VII
In Sickness and in Health
I have been sick, but not utterly,—a tooth. I am in
the convalescent's mood of confidence and confession;
therefore, I write in haste, for in health I am buoyant
and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed, there
is little then to be penitent about. For a week I have
been very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to
remarks on the moral disintegration attendant upon
indisposition. I speak of petty disorders, for
illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for
instance, sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,—at
least, it is so demonstrated in fiction. Doubtless the
pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has a
soothing effect upon the patient's nerves, but
illnesses in which one has not the comfort of composing
one's epitaph are not composing to the soul. The
lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity:
myself last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate
forbear. Ferocious, but it was the elemental ferocity
of suffering. It is a fact, belonging rather to
the
science of psychology than of medicine, that
small sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I appeal to
all connoisseurs in invalidism whether a tooth, an ear,
an ankle, are not more direct in their methods of
torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis.
Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the
vilified hero of a certain novelette of my
acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has a tooth;
the wife, a heart,—a literal heart, mechanical,
physiological. Everybody knows which suffered more,
and yet because the gentleman got a little crusty over
a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author
trounced him through page after page! I am hot with
indignation. There ought to be a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Creations. Manufacturers of
heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and
burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane
reading public should take from them the prerogative of
so unnatural a parenthood.
This one man should have been forgiven; he had a
toothache, and non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of
the meekest of us; but fortunately, the illness being
temporary, so is the monster. Only the recollection is
humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the
legion so recently cast out of me. Sickness
sets
free all the processes of atavism, and whirls us back
into savagery at a breathless rate. The first bit of
baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey
is family affection. Last week my kin stood about my
couch day and night with poultices and sympathy in
their hands. I took the poultices and tossed back evil
words out of my mouth. I looked upon my relatives with
frankest loathing. Why? Their insulting forbearance,
their aggressive meekness, their
poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred
the foundations of my bile. Their serene patience
provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and I was
impotent; their invulnerability was an affront to my
powers of invention. My own possibilities of
vituperation were only less surprising to me than the
endurance of the abused. And all the time that I
listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect was
ebbing from me most uncomfortably,—and it was all
their fault.
A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our
civilization is that of the sense of humor. Being so
recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can
confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while
they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom
of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms
seem
only studied banalities. There is no comedy in the
incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved
tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor
that is lacking, for frequently the situations are
appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at
intervals for a lifetime. I doubt whether this
suspension of the processes of humor could be
established in the case of serious illness, admitting
of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers a-plenty who
have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on
record where a timely jest or a merry incident has
saved the day. I cite one such situation. A husband
lay at death's door, and the door was ajar. It was
midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly the patient
seemed to be sinking, slipping from her. She put the
hartshorn bottle to his nostrils, but he could smell
nothing. Both were terrified as they realized the
import of this. Then the wife glancing down discovered
that the bottle contained witch-hazel. The man
laughed—and lived.
In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a
positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities; there is
such a thing as dying game, or the fight for life may
be worth some bravado. But imagine feeling gamy with
tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is
absolutely no histri
onic appeal. If your sickness
has no spice of fatality, you might just as well give
up; you won't see the light of humor again until you
recover.
No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there
is another evil of savagery thrust upon us by illness.
It is the sudden acquisition of personality by
inanimate objects. What possibilities of abusive
conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday,
in health, perfectly inoffensive! What malevolence in
the wall-paper! Such a sneaking, underhand, leering
pattern for curtains with any pretensions to
respectability! How tipsy the books look, crowding and
pushing themselves askew for very perversity! No
amount of chastisement will make the pillows conduct
themselves comfortably. There is something about the
billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me
think of the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the
ocean when the sailboat is becalmed. I am as much at
the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before his
fetish.
Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or
gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no
greater in compass than one's little finger-nail,—
soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are!
Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of
all
insupportables, the people whom sickness makes
saints are the most contemptible. I know men and
ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,—
but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at
once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are
uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be
canonized. When a small boy I know voluntarily allows
his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse, his
nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine;
generosity with him is a sure presage of sore throat.
I have seen great strapping lads, full of sin, reduced
to sudden and spurious sainthood by a black eye. There
is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,—
there is nothing more alarming to an anxious family
than a course of virtuous endurance obstinately
persisted in. So long as you rage and are unseemly
your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility
under the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed
toe as much a matter of apprehension as angina
pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid for
unmerited martyrdom. These gentle sufferers are likely
to employ the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing
well that the bellow of rebellion is much too
reassuring. I am glad I am not as one of these; sick,
I throw things.
Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too,
are divided, though unevenly, into those who are better
in sickness and those who are worse. The marriage
service on examination will be found to be a very canny
document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater
shrewdness than in just that little phrase which
insures conjugal devotion in sickness and in health.
For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others,
Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the
world can the contracting parties foresee, demon or
angel, which will develop, or, having developed, which
will be better company?
