I was allowed to sit on my balcony for an hour this morning. This
would have been a pleasant change had I not heartily disliked at first
sight my next-door neighbor who was sitting on the adjoining balcony.
At noon she sent me a bunch of pansies and her card: Mrs. Grosvenor
Chittenden-Ffollette.
Among fifty or sixty attendants there are always a few who gossip in
spite of repeated warnings from the authorities. Sometimes it is a
young nurse, sometimes a masseuse, a manicure or a shampooer, but
there are always those who retail the news, mostly innocent news, of
an institution like this. Cold-packing, or rubbing, or spraying, or
electrifying, or brushing, or polishing--all these operations open the
flood-gates of speech and no damming process is effectual. Miss Phoebe
Blossom is the herald who proclaims tidings of various kinds in my
room, and there is also a neophyte in the electricity department who
is always full of information and quite unable to retain it. It would
be almost more than human to ask them to be silent when they are the
only links with the world outside. A system reduced to nothingness by
a supper of Wheatoata Coffee, Cracker-dust Croquettes, Cosmos with
milk, and a choice of Cerealina, Nuttetta, Proteinetta, or Glucosa is
in no fit state to resist gossip.
It seems that Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette is more than a mere woman--she
is a remarkable "case," and has proved a worldwide advertisement for
this sanitarium. Dr. Stanwood has almost effected a cure; her disease
has had to be named and her symptoms have been written up in all the
medical journals. I don't know what sort of person she was before she
became a case, but she is now a greater tyrant than Caligula or
Catherine of Russia. As to her disease, she has those things that she
ought not to have, and she has not those things that she ought to
have, and there is no health in her; or at least there was not until
she came here a year ago. Now she is strong enough to perambulate in
the corridor a little while each morning or be wheeled along the
board-walk in the afternoon, and when she hears that some of the other
patients are suffering, she sneers at their modest, uninteresting
ailments and glances in at their doors with half-disguised contempt.
You know the expression of the prize dog who is borne from the show
hung with medals and ribbons--how he gazes on the little mongrel curs
that gather with the crowd in the streets?
Her name, Chittenden-Ffollette, is of as vital importance as her
medical-journal malady. When the third floor is in dire confusion; when
Mrs. Parks has hysterics and Miss Simmons is crying for her mother, and
Mrs. Bell's hot-water bottle has burst in the bed, and Miss Phipps has
discovered that the undergraduate has bandaged the wrong ankle, Miss
Blossom sometimes becomes flustered and hurried and calls her patient
Mrs. Follett, whereupon she says, "_Chittenden_-Ffoll_ette, if_ you
please!"
If by any chance she sees the Chittenden-Ffollette without the hyphen
in the Nurses' Bedside Record Book or scribbled on the morning paper
she doesn't need any stimulant the rest of the day. The omission of
the hyphen sends up her pulse and temperature to the required point
for several hours, though there is always a reaction afterward. I've
told Dr. Levi that I should name one of her complaints hyphenitis. The
occasional operation performed on the hyphen by Miss Blossom, or the
young lady at the stationery counter, might be called hyphenotomy.
Everybody detests Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette, but as the banner patient
of the sanitarium she must be treated with respectful consideration.
All America's most skillful physicians have struggled with her
organism. They have tried to get her symptoms into line, so to speak,
so as to deduce some theory from the grand array of phenomena, but the
symptoms courteously decline to point in any one direction. When the
doctors get seven eighths of them in satisfactory relation there are
always two or three that stay out and sulk, refusing to collaborate in
any sort of harmony. They act precisely like an obstinate jury, in
that they calmly refuse to agree, and then Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette
appeals to a higher court where flaws in the testimony are always
found, judgment is reversed, and a new trial ordered. The greatest
surgeons in Europe have left the bedsides of crowned heads to ponder
over her inscrutable mysteries, and have returned to their sovereigns
crushed and humbled. All this attention would have upset a stronger
character than hers, and now that she is in a fair way to recover, her
pride will have its inevitable fall. Though much more agreeable and
docile than when she entered, she is in uniformly low spirits. The
truth is, she liked being an unsolved mystery and she is a good deal
nettled at being found at last both soluble and curable--obliged to
live, like an ex-president, on the glories of the past.
* * * * *