Half-Hours with the Idiot Part 7

"Everybody in the place, of course, is immediately sympathetic. All are sorry for me, and it is such an unusual thing for one of my volatile, not to say fluffy, nature to suffer that a vast amount of commiseration is manifested by my fellow guests, especially by the ladies.

"They turn me at once into a suffering hero. As I lie listlessly in my steamer-chair they pa.s.s me by on tip-toe, or pause and inquire into the progress of my aches and show a great deal more interest in my condition than they do in bridge or votes for women. One fetching young creation in polka-dotted dimity, aged twenty-three, offers to stay home from a picnic and read Robert W. Chambers aloud to me. Another goes to her room and brings me down a little jar of mint jelly, which she feeds to me on the end of a macaroon or a lady finger, while still a third, a pretty little widow of twenty-seven summers, now and then leaves her embroidery to put a cool little hand on my forehead to see if I have any fever--"

"A most alluring picture," said the Doctor.

"It almost makes my head ache to think of it!" said the Idiot. "But to continue, this goes on all morning, and then when afternoon comes they hang a nice little hammock for me, filled with dainty sofa cushions, out under the trees, and as they gently swing me to and fro a charming creature from Wellesley or Va.s.sar sits alongside of me and fans my fevered brow, driving away dull care, flies, and mosquitoes until twilight, when, after feeding me on more macaroons, washed down with copious libations of sparkling lemonade, a bevy of elfin maids sit around in a circle and sing 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean', while the aforesaid little widow comes now and then to brush my scalp-lock back from my brow with the aforesaid pink paddy."

"Oh, well, what of it?" interrupted the Doctor. "I've known many a stronger man than you made a fool of--"

"What of it?" demanded the Idiot. "What of it? There's a lot of it. Do you suppose for one minute that I am going to get well under those circ.u.mstances?"

"I wouldn't," said the Lawyer.

"Not on your faith in the Materia Medica!" cried the Idiot. "That headache would become immortal. As undying as a poet's fame. Life would become for me one blissful eternity of cerebellian suffering under those conditions. Rather that lose my job as the cynosure of all that lovely solicitude I'd hire a bellboy to come to my room in the morning with a croquet mallet and hammer my head until it split, if I couldn't get one in any more legitimate fashion.

"The quiet joy of lying off there with all those ministering angels about me, secretly enjoying the discomfiture of all the other men about the place--they nursing their wrath; their sisters, cousins, aunts, rich grandmothers, and best girls nursing me--get well? me? never, Doctor!

"But if, on the other hand, n.o.body came near me all day long save a horse marine of a landlady armed with a bottle of squills, with the request that I go to bed until I felt better, why then I'd be a well man in just seven and a half minutes, dancing the tango, and challenging all the rheumaticky old beaux about the place to a hundred yards' dash for the fifteenth turkey trot with the little widow at the Sat.u.r.day night hop."

"Yes, I admit that there is such a thing as too much coddling," said the Doctor. "There are people who are inclined to hug their troubles, and for whom too much sympathy is a positive deterrent in the process of recuperation, but after all, my dear fellow, until we find something better the sanitarium must serve its purpose, and a great many people are unquestionably helped along by its beneficent operations."

"I haven't a doubt of that," said the Idiot, "and here's to them! Long may they wave! I quaff this pony of maple syrup to the health of the sanitariums of the land--but just the same, for the tired business man, and his name is not only Smith, but Legion, there should be some other kind of an inst.i.tution where this coddling process is frowned upon."

"Why not devote that ma.s.sive brain of yours to the working out of the idea?" suggested the Bibliomaniac. "The great trouble with you, Mr.

Idiot, is that you are prolific in thinking out things that ought to be done, but there you stop. How to do them you never tell us. Why don't you give us a constructive notion once in awhile?"

"Thank you, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, with a grateful smile. "I've been fishing for that particular nibble for the past eighteen minutes, and I was beginning to fear the shad were shy this morning. You have saved the day, Sir. Speaking of Mr. Bib's idea that we ought to have something to take the place of the sanitarium for the tired business man, Doctor, how do you think an irritarium would pay?"

"A what?" cried the Doctor, holding his waffle like Mohammed's coffin, suspended in midair.

"An irritarium," repeated the Idiot. "An inst.i.tution of aggravation, where, instead of being coddled into permanent invalidism, we should be constantly irritated, provoked, exacerbated, or, as my old friend Colonel Thesaurus says in his Essay on Excitation, exasperated into a cantankerously contentious pugnacity!"

"And for what purpose, pray?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.

"As an anti-coddling resource for the restoration of our pristine powers," said the Idiot. "Just take our old friend, the tired business man, for example. He has been working forty-eight hours a day all winter long, and with the coming of spring he is first cousin to the frazzle, and in the matter of spine twin brother to the jellyfish. His middle name is Flabby, and his nerve has succ.u.mbed to the superior numbers of nerves.

"He is headed straight for the Down-and-Out Club. His lip quivers when he talks, and his hand is the center of a seismic disturbance that turns his autograph into a cross between a dress pattern and a futurist conception of a straight line in the cold gray dawn of the morning after. He has prolonged fits of weeping, and when it comes to making up his mind on any definite course of action he vacillates between two possibilities until it is too late, and then decides wrong.

"Now, under present conditions they railroad this poor wreck off to a sanitarium, where the very atmosphere that he breathes is the dread thing that has haunted his sleepless hours all winter long--that of retirement. He is made to believe that he is a vurry, vurry sick man, and the only real pleasure that is left to him is bragging about his symptoms to some other unfortunate incarcerated with him; and after each period of boastful exposure of these symptoms in the exchange provided for the swapping of these things in the sanitariums of the day, he goes back to his room more than ever convinced that his case is hopeless; and, confronted by the bogey of everlasting ill health, he lets go of himself altogether and a long, long, tedious period of rehabilitation begins which may or may not get him into shape again in time for the fall season."

"It's the only way," said the Doctor. "Don't fight your doctor. Just let go of yourself, and let him do the rest."

"Well, I'd like to see my system tried for a while," said the Idiot.

"I'll guarantee that any tired business man who will go to my irritarium will get his spine and his s.p.u.n.k, his nerve and his dander, back in a jiffy.

"The first morning, after giving him a first-cla.s.s breakfast that fills his weary soul with peace, I'd turn him loose in a picture gallery on the walls of which are hung soft, dreamy reproductions of pastoral scenes calculated to lull his soul into an unsuspecting sense of calm, and while he is looking placidly at these lovely things I'd have a husky attendant wearing sneakers creep quietly up behind him and give him such a kick as should for a moment make him feel that the earth itself had blown up. It wouldn't be a pleasant, sympathetic little love tap calculated to make him feel that he never even wanted to get well, but a violent, exacerbating a.s.sault; utterly uncalled for and unexpected; a bit of sheer, brutal provocation.

"Do you suppose for an instant that the party of the second part would throw himself down forthwith upon a convenient divan and give way to a fit of weeping? Not he, my dear Doctor. The tire of that tired business man would blow out with a report like a crash of distant thunder. All the latent business manhood in him would be aroused into instant action.

Nerves would fly, and nerve would return. Spinelessness and uncertainty would give way to s.p.u.n.k, and a prompt.i.tude of truculent reprisal worthy of the palmiest days of his commercial pre-eminence would ensue. Worn and weary as he was when he entered the irritarium, he would be so outraged by the rank discourtesy and utter injustice of that kick that he would beat up that attendant as if he were a world's champion battling with a bowlful of cold consomme for a ten-thousand-dollar purse."

"Tush!" said the Doctor. "What do you suppose the attendant would be doing all this time? You seem to think your tired business man would find beating him up as easy as mashing potatoes with a pile driver."

"It would be part of my system," said the Idiot, "that the attendant should allow himself to be thrashed, so that the tired business man, irritated into a show of spirit and deceived into thinking that he was still some fighter, would leave the place next day, his courage renewed and his confidence in himself completely restored. Instead of inoculating him with Nut chops and hot water for a weary period of six months, I'd pin the red badge of courage on him at the very start; and I miss my guess if he wouldn't go back to business the next morning as fit as a fiddle, and spend most of his time for the next two years telling everybody who would listen how he walloped the life out of one of the huskiest attendants he could find in a month of Sundays."

"And you really think such brutal methods would work, do you?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"I have eight dollars that are willing to state it is a fact to any two-dollar certificate ever printed by Uncle Sam," returned the Idiot.

"Why, Mr. Bib, I had a very dear friend once who was paralyzed. So completely paralyzed was he that he couldn't move without help, and, what was worse, couldn't even talk.

"He went to a sanitarium, and for seven long and weary months he was dipped in a warm bath every morning by two attendants, an Irishman and a Dutchman. One held him by the shoulders and the other by the ankles, and day after day for nearly a year they dipped, and dipped, and dipped him. He showed no signs of improvement whatsoever until one bitterly cold winter's morning, the two attendants, having been off on a spree the night before, forgot to turn on the hot-water faucet and dipped him into a tub of ice water!

"The effect was electrical. The patient was so mad that he impulsively broke the dam of silence that had afflicted him for so long and let loose a flow of language on those attendants that made the wrath to come seem like the twittering of a bird; and before they had recovered from their astonishment he had leaped from the tub, pinked the Irishman on the eye with a cake of soap, and, after chasing the Dutchman downstairs into the parlor, spanked him into a state of coma with a long-handled bath brush he had picked up off the floor."

"And I suppose he is giving lessons in the tango to-day!" interjected the Lawyer, with a laugh.

"Nothing so mild," said the Idiot. "The last time I saw him he was starting off with old man Weston on his walk to Chicago. He told me he was going as far as Albany with Weston."

"Well," said the Doctor, "it might work, but I doubt it. I should have to see the scheme in operation before I recommended it to any of my patients."

"All right," said the Idiot. "Send 'em along, Doctor. Mr. Bib and I can take care of them right here."

"Leave me out," snapped the Bibliomaniac. "I don't care to be a partner in any of your idiotic nonsense."

"No, Mr. Bib," smiled the Idiot, genially. "I wasn't going to use you as a partner, but as a shining example of the effectiveness of my theory. I've been irritating you constantly for the past twenty years, and you are still able to eat your thirty-seven and a half flapjacks daily without turning a hair, and that's some testimonial."