The Genial Idiot Part 12

"Still rambling, eh?" vouchsafed the Doctor. "You ought to submit your tongue to some scientific student of dynamics. I am inclined to think, from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of perpetual motion."

"I will consider your suggestion," replied the Idiot. "Meanwhile, let us consult harmoniously together on the original point. Is there anything in this music cure, and is it true that our medical schools are hereafter to have conservatories attached to them, in which aspiring young M.D.'s are to be taught the _materia musica_ in addition to the _materia medica_?"

"I had heard of no such idiotic proposition," returned the Doctor. "And as for the music cure, I don't know anything about it; haven't heard everybody talking about it; and doubt the existence of any such thing outside of that mysterious realm which is bounded by the four corners of your own bright particular cerebellum. What do you mean by the music cure?"

"Why, the papers have been full of it lately," explained the Idiot.

"The claim is made that in music lies the panacea for all human ills. It may not be able to perform a surgical operation like that which is required for the removal of a leg, and I don't believe even Wagner ever composed a measure that could be counted on successfully to eliminate one's vermiform appendix from its chief sphere of usefulness; but for other things, like measles, mumps, the snuffles, or indigestion, it is said to be wonderfully efficacious. What I wanted to find out from you was just what composers were best for which specific troubles."

"You'll have to go to somebody else for the information," said the Doctor. "I never heard of the theory, and, as I said before, I don't believe anybody else has, barring your own sweet self."

"I have seen a reference to it somewhere," put in Mr. Whitechoker, coming to the Idiot's rescue. "As I recall the matter, some lady had been cured of a nervous affection by a scientific application of some musical poultice or other, and the general expectation seems to be that some day we shall find in music a cure for all our human ills, as the Idiot suggests."

"Thank you, Mr. Whitechoker," said the Idiot, gratefully. "I saw that same item and several others besides, and I have only told the truth when I say that a large number of people are considering the possibilities of music as a subst.i.tute for drugs. I am surprised that Dr. Capsule has neither heard nor thought about it, for I should think it would prove to be a pleasant and profitable field for speculation.

Even I, who am only a dabbler in medicine and know no more about it than the effects of certain remedies upon my own symptoms, have noticed that music of a certain sort is a sure emollient for nervous conditions."

"For example?" said the Doctor. "Of course, we don't doubt your word; but when a man makes a statement based upon personal observation it is profitable to ask him what his precise experience has been, merely for the purpose of adding to our own knowledge."

"Well," said the Idiot, "the first instance that I can recall is that of a Wagner opera and its effects upon me. For a number of years I suffered a great deal from insomnia. I could not get two hours of consecutive sleep, and the effect of my sufferings was to make me nervous and irritable. Suddenly somebody presented me with a couple of tickets for a performance of 'Parsifal,' and I went. It began at five o'clock in the afternoon. For twenty minutes all went serenely, and then the music began to work. I fell into a deep and refreshing slumber. The intermission came, and still I slept on. Everybody else went home, dressed for the evening part of the performance, had their dinner, and returned. Still I slept, and continued so to do until midnight, when one of the gentlemanly ushers came and waked me up, and told me that the performance was over. I rubbed my eyes, and looked about me. It was true--the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening. I put on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from five-twenty until twelve, or six hours and forty minutes straight. That was one instance.

Two weeks later I went again, this time to hear 'Gotterdammerung.' The results were the same, only the effect was instantaneous. The curtain had hardly risen before I retired to the little ante-room of the box our party occupied and dozed off into a fathomless sleep. I didn't wake up this time until nine o'clock the next day, the rest of the party having gone off without awakening me as a sort of joke. Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then, deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science. I have tried all sorts of other things--sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest, and not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two doses of Wagner brought about in one instant. And, best of all, there was no reaction: no splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got completely rested up."

"You run a dreadful risk, however," said the Doctor, with a sarcastic smile. "The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, Mr. Idiot."

"That may be," said the Idiot; "worse than the sulfonal habit by a great deal, I am told; but I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while it costs from five to seven dollars a dose. In addition to this experience, I have also the testimony of a friend of mine who was cured of a frightful attack of the colic by Sullivan's 'Lost Chord,' played on a cornet. He had spent the day down at Asbury Park, and had eaten not wisely but too copiously. Among other things that he turned loose in his inner man were two plates of lobster salad, a gla.s.s of fresh cider, and a saucerful of pistache ice-cream. He was a painter by profession, and the color scheme he thus introduced into his digestive apparatus was too much for his artistic soul. He was not fitted by temperament to a.s.similate anything quite so strenuously chromatic as that, and, as a consequence, shortly after he had retired to his studio for the night, the conflicting tints began to get in their deadly work, and within two hours he was completely doubled up. The pain he suffered was awful.

