“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am
going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and
catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the
suitable place for you. But what you need is rest—absolute rest and
exercise.”
That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: “What
I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one
of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up
and down while I rest?”
The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced
sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man
came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west
entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over.
“I thought you had ’em,” he said, not unkindly, “but I guess you’re all
right. You’d better go see a doctor, old man.”
A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the
preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon. And
his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.
“What you need,” he decided, “is sea air and companionship.”
“Would a mermaid—” I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.
“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast
of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet,
comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”
The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry
on an island off the main shore. Everybody who did not dress for dinner
was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and
champagne table d’hôte. The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy
yachtsmen. The _Corsair_ anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr.
Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly
at the hotel. Still, it was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could
afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your
baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.
When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph
blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for
get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf
links and went to sleep on the lawn.
When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “By
the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”
“Relieved of very much,” I replied.
Now a consulting physician is different. He isn’t exactly sure whether
he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the
most careful or the most careless attention. My doctor took me to see a
consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful
attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some coördination
exercises.
“Have you a pain in the back of your head?” he asked. I told him I had
not.
“Shut your eyes,” he ordered, “put your feet close together, and jump
backward as far as you can.”
I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed. My
head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and
was only three feet away. The doctor was very sorry. He had overlooked
the fact that the door was open. He closed it.
“Now touch your nose with your right forefinger,” he said.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“On your face,” said he.
“I mean my right forefinger,” I explained.
“Oh, excuse me,” said he. He reopened the bathroom door, and I took my
finger out of the crack of it. After I had performed the marvellous
digito-nasal feat I said:
“I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have
something like a pain in the back of my head.” He ignored the symptom
and examined my heart carefully with a
latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad.
“Now,” he said, “gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the
room.”
I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led
out of Madison Square Garden. Then, without dropping in a penny, he
listened to my chest again.
“No glanders in our family, Doc,” I said.
The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of
my nose. “Look at my finger,” he commanded.
“Did you ever try Pears’—” I began; but he went on with his test
rapidly.
“Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger.
At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the
bay.” This for about three minutes.
He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed
easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that
if he had used the phrases: “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied,
outward—or rather laterally—in the direction of the horizon, underlaid,
so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning—or
rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my
upraised digit”—I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have
passed the examination.
After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the
spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the
bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I
ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.
The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and
Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was
to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on
it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and
bites me first.
“You must follow this diet strictly,” said the doctors.
“I’d follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what’s on it,” I
answered.
“Of next importance,” they went on, “is outdoor air and exercise. And
here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you.”
Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my
departure.