One Third Off | Page 9

of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints. North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people and much too good for many of the others. The word "intrigued" creeps into our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the payment of Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and that chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the old-line Democrats, practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a dismal conviction that creation has gone plum' to perdition in a hand basket. Those more optimistically inclined look upon the brighter side of things and distill consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad but what it might have been worse--Trotzky might have been born twins. Great Britain has her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn Féin enlarges the British national anthem to read God Save the King Till We Can Get at Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that the airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to the early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been aiming for all through this paragraph.
Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart there was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my imagination was at fault. Mentally, I found myself--well, for lack of a better word to express it--logy. Otherwise, in all physical regards, I felt as brisk and peart as ever I have, despite the circumstance of having reached the age when a great many of us are confronted by the distressing discovery that we are rapidly getting no younger.
Now when a man who has always enjoyed such outrageously perfect health as it has been my good fortune to enjoy takes note that certain nagging manifestations are persisting within him it is his duty, or least it should be his duty, to try to find out the underlying cause of whatever it is that distresses him and correct the trouble before it becomes chronic.
I did not get frightened--I trust I am not a self-alarmist--but I did get worried. I made up my mind that I would not wait, as those who approach middle age so often do, for the medical examiner of an insurance company to scare me into sudden conniption fits. But I also made up my mind that I would find out what radically was wrong with me, if anything, and endeavor to master it while the mastering was good.
This, though, was after I had harked back to the days of my adolescence. I was born down on the northern edge of the southern range of the North American malaria belt; and when I was growing up, if one seemed intellectually torpid or became filled with an overpowering bodily languor, the indisposition always was diagnosed offhand as a touch of malaria. Accordingly, the victim, taking his own advice or another's, jolted his liver with calomel until the poor thing flinched every time a strange pill was seen approaching it, and then he rounded out the course of treatment with all the quinine the traffic would stand. Recalling these early campaigns, I borrowed of their strategy for use against my present symptoms--if symptoms they were. I took quinine until my ears rang so that persons passing me on the public highway would halt to listen to the chimes. My head was filled with mysterious muffled rumblings. It was like living in a haunted house and being one at the same time.
CHAPTER VII
Office Visits, $10
It required all of two weeks of experimenting with my interior to convince me that whatever it might be that annoyed me, it surely was not a thing which an intensive bombardment of the liver would cure. The liver has