Kitabı oku: «Half-Hours with the Idiot», sayfa 5
V
A PSYCHIC VENTURE
"I beg your pardon, Doctor," said the Idiot, as he laid aside his morning paper and glanced over the gastronomic delights spread upon the breakfast table at Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog's high-class home for single gentlemen. "I don't wish to intrude upon this moment of blissful intercourse which you are enjoying with your allotment of stock in the Waffle Trust, but do you happen to have any A No. 1 eighteen-karat psychrobes among your patients that you could introduce me to? I need one in my business."
"Sike whats?" queried the Doctor, pausing in the act of lifting a sizable section of the eight of diamonds done in batter to his lips.
"Psychrobes," said the Idiot. "You know what I mean – a clairvoyant, a medium, a sike – somebody in the spiritual inter-State commerce business, who knows his or her job right down to the ground and back again."
"H'm! Why – yes, I know one or two mediums," said the Doctor.
"Strictly up-to-date and reliable?" said the Idiot. "Ready to trot in double harness?"
"Oh, as to their reliability as mediums I can't testify," said the Doctor. "You never can tell about those people, but I will say that in all respects other than their psychic indulgences I have always found those I know wholly reliable."
"You mean they wouldn't take a watch off a bureau when the owner wasn't looking, or beat a suffering corporation out of a nickel if they had a chance?" said the Idiot.
"That's it," said the Doctor. "But, as I say, you never can tell. A man may be the soul of honor in respect to paying his board bill, and absolutely truthful in statements of the everyday facts of life, and yet when he goes off, er – when he goes off – "
"Psychling," suggested the Idiot. "Bully good title for a story that – 'Psychling with a Psychrobe' – eh? What?"
"Fair," said the Doctor. "But what I was going to say was that when he goes off psychling, as you put it, he may, or may not, be quite so reliable. So if I were to indorse any one of my several clairvoyant patients for you, it would have to be as patients, and not as psychlists."
"That's all right," said the Idiot. "That's all I really want. If I can be sure that a medium is a person of correct habits in all other respects, I'll take my chances on his reliability as a transient."
"As a transient?" repeated the Bibliomaniac.
"Yes," said the Idiot. "A person in a state of trance."
"What has awakened this sudden interest of yours in things psychic?" asked the Doctor. "Are you afraid that your position as a dispenser of pure idiocy is threatened by the recorded utterances of great thinkers now passed into the shadowy vales, as presented to us by the mediums?"
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "Fact is, I do not consider their utterances as idiotic. Take that recent report of the lady who got into communication with the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte, and couldn't get anything out of him but a regretful allusion to Panama hats and pink pajamas, for instance. Everybody thought it was very foolish, but I didn't. To me it was merely a sad intimation of the particular kind of climate the great Corsican had got for his in the hereafter. He needed his summer clothes, and couldn't for the moment think of anything else. I should have been vastly more surprised if he had called for a pair of ear-tabs and a fur overcoat."
"And do you really believe, also for instance," put in the Bibliomaniac scornfully, "that with so many big questions before the public to-day Thomas Jefferson would get off such drivel as has been attributed to him by these people, having a chance to send a real message to his countrymen?"
"I've only seen one message from Jefferson," said the Idiot, "and it seemed to me most appropriate. It was received by a chap up in Schenectady, and all the old man said was 'Whizz – whizz – whizz, buzz – buzz – buzz, whizz – whizz – whizz!' Lots of people considered it drivel, but to me it was fraught with much sad significance."
"Well, if you can translate it, it's more than I can," said the Bibliomaniac. "The idea that the greatest political thinker of the ages could stoop to unmeaning stuff of that sort is to me preposterous."
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "You have not the understanding mind. Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapidity with which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as he realized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political belief were putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple old Democrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit of entomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums of his native land."
"Pouf!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You are a reactionary, Sir."
"Ubetcha," said the Idiot. "First principles first, say I. But to come back to clairvoyants. I am very anxious to get hold of a medium, Doctor, and the sooner the better. I'm going to give up Wall Street. I can't afford to stay there any longer unless I move out of this restful paradise of food and thought and take up my abode in a Mills Hotel, or charter a bench in the park from the city. The only business we had in our office last week was a game of poker between the firm and its employés, and the firm tided itself over the emergency by winning my salary for the next six weeks. Another week of such activity would prostrate me financially, and I am going to open a literary bureau to deal in posthumous literature."
