Let Me Feel Your Pulse

"Let Me Feel Your Pulse" by O. Henry is a clever and heartwarming short story that explores themes of love, deception, and the complexities of human relationships. The narrative revolves around a chance encounter between two characters, a man and a woman, who engage in a playful yet insightful exchange. Through witty dialogue and a twist ending, O. Henry masterfully reveals the deeper emotional truths that emerge when people confront their feelings and vulnerabilities. The story showcases his signature style of irony and surprise, leaving readers reflecting on the nature of connections between individuals.

• Short story

								
So I went to a doctor.

“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he
asked.

Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”

He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore
heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.

“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your
circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have
been “advertising.”

He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and
gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like
him better.

Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his
fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a
stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down
without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two
hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such
number.

“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”

“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have
one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!

Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying
good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a
finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips
that he had fastened to a card.

“It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is
wrong.”

“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of
mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with
some people on Nantucket Island, so—”

“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”

“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”

The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he
did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or
Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of
grievances that the flesh is heir to—mostly ending in “itis.” I
immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.

“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I
thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a
certain amount of interest.

“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be
arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be
eighty-five or ninety.”

I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be
sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on
account.

“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a
sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow
your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you
and select a suitable one.”

So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare
mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see
nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered
pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave
me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon
time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates
at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came
to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard
themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking
a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in
conversation.”

My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of
lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my
repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees.
It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly,
“Neurasthenia!”—except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard
say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in
charge turned and walked away.

An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—say fifty
yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the
physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—a man with feet and
a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but
the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.

“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from
past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical
labour—recreation, in reality.”

There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools,
spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums,
enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and
everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of
a first-rate sanitarium.

“The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in
charge, “is no other than—Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel
entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her
mind after performing that piece of work.”

I had seen the book. “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one
instead?” I asked.

As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.

“The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the
physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from
overwork.”

I buttoned my coat.

Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks,
ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood,
tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered
sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a
prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.

“You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me. “I think
the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders
over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”

I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am
going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and
catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the
suitable place for you. But what you need is rest—absolute rest and
exercise.”

That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: “What
I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one
of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up
and down while I rest?”

The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced
sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man
came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west
entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over.

“I thought you had ’em,” he said, not unkindly, “but I guess you’re all
right. You’d better go see a doctor, old man.”

A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the
preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon. And

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes