Читать книгу Stammering, Its Cause and Cure - Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue - Страница 14

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After recovering from my sad experiment with the "Wonderful Specialist," I did not want to go home and listen to the Anvil Chorus of "It Can't Be Done!" and "I Told You So!" I had no desire to be the object of laughter as well as pity. So I tried to get a job in that same city. I went from office to office—but nobody had a job for a man who stammered.

Finally I did land a job, however, such as it was. My duties were to operate the elevator in a hotel. How I managed to get that job, I often wonder now, for nobody on whom I called had any place for a boy or man who stammered. I thought it would be easy to find a job where I wouldn't need to talk, but when I started out to look for this job, I found it wasn't so easy after all. Almost any job requires a man who can talk. This I had learned in my own search for a place. But somehow or other, I managed to get that job as elevator boy in a hotel.

For the work as elevator boy I was paid three dollars a week. Wasn't that great pay for a man grown? But that's what I got.

That is, I got it for a little while, until I lost my job. For lose it I did before very long. I found out that I couldn't do much with even an elevator boy's job at three dollars a week unless I could talk. My employer found it out, too, and then he found somebody who could take my place—a boy who could answer when spoken to.

Well, here I was out of a job again. I am afraid I came pretty near being discouraged about that time. Things looked pretty hopeless for me—it was mighty hard work to get a job and the place didn't last long after I had gotten it.

But, nevertheless, the only thing to do was to try again. I started the search all over again. I tried first one place and then another. One man wanted me to start out as a salesman. He showed me how I could make more money than I had ever made in my life—convinced me that I could make it. Then I started to tell my part of the story—but I didn't get very far before he discovered that I was a stammerer. That was enough for him—with a gesture of hopelessness, he turned to his desk. "You'll never do, young man, you'll never do. You can't even talk!" And the worst of it was that he was right.

I once thought I had landed a job as stock chaser in a factory, but here, too, stammering barred the way, for they told me that even the stock chaser had to be able to deliver verbal messages from one foreman to another. I didn't dare to try that.

Eventually, I drifted around to the Union News Company. They wanted a boy to sell newspapers on trams running out over the Grand Trunk Railway. I took the job—the last job in the world I should have expected to hold, because of all the places a newsboy's job is one where you need to have a voice and the ability to talk.

I hope no stammerer ever has a position that causes him as much humiliation and suffering as that job caused me. You can imagine what it meant to me to go up and down the aisles of the train, calling papers and every few moments finding out that I couldn't say what I started out to say and then go gasping and grunting down the aisle making all sorts of facial grimaces.

How the passengers laughed at me! And how they made fun of me and asked me all sorts of questions just to hear me try to talk. It almost made me wish I could never see a human being again, so keen was the suffering and so tense were my nerves as a result of this work.

I don't believe I ever did anything that kept me in a more frenzied mental state than this work of trying to sell newspapers—and it wasn't very long (as I had expected) until the manager found out my situation and gently let me out.

Then I gave up, all at once. Was I discouraged? Well, perhaps. But not exactly discouraged. Rather I saw the plain hopelessness of trying to get or hold a job in my condition. So I prepared to go home. I didn't want to do it, because I knew the neighbors and friends round about would be ready for me with, "I told you so" and "I knew it couldn't be done" and a lot of gratuitous information like that.

But I gave up, nevertheless, deeply disappointed to think that once again I had failed to be cured of stammering, yet all the while resolving just as firmly as ever that I would try again and that I would never give up hope as long as there remained anything for me to do.

And this rule I followed out, month after month and year after year, until in the end I was richly rewarded for my patience and persistence.