"Posthumous literature is the curse of letters," said the Bibliomaniac. "It generally means the publication of the rejected, or personally discarded, manuscripts of a dead author, which results in the serious impairment of the quality of his laurels. It ought to be made a misdemeanor to print the stuff."
"I agree with you entirely as to that, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "This business of emptying the pigeonholes of deceased scribes, and printing every last scrap of scribbling to be found there, whether they intended it to be printed or not, is reprehensible, and I for one would gladly advocate a law requiring executors of a literary estate to burn all unpublished manuscripts found among the decedent's papers merely as a matter of protection to a great name. But it isn't that kind of posthumous production that I am going in for. It's the production posthumously produced that I am after, and I need a first-class medium as a side partner to get hold of the stuff for me."
"Preposterous!" sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's a lady over in England has recently published a book of short stories by the late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted to the world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, I don't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, and others, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get up a posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity."
"I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor.
"Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall do will be to send the lady after Charles Dickens and good old Thackeray, and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences, and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself with just taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply them with subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definite policy.
"Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could do with little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results would come from turning Dickens loose on the underworld, and setting Thackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! If there ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another 'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I can hardly sleep nights for thinking about it."
"I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quite perfect as it is."
"No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. For example, think of a scene described by Dickens in which Fagin, now become a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takes little Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunman out of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of an electric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly moving platform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes so expert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they pass, missing the twentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man Fagin wants to scare and not kill.
"Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle and expose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisite dullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man on the outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with the sounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he is writing about! Great heavens – the idea makes my mouth water!"
"That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how are you going to get the facts over to Dickens and Thackeray?"
"I shall not need to," said the Idiot. "All they'll have to do will be to project themselves in spirit over here into the very midst of the scenes to be described. As spirits they will have the entrée into any old kind of society they wish to investigate, and in that respect they will have the advantage over us poor mortals who can't go anywhere without having to take our confounded old bodies along with us. Then after I had arranged matters with Dickens and Thackeray, I'd send my psychic representative after Alexander Dumas, and get him to write a sequel to 'The Three Musketeers', and 'Twenty Years After', which I should call 'Two Hundred and Ninety Years After, a Romance of 1916', in which D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should return to modern times and try their hands on trench work, introducing the aëroplane, the submarine, and all the other appurtenances of war, from the militant brick to the dynamite bomb. Why, a good, rip-staving old Dumas tale of adventure of to-day, with those old heroes of his mixed up with the Militant Suffragettes and the Crown Prince of Germany, would be what old Doctor Johnson would have called a cracker-jack, if he had had the slightest conception of the possibilities of the English language."
"Wouldn't interest me in the least," said the Bibliomaniac coldly, "If there is anything under the canopy that I despise it is so-called romance. Now, if you could get hold of some of the solider things, such, for instance, as Macaulay might write, or" —
"Ah!" said the Idiot, triumphantly, "it is there that my scheme would work out most beneficently. My special articles on historic events by personal participators would thrill the world.
"From Adam I would secure the first and only authentic account of the Fall, with possibly an expression of his opinion as to the validity of the Darwinian theory. From Noah, aided and abetted by Shem, Ham, and Japhet, would come a series of sea stories narrating in thrilling style the story of The Flood, or How We Landed the Zoo on Ararat. A line or two from Balaam's Ass on the subject of modern Socialism would fill the reading world with wonder. A series of papers specially prepared for a woman's magazine by Henry VIII. on 'Wild Wives I Have Wedded', edited, possibly, with copious footnotes by Brigham Young, would bring fortune to the pockets of the publishers.
"And then the poets – ah, Mr. Bib, what treasures of poesy would this plan of mine not bring within our reach! Dante could write a new 'Inferno' introducing a new torture in the form of Satan compelling a Member of Congress to explain the Tariff bill. Homer could sing the sufferings and triumphs of arctic exploration in a new epic entitled 'The Chilliad', or possibly expend his genius upon the story of the rise and fall of Bryan in immortal periods under the title of 'The Billiad'" —
"Or describe your progressive idiocy under the title of 'The Silliad!'" put in the Bibliomaniac.
