Mr. Clyde. “I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is
nervous. He’s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of
what’s in it.”
“What _is_ in it?” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of
fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There’s as much
nerve-excitation in a glass of it—yes, and more—than in a cup of strong
coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five
cups of strong coffee every day?”
“I’d think his parents were fools,” declared Grandma Sharpless bluntly.
“Or his physician,” suggested Dr. Strong. “I’ve seen cases of people
drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that ‘harmless’ stuff every
day. Of course, they were on the road to nervous smash-up. But the
craving for it was established and they hadn’t the nerve to stop.”
“The soda-fountain as a public peril,” said Mr. Clyde, with a smile.
“There’s more in that than can be smiled away,” retorted the doctor
vigorously. “What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised
‘bracers,’ and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like bromo-seltzer,
the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the community.”
“What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation.
So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about
soda-water and candy, particularly the latter—”
“I’ve always said,” broke in Grandma Sharpless, “that candy-eating
would ruin any digestion.”, “Then you’ve always been wrong, ma’am,”
said Dr. Strong. “Candy, well and honestly made, is excellent food at
the proper time. The trouble is, both with candy and with the heavy,
rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling up with them
between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of work
to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen
to the machines in your factory, if you didn’t give them proper
intervals of rest?”
“They’d be very short-lived,” said Mr. Clyde. “There’s a curious thing
about machinery which everybody knows but nobody understands: running a
machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives it harder wear than
running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a regular rest.”
“So with the machinery of digestion,” said the doctor. “The stomach and
intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest up,
if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding
down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a
meal, if you want it. It’s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give
your digestion a fair chance.”
“You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,” observed Mr.
Clyde sardonically. “The newspapers say so.”
“That’s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,” returned Dr.
Strong. “The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation.
Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew
properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If
they’d take time to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.”
“Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,” remarked Mr.
Clyde. “Since I took up hand-ball I haven’t needed them. But I suppose
that half the business men in town think they couldn’t live without
drugging themselves two or three times a week.”
“Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print,
about his digestion, and he’ll swallow it whole, together with the drug
which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising.
Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but
a steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of
the advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion
into a state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more
digestions and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into
type.”
“Castor-oil is good enough for me,” said Grandma Sharpless
emphatically.
“It’s good enough for anybody—that is to say, bad enough and nasty
enough so that there isn’t much danger of its being abused. But these
infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man’s intestinal
organization so that it can’t do its work without ‘em, and, Lord knows,
it can’t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along comes
appendicitis.”
“But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent appendicitis,”
said Mrs. Clyde.
Dr. Strong’s face was very grim. “Yes, they advertise. Commercial
travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers
as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A
Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has kept
records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the
appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the ‘liver-pill’ and
‘steady-cathartic’ habit. He explains his theory in this way. The man
begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life. Little by
little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows less
responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his
intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature.
Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix
becomes infected, and there’s nothing for it but the surgeon’s knife.”
“Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time
their stomach got a little out of kilter?” asked Mrs. Sharpless
shrewdly.
“Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run
anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,” answered Dr.
Strong with a smile. “A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of
brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more
slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine
cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the
newspaper-and-drug-store pill.”
“But all patent medicines aren’t bad, are they?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“Some have very good testimonials.”
“Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to _cure_ is a fraud and
a swindle.”
“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are
prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em
long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim
but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot
are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and
soothing syrups.”
“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them
has turned out to be an opium fiend.”
The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had
sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from
Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at
him.
“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I
remember as a boy—”
“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t
going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I
had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he
was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups;
had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little
fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or
nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and
a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was
doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never
knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that
the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything
to do with his ruin?”
“Why, Mrs. Sharpless,” said the other, very gently, “I can only put it
before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and enslaving of
all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and formative
years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting the
seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol,
which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his
second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey
every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard,
would you think it strange?”
“I’d think it strange if he didn’t.”
“Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are
a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or
morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow’s ‘Soothing Syrup,’ and Kopp’s ‘Baby
Friend.’ This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact that the
morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country. Isn’t
it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some of
the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in
childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The
nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at
a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed
manifestation.”
“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription,
can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“It can _in a patent medicine_,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the
ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest
people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”
“Some testimonials are hard to believe,” said Mrs. Clyde, thankfully
accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful phase
of the topic. “Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she owes
her health to Hall’s Catarrh Cure.” Dr. Strong smiled sardonically.
“That’s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars reward for any
case it can’t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one
hundred dollars, they said he hadn’t given their remedy a sufficient
trial: he’d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a
useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does
she?”
“Why shouldn’t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three bottles
of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.”
“All right. Let’s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases.
While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with
pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.”
“In two places,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I saw him walking up the street
yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.”
“Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs.
Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a
strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.”
“But she got well,” said Mrs. Clyde. “They’re up in the woods now.”
“Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble’s experience with Hall’s
Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of typhoid, set
a cat on the patient.”
Mr. Clyde laughed. “I see,” he said. “People get well in spite of these
patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. _Post hoc, non propter
hoc_, as our lawyer friends say.”
“You’ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its
own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and
mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it’s
diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it
on. If it’s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices
to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the
body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient
chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack ‘cure’ the credit
goes to that medicine.”
“Or to the doctor, if it’s a doctor’s case,” suggested Grandma
Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.
“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth
or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.
“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs.
Clyde.
“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure
a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather
it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is
often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by
skillful handling.”
“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”
“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure
for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And
Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly,
successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which
strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however,
come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the
physician and the laboratory.”
“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship
through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.
“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures.
To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like
Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies
everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of
the poor fools who believe and take it.”
“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde
innocently.
“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it.
Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which
granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court
and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which
generally signify a way to get around a good law.”
“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more,
as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.
“That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you’ll find that the
words ‘alcohol,’ ‘opium,’ ‘acetanilid,’ ‘chloral,’ and other terms of
poison, have sprouted forth there, in very small and inconspicuous
type. But there’s a free field for the false promises on sign-boards,
in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next
drug-store window you pass and you’ll see ‘sure cures’ exploited in
terms that would make Ananias feel like an amateur.”
