“Don’t you know who I am?”
“No, and I don’t care!”
“Can’t you hear what I say?”
“No, and I don’t want to! Mind your own business!”
The bullet-headed man uttered one short expressive word and sat down. At Forty-second Street two good-sized policemen appeared, but they waited for reinforcements before arresting the disturber. However, he went willingly, casting back a look of mingled fear and admiration at the deaf man. My friend did not know he was a hero until he learned that the belligerent gentleman was a champion middle-weight boxer, very drunk and very ugly. He had threatened to clean out the crowd—hence the sudden stampede. This deaf man tells me that if he had really known to whom the cauliflower ear belonged he would have been the first man out of the car. As it happened he gained a reputation for being the only man who ever told a “champ” to shut up, and then cooled him off by shaking a finger. I have known many deaf men who have escaped from such situations most marvelously uninjured.
Yet while the deaf man is smiling at most of the terrors which approach him from without, he falls an easy prey to those which attack from within. Imagination will often lead a sensitive man into untold misery. Our hardest struggles come when we must strangle the imps of depression, our personal devils. They come with evil suggestion, frequently with actual voices, eager to poison the will and paralyze the courage. I have no doubt that Whittier’s great poem beginning:
“Spare me, dread angel of reproach”
was written as the result of subjective audition. I suppose the average person can never know how close the deaf are driven to temporary insanity in their struggles to overcome doubts and imaginary fears. Sometimes the fear concentrates upon the idea that they will lose sight as well as hearing! Or perhaps doubt of wife, children or friends will present itself forcibly. Little incidents, a feeling that people are laughing at their expense, some unintentional slight, a misunderstanding or a rude nervous shock, any of these may start the hateful imps which live in one part of the brain at their fearful work of poisoning the mind and the will. At times the deaf man finds it almost impossible to wrench free from these accursed influences.
Some readers become so completely absorbed in books that they cannot take the mind from a sad or an exciting story. I have known deaf men to enter into such a story as George Eliot’s “Mill on the Floss” so that they lived through the lives of the various characters and found that they could not shake off the depression. Usually I can tell when the author is deaf by the general character of the story. The dialogue is as a rule unnatural and the tone is apt to be gloomy. Music, or light, aimless conversation would clear the mind and make the reader remember that it is only a story—but to the deaf man, deprived of these aids, the tragedy depicted on the printed page becomes shockingly real. The best remedy for me is to “read in streaks.” Whenever I find that a book is liable to have this powerful effect on me I do not read continuously, but after a few chapters I take up something in lighter vein, or even a serious volume of solid thought. Some of us deaf acquire a morbid desire to read sad or sombre literature. This mistake should be overcome even if it requires a supreme effort. If one can acquire faith in the Bible and reverence for its teachings it will give greater comfort to the deaf than will any other book. I place Shakespeare next, then Milton and the other great poets. But let a deaf man read what interests him, if it be nothing but the local paper. If he lives in the country let him become a correspondent for his local paper, and join the hunt for local news. He should leave out of his list all tales of depression and sin. The deaf person should make a point of reading half a dozen of the “best sellers” each year. They are likely to be stories of human nature, and they will undoubtedly contain natural dialogue; these elements are sadly needed by the deaf, yet they are the least likely to come into the silent world.
Of course you will contend, and truly, that it is supremely foolish for grown men and women to give way to imaginary fears and doubts. Yet the very absurdity makes it harder to bring cool reason into the fight against these imps. As Claude Melnotte in “The Lady of Lyons” puts it: