The Dumb House Read Online Free PDF Page B

conclusion at all, but a new beginning. That was what Mother had made me see. She had shown me the horror of the children’s predicament, through the counsellors’ eyes; at the same time, she had let me understand the beauty of the experiment, through the image of the Dumb House itself: perfect, inscrutable, shining in my mind, like a proposition in geometry, or one of thoselogical paradoxes that, by itself, can open up a whole new field of thought.
    For the first few days after I stopped travelling, I worked in the garden and thought about what I wanted to do. I had left the iris beds and rose borders to fend for themselves ever since Mother’s death, and the whole place was untidy and overgrown. Now, as I worked, the plants reappeared, complete with their names – and with them emerged my basic plan. I would begin by collecting all the information I could about language learning and deprivation. I would research speech disorders, elective mutism, the wild boys and wolf children of legend, the creators of secret languages and scripts. I would add to the body of research myself, perhaps, trawling through specialist publications and the general press for case histories, anecdotes, hearsay – anything that would help me find what I was looking for – and I would place an advertisement in the local paper asking for personal, previously undocumented experiences. I would leave the wording deliberately vague, to encourage a wide response.
    Naturally, though, I still felt something was missing. I knew that the only way to test the hypothesis was to repeat the experiment and, from the beginning, that was my true intention. Nevertheless, I telephoned the
County Herald
and placed an advertisement. I deliberated for some time on where it should be printed, but in the end there was no alternative but to put it in the personal columns, among the Tarot readings and lonely hearts, the exclusive massages and the appeals for information about people half-met in palm houses and tea rooms. There was something about the Personals – something in the language used – that suggested autumn: I had probably read too many books where the lovers come splashing through fallen leaves in scarvesand winter coats. It is always Sunday afternoon, there is always a lamp burning in the middle distance, probably even a smell of toast and warm butter, or the sound of a violin being played in some rented room in the backstreets. I liked the idea of my clinical, tersely-worded piece appearing there, as a form of rebuke, a cold, sharp instrument amongst the love hearts and the bad poems.
    Meanwhile, I began visiting the reference library in Weston, to collect what information I could not find in books from Mother’s study. The historical evidence was apocryphal. The earliest language experiment I could find was that recorded by Herodotus: in his second history he describes how Psamtik gave two new born babies to a shepherd, to keep hidden among his flocks. He told the man that no one should utter a word in the presence of these children, but they should live by themselves, in a lonely place. It was the shepherd’s task to keep them fed, and ‘perform the other things needful’. Psamtik commanded these things, said Herodotus, because he desired, when the babes should be past meaningless whimpering, to hear what language they would utter first. One day, after two years had passed, when the shepherd went into the children’s house, they fell down before him and cried
becos
, and stretched out their hands. The shepherd brought the king to see the children, and they repeated the word
becos
which, in Phrygian, means bread. Herodotus concludes his account by saying that the Pharaoh was forced to accept that the Phrygians were the oldest race on earth, and not the Egyptians, as he had previously maintained.
    It was an amusing story, but it was pure fairy tale. Other accounts were similar, for example that of James