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Twelve Men by Theodore Dreiser

T >> Theodore Dreiser >> Twelve Men




"Oh, all right. Wait'll I git my big knife," and back he went, returning
later with a large horn-handled knife, which he opened. He preceded me
out through the barn lot and into the orchard beyond.

"Dr. Gridley sent cha, did he, huh?" he asked as he went. "Well, I guess
we all have ter comply with whatever the doctor orders. We're all apt
ter git sick now an' ag'in," and talking trivialities of a like
character, he cut me an armful, saying: "I might as well give ya too
many as too few. Peach sprigs! Now, I never heered o' them bein' good
fer anythin', but I reckon the doctor knows what he's talkin' about. He
usually does--or that's what we think around here, anyhow."

In the dusk I trudged home with my armful, my fingers cold. The next
morning, the tea having been brewed and taken, my father was better. In
a week or two he was up and around, as well as ever, and during this
time he commented on the efficacy of this tea, which was something new
to him, a strange remedy, and which caused the whole incident to be
impressed upon my mind. The doctor had told him that at any time in the
future if he was so troubled and could get fresh young peach sprigs for
a tea, he would find that it would help him. And the drug expense was
exactly nothing.

In later years I came to know him better--this thoughtful, crusty,
kindly soul, always so ready to come at all hours when his cases
permitted, so anxious to see that his patients were not taxed beyond
their financial resources.

I remember once, one of my sisters being very ill, so ill that we were
beginning to fear death, one and another of us had to take turn sitting
up with her at night to help and to give her her medicine regularly.
During one of the nights when I was sitting up, dozing, reading and
listening to the wind in the pines outside, she seemed persistently to
get worse. Her fever rose, and she complained of such aches and pains
that finally I had to go and call my mother. A consultation with her
finally resulted in my being sent for Dr. Gridley--no telephones in
those days--to tell him, although she hesitated so to do, how sister was
and ask him if he would not come.

I was only fourteen. The street along which I had to go was quite dark,
the town lights being put out at two a.m., for reasons of thrift
perhaps. There was a high wind that cried in the trees. My shoes on the
board walks, here and there, sounded like the thuds of a giant. I recall
progressing in a shivery ghost-like sort of way, expecting at any step
to encounter goblins of the most approved form, until finally the
well-known outlines of the house of the doctor on the main
street--yellow, many-roomed, a wide porch in front--came, because of a
very small lamp in a very large glass case to one side of the door, into
view.

Here I knocked, and then knocked more. No reply. I then made a still
more forceful effort. Finally, through one of the red glass panels which
graced either side of the door I saw the lengthy figure of the doctor,
arrayed in a long white nightshirt, and carrying a small glass
hand-lamp, come into view at the head of the stairs. His feet were in
gray flannel slippers, and his whiskers stuck out most grotesquely.

"Wait! Wait!" I heard him call. "I'll be there! I'm coming! Don't make
such a fuss! It seems as though I never get a real good night's rest any
more."

He came on, opened the door, and looked out.

"Well," he demanded, a little fussily for him, "what's the matter now?"

"Doctor," I began, and proceeded to explain all my sister's aches and
pains, winding up by saying that my mother said "wouldn't he please come
at once?"

"Your mother!" he grumbled. "What can I do if I do come down? Not a
thing. Feel her pulse and tell her she's all right! That's every bit I
can do. Your mother knows that as well as I do. That disease has to run
its course." He looked at me as though I were to blame, then added,
"Calling me up this way at three in the morning!"

"But she's in such pain, Doctor," I complained.

"All right--everybody has to have a little pain! You can't be sick
without it."

"I know," I replied disconsolately, believing sincerely that my sister
might die, "but she's in such awful pain, Doctor."

"Well, go on," he replied, turning up the light. "I know it's all
foolishness, but I'll come. You go back and tell your mother that I'll
be there in a little bit, but it's all nonsense, nonsense. She isn't a
bit sicker than I am right this minute, not a bit--" and he closed the
door and went upstairs.

