go of yourself, and let him do the rest."
"Well, I'd like to see my system tried for a while," said the Idiot.
"I'll guarantee that any tired business man who will go to my irritarium
will get his spine and his spunk, his nerve and his dander, back in a
jiffy.
"The first morning, after giving him a first-class breakfast that fills
his weary soul with peace, I'd turn him loose in a picture gallery on
the walls of which are hung soft, dreamy reproductions of pastoral
scenes calculated to lull his soul into an unsuspecting sense of calm,
and while he is looking placidly at these lovely things I'd have a husky
attendant wearing sneakers creep quietly up behind him and give him such
a kick as should for a moment make him feel that the earth itself had
blown up. It wouldn't be a pleasant, sympathetic little love tap
calculated to make him feel that he never even wanted to get well, but a
violent, exacerbating assault; utterly uncalled for and unexpected; a
bit of sheer, brutal provocation.
"Do you suppose for an instant that the party of the second part would
throw himself down forthwith upon a convenient divan and give way to a
fit of weeping? Not he, my dear Doctor. The tire of that tired business
man would blow out with a report like a crash of distant thunder. All
the latent business manhood in him would be aroused into instant action.
Nerves would fly, and nerve would return. Spinelessness and uncertainty
would give way to spunk, and a promptitude of truculent reprisal worthy
of the palmiest days of his commercial pre-eminence would ensue. Worn
and weary as he was when he entered the irritarium, he would be so
outraged by the rank discourtesy and utter injustice of that kick that
he would beat up that attendant as if he were a world's champion
battling with a bowlful of cold consomme for a ten-thousand-dollar
purse."
"Tush!" said the Doctor. "What do you suppose the attendant would be
doing all this time? You seem to think your tired business man would
find beating him up as easy as mashing potatoes with a pile driver."
"It would be part of my system," said the Idiot, "that the attendant
should allow himself to be thrashed, so that the tired business man,
irritated into a show of spirit and deceived into thinking that he was
still some fighter, would leave the place next day, his courage renewed
and his confidence in himself completely restored. Instead of
inoculating him with Nut chops and hot water for a weary period of six
months, I'd pin the red badge of courage on him at the very start; and
I miss my guess if he wouldn't go back to business the next morning as
fit as a fiddle, and spend most of his time for the next two years
telling everybody who would listen how he walloped the life out of one
of the huskiest attendants he could find in a month of Sundays."
"And you really think such brutal methods would work, do you?" asked the
Bibliomaniac.
"I have eight dollars that are willing to state it is a fact to any
two-dollar certificate ever printed by Uncle Sam," returned the Idiot.
"Why, Mr. Bib, I had a very dear friend once who was paralyzed. So
completely paralyzed was he that he couldn't move without help, and,
what was worse, couldn't even talk.
"He went to a sanitarium, and for seven long and weary months he was
dipped in a warm bath every morning by two attendants, an Irishman and
a Dutchman. One held him by the shoulders and the other by the ankles,
and day after day for nearly a year they dipped, and dipped, and dipped
him. He showed no signs of improvement whatsoever until one bitterly
cold winter's morning, the two attendants, having been off on a spree
the night before, forgot to turn on the hot-water faucet and dipped him
into a tub of ice water!
"The effect was electrical. The patient was so mad that he impulsively
broke the dam of silence that had afflicted him for so long and let
loose a flow of language on those attendants that made the wrath to come
seem like the twittering of a bird; and before they had recovered from
their astonishment he had leaped from the tub, pinked the Irishman on
the eye with a cake of soap, and, after chasing the Dutchman downstairs
into the parlor, spanked him into a state of coma with a long-handled
bath brush he had picked up off the floor."
"And I suppose he is giving lessons in the tango to-day!" interjected
the Lawyer, with a laugh.
"Nothing so mild," said the Idiot. "The last time I saw him he was
starting off with old man Weston on his walk to Chicago. He told me he
was going as far as Albany with Weston."
"Well," said the Doctor, "it might work, but I doubt it. I should have
to see the scheme in operation before I recommended it to any of my
patients."
"All right," said the Idiot. "Send 'em along, Doctor. Mr. Bib and I can
take care of them right here."
"Leave me out," snapped the Bibliomaniac. "I don't care to be a partner
in any of your idiotic nonsense."
"No, Mr. Bib," smiled the Idiot, genially. "I wasn't going to use you
as a partner, but as a shining example of the effectiveness of my
theory. I've been irritating you constantly for the past twenty years,
and you are still able to eat your thirty-seven and a half flapjacks
daily without turning a hair, and that's some testimonial."
End of Project Gutenberg's Half-Hours with the Idiot, by John Kendrick Bangs