Speaking of Operations | Page 8

six.
Our own domestic tailors are bad enough in this regard and the Old
World tailors are even worse.
I remember a German tailor in Aix-la-Chapelle in the fall of 1914 who
undertook to build for me a suit suitable for visiting the battle lines
informally. He was the most literary tailor I ever met anywhere. He
would drape the material over my person and then take a piece of chalk
and write quite a nice long piece on me. Then he would rub it out and
write it all over again, but more fully. He kept this up at intervals of

every other day until he had writer's cramp. After that he used pins. He
would pin the seams together, uttering little soothing, clucking sounds
in German whenever a pin went through the goods and into me. The
German cluck is not so soothing as the cluck of the English-speaking
peoples, I find.
At the end of two long and trying weeks, which wore both of us down
noticeably, he had the job done. It was not an unqualified success. He
regarded is as a suit of clothes, but I knew better; it was a set of slip
covers, and if only I had been a two-seated runabout it would have
proved a perfect fit, I am sure; but I am a single-seated design and it did
not answer. I wore it to the war because I had nothing else to wear that
would stamp me as a regular war correspondent, except, of course, my
wrist watch; but I shall not wear it to another war. War is terrible
enough already; and, besides, I have parted with it. On my way home
through Holland I gave that suit to a couple of poor Belgian refugees,
and I presume they are still wearing it.
So far as I have been able to observe, the surgeons and the tailors of
these times share but one common instinct: If you go to a new surgeon
or to a new tailor he is morally certain, after looking you over, that the
last surgeon you had or the last tailor, did not do your cutting properly.
There, however, is where the resemblance ends. The tailor, as I
remarked in effect just now, wants an hour at least in which to decide
how he may best cover up and disguise the irregularities of the human
form; in much less time than that the surgeon has completely altered
the form itself.
With the surgeon it is very much as it is with those learned men who
write those large, impressive works of reference which should be
permanently in every library, and which we are forever buying from an
agent because we are so passionately addicted to payments. If the thing
he seeks does not appear in the contents proper he knows exactly where
to look for it. "See appendix," says the historian to you in a footnote.
"See appendix," says the surgeon to himself, the while humming a
cheery refrain. And so he does.
Well, I went home. This was Tuesday and the operation was not to be

performed until the coming Friday. By Wednesday I had calmed down
considerably. By Thursday morning I was practically normal again as
regards my nerves. You will understand that I was still in a blissful
state of ignorance concerning the actual methods of the surgical
profession as exemplified by its leading exponents of today. The
knowledge I have touched on in the pages immediately preceding was
to come to me later.
Likewise Doctor Z's manner had been deceiving. It could not be that he
meant to carve me to any really noticeable extent--his attitude had been
entirely too casual. At our house carving is a very serious matter. Any
time I take the head of the table and start in to carve it is fitting women
and children get to a place of safety, and onlookers should get under the
table. When we first began housekeeping and gave our first small
dinner-party we had a brace of ducks cooked in honor of the company,
and I, as host, undertook to carve them. I never knew until then that a
duck was built like a watch--that his works were inclosed in a
burglarproof case. Without the use of dynamite the Red Leary-O'Brien
gang could not have broken into those ducks. I thought so then and I
think so yet. Years have passed since then, but I may state that even
now, when there are guests for dinner, we do not have ducks. Unless
somebody else is going to carve, we have liver.
I mention this fact in passing because it shows that I had learned to
revere carving as one of the higher arts, and one not to be approached
except in