Short Fiction, O. Henry [best books to read for teens TXT] 📗

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 getaway 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 coordination 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 suitcase and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat