrow you found yourself totally blind or totally deaf. Like many young men I had received no special training for any life enterprise; I knew no trade and had no particular “knack” at tools or machinery. I had attended a country school and one term of high school, but had never been taught the true foundation principles of any of my subjects. I had read many books without direction or good judgment, with no definite end in view. The sum total of my life assets seemed to be that I was an expert milker and could take care of cattle; the most promising position for me that of a rather inferior hired man. Thousands of men have gone through life with a poorer outfit, but they have had, in addition, the boon of perfect hearing; how great an advantage this is no one can know until he must face the world without it.

Every healthy young man looks forward to the time when he may build four strong walls about his life. These walls are home, wife, a piece of land and power. In the flush of youth we feel that if we build this square and live inside we may laugh at adversity and say in our hearts, “The world is mine!” But this becomes a troubled dream when one comes to understand that he must crawl through life crippled—with one great faculty on crutches.

It is rather curious how at such a time the mind grasps at meanings hardly considered before, and makes new and rapid applications from things which formerly seemed of no consequence. I remember picking up at this time a school reader which one of the children was studying. My eye fell on the old familiar poem—how many of us have performed a parrot-like recitation of it in the little old schoolhouse!

“Oh, solitude! where are the charms

Which sages have seen in thy face?

Better dwell in the midst of alarms

Than reign in this horrible place.

I am out of humanity’s reach,

I must finish my journey alone;

Never hear the sweet music of speech,

I start at the sound of my own!”

I had read this many times before without getting its full power. Now I saw that I was drifting with other deaf men out of reach of the “soft music of speech.” Suppose that I were to end my days on a desert island of complete silence! The idea haunted me for days, and I thought it out to the end. At last it came to me that Robinson Crusoe and Alexander Selkirk were but examples of brave spirits who could not be conquered by ordinary conditions. Other men have been marooned or swept ashore upon deserted or unknown islands—men of feeble will, without stern personal power. They made a struggle to hold on to civilization, but finally gave up, surrendered to natural forces, and either perished or reverted to barbarism. They, “heirs of all the ages,” renounced the progress of their race and went back nearer to the brute. Crusoe and Selkirk were made of sterner stuff. They were not to be beaten; out of the crudest materials they made home and companions and retained self-respect and much of the sweetness of life. Each made his own house in a new world, fashioned it by sheer force of will and faith. I made up my mind that I would do likewise. I would build my own house in the silent world and would make it a house of cheer.

But who will help the deaf man to build his house? Where can he find the material? I meet deaf people who complain bitterly because the people with whom they work and live do not treat them with full understanding and consideration. Let us be honest, and remember how little we ever went out of our way to stand by the deaf before our own affliction put us out of the social game! No doubt we laughed with the others at the queer blunders of deaf people, or let them see our annoyance when communication with them became a trouble. The chances are that we will receive fairer treatment from our associates than we ourselves gave to the afflicted in our best days. As for me, I vote the world a kindly place; people treat me reasonably. They are not cruel, but many of them are busy or selfish, and I fully realize that it is no pleasure for the average man or woman to attempt communication with the deaf. I do not blame them for avoiding it. And even when they use us well, from the very nature of the situation which separates us they can help but little in the building of these isolated houses of the silent world.

But I have lived to learn a strange thing. The silent world is peopled with the ghosts and shadows of men and women who have lived in other ages. Somehow they seem to feel that they would like to relive their lives, and repeat their message to humanity; but only the blind, the deaf and those otherwise afflicted seem to be able to meet them fully. The great undying souls who have made or modified history and human thought live in books, pictures and memories, but only in the world of silence can they give full comfort and power. For we come to know them so intimately that we learn how each one of them went about his great work carrying a cross of some kind—and the bond of sympathy to the afflicted grows stronger. You with light physical crosses perhaps think that you take full inspiration from Milton. Have you ever thought how much clearer his message can be to the blind or the deaf? Here, then, is our help and our hope. Our ears are not dull to the reverberating echoes of the past, and we can reach back for the best worldly solace—the experience and advice of those who have fought the good fight, and won.

It would be nonsense for anyone to claim that he goes through this preparatory course in philosophy with patience or good temper. He misses too much. The future is too uncertain. The dread of losing the rest of his hearing and the thought of the blight which this would mean to his future will at times drive the deaf man to desperation. At times he is almost willing to take the advice of Job’s wife—

“Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die!”

And some of us never gain the faith and philosophy which make life in the silence endurable. Others acquire them slowly by a burning process which scars, but in the end gives them new strength. I remember two incidents which influenced me during the first days of my realization of what was ahead. They are of distinctly opposite character.

One day the regular herder was sick and I took his place. He was a “lunger,” a victim of tuberculosis, who had waited too long before coming to Colorado. At one time I worked with three of these men, and I came to know how their disease could send them to the top round of ecstasy and to the lowest level of depression in a single day. I have seen them get up in the morning dancing at the very joy of life, planning their “going home” to surprise the old folks with their cure. Yet by night perhaps they put a handkerchief to the mouth and took it away stained with blood—and their spirits would fall to earth abruptly. They are even more distressing companions than inhabitants of the silence who feel that they have lost life, fortune and future with the closing of their ears.

This herder had built up trouble for me without telling me about it. The deaf man usually runs blindly into that form of trouble every week of his life; it is a sort of legacy which others leave at his door. Down the river some two miles lived a ranchman who had seeded wheat and made a garden on a low flat where the river curved past a bluff. The herder had carelessly let the cattle get away from him the previous day, and before he could stop them several cows had trampled through this garden with all the exasperating nonchalance that a fat and stupid cow is capable of showing. When a man has lived for a year or so on “sow belly,” pancakes and potatoes, and when he is naturally inclined to a profane disposition of language, he knows precisely what to do to the responsible party. As I came along the river behind the herd, I saw this ranchman and his wife advancing to meet me. He opened up at long range, but as I did not know what it was all about, and, moreover, could not hear him, I kept on riding right up to meet him. My pony had once belonged to a mule driver noted for his remarks to mules, and the little horse actually seemed to recognize a master in this excited individual. This man’s boy afterwards told me that as he advanced his father was relating in a dozen ways in which he proposed to punish me. Shooting, it appeared, was too easy. He would meet me man to man and roll me in the cactus, etc., and worse! Unfortunately, I did not hear at all until I got close to him, and then his breath had failed somewhat, so that he was not doing himself full justice. So I rode right up to him and asked him the most foolish of questions—so he must have thought:

“What can I do for you?”

He looked at me in amazement.

“Are you deaf?”

I told him that I could not hear well.

“Ain’t you heard a word of what I’ve been handing you?”

“Hardly a word!”

“Well, by God, if that don’t beat all! I’ve wasted all them words on a deaf man!”

There was genuine sorrow in his voice as he spoke of the loss sustained by society through my failure to hear. All his anger was gone.

“Come,” he said. “Get off your horse. The woman’s got dinner ready. Come in and eat.”

“But suppose the cows get on your wheat?”

“Darn the wheat. I don’t make a new friend like you every day. Anyway, the boy can herd ’em.”

He put his boy on my pony and we went into the house, where over coffee, fried pork, riz biscuits and rhubarb sauce we pledged eternal friendship. His wife was a very happy woman as she explained matters to me.

“My man is terrible profane at times. Some men go and get drunk now and again to relieve their feelings, but my man don’t do that. He just swears something awful, and when it’s all over he’s all right again. He was awful to you, but when he found out you didn’t hear him, he was terrible shocked, and came out of his mad like the man in the Scriptures. He met his match at last, and I do hope he’ll quit.”

I have heard that the Indians never torture or mutilate a deaf man. They seem to think that he is specially protected by the Great Spirit. Here was a white man with much the same feeling, and I have seen a like forbearance in other cases. I think the great majority of human beings seldom or never take deliberate advantage of the hard of hearing; they may be amused at our blunders or annoyed by our mistakes, but they hesitate to treat us with the severity they could justly accord one in full possession of his faculties. Some deaf man could probably point to bitter personal experiences, but this is my own feeling. The above encounter also helps to prove what I feel to be a psychological truth—that most of our fear comes as a result of sounds registered by the brain. I frankly confess that if I could have heard this big man I should not have gone within a hundred and fifty feet of him. I shall discuss this phase of fear later; but I learned early in my affliction that:

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.”

One January night I was caught out in a Colorado blizzard. Only those who have felt and seen the icy blasts pour down out of the mountain canyons and roar over the plains, driving the hard flakes like the volley from a thousand machine guns, can realize what it means to face such a blast. The cattle turn from such a wind and drift before it, half-frozen, heads lowered, moaning with pain. A herd of horses will bunch together, heads at the center, ready to lash out at the wolves. I was riding carelessly, rubbing my frosted ears, when the pony stepped into a prairie-dog hole, fell and threw me into the snow. Then with a snort, reins dragging, he started at a wild run directly into the storm. I stood in the snow, in the midst of whirling blackness, with nothing to guide me except the rapidly filling tracks of the deserting horse. I knew he was headed for home, and I followed as best I could, feeling for his tracks in the snow. After wading for a few rods, I saw far ahead what seemed like a dim star, close to the earth. It grew brighter as I approached, and sooner than I expected I stumbled upon a small group of buildings and a sod corral—The star proved to be the light in the house window. My horse stood with drooping head in front of the door.

Then the door opened and revealed a sheep herder. He had on a fur coat and bags were tied about his feet. Out he came with his lantern, and we put the horse in a shed. The air was filled with a low and plaintive crying from the sheep in the corral, bunched together where the snow was drifting in over them. There was nothing we could do for them, so we made our way to the house.

It was a tiny one-room affair, built of sods piled up like bricks, with a roof made of poles covered with sods and wild hay; it boasted a wooden floor. There were a stove, a table, three chairs and a small cot. In these days there would be a phonograph and a collection of the latest music, but this herder’s only constant companions were a dog and a canary bird. For fuel there was a small pile of cottonwood sticks, a box of buffalo chips, and a barrel containing bunches of wild hay tied into knots. Two other men were there, also driven in by the blizzard. I shall always feel that the mental picture revealed to me by the contrast between those two men in that lonely hut had the greatest deciding influence in helping me to fit myself for the life of the silent world.

