YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT GETTING THE GRIP
Say! did you ever put on the goggles and go joy-riding with an attack of
grip?
It has all other forms of amusement hushed to a lullaby--take it from
Uncle Hank.
As a Bad Boy the grip has every other disease slapped to a sobbing
stand-still.
It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the brainiest little bug
that was ever chased by a doctor.
I was sitting quietly at home reading Maeterlinck on Auction Bridge when
suddenly I began to sneeze like a Russian regiment answering roll call.
Friend wife was deep in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement,
"The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledged
my first sneeze with the customary "Gesundheit!"
Then she trailed along bravely with her responses for ten or fifteen
minutes, but it was no use--I had more sneezes in my system than there
are "Gesundheits!" in the entire German nation, including
principalities, possessions across the sea, and the Musical Union.
"John," she ventured after a time, "you are getting a cold!"
"I'm not getting it," I sniffed; "I have it now."
What a mean, contemptible little creature a grip germ must be.
Absolutely without any of the finer instincts, it sneaks into people's
systems disguised as an ordinary cold. It isn't on the level, like
appendicitis or inflammatory rheumatism, both of which are brave and
fearless and will walk right up to you and kick you on the shins, big as
you are.
Nobody ever knows just what make-up the grip germs will put on to break
into the human system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis
nothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.
The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.
I discovered shortly after I had sneezed myself into a condition of pale
blue profanity that a newly married couple of grip germs had taken a
notion to build a nest somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus,
and two hours later they had about 233 children attending the public
school in my medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out for
recess I would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my Lima.
Before daylight came all these grip children had graduated from school
and, after tearing down the school-house, the whole bunch had married
and had large families of their own, and all hands were out paddling
their canoes on my alimentary canal.
By nine o'clock that morning there must have been eighty-five million
grip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to shoot their
initials over the walls of my interior department.
It was fierce!
When Doctor Leiser arrived on the scene I was carrying enough concealed
weapons to start something in Mexico.
The good old pill-pusher threw his saws behind the sofa, put his dip-net
on the mantelpiece, and took a fall out of my pulse.
"Ah!" he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like a
currycomb.
"The same to you, Doc," I said.
"Ah!" he said, looking hard at the wall.
"Say, Doc!" I whispered; "there's no use to cut off my leg because the
germs will hide in my elbow."
"Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum, near the apex of the
cosmopolitan?" inquired the doctor.
"Surest thing you know," I said.
"Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distant
laughter in the panatella?" he asked.
"It's a cinch, Doc," I said.
"Do you feel a roaring in the cornucopia with a tickling sensation in
the diaphragm?" he asked.
"Right again," I whispered.
"Do the joints feel sore and pinched like a pool-room?" he said.
"Right!"
"Does your tongue feel rare and high-priced, like a porterhouse steak at
a summer resort?"
"Exactly!"
"Do you feel a spasmodic fluttering in the concertina?"
"Yes!"
"Have you a sort of nervous hesitation in your hunger and does
everything you eat taste like an impossible sandwich made by a ghostly
baker from a disappearing bread and phantom?"
"Keno!"
"Does your nerve center tinkle-tinkle like a breakfast bell in a
kitchenless boarding house?"
"Right again!"
"Have you a feeling that the germs have attacked your Adam's apple and
that there won't be any core?"
"Yes!"
"When you look at the wall paper does your brain do a sort of
loop-the-loop and cause you to meld 100 aces or double pinochle?"
"Yes, and 80 kings, too!"
"Do you feel a slight palpitation of the membrane of the colorado madura
and is there a confused murmur in your brain like the sound of a
hard-working gas meter?"
"You've got me sized good and plenty, Doc!"
"Do you have insomnia, nightmare, loss of appetite, chills and fever and
concealed respiration in the Carolina perfecto?"
"That's the idea, Doc."
"When you lay on your right side do you have an impulse to turn over on
your left side, and when you turn over on your left side do you feel an
impulse to jump out of bed and throw stones at a policeman?"
"There isn't anything you can mention, Doc, that I haven't got."
"Ah!" said the doctor; "then that settles it."
"Tell me the truth," I groaned; "what is it, bubonic plague?"
"You have something worse--you have the grip," Doc Leiser whispered
gently. "You see I tried hard to mention some symptom which you didn't
have, but you had them all, and the grip is the only disease in the
world which makes a specialty of having every symptom known to medical
jurisprudence."
Then the doctor got busy with the pencil gag and left me enough
prescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket money throughout the
winter.
Then my friends and relatives began to drop in and annoy me with
suggestions.
"Pop" Barclay sat by my bedside and, after I had barked for him two or
three times, he decided I had inflammation of the lungs and was
insistent that I tie a rubber band around my chest and rub myself with
gasolene.
I told Pop I had no desire to become a human automobile so he got mad
and went home. But before he got mad he drank six bottles of beer and
before he went home he invited himself back to dinner.
Then Hep Hardy dropped in and ten minutes later he had me making signs
for an undertaker.
Hep comes to the bedside of the afflicted in the same restful manner
that a buzz-saw associates with a log of pine.
He insisted upon taking my pulse and listening to my heart beats, but
when he attempted to turn my eyelids back to see if I had a touch of the
glanders every germ in my body rose in rebellion and together we chased
Hep out of the room.
The next calamity was Teddy Pearson, who had an apartment on the floor
above us. Teddy had spent the previous night at a Tango party and ever
since daylight he had been beating home to windward. His cargo had
shifted and the seaway was rough. Still clad in the black and white
scenery with the silk bean-cover somewhat mussed he groped across the
darkened room and solemnly shook hands with me.
Then he sat in a chair by the bedside and began to sing soft lullabies
to a hold-over.
Presently he reached out his arm and made all the gestures that go with
the act of hitting a bell to summon a waiter.
Receiving no answer to his thirsty appeal he arose and said, "This is a
heluva club--rottenest service in this club--s'limit, that's what it is,
s'limit!" Then he hiccoughed his weary way out of the room and I haven't
seen him since.
An hour later Uncle Louis Miffendale had looked me over and concluded I
had galloping asthma, compressed tonsilitis, chillblainous croup, and
incipient measles. He insisted that I take three grains of quinine, two
grains of asperine, rub the back of my neck with benzine, soak my ankles
in kerosene, then a little phenacetine, and a hot whiskey toddy every
half hour before meals.
If I found it hard to take the toddy he volunteered to run in every half
hour and help me.
Then his wife, Aunt Jessica, blew in with a decoction she called catnip
tea. She brought it all the way from the Bronx in a thermos bottle, so I
had to drink it or lose a perfectly respectable old aunt.
It tasted like a linoleum cocktail--weouw!
During the rest of the day every friend and relative I have in the
world rushed in, suggested a sure cure, and then rushed out again.
Peaches tried them all on me and I felt like the inside of a medicine
chest.
[Illustration]
To make matters worse I drank some dogberry cordial and it chased the
catnip tea all over my concourse.
Then Peaches, being a student of natural history, insisted that I take
some hoarhound, I suppose to bite the dogberry, but it didn't.
Blood will tell, so the hoarhound joined forces with the dogberry and
chased the catnip up my family tree.
Suffering antiseptics! everybody with a different remedy, from snake
poison to soothing syrup--but it cured the grip.
Now all I have to do is to cure the medicine.