From a Girl's Point of View

by Lilian Bell

THE DYSPEPTIC

The dyspeptic generally wants to tell you all about it. That is a bore to begin with; for nobody in the world wants to hear anybody in the world tell all about anything in the world. Oh, those wearisome, breathless people, who insist upon giving you the tiresome details of insipid trivialities! There is no escape from them; they are everywhere. They are to be found on farms, in mining-camps, in women's clubs, in churches, jails, and lunatic asylums, and the nearest approach to a release from them is to be fashionable, for in society nobody ever is allowed to finish a sentence.

This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory. None other can account for its universality. You can carry contagion of it in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental constitution, who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit. There is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases about it—such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly. It is rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for fifty years and then die of something else.

I never heard of a yacht which did not carry at least one of this particular breed of bores upon every trip. I never heard of a private-car party which was free from it. Or, if you do not carry them with you, you meet them on the way, and they ruin the sunset for the whole party.

Something ought to be done about it. There ought to be a poll-tax on bores. Mothers ought to train their children to avoid lying and boring people with equal earnestness. Infirmaries should be established for the purpose of making the stupid interesting, or classes organized on "How to be Brief," or on "The Art of Relating Salient Points," or on "The Best Method of Skipping the Unessentials in Conversation." I would go, for one.

I quite envy a man who is an acknowledged bore. He is so free from responsibility. He does not care that the conversation dies every time he shows his face. He is used to it. It is nothing to him that clever men and women ache audibly in his presence. He has no reputation to lose. The hostess is not a friend of his, for whom he feels that he must exert himself. A bore has no friends. He is a social leech.

It implies, first of all, a superb conceit to think anybody wishes one to tell all about anything, but conceit is a natural attribute—a twin brother of its sister, vanity—and everybody has it to a greater or less degree. Indeed, the cleverest man I know—quite the cleverest—is one who always panders to this particular foible because he recognizes its universality. He has a country-house, which is always full of guests, with a great many girls among them. Every afternoon, when he drives out from town, his first sentence is, "Now come, children, and tell me all about everything. Who has been here, and what they said, and what you thought, and everything that has happened, including all that is going to happen. Don't skip a word."

See the base flattery of that! Is it any wonder that his house is always full? What bores he would be responsible for making if we were stupid enough to do as he asks! The chief reason people do not is that ten people cannot tell all they know about everything, even if they want to. He is only furnished with two ears.

The dyspeptic is one who makes the most valiant effort to try. His dyspepsia is the most important issue of the world with him, and he will talk about it. He cannot keep still and let other people enjoy their sound digestion and healthful sleep. He will not even let other people eat in peace. When he refuses a dish at table he must needs tell you why—just as if you cared!

"Have some coffee, Mr. Bore?"

"No, I thank you, Madame Sans-Gene. I like coffee, but it doesn't like me!"

Irritating, maddeningly reiterated words—the trade-mark of the dyspeptic bore! I feel like saying, "I agree with the coffee. I don't like you either!"

A dyspeptic disagrees with me as religiously as if I had eaten him.

No wonder a man is ill who never thinks or talks of anything but the seat of his ailment, for talk about it he will, and tell you that he cannot eat hot breads or pastry or griddle-cakes or waffles. And if any of those adorable things which your soul loves are on the table, he will sit and watch you eat them, with his hand on his own pulse, and will entertain you with cheerful statements of how he would be feeling if he were eating any of the deadly poisons, until it nearly gives you indigestion to hear him describe it.

I dare say I know plenty of women dyspeptics, as long as dyspepsia is said to be our national ailment, but if I do I never hear them talk about it.

Of course every woman knows that a sick man is sicker than a thousand sick women, each of whom is twice as sick as he is. We all know that he can groan louder and roll his eyes higher and keep more people flying about, and all this with just a plain pain, than his wife would do with seven fatal ailments. Then to hear him tell about it, after he has recovered, is to imagine that he is Lazarus over again, and that the day of miracles has returned, that he ever lived to tell the tale. All this refers to an acute attack. But when his trouble is chronic, and it has to do, like dyspepsia, with a man's eating!—you cannot escape. He will tell you all about it.

In the first place, dyspepsia is such a refined and lady-like trouble. It has no disgusting details. You can refer to it at all times without fear of nauseating your hearers. In the second place, you can count on nearly half of your hearers having it too, as dyspepsia is almost as catching as Christian Science.

Carlyle was the most famous of dyspeptics. But magnificent as he was in his growling, I fancy it is more bearable to read about it than it was for that adorable wife of his to hear him talk about it. How well we can imagine her feelings when she wrote, "The amount of bile that he brings home is awfully grand."

But one forgives much of his dyspeptic talk, and even allows the mantle of one's Christian charity to cover the sins of lesser bile-cursed men to hear how he sums up the subject:

"With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much. But what, in these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the liver? Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold. There, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the devil and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect."

I really do feel sorry for dyspeptics when I read a thing like that. I am not heartless. It must be a sad thing not to be able to eat lobster and ice-cream together, and to have to say "No" to broiled mushrooms, and not to dare to eat Welsh-rarebits after the theatre, and to have to lock up your chafing-dish. But I do say this: unless a man can talk of his trouble as cleverly as Carlyle—and some of the choice dyspeptics I know can almost do that—I want them not to talk at all. If they suffer, let them do it in silence. If they die, let them die entertainingly, or else, I say, don't die in public.

I never see a dyspeptic with his little pair of silver scales on the table, weighing out two ounces of meat, or one ounce of bread, and looking like a death's-head at a feast, and talking like a grave-digger with Yorick's skull for a theme, that I do not think of this:

"Fantastic tricks enough man has played in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, even down to an animated heap of glass; but to fancy himself a dead iron balance for weighing pains and pleasures on was reserved for this, his latter era."