What Methuselah Thinks of Dr. Osler.
“O that mine adversary had written a book!”
“The most miserable man in Hades is no longer Job but Methuselah,”
whispered Anon. “Ever since Dr. Osler celebrated his departure for
England by proposing a wholesale slaughter of the innocent aged,
Methuselah has had to take a seat on the sinners’ bench. It was
formerly considered an honor to be an old man, even in Hades, but now
it is a disgrace not to have died young. The other day, Cain, who is
the bad boy of the underworld, gave Methuselah as a birthday present
a collection of thirty-six bottles of chloroform, one for each sixty
years of his earthly age. Then the lad, who is Satan’s chief imp, put a
placard on Methuselah’s back reading ‘Oslerized.’”
“There comes a time in every man’s life when he wishes for Herod’s
power, that he might order all children killed—except his own!”
muttered the old man. “But I had my revenge: I was Abel to raise Cain
over a foot.”
“Under a spreading chestnut tree,
The ancient jokesmith lies,”
hummed Longfellow.
“That is a prehistoric relic which leaked from the Ark when we grounded
on Mt. Ararat,” volunteered Noah. “I sprung that ‘raising Cain’ joke on
Mrs. Noah, but you know a woman has no sense of humor and she said she
had her hands full without working the adoption degree.”
“‘O, that mine adversary had written a book!’” reiterated Methuselah.
“He has; your wish is fulfilled.”
It was a newcomer who spoke. All eyes were turned upon him as
Methuselah asked:
“Who are you?”
“A. Hasbeen, M.D., late secretary of the Os-slurs Chloroforming
Institute of Baltimore. To-day I became a back number—60—which entitled
me to a painless passing, the anæsthetic being administered by Dr.
Senile. But there was no need of the old men getting angry at what Dr.
Osler said about them. He intended it only for advertising purposes.
Having got himself talked into notoriety, his publishers have announced
that a book by the doctor is in press.”
“Then am I revenged indeed! Æsthetic as he is, Dr. Osler will wish that
he had taken an anæsthetic before the book reviewers get through with
him. Oh, for the fatally facile pen of the bright and bitter Corelli!”
“Anthony Trollope says he said it first.”
“Oh, the idea is itself old enough to be chloroformed,” explained Dr.
Hasbeen. “Osler has been trying to explain that it was all a jest, but
the public refuses to take him in earnest: a comedian never can become
a tragedian. It only goes to show that, although Barnum may be right
in his opinion that the American people like to be fooled, they won’t
swallow a joke that is thrust down their throats and smile over it, and
they do not want their sense of the ludicrous drugged by an overdose of
chloroform.”
“I may be a member of the silent majority,” went on Methuselah, “but
this insult to age would put speech in the most chapfallen mummy,
however it might be pressed for time. Notified to quit thinking at
forty and to stop living at sixty! Why, in my day, a man hadn’t cut
his wisdom tooth then! I’m inclined to think that Dr. Osler still has
some teeth to cut. Man, like wine, improves with age. Before making
that speech the doctor should have put on his old slippers; then nobody
would have known where the shoe pinched him.”
“I wonder how long it took Osler to sober up after that intemperate
speech? Nobody ever heard of him until he approached the danger line of
encroaching years. What has he been doing in the past? Doubtless he is
no different from the ordinary man, who remains a dormant factor until
he comes to years of discretion, which is more likely to be sixty than
sixteen. Before that time, he courts women and wine more assiduously
than wisdom and common sense.”
“A man’s early life is too much taken up with breach-of-promise cases,
divorces and the stock exchange to care whether or not the world owes
him a living or to take the trouble to collect it. Though the financial
acumen of Humpty Dumpty does not make Wall Street tremble, it tumbles
to a good thing long before he takes a fall to himself. The bears come
out of their pits and the bulls leave their greenbacks to seek other
and greener goods to devour.”
“You know ‘there is no fool like an old fool,’” I ventured to quote.
“‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are
fools’; they’ve been there themselves,” retorted Methuselah.
“It is easy to mould even stubborn facts by applying the sparks from
the thought anvils of dead men’s minds, which the world accepts because
the men are dead and not because the sparks burn with living truth.
“Proverbs, not men, should be sacrificed on the altar of antiquity.
“‘At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty and reforms his plan.’”
“Thank you, Young,” said Methuselah, gratefully. “Your ‘Night Thoughts’
have shed light on a dark subject. Young is older in wisdom than his
name implies, for a man does not get his mental equilibrium until the
pendulum is swinging to the west, and he becomes too old to wallow in
champagne or to eat lobster suppers with a peroxide blonde. A man’s
legs may be in a forced retreat to the grave, but his brain remains
more active in the world’s service than that of the youngster under
forty, who develops the muscle in his arms at the expense of the gray
matter in his brain. It is only the callow youth who suffers from
softening of the brain. The man at sixty has more dollars in his cellar
and more sense in his garret than the fool of thirty has cents in his
pocket. Yet youth and age are not antagonistic; they are like the two
parts of a pair of scissors in the work of the world: ‘useless each
without the other.’”
“Don’t you think that Dr. Osler promulgated his theory of earthly
eradication at the suggestion of a feminine relative?”
“That would not be surprising. Women are apt to see the defects of an
aged man of talent and the merits of a young fool. It is possible that
some woman in the Osler family is weary of being an old man’s darling
and wants to squeeze him out, unless he can produce the elixir of
Faust.”
“That’s the solution. The women are determined to have something to
squeeze, even if they have to stifle their embraces in chloroform and
let their affections go to ‘weeds.’ Woman is a poppy that exhales
her perfume only in the shade. It may be that somebody else has said
that after me, for Osler implies that the oldest inhabitant is only a
reminiscence of what isn’t so. Who was the author, Bartlett?”
“That is not a ‘Familiar Quotation,’” answered Bartlett, after a
hurried consultation with Dr. Johnson and Roget. “Therefore, it must
belong to Anon; he claims everything to which other people cannot prove
their title. It seems to me that you are getting so independent that
you even rebel against your metaphors. You call woman a fragrant poppy
in the shade, in apparent ignorance of the fact that in Hades, where
all women have shady characters, there is no perfume. You poets can
scent everything but the bloom of truth.”
“Oh, well, you’re not so fragrant,” said Anon, slangily. “You only
gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, while I furnished the thread
which bound them. But we have lost the thread of this discourse. It
seems to me that if the lethal chamber were to become popular, a man
would have to begin putting his affairs in order almost as soon as he
had ceased to ask his mother-in-law if he might kiss his wife.”
“That’s one thing which has struck me as odd,” I said. “What particular
place of torment has been reserved for the mothers-in-law? I haven’t
seen one since I came to Hades.”
“Nor are you likely to do so,” chuckled Anon. “Mothers-in-law go to
Paradise without any preliminary probation. Adam had no mother-in-law,
you know, so he insisted that he wasn’t going to put up with any one’s
else. Lucifer was glad to accede to Adam’s request for banishing these
marital appendages, for he feared that if he allowed the mothers-in-law
to enter Hades, he would be out of a job within twenty-four hours. No
man ever doubted that his wife’s mother could outpoint the devil.”
I glanced in alarm at Dr. Roget, who appeared to be choking, but soon
I discovered that he was merely swallowing half a dozen pages of his
“Thesaurus” preparatory to communicating his ideas to us. He spoke
slowly, biting off a word, chewing it until it was thoroughly digested,
and then spitting it forth with the retort of a verbal bomb. His speech
lasted as long as the paper held out, which he later explained by
saying that he never could speak without notes.
“If the world knew that the mother-in-law is a rarer bird in Hades than
a political blackbird hanging over both sides of the fence under the
plum tree, the earth would be depopulated faster by that news than by
the Oslerized process. Charon would have to charter all the world’s
warships for transports and each man in Hades would have to make a
jack o’ lantern of his skull to prevent being run down by the crowd
of onrushing shades. Hades would no longer be a country of suburban
cottages but a Hell of Harlem flats.”
“We are wandering farther away from the subject under discussion than
any convention of preachers I ever knew,” said David. “Isn’t it about
time we had a text? I would suggest: ‘And Saul took the sword and fell
upon it.’”
“You see I didn’t have Dr. Osler for a medical adviser,” explained
Saul. “In my day, when we wanted to shorten the duration of our stay on
that planet called the earth, we cut it. Methinks an opiate would have
deadened the edge of the sword when I walked the plank.”
“Dr. Osler has gone me one better,” said David. “He has revised the
Psalms to read: The days of a man are two score years, and if, by
reason of any extraordinary fund of vitality, he shall linger around
until he is three score without the ten, he had better get a hustle on
and remove himself, for he is in the way of some one else.”
“Like an emetic, one thing brings up another,” put in Methuselah,
anxious to throw up his grievance. “Having told us it is one’s duty to
dismiss himself from the world, this authority very kindly suggested
that a particular anæsthetic would be the best means for one’s
transfer out of time. The edict has gone forth: All out at sixty. When
the census-taker makes his rounds, he will say: ‘Age, if you please?
Sixty? Kindly step into the asphyxiation chamber or into the ambulance
where you will find a bottle awaiting you. Good-night’. Night, when
deep sleep falleth upon man, has come too early. When a babe, he
smelleth the bottle afar off and lo! children cry for the soothing
syrup which the man would fain put away. Before his eye is dimmed by
the sunset glow, the light of his life is quenched in four ounces of
chloroform.
“According to this medical expert,” continued Methuselah, “when a man
proposes to celebrate his sixtieth birthday by emigrating beyond the
Styx, he is to buy a ticket and pay for it with poison or pistol. He is
then fit only for the doctor and the refuse heap. Has it come to this?
No twentieth century painless surgery for me, thank you. Long life is
no longer a thing to long for. I would prefer to be kissed not by the
dews of night but by the salutation of the glorious morning.”
“‘Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth,’” exclaimed Solomon, who still
the wisest of men, had hitherto kept silent. He was addressing
Methuselah. “One may no longer tarry until his beard is grown and his
hair is dyed. No longer may he come to his grave in a full age like as
a shock of corn cometh in his season, and though it may go against the
grain, the Grim Reaper stalks through the field, stopping up the ears
with Osler’s Death Drugs.”
“The doctor is an homeopathist,” observed Sherlock Holmes, in a tone so
decided that it left no question for argument.
“I’m not Watson,” I responded, “but of course I know you want some one
to ask you how you know. Just to be accommodating, allow me to inquire
how you can tell that Dr. Osler is an homeopathist when you haven’t
even the ashes of his cigar to analyze? Do you mean because of small
doses?”
“No; like cures like. Old men being a drug on the market, it takes
a drug to remove them. Had he consulted me I would have recommended
cocaine instead of chloroform.”
“Do you think that Dr. Osler will take his own medicine when the frost
is on the temples and the anæsthetic’s handy?”
“Doctors never do. That may be because of professional etiquette, but
it is more likely that the physicians recognize the truth of the saying
about self-preservation being the first law of nature. Some doctors
are so conscientious that they would rather be murdered by another
physician than commit suicide themselves. You may depend upon it that
there is no chloroform in Dr. Osler’s family medicine chest; he keeps
it only for his patients!”
[Illustration: _The Virgin Throned in the West. Chapter VI_]
THE VIRGIN THRONED IN THE
WEST: A TABLOID TANGLE OF
LOVE AND HISTORY.