“You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,”
observed Mr. Clyde.
“Not at all. As a class, they’re a decent, self-respecting, honorable
lot of men.”
“Then why do they stick to a bad trade?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
Dr. Strong got to his feet. “Let one of them answer,” he said. “Mr.
Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here
about this time, and I think I see him coming now.”
“They can talk all they like,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically, as
the doctor walked across to the front fence, “but I wouldn’t be without
a bottle of cough syrup in the house.”
“Nor I without my headache tablets,” added Mrs. Clyde. “I’d have had to
give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.”
Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother.
“Well, I’d like to see the labels on your particular brands of
medicine,” he remarked.
“There’s nothing bad in mine,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “Mrs. Martin
recommended them to me; she’s been taking them for years.”
At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly
man, whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed
glasses.
“So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,” he remarked
good-humoredly, after the greetings. “Well, I don’t object to relieving
my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can’t dodge, I’ll yell.”
“Why do you deal in patent medicines if they’re so bad?” asked Grandma
Sharpless bluntly. “Is there such a big profit in them?”
“No profit, worth speaking of,” replied Mr. Gormley. “Though you’ll
note that I haven’t admitted they are bad—as yet.”
“The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn’t it?” queried
Mr. Clyde.
“Worse luck, it is. They’ve got us through their hold on the public.
And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down
to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing
business.”
“But you aren’t compelled to deal in their medicines,” objected Mr.
Clyde.
“Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling
prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs,
but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to
maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store.
And they won’t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of
patent medicines.”
“Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?” said Mr.
Clyde quickly.
“Legitimate? Hardly. It’s purely an inspired demand.”
“What makes it persist, then?”
“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns
with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated
falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent
cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent;
printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford
it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a
placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he
displays in his drug-store.”
Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to
read. The inscription was:—
“Please do not ask us what _any old patent, medicine_ is worth, for you
embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that _it is worthless_.
“If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an
entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good
physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it
cheaper in the end than self-medication with _worthless ‘patent’
nostrums._”
“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.
“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a
peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid
lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an
expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and
roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the
newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”
“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“All that claim to _cure_. They’re either frauds, appealing to the
appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or
disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing
syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices
for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in
the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”
“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless
with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which
keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something
good in it.”
“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There
isn’t any such patent medicine.”
“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the
exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from
underfoot.
“Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising
and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them
drop out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for
it would be dead in a year.”
“Yet, as a student of business conditions,” said Mr. Clyde, “I’m
inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line of goods
which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some merit.”
The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the
air, with a flourish.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death,
he quoted sonorously. “We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the
ages, without stopping to consider that we’re heirs to the foolishness,
also. We’re gulled by the printed lie about Doan’s Kidney Pills, just
as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the itinerant quack who
sold the ‘Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life’ at one dollar per bottle.”
“Well, I hesitate to admit it,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a little laugh,
“but we always have a few of the old remedies about.”
“Suppose you name some of them over,” suggested the druggist.
“Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That’s
harmless, isn’t it?”
The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.
“It _might_ be harmless,” said the druggist mildly, “if it didn’t
contain both morphine and hasheesh.”
“Goodness!” said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “How could one suppose—”
“By reading the label carefully,” interjected Dr. Strong. “Anything
else?”
“Let me think. I’ve always considered Jayne’s Expectorant good for the
children when they have a cold.”
“Tastes differ,” observed the druggist philosophically. “I wouldn’t
consider opium good for _my_ children inside or outside of any
expectorant. Next!”
“But the names _sound_ so innocent!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “I’m almost
afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall Cholera Cure on
hand.”
“Had much cholera in the house lately?” inquired the druggist, with an
affectation of extreme interest.
“Of course it’s only for stomach-ache,” explained Mrs. Clyde. “It
certainly does cure the pain.”
“Not cure,—drug it into unconsciousness,” amended Mr. Gormley. “The
opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium, for a little
stomach-ache, don’t you think?”
“What have you got to say against Kohler’s One-Night Cough Cure that I
always keep by me?” demanded Grandma Sharpless.
Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. “Who? Me?
Gracious! I’ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says against
itself, on its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What more
_is_ there to say?”
“How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?” asked Mr.
Clyde suddenly of his wife.
“Now, Tom,” she protested. “I’ve always been careful about using them
for the children. Personally, I never touch patent medicines.”
But at this her mother, smarting under their caller’s criticism of her
cough syrup, turned on her.
“What do you call those headache tablets you take?”
“Those? They aren’t a patent medicine. They’re Anti-kamnia, a
physician’s prescription.”
“Yes; a fine prescription they are!” said the druggist. “Did you ever
read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled, able-bodied,
fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has got most of
the patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless, they say!
I’ve seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get out of the
door before they got in their fine work on her heart and over she went
like a shot rabbit.”
“Not dead!”
“No; but it was touch and go with her.”
“What’s in that; opium, too?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One or
another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There’s a
long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.”
“Habit?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Do you mean I’m in danger of not being able
to get along without the tablets?”
“If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them
occasionally, you’re only in danger of dropping dead one of these
days.”
Mr. Clyde’s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom
permitted it. “Well, that settles _that_,” he observed; and it was
entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of
the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy—and didn’t get
any.
“Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,” continued the druggist,
“with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray’ flabby wrinkles under
her eyes, I know without asking what _she_ wants. She’s a
headache-powder fiend.”
“That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,” said
Dr. Strong. “The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the coal-tar
derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases
of this I’ve seen blood the color of muddy water.”
“It certainly makes a fright of a woman. ‘Orangeine’ gets a lot of ‘em.
You’ ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The owner of
Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live on
the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He’s a living, or, rather a dead
illustration of what his own dope will do.”
“But what are you to do for a splitting headache?” queried Mrs. Clyde,
turning to Dr. Strong.
