: O. Henry
: Sixes and Sevens
: Seltzer Books
: 9781455333509
: 1
: CHF 0.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 460
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Accord ng to Wikipedia: 'O. Henry was the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 - June 5, 1910). O. Henry short stories are known for wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.... Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry's work provides one of the best English examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the 'gentle grafter,' or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period. The Four Million is another collection of stories. It opens with a reference to Ward McAllister's 'assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen-the census taker-and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the 'Four Million.'' To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted. He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called 'Bagdad-on-the-Subway,'

 XIV LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 


 

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 haemoglobin 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