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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XVIII. Brosie on the Pinnacle of Science

Chapter XVIII. Brosie on the Pinnacle of Science.

"I do remember an apothecary.
In tattered weeds with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones,
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuffed, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes."

The storming of the Acropolis2, the citadel of dental industries and refinement in the city of New Orleans, was commenced in the following year by Dr. Ambrose Vernon Whitworth, Doctor of Dental Surgery of the Chicago Dental College and Oral Institute, Apricot Street, Lake Michigan, page 113United States of America. The brass plates at the top end of Fifth Avenue for a distance of a quarter of a mile on both sides of the street, screwed upon the doors, screwed into plugs in the walls at the fronts and sides, and fastened with cleets and patent fixings on the iron gates, were as thick as the blight on cotton-plantations, upon which thousands of turkeys, whose native home is America, subsisted; or as thick as blackberries around Raspberry Gully in the merry month of June. So fast was the number of brass plates increasing that it was at one time feared it would be necessary to lengthen the street or build new storeys on the roofs of aerial buildings skywards. Upstairs, downstairs, and in the attic on the top, the brass plates indicated the habitudes of physicians, surgeons, oculists, aurists, specialists, dentists in ordinary, surgeon dentists, mechanical dentists, galvanists, electropathists, masseurs, masseuses, palmists, cheiropodists and fortune-tellers. Some of the buildings were seven storeys high. If a galvanic or faradic shock, a set of false teeth, an artificial limb was required, or an eye, ear, nose or throat was to be examined, here were to be found the vendors of the manufacture and the advice of the specialists galore. From all parts of the States, by sea and by train, the halt, the lame, the blind and the toothless flocked every day to the great medical market. It was the fountain-head of medical science. Any medical practitioner or dentist located in the country, no matter how intrinsically superior he might be to the exquisite practising at the medical fair, was looked upon by the gullible public as a nonentity by his side. Medicaments floated in the atmosphere of the fair, magic and charm were ingrained with the lime of the buildings themselves. To the faithful it was a panacea as renowned as the pool of Bethsaida3. It was to sit on the highest pinnacle of fame in the medical world to be there, and to throw the electric light into a foul malodorous ulcerated nose, or to stand over a loathsome mouth with a dental hammering engine and inhale their feculent pestiferous perfumes for hours. Several good openings in the country suggested themselves to Dr Ambrose Vernon, but to practise there was, for one of such credentials, to throw pearls before swine. What had he gone to Chicago for? what had he stayed there so many years for? but by incessant application and toil at his noble profession to distinguish himself, not alone at the college from which he had emanated, but in his after life in actual practice and rivalry with the most aspiring in the world; to show them what Chicago dentistry was; what gold filling was; what crown and bridge work was; pivoting, scaling, and artistic manipulation of the jaws. His training had embraced specialties that infringed on the domain of surgery, specially so called. He could easily excise the tongue with an ecraseur invented by himself, compared to which Middledorpf's was a toy: he could operate for necrosis of the jaws and knock out abscess of the antrum of Highmore in one act. Furthermore, surgical diseases of the throat and vocal chords, excepting papillomata, the nerve and blood supply of the face and neck, as far as the shoulders and even the membranes of the brain he had minutely page 114gone into, and practised upon with his own hands time after time with signal success. Was all this recondite science and art to be thrown away on the wilderness? Perish the thought! It should illuminate the very pinnacle itself, and shed its irradiating light over the far desert at the same time.

One Batty Tuke, at the time of the arrival of the Mararona at the Mississippi quay with the sheaves, had for some length of time been casting his net for a suitable partner, and was advertising the fact that he would give a preferment to a dentist with a brand of D.D.S. upon him in an opening as a partner with himself. Hitherto Batty Tuke had been the proprietor of a small establishment, open for the sale of medicines, cigars, newspapers, and cheap jewelry, although he was generally known as an apothecary—

   "and about his shelves,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of pack-thread and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scattered, to make up a show." 4

By virtue of a ratified act of Parliament, inasmuch as he had pulled a tooth during the tenure of his certificate as an apothecary, although he had no more knowledge of dentistry than a cow has of chemistry, he had full power to advertise himself as a dentist in ordinary of the State of Louisiana. Many were his claims on the attention of the newly-arrived Brosie, branded in Chicago with a big D.D.S. Batty had a very large circle of country friends, who had promised to support him hip and thigh, and he had a brother who advanced the wherewithal for floating the new enterprise.