“I don’t know, unless I know what causes it,” said Dr. Strong.
“Headache isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom, a danger signal. It’s the
body’s way of crying for help. Drugs don’t cure a headache. They simply
interrupt it.”
“What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the
consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt
whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade,
I sometimes wonder what we’re coming to,” remarked Mr. Gormley.
Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But poor people who can’t
afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,” said he.
“Can’t afford a doctor!” exclaimed Dr. Strong. “Why, don’t you know
that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of treatment? Did you
ever happen to see A. B. Frost’s powerful cartoon called ‘Her Last
Dollar’? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with disease, is buying,
across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some kind of ‘sure
cure,’ from the merchant, who serves her with a smile, half-pitying,
half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger and hope in
their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases.
There’s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. ‘Her Last
Dollar!’ That’s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at least
_tries_ to cure. But the patent medicine shark’s policy is to keep the
sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a
nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to
each victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After
that, the profits. Since you’ve brought up the matter of expense, I’ll
give you an instance from your own household, Clyde.”
“Here! What’s this?” cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight. “More patent
dosing?”
“One of the servants,—Maggie, the nurse. I’ve got her whole medical
history and she’s a prime example of the Dupe’s Progress. She’s run the
gamut of fake cures.”
“Something must have been the matter with her to start her off,
though,” said Mr. Clyde.
“That’s the joke—or would be if it weren’t pathetic. She started out by
having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took headache-powders.”
“One for you, Myra,” remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside.
“Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing—the natural result—scared
her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was given to
this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a
religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of
heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a
sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was
earnestly implored to try Kinsman’s heart remedy. She did so, and, of
course, got worse, since the ‘remedy’ was merely a swindle. About this
time Maggie’s stomach began to ‘act up,’ partly from the medicines,
partly from the original trouble which caused her headaches.”
“You haven’t told us what that was, Strong,” remarked Mr. Clyde.
“Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by
reading one of old Dr. Hartman’s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of
Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit—temporarily and
alcoholically.”
“Then it was _that_ that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her of
drinking,” said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.
“So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and
doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career,
her stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn’t accustomed to
strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper
she read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the
real Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way),
which seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she ‘tanked up’
some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly
drugging herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and
she got a bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather,
the consumption cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and
she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King’s
New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso’s Cure and
added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a
fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never
occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles’s Anti-Pain Pills
(more acetanilid), and finally decided—having read some advertising
literature on the subject—that she had cancer. And the reason she was
leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a
scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in
Kansas City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the
pretense that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.”
“Can’t you stop her?” asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.
“Oh, I’ve stopped her! You’ll find the remains of her patent medicines
in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I’ve fixed _her_ case.”
Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. “‘Any doctor who claims to
cure is a quack.’ Quotation from Dr. Strong,” she said.
“Nearly had me there,” admitted he. “Fortunately I didn’t use the word
‘cure.’ It wasn’t a case of cure. It was a case of correcting a stupid,
disastrous little blunder in mathematics.”
“Mathematics, eh?” repeated Mr. Clyde. “Have you reached the point
where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an
operation?”
“Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely
through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had
trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to
one of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in
the price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free
things usually are worth—or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for
two dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for
her error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain
caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false
glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she’s been
insulting her insides, are all that’s the matter with Maggie.”
“That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines
the stomach derangement,” said Mr. Clyde.
“And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both
before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise
doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence
of other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent
and far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic
dyspepsia, of a year’s standing, completely cured by a change of
eyeglasses.”
“As a financial proposition,” said Mr. Gormley, “your nurse must have
come out at the wrong end of the horn.”
“Decidedly,” confirmed the doctor. “She spent on patent medicines about
forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a hundred
dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred dollars
would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the
quacks. Any good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would
have fitted proper glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The
entire bill for doctor, oculist, and glasses might have been
twenty-five dollars. Yet they defend patent medicines on the ground
that they’re the ‘poor man’s doctor.”
Mr. Gormley rose. “Poor man’s undertaker, rather,” he amended. “Well,
having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I think I’ll go.
Here’s the whole thing summed up, as I see it. It pays to go to the
doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the druggist first and
the doctor afterward.”
Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde
remarked:
“What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like that?”
“They’re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,” said Dr.
Strong, “but they have to be pretty intelligent before they can pass
the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored
lights.”
“I’ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in front of a
drug-store stand for,” said Mrs. Clyde. “What is their derivation?”
“Green is the official color of medical science,” explained the doctor.
“The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps in war-time;
and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in academic
functions.”
“And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that
mean?”
“Danger,” replied Dr. Strong grimly.
V.
THE MAGIC LENS
“No good fairy had ever bestowed such a gift as this magic lens,” said
Dr. Strong, whisking Bettina up from her seat by the window and setting
her on his knee. “It was most marvelously and delicately made, and
furnished with a lightning-quick intelligence of its own. Everything
that went on around it, it reported to its fortunate possessor as
swiftly as thought flies through that lively little brain of yours. It
earned its owner’s livelihood for him; it gave him three fourths of his
enjoyments and amusements; it laid before him the wonderful things done
and being done all over the world; it guided all his life. And all that
it required was a little reasonable care, and such consideration as a
man would show to the horse that worked for him.”
“At the beginning you said it wasn’t a fairytale,” accused Bettina,
with the gravity which five years considers befitting such an occasion.
“Wait. Because the owner of the magic lens found that it obeyed all his
orders so readily and faithfully, he began to impose on it. He made it
work very hard when it was tired. He set tasks for it to perform under
very difficult conditions. At times when it should have been resting,
he compelled it to minister to his amusements. When it complained, he
made light of its trouble.”
“Could it speak?” inquired the little auditor.
“At least it had a way of making known its wants. In everything which
concerned itself it was keenly intelligent, and knew what was good and
bad for it, as well as what was good and bad for its owner.”
“Couldn’t it stop working for him if he was so bad to it?”