To me this seemed just the least bit harsh for the doctor, although, as
I reasoned afterwards, he was probably half-asleep and tired--dragged
out of his bed, possibly, once or twice before in the same night. As I
returned home I felt even more fearful, for once, as I was passing a
woodshed which I could not see, a rooster suddenly flapped his wings and
crowed--a sound which caused me to leap all of nineteen feet Fahrenheit,
sidewise. Then, as I walked along a fence which later by day I saw had
a comfortable resting board on top, two lambent golden eyes surveyed me
out of inky darkness! Great Hamlet's father, how my heart sank! Once
more I leaped to the cloddy roadway and seizing a cobblestone or hunk of
mud hurled it with all my might, and quite involuntarily. Then I ran
until I fell into a crossing ditch. It was an amazing--almost a
tragic--experience, then.

In due time the doctor came--and I never quite forgave him for not
making me wait and go back with him. He was too sleepy, though, I am
sure. The seizure was apparently nothing which could not have waited
until morning. However, he left some new cure, possibly clear water in a
bottle, and left again. But the night trials of doctors and their
patients, especially in the country, was fixed in my mind then.

One of the next interesting impressions I gained of the doctor was that
of seeing him hobbling about our town on crutches, his medicine case
held in one hand along with a crutch, visiting his patients, when he
himself appeared to be so ill as to require medical attention. He was
suffering from some severe form of rheumatism at the time, but this,
apparently, was not sufficient to keep him from those who in his
judgment probably needed his services more than he did his rest.

One of the truly interesting things about Dr. Gridley, as I early began
to note, was his profound indifference to what might be called his
material welfare. Why, I have often asked myself, should a man of so
much genuine ability choose to ignore the gauds and plaudits and
pleasures of the gayer, smarter world outside, in which he might readily
have shone, to thus devote himself and all his talents to a simple rural
community? That he was an extremely able physician there was not the
slightest doubt. Other physicians from other towns about, and even so
far away as Chicago, were repeatedly calling him into consultation. That
he knew life--much of it--as only a priest or a doctor of true wisdom
can know it, was evident from many incidents, of which I subsequently
learned, and yet here he was, hidden away in this simple rural world,
surrounded probably by his Rabelais, his Burton, his Frazer, and his
Montaigne, and dreaming what dreams--thinking what thoughts?

"Say," an old patient, friend and neighbor of his once remarked to me
years later, when we had both moved to another city, "one of the
sweetest recollections of my life is to picture old Dr. Gridley, Ed
Boulder who used to run the hotel over at Sleichertown, Congressman
Barr, and Judge Morgan, sitting out in front of Boulder's hotel over
there of a summer's evening and haw-hawing over the funny stories which
Boulder was always telling while they were waiting for the Pierceton
bus. Dr. Gridley's laugh, so soft to begin with, but growing in force
and volume until it was a jolly shout. And the green fields all around.
And Mrs. Calder's drove of geese over the way honking, too, as geese
will whenever people begin to talk or laugh. It was delicious."

One of the most significant traits of his character, as may be inferred,
was his absolute indifference to actual money, the very cash, one would
think, with which he needed to buy his own supplies. During his life,
his wife, who was a thrifty, hard-working woman, used frequently, as I
learned after, to comment on this, but to no result. He could not be
made to charge where he did not need to, nor collect where he knew that
the people were poor.

"Once he became angry at my uncle," his daughter once told me, "because
he offered to collect for him for three per cent, dunning his patients
for their debts, and another time he dissolved a partnership with a
local physician who insisted that he ought to be more careful to charge
and collect."

This generosity on his part frequently led to some very interesting
results. On one occasion, for instance, when he was sitting out on his
front lawn in Warsaw, smoking, his chair tilted back against a tree and
his legs crossed in the fashion known as "jack-knife," a poorly dressed
farmer without a coat came up and after saluting the doctor began to
explain that his wife was sick and that he had come to get the doctor's
advice. He seemed quite disturbed, and every now and then wiped his
brow, while the doctor listened with an occasional question or gently
accented "uh-huh, uh-huh," until the story was all told and the advice
ready to be received. When this was given in a low, reassuring tone, he
took from his pocket his little book of blanks and wrote out a
prescription, which he gave to the man and began talking again. The
latter took out a silver dollar and handed it to the doctor, who turned
it idly between his fingers for a few seconds, then searched in his
pocket for a mate to it, and playing with them a while as he talked,
finally handed back the dollar to the farmer.

"You take that," he said pleasantly, "and go down to the drug-store and
have the prescription filled. I think your wife will be all right."

When he had gone the doctor sat there a long time, meditatively puffing
the smoke from his cob pipe, and turning his own dollar in his hand.
After a time he looked up at his daughter, who was present, and said:

"I was just thinking what a short time it took me to write that
prescription, and what a long time it took him to earn that dollar. I
guess he needs the dollar more than I do."

In the same spirit of this generosity he was once sitting in his yard of
a summer day, sunning himself and smoking, a favorite pleasure of his,
when two men rode up to his gate from opposite directions and
simultaneously hailed him. He arose and went out to meet them. His wife,
who was sewing just inside the hall as she usually was when her husband
was outside, leaned forward in her chair to see through the door, and
took note of who they were. Both were men in whose families the doctor
had practiced for years. One was a prosperous farmer who always paid his
"doctor's bills," and the other was a miller, a "ne'er-do-well," with a
delicate wife and a family of sickly children, who never asked for a
statement and never had one sent him, and who only occasionally and at
great intervals handed the doctor a dollar in payment for his many
services. Both men talked to him a little while and then rode away,
after which he returned to the house, calling to Enoch, his old negro
servant, to bring his horse, and then went into his study to prepare his
medicine case. Mrs. Gridley, who was naturally interested in his
financial welfare, and who at times had to plead with him not to let his
generosity stand wholly in the way of his judgment, inquired of him as
he came out:

"Now, Doctor, which of those two men are you going with?"

"Why, Miss Susan," he replied--a favorite manner of addressing his wife,
of whom he was very fond--the note of apology in his voice showing that
he knew very well what she was thinking about, "I'm going with W----."

"I don't think that is right," she replied with mild emphasis. "Mr.
N---- is as good a friend of yours as W----, and he always pays you."

"Now, Miss Susan," he returned coaxingly, "N---- can go to Pierceton and
get Doctor Bodine, and W---- can't get any one but me. You surely
wouldn't have him left without any one?"

What the effect of such an attitude was may be judged when it is related
that there was scarcely a man, woman or child in the entire county who
had not at some time or other been directly or indirectly benefited by
the kindly wisdom of this Samaritan. He was nearly everybody's doctor,
in the last extremity, either as consultant or otherwise. Everywhere he
went, by every lane and hollow that he fared, he was constantly being
called into service by some one--the well-to-do as well as by those who
had nothing; and in both cases he was equally keen to give the same
degree of painstaking skill, finding something in the very poor--a
humanness possibly--which detained and fascinated him and made him a
little more prone to linger at their bedsides than anywhere else.

"He was always doing it," said his daughter, "and my mother used to
worry over it. She declared that of all things earthly, papa loved an
unfortunate person; the greater the misfortune, the greater his care."

In illustration of his easy and practically controlling attitude toward
the very well-to-do, who were his patients also, let me narrate this:

In our town was an old and very distinguished colonel, comparatively
rich and very crotchety, who had won considerable honors for himself
during the Civil War. He was a figure, and very much looked up to by
all. People were, in the main, overawed by and highly respectful of him.
A remote, stern soul, yet to Dr. Gridley he was little more than a child
or schoolboy--one to be bossed on occasion and made to behave. Plainly,
the doctor had the conviction that all of us, great and small, were very
much in need of sympathy and care, and that he, the doctor, was the one
to provide it. At any rate, he had known the colonel long and well, and
in a public place--at the principal street corner, for instance, or in
the postoffice where we school children were wont to congregate--it was
not at all surprising to hear him take the old colonel, who was quite
frail now, to task for not taking better care of himself--coming out,
for instance, without his rubbers, or his overcoat, in wet or chilly
weather, and in other ways misbehaving himself.

"There you go again!" I once heard him call to the colonel, as the
latter was leaving the postoffice and he was entering (there was no
rural free delivery in those days) "--walking around without your
rubbers, and no overcoat! You want to get me up in the night again, do
you?"

"It didn't seem so damp when I started out, Doctor."

"And of course it was too much trouble to go back! You wouldn't feel
that way if you couldn't come out at all, perhaps!"

"I'll put 'em on! I'll put 'em on! Only, please don't fuss, Doctor. I'll
go back to the house and put 'em on."