Agony was bliss alongside of the pangs that now afflicted him, and all the palliatives and pain-killers known to man were tried without avail, and then, just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the 'Lost Chord.' A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the 'Lost Chord' the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded, the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally pa.s.sed away, entirely leaving him so far from prostrate that by 1 A. M.

he was out of bed and actually girding himself with a shot-gun and an Indian club to go up-stairs for a physical encounter with the cornetist."

"And you reason from this that Sullivan's 'Lost Chord' is a cure for cholera morbus, eh?" sneered the Doctor.

"It would seem so," said the Idiot. "While the music continued my friend was a well man, ready to go out and fight like a warrior; but when the cornetist stopped the colic returned, and he had to fight it out in the old way. In these incidents in my own experience I find ample justification for my belief, and that of others, that some day the music cure for human ailments will be recognized and developed to the full.

Families going off to the country for the summer, instead of taking a medicine-chest along with them, will be provided with a music-box with cylinders for mumps, measles, summer complaint, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, chills and fever, and all the other ills the flesh is heir to. Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long just what composition will cure specific ills. If a baby has whooping-cough, an anxious mother, instead of ringing up the doctor, will go to the piano and give the child a dose of 'Hiawatha.' If a small boy goes swimming and catches a cold in his head and is down with a fever, his nurse, an expert on the accordion, can bring him back to health again with three bars of 'Under the Bamboo Tree' after each meal. Instead of dosing the kids with cod-liver oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work at a mechanical piano and braced up on 'Narcissus.' 'There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night' will become an effective remedy for a sudden chill. People suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves back to normal conditions with Wagner the way I did. Tchaikowsky, to be well shaken before taken, will be an effective remedy for a torpid liver, and the man or woman who suffers from la.s.situde will doubtless find in the lively airs of our two-step composers an efficient tonic to bring their vitality up to a high standard of activity. Nothing in it?

Why, Doctor, there's more in it that's in sight to-day that is promising and suggestive of great things in the future than there was of the principle of gravitation in the rude act of that historic pippin that left the parent tree and swatted Sir Isaac Newton on the nose."

"And the drug stores will be driven out of business, I presume," said the Doctor.

"No," said the Idiot. "They will subst.i.tute music for drugs, that is all. Every man who can afford it will have his own medical phonograph, or music-box, and the drug stores will sell cylinders and records for them instead of quinine, carbonate of soda, squills, paregoric, and other nasty-tasting things they have now. This alone will serve to popularize sickness, and, instead of being driven out of business, their trade will pick up."

"And the doctor, and the doctor's gig, and all the appurtenances of his profession--what becomes of them?" demanded the Doctor.

"We'll have to have the doctor just the same to prescribe for us, only he will have to be a musician, but the gig--I'm afraid that will have to go," said the Idiot.

"And why, pray?" asked the Doctor. "Because there are no more drugs, must the physician walk?"

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "But he'd be better equipped if he drove about in a piano-organ or, if he preferred, an auto on a steam-calliope."

XIV

HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS

"Good-morning, gentlemen," said the Idiot, cheerily, as he entered the breakfast-room. "This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all."

"You think that, do you?" observed the Bibliomaniac. "Well, I don't agree with you. I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be a great relief to me when it is all over."

"Dear me, what a blase old customer you are, Mr. Bib," returned the Idiot. "Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep your nerve-centres in a constant state of pleasurable t.i.tillation? Why, to me it is what a bag full of nuts must be to a squirrel. I fairly gloat over these quadrennial political campaigns of ours. They are to me among the most exhilarating inst.i.tutions of modern life. They satisfy all one's zest for warfare without the distressing shedding of blood which attends real war, and regarded from the standpoint of humor, I know of nothing that, to the eye of an ordinarily keen observer, is more provocative of good, honest, wholesome mirth."

"I don't see it," said Mr. Bib. "To my mind, the average political campaign is just a vulgar sc.r.a.p in which men who ought to know better descend to all sorts of despicable trickery merely to gain the emoluments of office. This quest for the flesh-pots of politics, so far from being diverting, is, to my notion, one of the most deplorable exhibitions of human weakness that modern civilization, so called, has produced. A couple of men are put up for the most dignified office known to the world--both are gentlemen by birth and education, men of honor, men who, you would think, would scorn baseness as they hate poison--and then what happens? For three weary months the followers of each attack the character and intelligence of the other until, if you really believed what was said of either, neither in your estimation would have a shred of reputation left. Is that either diverting or elevating or educational or, indeed, anything but deplorable?"

"It's perfectly fine," said the Idiot, "to think that we have men in the country whose characters are such that they can stand four months of such a test. That's what I find elevating in it. When a man who is nominated for the Presidency in June or July can emerge in November unscathed in spite of the minute scrutiny to which himself and his record and the record of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts have been subjected, it's time for the American rooster to get upon his hind legs and give three cheers for himself and the people to whom he belongs. Even old Diogenes, who spent his life looking for an honest man, would have to admit every four years that he could spot him instantly by merely coming to this country and taking his choice from among the several candidates."

