Let Me Feel Your Pulse - O. Henry

  So I went to a doctor.

   “How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.

   Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”

   He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.

   “Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”

   He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better.

   Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.

   “Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”

   “It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!

   Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips that he had fastened to a card.

   “It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is wrong.”

   “Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so—”

   “I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”

   “Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”

   The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to—mostly ending in “itis.” I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.

   “Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.

   “All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”

   I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.

   “The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”

   So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”

   My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, “Neurasthenia!”—except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and walked away.

   An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—a man with feet and a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.

   “Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labour—recreation, in reality.”

   There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium.

   “The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in charge, “is no other than—Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work.”

   I had seen the book. “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one instead?” I asked.

   As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.

   “The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork.”

   I buttoned my coat.

   Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks, ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.

   “You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me. “I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”

   I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.

   “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.

   I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.

   “It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle,” he said.

   “Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?” said I.

   I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.

   Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”

   Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold.

   He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.

   A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept disconsolately.

   “I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead.”

   “Oh, what is it—what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.

   “Nerves a little unstrung,” said John, in his calm way. “Don’t worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.

   Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.

   I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I listened.

   Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and, in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise generally translated as “cheep!”

   I leaped into the air.

   “Hey! what’s the matter down there?” called John from his room above mine.

   “Oh, nothing,” I answered, “except that I accidentally bumped my head against the ceiling.”

   The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains. There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the big hall sitting room of the house, selected “Pancoast’s Family Practice of Medicine” from a bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred acres furnished with the usual complement of barns, mules, peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.

   Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. “Oh, yes,” said I, “wasn’t she in the chorus of—let’s see—”

   “Green, you know,” said John, “and tender, and you plow it under after the first season.”

   “I know,” said I, “and the grass grows over her.”

   “Right,” said John. “You know something about farming, after all.”

   “I know something of some farmers,” said I, “and a sure scythe will mow them down some day.”

   On the way back to the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing at it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern farmer. After ten minutes he said: “Are you going to stand there looking at that chicken all day? Breakfast is nearly ready.”

   “A chicken?” said I.

   “A White Orpington hen, if you want to particularize.”

   “A White Orpington hen?” I repeated, with intense interest. The fowl walked slowly away with graceful dignity, and I followed like a child after the Pied Piper. Five minutes more were allowed me by John, and then he took me by the sleeve and conducted me to breakfast.

   After I had been there a week I began to grow alarmed. I was sleeping and eating well and actually beginning to enjoy life. For a man in my desperate condition that would never do. So I sneaked down to the trolley-car station, took the car for Pineville, and went to see one of the best physicians in town. By this time I knew exactly what to do when I needed medical treatment. I hung my hat on the back of a chair, and said rapidly:

   “Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries, neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at night and a cold one in the morning. I shall endeavour to be cheerful, and fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to take a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and a tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any pharmacy. Good morning.”

   I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly nervous start when he saw me again.

   “I forgot to mention,” said I, “that I shall also take absolute rest and exercise.”

   After this consultation I felt much better. The reëstablishing in my mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much satisfaction that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful.

   John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains nearby. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans.

   In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick, sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of cemetery lots in Pineville.

   He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. “Brother,” he said, after a while, “you are in a mighty bad way. There’s a chance for you to pull through, but it’s a mighty slim one.”

   “What can it be?” I asked eagerly. “I have taken arsenic and gold, phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest, excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything left in the pharmacopœia?”

   “Somewhere in these mountains,” said the doctor, “there’s a plant growing—a flowering plant that’ll cure you, and it’s about the only thing that will. It’s of a kind that’s as old as the world; but of late it’s powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it up. I’m not engaged in active practice now: I’m getting along in years; but I’ll take your case. You’ll have to come every day in the afternoon and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they don’t know much about the cures that nature carries around in her saddlebags.”

   So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine—road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.

   As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find. But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning. This we kept up for a month.

   One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes around them for their night’s repose.

   “I’m glad you’re well again,” she said. “When you first came you frightened me. I thought you were really ill.”

   “Well again!” I almost shrieked. “Do you know that I have only one chance in a thousand to live?”

   Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. “Why,” said she, “you are as strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want?”

   “I tell you,” said I, “that unless we find the magic—that is, the plant we are looking for—in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me so.”

   “What doctor?”

   “Doctor Tatum—the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain. Do you know him?”

   “I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go every day—is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor.”

   Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would be on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and called to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes while I waited. Then the old doctor drove on.

   When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopædia and sought a word in it. “The doctor said,” she told me, “that you needn’t call any more as a patient, but he’d be glad to see you any time as a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopædia and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?”

   “I know what he meant,” said I. “I know now.”

   A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia.

   The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.

   And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black Oak Mountain—take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house in the pine-grove.

   Absolute rest and exercise!

   What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night?

(Sixes and Sevens, by O. Henry)