The doctor merely stared after him quizzically, like an old
schoolmaster, as the rather stately colonel marched off to his home.

Another of his patients was an old Mr. Pegram, a large, kind,
big-hearted man, who was very fond of the doctor, but who had an
exceedingly irascible temper. He was the victim of some obscure malady
which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve. This seemed to
increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had
at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the
malady would occasionally disappear. This seemed at times as good a
remedy as any, and in consequence he was occasionally inclined to try
it.

Among other things, this old gentleman was the possessor of a handsome
buffalo robe, which, according to a story that long went the rounds
locally, he once promised to leave to the doctor when he died. At the
same time all reference to death both pained and irritated him
greatly--a fact which the doctor knew. Finding the old gentleman in a
most complaining and hopeless mood one night, not to be dealt with,
indeed, in any reasoning way, the doctor returned to his home, and early
the next day, without any other word, sent old Enoch, his negro
servant, around to get, as he said, the buffalo robe--a request which
would indicate, of course that the doctor had concluded that old Mr.
Pegram had died, or was about to--a hopeless case. When ushered into the
latter's presence, Enoch began innocently enough:

"De doctah say dat now dat Mr. Peg'am hab subspired, he was to hab dat
ba--ba--buffalo robe."

"What!" shouted the old irascible, rising and clambering out of his bed.
"What's that? Buffalo robe! By God! You go back and tell old Doc Gridley
that I ain't dead yet by a damned sight! No, sir!" and forthwith he
dressed himself and was out and around the same day.

Persons who met the doctor, as I heard years later from his daughter and
from others who had known him, were frequently asking him, just in a
social way, what to do for certain ailments, and he would as often reply
in a humorous and half-vagrom manner that if he were in their place he
would do or take so-and-so, not meaning really that they should do so
but merely to get rid of them, and indicating of course any one of a
hundred harmless things--never one that could really have proved
injurious to any one. Once, according to his daughter, as he was driving
into town from somewhere, he met a man on a lumber wagon whom he
scarcely knew but who knew him well enough, who stopped and showed him a
sore on the upper tip of his ear, asking him what he would do for it.

"Oh," said the doctor, idly and jestingly, "I think I'd cut it off."

"Yes," said the man, very much pleased with this free advice, "with
what, Doctor?"

"Oh, I think I'd use a pair of scissors," he replied amusedly, scarcely
assuming that his jesting would be taken seriously.

The driver jogged on and the doctor did not see or hear of him again
until some two months later when, meeting him in the street, the driver
smilingly approached him and enthusiastically exclaimed:

"Well, Doc, you see I cut 'er off, and she got well!"

"Yes," replied the doctor solemnly, not remembering anything about the
case but willing to appear interested, "--what was it you cut off?"

"Why, that sore on my ear up here, you know. You told me to cut it off,
and I did."

"Yes," said the doctor, becoming curious and a little amazed, "with
what?"

"Why, with a pair of scissors, Doc, just like you said."

The doctor stared at him, the whole thing coming gradually back to him.

"But didn't you have some trouble in cutting it off?" he inquired, in
disturbed astonishment.

"No, no," said the driver, "I made 'em sharp, all right. I spent two
days whettin' 'em up, and Bob Hart cut 'er off fer me. They cut, all
right, but I tell you she hurt when she went through the gristle."

He smiled in pleased remembrance of his surgical operation, and the
doctor smiled also, but, according to his daughter, he decided to give
no more idle advice of that kind.

In the school which I attended for a period were two of his sons, Fred
and Walter. Both were very fond of birds, and kept a number of one kind
or another about their home--not in cages, as some might, but inveigled
and trained as pets, and living in the various open bird-houses fixed
about the yard on poles. The doctor himself was intensely fond of these
and all other birds, and, according to his daughter and his sons, always
anticipated the spring return of many of diem--black-birds, blue jays,
wrens and robins--with a hopeful, "Well, now, they'll soon be here
again." During the summer, according to her, he was always an interested
spectator of their gyrations in the air, and when evening would come was
never so happy as when standing and staring at them gathering from all
directions to their roosts in the trees or the birdhouses. Similarly,
when the fall approached and they would begin their long flight
Southward, he would sometimes stand and scan the sky and trees in vain
for a final glimpse of his feathered friends, and when in the gathering
darkness they were no longer to be seen would turn away toward the
house, saying sadly to his daughter:

"Well, Dollie, the blackbirds are all gone. I am sorry. I like to see
them, and I am always sorry to lose them, and sorry to know that winter
is coming."