"Ubetcha!" cried the Idiot. "Or tell the sad tale of your life under the title of 'The Seniliad.' And in addition to these wonders, who can estimate to what extent we should all profit were our more serious reviews to secure articles from Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and old Ben Franklin on the present state of the nation! Why, an article dictated off-hand by the shade of Lincoln on the thousands who are now flattering themselves that they occupy his shoes, illustrated with those apt anecdotes of which he was a master, and pointed with his gloriously dry humor, under the title of 'Later Links', would alone make the venture worth while, even if nothing else came of it."
"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, rising, "perhaps there is something in the idea after all, and I wish you success, Mr. Idiot – and, by the way, if the scheme works out as you expect it to, and you happen to come across old Æsculapius, ask him for me for an authoritative statement of the origin and proper treatment of idiocy, will you?"
"Sure," said the Idiot, turning to his breakfast, "but it really isn't necessary to do that, Mr. Bib. Our good old friend, the Doctor here, is quite capable of curing you at any time you consent to put yourself unreservedly in his hands."
VI
ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION
"I see by the paper this morning," said the Idiot, as he put three lumps of sugar into his pocket and absent-mindedly dropped his eyeglasses into his coffee, "that, thanks to the industry of our Medical Schools and Colleges, the world is richer by thirty thousand new doctors to-day than it was yesterday. How does the law of supply and demand work in cases of that kind, Doctor Squills?"
"Badly – very badly, indeed," said the Doctor, with a gloomy shake of his head. "The profession is sadly overcrowded, and mighty few of us are making more than a bare living."
"I was afraid that was the case," said the Idiot sympathetically. "I was talking with a prominent surgeon at the Club the other night, and he was terribly upset over the situation. He intimated that we have been ruthlessly squandering our natural internal resources almost as riotously and as blindly as our lumbermen have been destroying the natural physical resources of the country. He assured me that he himself had reached a point in his career where there was hardly a vermiform appendix left in sight, and where five years ago he was chopping down not less than four of these a day for six days of the week at a thousand dollars per, it was now a lucky time for him when he got his pruning knife off the hook once a month."
"That vermiform appendix craze was all a fad anyhow," said the Bibliomaniac sourly. "Like the tango, and bridge, and golf, and slumming, and all the rest of those things that Society takes up, and then drops all of a sudden like a hot stick. It looked at one time as if nobody could hope to get into society who hadn't had his vermiform removed."
"Well, social fad or not," said the Idiot, "whatever it was, there is no question about it that serious inroads have been made upon what we may call our vermiforests, and unless something is done to protect them, by George, in a few years we won't have any left except a few stuffed specimens down in the Smithsonian Institution.
"I asked my friend Doctor Cuttem why he didn't call for a Vermiform Conservation Congress to see what can be done either to prevent this ruthless sacrifice of a product that if suitably safeguarded should supply ourselves, and our children, and our children's children to the uttermost posterity, with ample appendicular resources for the maintenance in good style of a reasonable number of surgeons; or to re-seed scientifically where the unscientific destruction of these resources is uncontrollable. How about that, Doctor? Suppose you remove a man's vermiform appendix – is there any system of medical, or surgical, fertilization and replanting that would cause two vermiforms to grow where only one grew before, so that sooner or later every human interior may become a sort of garden-close, where one can go and pluck a handful of vermiform appendices every morning, like so many hardy perennials in full bloom?"
"I'm afraid not," smiled the Doctor.
"Anybody but the Idiot would know that it couldn't be done," said the Bibliomaniac, "because if it could be done it would have been done long ago. When you find men successfully transplanting rabbits' tails on monkeys, and frogs' legs on canary birds, you can make up your mind that if it were within the range of human possibility they would by this time have vermiform appendices sprouting lushly in geranium pots for insertion into the systems of persons desiring luxuries of that sort."
"You mustn't sneer at the achievements of modern surgery, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "There is no telling how soon any one of us may need to avail himself of its benefits. Who knows – maybe a surgeon will come along some day who will be able to implant a sense of humor in you, to gladden all your days."
"Preposterous!" snapped the Bibliomaniac.
