Джералд Керш - On an Odd Note

“No, you may not.”

The lady reporter said, “I think they’re cute. Where can I get one?”

Majestically, Dr. Holliday called to an assistant: “Everington, put a couple of salamanders in a jar for the lady!”

Next day there were photographs of a salamander in the papers, and headlines like this:

HEAD GRAFT NEXT?

MYSTERY OF SALAMANDER

After that Dr. Holliday would not speak to anybody connected with the press and was dragged into the limelight again only when he grafted the right eye of Rurik into the head of a four-year-old boy named Dicky Aldous, son of Richard Aldous, a wealthy paint manufacturer of Greenwich, Connecticut.

It was not one operation, but eight, over a period of about six weeks, during which time the child’s eye was kept half-in and half-out of a certain fluid which Dr. Holliday has refused to discuss. The Sunday supplement writer, the “sensationalist,” has hinted that this stuff is derived from the lizard-like amphibian salamander which, alone among vertebrates, has the power to regenerate nervous tissue. It is not for me to express an opinion in this matter. Only I will insist that sensationalists all too often are right.

Jules Verne was a sensationalist; and now we are discussing man-powered rockets to the moon. H.G. Wells was a sensationalist; but there really are such things as heavier-than-air aircraft, automatic sights and atomic bombs. I, for one, refuse to discount the surmises of the Sunday supplement man who put it as a conjecture that Dr. Holliday was using, as a regenerative principle, some hormone extracted from the humble salamander. Why not? Alexander Fleming found penicillin in the mold on lemon rind. Believe me, if it were not for such cranks, medicine would still be witch-doctoring, and brain surgery a hole in the head to let the devils out.

Anyway, Dr. Holliday grafted Rurik Duncan’s right eye into the head of the four-year-old Dicky Aldous. It is not true that the father, Richard Aldous, paid Dr. Holliday a hundred thousand dollars for the operation; Mr. Aldous donated this sum, and more, to the Holliday Foundation, of which every schoolboy has heard.

To state the facts baldly: when the bandages were lifted, Dicky Aldous, born blind, could see out of his new right eye. The left remained sightless; but with the right the child could clearly discriminate objects. The lady reporter made quite a piece out of his first recognition of the color blue.

The Sunday supplement man, in whose bosom still rankled Dr. Holliday’s rudeness, wrote an article suggesting that the delicate tissues of the human eye might be seriously altered by the tremendous shock of electrocution which, since it involves the entire nervous system, necessarily affects the optic nerve.

Dr. Holliday, after a few outbursts, became silent. It was noted that he was frequently found to be in consultation with the English brain specialist, Mr. Donne, and Dr. Felsen, the neurologist. Paragraph by paragraph the case of Dicky Aldous dropped out of the papers.

It was simply taken for granted that it was possible to graft a living eye. Other matters came up to occupy our attention—Russia, the hydrogen bomb, Israel, the World Series—and the fly-trap of the public mind closed upon and digested what once it had gapingly received as “The Dicky Aldous Miracle.”

But this is far from being the end of the story. As an old friend of Richard Aldous and his family I was privileged to witness subsequent events. And since, now, it can do no harm and might do some good, I feel that I have the right to offer the public a brief account of these events.

Richard Aldous was a third-generation millionaire; genteel, sensitive, a collector of engravings. His wife, whom he had met in Lucca, was an Italian princess—finely engraved herself, and almost fanatically fastidious. Tourists used to wonder how it was possible for a sensitive, highbred Italian aristocrat to live in a palazzo surrounded with filth. Actually there is nothing to wonder at—the explanation is in the three wise monkeys, procurable at any novelty store. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil—and there you are, divorced from humanity. In extreme cases stop your nose, having previously sprinkled yourself with strong perfume.

As you can imagine, therefore, little Dicky Aldous in his fifth year was a child who was being brought up by his mother in complete ignorance of the ugliness that exists in the world. The servants in the Aldous house had been selected rather than simply employed—examined, as it were, through a magnifying glass—generally imported from Europe, expense being no object. Dicky’s nurse was a sweet-natured English gentlewoman. From her he could have heard nothing but old-fashioned nursery songs—sung off-key, perhaps, but kindly and innocuous—and no story more dangerous than the one about the pig that wouldn’t jump over the stile. The housekeeper was from Lucca; she had followed her mistress six years previous, with her husband, the butler. Neither of them could speak more than two or three phrases in English. Mrs. Aldous’s maid, Beatrice, also was an Italian girl, a wonderful needlewoman and hairdresser but totally ignorant of the English language. Indeed, she seldom spoke any language at all—she preferred to sing, which the little boy liked, being blind.

Here were no evil communications to corrupt the good manners of poor Dicky Aldous.

Yet one day, about a month after the sensational success of Dr. Holliday’s operation had been fully established, the English nurse came down from the nursery to make the required announcement that Master Dicky was asleep, and there was something in her manner which made the father ask, “Anything wrong, Miss Williams?”

Rachel Williams, the English nanny, didn’t like to say, but at last she burst out—that somebody must have been teaching little Dicky to use bad language. She could not imagine who might be responsible. Closely pressed, she spelled out a word or two—she could not defile her tongue by uttering them whole—and Aldous began to laugh. “Tell me now, Miss Williams, what is the name of Mrs. Aldous’s maid?”

“Beatrice,” said Miss Williams, pronouncing the name in the Italian style.

“And what’s the diminutive? How does Mrs. Aldous generally address her?”

“Bici,” said the nurse.

“When Dicky first saw the light, bless his heart, where did you tell him it came from?”

“Why, Mr. Aldous, from the sun.”

“Work it out, Miss Williams, and I think you’ll arrive at the origins of most of this so-called ‘bad’ language.”

All the same, when the nurse was at supper, Mr. Aldous went to the nursery where his son lay sleeping. On the way into the room he met his wife hurrying out, evidently on the verge of tears. She said, “Oh Richard, our boy is possessed by a devil! He just said, in his sleep, ‘For crying out roud, cease, you rousy sandwich!’ Where did he ever hear a word like ‘cease’?”

Her husband sent her to bed, saying, “Why, darling, little Dicky has had to suffer the impact of too many new sensations, too suddenly. The shock must be something like the shock of being born. Rest, sweetheart.” Then he went into the nursery and sat by the child’s crib.

After a little while, stirring uneasily in his sleep, speaking in the accents of the gutters of the West, Dicky Aldous said quite clearly, “Ah, shup! Aina kina guya rat!”—distinguishable to his father as: ‘Ah, shut up! I ain’t the kind of guy to rat!’

Then, tossing feverishly from side to side and talking through his milk teeth, his face curiously distorted so that he spoke almost without moving his lips, Dicky Aldous said, in baby talk with which I will not trouble your eyes or distract your attention by writing it phonetically: “. . . Listen, and get it right, this time, you son-of-a . . .” He added a string of expletives which, coming from him, were indescribably shocking. Perhaps horrifying is the better word because you can understand shock, being aware of its cause; but horror makes no sense. That is why it is horrible—there lies the quintessence of nightmare, in the truth divorced from reason.