"Usually about the 25th or 26th of December," his daughter once
quaintly added to me, "he would note that the days were beginning to get
longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and bring
them all back again."

One of the most interesting of his bird friendships was that which
existed between him and a pair of crows he and his sons had raised,
"Jim" and "Zip" by name. These crows came to know him well, and were
finally so humanly attached to him that, according to his family, they
would often fly two or three miles out of town to meet him and would
then accompany him, lighting on fences and trees by the way, and cawing
to him as he drove along! Both of them were great thieves, and would
steal anything from a bit of thread up to a sewing machine, if they
could have carried it. They were always walking about the house,
cheerfully looking for what they might devour, and on one occasion
carried off a set of spoons, which they hid about the eaves of the
house. On another occasion they stole a half dozen tin-handled pocket
knives, which the doctor had bought for the children and which the crows
seemed to like for the brightness of the metal. They were recovered once
by the children, stolen again by the crows, recovered once more, and so
on, until at last it was a question as to which were the rightful
owners.

The doctor was sitting in front of a store one day in the business-heart
of town, where also he liked to linger in fair weather, when suddenly he
saw one of his crows flying high overhead and bearing something in its
beak, which it dropped into the road scarcely a hundred feet away.
Interested to see what it was the bird had been carrying, he went to the
spot where he saw it fall and found one of the tin-handled knives, which
the crow had been carrying to a safe hiding-place. He picked it up and
when he returned home that night asked one of his boys if he could lend
him a knife.

"No," said his son. "Our knives are all lost. The crows took them."

"I knew that," said the doctor sweetly, "and so, when I met Zip uptown
just now, I asked her to lend me one, and she did. Here it is."

He pulled out the knife and handed it to the boy and, when the latter
expressed doubt and wonder, insisted that the crow had loaned it to him;
a joke which ended in his always asking one of the children to run and
ask Zip if she would lend him a knife, whenever he chanced to need one.

Although a sad man at times, as I understood, the doctor was not a
pessimist, and in many ways, both by practical jokes and the humoring of
odd characters, sought relief from the intense emotional strain which
the large practice of his profession put upon him. One of his greatest
reliefs was the carrying out of these little practical jokes, and he had
been known to go to much trouble at times to work up a good laugh.

One of the, to him, richest jokes, and one which he always enjoyed
telling, related to a country singing school which was located in the
neighborhood of Pierceton, in which reading (the alphabet, at least),
spelling, geography, arithmetic, rules of grammar, and so forth, were
still taught by a process of singing. The method adopted in this form of
education was to have the scholar memorize all knowledge by singing it.
Thus in the case of geography the students would sing the name of the
country, then its mountains, then the highest peaks, cities, rivers,
principal points of interest, and so on, until all information about
that particular country had been duly memorized in song or rhyme.
Occasionally they would have a school-day on which the local dignitaries
would be invited, and on a number of these occasions the doctor was, for
amusement's sake merely, a grave and reverent listener. On one occasion,
however, he was merely passing the school, when hearing "Africa-a,
Africa-a, mountains of the moo-oo-oon" drawled out of the windows, he
decided to stop in and listen a while. Having tethered his horse outside
he knocked at the door and was received by the little English singing
teacher who, after showing him to a seat, immediately called upon the
class for an exhibition of their finest wisdom. When they had finished
this the teacher turned to him and inquired if there was anything he
would especially like them to sing.

"No," said the doctor gravely, and no doubt with an amused twinkle in
his eye, "I had thought of asking you to sing the Rocky Mountains, but
as the mountains are so high, and the amount of time I have so limited,
I have decided that perhaps it will be asking too much."

"Oh, not at all, not at all" airily replied the teacher, and turning to
his class, he exclaimed with a very superior smile: "Now, ladies and
gentlemen, 'ere is a scientific gentleman who thinks it is 'arder to
sing of _'igh_ mountings than it is to sing of _low_ mountings," and
forthwith the class began to demonstrate that in respect to vocalization
there was no difference at all.

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