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: