That wasn’t the arrangement. We had committees for all such matters.
Otherwise there would have been intolerable confusion. It would never
have done in the world. A husband might inadvertently give twenty or
thirty different—er-er—explanations of his unavoidable tardiness, and
then when they got to comparing notes there would have been trouble. As
I have said, we had committees. There was a committee on late returns
and excuses, a committee for seeing that husband wore his rubbers to the
office, a committee for reminding him to get his hair cut, a committee
on new hats and gowns for summer and other seasons, a committee to get
him to put on the screen doors in May, a committee to remind him about
birthdays one week in advance, a committee for—oh, everything you can
imagine. It was like a Legislature or Congress—except that instead of one
there were forty-nine Speakers in the House.”
“Very interesting, Mr. Young, I am sure. But I was instructed to get your
views on woman suffrage. Do you approve of women voting?”
“I don’t quite like the form of your question. Put it this way: do I
object to women voting? I do not, for two reasons: first, I know better,
after my extensive experience, than to object to anything women want to
do, since it can do no good; and second, since women run things, anyway,
to suit themselves, the act of voting is merely a symbol or ceremony of
registration of their power. They were the real rulers before they got
the ballot, and the vote isn’t going to change the situation any. The
only hitch I see will come if the women can’t make up their minds as to
just what and whom they want to vote for. I suppose in states where women
have never voted before there may be a little trouble with those who
have changed their minds after casting their ballot and want to get it
back for a minute to add a postscript. But on the whole I don’t see why
any man—any married one at least—should object to woman suffrage. Since
the average voter gets his instructions from a political boss, anyway,
it might be more convenient to have that boss in the family. Woman is
assuming new duties and responsibilities every day. The hand that used
to roll the baby carriage now rolls the cigarette.”
“You have spoken, Mr. Young,” I remarked as I rose to depart, “as if the
wife were always the ruler, the autocrat of the home. Are you aware that
the Census Bureau now officially recognizes the husband as the head of
the house?”
Brigham smiled sadly as he replied: “Yes; but they only take a census
once in ten years.”
And I tiptoed silently from the pathetic presence of one who had married
not wisely, but too much.
VII
HIPPOCRATES ON MODERN DOCTORS
“What did you say about a hip-pocket?” queried the city editor
suspiciously. “I want a drink as much as any man, but since prohibition
arrived no camel has had anything on me. I believe in respecting the law
even if—”
“I didn’t say anything about a hip-pocket,” I cut in. “I said it might
be a good scheme to interview old Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine,
and find out what he thinks about modern doctors and surgeons and
professional etiquette and whether times have improved any since he was
in active practice a couple of thousand years ago. What do you think of
the idea?”
“Go to it,” responded the C. E., “but be careful he doesn’t try to charge
you ‘for professional advice.’ Make him understand that we’re doing the
favor, not he. He ought to be glad of the free advertising. He’ll say at
first he doesn’t want any publicity—it is unethical. See if he doesn’t.
These doctors are all alike. I know ’em.”
Much to my surprise the city editor’s cynical prediction was verified
by my victim’s opening remarks. “You want me to talk for _publication_,
young man?” said the Father of Medicine. “You’re sure you’re not a
representative of an eastern publishing house who has been authorized
to place a few copies of a new encyclopedia with a selected number of
the most prominent citizens, absolutely free of charge, on payment of a
dollar down and five dollars a month for twenty years?”
Somewhat mystified, I replied in the negative.
“And you’re not demonstrating from purely philanthropic motives—the only
charge being for packing and postage—a new tonic guaranteed to make the
baldest pate blossom into a Paderewski?”
“No, sir, I’m not an agent of any kind. I have nothing to sell.”
“You are certain you are not promoting the sale of a new absolutely
talk-proof safety razor for married men whose wives insist on conversing
while they are trying to shave themselves? Or a new hip-pocket Testament
holding one pint? Or a machine for manufacturing cigars at home, in
anticipation of the next Great Reform? Or a self-spelling typewriter
for business college graduates? You are not selling stock in a gold
mine in Iceland at fifty cents par today, but price to be raised
positively next Monday at ten o’clock to a dollar and a half, all shares
guaranteed non-assessable and non-returnable? You are not the agent for a
combination snow-shovel and lawn-mower, especially designed for the North
American climate, transposable at a moment’s notice? You are not selling
diamond-studded coupon clippers for profiteers or self-finding collar
buttons, or—”
“My dear sir, I have nothing to sell at all. I am a reporter and I want—”
“Oh, a reporter? Well, why didn’t you say so at first, instead of causing
all this confusion and waste of breath? I’ve been so bothered with
agents of every sort lately that I can’t sleep nights. I told one that
the other day and he pulled a bottle out of his bag and tried to sell me
an infallible cure for insomnia. I resolved not to let another one into
my house. But you’re a reporter, eh? That’s a refreshing novelty around
here. Come in.
“But you must know that I never talk for publication. I have never done
such a thing in my entire professional career. It would be entirely
contrary to the ethics of my sacred calling. Somebody might say I was
trying to advertise myself. You know doctors can’t be too careful. We
never advertise. We may occasionally consent, under pressure, to the
publication of an item in the society column saying that ‘Dr. Theophilus
Sawbones of 52896 Arnica Avenue has returned after a two weeks’ trip to
Atlantic City and resumed his practice.’ But that isn’t advertising.
That’s news. You never see a surgeon, for instance, descending to the
low commercial plane of your merchants, and announcing in a display
advertisement: ‘Cut rates all this week at Dr. Carvem’s. Now is the
time to get that appendix cut out. All operations marked down. Special
bargains in tonsils.’
“No, sir. We have an exalted code of ethics in our profession, I am happy
to say, dating from the time when I founded the practice of medicine. But
if you are sure a few timely remarks from me will not be misinterpreted
and regarded as an attempt on my part to get into the limelight, I am
at your service to the extent of about a column and a half, offered for
acceptance at your regular rates, to be run next reading matter.”
“I am certain, doctor,” I responded, “that the world will attribute
no self-promoting motives to one enjoying your long and honorable
reputation. Do you note many changes in the practice of medicine since
the days when you were in the harness?”
“Well,” responded Hippocrates as he thoughtfully stroked his long beard,
“there seem to be more different kinds of doctors nowadays than we had
in 400 B. C. We didn’t know anything about specialists in our time. We
were not merely general practitioners; we were universal practitioners.
“Suppose, for instance, a prosperous citizen of Athens had the gout,
indigestion, corns, heart murmur, rheumatism, torpidity of the liver
and clergyman’s sore throat—seven ailments in all. He sent for me and I
treated all his diseases at the same time. While he had a combination of
diseases, we knew any good doctor would understand the combination.
“I felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, and told him he was working too
hard—just as one of your modern doctors would do. It always pleases a
prosperous citizen to be told that he is working too hard—and we aim to
please. If I thought he would like a trip somewhere, I recommended a run
over to Rome during the Coliseum season. They used to have some mighty
good shows at the Coliseum. If he preferred to take his vacation at home,
then I recommended a trip for his wife. I told him not to eat so much and
to take more exercise, and to cut out the worry, and then collected my
fee of two drachmas, and went on to the next vic—I mean, the next patient.
“But take that same prosperous citizen today. How many specialists would
he have to call in before he could consider his case properly attended
to? Seven diseases, seven specialists, you say? Oh, more than that. First
thing he’d have to send for the primary diagnostician, if he wished to
do it in thoroughly up-to-date style. Well, the primary diagnostician
would come in to find out, first, what was the matter with him. He looks
the patient all over and takes flash-light pictures of his interior,
makes a card index of all the things the matter with him and then calls
in his stenographer and dictates a circular letter to a collection of
specialists, asking them to drop around at their leisure and confirm his
diagnoses. And do _they_ proceed then to treat the patient? Not for a
minute. They are the secondary diagnosticians. Each has his specialty and
wouldn’t dream of encroaching on any other specialist’s territory. The
gout man looks only for gout—and he finds what he is looking for. The
indigestion expert does the same—and it can’t escape his eagle eye. It’s
the same all down the line.
“When the seven secondary diagnosticians have finished their job the
patient is presented with seven neatly-inscribed charts, showing the
general plan and location of his various troubles—and seven courteously
worded communications beginning with precisely the same words: ‘For
professional services to date.’
“Now it’s time to call in the specialists who administer the treatment.
Seven more of ’em. Why, nowadays the house of a rich man who’s got
something the matter with his insides looks like the convention hall of
the American Medical Association during a well-attended session. And
that’s not all. You not only have to have a different doctor for each
disease, but a whole lot of brand-new diseases we never heard of in my
time have been invented. Back in the old days in Athens there were only
about a dozen ailments a fellow could acquire. If he escaped these he
never had to call in a doctor. But today, as any specialist will tell
you, there are about fifty-seven varieties of throat trouble alone. You
can have eighty-six different things the matter with your liver, while
the various kinds of indigestion, plain and fancy, would fill a book. In
our time, too, we did mighty little tinkering with the human frame with
tools and things. We knew about the appendix, but we failed to perceive
its commercial possibilities. We thought it had been put there for some
wise purpose—but it didn’t occur to us that it might be a financial one.
The price of a modern appendicitis operation would have supported one of
our old Greek physicians in luxury for three years.
“It was the same with tonsils. We’d as soon have thought of cutting off a
man’s tongue as taking out his tonsils. Every young doctor had to take an
oath—the _Hippocratic_ oath, _I_ called it—that he would give everybody
the benefit of his services without regard to money. Nowadays if doctors
take the oath I presume a good many of them keep their fingers crossed.
I agree that when a doctor is called out of his bed in the middle of the
night, to treat an old fellow who is suffering from nothing except fatty
degeneration of the pocketbook, it’s quite a temptation to relieve him of
a substantial share of that trouble. Some folk think they aren’t getting
full attention unless they are charged enough to make them feel it in
the pocket nerve. Increased wages of workingmen are bound to enlarge the
number of millionaire medicos.”
“So, you think, Doctor, the practice of medicine has become somewhat
commercialized since your day?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. I did not wish to reflect on my successors. That
would not be professional. I’m simply sorry that back in 400 B. C. we
were not alive to our opportunities. Think of our allowing Croesus, the
richest man that ever lived, to go around with his appendix intact! Why,
I sat up with him all one night when he had acute inflammation of the
imagination and thought he saw pink Egyptian crocodiles crawling up the
window-shades, and only charged him two dollars!
“No, understand me. I’m not finding fault with the twentieth century
doctors. I’m only envious of their opportunities. Your modern doctor
dashes around town in his automobile and calls on twenty patients a
day. I had an old ox team, non-self-starting, that couldn’t take the
smallest hill on high and had a maximum speed on the level of two miles
an hour. While I was attending a patient at one end of Athens a patient
at the other end had time to get well without my assistance. That was
discouraging to any young fellow just as his practice and professional
beard were beginning to grow. And nowadays they tell me you have
allopaths, and homeopaths and osteopaths—but you must remember that all
paths lead to the grave.”
“Why is that last joke just like you, Doctor?” I interposed in
self-defense.
“I give it up. Why is it?”
“Because it dates from at least 400 B. C.”
And the look Hippocrates gave in return made me thankful he wasn’t my
family doctor. I knew he would rejoice to write me a prescription of ten
grains of strychnine, three times a day, to be taken before meals.
VIII
METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS
It’s odd how often in interviewing the old-timers and ancient shades
one’s preconceived ideas get a jolt. In my mind’s eye I had a vision of
Methuselah, for instance, as an antediluvian figure with a Santa Claus
beard and a general air of decrepitude. The door was opened in response
to my ring by a smartly dressed, smooth-shaven individual, who certainly
looked as if the burden of age sat lightly upon his shoulders.
“I should like to see Mr. Methuselah,” I said. “That is, if he is able to
see callers today. If he’s having his nap, or not feeling very spry this
morning, I can come again.”
“Come again? I guess not. You see me right now. I was going over to the
Olympus Club to play a round of golf, but I’ll be glad to give you half
an hour. Walk right in. What can I do for you?”
“My city editor wanted an interview on how to attain long life, but I
must have got hold of the wrong Mr. Methuselah. I want the one who
lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, the world’s champion oldest
inhabitant. Surely you’re not—”
“I’ll say I am. I’m the only original, the guaranteed
nine-times-centenarian and then some. I know what you expected to see:
an old fossil with snowy whiskers and numerous wrinkles, walking with a
couple of canes and dressed in a single garment like an old-fashioned
nightshirt. You were prepared to have me give my reminiscences, to wheeze
out, between painful breaths, that the old days were far better than
anything we have now, to roast the younger generation, and wind up by
attributing my longevity to abstaining from booze and the use of tobacco
in any form. You were all ready to put down that I can read fine print
without glasses and can remember events of nine hundred and fifty years
ago as if they happened only yesterday. Oh, I know you newspaper fellows
and I’ve read so many interviews with centenarians I could write one
myself with my eyes shut. My advice to anybody who wants to live to be a
hundred, to say nothing of nine hundred and sixty-nine, is, ‘Don’t.’ And
as for reminiscences, my motto is, ‘Forget it.’ I haven’t any very happy
recollections of my long-drawn-out stay on earth. Existence is pleasant,
but it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing.
“Take our married life, for instance. At the start everybody said it
was a regular love story. But even a love story that stretches out
into a serial of over nine hundred chapters gets a trifle monotonous.
You’ve never heard of Mrs. M. She wouldn’t tell her age even to get
her name into the Bible. I remember when they first started taking
the census. The census taker came to our house and camped out three
years. Couldn’t get all the facts of our family any other way. And we
had to board him all that time. Well, his wife’s sister belonged to
the Daughters of Eve Foreign Missionary Society, the same one my wife
did, and Mrs. M. said she just knew that if she gave her age, why,
that mean old thing would know it within half an hour, and it would be
all around town before the day was over. And she just wouldn’t give
it. I gave him all the dope about the other members of the family, my
great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren and the close relations on my wife’s
side who’d been living with us for three hundred and fifty years (close
was no name for it), but I balked when it came to the question of Mrs.
M.’s age. The fact was, she was only about four hundred and twenty-five,
or thereabouts, at the time, but you know how women are—so blamed
sensitive about something that men are proud of—and so I told him to go
and get the information from headquarters.
“Well, it happened to be a bad combination that day. It was wash-day,
and the cook had just left, after being with us for a hundred and eighty
years, and quite a number of the children had the measles and the
whooping cough and one thing another, and Mrs. M. happened to have a mop
in her hand at the time, and—But here I am reminiscing away and I said I
wouldn’t. Let’s get back to business. What did you want me to talk about?”
“I’d like you to explain how you’ve kept so young-looking and feeling
after all these years.”
“That’s easy. I’m just following the new policy of you folks down below
and carrying it out to its logical extreme. The modern idea is to regard
age as merely a state of mind. Simply refuse to grow old and you’ll find
it’s easy enough to stay young. Is your hair getting gray? Never say dye.
Is your hair falling out? Get it bobbed. Don’t try camouflaging your
face, but keep young inside. Joshua has the right dope: let’s have some
lifetime saving. Half a century ago a man was old at forty and a woman
put on a cap and sat in the chimney corner when she turned thirty. A
girl was an old maid at twenty-five. Today you think there’s something
wrong with a grandmother who can’t jazz and nobody knows the meaning of
‘declining years.’ And nobody is too old to decline a cigarette or a
dance. They used to say a man ought to retire at seventy. Now it’s hard
to get him to retire at midnight, if there’s a good show left in town.
Folks are just beginning to enjoy life at sixty.
“All I’ve done is to follow you folk’s example and refuse to be old at
nine hundred and sixty-nine. If I can do it, everybody can. How does
this jibe with my advice not to try to live to be a hundred, you may
ask. That’s perfectly consistent. The way to live long is not to bother
about it. I wouldn’t have been five hundred if I’d tried to keep up with
the advice of all the insurance experts. I speak from experience. Take
the ‘no breakfast’ cranks, for instance. I went without breakfast for
one hundred and twenty-five years and I didn’t know what was the matter
with me. Then I tried taking a couple of pounds of beefsteak and half a
dozen baked potatoes before breakfast every morning, and I felt like a
new man. Then, once at the beginning of a century—I forget which one—Mrs.
M. got me to swear off on tobacco for a hundred years. We used to make
our so-called good resolutions at the start of a century, not of a year,
the way you do. The first hundred years may be the hardest, she said,
but ‘see how much better you’ll feel.’ Well, I stuck it out about sixty
years, and then the whole family came around and besought me on bended
knee to go back to hitting the pipe. They said life in our once happy
home was getting to resemble a bear garden or a peace conference or a
free-for-all prize fight. Better to smoke than to fume. And so I got out
the old pipe and smoked up for another six hundred years.
“I wish I’d kept a card index of all the health fads I’ve seen come and
go. Once the vegetarians had their inning. Somebody said the secret of
health was to eat nothing but onions. It would have been pretty hard to
keep the secret. Then we were told to eat only fruit. And once all the
cranks decided on an exclusive diet of nuts—sort of cannibalistic when
you come to think of it. One winter they said we’d all be healthier with
the minimum of underwear—the short and simple flannels of the poor.
Another rule for living long was to almost freeze yourself every morning
taking a cold bath—I remember one winter I qualified for a zero medal.
I ate baled hay and fried sawdust and all sorts of breakfast foods for
two or three centuries, under the impression that they were the elixirs
of eternal youth, and then one day I found I was getting so weak and
wobbly on my pins I cut ’em all out and went back to a good dose of real
food, three times a day, to be taken at mealtime. I quit the fads and
fancies, ate everything that came my way and let ’em fight it out among
themselves. And I broke the world’s record for dodging the undertaker.
“But, as I remarked before, I can’t say I’d advise anybody to try to
be even a single centenarian, to say nothing of scoring nine. Think of
paying for nine hundred birthday presents your wife gave you, not to
mention several thousand contributed by the children and grandchildren
and other descendants. Why, one birthday I got ninety-three pairs of
slippers, most of ’em, of course, a size too small—must have thought
I was a centipede. Then there’s a good deal of competition among
centenarians, and that leads to jealousy and hard feelings. For instance,
I’d always predicted the weather by my rheumatiz (although I could
never tell when there was going to be a storm at home). I got quite a
reputation by it. And then an upstart centenarian over at Ararat, a young
fellow only about three hundred years old, claimed it always rained when
his corns hurt him—or the other way round—and took away about half my
visitors. He boasted that he had a set of infallible corns, and every
morning he’d get out a bulletin such as ‘Fair and warmer,’ or ‘Cold
weather with snow.’ A regular fakir, he was. Honest folk just considered
him one of those excess prophets. But he seemed to guess right about
fifty per cent of the time, and when he was wrong people gave him credit
for his good intentions. His whole stock in trade was his corns. Any good
chiropodist could have reduced him to bankruptcy in five minutes. But he
put up a bluff and got away with it and made folks think he was the real
Oldest Inhabitant.”
“One more question, Mr. Methuselah: how do you account for the fact that
folks lived so much longer in your time than they do nowadays?”
“Well, there were no automobiles and telephones and germ theories, and
revenue officers and apartment houses and phonographs and piano-players
and rolled hose and alarm clocks and table d’hôte dinners, for one thing,
and for another, we didn’t try to compress five hundred years of living
into a fifty years’ existence. We didn’t cover any more distance over the
highway of life than you moderns do, but we took more time to do it in.
We walked instead of ran, and picked flowers along the wayside and paused
now and then to admire the scenery. And rich or poor, young or old, we
got out of life exactly what you do—a living. And now I must ask you to
excuse me. I promised to play nine holes with Noah before luncheon. How
would you like to carry my golf sticks?”
I respectfully declined, pleading a previous engagement. I have played
many rôles in my time, as a reporter, but I felt I must draw the line at
caddying for Methuselah.
IX
JESSE JAMES TALKS ON TIPPING
On receiving the city editor’s assignment to interview the shade of
Jesse James on the tipping custom, I carefully removed my watch, purse
and scarfpin and left them in my desk, for even my brief experience with
dwellers in the astral region had taught me that they haven’t greatly
changed their habits and modes of living since their departure from
earthly scenes, and I couldn’t afford to run any risk. But I soon found
that I needn’t have taken the precaution, for in almost his first words
the famous bandit and all-round bad man showed me that he had thoroughly
reformed.