_More Anon_
Well, I made up my mind, having tried violent exercise in the gymnasium,
coupled with violent language in the steam room, and having found neither
or both had been of the least avail in trimming down my proportions, but
on the contrary had augmented them to the extent of nearly ten pounds,
live weight, that I would let well enough alone. If 'twere my ordained
fate to be fat--why, then so be it; I'd be fatly fatalistic and go on
through life undulating and rippling. If an all-wise Providence meant to
call me to the estate of being the bulkiest writing man using the English
language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire Belloc look to his laurels and
Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings. There was one consolation:
Thank heavens the championship would remain in America!
The years go marching by in ordered processional. A great war bursts and
for a space endures. In our own land prohibition is nationally enacted and
women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the
times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change;
other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who
in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of
eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those
who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three
days taking Château-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce
it. Ireland undertakes to settle her ancient problem on the basis of
self-extermination. Several rich retail profiteers die, the approval being
hearty and general, and on arriving at heaven experience great difficulty
in passing through the Needle's Eye, or tradesmen's entrance. Somebody
tells Henry Ford about what some high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two
thousand years ago and in the first flush of his startled indignation he
becomes violently anti-Semitic. General Pershing returns from the
battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military
efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip
Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into
the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he
ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled
few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of
but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins,
Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo."
Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics,
its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation
in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains
at the juncture of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to
start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld
builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints.
North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned
thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that
for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the
sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are
undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the
selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people
and much too good for many of the others. The word "intrigued" creeps into
our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it
first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost
exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the payment of
Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and that
chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the old-line Democrats,
practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a
dismal conviction that creation has gone plum' to perdition in a hand
basket. Those more optimistically inclined look upon the brighter side of
things and distill consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad but
what it might have been worse--Trotzky might have been born twins. Great
Britain has her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn
Féin enlarges the British national anthem to read God Save the King Till
We Can Get at Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in
the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that
the airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of
home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to the
early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been aiming
for all through this paragraph.
Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that
something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart there
was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my imagination was at
fault. Mentally, I found myself--well, for lack of a better word to
express it--logy. Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk and
peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance of having reached the age
when a great many of us are confronted by the distressing discovery that
we are rapidly getting no younger.
Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously perfect health as
it has been my good fortune to enjoy takes note that certain nagging
manifestations are persisting within him it is his duty, or least it
should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying cause of whatever
it is that distresses him and correct the trouble before it becomes
chronic.
I did not get frightened--I trust I am not a self-alarmist--but I did get
worried. I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who approach
middle age so often do, for the medical examiner of an insurance company
to scare me into sudden conniption fits. But I also made up my mind that I
would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor
to master it while the mastering was good.
This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I
was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North
American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed
intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily
languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of
malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's,
jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a
strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course
of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand. Recalling these
early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present
symptoms--if symptoms they were. I took quinine until my ears rang so that
persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the
chimes. My head was filled with mysterious muffled rumblings. It was like
living in a haunted house and being one at the same time.