The gentlemanly demeanour of Doctor Ambrose, as he called with the card which he had printed while he waited at the cheap jack's stamping machine in the street and interviewed the pushing apothecary (who had pulled a tooth) with his black silk bell-topper, gloves, umbrella and surtout, enlisted all the fund of faith which the apothecary possessed. When he displayed a little bit of paper stating that he was entitled to a gold medal for regulating teeth in addition to the diploma of D.D.S. on payment of a few arrears in his college fees, and stated that it was his poverty and not his will that made him consent to a partnership, the shrewd though precipitous Batty clinched the arrangement at once from fear that the prize would be snapped up somewhere else, engendered by Brosie's avowals that he had seas of offers on hand, all pressing for an immediate reply and his assurances that he would not join a partner if it were not for the fact that he was not wallowing in wealth. Together they drew out the plans and specifications of a huge brass plate, proclaiming to all to whom the tidings should come, greeting: Dr. Ambrose Whitworth, D.D.S., and Batty Tuke, R.D.S., registered dental surgeons: Doctor of Dental Surgery, Chic., Ill., U S.A., American dentists. The flash of genius on the jeweller's part deceived any casual observer with the impression that he was a D.D.S. Chic., Ill., U.S.A. as well as Brosie, and although the translation of R.D.S. into page 115"registered dental surgeon" was somewhat redundant, ninety-nine out of every hundred who read the inscription thought it signified something else besides.

Three furnished rooms at a rental of twenty dollars per week were leased for twelve months, in one of the highest flats of the pinnacle, and a boy was engaged, not only to stand outside and make people sick or give them the toothache, but also to sit inside the door, fixed up in a silver-buttoned coat, answer the door, marshal the clients into the waiting-room, and tell lies by the bushel for Brosie.

A Yankee patent operating chair was secured at a cost of ninety-five dollars. It was a most elaborate concern. It was fitted with brackets at the side arms, and a multitude of miniature cabinet walnut drawers for the reception of perforators, files, drills, prickers and excavators of a variety of shapes and sizes. There was a combination head-piece or rest, covered with crimson plush, the side arms and seat being also upholstered in plush. A universal ball-and-socket joint, by pressing a lever at the back of the undercarriage, could place the patient in any position desirable or undesirable; it could even hoist his feet into the air vertically and retain his head in the head-piece next the floor. It was a work of art in itself, and required protecting every night from the dust of the outside world with an elaborate case of dark brown holland5 large enough to sail a canoe. Near at hand stood a dental engine, fitted with a treadling apparatus, similar, though incomparably superior, to the common treadle which he had treadled so long at the emporium of Foster Wax and Co. A large retort for the production of nitrous oxide or laughing gas, a specially constructed dentist's table, a vast combination of little phials, and a full supply of instruments auxiliary to the art filled up the rest of the operating room. The New York "Police Gazette," "Life," "Puck," and other comic, serio-comic or artistic periodicals lay in heaps upon the waiting-room table; while a leather suite, a cedar show-case, a photograph of Brosie addressing five hundred students at a dinner in Chicago, an ormolu clock and an overmantel equipped it in first-class style. An old lumber-room at the back was transformed into a work-room or laboratory by conducting a water-supply pipe through an embrasure in the wall; while a sink and a bench completed the necessary working plant of the establishment—all at the expense of the adventurous jeweller and apothecary.

When a skeleton outline of the terms of the agreement was drawn up on the counter of his little shop, it was forthwith put into proper legal phraseology by a firm of solicitors well-known to Brosie and very friendly with him. It contained thirty-two clauses, conspicuous among which was one whose purport was that each partner should devote himself, body and soul, to the furtherance of the project, each using his best and most strenuous endeavours to promote the interests of the other by every means that lay in his power. It was a fundamentally altruistic arrangement.

An advertisement was inserted in the daily papers drawing the attention of page 116the public to the registration of the dental partnership, and containing a foot-note to the effect that Dr. Ambrose Whitworth was a candidate far election as president of the Dental Board of the State of Louisiana. The concern was then declared open to the public by a flag stuck out of the window.

The first customer who called to patronise and inaugurate the new business was none other than old Adam Quain. He had come all the way from the Colorado ranges to have a tooth drawn, and could not refrain from passing remarks about the bright well-kept instruments, and the princely equipment of the rooms, probably harking back on the rusty screwdriver with which he had been operated upon in Foster Wax and Co.'s armchair on a former occasion, when Brosie was not yet out of his indentures. He presumed Brosie had brought all the grand furniture from Chicago.

No other patient called for a month. The ennui of attendance from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon with nothing to do began to show its effects upon the over-sanguine Brosie. He dreamed that he might advance the business by judiciously patronising some of the aristocratic hotels, by buttering up and slithering down the young ladies behind the bars, and by prying into their mouths and coaxing them into a new set which he would offer cheap. Hailing the handsomest of the hansom cabs from the rank arrayed opposite his rooms, he would drive in lordly style to the Mississippi Hotel, enter the bar of the hotel and keep the cab waiting outside. Elbowing his way through the bibulous crowd in the bar-room, over the bar he would lean, whistle to the lady in attendance and call for something with, a Chicago slang name, which she didn't understand. During the conversation thus necessitated for the edification of the maiden, he would notice something peculiar about her teeth and draw her attention to the same. Mocking the Western accent every time he saw a chance, after shaking hands he would say—"Open—take your finger away—close: yaas, jest so, I guess your teeth air chock-a-block full of tartar and odontoclasts: your peach-blossom cheeks air fairly spoilt for want of a set of ivory; there's my caird; if you air careful to keep it to yourself I'll make you a set for nothing."

Several of the maidens thuswise drawn to the dental emporium did not forget to call for the set without fee or reward. They further introduced their friends as well, so that, all at once, new customers rapidly increased in number, and made the place so lively outside that people considered the firm of Whitworth and Tuke was one of the most successful in the city, and talked about the wondrous mushroom growth of the new emporium.

The quid-pro-quo for the ivory was unlimited credit at the bars, so that in due course it became quite a common thing when he was engaged in these outdoor duties to summon the cabman with much patronage to follow at his heels, and call for refreshments for all the occupants of the room. The quid-pro-quo for the charioteer was, that beyond the drink, although he was kept waiting for half-an-hour at half-a-dozen hotels, he got no quidpage 117at all. The jehus6 often bailed up his brother, the doctor, in the city for payment, mistaking him for the dentist, both being remarkably alike.

The only other contingent who patronised the new firm consisted of the uncles, sisters, cousins, aunts and the ubiquitous mother-in-law of the original partner. These would occupy the rooms the whole day long, just as if they fancied themselves on the staff and were required there to add some tone to the proceedings; but although they were all fitted out with new sets of felspars, they never thought it worth while to put down the dollars for a tooth. On his remonstrating with the quondam jeweller about the importunate demands of his connexions, the jeweller informed him that they hung about the place for the sake of a show.

"We must make a show," he would say, "or the thing will never succeed," whereupon Brosie retorted that they should get a large glass show-case at the quondam jeweller's expense and put them in that, where they would make a holy show.

The pet patients of the doctor of dental surgery himself were always the ones from the bars; he never failed in his ministrations to their wants and in keeping them busy in return before the eyes of their masters in the hotels. Annoyed by the constant visits of the aunts and mother-in-low, and disconcerted by the black looks of the apothecary (who had pulled a tooth) when he examined the cash-book for the day every evening, Brosie began to think it would be much better if instead of staying so much at the rooms he occupied his time, his body and soul, by rousing up the business at the bars. In six weeks there wasn't a bar in the city with a barmaid whose mouth had not opened and closed at his command.