“Only as an extreme measure. But presently, in this case, it threatened
to stop. So the owner took it to a cheap and poor repair-shop, where
the repairer put a little oil in it to make it go on working. For a
time it went on. Then, one morning, the owner woke up and cried out
with a terrible fear. For the magic light in the magic lens was gone.
So for that foolish man there was no work to do nor play to enjoy. The
world was blotted out for him. He could not know what was going on
about him, except by hearsay. No more was the sky blue for him, or the
trees green, or the flowers bright; and the faces of his friends meant
nothing. He had thrown away the most beautiful and wonderful of all
gifts. Because it is a gift bestowed on nearly all of us, most of us
forgot the wonder and the beauty of it. So, Honorable Miss Twinkles, do
you beware how you treat the magic lens which is given to you.”
“To me?” cried the child; and then, with a little squeal of
comprehension: “Oh, I know! My eyes. That’s the magic lens. Isn’t it?”
“What’s that about Bettykin’s eyes?” asked Mr. Clyde, who had come in
quietly, and had heard the finish of the allegory.
“I’ve been examining them,” explained Dr. Strong, “and the story was
reward of merit for her going through with it like a little soldier.”
“Examining her eyes? Any particular reason?” asked the father
anxiously.
“Very particular. Mrs. Clyde wishes to send her to kindergarten for a
year before she enters the public school. No child ought to begin
school without a thorough test of vision.”
“What did the test show in Bettykin’s case?”
“Nothing except the defects of heredity.”
“Heredity? My sight is pretty good; and Mrs. Clyde’s is still better.”
“You two are not the Cherub’s only ancestors, however,” smiled the
physician. “And you can hardly expect one or two generations to recast
as delicate a bit of mechanism as the eye, which has been built up
through millions of years of slow development. However, despite the
natural deficiencies, there’s no reason in Betty why she shouldn’t
start in at kindergarten next term, provided there isn’t any in the
kindergarten itself.”
Mr. Clyde studied the non-committal face of his “Chinese physician,” as
he was given to calling Dr. Strong since the latter had undertaken to
safeguard the health of his household on the Oriental basis of being
paid to keep the family well and sound. “Something is wrong with the
school,” he decided.
“Read what it says of itself in that first paragraph,” replied Dr.
Strong, handing him a rather pretentious little booklet.
In the prospectus of their “new and scientific kindergarten,” the
Misses Sarsfield warmly congratulated themselves and their prospective
pupils, primarily, upon the physical advantages of their school
building which included a large work-and-play room, “with generous
window space on all sides, and finished throughout in pure, glazed
white.” This description the head of the Clyde household read over
twice; then he stepped to the door to intercept Mrs. Clyde’s mother who
was passing by.
“Here, Grandma,” said he. “Our Chinese tyrant had diagnosed something
wrong with that first page. Do you discover any kink in it?”
“Not I,” said Mrs. Sharpless, after reading it. “Nor in the place
itself. I called there yesterday. It is a beautiful room; everything as
shiny and clean as a pin.”
“Yesterday was cloudy,” observed the Health Master.
“It was. Yet there wasn’t a corner of the place that wasn’t flooded
with light,” declared Mrs. Sharpless.
“And on a clear day, with the sun pouring in from all sides and being
flashed back from those shiny, white walls, the unfortunate inmates
would be absolutely dazzled.”
“Do you mean to say that God’s pure sunlight can hurt any one?”
challenged Mrs. Sharpless, who was rather given to citing the Deity as
support for her own side of any question.
“Did you ever hear of snow-blindness?” countered the physician.
“I’ve seen it in the North,” said Mr. Clyde. “It’s not a pleasant thing
to see.”
“Glazed white walls would give a very fair imitation of snow-glare. Too
much light is as bad as too little. Those walls should be tinted.”
“Yet it says here,” said Mr. Clyde, referring to his circular, “that
the ‘Misses Sarsfield will conduct their institution on the most
improved Froebelian principles.”
“Froebel was a great man and a wise one,” said Dr. Strong. “His
kindergarten system has revolutionized all teaching. But he lived
before the age of hygienic knowledge. I suppose that no other man has
wrought so much disaster to the human eye as he.”
“That’s a pretty broad statement, Strong,” objected Air. Clyde.
“Is it? Look at the evidence. North Germany is the place where Froebel
first developed his system. Seventy-five per cent of the population are
defective of vision. Even the American children of North German
immigrants show a distinct excess of eye defects. You’ve seen the comic
pictures representing Boston children as wearing huge goggles?”
“Are you making an argument out of a funny-paper joke?” queried Grandma
Sharpless.
“Why not? It wouldn’t be a joke if it hadn’t some foundation in fact.
The kindergarten system got its start in America in Boston. Boston has
the worst eyesight of any American city; impaired vision has even
become hereditary there. To return to Germany: if you want a shock,
look up the records of suicides among school-children there.”
“But surely that has no connection with the eyes.”
“Surely it has,” controverted Dr. Strong. “The eye is the most nervous
of all the organs; and nothing will break down the nervous system in
general more swiftly and surely than eye-strain. Even in this country
we are raising up a generation of neurasthenic youngsters, largely from
neglect of their eyes.”
“Still, we’ve got to educate our children,” said Mr. Clyde.
“And we’ve got to take the utmost precautions lest the education cost
more than it is worth, in acquired defects.”
“For my part,” announced Grandma Sharpless, “I believe in early
schooling and in children learning to be useful. At the Sarsfield
school there were little girls no older that Bettina, who were doing
needlework beautifully; fine needlework at that.”
“Fine needlework!” exploded Dr. Strong in a tone which Grandma
Sharpless afterwards described as “damnless swearing.”
“That’s enough! See here, Clyde. Betty goes to that kindergarten only
over my dead job.”
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Clyde, amazed at the quite unwonted excitement
which the other exhibited, “if you’re dealing in ultimatums, I’ll drop
out and leave the stricken field to Mrs. Clyde. This kindergarten
scheme is hers. Wait. I’ll bring her. I think she just came in.”
