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<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2> <h2>PILLOWLAND</h2> In his immortal essay on the "flat swamp of convalescence" Charles Lamb speaks from personal experience of the "king-like way" the sick man "sways his pillow—tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician." How true this is—even to the italicised word—I discovered for myself after a personal encounter with the malignant Pneumococcus, backed up by his ally, the pleurisy. Such was the novelty of my first serious illness that it literally took my breath away. When I recovered my normal wind I found myself monarch of all I surveyed, my kingdom a bed, yet seemingly a land without limit,—who dares circumscribe the imagination of an invalid? As to the truth of Mr. Lamb's remarks on the selfishness of the sick man there can be no denial. His pillow is his throne—from it he issues his orders for the day, his bulletins for the night. The nurse is his prime minister, his right hand; with her moral alliance he is enabled to defy a host of officious advisers. [Pg 278] But woe betide him if nurse and spouse plot against him. Then he is helpless. Then he is past saving. His little pet schemes are shattered in the making. He is shifted and mauled. He is prodded and found wanting. No hope for the helpless devil as his face is scrubbed, his hands made clean, his miserable tangled hair combed straight. In Pillowland what Avatar? None, alas! Nevertheless, your pillow is your best friend, your only confidant. In its cool yielding depths you whisper (yes, one is reduced to an evasive whisper, such is the cowardice superinduced by physical weakness) "Bedpans are not for bedouins. I'll have none of them." And then you swallow the next bitter pill the nurse offers. Suffering ennobles, wrote Nietzsche. I suppose he is right, but in my case the nobility is yet to appear. Meek, terribly meek, sickness makes one. You suffer a sea change, and without richness. The most annoying part of the business is that you were not consulted as to your choice of maladies; worse remains: you are not allowed to cure yourself. I loathe pneumonia, since I came to grips with the beast. The next time I'll go out of my way to select some exotic fever. Then my doctor will be vastly intrigued. I had a common or garden variety of lung trouble. Pooh! his eyes seemed to say—I read their meaning with the clairvoyance of the defeated—we shall have this fellow on his hind-legs in a jiffy. And I didn't want to get well too [Pg 279] rapidly. Like Saint Augustine I felt like praying with a slight change of text: "Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." Give, I said to my doctor, health, but let me loaf a little longer. Time takes toll of eternity and I've worked my pen and wagged my tongue for twice twenty years. I need a rest. So do my readers. The divine rights of cabbages and of kings are also shared by mere newspaper men. A litany of massive phrases followed. But in vain. The doctor was inexorable. I had pneumonia. My temperature was tropical. My heart beat in ragtime rhythm, and my pulse was out of the running. I realised as I tried to summon to my parched lips my favourite "red lattice oaths" that, as Cabanis put it years ago: "Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends." All the velvet vanities of life had vanished. I could no longer think in alliterative sentences. Only walking delegates of ideas filled my hollow skull like dried peas in a bladder. Finally, I "concentrated"—as the unchristian unscientists say—on the nurse, my nurse. As an old reporter of things theatrical I had seen many plays with the trained nurse as heroine. One and all I abhorred them, even the gentle and artistic impersonation of Margaret Anglin in a piece whose name I've forgotten. I welcomed a novel by Edgar Saltus in which the nurse is depicted as a monster of crime incarnate. How mistaken I have been. Now, the trained nurse seems an angel without [Pg 280] wings. She may not be the slender, dainty, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl of the footlights; she is often mature and stout and a lover of potatoes. But she is a sister when a man is down. She is severe, but her severity hath good cause. At first you feebly utter the word "nurse." Later she is any Irish royal family name. Follows, "Mary," and that way danger lies for the elderly invalid. When he calls her "Marie" he is doomed. Every day the newspapers tell us of marriages made in pillowland between the well-to-do widower, Mr. A. Sclerosis, and Miss Emma Metic of the Saint Petronius Hospital staff. Married sons and daughters may protest, but to no avail. A sentimental bachelor or widower in the lonesome latter years hasn't any more chance with a determined young nurse of the unfair sex than a "snowbird in hell"—as Brother Mencken phrases it. However, every nurse has her day. She finally departs. Your eyes are wet. You are weeping over yourself. The nurse represented not only care for your precious carcass but also a surcease from the demands of the world. Her going means a return to work, and you hate to work if you are a convalescent of the true-blue sort. Hence your tears. But you soon recover. You are free. The doctor has lost interest in your case. You throw physic to the dogs. You march at a lenten tempo about your embattled bed. You begin sudden [Pg 281] little arguments with your wife, just to see if you haven't lost any of your old-time virility in the technique of household squabbling. You haven't. You swell with masculine satisfaction and for at least five minutes you are the Man of the House. A sudden twinge, a momentary giddiness, send you scurrying back to your bailiwick, the bedroom, and the familiar leitmotiv is once more sounded, and with what humility of accent: "Mamma!" The Eternal Masculine? The Eternal Child! You mumble to her that it is nothing, and as you recline on that thrice-accursed couch, you endeavour to be haughty. But she knows you are simply a sick grumpy old person of the male species who needs be ruled with a rod of iron, although the metal be well hidden. The first cautious peep from a window upon the world you left snow white, and find in vernal green, is an experience almost worth the miseries you have so impatiently endured. A veritable vacation for the eyes, you tell yourself, as the fauna and flora of Flatbush break upon your enraptured gaze. Presently you watch with breathless interest the manœuvres of ruddy little Georgie in the next garden as he manfully deploys a troupe of childish contemporaries, his little sister doggedly traipsing at the rear. Sturdy Georgie has the makings of a leader. He may be a Captain of Commerce, a Colonel, and Master-politician; but he will always be foremost, else nowhere. "You are the audience," [Pg 282] he imperiously bids his companions, and when rebellion seemed imminent he punched, without a trace of anger, a boy much taller. I envied Georgie his abounding vitality. Furtively I raised the window. Instantly I was spied by Georgie who cried lustily: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!" I almost felt gay, "You come up here," I called out with one lung. "I haven't a stepladder," he promptly replied. The fifth floor is as remote without a ladder as age is separated from youth. (Now I'm moralising!) Undismayed, Georgie continued to call: "Little boy, little boy, come down and play with me!" The most disheartening thing about a first sickness is the friend who meets you and says: "I never saw you look better in your life." It may be true, but he shouldn't have said it so crudely. You renounce then and there the doctor with all his pomps of healing. You refuse to become a professional convalescent. You are cured and once more a commonplace man, one of the healthy herd. Notwithstanding you feel secretly humiliated. You are no longer King of Pillowland. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 283] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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