"You must admit, however," said the Bibliomaniac, "that a man with an honorable name must find it unpleasant to have such outrageous stories told of him."

"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot. "The more outrageous the better.

For instance, when _The Sunday Jigger_ comes out with a four-page revelation of your Republican candidate's past, in which we learn how, in 1873, he put out the eyes of a maiden aunt with a red-hot poker, and stabbed a negro cook in the back with a skewer, because she would not permit him to put rat-poison in his grandfather's coffee, you know perfectly well that that story has been put forth for the purpose of turning the maiden aunt, negro, and grandfather votes against him. You know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him, or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated--he may have stuck a pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his relatives--but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore harmless. Similarly with the Democratic candidate. When the _Daily Flim Flam_ a.s.serts that he believes that the working-man is ent.i.tled to four cents a day for sixteen hours' work, and has repeatedly avowed that bread and water is the proper food for motormen, everybody with common-sense realizes at once that even the _Flim Flam_ doesn't believe the story. It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of innocent mirth. You don't yourself believe that last yarn about the Prohibition candidate, do you?"

"I haven't heard any yarn about him," said the Bibliomaniac.

"That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen saloons and a pool-room in New York?" said the Idiot.

"Of course I don't," said the Bibliomaniac. "Who does?"

"n.o.body," said the Idiot; "and therefore the story doesn't hurt the man's reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the least. Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on the 10th of last August Thompson Bondifeller's yacht was seen anch.o.r.ed for six hours off Tom Watson's farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off with the trust magnate on a cruise from Atlanta, Georgia, to Oklahoma--you don't believe that, do you?"

"It's preposterous on the face of it," said Mr. Bib.

"Well, that's the way the thing works," said the Idiot. "And that's why I think there's a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political campaign. I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar. If it wasn't for these quadrennial political campaigns to spur the fancy on to glorious flights we should become a dull, hard, prosaic, unimaginative people, and that would be death to progress. No people can progress that lacks imagination. Politics is an emery-wheel that keeps our wits polished."

"Well, granting all that you say is true," said the Bibliomaniac, "the intrusion upon a man's private life that politics makes possible--surely you cannot condone that."

The Idiot laughed.

"That's the strangest argument of all," he said. "The very idea of a man who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous. The fellow who does that, Mr. Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is reprehensible. The man who offers himself to the people hasn't any business to tie a string to any part of him. If Jim Jones wants to be President of the United States the people who are asked to put him there have a right to know what kind of a person Jim Jones is in his dressing-gown and slippers. If he beats his mother-in-law, and eats asparagus with the sugar-tongs, and doesn't pay his grocer, the public have a right to know it. If he has children, the voters are perfectly justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their bean-snappers and putty-blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of the premises, ought to be warned beforehand. You wouldn't yourself rent a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?"

"I think not," smiled the Bibliomaniac.

"Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage on the Potomac," said the Idiot. "So it happens that when a man runs for the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow-citizens. When I hear from an authentic source that Mr. So-and-So, the candidate of the Thisorthatic party for the Presidency, is married to an estimable lady who refers to all Frenchmen as parricides, because she believes they have come from Paris, I have a right to consider whether or not I wish to vote to place such a lady at the head of my official table at White House banquets, where she is likely, sooner or later, to encounter the French amba.s.sador, and the man who gives me the necessary information is doing me a service. You may say that the lady is not running for a public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public scrutiny, but that is a fallacy. A man's wife is his better half and his children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don't do becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. As a matter of fact, a public man _can_ have no private life."

"Then you approve of these stories of candidates' cousins, the prattling anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings of their uncles-in-law, and all that?" sneered the Bibliomaniac.

"Certainly, I do," said the Idiot. "When I hear that Judge Torkin's grandson, aged four, has come out for his grandfather's opponent I am delighted, and give the judge credit for the independent spirit which heredity accounts for; when it is told to me that Tom Watson's uncle is going to vote for Tom because he knows Tom doesn't believe what he says, I am almost inclined to vote for him as the uncle of his country; when I hear that Debs's son, aged three, has punched his daddy in the eye, on general principles I feel that there's a baby I want in the White House; and when it is told to me that the Prohibition candidate's third cousin has just been cured of delirium tremens, I feel that possibly there is a family average there that may be struck to the advantage of the country."

"Say, Mr. Idiot," put in the Poet, at this point, "who are you going to vote for, anyhow?"

"Don't ask me," laughed the Idiot. "I don't know yet. I admire all the candidates personally very much."

"But what are your politics--Republican or Democratic?" asked the Lawyer.