Gordon looked laughingly at James when the man had gone. "I infer that you are wondering what 'aqua' may be," he said.
"I was brought up to think it was water," said James.
"So it is, water pure and simple, with a little coloring matter thrown in. Bless you, boy, the people around here want their medicines by the quart, and if they had them by the quart, good-by to the doctor's job, and ho for the undertaker! So the doctor is obliged to impose upon the credulity of the avariciously innocent, and dilute the medicine. Bless you, I have patients who would accuse me of cheating if I prescribed less than a cupful of medicine at a time. They have to be humored. After all, they are a harmless, good lot, but stiffened with hereditary ideas, worse than by rheumatism. If I should give a few drops in half a glass of water, and order a teaspoonful at a time, I should fly in the face of something which no mortal man can conquer, sheer heredity. The grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these people took their physic on draft, the children must do likewise. Sometimes I even think the medicine [pg 061] would lose its effect if taken in any other way. Nobody can estimate the power of a fixed idea upon the body. All the same, it is a confounded nuisance carrying around the aqua. I will confess, although I see the necessity of yielding, that I have less patience with men's stiff-necked stupidity than I have with their sins."
James drove all the morning with Doctor Gordon about the New Jersey country. It was a moist, damp day, such as sometimes comes even in winter. It was a dog day with an atmosphere slightly cooler than that of midsummer. Overcoats were oppressive, the horses steamed. The roads were deep with red mud, which clogged the wheels and made the hoofs of the horses heavy. "It's a damned soil," said Doctor Gordon. This morning after appearing somewhat saturnine at breakfast, he was again in his unnatural, rollicking mood. He hailed everybody whom he met. He joked with the patients and their relatives in the farmhouses, approached through cart-tracks of mire, and fluttered about by chickens, quacking geese, and dead leaves. Now and then, stately ranks of turkeys charged in line of battle upon the muddy buggy, and the team, being used to [pg 062] it, stood their ground, and snorted contemptuously. The country people were either saturnine with an odd shyness, which had something almost hostile in it, or they were effusively hospitable, forcing apple-jack upon the two doctors. James was much struck by the curious unconcern shown by the relatives of the patients, and even by the patients themselves. In only one case, and that of a child suffering from a bad case of measles, was much interest evinced. The majority of the patients were the very old and middle-aged, and they discussed, and heard discussed, their symptoms with much the same attitude as they might have discussed the mechanism of a wooden doll. If any emotion was shown it was that of a singular inverted pride. "I had a terrible night, doctor," said one old woman, and a smirk of self-conceit was over her ancient face. "Yes, mother did have an awful night," said her married daughter with a triumphant expression. Even the children clustering about the doctor looked unconsciously proud because their old grandmother had had an awful night. The call of the two doctors at the house was positively hilarious. Quantities of old apple-jack were forced upon them. The old woman in the adjoining [pg 063] bedroom, although she was evidently suffering, kept calling out a feeble joke in her cackling old voice.
"Those people seem positively elated because that old soul is sick," said James when he and the doctor were again in the buggy.
"They are," said Doctor Gordon, "even the old woman herself, who knows well enough that she has not long to live. Did you ever think that the desire of distinction was one of the most, perhaps the most, intense purely spiritual emotion of the human soul? Look at the way these people live here, grubbing away at the soil like ants. The most of them have in their lives just three ways of attracting notice, the momentary consideration of their kind: birth, marriage, sickness and death. With the first they are hardly actively concerned, even with the second many have nothing to do. There are more women than men as usual, and although the women want to marry, all the men do not. There remains only sickness and death for a stand-by, so to speak. If one of them is really sick and dies, the people are aroused to take notice. The sick person and the corpse have a certain state and dignity which they have never attained before. Why, bless you, man, [pg 064] I have one patient, a middle-aged woman, who has been laid up for years with rheumatism, and she is fairly vainglorious, and so is her mother. She brags of her invalid daughter. If she had been merely an old maid on her hands, she would have been ashamed of her, and the woman herself would have been sour and discontented. But she has fairly married rheumatism. It has been to her as a husband and children. I tell you, young man, one has to have his little footstool of elevation among his fellows, even if it is a mighty queer one, or he loses his self-respect, and self-respect is the best jewel we have."
They were now out in the road again, the team plodding heavily through the red shale. "It's a damned soil," said the doctor for the second time. He looked down at the young man beside him, and James again felt that resentful sense of youth and inexperience. "I don't know how you've been brought up," said the elder man. "I don't want to infuse heretic notions into your innocent mind."
James straightened himself. He tried to give the other man a knowing look. "I have been about a good deal," he said. "You need not be afraid of corrupting me."
Doctor Gordon laughed. "Well, I shall [pg 065] not try," he said. "At least, I shall not mean to corrupt you. I am a pessimist, but you are so young that you ought not to be influenced by that. Lord, only think what may be before you. You don't know. I am so far along that I know as far as I am concerned. I did not know but you had been brought up to think that whatever the Lord made was good, and that in saying that this red, gluey New Jersey soil was darned bad, I was swearing the worst way. I don't want to have millstones and that sort of thing about my neck. I was quite up in the Scriptures at one time."
"You need not be afraid," said James with dignity; "I think the soil darned bad myself." He hesitated a little over the darned, but once it was out, he felt proud of it.