They were both white-haired old men, though full of vigor. One I recognized as the cattle king of Northern Colorado. His cattle were everywhere; he owned half a town and an army ran at his beck and call, yet he could barely write his own name. It was said he always signed his checks “Z,” because he could not be sure of spelling “Zachariah” properly. He had no poetry or imagination, except what he could drink out of a jug. In the old days, when the plains were ruled by brute force, this man was happy, for life becomes tolerable only as we can equal our friends in manners and education. But how the plains had changed! Schools, churches, music, culture, were working in with the towns—the leaven which was to change the soggy biscuit of the old life to the “riz bread” of the new. That strange, fateful, overmastering thing we call education was separating the people of the new prairie towns into classes more distinct than money and material power had ever been able to create. This old man had railed and cursed at the change, for a premonition of what was to come had entered his heart, and something told him that his blunt philosophy of life was all wrong. In this country a man may climb from poverty up to wealth, or he may leave wealth to others, but it is not possible for him to climb in the same way up into education, and he cannot leave these benefits to those who follow him. The old man had begun to fear that he had climbed the wrong ladder. There he sat, bitter and hateful, chained to prejudice, the slave of ignorance. He had no companion to share his narrow prison except his money—the most useless and irritating single companion that any man can have for the harvest years.

His companion was about the same age, an educated man, a “lunger,” forced to spend the rest of his life in these dry plains. I had seen him before at the county convention, where there had been talk of nominating him for county clerk—a much-desired political job. He might have been nominated but for his own actions. He stood straight up in the convention and said:

“Gentlemen, I refuse to let my name go before this convention. I have been approached by certain people who would compromise my manhood, and now I would not accept your nomination, even if you offered it.”

“Made a fool of himself. Had a cinch and threw it away!”

That was the way they talked in the street afterwards; but I remember going home that night with this thought dancing through my brain:

“I wish I could get up and do such things.”

He would have ranked as a poor man, or at best one of modest competence, yet in his enforced exile from home and friends he was sustained and comforted by a mighty host of men and women who came trooping out of history at his call.

There they sat in the dimly lighted room—the cattle king and the scholar, a slave of disease. Their chosen companions were about them, and these had turned the king into a slave, the slave into a monarch. For one there were only the spirits of hopeless gloom, grinning, snarling as though they knew that fate disdains money in exchange for the things which alone can bring comfort and courage into the shadow of years. For the other man the dim room was crowded with a goodly company—the great spirits who live forever in song and story, who gladly come back from the unknown country at the call of those who have learned to know them.

I saw all this, and then I seemed to see myself in the years that were coming, in the shadow of the impending affliction, a resident of the silent world. It was evidently to be a choice of masters. I remember now as though it were yesterday how on that howling night in that dim sod house I made a desperate vow that I would, if need be, go through fire and acid before I would end my days or sit alone in the silence as mentally hopeless and impotent as that “cattle king.” And I had been ready to say “me, too,” only a short time before to the cowboy who said:

“If I could round up and brand the money old Zack can, I wouldn’t care how little else I knew.”

Take a man with dull hearing, little or no education, no surplus capital—nothing except health and a dim idea that “education” will prove the tool to crack the safe wherein is locked opportunity—and what college will take and train him? I am sure that the colleges to which my boys have gone would never have given me a chance. But one fine day in September found me entering the gate of the Michigan Agricultural College. I do not think I ever passed the examination—I think the instructors felt somewhat as the Indians do about the deaf. At any rate, I entered, not knowing what I wanted or what I was fitted for. It might be interesting to see what sort of an education may be picked up in this go-as-you-please manner, or what is required to fit a man for a happy life in the silent world. However needful it may be for a deaf man to acquire excellence in some definite work, it is most of all important that he soak in all possible poetry, human sunshine and inspiration against the time that he must enter prison.

CHAPTER V
“A Heart For Any Fate”

Early Adventures—From Boston to the West—The Milkman and the Ear Trumpet—The “Milk Cure”—The Office of the Apple—Cases of Mistaken Identity—The Prohibitionist and the Missing Uncle George.

Until I went to Colorado as a young man to work on a dairy ranch, I did not fully realize the possibilities of deafness. I made a long jump to the Rocky Mountains. In those days it was something of a leap in longitude, culture and occupation. I had been working in a publishing house, and for several years part of my job had consisted in running errands for a group of the most distinguished authors ever brought together in America. Of course, no gentleman can be a hero to his valet, but a great author can be more than a hero to his errand boy. I went out once and bought a bag of peanuts for this merry group of serious-minded men; I suppose I am the only living person who ever ate peanuts with Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier and Aldrich. I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes put a peanut shell on his thumb and shoot it across the room at John G. Saxe, as a boy would shoot a marble. To me the most impressive of all that group of supermen was John Greenleaf Whittier. He was quite deaf, and the affliction troubled him greatly. Some of the critics think that his inability to hear accurately accounts for some of his slips of rhyme. To me the remarkable thing is that in all Whittier’s writings I can find only one indirect reference to his severe affliction. This is in the poem entitled “My Birthday”:

Better than self-indulgent years

The outflung heart of youth,

Than pleasant songs in idle years

The tumult of the truth.

* * * * * * *

And if the eye must fail of light,

The ear forget to hear,

Make clearer still the Spirit’s sight,

More fine the inward ear!

There could be no finer advice for the deaf. I think Whittier’s gentle and placid philosophy (whose only sting was for slavery) was ripened and mellowed by his narrow life, which was still more closely circumscribed by the years of silence. But how strangely does compensation spring from a bitter root, and how surely are its best fruits reserved for “character”! Denied wide experience and education, deprived of one important avenue of approach to humanity, nevertheless Whittier’s voice came from his lonely hills with a rugged power all its own. And the message still rings true and sweet. He is truly a noble Apostle of the Silence.

It was indeed something of a jump from such associations as these to a milking-stool beside a bad-smelling cow in a dusty barnyard, or out among the cactus on the dry plains. Then I soon found that I was on the road to silence. In that dry country those who naturally suffer from catarrh are sure to have trouble with the head and ears unless they can have expert treatment in time. Our ranch was just outside a growing town; the cattle were herded on the open prairie. We milked our cows in the open air in Summer and in low sheds in Winter; the milk was peddled from door to door, dipped out of an open can, so that the dust might increase the amount of milk solids. That was long before these days of certified milk or sanitary inspection; I doubt if there was a single milk inspector in the whole of Colorado. Such milk as we handled could never be sold for human consumption in these critical modern days. Happily for us, we had never heard of germs or bacteria. We doubtless consumed thousands of them with every meal—and rather liked the taste!

Our custom was to drive up in front of a house and ring a large bell until someone came out with pail or pitcher. The milk was dipped out of the can and poured into the open dish. On an early morning in cool weather some of our customers were slow in responding to the bell. At those times we would ring patiently until the side door would open a narrow crack and a hand would appear holding a receptacle for the milk. Whenever I saw those hands extended, I thought of Whittier’s terrible lines on Daniel Webster: “Walk backward with averted face.” That was the way we were expected to approach the door.

On one occasion the milkman had forgotten his glasses, and he was somewhat near-sighted. He rang his bell before one house for several minutes with no visible response. Finally he saw the front door open, and what seemed to him a tin bucket was thrust through the opening. Being somewhat familiar with the vagaries of lazy housewives, he filled a quart measure with milk and backed up to the door. He was careful, for hardly ten minutes before a lady holding out a hand in much the same way had plainly cautioned him:

“Walk straight now, and if you bat an eye at this door I’ll call my husband!”

In a community where women were a minority such a command was emphatic, so the milkman proceeded with care and circumspection. Peering about uncertainly, he carefully poured the milk into what he supposed was a milkpail. There was a tremendous commotion within, for quite innocently he had sent a forcible message into the world of silence. It later appeared that the woman of the house was ill and had been greatly disturbed by the bell, so Aunt Sarah had volunteered to end the noise. But Aunt Sarah, though a woman of large and very superior intentions, was not an expert on noises. She was very deaf, and made use of one of the old-fashioned trumpets with a mouthpiece as large as a good-sized funnel. She had not been able to fully complete her toilet, so she did not throw the door wide open; but in order to hear what the milkman had to say for himself, she made an opening just wide enough to thrust out the mouthpiece of her trumpet. The man poured the milk into it—literally giving Aunt Sarah “an earful.” I have heard of several cases where a great nervous shock or a long continuance of trouble has suddenly destroyed the hearing. I wish I might say that Aunt Sarah’s hearing was restored or improved by this milk treatment; the dispenser of the liquid declares that it had a striking effect upon her voice, but that she was quite unable to appreciate his explanation. Were I to repeat some of her remarks, I should add to the force of this narrative, but hardly to its dignity.

The town of Greeley was organized as a temperance community. It was recorded in every deed or lease that the title was to be forfeited at any time that liquor was sold on the premises, and this regulation was absolutely enforced, for the settlers were a band of earnest “cranks,” who saw to it that the wheels went ’round. The result was that this town contained more cases of near-delirium tremens than any other place of equal size in the State. It came to be a favorite plan for those who had been elsewhere on a spree to come to Greeley to sober up. They could get no liquor except what they brought, and most of that was taken away from them. The first time I drove the milk wagon I encountered one of these “patients.” At a lonely place on the outskirts of town a disreputable character suddenly started up from the roadside and caught the horse’s bridle with his left hand, meanwhile pointing a long forefinger at me. He was red-eyed, unshaven and trembly, and I could not hear a word he said. I took it to be “Money or your life”—and who ever knew a milkman to have money? It turned out that he was demanding a quart of new milk with which to help float over a new leaf. I had nothing in which to serve the milk except the quart measure, but I filled that and handed it over. The man sat down on the grass and slowly drank his “medicine”; then I washed the measure in an irrigating ditch and was prepared for the next customer.

This man told me that he was making a desperate effort to recover from a protracted spree, and it was the general belief that a diet of warm milk was the best treatment. It came to be a common thing for us to meet these haggard, wild-eyed sufferers, and help them to the milk cure. I have seldom heard of the treatment elsewhere. It was there considered a standard remedy, though I have never been able to understand the psychology or the physiology of it. A friend of mine who is quite deaf tells me of another experience with a new cure for the drink habit.

He took his vacation one Summer on a steamer running from Buffalo up the Great Lakes. Among other supplies he carried a peck of good apples. I cannot say that apples are to be recommended as a cure for deafness, but to many of us they are better than tobacco for companionship. The first day out, while waiting for his fellow-passengers to realize that a deaf man was not likely to eat them up or convey some terrible disease, my friend took two mellow Baldwins, found a shady place on the forward deck, and prepared for a lazy lunch. He was about to bite into the first of his fruit when an excited man hurried up from below and began talking eagerly. The deaf man could not imagine what it was all about, and while he was trying to explain the newcomer snatched the apple out of his hand and buried his teeth far into it. My friend was reminded of a wild animal half-crazed for food. At this moment an anxious-faced woman appeared. The man turned to her, and with his mouth well filled shouted:

“Mary, you’ll find it in the false bottom of my bag. Get rid of it at once.”

The woman disappeared on the run, while the man finished the first apple and held out his hand for the other. Presently she returned with two bottles of whiskey, and, going to the side of the steamer, she deliberately threw them overboard. Then, while her husband kept at the apples, she made the deaf man understand.

It appeared that her man was a hard drinker, though he was trying with all his poor enfeebled will to free himself from the slavery. He had tried many “cures,” but the only way to overcome the desire for whiskey was to eat sour apples when the craving became too strong. It did not always work, but frequently this remedy was successful. This trip was a vacation for him and his wife, and just before the boat had started some of his companions had brought him two bottles of whiskey, which he had hidden in the bottom of his bag, and he was waiting for an opportunity to “enjoy life.” All the morning he had been prowling about the boat trying to fight off the craving. Finally down in the hold he had come upon what he called a “funeral outfit.” There was a coffin—but let him tell it.

“That coffin was going as freight to the last resting-place, and it made me realize that I was going by express to the same place. Beside it stood an undertaker—one of those melancholy individuals with black burnsides and a long chin. He looked at me, and I thought he was saying:

‘Come on, old man! This is what rum is bringing you to. Give me the job.’”

“I knew right there that I must decide between that coffin and a barrel of apples.”

There came upon him a fierce craving to brace his nerves with some of the whiskey in his bag. He ran through the ship praying as fervently as a drowning man for some saving straw. He saw the deaf man with the Baldwin apple, and he ran to the fruit like a hunted animal—eager to bite into it and to ease his heated tongue against its sour juice.

Since I first heard the story I have investigated many cases, and have never found a heavy drinker who was at the same time a large consumer of raw apples. And I have run upon several cases where sour apples eaten freely have safely tided men past the desire to drink. Surely a prohibition country must be one flowing with milk and apples!

We founded the Apple Consumers’ League largely on that theory. Something over twenty-five years ago I was lunching at a New York restaurant. There was a bumper apple crop that year, and a poor sale for it. Looking over the bill of fare, I found oranges, prunes and bananas, and an idea struck me.

“Bring me a baked apple.”

“We ain’t got none.”

“What, no baked apples? I thought this was an American place.”

“Sorry, boss, but we ain’t got none.”

By this time everyone within fifty feet was listening. Soon came an anxious-looking man, rubbing his hands and trying to smile.

“Nothing the matter with the food, I hope.”

I could not hear much that he said, and it did not matter. I did my best to deliver a public lecture on the apple, and all around me people were nodding as if to say:

“I’d order one if I could get it.”

The manager was impressed, and that night for supper he had “Baked Apple with Cream” written into his card in red ink. Later he came to me and asked names of varieties and where they could be found. As a result of this experiment a few of us founded the “American Apple Consumers’ League.” We pledged ourselves to call for apple in some form whenever we sat at any public table. Our declaration was cast in rhyme:

Apple, apple, call for apple

Everywhere you go.

Closely scan the bill of fare,

And if apple is not there

Call the landlord down with care!

He will come with smirking manner

Offering the soft banana,

Or the orange—be not shaken

In the job you’ve undertaken.

Call for apple! Call for apple!

With the problem closely grapple.

Some commercial travelers took it up, and soon nearly every restaurant in the country began providing baked apple. There was one result which we did not anticipate. The finer apples do not “stand up” well on baking; they are delicious, but they flatten to a jelly. The public demands something that stands up like an apple in shape. This has created a great demand for the coarse-fleshed fruit of inferior quality, which will stand up well in the pan.

We came upon another good office of the apple in this campaign. It is an ideal toothbrush. We found that the bacteria which cause pyorrhea are weakened by the mild acid, thus a wash of vinegar and water is an excellent remedy. This has been verified by dentists, and a mellow, sour apple eaten raw is likewise helpful. Using a sour apple as a toothbrush ought to be a popular method of scrubbing the teeth.

I have perhaps spent unnecessary time over these matters, but in my study of men who live in the silent world I have found a number who consider the deaf man justified in finding solace in drink. It is a most foolish prescription, but I fear the practice is all too common. The deaf are subject to periods of deep depression, and the argument is that the moderate use of alcohol will brighten their lives. I can think of nothing more pitiful or ridiculous than an intoxicated deaf man. Alcohol is the worst possible companion for the silence. There, if anywhere, the faithless and deceitful comrades of life lead only to darkness and misery. The deaf man needs every moral brace that life can give him; no other character who tries to find a place and to adjust himself to his fellow-men has greater need of the discipline which self-denial alone can give. Only the finer and more substantial hopes are worth considering when music no longer greets us and well-loved voices fade away or lose all their tenderness, when they become harsh and discordant sounds. Bottled sunshine, taken from coal or the electric wire, may be a fair substitute for daylight, but bottled happiness will finally bring nothing but misery to the deaf.

