Part 11

"I don't think that is right," she replied with mild emphasis. "Mr. N---- is as good a friend of yours as W----, and he always pays you."

"Now, Miss Susan," he returned coaxingly, "N---- can go to Pierceton and get Doctor Bodine, and W---- can't get any one but me. You surely wouldn't have him left without any one?"

What the effect of such an attitude was may be judged when it is related that there was scarcely a man, woman or child in the entire county who had not at some time or other been directly or indirectly benefited by the kindly wisdom of this Samaritan. He was nearly everybody's doctor, in the last extremity, either as consultant or otherwise. Everywhere he went, by every lane and hollow that he fared, he was constantly being called into service by some one--the well-to-do as well as by those who had nothing; and in both cases he was equally keen to give the same degree of painstaking skill, finding something in the very poor--a humanness possibly--which detained and fascinated him and made him a little more prone to linger at their bedsides than anywhere else.

"He was always doing it," said his daughter, "and my mother used to worry over it. She declared that of all things earthly, papa loved an unfortunate person; the greater the misfortune, the greater his care."

In illustration of his easy and practically controlling attitude toward the very well-to-do, who were his patients also, let me narrate this:

In our town was an old and very distinguished colonel, comparatively rich and very crotchety, who had won considerable honors for himself during the Civil War. He was a figure, and very much looked up to by all. People were, in the main, overawed by and highly respectful of him. A remote, stern soul, yet to Dr. Gridley he was little more than a child or schoolboy--one to be bossed on occasion and made to behave. Plainly, the doctor had the conviction that all of us, great and small, were very much in need of sympathy and care, and that he, the doctor, was the one to provide it. At any rate, he had known the colonel long and well, and in a public place--at the principal street corner, for instance, or in the postoffice where we school children were wont to congregate--it was not at all surprising to hear him take the old colonel, who was quite frail now, to task for not taking better care of himself--coming out, for instance, without his rubbers, or his overcoat, in wet or chilly weather, and in other ways misbehaving himself.

"There you go again!" I once heard him call to the colonel, as the latter was leaving the postoffice and he was entering (there was no rural free delivery in those days) "--walking around without your rubbers, and no overcoat! You want to get me up in the night again, do you?"

"It didn't seem so damp when I started out, Doctor."

"And of course it was too much trouble to go back! You wouldn't feel that way if you couldn't come out at all, perhaps!"

"I'll put 'em on! I'll put 'em on! Only, please don't fuss, Doctor. I'll go back to the house and put 'em on."

The doctor merely stared after him quizzically, like an old schoolmaster, as the rather stately colonel marched off to his home.

Another of his patients was an old Mr. Pegram, a large, kind, big-hearted man, who was very fond of the doctor, but who had an exceedingly irascible temper. He was the victim of some obscure malady which medicine apparently failed at times to relieve. This seemed to increase his irritability a great deal, so much so that the doctor had at last discovered that if he could get Mr. Pegram angry enough the malady would occasionally disappear. This seemed at times as good a remedy as any, and in consequence he was occasionally inclined to try it.

Among other things, this old gentleman was the possessor of a handsome buffalo robe, which, according to a story that long went the rounds locally, he once promised to leave to the doctor when he died. At the same time all reference to death both pained and irritated him greatly--a fact which the doctor knew. Finding the old gentleman in a most complaining and hopeless mood one night, not to be dealt with, indeed, in any reasoning way, the doctor returned to his home, and early the next day, without any other word, sent old Enoch, his negro servant, around to get, as he said, the buffalo robe--a request which would indicate, of course that the doctor had concluded that old Mr. Pegram had died, or was about to--a hopeless case. When ushered into the latter's presence, Enoch began innocently enough:

"De doctah say dat now dat Mr. Peg'am hab subspired, he was to hab dat ba--ba--buffalo robe."

"What!" shouted the old irascible, rising and clambering out of his bed. "What's that? Buffalo robe! By God! You go back and tell old Doc Gridley that I ain't dead yet by a damned sight! No, sir!" and forthwith he dressed himself and was out and around the same day.

Persons who met the doctor, as I heard years later from his daughter and from others who had known him, were frequently asking him, just in a social way, what to do for certain ailments, and he would as often reply in a humorous and half-vagrom manner that if he were in their place he would do or take so-and-so, not meaning really that they should do so but merely to get rid of them, and indicating of course any one of a hundred harmless things--never one that could really have proved injurious to any one. Once, according to his daughter, as he was driving into town from somewhere, he met a man on a lumber wagon whom he scarcely knew but who knew him well enough, who stopped and showed him a sore on the upper tip of his ear, asking him what he would do for it.

"Oh," said the doctor, idly and jestingly, "I think I'd cut it off."

"Yes," said the man, very much pleased with this free advice, "with what, Doctor?"

"Oh, I think I'd use a pair of scissors," he replied amusedly, scarcely assuming that his jesting would be taken seriously.

The driver jogged on and the doctor did not see or hear of him again until some two months later when, meeting him in the street, the driver smilingly approached him and enthusiastically exclaimed:

"Well, Doc, you see I cut 'er off, and she got well!"

"Yes," replied the doctor solemnly, not remembering anything about the case but willing to appear interested, "--what was it you cut off?"

"Why, that sore on my ear up here, you know. You told me to cut it off, and I did."

"Yes," said the doctor, becoming curious and a little amazed, "with what?"

"Why, with a pair of scissors, Doc, just like you said."

The doctor stared at him, the whole thing coming gradually back to him.

"But didn't you have some trouble in cutting it off?" he inquired, in disturbed astonishment.

"No, no," said the driver, "I made 'em sharp, all right. I spent two days whettin' 'em up, and Bob Hart cut 'er off fer me. They cut, all right, but I tell you she hurt when she went through the gristle."

He smiled in pleased remembrance of his surgical operation, and the doctor smiled also, but, according to his daughter, he decided to give no more idle advice of that kind.

In the school which I attended for a period were two of his sons, Fred and Walter. Both were very fond of birds, and kept a number of one kind or another about their home--not in cages, as some might, but inveigled and trained as pets, and living in the various open bird-houses fixed about the yard on poles. The doctor himself was intensely fond of these and all other birds, and, according to his daughter and his sons, always anticipated the spring return of many of diem--black-birds, blue jays, wrens and robins--with a hopeful, "Well, now, they'll soon be here again." During the summer, according to her, he was always an interested spectator of their gyrations in the air, and when evening would come was never so happy as when standing and staring at them gathering from all directions to their roosts in the trees or the birdhouses. Similarly, when the fall approached and they would begin their long flight Southward, he would sometimes stand and scan the sky and trees in vain for a final glimpse of his feathered friends, and when in the gathering darkness they were no longer to be seen would turn away toward the house, saying sadly to his daughter:

"Well, Dollie, the blackbirds are all gone. I am sorry. I like to see them, and I am always sorry to lose them, and sorry to know that winter is coming."

"Usually about the 25th or 26th of December," his daughter once quaintly added to me, "he would note that the days were beginning to get longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and bring them all back again."

One of the most interesting of his bird friendships was that which existed between him and a pair of crows he and his sons had raised, "Jim" and "Zip" by name. These crows came to know him well, and were finally so humanly attached to him that, according to his family, they would often fly two or three miles out of town to meet him and would then accompany him, lighting on fences and trees by the way, and cawing to him as he drove along! Both of them were great thieves, and would steal anything from a bit of thread up to a sewing machine, if they could have carried it. They were always walking about the house, cheerfully looking for what they might devour, and on one occasion carried off a set of spoons, which they hid about the eaves of the house. On another occasion they stole a half dozen tin-handled pocket knives, which the doctor had bought for the children and which the crows seemed to like for the brightness of the metal. They were recovered once by the children, stolen again by the crows, recovered once more, and so on, until at last it was a question as to which were the rightful owners.

The doctor was sitting in front of a store one day in the business-heart of town, where also he liked to linger in fair weather, when suddenly he saw one of his crows flying high overhead and bearing something in its beak, which it dropped into the road scarcely a hundred feet away. Interested to see what it was the bird had been carrying, he went to the spot where he saw it fall and found one of the tin-handled knives, which the crow had been carrying to a safe hiding-place. He picked it up and when he returned home that night asked one of his boys if he could lend him a knife.

"No," said his son. "Our knives are all lost. The crows took them."