One or two chance patients did call during the hours of his absence the following month, but went away with the hell o' a' diseases swearing across the street. Marvel herself her husband endeavoured to persuade to have the hell removed at the emporium, but the bird of Heaven declared she would die first, and went away haughtily and spitefully before the gaze of the Chicago dentist to get it removed by an opposing firm. The great and mighty coal-king promised to call and submit to the taking of a wax impression of his mouth, in which a fang was hanging here and there, in order to get a new set at a cost of eighty-five dollars. He never, however, carried out his promise, and it was the last straw to break the camel's back.

Just as the abortive business was manifesting unequivocal signs of a stir, the plumber, a man with a scowling and merciless moustache, called for his wages for fitting up the chair, the water-pipe and the sink in the work-room. He was told he had called after banking hours, but that if he would leave it till the following day he would get his money without fail. Several cabmen and publicans also called and waited for some considerable time, giving the emporium quite a busy appearance before the public gaze; but they were one and all dismissed on the same understanding.

With the art of a cunning old debt dodger, he educated the silvery-buttoned boy, if they called again, to say the doctor was out for the day; page 118the silvery boy told everybody who called that the doctor was out for the day, and thus promoted the business to its flickering end. One or two, more knowing and suspicious than the majority, insisted on waiting till the doctor returned, and for hours together, with bills in their hands, they mounted guard in the waiting-room, while Brosie all the while was sleeping off the products of the bar in a beer-sodden slumber on the sofa, with his boots cocked up on the crimson plush cushion of the operating chair in true Chicago style.

The silvery boy would open the door and poke in his ear to receive the question—"Are the animals gone?" and on being informed that the animals had gone, but were to return in half-an-hour, the worried, long-suffering Brosie would hurriedly assume his hat, despatch the boy for a cab, and begin the round of the town again.

Contemporaneous with another visit to Moss Rose, came the climax of the dental emporium, inasmuch as his brother from Augusta called upon him. He had heard of the failure of the concern, and called with an offer to help all he could. Looking around the operating room, the grand plush operating chair had the appearance of having been vomited over, the plush was stained and matted, the crank of the lever was broken, and the chair itself had a groggy appearance. The coalscuttle placed in the middle of the room was made to do duty as a spittoon. Not an instrument could be seen that was not covered with rust, and around the point of every perforator and excavator was twisted a dirty bit of cotton wool, while the ink was spilt over the account-books, and the cupboards were full of dead marines.

"You're a great pair of dentists, Brosie," he said in roars of laughter; "one knows nothing about it, and the other is never on duty."

Brosie declared that it was entirely the fault of the erstwhile jeweller, and that he had entered in his mind a judgment against Batty and a firm resolve to cut him. Cut him he did—and the silvery boy with him—for he never went back again, and all that remained for the partner to do was to pay the rent in arrears, pay nine hundred dollars for the fittings and materials, and sell them at auction for seventy-five per cent. less then what he had paid for them new. It nearly broke his heart, and compelled him to postpone his contemplated wedding with a fourth wife for a year, while the old mother-in-law stumped the town busy with the declamation of the Chicago dentist. She had never seen sich a man in all her born days.

So ended ingloriously within the short space of six weeks the first act in the burlesque of dentistry, as enactad by Dr. Ambrose Vernon Whitworth; so shown were the results of the six thousand dollars spent on Apricot Street, Chicago, and the ardor with which he had embraced his studies and labours while he was away. It broke the heart of poor old Christopher.

How many have passed through a similar first stage, to shine all the brighter and succeed all the more when from their after acts the dramatist eliminates the barmaid!

Perturbed and anxious, yet loving, Miriam called to offer her consolation page 119when the great undertaking failed; but on being informed he was not in the office, with the assistance of the inamorate Dolly she searched about the city for him all day, and eventually came upon him sitting on the dirty form in the bar of a common tap-room called the "Slopers' Rest." He had left his lodgings, and his only possession was the key of the streets. Day after day the sun had gone down and left the world to darkness and to Brosie. The new silk hat had been exchanged for a dirty little second-hand half-moon-peaked cap; the fashionable surtout discarded for a frayed and moth-eaten serge7 sac8; his gold pin, watch, locket and chain deposited safely under the bane of the golden balls9, and all the tickets, which he called tomb-stones, were lost. There he sat in his disreputable plight, as thin as a rake and as yellow as a guinea—a victim of drink and famine-fever—with a gnawing pain at his side, for the way of the transgressor is hard. The sight of him staggered her. The blow of finding him where he was, and the incoherent, independent, babble to which he gave vent, were like arrows in her breast. Gently coaxing him out of the den with the promise to give him three cents for a glass of beer if he came, by slow interrupted stages she succeeded in getting him back to Lily cottage, where he had no option but to stay till he could recover his senses and feet. Brosie drank very small beer there.

Then, in that hitherto quiescent and united home, was initiated a ruffianly system of ameliorating his condition by knocking him about when he was scarcely able to stand and addressing him, if he showed any signs of a relapse, as if he were the dog about the place. The unenviable, narrow, ill-natured, ignoble ideas of the huckstering Jonathan Scatter, who made himself rudely officious in the affairs of Lily cottage, were to lose no opportunity of trying to induce his father to literally kick him out, and when he saw a safe chance he would maltreat him meanly and unmanfully, whereas the flying Dutchman forged grappling-irons to save him from external evil and anchor him in the calm sea of affection at home.

In his mother and his brother Eugene the ill-starred Brosie had the sum-total of his friends. Constantly urging upon old Christopher the parable of the man and the fig-tree10, it was the gentle influence of Miriam that showed Brosie he was wrong, but the rough fists that assailed him only hurled him into the profoundest depths of desperation and confusion. For weeks together he would absent himself from Lily cottage, spending his days in barbers' shops and superintending cock-fights, and his nights by intruding himself for a bed upon a destitute old woman who had known his grandmother. Sending messages to Miriam by the milk-boy, he would meet her in the evening at the old favorite spot—the foot of the good Gordon's grave.

The presence of his dead brother added greatly to the power which Miriam held over his mind: for he was of a highly-strung emotional nature, and he experienced the hallucination that his guiltless brother's voice was speaking about his foibles from the tomb. He had fallen into the pit which waylays every man's steps—the pit from which few can page 120clamber out unless some terrible calamity, earthquake-like, destroys the pit and accidentally liberates them; but to rise Brosie was slowly and surely persuaded by the vis vitæ11 and the still small voice within him, together with the gently-dropping influences, mightiest in the mighty—the influence of the convincing tone of his mother's reasoning force and discrimination, together with that charity extolled by St. Paul as the greatest of all the graces.

The habit of excessive drinking is not so much a vice as it is a misfortune—an incompatibility between the virtues of alcohol and certain qualities and conditions of the brain. The finer the brain the greater the in-compatability; the coarser the brain the more able is the man to disguise the effects of alcohol, and thus escape its handicapping influences in the battle of life, Oh! be merciful my brother whose virtue sits serene only in the absence of temptation. In the days of your prosperity sink the pride of your serene self-satisfaction, and scorn not yonder bedraggled victim whom you pass every morning on your triumphant march to business while you make broad your own phylacteries12. In the great battle he is but a prisoner in the camp of a truculent enemy, and the day may come when he may exchange places with you. When we first begin to obey a rule we take to it absolutely, and follow it in its widest sense. Pluck then the mote out of thine own eye, and judge not that ye be not judged.

1 Romeo and Juliet, V.i.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 An allusion to (probably) the invasion of Athens by Xerxes' Persian forces in 480BC.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Generally 'Bethesda'. A healing pool of Jerusalem referred to in the Gospel of John, 5:2.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, V.i.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 A linen fabric from the Netherlands, called Holland cloth; when unbleached, called brown Holland. OED Online, 1, sense 2a.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 Coachman. Green 2005. See 'jehu', Green 2005.n.1.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 A woollen fabric.OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 Possibly 'bag'.OED Online., 2, sense 3.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 The pawnshop.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 The Gospel of Luke, 13:6-9.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 Vital force. OED Online, in vis, n.2, sense 1d.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 The Gospel of Matthew, 23:5.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]