Sam Joplin's Epigastric Nerve

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Title:     Sam Joplin's Epigastric Nerve
Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith [More Titles by Smith]

I

"You eat too much, Marny." It was Joplin, of Boston, who was speaking--Samuel Epigastric Joplin, his brother painters called him. "You treat your stomach as if it were a scrap-basket and you dump into it everything you--"

"I do? You caricature of a codfish ball!"

"Yes, you do. You open your mouth, pin back your ears and in go pickles, red cabbage, Dutch cheese. It's insanity, Marny, and it's vulgar. No man's epigastric can stand it. It wouldn't make any difference if you were a kangaroo with your pouch on the outside, but you're a full-grown man and ought to have some common-sense."

"And you think that if I followed your idiotic theory it would keep me out of my coffin, do you? What you want, Joppy, is a square meal. You never had one, so far as I can find out, since you were born. You drank sterilized milk at blood temperature until you were five; chewed patent, unhulled wheat bread until you were ten, and since that time you've filled your stomach with husks--proteids, and carbohydrates, and a lot of such truck--isn't that what he calls em, Pudfut?"

The Englishman nodded in assent.

"And now just look at you, Joppy, instead of a forty-inch chest--"

"And a sixty-inch waist," interjected Joplin with a laugh, pointing at Marny's waistcoat.

"I acknowledge it, old man, and I'm proud of it," retorted Marny, patting his rotundity. "Instead, I say, of a decent chest your shoulders crowd your breast-bone; your epigastric, as you call it--it's your solar plexus, Joppy--but that's a trifle to an anatomist like you--your epigastric scrapes your back-bone, so lonely is it for something warm and digestible to rub up against, and your-- Why, Joppy, do you know when I look at you and think over your wasted life, my eyes fill with tears? Eat something solid, old man, and give your stomach a surprise. Begin now. Dinner's coming up--I smell it. Open your port nostril, you shrivelled New England bean, and take in the aroma of beatific pork and greens. Doesn't that put new life into you? Puddy, you and Schonholz help Joppy to his feet and one or two of you fellows walk behind to pick up the pieces in case he falls apart before we can feed him. There's Tine's dinner-bell!"

White-capped, rosy-checked, bare-armed Tine had rung that bell for this group of painters for two years past--ever since Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue over the way, who once claimed her services, had reproved Johann, the porter, for blocking up with the hotel trunks that part of the sidewalk over which the steamboat captain slid his gangplank. Thereupon Tine slipped her pretty little feet into her white sabots--she and Johann have been called in church since--and walked straight over to the Holland Arms. Johann now fights the steamboat captain, backed not only by the landlord of the Arms, who rubs his hands in glee over the possession of two of his competitor's best servants, but by the whole coterie of painters whose boots Johann blacks, whose kits be packs and unpacks, whose errands he runs; while Tine, no less loyal and obliging, darns their stockings, mends their clothes, sews on buttons, washes brushes, stretches canvases, waits on table, rings the dinner-bell, and with her own hands scrubs every square inch of visible surface inside and out of this quaint old inn in this sleepy old town of Dort-on-the-Maas--side-walks, windows, cobbles--clear to the middle of the street, her ruddy arms bare to the elbow, her sturdy, blue-yarn-stockinged legs thrust into snow-white sabots to keep her trim feet from the wet and slop.

Built in 1620, this inn of the Holland Arms--so the mildewed brick in the keystone over the arch of the doorway says--and once the home of a Dutchman made rich by the China trade, whose ships cast anchor where Fop Smit's steamboats now tie up (I have no interest in the Line); a grimy, green-moulded, lean-over front and moss-covered, sloping-roof sort of an inn, with big beams supporting the ceilings of the bedrooms; lumbering furniture blackened with the smoke of a thousand pipes flanking the walls of the coffee-room; bits of Delft a century old lining the mantel; tiny panes of glass with here and there a bull's-eye illumining the squat windows; rows of mugs with pewter tops crowding the narrow shelves beside the fireplace, and last, and by no means least, a big, bulky sun-moon-and-stars clock, with one eye always open, which strikes the hours as if it meant to beat the very life out of them.

But there is something more in this coffee-room--something that neither Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue nor any other landlord in any other hostelry, great or small, up and down the Maas, can boast. This is the coffee-room picture gallery--free to whoever comes.

It began with a contribution from the first impecunious painter in payment of an overdue board-bill, his painting being hung on a nail beside the clock. Now; all over the walls--above the sideboard with its pewter plates and queer mugs; over the mantel holding the Delft, and between the squat windows--are pinned, tacked, pasted and hung--singly and in groups--sketches in oil, pastel, water color, pencil and charcoal, many without frames and most of them bearing the signature of some poor, stranded painter, preceded by the suggestive line, "To my dear friend, the landlord"--silent reminders all of a small cash balance which circumstances quite beyond their control had prevented their liquidating at the precise hour of their departure.

Mynheer had bowed and smiled as each new contribution was handed him and straightway had found a hammer and a nail and up it went beside its fellows. He never made objection: the more the merrier. The ice wind would soon blow across the Maas from Papendrecht, the tall grasses in the marshes turn pale with fright, and the lace-frost with busy fingers pattern the tiny panes, and then Johann would pack the kits one after another, and the last good-byes take place. But the sketches would remain. Oh! yes, the sketches would remain and tell the story of the summer and every night new mugs would be filled around the coal-fire, and new pipes lighted--mugs and pipes of the TOWNSPEOPLE this time, who came to feast their eyes,--and, although the summer was gone, the long winter would still be his. No, Mynheer never objected!

And this simple form of settlement--a note of hand (in color), payable in yearly patronage--has not been confined to modern times. Many an inn owes its survival to a square of canvas--the head of a child, a copper pot, or stretch of dune; and more than one collector now boasts of a masterpiece which had hung for years on some taproom wall, a sure but silent witness of the poverty of a Franz Hals, Wouverman or Van der Helst.

Each year had brought new additions to the impecunious group about Mynheer's table.

Dear old Marny, with his big boiler amidships, his round, sunburned face shaded by a wide-brimmed, slouch hat--the one he wore when he lived with the Sioux Indians--loose red tie tossed over one shoulder, and rusty velveteen coat, was an old habitue. And so was dry, crusty Malone, "the man from Dublin," rough outside as a potato and white inside as its meal. And so, too, was Stebbins, the silent man of the party, and the only listener in the group. All these came with the earliest birds and stayed until the boys got out their skates.

But there were others this year who were new. Pudfut, the Englishman, first--in from Norway, where he had been sketching on board some lord's yacht--he of the grizzly brown beard, brown ulster reaching to his toes, gray-checked steamer-cap and brierwood pipe--an outfit which he never changed--"slept in them," Marny insisted.

"Me name's Pudfut," he began, holding out his hand to Marny. "I've got a letter in my clothes for ye from a chap in Paris."

"Don't pull it out," had come the answer. "Put it there!" and within an hour the breezy fellow, his arm through the Englishman's, had trotted him all over Dort from the Groote Kerk to the old Gate of William of Orange, introducing him to every painter he met on the way, first as Pudfut, then as Puddy, then as Pretty-foot, then as Tootsie-Wootsie, and last as Toots--a name by which he is known in the Quartier to this day. This done, he had taken him up to his own room and had dumped him into an extra cot--his for the rest of the summer.

Then Schonholz wandered in--five gulden a week board was the magnet--a cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted his fat fingers in the lad's forelock to make sure that it was still fast. Schonholz had passed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma on his cheek--two crisscross slashes that had never healed--spoke battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat with two rows of horn buttons ("Come to shoot chamois, have you?" Marny had asked when he presented his credentials.)--laughed three-quarters of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette while he was in Dort. "Too vet and too fodgy all dime," was the way he accounted for his laziness.

Last came Joplin--a man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny. ("Dangerous to have a hen around," Marny would say, rubbing the pate after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water when he got up--two glasses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of him; window open all night no matter how hard it blew or rained; ate three meals a day and no more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times--coffee, soup, even his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)--a walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice, and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete.

