by O. Henry
“Uncle Mose am a delicate,” he explained, “to de grand Baptis’ convention in dis city. I never preached none, but bein’ a residin’ elder in de church, and able fur to pay my own expenses, dey sent me along.”
“And how did you know we were in Washington?” inquired Miss Lydia.
“Dey’s a cullud man works in de hotel whar I stops, what comes from Mobile. He told me he seen Mars’ Pendleton comin’ outen dish here house one mawnin’.
“What I come fur,” continued Uncle Mose, reaching into his pocket— “besides de sight of home folks — was to pay Mars’ Pendleton what I owes him.”
“Owe me?” said the major, in surprise.
“Yassir — three hundred dollars.” He handed the major a roll of bills. “When I lef’ old mars’ says: ‘Take dem mule colts, Mose, and, if it be so you gits able, pay fur ‘em’. Yassir — dem was his words. De war had done lef’ old mars’ po’ hisself. Old mars’ bein’ ‘long ago dead, de debt descends to Mars’ Pendleton. Three hundred dollars. Uncle Mose is plenty able to pay now. When dat railroad buy my lan’ I laid off to pay fur dem mules. Count de money, Mars’ Pendleton. Dat’s what I sold dem mules fur. Yassir.”
Tears were in Major Talbot’s eyes. He took Uncle Mose’s hand and laid his other upon his shoulder.
“Dear, faithful, old servitor,” he said in an unsteady voice, “I don’t mind saying to you that ‘Mars’ Pendleton’ spent his last dollar in the world a week ago. We will accept this money, Uncle Mose, since, in a way, it is a sort of payment, as well as a token of the loyalty and devotion of the old regime. Lydia, my dear, take the money. You are better fitted than I to manage its expenditure.”
“Take it, honey,” said Uncle Mose. “Hit belongs to you. Hit’s Talbot money.”
After Uncle Mose had gone, Miss Lydia had a good cry — for joy; and the major turned his face to a corner, and smoked his clay pipe volcanically.
The succeeding days saw the Talbots restored to peace and ease. Miss Lydia’s face lost its worried look. The major appeared in a new frock coat, in which he looked like a wax figure personifying the memory of his golden age. Another publisher who read the manuscript of the “Anecdotes and Reminiscences” thought that, with a little retouching and toning down of the high lights, he could make a really bright and salable volume of it. Altogether, the situation was comfortable, and not without the touch of hope that is often sweeter than arrived blessings.
One day, about a week after their piece of good luck, a maid brought a letter for Miss Lydia to her room. The postmark showed that it was from New York. Not knowing any one there, Miss Lydia, in a mild flutter of wonder, sat down by her table and opened the letter with her scissors. This was what she read:
Dear Miss Talbot:
I thought you might be glad to learn of my good fortune. I have received and accepted an offer of two hundred dollars per week by a New York stock company to play Colonel Calhoun in “A Magnolia Flower.”
There is something else I wanted you to know. I guess you’d better not tell Major Talbot. I was anxious to make him some amends for the great help he was to me in studying the part, and for the bad humour he was in about it. He refused to let me, so I did it anyhow. I could easily spare the three hundred.
Sincerely yours,
H. Hopkins Hargraves,
P.S. How did I play Uncle Mose?
Major Talbot, passing through the hall, saw Miss Lydia’s door open and stopped.
“Any mail for us this morning, Lydia, dear?” he asked.
Miss Lydia slid the letter beneath a fold of her dress.
“The Mobile Chronicle came,” she said promptly. “It’s on the table in your study.”
LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE
So I went to a doctor.
“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.
Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”
He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.
“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”
He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better.
Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.
“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”
“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!
Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips that he had fastened to a card.
“It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is wrong.”
“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so— “
“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”
“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”
The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to — mostly ending in “itis.” I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.
“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.
“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”
I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.
“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”
So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”
My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, “Neurasthenia!” — except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and walked away.
An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop — say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder — a man with feet and a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but the Arm
our Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.
“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labour — recreation, in reality.”
There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium.
“The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in charge, “is no other than — Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work.”
I had seen the book. “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one instead?” I asked.
As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.
“The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork.”
I buttoned my coat.
Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks, ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.
“You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me. “I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”
I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the suitable place for you. But what you need is rest — absolute rest and exercise.”
That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: “What I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up and down while I rest?”
The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over.
“I thought you had ‘em,” he said, not unkindly, “but I guess you’re all right. You’d better go see a doctor, old man.”
A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon. And his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.
“What you need,” he decided, “is sea air and companionship.”
“Would a mermaid— “ I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.
“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet, comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”
The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry on an island off the main shore. Everybody who did not dress for dinner was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and champagne table d’hôte. The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy yachtsmen. The Corsair anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr. Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly at the hotel. Still, it was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.
When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf links and went to sleep on the lawn.
When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “By the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”
“Relieved of very much,” I replied.
Now a consulting physician is different. He isn’t exactly sure whether he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the most careful or the most careless attention. My doctor took me to see a consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some coördination exercises.
“Have you a pain in the back of your head?” he asked. I told him I had not.
“Shut your eyes,” he ordered, “put your feet close together, and jump backward as far as you can.”
I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed. My head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and was only three feet away. The doctor was very sorry. He had overlooked the fact that the door was open. He closed it.
“Now touch your nose with your right forefinger,” he said.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“On your face,” said he.
“I mean my right forefinger,” I explained.
“Oh, excuse me,” said he. He reopened the bathroom door, and I took my finger out of the crack of it. After I had performed the marvellous digito-nasal feat I said:
“I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have something like a pain in the back of my head.” He ignored the symptom and examined my heart carefully with a latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad.
“Now,” he said, “gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the room.”
I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led out of Madison Square Garden. Then, without dropping in a penny, he listened to my chest again.
“No glanders in our family, Doc,” I said.
The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of my nose. “Look at my finger,” he commanded.
“Did you ever try Pears’— “ I began; but he went on with his test rapidly.
“Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger. At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay.” This for about three minutes.
He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that if he had used the phrases: “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward — or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit” — I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination.
After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.
The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and bites me first.
“You must follow this diet strictly,” said the doctors.
“I’d follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what’s on it,” I answered.
“Of next importance,” they went on, “is outdoor air and exercise. And here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you.”
Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my departure.
I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.
“It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle,” he said.
“Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?” said I.
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br /> I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.
Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”
Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold.
He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.
A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept disconsolately.
“I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead.”
“Oh, what is it — what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.
“Nerves a little unstrung,” said John, in his calm way. “Don’t worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.
Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.