The Genial Idiot: His Views and Reviews by John Kendrick Bangs (cat reading book TXT) 📖

part of the performance, had their dinner, and returned. Still I slept, and continued so to do until midnight, when one of the gentlemanly ushers came and waked me up, and told me that the performance was over. I rubbed my eyes, and looked about me. It was true—the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening. I put on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from[152] five-twenty until twelve, or six hours and forty minutes straight. That was one instance. Two weeks later I went again, this time to hear ‘Götterdämmerung.’ The results were the same, only the effect was instantaneous. The curtain had hardly risen before I retired to the little ante-room of the box our party occupied and dozed off into a fathomless sleep. I didn’t wake up this time until nine o’clock the next day, the rest of the party having gone off without awakening me as a sort of joke. Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then, deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science. I have tried all sorts of other things—sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest, and not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two doses of Wagner brought about in one instant. And, best of all, there was no reaction: no splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got completely rested up.”

[153] “You run a dreadful risk, however,” said the Doctor, with a sarcastic smile. “The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, Mr. Idiot.”

“That may be,” said the Idiot; “worse than the sulfonal habit by a great deal, I am told; but I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while it costs from five to seven dollars a dose. In addition to this experience, I have also the testimony of a friend of mine who was cured of a frightful attack of the colic by Sullivan’s ‘Lost Chord,’ played on a cornet. He had spent the day down at Asbury Park, and had eaten not wisely but too copiously. Among other things that he turned loose in his inner man were two plates of lobster salad, a glass of fresh cider, and a saucerful of pistache ice-cream. He was a painter by profession, and the color scheme he thus introduced into his digestive apparatus was too much for his artistic soul. He was not fitted by temperament to assimilate anything quite so strenuously chromatic as that, and, as a consequence, shortly after he had retired to[154] his studio for the night, the conflicting tints began to get in their deadly work, and within two hours he was completely doubled up. The pain he suffered was awful. Agony was bliss alongside of the pangs that now afflicted him, and all the palliatives and pain-killers known to man were tried without avail, and then, just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the ‘Lost Chord.’ A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the ‘Lost Chord’ the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded, the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away, entirely leaving him so far from prostrate that by 1 A. M. he was out of bed and actually girding himself with a shot-gun and an Indian club to go up-stairs for a physical encounter with the cornetist.”

“And you reason from this that Sullivan’s[155] ‘Lost Chord’ is a cure for cholera morbus, eh?” sneered the Doctor.

“It would seem so,” said the Idiot. “While the music continued my friend was a well man, ready to go out and fight like a warrior; but when the cornetist stopped the colic returned, and he had to fight it out in the old way. In these incidents in my own experience I find ample justification for my belief, and that of others, that some day the music cure for human ailments will be recognized and developed to the full. Families going off to the country for the summer, instead of taking a medicine-chest along with them, will be provided with a music-box with cylinders for mumps, measles, summer complaint, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, chills and fever, and all the other ills the flesh is heir to. Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long just what composition will cure specific ills. If a baby has whooping-cough, an anxious mother, instead of ringing up the doctor, will go to the piano and give the child a dose of ‘Hiawatha.’ If a small boy goes swimming and catches a cold[156] in his head and is down with a fever, his nurse, an expert on the accordion, can bring him back to health again with three bars of ‘Under the Bamboo Tree’ after each meal. Instead of dosing the kids with cod-liver oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work at a mechanical piano and braced up on ‘Narcissus.’ ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night’ will become an effective remedy for a sudden chill. People suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves back to normal conditions with Wagner the way I did. Tchaikowsky, to be well shaken before taken, will be an effective remedy for a torpid liver, and the man or woman who suffers from lassitude will doubtless find in the lively airs of our two-step composers an efficient tonic to bring their vitality up to a high standard of activity. Nothing in it? Why, Doctor, there’s more in it that’s in sight to-day that is promising and suggestive of great things in the future than there was of the principle of gravitation in the rude act of that historic pippin that left the parent tree[157] and swatted Sir Isaac Newton on the nose.”

“And the drug stores will be driven out of business, I presume,” said the Doctor.

“No,” said the Idiot. “They will substitute music for drugs, that is all. Every man who can afford it will have his own medical phonograph, or music-box, and the drug stores will sell cylinders and records for them instead of quinine, carbonate of soda, squills, paregoric, and other nasty-tasting things they have now. This alone will serve to popularize sickness, and, instead of being driven out of business, their trade will pick up.”

“And the doctor, and the doctor’s gig, and all the appurtenances of his profession—what becomes of them?” demanded the Doctor.

“We’ll have to have the doctor just the same to prescribe for us, only he will have to be a musician, but the gig—I’m afraid that will have to go,” said the Idiot.

“And why, pray?” asked the Doctor.[158] “Because there are no more drugs, must the physician walk?”

“Not at all,” said the Idiot. “But he’d be better equipped if he drove about in a piano-organ or, if he preferred, an auto on a steam-calliope.”

[159] XIV

HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS