And the look Hippocrates gave in return made me thankful he wasn’t my family doctor. I knew he would rejoice to write me a prescription of ten grains of strychnine, three times a day, to be taken before meals.
VIII
METHUSELAH GIVES LONGEVITY SECRETS
It’s odd how often in interviewing the old-timers and ancient shades one’s preconceived ideas get a jolt. In my mind’s eye I had a vision of Methuselah, for instance, as an antediluvian figure with a Santa Claus beard and a general air of decrepitude. The door was opened in response to my ring by a smartly dressed, smooth-shaven individual, who certainly looked as if the burden of age sat lightly upon his shoulders.
“I should like to see Mr. Methuselah,” I said. “That is, if he is able to see callers today. If he’s having his nap, or not feeling very spry this morning, I can come again.”
“Come again? I guess not. You see me right now. I was going over to the Olympus Club to play a round of golf, but I’ll be glad to give you half an hour. Walk right in. What can I do for you?”
“My city editor wanted an interview on how to attain long life, but I must have got hold of the wrong Mr. Methuselah. I want the one who lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, the world’s champion oldest inhabitant. Surely you’re not—”
“I’ll say I am. I’m the only original, the guaranteed nine-times-centenarian and then some. I know what you expected to see: an old fossil with snowy whiskers and numerous wrinkles, walking with a couple of canes and dressed in a single garment like an old-fashioned nightshirt. You were prepared to have me give my reminiscences, to wheeze out, between painful breaths, that the old days were far better than anything we have now, to roast the younger generation, and wind up by attributing my longevity to abstaining from booze and the use of tobacco in any form. You were all ready to put down that I can read fine print without glasses and can remember events of nine hundred and fifty years ago as if they happened only yesterday. Oh, I know you newspaper fellows and I’ve read so many interviews with centenarians I could write one myself with my eyes shut. My advice to anybody who wants to live to be a hundred, to say nothing of nine hundred and sixty-nine, is, ‘Don’t.’ And as for reminiscences, my motto is, ‘Forget it.’ I haven’t any very happy recollections of my long-drawn-out stay on earth. Existence is pleasant, but it is possible to have entirely too much of a good thing.
“Take our married life, for instance. At the start everybody said it was a regular love story. But even a love story that stretches out into a serial of over nine hundred chapters gets a trifle monotonous. You’ve never heard of Mrs. M. She wouldn’t tell her age even to get her name into the Bible. I remember when they first started taking the census. The census taker came to our house and camped out three years. Couldn’t get all the facts of our family any other way. And we had to board him all that time. Well, his wife’s sister belonged to the Daughters of Eve Foreign Missionary Society, the same one my wife did, and Mrs. M. said she just knew that if she gave her age, why, that mean old thing would know it within half an hour, and it would be all around town before the day was over. And she just wouldn’t give it. I gave him all the dope about the other members of the family, my great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren and the close relations on my wife’s side who’d been living with us for three hundred and fifty years (close was no name for it), but I balked when it came to the question of Mrs. M.’s age. The fact was, she was only about four hundred and twenty-five, or thereabouts, at the time, but you know how women are—so blamed sensitive about something that men are proud of—and so I told him to go and get the information from headquarters.
“Well, it happened to be a bad combination that day. It was wash-day, and the cook had just left, after being with us for a hundred and eighty years, and quite a number of the children had the measles and the whooping cough and one thing another, and Mrs. M. happened to have a mop in her hand at the time, and—But here I am reminiscing away and I said I wouldn’t. Let’s get back to business. What did you want me to talk about?”