4. CHAPTER IV.
Some account of the inconveniences of having a digestive apparatus.
But ennui was not the worst of the evils that
clouded my happy lot. Some touches of that diabolical
disorder, the curse of the rich man, which,
as my sister so often gave me to know, had threatened
the peace of Mr. Arthur Megrim several times
before, now began to assail my own serenity, and
threw gall and ratsbane over my dinners. I had
slighted her warnings, and despised her advice, and
now I was to pay the price of indiscretion. In a
word, that very digestive apparatus, on which she
read me a lecture at least thrice a day, began to
grumble, refuse to do duty, and strike; though, unlike
the industrious artisans, who were in all quarters
setting it the example, it struck, not for high
wages, of which it had had a surfeit, but for low
ones, in which, however, its master was scarce able
to oblige it, having an uncommonly good appetite
most of the time; and even when he had not, not
well knowing how to dispose of his time unless at
the table.
My faithful sister, who had been so constant to
predict, was the first to detect the coming evil, and,
step by step, she pointed it out to my unwilling
observation.
“Arthur,” said she, one morning as we sat at
breakfast, “your eyelid is winking.”
“Augh—” said I, “yes; it is winking.”
“It is a sign,” said she, “your digestive apparatus
is getting out of order!”
“Augh!” said I, “hang the digestive apparatus!”
for I was tired of hearing it mentioned.
“Arthur,” said she, the next day, “you are beginning
to look yellow and bilious!”
“Yes,” said I; on which she declared that “the
alkalis of my biliary fluids”—she had studied the
whole theory and nomenclature of dyspepsy out
of a book the doctor lent her—“were beginning to
fail to coalesce, in the natural chymical way, with
the acids of the chymous mass; and that no better
argument could be desired to prove that my digestive
apparatus was getting out of order.” And she
concluded by recommending me to regulate my diet,
and fall back upon bran bread and hickory ashes.
In short, my dear sister assailed me with a pertinacity
equal to the disease itself, so that I came,
in a short time, to consider her as one of its worst
symptoms.
To add to my woes, Dr. Tibbikens began to go
over to her opinion, to talk of my digestive apparatus,
and to drop hints in relation to bran bread and
hickory ashes, which would decidedly have robbed
him of my friendship, had I not at last found myself
unable to do without him.
To make a long story short, I will omit a detailed
history of my tribulations during the winter,
and skip at once to the following spring; at the
opening of which I found myself, young, rich, and
independent as I was, the bond-slave and victim of
a malady to which the woes of age and penury are as
the sting of moschetoes to the teeth of raging tigers.
Reader, I have, in the course of this history, related
to thee many miseries which it was my lot, on
different occasions, to encounter, and some of them
of a truly cruel and insupportable character. Could
I, however, give thee a just conception of the ills I
was now doomed to suffer, which, of a certainty, I
cannot do, unless thou art at this moment the victim
of a similar infliction, I am convinced thou
wouldst agree with me, that I had now stumbled
upon a grief that concentrated in itself all others
of which human nature is capable.
Dost thou know what it is to have thy stomach
stuffed, like an ostrich's, with old iron hoops and
brickbats—or feeling as if it were? to have it now
drowned in vinegar, now scorched as with hot potatoes?
thy head filled with achings, dizziness, and
streaks of lightning? thy heart transformed into
the heels of a hornpipe-dancer, and plying thy ribs,
lungs, and diaphragm with the energy of an
artiste
in the last agony?
If thou dost, then thou wilt know that bodily distress,
of which the above miseries form but a small
portion, is the least of the evils of dyspepsy—that
its most horrible symptoms develop themselves in
the mind. What care those devils, falsely called
blue (for they are as black as midnight, or the bile
which engenders them), for the youth, the wealth,
the independence, the gentility of a man whose digestive
apparatus is out of order? The less cause
he may have in reality to be dissatisfied with his
lot, the more cause they will find him; the greater
and more legitimate his claims to be a happy man,
the more fierce and determined their efforts to make
him a miserable one.
The serenity of my mind gave way before the
attacks of these monsters; sleeping and waking,
by day and by night, they assailed me with equal
pertinacity and fury. If I slept, it was only to be
tormented by demon and caco-demon—to be ridden
double by incubus and succuba, under whose bestriding
limbs I felt like a Shetland pony carrying
two elephants. My dreams, indeed, so varied and
terrific were the images with which they afflicted
me, I can compare to nothing but the horrors or last
delirium of a toper. Hanging, drowning, and tumbling
down church-steeples were the common and
least frightful of the fancies that crowded my sleeping
brain: now I was blown up in a steamboat, or
run over by a railroad car; now I was sticking fast
in a burning chimney, scorching and smothering,
and now, head downwards, in a hollow tree, with
a bear below snapping at my nose; now I was
plastered up in a thick wall, with masons hard at
work running the superstructure up higher, and now
I was enclosed in a huge apple-dumpling, boiling
in a pot over a hot fire. One while I was crushed
by a boa constrictor; another, perishing by inches
in the mouth of a Bengal tiger; and, again, I was
in the hands of Dr. Tibbikens and his scientific
coadjutors of the village, who were dissecting me
alive. In short, there was no end to the torments
I endured in slumber, and nothing could equal
them except those that beset me while awake.
A miserable melancholy seized upon my spirits,
in which those very qualifications which everybody
envied me the possession of were regarded
with disgust, as serving only the purpose of adding
to my tortures. What cared I for youth, when it
opened only a longer vista of living wretchedness?
What to me was the wealth which I could not
enjoy? which had been given me only to tantalize?
And as for independence, the idea was a mockery;
the servitude of a galley-slave was freedom, unlimited
license, compared with my subjection to dyspepsy,
and—for the truth must be confessed—the
doctor; to whom I was at last obliged to submit,
nolens volens.