"I knew that," said the doctor sweetly, "and so, when I met Zip uptown just now, I asked her to lend me one, and she did. Here it is."

He pulled out the knife and handed it to the boy and, when the latter expressed doubt and wonder, insisted that the crow had loaned it to him; a joke which ended in his always asking one of the children to run and ask Zip if she would lend him a knife, whenever he chanced to need one.

Although a sad man at times, as I understood, the doctor was not a pessimist, and in many ways, both by practical jokes and the humoring of odd characters, sought relief from the intense emotional strain which the large practice of his profession put upon him. One of his greatest reliefs was the carrying out of these little practical jokes, and he had been known to go to much trouble at times to work up a good laugh.

One of the, to him, richest jokes, and one which he always enjoyed telling, related to a country singing school which was located in the neighborhood of Pierceton, in which reading (the alphabet, at least), spelling, geography, arithmetic, rules of grammar, and so forth, were still taught by a process of singing. The method adopted in this form of education was to have the scholar memorize all knowledge by singing it. Thus in the case of geography the students would sing the name of the country, then its mountains, then the highest peaks, cities, rivers, principal points of interest, and so on, until all information about that particular country had been duly memorized in song or rhyme. Occasionally they would have a school-day on which the local dignitaries would be invited, and on a number of these occasions the doctor was, for amusement's sake merely, a grave and reverent listener. On one occasion, however, he was merely passing the school, when hearing "Africa-a, Africa-a, mountains of the moo-oo-oon" drawled out of the windows, he decided to stop in and listen a while. Having tethered his horse outside he knocked at the door and was received by the little English singing teacher who, after showing him to a seat, immediately called upon the class for an exhibition of their finest wisdom. When they had finished this the teacher turned to him and inquired if there was anything he would especially like them to sing.

"No," said the doctor gravely, and no doubt with an amused twinkle in his eye, "I had thought of asking you to sing the Rocky Mountains, but as the mountains are so high, and the amount of time I have so limited, I have decided that perhaps it will be asking too much."

"Oh, not at all, not at all" airily replied the teacher, and turning to his class, he exclaimed with a very superior smile: "Now, ladies and gentlemen, 'ere is a scientific gentleman who thinks it is 'arder to sing of _'igh_ mountings than it is to sing of _low_ mountings," and forthwith the class began to demonstrate that in respect to vocalization there was no difference at all.

Only those, however, who knew Dr. Gridley in the sickroom, and knew him well, ever discovered the really finest trait of his character: a keen, unshielded sensibility to and sympathy for all human suffering, that could not bear to inflict the slightest additional pain. He was really, in the main, a man of soft tones and unctuous laughter, of gentle touch and gentle step, and a devotion to duty that carried him far beyond his interests or his personal well-being. One of his chiefest oppositions, according to his daughter, was to telling the friends or relatives of any stricken person that there was no hope. Instead, he would use every delicate shade of phrasing and tone in imparting the fateful words, in order if possible to give less pain. "I remember in the case of my father," said one of his friends, "when the last day came. Knowing the end was near, he was compelled to make some preliminary discouraging remark, and I bent over with my ear against my father's chest and said, 'Doctor Gridley, the disease is under control, I think. I can hear the respiration to the bottom of the lungs.'

"'Yes, yes,' he answered me sadly, but now with an implication which could by no means be misunderstood, 'it is nearly always so. The failure is in the recuperative energy. Vitality runs too low.' It meant from the first, 'Your father will not live.'"

In the case of a little child with meningitis, the same person was sent to him to ask what of the child--better or worse. His answer was: "He is passing as free from pain as ever I knew a case of this kind."

In yet another case of a dying woman, one of her relatives inquired: "Doctor, is this case dangerous?" "Not in the nature of the malady, madam," was his sad and sympathetic reply, "but fatal in the condition it meets. Hope is broken. There is nothing to resist the damage."

One of his patients was a farmer who lived in an old-time log house a few miles out from Silver Lake, who while working about his barn met with a very serious accident which involved a possible injury to the gall bladder. The main accident was not in itself fatal, but the possible injury to the gall bladder was, and this, if it existed, would show as a yellow tint in the eyeball on the tenth day. Fearing the danger of this, he communicated the possibility to the relatives, saying that he could do little after that time but that he would come just the same and make the patient as comfortable as possible. For nine days he came, sitting by the bedside and whiling away many a weary hour for the sufferer, until the tenth morning. On this day, according to his daughter, who had it from the sick man's relatives, his face but ill concealed the anxiety he felt. Coming up to the door, he entered just far enough to pretend to reach for a water bucket. With this in his hand he turned and gave one long keen look in the eye of the sick man, then walked down the yard to a chair under a tree some distance from the house, where he sat, drooping and apparently grieved, the certainty of the death of the patient affecting him as much as if he were his own child.

"There was no need for words," said one of them. "Every curve and droop of his figure, as he walked slowly and with bent head, told all of us who saw him that hope was gone and that death had won the victory."

One of his perpetual charges, as I learned later, was a poor old unfortunate by the name of Id Logan, who had a little cabin and an acre of ground a half dozen miles west of Warsaw, and who existed from year to year heaven only knows how.

Id never had any money, friends or relatives, and was always troubled with illness or hunger in some form or other, and yet the doctor always spoke of him sympathetically as "Poor old Id Logan" and would often call out there on his rounds to see how he was getting along. One snowy winter's evening as he was traveling homeward after a long day's ride, he chanced to recollect the fact that he was in the neighborhood of his worthless old charge, and fancying that he might be in need of something turned his horse into the lane which led up to the door. When he reached the house he noticed that no smoke was coming from the chimney and that the windows were slightly rimmed with frost, as if there were no heat within. Rapping at the door and receiving no response, he opened it and went in. There he found his old charge, sick and wandering in his mind, lying upon a broken-down bed and moaning in pain. There was no fire in the fireplace. The coverings with which the bed was fitted were but two or three old worn and faded quilts, and the snow was sifting in badly through the cracks where the chinking had fallen out between the logs, and under the doors and windows.

Going up to the sufferer and finding that some one of his old, and to the doctor well-known, maladies had at last secured a fatal grip upon him, he first administered a tonic which he knew would give him as much strength as possible, and then went out into the yard, where, after putting up his horse, he gathered chips and wood from under the snow and built a roaring fire. Having done this, he put on the kettle, trimmed the lamp, and after preparing such stimulants as the patient could stand, took his place at the bedside, where he remained the whole night long, keeping the fire going and the patient as comfortable as possible. Toward morning the sufferer died and when the sun was well up he finally returned to his family, who anxiously solicited him as to his whereabouts.

"I was with Id Logan," he said.

"What's ailing him now?" his daughter inquired.

"Nothing now," he returned. "It was only last night," and for years afterward he commented on the death of "poor old Id," saying always at the conclusion of his remarks that it must be a dreadful thing to be sick and die without friends.

His love for his old friends and familiar objects was striking, and he could no more bear to see an old friend move away than he could to lose one of his patients. One of his oldest friends was a fine old Christian lady by the name of Weeks, who lived down in Louter Creek bottoms and in whose household he had practiced for nearly fifty years. During the latter part of his life, however, this family began to break up, and finally when there was no one left but the mother she decided to move over into Whitley County, where she could stay with her daughter. Just before going, however, she expressed a wish to see Doctor Gridley, and he called in upon her. A little dinner had been prepared in honor of his coming. After it was over and the old times were fully discussed he was about to take his leave when Mrs. Weeks disappeared from the room and then returned, bearing upon her arm a beautiful yarn spread which she held out before her and, in her nervous, feeble way getting the attention of the little audience, said:

"Doctor, I am going up to Whitley now to live with my daughter, and I don't suppose I will get to see you very often any more. Like myself, you are getting old, and it will be too far for you to come. But I want to give you this spread that I have woven with my own hands since I have been sixty years of age. It isn't very much, but it is meant for a token of the love and esteem I bear you, and in remembrance of all that you have done for me and mine."

Her eyes were wet and her voice quivering as she brought it forward. The doctor, who had been wholly taken by surprise by this kindly manifestation of regard, had arisen during her impromptu address and now stood before her, dignified and emotionally grave, his own eyes wet with tears of appreciation.

Balancing the homely gift upon his extended hands, he waited until the force of his own sentiment had slightly subsided, when he replied: