“As one afflicted man to another, I advise you to hang right on to your leg. Try the faith cure and make yourself believe it can be saved.”
“You bet I will. They’ll have to cut my throat before they cut this leg off!”
I saw him some years later. He carried a cane and limped, but he still had two legs.
“They never cut it off,” he reported. “They put a silver cord in the joint, and it has held ever since. It’s a little stiff—but it’s a leg. I guess if Pa Morton and you hadn’t been deaf that night they would have finished the job.”
I have heard of a deaf man who had an experience somewhat similar to this. He also left the train one dark, stormy night in a good-sized city. He was a stranger, so he was quite unfamiliar with the place. He carried a small black case containing his hearing device and a few toilet articles. As he stood in the dim light looking about for his friends, two men rushed up to him, talking quite excitedly; they grasped him by the arms and hurried him outside the station. Unable to understand the performance, the deaf man followed, trying to explain that he was waiting for his friends. Almost before he knew it he found himself inside a car with these excitable gentlemen, driving rapidly through the streets. Of course, you wonder why deaf men under such conditions do not explain and break away.
“You wouldn’t catch me in any such situation,” says my friend Jones. “I’d soon make ’em understand.”
There is only one thing the matter with Jones’ point of view—he has never lived in the silence. Let him try that and he will understand that philosophy assumes a form of patience in such situations. We are usually quite helpless in the darkness, and when we go among strangers we must either suspect everyone who approaches us or consider him a friend. Most of us conclude from experience that it is wiser to drop suspicion and assume that the majority of human beings are honest. And as the great emotion of fear apparently enters the brain through the ear, we are apt to be calm under most extraordinary conditions.
We left our puzzled deaf man rushing in a car through the streets of an unknown city. The auto finally entered a narrow, dark alley and stopped before what appeared to be the back door of a large building. The deaf man was urged out of the car by his nervous companions and was hurried up a steep stairway. They blundered through several dark passages and finally came out on the stage of a theater, where they stood in the wings and watched a long-haired pianist in the center of the stage laboring to unlock the keys of a piano in a way calculated to let loose a horde of imprisoned melodies. A vast audience filled the house.
A man who appeared to be master of ceremonies rushed up to the deaf man and wrote on his notebook:
“Delighted to see you! We feared you were not coming. Your first number is next on the program. We will give the professor an encore while you are preparing.”