The other day I saw three sights, and, although they have no connexion
with each other, each was in its way sufficiently evocative of thought
to make that day a little more interesting than most.
It was the first day of the tardy spring of 1917, or rather the first
day into which had crept those hints that the power of the long, cruel
war-winter must some day be broken. The sun was almost visible, and a
tenderness now and then touched the air, and no one who is at all
responsive to weather conditions could fail to be a little elated and
believe once more not only in a future of sorts but also in a lurking
benignancy somewhere. Stimulated myself in this way, even although I was
approaching a rehearsal of a _revue_, I came suddenly in the King's Road
upon that disused burial-ground opposite the Six Bells, and was aware
that, sitting there on seats facing the road, in white aprons and caps,
with shawls over their shoulders, were five of the saddest old ladies I
have ever seen--occupants, I presume, of a neighbouring workhouse. There
they sat, saying nothing, and watching without enthusiasm the passers-by
and the 'buses and the taxis and all the hurry and scurry of an
existence from which they are utterly withdrawn and which they will soon
leave for ever. Being on my frivolous errand, I was pulled up very short
by the spectacle of five such stallholders as these whom the bigger
_revue_ which we call life had left so cold; and not only cold, but so
tired and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their
very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them,
that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient
than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian feasts,
they were equally admonitory....
I was glad again to be in the theatre listening to the familiar tones of
the producer wondering why in thunder no one but himself had the
faintest respect for punctuality.
Later in the day I saw a blinded officer, with both eyes bandaged, being
led along Sloane Street. Blinded men are, alas! not rare, and it was not
the officer himself that attracted my notice, but two fine, upstanding
young soldiers who as they passed him saluted with as much punctilio as
though he could see them. Of this salute he was, of course, wholly
unconscious, but the precision with which it was given, and, indeed, the
fact that it was given at all, could not but make an impression on the
observer. It seemed to comprise so thoroughly both the spirit and the
letter of discipline.
And late that night I watched in the Tube, after the theatres, a man
and a small eager-faced boy talking about something they had been to
see. Although sitting exactly opposite them, I have no idea what they
said, but they amused each other immensely as they recalled this joke
and that. Nothing extraordinary in this, you will say. But there was.
The reason why I was so profoundly interested to be a witness of the
scene was that they were deaf and dumb, and the whole conversation was
carried on by signs; not by the alphabet that one learnt at school in
order to communicate during class, but a rapid synthetic improvement
upon it, where two or three lightning-quick movements--gesture
grammalogues--sufficed to convey whole sentences of meaning. It is
perhaps curious, but I had never before been brought into such close
contact with the deaf and dumb; I have never even been--as, since I
profess to explore and study London, I should have been--to that church
in Oxford Street, opposite the great secret emporium, where the deaf and
dumb worship and by signs are exhorted to be good. Beyond watching that
boys' school which one sees gesticulating on the Brighton front, I had
never until this night seen these afflicted creatures in intimate and
sparkling talk. I found the sight not only interesting, but as cheering
as those poor old things in the King's Road oasis had been saddening.
Because the unfortunates were making such a splendid fight for it. No
boy with every faculty about him could have been gayer or merrier than
this mute with the dancing eyes; nor can I conceive of a spoken
conversation that contained a completer interchange of ideas in the same
space of time.
At Oxford Circus they got out, and left me pondering on deafness and
dumbness. To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing;
for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf--to
live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands
wandering over the keys, to see birds exulting, and be denied the
resultant harmonies: that must be terrible. Yet terrible only to those
who have known what the solace and gaiety of words and the beauty of
sound can be. To have been born deaf is different, and I have no doubt
whatever that the deaf and dumb have delectable lands of their own into
which we can never stray, where wonderful flowers of silence grow. It is
even possible, since all the visible world is theirs, that they never
envy us at all.