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By Root 890 0

and chops without as much as a wrinkle. Just luck, a pure fluke! He could have ruined his face for ever so long, but do you think that made him blink? ... Then there is the boy’s mother, the mistress of the house. She’s sick, debilitated, weak, dizzy, nervous, with poor appetite and a buzzing in her ears. ‘Take a bath!’ I say. ‘Take a bath and wash yourself, get some water on your body, damn it! Roast a calf and get some meat on your bones, push open the windows and get some fresh air, don’t stay wet, go outside, throw away that book, Johann Arendt, burn it!’ and so on. ‘But above all, bathe and shower and bathe again, otherwise my medicine won’t do you any good.’ Well, she couldn’t afford the calf, which may have been true enough, but she bathes, she bathes and gets rid of some dirt, till she can’t take it anymore; she’s freezing cold, her teeth chatter from all that cleanliness, and so she says goodbye to the water! She simply couldn’t stand being clean any longer! What then! Well, she gets hold of a chain, an antirheumatic chain, a Volta cross or whatever it’s called, and hangs it around her neck. I ask if I may see the thing: a zinc disk, a rag, a couple of hooks, a couple of smallish hooks, that’s all. ‘What the hell are you using this for?’ I say. Oh, it had helped some, it had really helped her; it had soothed her headaches and given her back some warmth. Oh yes, those hooks and that zinc disk had made her better! What can you do with such people? I could spit on a stick and give it her, and it would do her just as much good. But try to tell her that! ‘Put that thing away,’ I say, ‘or I won’t do anything for you, I won’t touch you.’ And what do you think she does? She holds on to her zinc disk and lets me go! Hee-hee-hee, she lets me go! Good God! No, one shouldn’t be a physician, one should be a medicine man....”

The doctor sits down to his coffee in great agitation. His wife exchanges glances with Nagel and says, laughing, “Mr. Nagel would’ve done exactly the same as that woman. We were discussing the matter just before you came. Mr. Nagel doesn’t believe in your science.”

“So, Mr. Nagel doesn’t?” the doctor remarks curtly. “Well, Mr. Nagel can do as he likes in that regard.”

Annoyed and offended, filled with anger at these bad patients who had ignored his orders, the doctor drank his coffee in silence. He was indignant that everyone was watching him. “Dream up something, get a move on,” he said. But after the coffee he cheered up again, chatted with Dagny awhile, and made fun of his oarsman, the man who had taken him to his patients. Then he reverted to his troubles as a physician and lost his temper afresh. He still found it impossible to forget that mistake with the ointments; it was all just coarseness and superstition and idiocy and nothing else. All in all, the ignorance among the common people was atrocious.

“But the man got well, after all!”

The doctor could have dug his teeth into Dagny when she said this. He straightened up. The man got well, sure, and so what? That didn’t preclude the existence of scandalous stupidity out there among the common people. The man got well, all right; but what if he had burned up his chops? Did she mean to defend his bovine stupidity?

This ignominious run-in with a peasant lout who had acted in the teeth of his instructions and still been cured, irritated the doctor more than anything else and made his otherwise gentle eyes look perfectly furious behind his glasses. He had been taken in by the wiliest fluke, set aside in favor of a zinc disk, and only after a stiff toddy on top of the coffee was he able to forget about it. Then he suddenly said, “Jetta, look, I gave the man who picked me up five kroner, just so you know. Ha-ha-ha, I’ve never seen such a fellow; the whole seat of his pants was gone, but what strength there was in him, and what nonchalance! A helluva guy! He sang all the way rowing out. He was sure as sin he could reach the sky with a fishing rod if he stood on top of Mount Etje. ‘You would have to stand on tiptoe, then,’ I said. That he didn’t understand;