And his fads did not stop with his food; they extended to his clothes--everything he used, in fact. His baggy knickerbockers ended in leather leggins to protect his pipe-stem shanks; his shirts buttoned all the way down in front and went on like a coat; he wore health flannels by day and a health shirt at night ("Just like my old Aunt Margaret's wrapper," whispered Marny in a stage voice to Pudfut); sported a ninety-nine-cent silver watch fastened to a leather strap (sometimes to a piece of twine); stuck a five-hundred-dollar scarab pin in his necktie--"Nothing finer in the Boston Museum," he maintained, and told the truth--and ever and always enunciated an English so pure and so undefiled that Stebbins, after listening to it for a few minutes, proposed, with an irreverence born of good-fellowship, that a subscription be started to have Joplin's dialect phonographed so that it might be handed down to posterity as the only real and correct thing.

"Are you noticing, gentlemen, the way in which Joplin handles his mother tongue?" Stebbins had shouted across the table: "never drops his 'g's,' never slights his first syllable; says 'HUmor' with an accent on the 'HU.' But for the fact that he pronounces 'bonnet' 'BUNNIT' and 'admires' a thing when he really ought only to 'like' it, you could never discover his codfish bringing up. Out with your wallets--how much do you chip in?"

These peculiarities soon made Joplin the storm-centre of every discussion. Not only were his views on nutrition ridiculed, but all his fads were treated with equal disrespect. "Impressionism," "plein air," the old "line engraving" in contrast to the modern "half-tone" methods--any opinion of Joplin's, no matter how sane or logical, was jostled, sat on, punched in the ribs and otherwise maltreated until every man was breathless or black in the face with assumed rage--every man except the man jostled, who never lost his temper no matter what the provocation, and who always came up smiling with some such remark as: "Smite away, you Pharisees; harmony is heavenly--but stupid. Keep it up--here's the other cheek!"

On this particular night Joplin, as I have said, had broken out on diet. Some movement of Marny's connected with the temporary relief of the lower button of his waistcoat had excited the great Bostonian's wrath. The men were seated at dinner inside the coffee-room, Johann and Tine serving.

"Yes, Marny, I'm sorry to say it, but the fact is you eat too much and you eat the wrong things. If you knew anything of the kinds of food necessary to nourish the human body, you would know that it should combine in proper proportions proteid, fats, carbohydrates and a small percentage of inorganic salts--these are constantly undergoing oxidation and at the same time are liberating energy in the form of heat."

"Hear the bloody bounder!" bawled Pudfut from the other end of the table.

"Silence!" called Marny, with his ear cupped in his fingers, an expression of the farthest-away-boy-in-the-class on his face.

Joplin waved his hand in protest and continued, without heeding the interruption: "Now, if you're stupid enough to stuff your epigastrium with pork, you, of course, get an excess of non-nitrogenous fats, and in order to digest anything properly you must necessarily cram in an additional quantity of carbohydrates--greens, potatoes, cabbage--whatever Tine shoves under your nose. Consult any scientist and see if I am not right--especially the German doctors who have made a specialty of nutrition. Such men as Fugel, Beenheim and--"

Here a slice of Tine's freshly-cut bread made a line-shot, struck the top of Joplin's scalp, caromed on Schonholz's shirt-front and fell into Stebbins's lap, followed instantly by "Order, gentlemen!" from Marny. "Don't waste that slab of proteid. The learned Bean is most interesting and should not be interrupted."

"Better out than in," continued Joplin, brushing the crumbs from his plate. "Bread--fresh bread particularly--is the very worst thing a man can put into his stomach."

"And how about pertaties?" shouted Malone. "I s'pose ye'd rob us of the only thing that's kep' us alive as a nation, wouldn't ye?"

"I certainly would, 'Loney, except in very small quantities. Raw potatoes contain twenty-two per cent. of the worst form of non-nitrogenous food, and seventy-eight per cent. of water. You, Malone, with your sedentary habits, should never touch an ounce of potato. It excites the epigastric nerve and induces dyspepsia. You're as lazy as the devil and should only eat nitrogenous food and never in excess. What you require is about one hundred grams of protein, giving you a fuel value of twenty-seven hundred calories, and to produce this fifty-five ounces of food a day is enough. When you exceed this you run to flesh--unhealthy bloat really--and in the wrong places. You've only to look at Marny's sixty-inch waist-line to prove the truth of this theory. Now look at me--I keep my figure, don't I? Not a bad one for a light-weight, is it? I'm in perfect health, can run, jump, eat, sleep, paint, and but for a slight organic weakness with my heart, which is hereditary in my family and which kills most of us off at about seventy years of age, I'm as sound as a nut. And all--all, let me tell you, due to my observing a few scientific laws regarding hygiene which you men never seem to have heard of."

Malone now rose to his feet, pewter mug in hand, and swept his eye around the table.

"Bedad, you're right, Joppy," he said with a wink at Marny--"food's the ruination of us all; drink is what we want. On yer feet, gintlemen--every mother's son of ye! Here's to the learned, livin' skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint. crank!"

 

II

The next morning the group of painters--all except Joplin, who was doing a head in "smears" behind the Groote Kerk a mile away--were at work in the old shipyard across the Maas at Papendrecht. Marny was painting a Dutch lugger with a brown-madder hull and an emerald-green stern, up on the ways for repairs. Pudfut had the children of the Captain posed against a broken windlass rotting in the tall grass near the dock, and Malone and Schonholz, pipe in mouth, were on their backs smoking. "It wasn't their kind of a mornin'," Malone had said.

Joplin's discourse the night before was evidently lingering in their minds, for Pudfut broke out with: "Got to sit on Joppy some way or we'll be talked to death," and he squeezed a tube of color on his palette. "Getting to be a bloody nuisance."

"Only one way to fix him," remarked Stebbins, picking up his mahlstick from the grass beside him.

"How?" came a chorus.

"Scare him to death."

The painters laid down their brushes. Stebbins rarely expressed an opinion; any utterance from him, therefore, carried weight.

"Go for him about his health, I tell you," continued Stebbins, dragging a brush from the sheaf in his hand.

"But there's nothing the matter with him," answered Marny. "He's as skinny as a coal-mine mule, but he's got plenty of kick in him yet."

"You're dead right, Marny," answered Stebbins, "but he doesn't think so. He's as big a fool over every little pain as he is over his theories."

"Niver cracked his jaw to me about it," sputtered Malone from between the puffs of his pipe.

"No, and he won't. I don't jump on him as you fellows do and so I get his confidence. He's in my room two or three times every night going over his symptoms. When his foot's asleep he thinks he's got creeping paralysis. Every time his breath comes short, his heart's giving out."

"That's hereditary!" said Marny; "he said so."

"Hereditary be hanged! Same with everything else. Last night he dug me out of bed and wanted me to count his pulse--thought it intermitted. He's hipped, I tell you, on his health!"

"That's because he lives on nothing," rejoined Marny. "Tine puts the toast in the oven over night so it will be dry enough for him in the morning--she told me so yesterday. Now he's running on sour milk and vinegar--'blood too alkaline,' he says--got a chalky taste in his mouth!"

"Well, whatever it is, he's a rum-nuisance," said Pudfut, "and he ought to be jumped on."

"Yes," retorted Stebbins, "but not about his food. Jump on him about his health, then he'll kick back and in pure obstinacy begin to think he's well--that's his nature."

"Don't you do anything of the kind," protested Marny. "Joppy's all right--best lad I know. Let him talk; doesn't hurt anybody and keeps everything alive. A little hot air now and then helps his epigastric."

Malone and Schonholz had raised themselves on their elbows, twisted their shoulders and had put their heads together--literally--without lifting their lazy bodies from the warm, dry grass--so close that one slouch hat instead of two might have covered their conspiring brains. From under the rims of these thatches came smothered laughs and such unintelligible mutterings as:

"Dot's de vay, by chimminy, 'Loney! And den I--"

"No, begorra! Let me have a crack at him fu'st!"

"No, I vill before go and you come--"

"Not a word to Marny, remimber; he'd give it away--"

"Yes, but we vill tell Poodfut und Sthebbins, eh?"

That afternoon the diabolical plot was put in motion. The men had finished for the day; had crossed the ferry and had found Joplin wandering around the dock looking for a new subject. The Groote Kerk "smear" was under his arm.

Pudfut, under pretence of inspecting the smear--a portrait of the old Sacristan on a bench in front of the main entrance--started back in surprise on seeing the Bostonian, and asked with an anxious tone in his voice:

"Aren't you well, old man? Look awfully yellow about the gills. Worked too hard, haven't you? No use overdoing it."

"Well? Of course I'm well! Sound as a nut. Little bilious, maybe, but that's nothing. Why?"

"Oh, nothing! Must say, though, you gave me a twist when I came on you suddenly. Maybe it's your epigastric nerve; maybe it's your liver and will pass off, but I'd knock off work for a day or two if I were you."

Malone now took a hand.

"Let me carry yer kit, Joppy, ye look done up. What's happened to ye, man, since mornin'?"

"Never felt better in my life," protested Joplin. "No, I'll carry it--not heavy--"

Then he quickened his pace--they were all on their way back to the inn--and overtook Stebbins and Schonholz.

"Stebbins, old man--"

"Yes, Joppy."

"What I told you last night is turning out just as I expected. Heart's been acting queer all morning and my epigastric nerve is very sensitive. Puddy says I look awful. Do you see it?"

Stebbins looked into the Bostonian's face, hesitated, and said with an apologetic tone in his voice:

"Well, everybody looks better one time than another. You've been working too hard, maybe."

"But do I look yellow?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, Joppy, you do--yellow as a gourd--not always, just now and then when you walk fast or run upstairs."

"I've been afraid of that. Was my pulse all right when you counted it last night?"

"Yes, certainly--skipped a beat now and then, but that's nothing. I had an uncle once who had a pulse that wobbled like that. He, of course, went off suddenly; some said it was apoplexy; some said it was his heart--these doctors never agree. I wouldn't worry about it, old man. Hold on, Pudfut, don't walk so fast."

Pudfut held on, and so did Schonholz and Malone, and then the four slipped behind a pile of oil barrels and concentrated their slouch hats and Schonholz slapped his thigh and said with a smothered laugh that it was "sphlendeed!" and Malone and Pudfut agreed, and then the three locked arms and went singing up the street, their eyes on Joplin's pipe-stem legs as he trotted beside Marny on his way to the inn.

When the party reached the coffee-room Marny called Tine to his side, spread out the fingers and thumb of one hand, and that rosy-cheeked lass without the loss of a second, clattered over to the little shelf, gathered up five empty mugs and disappeared down the cellar steps. This done the coterie drew their chairs to one of Tine's hand-scrubbed tables and sat down, all but Joplin, who kept on his way to his room. There the Bostonian remained, gazing out of the window until Johann had banged twice on his door in announcement of dinner. Then he joined the others.

When all were seated Schonholz made a statement which was followed with results more astounding to the peace of the coterie than anything which had occurred since the men came together.

"I haf bad news, boys," he began, "offle bad news. Mine fader has wrote dat home I must. Nod anuder mark he say vill he gif me. Eef I could sell somedings--but dat ees very seldom. No, Marny, you don't can lend me noddings. What vill yourselluf do? Starve!"

"Where do you live, Schonholz?" asked Joplin.

"By Fizzenbad."

"What kind of a place is it--baths?"

"Yes."

"What are they good for?" continued Joplin in a subdued tone.

"Noddings, but blenty peoples go."

"I can tell you, Joppy," said Pudfut gravely, with a wink at Malone. "There are two spas, both highly celebrated. Lord Ellenboro spent a month there and came back looking like another man. One is for the liver and the other for something or other, I can't recollect what."

"Heart?" asked Joplin.

"I don't know."

He didn't,--had never heard the place mentioned until Schonholz had called its name a moment before.

Joplin played with his knife and made an attempt to nibble a slice of Tine's toast, but he made no reply. All the fight of every kind seemed to have been knocked out of him.

"Better take Fizzenbad in, Joppy," remarked Pudfut in an undertone. "May do you a lot of good."

"How far is it, Schonholz?" asked Joplin, ignoring the Englishman's suggestion.

"Oh, you leafe in de morgen and you come by Fizzenbad in a day more as do one you go oud mid."

"No--can't afford it."

Here Joplin pushed back his chair, and with the remark that he thought he would go downtown for some colors, left the room.

"It's working like a dose of salts," cried Pudfut when the Bostonian was out of hearing. "Hasn't said 'epigastric nerve,' 'gram' or 'proteids' once. Got real human in an hour. Stebbins, you're a wonder."

The next morning everybody was up bright and early to see Schonholz off. One of Fop Smit's packets was to leave for Rotterdam at seven and Schonholz was a passenger. He could go by rail, but the boat was cheaper. No deceptions had been practised and no illusions indulged in as to the cause of his departure. He had had his supplies cut off, was flat broke and as helpless as a plant without water. They had all, at one time or another, passed through a similar crisis and knew exactly what it meant. A purse, of course, could have been made up--Marny even insisted on sharing his last hundred francs with him--and Mynheer would have allowed the board-bill to run on indefinitely with or without an addition to his collection, but the lad was not built along those lines.

"No--I go home and help mine fader once a leetle, den maybe I come back, don't it?" was the way he put it.

The next morning, when the procession formed to escort him through the Old Gate, every man answered to his name except Joplin--he had either overslept himself or was taking an extra soak in his portable tub.

"Run, Tine, and call Mr. Joplin," cried Marny--"we'll go ahead. Tell him to come to the dock."

Away clattered the sabots up the steep stairs, and away they scurried down the bare corridor to Joplin's room. There Tine knocked. Hearing no response she pushed open the door and looked in. The room was empty! Then she noticed that the bed had not been slept in, nor had anything on the washstand been used. Stepping in softly for some explanation of the unusual occurrence--no such thing had ever happened in her experience, not unless she had been notified in advance--her eye rested on a letter addressed to Stebbins propped up in full view against a book on Joplin's table. Catching it up as offering the only explanation of his unaccountable disappearance, she raced downstairs and, crossing the cobbles on a run, laid the letter in Stebbins's hand.

"For me, Tine?"

The girl nodded, her eyes on the painter's.

The painter broke the seal and his face grew serious. Then he beckoned to Marny and read the contents aloud, the others crowding close:

Dear Stebbins:

Keep my things until I send for them. I take the night train for Rotterdam. Tell Schonholz I'll join him there and go on with him to Fizzenbad. Sorry to leave this way, but I could not bear to bid you all good-by. Joplin.

 

III

That night the table was one prolonged uproar. The conspirators had owned up frankly to their share of the villany, and were hard at work concocting plans for its undoing. Marny was the one man in the group that would not be pacified; nothing that either Pudfut, Stebbins or Malone had said or could say changed his mind--and the discussion, which had lasted all day, brought him no peace.

"Drove him out!--that's what you did, you bull-headed Englishman--you and Malone and Stebbins ought to be ashamed of yourselves. If I had known what you fellows were up to I'd have pitched you all over the dike. Cost Joppy a lot of money and break up all his summer work! What did you want to guy him like that for and send him off to be scalded and squirted on in a damned Dutch--"

"But we didn't think he'd take it as hard as that."

"You didn't, didn't you! What DID you think he'd do? Didn't you see how sensitive and nervous he was? The matter with you fellows is that Joppy is a thoroughbred and you never saw one of his kind in your life. Ever since he got here you've done nothing but jump all over him and try to rile him, and he never squawked once--came up smiling every time. He's a thoroughbred--that's what he is!"

The days that followed were burdened with a sadness the coterie could not shake off. Whatever they had laughed at and derided in Joplin they now longed for. The Bostonian may have been a nuisance in one way, but he had kept the ball of conversation rolling--had started it many times--and none of the others could fill his place. Certain of his views became respected. "As dear old Joppy used to say," was a common expression, and "By Jove, he was right!" not an uncommon opinion. In conformity with his teachings, Marny reduced his girth measure an inch and his weight two pounds--not much for Marny, but extraordinary all the same when his appetite was considered.

Pudfut, in contrition of his offence, wrote his English friend Lord Something-or-other, who owned the yacht, and who was at Carlsbad, begging him to run up and see the "best ever" and "one of us"--and Malone never lost an opportunity to say how quick he was in repartee, or how he missed him. Stebbins kept his mouth shut.

He had started the crusade, he knew, and was personally responsible for the result. He had tried to arouse Joplin's obstinacy and had only aroused his fears. All he could do in reparation was to keep in touch with the exile and pave the way for his homecoming. If Joppy was ill, which he doubted, some of the German experts in whom the Bostonian believed would find the cause and the remedy. If he was "sound as a nut," to quote Joplin's own words, certainty of that fact, after an exhaustive examination by men he trusted, would relieve his nervous mind and make him all the happier.

The first letter came from Schonholz. Liberally translated, with the assistance of Mynheer, who spoke a little German, it conveyed the information that the Bostonian, after being put on a strict diet, had been douched, pounded and rubbed; was then on his second week of treatment; had one more to serve; was at the moment feeling like a fighting-cock, and after a fifth week at Stuckbad, in the mountains, where he was to take the after-cure, would be as strong as a three-year-old, and as frisky.

The second letter was from Joplin himself and was addressed to Stebbins. This last was authentic, and greatly relieved the situation. It read:

Nothing like a thoroughly trained expert, my dear Stebbins. These German savants fill me with wonder. The moment Dr. Stuffen fixed his eyes upon me he read my case like an open book. No nitrogenous food of any kind, was his first verdict; hot douches and complete rest packed in wet compresses, the next. I am losing flesh, of course, but it is only the "deadwood" of the body, so to speak. This Dr. Stuffen expects to replace with new shoots--predicts I will weigh forty pounds more--a charming and, to me, a most sane theory. You will be delighted also to hear that my epigastric nerve hasn't troubled me since I arrived. Love to the boys, whom I expect to see before the month is out. Joppy.

"Forty pounds heavier!" cried Marny from his end of the table. "He'll look like a toy balloon in knee pants. Bully for Joppy! I wouldn't let any Schweizerkase with a hot douche get within a hundred yards of me, but then I'm not a bunch of nerves like Joppy. Anyhow, boys, we'll give the lad a welcome that will raise the roof. Joppy thin was pretty good fun, but Joppy fat will be a roaring farce."

And so it was decided, and at once all sorts and kinds of welcomes were discussed, modified, rearranged and discussed again. Pudfut suggested meeting him in Rotterdam and having a night of it. Malone thought of chartering a steam launch, hiring a band and bringing him past the towns with flags flying. Stebbins and Marny favored some demonstration nearer home, where everybody could join in.

The programme finally agreed upon included a pathway of boughs strewn with wild flowers from the steamboat landing, across the planking, over the cobbles, under the old Gate of William of Orange, and so on to the door of the inn; the appointment of Tine, dressed in a Zeeland costume belonging to her grand-mother, as special envoy, to meet him with a wreath of laurel, and Johann in short clothes--also heirlooms--was to walk by his side as First Groom of the Bed Chamber.

The real Reception Committee, consisting of Mynheer in a burgomaster suit borrowed from a friend, and the four painters--Marny as a Dutch Falstaff, Pudfut as a Spanish Cavalier, Stebbins got up as a Night Watch, and Malone in the costume of a Man-at-Arms--all costumes loaned for the occasion by the antiquary in the next street--were to await Joplin's coming in the privacy of the Gate--almost a tunnel--and so close to the door of the inn that it might have passed for a part of the establishment itself.

Meantime the four painters were to collect material for the decoration of the coffee-room--wreaths of greens over the mantel and festoons of ivy hanging down the back of Joplin's chair being prominent features; while Mynheer, Tine and Johann were to concentrate their energies in preparing a dinner the like of which had never been eaten since the sluiceways in the dikes drowned out the Spanish duke. Not a word of all this, of course, had reached the ears of the Bostonian. Half, three-quarters, if not all, the enjoyment of the occasion would be realized when they looked on Joplin's face and read his surprise.

 

IV

The eventful day at last arrived. Stebbins, as prearranged, had begged the exile to telegraph the exact hour of his departure and mode of travel from Rotterdam, suggesting the boat as being by far the best, and Joplin had answered in return that Fop Smit's packet, due at sundown the following day, would count him among its passengers.

The deep tones of the whistle off Papendrecht sent every man to his post, the villagers standing back in amazement at the extraordinary spectacle, especially at Tine and Johann in their queer clothes, who, being instantly recognized, were plied with questions.

The boat slowed down; made fast; out came the gangplank; ashore went the little two-wheel carts drawn by the sleepy, tired dogs; then the baskets of onions were rolled off, and the few barrels of freight, and then two or three passengers--among them a small, feeble man, in a long coat reaching to his heels--made their way to the dock.

NO JOPPY!!

"That's the last man to come ashore here," said Marny. "What's become of the lad?"

"Maybe he's gone aft," cried Stebbins; "maybe--"

Here Tine gave a little scream, dropped her wreath and running toward the small, feeble man, threw her arms around his neck. Marny and the others bounded over the cobbles, tossing the bystanders out of the way as they forged ahead. When they reached Joplin he was still clinging to Tine, his sunken cheeks and hollow deep-set eyes telling only too plainly how great an effort he was making to keep on his legs. The four painters formed a close bodyguard and escorted their long-lost brother to the inn.

Mynheer, in his burgomaster suit, met the party at the door, conducted them inside and silently drew out the chairs at the coffee-room table. He was too overcome to speak.

Joplin dropped into the one hung with ivy and rested his hands on the table.

"Lord! how good it is to get here!" he said, gazing about him, a tremble in his voice. "You don't know what I've gone through, boys."

"Why, we thought you were getting fat, Joppy," burst out Marny at last. Up to this time his voice, like that of the others, seemed to have left him, so great was his surprise and anxiety.

Joplin waved his forefinger toward Marny in a deprecatory way, as if the memory of his experience was too serious for discussion, played with his fork a moment, and said slowly:

"Will you lay it up against me, fellows, if I tell you the truth? I'm not as strong as I was and a good deal of the old fight is out of me."

"Lay up nothin'!" cried Malone. "And when it comes to fightin' ye kin count on me every--"

"Dry up!" broke in Marny. "You're way off, Malone. No, Joppy, not a man here will open his head: say the rest."

"Well, then, listen," continued the Bostonian. "I did everything they told me: got up at daylight; walked around the spring seven times; sipped the water; ate what they prescribed; lay in wet sheets two hours every day; was kneaded by a man with a chest as hairy as a satyr's and arms like a blacksmith's; stood up and was squirted at; had everything about me looked into--even stuck needles in my arm for a sample of my blood; and at the end of three weeks was so thin that my trousers had to be lapped over in the back under a leather strap to keep them above my hips, and my coat hung down as if it were ashamed of me. Doctor Stuffen then handed me a certificate and his bill. This done he stood me up and repeated this formula--has it printed--all languages:

"'You have now thrown from your system every particle of foul tissues, Mr.--, ah, yes--Mr. Joblin, I believe.' And he looked at the paper. 'You thought you were reasonably fat, Mr. Joblin. You were not fat, you were merely bloated. Go now to Stuckbad for two weeks. There you will take the after-cure; keep strictly to the diet, a list of which I now hand you. At the expiration of that time you will be a strong man. Thank you--my secretary will send you a receipt.'

"Well, I went to Stuckbad--crawled really--put up at the hotel and sent for the resident doctor, Professor Ozzenbach, Member of the Board of Pharmacy of Berlin, Specialist on Nutrition, Fellow of the Royal Society of Bacteriologists, President of the Vienna Association of Physiological Research--that kind of man. He looked me all over and shook his head. He spoke broken English--badly.

"'Who has dreated you, may I ask, Meester Boblin?'

"'Doctor Stuffen, at Fizzenbad.'

"'Ah, yes, a fery goot man, but a leedle de times behindt. Vat did you eat?'

"I handed him the list.

"'No vonder dot you are thin, my frent--yoost as I oxpected--dis ees de olt deory of broteids. Dot is all oxbloded now. Eef you haf stay anuder mont you vould be dead. Everyting dot he has dold you vas yoost de udder way; no bread, no meelk, no vegebubbles--noddings of dis, not von leedle bit. I vill make von leest--come to-morrow.'"

"Did you go, Joppy?" inquired Stebbins.

"DID _I_ GO? Yes, back to the depot and on to Cologne. That night I ate two plates of sauerkraut, a slice of pork and a piece of cheese the size of my hand; slept like a top."

"So the proteids and carbohydrates didn't do your epigastric any good, old chap," remarked Pudfut in an effort to relieve the gloom.

"Proteids, carbohydrates and my epigastric be damned," exploded Joplin. "On your feet, boys, all of you. Here's to the food of our fathers, with every man a full plate. And here's to dear old Marny, the human kangaroo. May his appetite never fail and his paunch never shrink!"

[The end]
Francis Hopkinson Smith's short story: Sam Joplin's Epigastric Nerve

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