A Book of Burlesques by H. L. Mencken (ebook reader color screen .txt) 📗

A what?

[177]

The Clergyman

That is to say, you have had more than one child?

The Bride’s Father

No.

The Clergyman

(Professionally) How sad! You will miss her!

The Bride’s Father

One job like this is en——

The Clergyman

(Interrupting suavely) But let us proceed. The ceremony must not be lengthened unduly, however interesting. We now approach the benediction.

(Dipping his gloved hands into the basin of bichloride, he joins the right hands of The Bride and The Bridegroom.)

The Clergyman

(To The Bridegroom) Repeat after me: “I, John, take thee, Mary, to be my wedded and aseptic wife, to have and to hold from this [178]day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, convalescence, relapse and health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part; and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

(The Bridegroom duly repeats the formula, The Clergyman now looses their hands, and after another dip into the bichloride, joins them together again.)

The Clergyman

(To The Bride) Repeat after me: “I, Mary, take thee, John, to be my aseptic and eugenic husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, to love, to cherish and to nurse, till death do us part; and thereto I give thee my troth.”

(The Bride duly promises. The Best Man then hands over the ring, which The Clergyman drops into the bichloride. It turns green. He fishes it up again, wipes it dry with a piece of aseptic cotton and presents it to The Bridegroom, who places it upon the third finger of The Bride’s left hand. Then The Clergyman goes on with the ceremony, The Bridegroom repeating after him.)

[179]

The Clergyman

Repeat after me: “With this sterile ring I thee wed, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

(The Clergyman then joins the hands of The Bride and Bridegroom once more, and dipping his own right hand into the bichloride, solemnly sprinkles the pair.)

The Clergyman

Those whom God hath joined together, let no pathogenic organism put asunder. (To the assembled company.) Forasmuch as John and Mary have consented together in aseptic wedlock, and have witnessed the same by the exchange of certificates, and have given and pledged their troth, and have declared the same by giving and receiving an aseptic ring, I pronounce that they are man and wife. In the name of Mendel, of Galton, of Havelock Ellis and of David Starr Jordan. Amen.

(The Bride and Bridegroom now kiss, for the first and last time, after which they gargle with two per cent carbolic and march out of the room, followed by the Bride’s Father and [180]the spectators. The Best Man, before departing after them, hands The Clergyman a ten-dollar gold-piece in a small phial of twenty per cent bichloride. The Clergyman, after pocketing it, washes his hands with green soap. The Bridesmaids proceed to clean up the room with the remaining bichloride. This done, they and The Clergyman go out. As soon as they are gone, the operating table is pushed back into place by an orderly, a patient is brought in, and a surgeon proceeds to cut off his leg.)

[181]

[183]

Once upon a time there was a surgeon who spent seven years perfecting an extraordinarily delicate and laborious operation for the cure of a rare and deadly disease. In the process he wore out $400 worth of knives and saws and used up $6,000 worth of ether, splints, guinea pigs, homeless dogs and bichloride of mercury. His board and lodging during the seven years came to $2,875. Finally he got a patient and performed the operation. It took eight hours and cost him $17 more than his fee of $20....

One day, two months after the patient was discharged as cured, the surgeon stopped in his rambles to observe a street parade. It was the annual turnout of Good Hope Lodge, No. 72, of the Patriotic Order of American Rosicrucians. The cured patient, marching as Supreme Worthy Archon, wore a lavender baldric, a pea-green [184]sash, an aluminum helmet and scarlet gauntlets, and carried an ormolu sword and the blue polka-dot flag of a rear-admiral....

With a low cry the surgeon jumped down a sewer and was seen no more.

The eminent physician, Yen Li-Shen, being called in the middle of the night to the bedside of the rich tax-gatherer, Chu Yi-Foy, found his distinguished patient suffering from a spasm of the liver. An examination of the pulse, tongue, toe-nails, and hair-roots revealing the fact that the malady was caused by the presence of a multitude of small worms in the blood, the learned doctor forthwith dispatched his servant to his surgery for a vial of gnats’ eyes dissolved in the saliva of men executed by strangling, that being the remedy advised by Li Tan-Kien and other high authorities for the relief of this painful and dangerous condition.

When the servant returned the patient was so far gone that Cheyne-Stokes breathing had already set in, and so the doctor decided to administer the whole contents of the vial—an heroic dose, truly, for it has been immemorially held that even so little as the amount that will [185]cling to the end of a horse hair is sufficient to cure. Alas, in his professional zeal and excitement, the celebrated pathologist permitted his hand to shake like a myrtle leaf in a Spring gale, and so he dropped not only the contents of the vial, but also the vial itself down the œsophagus of his moribund patient.

The accident, however, did not impede the powerful effects of this famous remedy. In ten minutes Chu Yi-Foy was so far recovered that he asked for a plate of rice stewed with plums, and by morning he was able to leave his bed and receive the reports of his spies, informers and extortioners. That day he sent for Dr. Yen and in token of his gratitude, for he was a just and righteous man, settled upon him in due form of law, and upon his heirs and assigns in perpetuity, the whole rents, rates, imposts and taxes, amounting to no less than ten thousand Hangkow taels a year, of two of the streets occupied by money-changers, bird-cage makers and public women in the town of Szu-Loon, and of the related alleys, courts and lanes. And Dr. Yen, with his old age and the old age of his seven sons and thirty-one grandsons now safely provided for, retired from the practise of his art, and devoted himself to a tedious scientific inquiry (long the object of his passionate [186]aspiration) into the precise physiological relation between gravel in the lower lobe of the heart and the bursting of arteries in the arms and legs.

So passed many years, while Dr. Yen pursued his researches and sent his annual reports of progress to the Academy of Medicine at Chan-Si, and Chu Yi-Foy increased his riches and his influence, so that his arm reached out from the mountains to the sea. One day, in his eightieth year, Chu Yi-Foy fell ill again, and, having no confidence in any other physician, sent once more for the learned and now venerable Dr. Yen.

“I have a pain,” he said, “in my left hip, where the stomach dips down over the spleen. A large knob has formed there. A lizard, perhaps, has got into me. Or perhaps a small hedge-hog.”

Dr. Yen thereupon made use of the test for lizards and hedge-hogs—to wit, the application of madder dye to the Adam’s apple, turning it lemon yellow if any sort of reptile is within, and violet if there is a mammal—but it failed to operate as the books describe. Being thus led to suspect a misplaced and wild-growing bone, perhaps from the vertebral column, the doctor decided to have recourse to surgery, and so, [187]after the proper propitiation of the gods, he administered to his eminent patient a draught of opium water, and having excluded the wailing women of the household from the sick chamber, he cut into the protuberance with a small, sharp knife, and soon had the mysterious object in his hand.... It was the vial of dissolved gnats’ eyes—still full and tightly corked! Worse, it was not the vial of dissolved gnats’ eyes, but a vial of common burdock juice—the remedy for infants griped by their mothers’ milk....

But when the eminent Chu Yi-Foy, emerging from his benign stupor, made a sign that he would gaze upon the cause of his distress, it was a bone that Dr. Yen Li-Shen showed him—an authentic bone, ovoid and evil-looking—and lately the knee cap of one Ho Kwang, brass maker in the street of Szchen-Kiang. Dr. Yen carried this bone in his girdle to keep off the black, blue and yellow plagues. Chu Yi-Foy, looking upon it, wept the soft, grateful tears of an old man.

“This is twice,” he said, “that you, my learned friend, have saved my life. I have hitherto given you, in token of my gratitude, the rents, rates, imposts and taxes, of two streets, and of the related alleys, courts and lanes. I [188]now give you the weight of that bone in diamonds, in rubies, in pearls or in emeralds, as you will. And whichever of the four you choose, I give you the other three also. For is it not said by K’ung Fu-tsze, ‘The good physician bestows what the gods merely promise’?”

And Dr. Yen Li-Shen lowered his eyes and bowed. But he was too old in the healing art to blush.

Once I lay in hospital a fortnight while an old man died by inches across the hall. Apparently a very painful, as it was plainly a very tedious business. I would hear him breathing heavily for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then he would begin shrieking in agony and yelling for his orderly: “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!” Now and then a nurse would come into my room and report progress: “The old fellow’s kidneys have given up; he can’t last the night,” or, “I suppose the next choking spell will fetch him.” Thus he fought his titanic fight with the gnawing rats of death, and thus I lay listening, myself quickly recovering from a sanguinary and indecent operation.... Did the shrieks of that old man startle me, worry me, torture me, set my nerves on edge? Not at all. I had [189]my meals to the accompaniment of piteous yells to God, but day by day I ate them more heartily. I lay still in bed and read a book or smoked a cigar. I damned my own twinges and fading malaises. I argued ignorantly with the surgeons. I made polite love to the nurses who happened in. At night I slept soundly, the noise retreating benevolently as I dropped off. And when the old fellow died at last, snarling and begging for mercy with his last breath, the unaccustomed stillness made me feel lonesome and sad, like a child robbed of a tin whistle.... But when a young surgeon came in half an hour later, and, having dined to his content, testified to it by sucking his teeth, cold shudders ran through me from stem to stern.

Temperature: 99.7. Respiration: rising to 65 and then suddenly suspended. The face is flushed, and the eyes are glazed and half-closed. There is obviously a sub-normal reaction to external stimuli. A fly upon the ear is unnoticed. The auditory nerve is anesthetic. There is a swaying of the whole body and an apparent failure of co-ordination, probably the effect of some disturbance in the semi-circular canals of [190]the ear. The hands tremble and then clutch wildly. The head is inclined forward as if to approach some object on a level with the shoulder. The mouth stands partly open, and the lips are puckered and damp. Of a sudden there is a sound as of a deep and labored inspiration, suggesting the upward curve of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. Then comes silence for 40 seconds, followed by a quick relaxation of the whole body and a sharp gasp....

One of the internes has kissed a nurse.

The world awaits that pundit who will study at length the relative respectability of the inward parts of man—his pipes and bellows, his liver and lights. The inquiry will take him far into the twilight zones of psychology. Why is the vermiform appendix so much more virtuous and dignified than its next-door neighbor, the cæcum? Considered physiologically, anatomically, pathologically, surgically, the cæcum is the decenter of the two. It has more cleanly habits; it is more beautiful; it serves a more useful purpose; it brings its owner less often to the doors of death. And yet what would one think of a lady who mentioned her cæcum? [191]But the appendix—ah, the appendix! The appendix is pure, polite, ladylike, even noble. It confers an unmistakable stateliness, a stamp of position, a social