Let Me Feel Your Pulse Page #2

"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

								

his socks were of a shade of tan that did not appeal to me.

“What you need,” he decided, “is sea air and companionship.”

“Would a mermaid—” I began; but he slipped on his professional manner.

“I myself,” he said, “will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast
of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet,
comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate.”

The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fashionable hostelry
on an island off the main shore. Everybody who did not dress for dinner
was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and
champagne table d’hôte. The bay was a great stamping ground for wealthy
yachtsmen. The Corsair anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr.
Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly
at the hotel. Still, it was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could
afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your
baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night.

When I had been there one day I got a pad of monogrammed telegraph
blanks at the clerk’s desk and began to wire to all my friends for
get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf
links and went to sleep on the lawn.

When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. “By
the way,” he asked, “how do you feel?”

“Relieved of very much,” I replied.

Now a consulting physician is different. He isn’t exactly sure whether
he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty insures you either the
most careful or the most careless attention. My doctor took me to see a
consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful
attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some coördination
exercises.

“Have you a pain in the back of your head?” he asked. I told him I had
not.

“Shut your eyes,” he ordered, “put your feet close together, and jump
backward as far as you can.”

I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed. My
head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and
was only three feet away. The doctor was very sorry. He had overlooked
the fact that the door was open. He closed it.

“Now touch your nose with your right forefinger,” he said.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“On your face,” said he.

“I mean my right forefinger,” I explained.

“Oh, excuse me,” said he. He reopened the bathroom door, and I took my
finger out of the crack of it. After I had performed the marvellous
digito-nasal feat I said:

“I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have
something like a pain in the back of my head.” He ignored the symptom
and examined my heart carefully with a
latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad.

“Now,” he said, “gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the
room.”

I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led
out of Madison Square Garden. Then, without dropping in a penny, he
listened to my chest again.

“No glanders in our family, Doc,” I said.

The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of
my nose. “Look at my finger,” he commanded.

“Did you ever try Pears’—” I began; but he went on with his test
rapidly.

“Now look across the bay. At my finger. Across the bay. At my finger.
At my finger. Across the bay. Across the bay. At my finger. Across the
bay.” This for about three minutes.

He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed
easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I’ll bet that
if he had used the phrases: “Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied,
outward—or rather laterally—in the direction of the horizon, underlaid,
so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet,” and “Now, returning—or
rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my
upraised digit”—I’ll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have
passed the examination.

After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curvature of the
spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doctors retired to the
bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I
ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay.

The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and
Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was
to be restricted. It had everything that I had ever heard of to eat on
it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and
bites me first.

“You must follow this diet strictly,” said the doctors.

“I’d follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what’s on it,” I
answered.

“Of next importance,” they went on, “is outdoor air and exercise. And
here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you.”

Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my
departure.

I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.

“It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle,” he said.

“Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?” said I.

I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it
around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little
superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.

Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I
couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any
sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody
would say: “Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a
jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?”

Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise.
So I went down South to John’s. John is an approximate relative by
verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a
bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John
has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude
and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged
into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer
than gold.

He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is
a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred
mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John’s
family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a
trifle anxiously.

A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house. I
threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty
yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept
disconsolately.

“I can’t catch a rabbit any more,” I sobbed. “I’m of no further use in
the world. I may as well be dead.”

“Oh, what is it—what is it, Brother John?” I heard Amaryllis say.

“Nerves a little unstrung,” said John, in his calm way. “Don’t worry.
Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits
get cold.” It was about twilight, and the mountains came up nobly to
Miss Murfree’s descriptions of them.
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