PILLOWLAND
In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles
Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick
man "sways his pillow--tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and
lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the
ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes
_sides_ oftener than a politician." How true this is--even to the
italicised word--I discovered for myself after a personal encounter
with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the
pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it
literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I
found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet
seemingly a land without limit,--who dares circumscribe the
imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on
the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow
is his throne--from it he issues his orders for the day, his
bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right
hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of
officious advisers. But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot
against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little
pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled.
He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as
his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled
hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas!
Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant.
In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an
evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical
weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them."
And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers.
Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in
my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness
makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most
annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to
your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure
yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast.
The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever.
Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden
variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say--I read their
meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated--we shall have this
fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well
too rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight
change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give,
I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time
takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue
for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine
rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper
men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor
was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My
heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I
realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red
lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a
digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of
life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative
sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull
like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"--as the
unchristian unscientists say--on the nurse, my nurse.
As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with
the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the
gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece
whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in
which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How
mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel without
wings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired
girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of
potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but
her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word
"nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary,"
and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her
"Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages
made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis,
and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married
sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental
bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more
chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a
"snowbird in hell"--as Brother Mencken phrases it.
However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are
wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only
care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands
of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work
if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears.
But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in
your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo
about your embattled bed. You begin sudden little arguments with
your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time
virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You
swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you
are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness,
send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the
familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of
accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You
mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that
thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows
you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who
needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well
hidden.
The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow
white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the
miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for
the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush
break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless
interest the man[oe]uvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden
as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his
little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the
makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and
Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere.
"You are the audience," he imperiously bids his companions, and
when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger,
a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality.
Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who
cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!"
I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung.
"I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as
remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm
moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy,
little boy, come down and play with me!"
The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend
who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life."
It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You
renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing.
You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured
and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd.
Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King
of Pillowland.