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!

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:

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.