"Well, it does seem unlikely," said the Idiot, "but I know of a young doctor who without any previous experience planted a little heart in a frigid Suffragette; and though I know the soil is not propitious, even you may sometime be blossoming luxuriantly within with buds of cheer and sweet optimism. But however this may be, it is the unquestioned and sad fact that a once profitable industry for our surgically-inclined brothers has slumped; and they tell me that even those surgeons who have adopted modern commercial methods, and give away a set of Rudyard Kipling's Works and a year's subscription to the Commoner with every vermiform removed, are making less than a thousand dollars a week out of that branch of their work."
"Mercy!" cried the Poet. "What couldn't I do if I had a thousand dollars a week!"
"You could afford to write real poetry all the time, instead of only half the time, eh, old man?" said the Idiot affectionately. "But don't you mind. We're all in the same boat. I'd be an infinitely bigger idiot myself if I had half as much money as that."
"Impossible!" said the Bibliomaniac, chuckling over his opportunity.
"Green-eyed monster!" smiled the Idiot. "But speaking of this overcrowding of the profession, it is a surprise to me, Doctor, that so many young men are taking up medicine these days, when competent observers everywhere tell us that the world is getting better all the time.
"If that is true, and the world really is getting better all the time, it is fair to assume that some day it will be entirely well, and then, let me ask you, what is to become of all the doctors? It will not be a good thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an army of unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made up as it will be of highly intelligent but desperately hungry men, face to face with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medical diploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the whole range of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussic acid and cyanide of potassium.
"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with a grin at the Doctor.
"Shudder isn't the word!" said the Idiot. "The bare idea makes my flesh creep like a Philadelphia trolley car! Coxey's Army was bad enough, made up as it was of a poor, miserable lot of tramps and panhandlers, all so unused to labor as to be really jobshy; but in their most riotous moods the worst those poor chaps could do was to heave a few bricks or a dead cat through a millinery shop window, or perhaps bat a village magnate on the back of the head with a bed slat. There was nothing insidiously subtle about the warfare they waged upon Society.
"But suppose that, laboring under a smarting sense of similar wrongs, there should come to be such a thing as old Doctor Pepsin's Army of Unemployed Physicians and Surgeons, marching through the country, headed for the White House in order to make an impressive public demonstration of their grievances! What a peril to the body politic that would be! Not only could the surgeons waylay the village magnates and amputate their legs, and seize hostile editors and cut off the finger with which they run their typewriting machines, and point with alarm with; but the more insidious means of upsetting the public weal by pouring calomel into our wells, putting castor oil in our reservoirs, leaving cholera germs and typhoid cultures under our door mats, or transferring a pair of jackass's legs to the hind-quarters of an old family horse, found grazing in the pasture, would transform a once smiling countryside into a scene of misery and desolation."
"Poor, poor Dobbin!" murmured the Bibliomaniac.
"Indeed, Mr. Bib, it will be poor, poor Dobbin!" said the Idiot. "I don't think that many people besides you and myself realize how desperately serious a menace it is that hangs over us; and I feel that one of the first acts of the Administration, after it has succeeded in putting grape juice into the Constitution as our national tipple, and constructed a solid Portland cement wall across the Vice President's thorax to insure that promised four years of silence, should be an effort to control this terrible situation."
"You talk as if it could be done," said the Doctor doubtfully.
"Of course it can be done," said the Idiot. "Doctors being engaged in Inter-State Commerce – "
"Doctors? Interstate Commerce?" cried Mr. Brief. "That's a new one on me, Mr. Idiot. Everybody is apparently in Interstate Commerce in your opinion. Seems to me it was only the other day that you spoke of Clairvoyants being in it."
"Sure," said the Idiot. "And it's the same way with the doctors. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where a man passes from this state into the future state, you'll find a doctor mixed up in it somewhere, even if it's only as a coroner. This being so, it would be perfectly proper to refer the matter to the Interstate Commerce Commission for a solution.
"Anyhow, something ought to be done to handle the situation while the menace is in its infancy. We need the ounce of prevention. Now, my suggestion would be that the law should step in and either place a limit to the number of doctors to be turned out annually, on a basis of so many doctors to so many hundreds of population – say three doctors to every hundred people – just as in certain communities the excise law allows only one saloon for every thousand registered voters; or else, since the State permits medical schools to operate under a charter, authorizing them to manufacture physicians and surgeons ad lib., and turn them loose on the public, the State should provide work for these doctors to do.
