Being a delayed letter from Dr. John Rogers to his friend and patient, Benis Hamilton Spence.
DEAR Idiot: I knew you would get it—and you got it. Perhaps after this you will learn to treat your sciatic nerve with proper respect. But there is a worse complaint than sciatica. It lasts longer. Certain symptoms of it are indicated in the things which your letter leaves unsaid. Beans, old thing, you alarm me.
Now here is a sporting offer. If you'll drop it and come home at once I'll promise never to tell Aunt Caroline. Come the moment you can put foot to the ground. And, until then, I recommend strict seclusion and no nursing. Nursing might well be fatal. Stick to Li Ho. He is your only chance.
Your Aunt Caroline sends her love. (I told her I was writing you directions for further treatment). She feels the deprivation of your letters keenly. She can't see why the writing of a nice, chatty letter to one's only living Aunt should prove an undue drain upon nervous energy. Life has taught her not to expect consideration from relatives, but it does seem hard that her only sister's boy should treat her as if she were the scarlet fever. To allow himself to be ordered away from home for a rest cure was certainly less than courteous. To anyone not understanding the situation it would almost imply that his home was not restful. And after all the trouble she had taken even to the extent of strained relations with those Macfarland people who own a rooster. If the slight had been aimed entirely at herself she could have taken it silently, but when it included the three or four charming girls whom she had asked to visit (one at a time) for the purpose of providing pleasant company, she felt obliged to protest. Although protest, she knew, was useless. All this, however, she could have borne. The thing that she could scarcely forgive was the slight offered to his native town by a departure three days before the set date, thereby turning his "going away" tea into a "gone away"—an action considered by all (invited) Bainbridge as a personal insult.
Pause here for breath.
To continue. Your Aunt Caroline does not believe in rest cures anyway. She thinks poultices are much more effective. It stands to reason that if a thing is in, it ought to come out. Rest cures are just laziness. But, thank goodness, she never expected anything from the Spence family but laziness. And she had told her sister so before she married into it....
Allow an hour here for ancestral history with appropriate comment and another hour for a brief review of your own conduct from youth up and we come within measurable distance of a few words by me. I took up the point of the four or five nice girls who had been invited to visit. I put the whole thing down to shock and pointed out that patience is required. A return to physical normality, I said, would doubtless bring with it a reviving interest in the sex. It was indeed very fortunate, I told her, that you were, at present, indifferent. Any question of selecting a life partner in your present nervous state would be most dangerous. Your power of judgment, I pointed out, was temporarily jarred and out of gear. You might marry anybody. The only safe, the only humane way, was to give you time to recover yourself.
"Power of judgment!" said Aunt Caroline. "Do you mean to tell me that my sister's son is in danger of becoming an idiot?"
I said not exactly an idiot. Yet your strong disinclination toward marriage could certainly be traced to a shocked condition of the nerves. Certain fixed ideas—
"Fixed ideas!" said your Aunt. She has a particularly annoying habit of repeating one's words. "Benis has always had fixed ideas—though when he was young," she added with satisfaction, "I knew how to unfix them. If this absurd rest cure can do anything to cure chronic stubbornness, I've nothing to say. Why, even his father was easier to manage."
"Benis," I said, "considers himself very like his father."
"Does he?" retorted your dear Aunt with withering scorn. "He is just as much like his father as a lemon is like a lobster."
This ended our conversation. But the effect of it is still with me. Last night I dreamed of lemons and today I prescribed lobster for a man with acute dyspepsia. I tell you what, you old shirker, it's up to you to come home and bear your own Aunt. I'm through. Bones.
P.S. The office nurse has been changed since you left. I have now Miss Watkins, returned from overseas. I think you knew her—name of Mary? Very good looking—almost her only fault.
P.P.S. What you say about your pleasant old gentle-man with the umbrella sounds very much like masked epilepsy. Ought to be under treatment. I should say dangerous.
S.O.S. Aunt Caroline has just 'phoned to know whether all letter-writing is barred or if not, wouldn't it be helpful if you were to drop a line to a few of your young-friends? For herself she expects nothing, but she does think, etc., etc., etc.!
Come back! B.
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