“What am I to fight with you about, Dr. Strong?” asked Mrs. Clyde,
appearing at the door, a vision of trim prettiness in her furs and
veil. “Tom didn’t tell me the _casus belli_.”
“Nobody in this house,” said Dr. Strong appealing to her, “seems to
deem the human eye entitled to the slightest consideration. You’ve
never worn glasses; therefore you must have respected your own eyesight
enough to—”
He stopped abruptly and scowled into Mrs. Clyde’s smiling face.
“Well! what’s the matter?” she demanded. “You look as if you were going
to bite.”
“What are you looking cross-eyed for?” the Health Master shot at her.
“I’m not! Oh, it’s this veil, I suppose.” She lifted the heavy
polka-dotted screen and tucked it over her hat. “There, that’s more
comfortable!”
“Is it!” said the physician with an emphasis of sardonicism. “You
surprise me by admitting that much. How long have you been wearing that
instrument of torture?”
“Oh, two hours. Perhaps three. But, Dr. Strong, it doesn’t hurt my eyes
at all.”
“Nor your head?”
“I _have_ got a little headache,” she confessed. “To think that a
supposedly intelligent woman who has reached the age of—of—”
“Thirty-eight,” said she, laughing. “I’m not ashamed of it.”
“—Thirty-eight, without having to wear glasses, should deliberately
abuse her hard-working vision by distorting it! See here,” he
interrupted himself, “it’s quite evident that I haven’t been living up
to the terms of my employment. One of these evenings we’re going to
have in this household a short but sharp lecture and symposium on eyes.
I’ll give the lecture; and I suspect that this family will furnish the
symposium—of horrible examples. Where’s Julia? As she’s the family
Committee on School Conditions, I expect to get some material from her,
too. Meantime, Mrs. Clyde, no kindergarten for Betty kin, if you
please. Or, in any case, not that kindergarten.”
No further ocular demonstrations were made by Dr. Strong for several
days. Then, one evening, he came into the library where the whole
family was sitting. Grandma Sharpless, in the old-fashioned rocker,
next a stand from which an old-fashioned student-lamp dispensed its
benign rays, was holding up, with some degree of effort, a rather heavy
book to the line of her vision. Opposite her a soft easychair contained
Robin, other-wise Bobs, involuted like a currant-worm after a dose of
Paris green, and imaginatively treading, with the feet of enchantment,
virgin expanses of forest in the wake of Mr. Stewart White.
Julia, alias “Junkum,” his twin, was struggling against the demon of
ill chance as embodied in a game of solitaire, far over in a dim
corner. Geography enchained the mind of eight-year-old Charles, also
his eyes, and apparently his nose, which was stuck far down into the
mapped page. Near him his father, with chin doubled down over a stiff
collar, was internally begging leave to differ with the editorial
opinions of his favorite paper; while Mrs. Clyde, under the direct
glare of a side-wall electric cluster, unshaded, was perusing a
glazed-paper magazine, which threw upon her face a strong reflected
light. Before the fire Bettykin was retailing to her most intelligent
doll the allegory of the Magic Lens.
Enter, upon this scene of domestic peace, the spirit of devastation in
the person of the Health Master.
“The horrible examples being now on exhibit,” he remarked from the
doorway, “our symposium on eyes will begin.”
“He says we’re a hor’ble example, Susan Nipper,” said Bettina
confidentially, to her doll.
“No, I apologize, Bettykin,” returned the doctor. “You’re the only two
sensible people in the room.”
Julia promptly rose, lifted the stand with her cards on it, carried it
to the center of the library, and planted it so that the central light
fell across it from a little behind her.
“One recruit to the side of common sense,” observed the physician.
“Next!”
“What’s wrong with me?” demanded Mr. Clyde, looking up. “Newspaper
print?”
“Newspaper print is an unavoidable evil, and by no means the worst
example of Gutenberg’s art. No; the trouble with you is that your neck
is so scrunched down into a tight collar as to shut off a proper blood
supply from your head. Don’t your eyes feel bungy?”
“A little. What am I going to do? I can’t sit around after dinner with
no collar on.”
“Sit up straight, then; stick your neck up out of your collar and give
it play. Emulate the attentive turtle! And you, Bobs, stop imitating an
anchovy. Uncurl! _Uncurl!!_”
With a sigh, Robin straightened himself out. “I was so comfortable,” he
complained.
“No, you weren’t. You were only absorbed. The veins on your temples are
fairly bulging. You might as well try to read standing on your head.
Get a straight-backed chair, and you’re all right. I’m glad to see that
you follow Grandma Sharpless’s good example in reading by a
student-lamp.”
“That’s my own lamp,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “Seventy years has at least
taught me how to read.”
“How, but not what,” answered the Health Master. “That’s a bad book
you’re reading.”
Grandma Sharpless achieved the proud athletic feat of bounding from her
chair without the perceptible movement of a muscle.
“Young man!” she exclaimed in a shaking voice, “do you know what book
that is?”
“I don’t care what book—”
“It is the Bible.”
“Is it? Well, Heaven inspired the writer, but not the printer. Text
such as that ought to be prohibited by law. Isn’t there a passage in
that Bible, ‘Having eyes, ye see not’?”
“Yes, there is,” snapped Mrs. Sharpless. “And my eyes have been seeing
and seeing straight for a good many more years than yours.”
“The more credit to them and the less to you, if you’ve maltreated them
with such sight-murdering print as that. Haven’t you another Bible?”
Grandma Sharpless sat down again. “I have another,” she said, “with
large print; but it’s so heavy.”
“Prescription: one reading-stand. Now, Mrs. Clyde.”
The mother of the family looked up from her magazine with a smile.
“You can’t say that I haven’t large print or a good light,” she said.
“The print is good, but the paper bad,” said the Health Master. “Bad,
that is, as you are holding it under a full, unqualified electric
light. In reading from glazed paper, which reflects like a mirror, you
should use a very modified light. In fact, I blame myself from not
having had all the electric globes frosted long since. Now, I’ve kept
the worst offender for the last.”
Charley detached his nose from his geography and looked up. “That’s me,
I suppose,” he remarked pessimistically and ungrammatically. “I’m
always coming in for something special. But I can’t make anything out
of these old maps without digging my face down into ‘em.”
“That’s a true bill against the book concern which turns out such a
book, and the school board which permits its use. Charley, do you know
why Manny isn’t playing football this year?”
“Manny” was the oldest son of the family, then away at school.
“Mother wanted him not to, I suppose,” said the boy.
“No,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Dr. Strong persuaded me that the development he
would get out of the game would be worth the risk.”
“It was his eyes,” said the Health Master. “He is wearing glasses this
year and will probably wear them next. After that I hope he can stop
them. But his trouble is that he—or rather his teachers—abused his eyes
with just such outrageous demands as that geography of yours. And while
the eye responded then, it is demanding payment now.”
“But a kid’s got to study, hasn’t he? Else he won’t keep up,” put in
Bobs, much interested.
“Not at the expense of the most important of his senses,” returned the
Health Master. “And never at night, at Charley’s age, or even yours,
Bobs.”
“Then he gets dropped from his classes,” objected Bobs.
“The more blame to his classes. Early learning is much too expensive at
the cost of eye-strain and consequent nerve-strain. If we force a
student in the early years to make too great demands on his eyes, the
chances are that he will develop some eye or nervous trouble at sixteen
or seventeen and lose far more time than he has gained before, not
reckoning the disastrous physical effects.”
“But if other children go ahead, ours must,” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Perhaps the others who go ahead now won’t keep ahead later. There is a
sentence in Wood and Woodruff’s textbook on the eye[1] which every
public-school teacher and every parent should learn by heart. It runs
like this: ‘That child will be happier and a better citizen as well as
a more successful man of affairs, who develops into a fairly healthy,
though imperfectly schooled animal at twenty, than if he becomes a
learned, neurasthenic asthenope at the same age.’”
[1] Commoner Diseases of the Eye, by Casey A. Wood and Thomas A.
Woodruff, pp. 418, 419.
“Antelope?” put in Bettina, who was getting weary of her exclusion from
the topic. “I’ve got a picture of that. It’s a little deer.”
“So are you, Toddles,” cried the doctor, seizing upon her with one hand
and Susan Nipper with the other, and setting one on each shoulder, “and
we’re going to keep those very bright twinklers of yours just as fit’as
possible, both to see and be seen.”
“But what of Charley and the twins?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“Everything right, so far. They’re healthy young animals and can meet
the ordinary demands of school life. But no more study at night, for
some years, for Charley; and no more, ever, of fine-printed maps. Some
day, Charley, you may go to the Orinoco. It’s a good deal more
desirable that you should be able to see what there is to be seen
there, then, than that you should learn, now, the name of every
infinitesimally designated town on its banks.”
“In my childhood,” observed Mrs. Sharpless, with the finality proper to
that classic introductory phrase, “we thought more of our brains than
our eyes.”
“An inverted principle. The brain can think for itself. The eye can
only complain, and not always very clearly in the case of a child.
Moreover, Mrs. Sharpless, in your school-days the eye wasn’t under half
the strain that it is in our modern, print-crowded world. The fact is,
we’ve made a tremendous leap forward, and radically changed a habit and
practice built up through hundreds and thousands of years, and Nature
is struggling against great difficulties to catch up with us.”
“I don’t understand what you are getting at,” said Mrs. Clyde, letting
her magazine drop.
“Have you tried walking on all fours lately?” inquired the physician.
“Not for a number of years.”
“Presumably you would find it awkward. Yet if, through some pressure of
necessity, the human race should have to return to the quadrupedal
method, the alteration in life would be less radical than we have
imposed upon our vision in the last few generations.”
“Sounds like flat nonsense to me,” said the downright Clyde. “We see
just as all our ancestors saw.”
“Think again. Our ancestors, back a very few generations, were an
outdoor race living in a world of wide horizons. Their eyes could range
over far distances, unchecked, instead of being hemmed in most of the
time by four walls. They were farsighted. Indeed, their survival
depended upon their being far-sighted; like the animals which they
killed or which killed them, according as the human or the beast had
the best eyes. Nowadays, in order to live we must read and write. That
is, the primal demand upon the eye is that it shall see keenly near at
hand instead of far off. The whole hereditary training of the organ has
been inverted, as if a mountaineer should be set to diving for pearls;
and the poor thing hasn’t had time to adjust itself yet. We employ our
vision for close work ten times as much as we did a hundred years ago
and ten thousand times as much as we did ten thousand years ago. But
the influence of those ten thousand years is still strong upon us, and
the human child is born with the eye of a savage or an animal.”
“What kind of an animal’s eyes have I got?” demanded Bettina. “A
antelope’s?”
“Almost as far-sighted,” returned the Health Master, wriggling out from
under her and catching her expertly as she fell. “And how do you think
an antelope would be doing fine needlework in a kindergarten?”
“But, Strong, few of us go blind,” said Mr. Clyde. “And of those who
do, nearly half are needlessly so. That we aren’t all groping,
sightless, about the earth is due to the marvelous adaptability of our
eyes. And it is exactly upon that adaptability that we are so prone to
impose; working a willing horse to death. In the young the muscles of
accommodation, whereby the vision is focused, are almost incredibly
powerful; far more so than in the adult. The Cherub, here, could force
her vision to almost any kind of work and the eye would not complain
much—at this time. But later on the effects would be manifest.
Therefore we have to watch the eye very closely until it begins to grow
old, which is at about twelve years or so. In the adult the eye very
readily lets its owner know if anything is wrong. Only fools disregard
that warning. But in the developing years we must see to it that those
muscles, set to the task of overcoming generations of custom, do not
overwork and upset the whole nervous organization. Sometimes glasses
are necessary; usually, only care.”
“In a few generations we’ll all have four eyes, won’t we?” asked Bobs,
making a pair of mock spectacles with his circled fingers and thumbs.
