CHAPTER IX
YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT GETTING THE GRIP
Say! did you ever put on the goggles and go joy-riding with an attack ofgrip?
It has all other forms of amusement hushed to a lullaby--take it fromUncle Hank.
As a Bad Boy the grip has every other disease slapped to a sobbingstand-still.
It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the brainiest little bugthat was ever chased by a doctor.
I was sitting quietly at home reading Maeterlinck on Auction Bridge whensuddenly I began to sneeze like a Russian regiment answering roll call.
Friend wife was deep in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement,"The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledgedmy first sneeze with the customary "Gesundheit!"
Then she trailed along bravely with her responses for ten or fifteenminutes, but it was no use--I had more sneezes in my system than thereare "Gesundheits!" in the entire German nation, includingprincipalities, possessions across the sea, and the Musical Union.
"John," she ventured after a time, "you are getting a cold!"
"I'm not getting it," I sniffed; "I have it now."
What a mean, contemptible little creature a grip germ must be.Absolutely without any of the finer instincts, it sneaks into people'ssystems disguised as an ordinary cold. It isn't on the level, likeappendicitis or inflammatory rheumatism, both of which are brave andfearless and will walk right up to you and kick you on the shins, big asyou are.
Nobody ever knows just what make-up the grip germs will put on to breakinto the human system, but once they get a foothold in the epiglottisnothing can remove them except inward applications of dynamite.
The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.
I discovered shortly after I had sneezed myself into a condition of paleblue profanity that a newly married couple of grip germs had taken anotion to build a nest somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus,and two hours later they had about 233 children attending the publicschool in my medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out forrecess I would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my Lima.
Before daylight came all these grip children had graduated from schooland, after tearing down the school-house, the whole bunch had marriedand had large families of their own, and all hands were out paddlingtheir canoes on my alimentary canal.
By nine o'clock that morning there must have been eighty-five milliongrip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to shoot theirinitials over the walls of my interior department.
It was fierce!
When Doctor Leiser arrived on the scene I was carrying enough concealedweapons to start something in Mexico.
The good old pill-pusher threw his saws behind the sofa, put his dip-neton the mantelpiece, and took a fall out of my pulse.
"Ah!" he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like acurrycomb.
"The same to you, Doc," I said.
"Ah!" he said, looking hard at the wall.
"Say, Doc!" I whispered; "there's no use to cut off my leg because thegerms will hide in my elbow."
"Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum, near the apex of thecosmopolitan?" inquired the doctor.
"Surest thing you know," I said.
"Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distantlaughter in the panatella?" he asked.
"It's a cinch, Doc," I said.
"Do you feel a roaring in the cornucopia with a tickling sensation inthe diaphragm?" he asked.
"Right again," I whispered.
"Do the joints feel sore and pinched like a pool-room?" he said.
"Right!"
"Does your tongue feel rare and high-priced, like a porterhouse steak ata summer resort?"
"Exactly!"
"Do you feel a spasmodic fluttering in the concertina?"
"Yes!"
"Have you a sort of nervous hesitation in your hunger and doeseverything you eat taste like an impossible sandwich made by a ghostlybaker from a disappearing bread and phantom?"
"Keno!"
"Does your nerve center tinkle-tinkle like a breakfast bell in akitchenless boarding house?"
"Right again!"
"Have you a feeling that the germs have attacked your Adam's apple andthat there won't be any core?"
"Yes!"
"When you look at the wall paper does your brain do a sort ofloop-the-loop and cause you to meld 100 aces or double pinochle?"
"Yes, and 80 kings, too!"
"Do you feel a slight palpitation of the membrane of the colorado maduraand is there a confused murmur in your brain like the sound of ahard-working gas meter?"
"You've got me sized good and plenty, Doc!"
"Do you have insomnia, nightmare, loss of appetite, chills and fever andconcealed respiration in the Carolina perfecto?"
"That's the idea, Doc."
"When you lay on your right side do you have an impulse to turn over onyour left side, and when you turn over on your left side do you feel animpulse to jump out of bed and throw stones at a policeman?"
"There isn't anything you can mention, Doc, that I haven't got."
"Ah!" said the doctor; "then that settles it."
"Tell me the truth," I groaned; "what is it, bubonic plague?"
"You have something worse--you have the grip," Doc Leiser whisperedgently. "You see I tried hard to mention some symptom which you didn'thave, but you had them all, and the grip is the only disease in theworld which makes a specialty of having every symptom known to medicaljurisprudence."
Then the doctor got busy with the pencil gag and left me enoughprescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket money throughout thewinter.
Then my friends and relatives began to drop in and annoy me withsuggestions.
"Pop" Barclay sat by my bedside and, after I had barked for him two orthree times, he decided I had inflammation of the lungs and wasinsistent that I tie a rubber band around my chest and rub myself withgasolene.
I told Pop I had no desire to become a human automobile so he got madand went home. But before he got mad he drank six bottles of beer andbefore he went home he invited himself back to dinner.
Then Hep Hardy dropped in and ten minutes later he had me making signsfor an undertaker.
Hep comes to the bedside of the afflicted in the same restful mannerthat a buzz-saw associates with a log of pine.
He insisted upon taking my pulse and listening to my heart beats, butwhen he attempted to turn my eyelids back to see if I had a touch of theglanders every germ in my body rose in rebellion and together we chasedHep out of the room.
The next calamity was Teddy Pearson, who had an apartment on the floorabove us. Teddy had spent the previous night at a Tango party and eversince daylight he had been beating home to windward. His cargo hadshifted and the seaway was rough. Still clad in the black and whitescenery with the silk bean-cover somewhat mussed he groped across thedarkened room and solemnly shook hands with me.
Then he sat in a chair by the bedside and began to sing soft lullabiesto a hold-over.
Presently he reached out his arm and made all the gestures that go withthe act of hitting a bell to summon a waiter.
Receiving no answer to his thirsty appeal he arose and said, "This is aheluva club--rottenest service in this club--s'limit, that's what it is,s'limit!" Then he hiccoughed his weary way out of the room and I haven'tseen him since.
An hour later Uncle Louis Miffendale had looked me over and concluded Ihad galloping asthma, compressed tonsilitis, chillblainous croup, andincipient measles. He insisted that I take three grains of quinine, twograins of asperine, rub the back of my neck with benzine, soak my anklesin kerosene, then a little phenacetine, and a hot whiskey toddy everyhalf hour before meals.
If I found it hard to take the toddy he volunteered to run in every halfhour and help me.
Then his wife, Aunt Jessica, blew in with a decoction she called catniptea. She brought it all the way from the Bronx in a thermos bottle, so
Ihad to drink it or lose a perfectly respectable old aunt.
It tasted like a linoleum cocktail--weouw!
During the rest of the day every friend and relative I have in theworld rushed in, suggested a sure cure, and then rushed out again.
Peaches tried them all on me and I felt like the inside of a medicinechest.
To make matters worse I drank some dogberry cordial and it chased thecatnip tea all over my concourse.
Then Peaches, being a student of natural history, insisted that I takesome hoarhound, I suppose to bite the dogberry, but it didn't.
Blood will tell, so the hoarhound joined forces with the dogberry andchased the catnip up my family tree.
Suffering antiseptics! everybody with a different remedy, from snakepoison to soothing syrup--but it cured the grip.
Now all I have to do is to cure the medicine.