And yet you never can tell how people will size you up. There was a deaf man who became greatly interested in prohibition. He could not even drink coffee as a stimulant. He was to be chairman of the State prohibition convention, and so started on a night train for the meeting. Just before retiring he read over his speech, and then crawled into his berth very well satisfied with himself. About midnight he was awakened by a heavy hand on his shoulder. You must remember that it is a great shock for the deaf to be rudely started from sleep in this way; it is then impossible for them to grasp any new situation quickly. In the dim light of the Pullman our deaf man saw the figure of a man who was fumbling about in his suitcase. When he saw that he had awakened the sleeper, this intruder left the case, opened the curtains and held out his hand with some object presented straight at the deaf man’s head. As he was evidently asking some question, the deaf man imagined that he was a train robber presenting a pistol with a “Hands up,” “Money or your life,” or some such appropriate remark. The prohibition orator thrust up his hands and said:

“I’m deaf. Take it all!”

The “train robber” talked for a while and then lowered his hand, took the deaf man by the arm and led him to the smoking-room. There the “robber” turned out to be the colored porter, with no pistol, but a glass bottle in his hand. Finally, he slowly and laboriously wrote out the following:

“Man in lower four sick. Has got to have brandy. Says you look like a sport and probably have it on you. Can you fill this bottle?”

They had taken our prohibition friend for the other sort of a “rum-punisher.” Such cases of mistaken identity are quite common to the deaf, and some of them are never fully untangled.

Once when I entered a crowded dining-room in New York City a young woman jumped up from a table and greeted me with every evidence of affection. I had never seen her before, and was greatly embarrassed, especially as I could not hear a word she said. I tried to explain, but she continued talking rapidly, holding me by the arm. Of all the people present, no one thought of coming to my aid except the colored waiter. He was the good Samaritan who talked to the lady and wrote out her story for me on the back of his order card. She thought I was her Uncle George, who had agreed to meet her there. She insisted that I was playing a practical joke in pretending that I was only a plain and somewhat bewildered deaf man. Finally she obtained a side view of my face which convinced her of her mistake, and then, greatly startled by the publicity she had caused, she hurried away. To this day I do not know who “Uncle George” was or if he ever found his niece. My colored interpreter, however, is still on duty, and frequently writes out for me the conversations of people near by.

CHAPTER VI
Memories of Early Life

Reflection versus Conversation—Old Memories—The Lecture and the Whipping—Education and the Stick—Ridicule Unbearable to the Deaf—The Office Fight—The Dangers of Bluffing.

The deaf man may not excel in conversation, but he is usually strong on reflection. He has plenty of time, for his life is roughly divided into three chief periods, working, sleeping and thinking. It may safely be said that the character and temper of the deaf are determined rather by their thought than by their work. The greater part of their thinking is a form of mental analysis. They like to go back to the beginning of things. That is why the deaf man is such a remarkably superior specimen of a “grouch” when he puts himself to the task of analyzing his own troubles. If you could read the thoughts of the deaf as they sit by themselves without book or work you would find that they are searching the past to find something which may be compared to their present experience.

It is a curious mental sensation, probably far different from anything that comes to you in your world of sound, unless it comes in moments of depression, or when you are deeply stirred by old memories. Sometimes in the evening we become tired of reading and we cannot join in the music or chatter about us; it is too dark to work outdoors, and we have accomplished enough for the day. So we amuse ourselves by trying to go back to the beginnings of things. When did I first fall in love with the portly lady who sits at the other side of the fire? How much smaller was she then? When did I find the first gray hair? When did I first discover that my eyes had failed so that I could not read signs across the way? When did I begin to discover something of the real life difference between work and play? We think these things out to no particular advantage, except that perhaps they may form a text for a moral lecture to our young people. And now I find that my children very properly pay little attention to my lectures. I have stopped delivering them since going back to the original dissertation given for my benefit.

The old gentleman who brought me up was much addicted to the lecture cure for youthful depravity. He would seat me in the corner on a little cricket, and with his long forefinger well extended would depict the sin and laziness of “this young generation” whenever I forgot to water the horses or to feed the hens. I can see him now, with his spectacles pushed up to the top of his bald head, and that thick finger projected at me as he recounted the hardships of his own boyhood, and his own faithful and unfailing service. What a remarkable boy he must have been! Then his wife, who was very deaf, and, more unfortunately, very inquisitive, would appear at the door and shout: “What say?” Her husband would patiently gather his lungs full of air, make a trumpet of his hands and roar in her ear:

“I’m telling the boy about the terrible sin and danger of this young generation. What kind of a world will it be, I ask you, when such boys as that grow up to control things? It will be another Babylon, and I don’t want to live to see it.”

And his wife, getting only a word here and there, would quote some appropriate passage from Isaiah and go back to her work well satisfied that she had done her duty.

“Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel:” And now it seems to me, as I sit here, a gray-haired man of the silent world, that I have seen many of the signs and wonders, though I did not recognize them as they passed by. That “sinful young generation” has grown up, and men of my age may be said to control the nation. It seems to me that it is a good world after all, and I believe that my mischief-making children will grow up into a steadily developing generation which will make it better yet. For here in the silent world we learn to smile at youthful antics, and to have great charity for them.

The earliest incident of my childhood that I can remember is the time my father pretended to give us a whipping. My older brother and I had been sent to bed in disgrace, to wait for father to come home and administer punishment. I can just recall that we were up in a New England attic, in the bed at the head of the stairs, surrounded by a collection of trunks, boxes and old rubbish which a thrifty housewife always puts “upstairs.” She is too economical to throw them away, and too neat to have them in sight downstairs. I think the town bell was faintly ringing, as it always did at six o’clock, and there was a sound like a gentle tapping as the water lapped at the wharf in high tide. I can just dimly remember the sunshine streaming in through the dusty window as we lay there in bed. The dust danced and floated in it like a flock of tiny flies. Since then I have read much of history. There have been many occasions when brave souls have waited for death or an ominous sentence. These scenes haunt the deaf; we cannot talk and laugh them away as others do. We must put down our book and go back in memory, seeking something in our own lives which may even remotely resemble what we have read. That is part of the penalty which must come with the silence. I remember reading a powerful description of Louis XVI on the night before his execution. A well-meaning, easy-going man, he had never been able to realize the serious side of life until it suddenly peered in through his window with the hideous face of Revolution. Then, face to face with death, he rose to that dignity “which doth become a king.” As I read that passage I put my book down, and, ridiculously enough, there flashed into my mind the picture of these two little boys waiting for the coming of father with his stick. We had determined that we would not cry, no matter how hard he hit us. That was our nearest approach to “dignity.”

I think that even then my hearing was a little defective. I heard my father come in below, and mother’s clear voice was certainly intended for our hearing.

“Now, Joseph, you go right up and whip those boys! They would not mind me, and you must do it.”

All through my life I have somehow managed to hear the unpleasant remarks or thorns of life. We deaf usually miss the bouquets. Poor father! The Civil War was raging, and he had volunteered. My young people seem to think that the Civil War was a mere skirmish beside the great World War just ended. Perhaps so, if we count only money and men, yet our part in this recent conflict was but a plaything in intense living, in sentiment, and breaking up of family life, as compared with the war of the sixties. Father was to leave home for the front in less than a week. He was captain of the local company, and should probably have been stronger in family discipline. But his heart was tender. He did not want to whip his boys, and he protested, as many a man has done. I could not hear what he said, but I knew from the expression on my brother’s face that he was protesting. Tonight, after these long and toilsome years have boiled out much of ambition and the desire to know the great things of life, I wish most keenly that I could have heard what my father said.

But mother insisted, as good women do, and finally we heard the big man slowly mounting the stairs. I can see him now as he stood framed in the doorway with the bright splinter of sunshine bathing him in light; a tall man with a strong, kindly face and a thick black beard. It is the only real memory I have of my father, for he did not come back from the war alive. Long, long years after, I sat at a great banquet next to a famous Senator, who had seen much of life. I told him that I have only this memory of my father, but that I had finally found a man who had served in the same regiment with him, slept in the same tent, who had known him intimately as a man.

“Now,” I asked, “shall I hunt up that man and have him tell me in his own way just what kind of a man my father was?”

Quickly the answer came from this hardened old diplomat:

“Keep away from him! Let him alone! Never go near him! Burn his letters without reading them. You now have an ideal of your father. This man knows him as just a plain, common man, probably with most of the faults of humanity. Let him alone! If at your age God has permitted you to retain an ideal of any human being, keep it pure. Take no chances of having it blackened!”

I took his advice, and have always been glad that I did so. It has been my experience that deaf men are able to hold their ideals longer than those who can hear; probably this is another part of our compensation. I would advise every man of the silent world to build up a hobby and gain an ideal. One will serve to keep hand and brain busy, the other helps to keep the soul clean. I heard one deaf man say that clean ideals mark the difference between a “grouch” and a gentleman.

My father came slowly to the bed where we lay, tuning his voice as nearly to a growl as the nerves between the vocal chords and the heart-strings would permit.

“I’ll attend to your case, young men! I’ll teach you to mind your mother!”

Then he began to strike the pillow with his hand, growling as before.

“Now, will you mind your mother when she speaks to you?”

It was one of those cases of thought suggestion which I have mentioned. My brother and I understood. No one can prove that father told us to cry and help him play his part. Like the horses in the pasture, we understood. We screamed lustily as father spanked the pillow, though we had fully agreed between us that we would endure it all without a sound. In fact, we carried out our part so well that mother, listening below to see that father did not shirk his duty, finally came running upstairs to defend her brood.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Joseph, to hurt those little boys so! They did nothing so very bad!” And there was a great loving time, with mother holding us close and making little crooning sounds as she swayed back and forth with us. Father stood by, trying to act the part of stern parent, with indifferent success. And then he carried us downstairs, a reunited family, where we boys each had a doughnut with our bread and milk.

That was nearly sixty years ago, and I have been forced to stand up and take punishment for many sins and omissions. If father had lived, it is not likely that we would have discussed this little deception, but it still would have been a beautiful memory. My wife, who was once a school teacher, strong in discipline, says it was a great mistake on father’s part. Perhaps I show this in defects of character. He should have taken a shingle to us, she says. Perhaps so; yet after all these years (and what test can compare with time?) I am glad he acted as he did. If I were starting on his long journey, I should be likely to treat my children in the same way.

I have often been asked if deaf people of middle-age can safely be entrusted with the bringing up of a little child. That depends—both on the grown people and the child. Generally speaking, I should not advise it. Deaf people are likely to be obstinate in their opinions, rather narrow in thought, and slow to understand that the habits and tendencies of society grow like a tree. Many of them have made a brilliant success in certain lines of work, but they are apt to be narrow as a board outside of their limited range. In rearing a child it is a great disadvantage not to be able to hear its little whispered confidences; if the little one has no reliable confidant it will grow up hard and unsympathetic, or it will go with its confidences to the wrong person. I know deaf people who regret bitterly that they can only give financial aid and reasonable example to their children, while they long to enter into that part of child life which can only be reached through sound.

Looking back over life, I become convinced that my hearing was always a little dull; probably the trouble started in a case of scarlet fever when I was a baby, and in those days no one thought of examining or treating the ears of a child. Also, I think one of my teachers helped to start me along the road to silence. Those were the days when “corporal punishment” was not only permitted, but was encouraged. Most of us were brought up on the “Scriptures and a stick,” and each teacher seemed to select some special portion of the human anatomy as the most susceptible part through which to make her authority felt. Some of the educational methods of those days were effective even if they were violent. I have had the teacher point a long stick at me and issue the order:

“Spell incomprehensibility!”

I would stumble on as far as “ability” and then fall down completely. In these days my children are led gently over the bad place in the road, but then we took it at a jump. The teacher would lay that long stick three times over your back, and while the dust was rising from your jacket would make another demand.

“Now spell it!”

And I must confess that we were then usually able to do so. This particular teacher chose the ear for her point of attack; she would steal up behind a whisperer or a loiterer and strike him over the ears with a large book, like a geography. Or she would upon occasion pull some special culprit out to the front of the school by the lobe of the ear. Such things are no longer permitted in the public schools, yet I frequently see people in sudden anger slap or “box” their children on the side of the face or on the ears. It is a cruel and degrading punishment, and, remembering my own experience, I always feel like striking those who are guilty of it squarely in their own faces with all my power.

What annoys the deaf man most is the suggestion that he is being used as the butt for ridicule. We can stand abuse or open attack with more or less serenity, but it is gall and wormwood to feel that there are those who can make sport of our serious affliction. I once worked on a newspaper where one of the editors was absolutely deaf, unable to hear his own voice. He was a big man, naturally good-natured and reasonably cheerful. The foreman of the composing-room was a man of medium size, and a great “bluffer.” Sometimes he would try to impress strangers in the office by using the big deaf man as a chopping block for courage. He would get out of sight behind, shake his fist over the poor fellow’s head and roar out his challenge:

“You big coward; for five cents I’d lift you out of that chair and mop up the floor with you. Step out in the street and I’ll knock your block off!”

It was very cheap stuff, though quite effective. The deaf man, of course, didn’t hear a word of it, but kept on with his work, and many visitors considered the foreman courageous for calling down a much larger man. But one day the editor chanced to see the reflection of that fist in his glasses. He looked up suddenly and caught the foreman right in the act. The deaf think quickly and accurately in a crisis, and in an instant this man was on his feet, pulling off his coat. He did not know what it was all about, but here was a man taking advantage of his affliction. There is something more than impressive about the wrath of the deaf, and the foreman ran behind a table, took a piece of paper and wrote the following:

“I cannot fight. I promised a Christian mother that I would never strike a cripple, or a deaf or a blind man!”

The deaf man read the communication and made but one remark:

“I am under no such obligation!”

The way he polished off his tormentor was a joy to us all. He could not hear the foreman yell “Enough!” and we did not notify him until the job was perfectly done.

However, the deaf man will be wise if he keeps out of quarrels. When they arise suddenly he cannot tell which side he ought to be on. I have taken part vigorously in several sudden and violent battles only to find when it was all over that I had been doing valiant work—on the wrong side! Likewise, “bluffing” is taboo. Few men can ever escape with even the wreckage of a “bluff” unless it is safely mounted on skids of sound. We all learn these things by hard experience before we discover the limitations of the silent life.

Some years ago I attended a banquet where a great company of lions appeared to have gathered to feed and to listen to a few roars after the meal. The man next to me would have made a splendid “announcer” for a circus. Here, he told me, was a famous statesman; that man over there might have been President; this man had enough money to buy a European state; the man helping himself to a double portion of terrapin was a poet; the big man nibbling his bit of cheese was a well-known historian. He was a man of great ability, though unfortunately somewhat deaf, which fact naturally interested me so much that I kept an eye on the historian.

When the toastmaster began his “We have with us tonight,” it seemed as though every speaker felt that he carried a ticket to a front seat in the Hall of Fame, and in an evil hour I decided to attempt a little “bluff.” I rose for a few remarks on agriculture. Pedigree or good stock is essential to good farming, so it was easy to refer to “my ancestor, Lord Collingwood.” I had read somewhere that Lord Collingwood was present at the Battle of Bunker Hill as a petty officer on one of the English warships. It was quite easy to refer to the fact that I had one ancestor in that battle wearing a red coat and another behind the American breastworks wearing overalls! What would have happened to me if both had been killed? It was what we call very cheap stuff—too cheap for a deaf man to handle. It was a very silly thing to do, but for the moment it seemed to impress the audience. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the historian with his hand at his ear whisper to his companion and then make notes on a sheet of paper.

“Ah,” I thought with gratification, “I have impressed the great historian!” And I sat down thinking very well of myself. But the eminent historian folded his paper and sent it to me by a waiter. This is what I read:

“Are you sure of your pedigree? The facts seem to be that Lord Collingwood had only two children, both daughters. I think neither of them ever married.”

Then and there I lost interest in my ancestors. I have no further desire to trace back my pedigree, especially in the presence of well-read historians. And I am cured of “bluffing.”