“Oh, let’s hope not. The cartoonists of prophecy always give the future
man spectacles. But I believe that the tendency will be the other way,
and that, by evolution to meet new conditions, the eye will fit itself
for its work, unaided, in time. Meantime, we have to pay the penalty of
the change. That’s a small price for living in this wonderful century.”
“You say that half the blind are needlessly so,” said Mrs. Clyde. “Is
that from preventable disease?”
“About forty per cent, of the wholly blind. But the half-blind and the
nervously wrecked victims of eye-strain owe their woes generally to
sheer carelessness and neglect. By the way, eye-strain itself may cause
very serious forms of disease, such as obstinate and dangerous forms of
indigestion, insomnia, or even St. Vitus’s dance and epilepsy.”
“But you’re not telling us anything about eye diseases, Dr. Strong,”
said Julia.
“There speaks our Committee on School Conditions, filled full of
information,” said the Health Master with a smile. “Junkum has made an
important discovery, and made it in time. She has found that two
children recently transferred from Number 14 have red eyes.”
“Maybe they’ve been crying,” suggested Bettykin.
“They were when I saw them, acute Miss Twinkles, although they didn’t
mean it at all. One was crying out of one eye, and one out of the
other, which gave them a very curious, absurd, and interesting
appearance. They had each a developing case of pink-eye.”
“Horses have pink-eye, not people,” remarked Grandma Sharpless.
“To be more accurate, then, conjunctivitis. People have that; a great
many people, once it gets started. It looks very bad and dangerous; but
it isn’t if properly cared for. Only, it’s quite contagious. Therefore
the Committee on Schools, with myself as acting executive, accomplished
the temporary removal of those children from school.”
“And then,” the Committee joyously took up the tale, “we went out and
trailed the pink-eye.”
“We did. We trailed it to its lair in School Number 14, and there we
found one of the most dangerous creatures which civilization still
allows to exist.”
“In the school?” said Bettykin. “Oo-oo! What was it?”
“It was a Rollertowl,” replied the doctor impressively and in a
sonorous voice.
“I never heard of it,” said the Cherub, awestruck. “What is it like?”
“He means a roller-towel, goosie,” explained Julia. “A towel on a
roller, that everybody wipes their hands and faces on.”
“Exactly. And because everybody uses it, any contagious disease that
anybody has, everybody is liable to catch. I’d as soon put a
rattlesnake in a school as a roller-towel. In this case, half the grade
where it was had conjunctivitis. But that isn’t the worst. There was
one case of trachoma in the grade; a poor little Italian whose parents
ignorantly sent her to an optician instead of an oculist. The optician
treated her for an ordinary inflammation, and now she will lose the
sight of one eye. Meantime, if any of the others have been infected by
her, through that roller-towel, there will be trouble, for trachoma is
a serious disease.”
“Did you throw out the roller-towel?” asked Charley with a hopeful eye
to a fray.
“No. We got thrown out ourselves, didn’t we, Junkum?”
“Pretty near,” corroborated Julia. “The principal told Dr. Strong that
he guessed he could run his school himself and he didn’t need any
interference by—by—what did he call us, Dr. Strong?”
“Interlopers. No, Cherub, an interloper is no relation to an antelope.
It was four days ago that we left that principal and went out and
whistled for the Fool-killer. Yesterday, the principal came down with a
rose-pink eye of his own; the Health Officer met him and ordered him
into quarantine, and the terrible and ferocious Rollertowl is now
writhing in its death-agonies on the ash-heap.”
“What about other diseases?” asked Mrs. Clyde after a pause.
“Nothing from me. The eye will report them itself quick enough. And as
soon as your eye tells you that anything is the matter with it, you
tell the oculist, and you’ll probably get along all right, as far as
diseases go. It is not diseases that I have to worry about, as your
Chinese-plan physician, so much as it is to see that you give your
vision a fair chance. Let’s see. Charley, you’re the Committee on Air,
aren’t you? Could you take on a little more work?”
“Try me,” said the boy promptly.
“All right; we’ll make you the Committee on Air and Light, hereafter,
with power of protest and report whenever you see your mother going out
in a polka-dotted, cross-eyed veil, or your grandmother reading a Bible
that needs burning worse than any heretic ever did, or any of the
others working or playing without sufficient illumination. Here endeth
this lecture, with a final word. This is it:—
“The eye is the most nervous of all the body’s organs. Except in early
childhood, when it has the recklessness and overconfidence of unbounded
strength, it complains promptly and sharply of ill-usage. Now, there
are a few hundred rules about when and how to use the eyes and when and
how not to use them. I’m not going to burden you with those. All I’m
going to advise you is that when your eyes burn, smart, itch, or feel
strained, there’s some reason for it, and you should obey the warning
and stop urging them to work against their protest. In fact, I might
sum it all up in a motto which I think I’ll hang here in the library—a
terse old English slang phrase.”
“What is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“‘Mind your eye,’” replied the Health Master.
VI.
THE RE-MADE LADY
“Of all unfortunate times!” lamented Mrs. Clyde, her piquant face
twisted to an expression of comic despair. “Why couldn’t he have given
us a little more notice?”
Impatiently she tossed aside the telegram which announced that her
husband’s old friend, Oren Taylor, the artist, would arrive at seven
o’clock that evening.
“Don’t let it bother you, dear,” said Clyde. “I’ll take him to the club
for dinner.”
“You can’t. Have you forgotten that I’ve invited Louise Ennis for her
quarterly—well—visitation?”
Clyde whistled. “That’s rather a poser. What business have I got to
have a cousin like Louise, anyway!”
Upon this disloyal observation Dr. Strong walked into the library. He
was a very different Dr. Strong from the nerve-shaken wanderer who had
dropped from nowhere into the Clyde household a year previous as its
physician on the Chinese plan of being employed to keep the family
well. The painful lines of the face were smoothed out. There was a deep
light of content, the content of the man who has found his place and
filled it, in the level eyes; and about the grave and controlled set of
the mouth a sort of sensitive buoyancy of expression. The flesh had
hardened and the spirit softened in him.
“Did you hear that, Strong?” inquired Mr. Clyde, turning to him.
“I have trained ears,” answered Dr. Strong solemnly. “They’re
absolutely impervious to any speech not intended for them.”
“Open them to this: Louise Ennis is invited for dinner to-night. So is
my old friend Oren Taylor, who wires to say that he’s passing through
town.”
“Is that Taylor, the artist of ‘The First Parting’? I shall enjoy
meeting him.”
“Well, you won’t enjoy meeting Cousin Louise,” declared Mr. Clyde. “We
ask her about four times a year, out of family piety. You’ve been lucky
to escape her thus far.”
“Rather a painful old party, your cousin?” inquired the physician,
smilingly, of Clyde.
“Old? Twenty-two,” said Mrs. Clyde. “But she looks fifty and feels a
hundred.”
“Allowing for feminine exaggeration,” amended Clyde.
“But what’s so wrong with her?” demanded the physician.
“Nerves,” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Stomach,” said Mr. Clyde.
“Headaches,” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Toe-aches,” said Mr. Clyde.
“Too much money,” said Mrs. Clyde.
“Too much ego,” said Mr. Clyde.
“Dyspepsia.”
“Hypochondria.”
“Chronic inertia.”
“Set it to music,” suggested Dr. Strong, “and sing it as a duet of
disease, from ablepsy to zymosis, inclusively. I shall be immensely
interested to observe this prodigy of ills.”
“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” said Mrs. Clyde rather
maliciously. “You’re to sit next to her at dinner to-night.”
“Then put Bettykin on the other side of me,” he returned. “With that
combination of elf, tyrant, and angel close at hand, I can turn for
relief from the grave to the cradle.”
“Indeed you cannot. Louise can’t endure children. She says they get on
her nerves. _My_ children!”
“Now you _have_ put the finishing touch to your character sketch,”
observed Dr. Strong. “A woman of child-bearing age who can’t endure
children—well, she is pretty far awry.”
“Yet I can remember Louise when she was a sweet, attractive young
girl,” sighed Mrs. Clyde. “That was before her mother died, and left
her to the care of a father too busy making money to do anything for
his only child but spend it on her.”
“You’re talking about Lou Ennis, I know,” said Grandma Sharpless, who
had entered in time to hear the closing words.
“Yes,” said. Dr. Strong. “What is our expert diagnostician’s opinion of
the case? You know I always defer to you, ma’am, on any problem that’s
under the surface of things.”
“None of your soft sawder, young man!” said the old lady, her shrewd,
gray eyes twinkling from her shrewd, pink face. “My opinion of Louise
Ennis? I’ll give it to you in two words. Just spoiled.”
“Taking my warning as I find it,” remarked the physician, rising, “I
shall now retire to put on some chain armor under my evening coat, in
case the Terrible Cousin attempts to stab me with an oyster-fork.”
The dinner was not, as Mrs. Clyde was forced to admit afterward, by any
means the dismal function which she had anticipated. Oren Taylor, an
easy, discursive, humorous talker, set the pace and was ably seconded
by Grandma Sharpless, whose knack of incisive and pointed comment
served to spur him to his best. Dr. Strong, who said little, attempted
to draw Miss Ennis into the current of talk, and was rewarded with an
occasional flash of rather acid wit, which caused the artist to look
across the table curiously at the girl. So far as he could do so
without rudeness, the physician studied his neighbor.
He saw a tall, amply-built girl, with a slackened frame whose muscles
had forgotten how to play their part properly in holding the structure
firm. Her face was flaccid. Under the large but dull eyes, there was a
bloodless puffiness. Discontent sat enthroned at the corners of the
sensitive mouth. A faint, reddish eruption disfigured her chin. Her two
strong assets, beautifully even teeth and a wealth of soft, fine hair,
failed wholly to save her from being a flatly repellent woman. Dr.
Strong noted further that her hands were incessantly uneasy, and that
she ate little and without interest. Also she seemed, in a sullen way,
shy. Yet, despite all of these drawbacks, there was a pathetic
suggestion of inherent fineness about her; of qualities become decadent
through disuse; a charm that should have been, thwarted and perverted
by a slovenly habit of life. Dr. Strong set her down as a woman at war
with herself, and therefore with her world.
After dinner Mr. and Mrs. Clyde slipped away to see the children. The
artist followed Dr. Strong, to whom he had taken a liking, as most men
did, into the small lounging-room, where he lighted a cigar.
“Too bad about that Miss Ennis, isn’t it?” said Taylor abruptly.
His companion looked at him interrogatively.
“Such a mess,” he continued. “Such a ruin. Yet so much left that isn’t
ruined. That face would be worth a lot to me for the ‘Poet’s Cycle of
the Months’ that I’m painting now. What a _November_ she’d make;
‘November, the withered mourner of glories dead and gone.’ Only I
suppose she’d resent being asked to sit.”
“Illusions are the last assets that a woman loses,” agreed Dr. Strong.
“To think,” pursued the painter, “of what her Maker meant her to be,
and of how she has belied it! She’s essentially and fundamentally a
beautiful woman; that is why I want her for a model.”
‘“In the structure of her face, perhaps—”
“Yes; and all through. Look at the set of her shoulders, and the lines
of her when she walks. Nothing jerry-built about her! She’s got the
contours of a goddess and the finish of a mud-pie. It’s maddening.”
“More maddening from the physician’s point of view than from the
artist’s. For the physician knows how needless it all is.”
“Is she your patient?”
“If she were I’d be ashamed to admit it. Give me military authority and
a year’s time and if I couldn’t fix her so that she’d be proud to pose
for your picture—Good Heavens!”
From behind the drapery of the passageway appeared Louise Ennis. She
took two steps toward the two men and threw out her hands in an appeal
which was almost grotesque.
“Is it true?” she cried, turning from one to the other. “Tell me, is it
really true?”