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.