Half-Hours with the Idiot

by John Kendrick Bangs

"The first morning, after giving him a first-class breakfast that fills his weary soul with peace, I'd turn him loose in a picture gallery on the walls of which are hung soft, dreamy reproductions of pastoral scenes calculated to lull his soul into an unsuspecting sense of calm, and while he is looking placidly at these lovely things I'd have a husky attendant wearing sneakers creep quietly up behind him and give him such a kick as should for a moment make him feel that the earth itself had blown up. It wouldn't be a pleasant, sympathetic little love tap calculated to make him feel that he never even wanted to get well, but a violent, exacerbating assault; utterly uncalled for and unexpected; a bit of sheer, brutal provocation.

"Do you suppose for an instant that the party of the second part would throw himself down forthwith upon a convenient divan and give way to a fit of weeping? Not he, my dear Doctor. The tire of that tired business man would blow out with a report like a crash of distant thunder. All the latent business manhood in him would be aroused into instant action. Nerves would fly, and nerve would return. Spinelessness and uncertainty would give way to spunk, and a promptitude of truculent reprisal worthy of the palmiest days of his commercial pre-eminence would ensue. Worn and weary as he was when he entered the irritarium, he would be so outraged by the rank discourtesy and utter injustice of that kick that he would beat up that attendant as if he were a world's champion battling with a bowlful of cold consommé for a ten-thousand-dollar purse."

"Tush!" said the Doctor. "What do you suppose the attendant would be doing all this time? You seem to think your tired business man would find beating him up as easy as mashing potatoes with a pile driver."

"It would be part of my system," said the Idiot, "that the attendant should allow himself to be thrashed, so that the tired business man, irritated into a show of spirit and deceived into thinking that he was still some fighter, would leave the place next day, his courage renewed and his confidence in himself completely restored. Instead of inoculating him with Nut chops and hot water for a weary period of six months, I'd pin the red badge of courage on him at the very start; and I miss my guess if he wouldn't go back to business the next morning as fit as a fiddle, and spend most of his time for the next two years telling everybody who would listen how he walloped the life out of one of the huskiest attendants he could find in a month of Sundays."

"And you really think such brutal methods would work, do you?" asked the Bibliomaniac.

"I have eight dollars that are willing to state it is a fact to any two-dollar certificate ever printed by Uncle Sam," returned the Idiot. "Why, Mr. Bib, I had a very dear friend once who was paralyzed. So completely paralyzed was he that he couldn't move without help, and, what was worse, couldn't even talk.

"He went to a sanitarium, and for seven long and weary months he was dipped in a warm bath every morning by two attendants, an Irishman and a Dutchman. One held him by the shoulders and the other by the ankles, and day after day for nearly a year they dipped, and dipped, and dipped him. He showed no signs of improvement whatsoever until one bitterly cold winter's morning, the two attendants, having been off on a spree the night before, forgot to turn on the hot-water faucet and dipped him into a tub of ice water!

"The effect was electrical. The patient was so mad that he impulsively broke the dam of silence that had afflicted him for so long and let loose a flow of language on those attendants that made the wrath to come seem like the twittering of a bird; and before they had recovered from their astonishment he had leaped from the tub, pinked the Irishman on the eye with a cake of soap, and, after chasing the Dutchman downstairs into the parlor, spanked him into a state of coma with a long-handled bath brush he had picked up off the floor."

"And I suppose he is giving lessons in the tango to-day!" interjected the Lawyer, with a laugh.

"Nothing so mild," said the Idiot. "The last time I saw him he was starting off with old man Weston on his walk to Chicago. He told me he was going as far as Albany with Weston."