M.O.M.

by E. F. Benson

M.O.M

By E. F. BENSON

HENRY ATTWOOD at the age of twenty was left an orphan, and cursed with a competence. Some natures are so strong that this blighting influence of a competence has no effect on them, and, like good citizens, they continue to work like galley-slaves in order to turn their competence into affluence, and pay taxes on the higher scale obligingly provided by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in order to penalise industry. But Henry Attwood was not one of these strong natures. He found the world so amazingly pleasant and interesting that, being without expensive tastes of any kind, he contrived to spend delightful and strenuous days on four hundred and fifty pounds a year until the fatal and almost universal experience of falling in love drove him to acquire the vast fortune that he is quite incapable of spending. It is true that his charming wife does all that can be expected of a mere woman in this direction, but the wealth that flows in a continual Pactolus into his bank balance seems to defy her most earnest endeavours.

So, at the age of twenty, Henry Attwood, in the year 1890, was left with an income of four hundred and fifty pounds a year, and instantly abandoned the routine of medical studies which he was following at a London hospital, with the idea of being a doctor. It was not that they did not interest him—for they interested him enormously—but, unfortunately, other things interested him enormously, too, and he wanted just now to win the amateur championship at golf more than he wanted anything else. He talked this over with his friend Hugh Ingleton—with whom he shared lodgings in Westminster Bridge Road—in his usual extravagant and vivid manner.

"I don't give up my profession, Hughie," he said; "and really, if you come to think of it, winning the championship will bring me in a far larger practice than seeing more arms and legs cut off. It amazes me that you don't see why! You are bound by materialistic views. You don't know how a little excitement and interest pulls a patient round. You and I, for instance, if we were called in to prescribe for a case of influenza, would certainly do exactly the same thing from a medical point of view. But if the man was a golfer at all—and most men think they are—he would be far more stimulated by an amateur champion than by you. We all know perfectly well that no medicine ever cured anybody. What cures is the stimulus you give. Then I shall learn a lot about art. I shall learn to play the piano. I shall learn about gardening. All for the same reason. Hypnotism, too—suggestion. I shall go to Paris and study there. It is suggestion really that cures, and here in England, at present, you are thought a quack if you dream of such a thing."

"All this will take time," remarked Hugh.

"Yes, dear child. Ars longa, vita brevis. Very likely I shan't ever be a doctor at all. You were going to say that, so I save you the trouble. I may become a professional golfer, I may become a gardener, or a mesmerist, or a musician, with long elfin locks. Really, at the age of twenty, no fellow ought to know what he is going to become, unless indigence drives him to become something. It's too early to choose. One should not choose until one has seen more what choices there are. Everyone ought to be supported by the State till he is forty. Then he is probably past work, you will say, and ought to be painlessly put out of the way. … Again, I've often thought of becoming a clergyman, not a country parsonage kind of buffer, with a glass of port wine after lunch, but a real parson down in the slums. But whenever I think of becoming anything, I feel that I've got a vocation for it."

Hugh Ingleton, with grim, serious face, rose and tossed him a pair of boxing-gloves.

"Then I'll prove you haven't got much of a vocation for a boxer," he said.

"Right O! Give me two minutes to change. If there's one thing I can do, it's to box."

"I'll knock the nonsense out of you," said Hugh.

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

An hour afterwards, when the two friends were dining at a small Italian restaurant over the way, it appeared that this result had not been attained, for Attwood expanded with fresh extravagances over Chianti.

"Wine!" he said. "Could one be an Omar Khayyam on four-fifty a year, do you think? I really don't ask any more than to play golf all day, have twenty minutes with the gloves—Jove, I could do without the gloves, for I believe you've broken a rib for me!—and then drink enormous quantities of rough, strong wine. One would get gouty, of course, but by that time I should be a Christian Scientist, and so get rid of that. And then—oh, Hughie!—then some poor white-faced devil, like that man there, comes in—he's half-blind, too, and I diagnose lead-poisoning—and one feels that it is only the brutes that perish who don't give their whole lives to trying to help a few of such sufferers out of the myriads. I wonder if suggestion would have any effect in definite organic disease? I don't see why not. Definite organic disease can assuredly be set up by nerves and worry, so why should it not be cured through the nerves also? I want to test that. But, first of all, I shall win the amateur championship."

"Marriage?" asked the laconic Ingleton.

"With regard to me? No, I'm too busy for the present to think about it. It is necessary to have a good deal of leisure to think about marrying, while, as far as one can judge, there's not much leisure afterwards. Now, will you please finish that Chianti, or shall I? No, I think neither of us will. We'll send it over to that poor, white-faced fellow with our compliments."

So for the next seven years Henry Attwood lived, with all his heart, mind, and soul, the delectable life so proper to the years between twenty and thirty, when the powers both of enjoyment and of learning are so keen, doing with all his might the things that seemed to him most worth while. With him these pursuits were always innocuous— he did not. for instance, take up the career of an Omar Khayyam—and generally laudable. A year and a half of incessant golf -playing secured for him the amateur championship, while a year of strenuous piano-playing proved to him,that he would never make a pianist. Then followed a couple of years in Paris, where he studied medicine at the Sorbonne, and mesmerism in the Charcot School, and then it suddenly struck him, with, a force that was inevitable and overwhelming, that he was living a life as selfish and self-centred as that of the merest sensualist. He had acquired quantities of delightful knowledge, but he had done it all to please himself, and was conferring by his superb physical fitness and mental equipment no shadow of benefit on any outside himself, while the "white-faced man," so to speak, had, earned from him nothing more than vague pity and the dregs of a bottle of Chianti. Nor had he even come near the less culpable selfishness of falling in love; he had lived as completely for himself as the drunkard or the drug-drinker.

So within a month he was attached in a lay, not a clerical, capacity to an East End mission, and had become a "real person down in the slums." His reality, indeed, was something amazing, if by reality we mean the "touch" he had with life. Nothing came amiss to him, and he poured into his work all that he had previously pent up in himself. He superintended soup-kitchens, he taught in schools, he organised and performed in penny readings and other entertainments, and presented himself every evening as a target at which the youth of Hackney aimed blows with boxing-gloves. But all these energetic affairs were to him no more than pastime; his real work, as his head acknowledged, lay with the sick and the dying. Assuming, as was indeed the case, that their spiritual requirements had been attended to by his clerical brethren, he coaxed or scolded the sick into a revival of their nervous energies which might combat their real or imaginary diseases, while if they could combat no more, he brightened the way into the dark valley with a lamp compounded, so to speak, of foolish nonsense and those little pleasant trivialities of this world of ours, which retain their interest even when the darkness is immediately and inevitably going to close round us. He dispersed shadows, and was the dispenser of pleasure and encouragement, and by his very presence seemed to relieve pain. He moved like some fresh wind through wards and miserable dwellings.

All the time his conviction that at least three-quarters, if not four, of the illness and malaise of the world is due to the imagination, and can be cured through the imagination, grew to a gospel certainty within him. On this he descanted to Hugh Ingleton, who had come down to see him one Saturday evening.

"I'm always at leisure on Saturday evening, Hughie," he had said, "because I let all the fellows in the boys' club do exactly what they choose that night."

"I should have thought that was the very night you would look after them more," said Hugh.

"Well, that's not my plan. If they are going to lead decent lives, and most of them are, they must lead them in spite of temptations. Now, when the boys' club is open, they really find it far more attractive than the streets—they don't want to go into the pubs, and get into beastly messes. So once a week I turn them all loose, and they've got to protect themselves against filth and boozing. It answers all right. Of course, some of them get into scrapes or drink too much; but usually, on reflection, they find they didn't enjoy it so tremendously. Men have got far more imagination than you think; they think of themselves as being strong and hard-working and clear-eyed, and that has a great effect on their lives. Imagination! Heavens, if one could only use imagination up to its true value! There's no other force in the world to compare to it."

"Charcot?" asked Hugh.

"Oh, it's beyond what Charcot dreamed of. There's no limit to the power of the imagination over the body and the mind. But we all want 'an outward and visible sign,' as the Catechism says. If you tell a dyspeptic man that there is nothing wrong with him sufficiently powerfully, he will perhaps improve, but only a little. But give him a pill to take after dinner, and tell him that it is bound to put him all right, he will improve a great deal."

"It depends what the pill is made of," said Hugh.

"Not very much, though, of course, you can do a little by drugs. But the main work of the pill will be done by the man's belief in its efficacy. I'm thinking out a medicine now which I expect will cure almost everything. It will cure, in any case, all the ailments that lead to organic disease."

"I shall expose it in 'Secret Remedies,'" said Hugh.

"No, you won't, because I'm going to tell you all about it now, this minute, in confidence, and you will certainly agree that, taken as I prescribe it, it is admirable. Besides, it won't be for sale, nor will it be advertised. I shall have it on tap at our sick-clubs, and shall direct the use of it myself. I'm going to call it 'My Own Mixture.' They'll remember that, and it will spread like mad. M.O.M., you know. You can't forget it. Bottle of Mom."

"I think I should prefer Mumm," said Hugh. "But let's hear all about it."

Henry Attwood deposited his long, big limbs in a chair that only just held him. His ruddy boyish face, with its blue eyes and crisp curling hair, showed like a sort of sun through the clouds of tobacco smoke which he puffed from a briar-wood pipe. Outside, a sudden flood of wind-vexed rain beat on the window, and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

"I hate a wet Saturday night," he said, "because it drives my lambs into the pubs. But they've got to learn to stand on their own feet, bless them! Well, about My Own Mixture. It's going to be made chiefly of camomile and salt. Have you ever tasted camomile and salt? You would remember it, if you had, for it is impossible to conceive a more loathsome and nauseating flavour."

"Then why prescribe it?" asked Ingleton.

"Chiefly because it tastes so utterly abominable. It tastes strong and awful, and consequently people will think—my sort of people, I mean—that it must be doing them good. They like medicine to be beastly; it is part of the outward and visible sign. I thought of adding a little quinine, but it's too expensive. But that's not the whole point. Here's a dried camomile flower for you. I ask you to chew it for a minute. You will then be able to understand what follows."

"Anything in the cause of science," said Hugh.

Attwood waited a couple of minutes.

"That's enough," he said. "Now have a cigarette."

"Part of the plan?" asked Hugh.

"Yes."

Hugh lit his cigarette, took one whiff of it, and instantly threw it into the fireplace.

"Good Heavens, what foul tobacco!" he said.

Attwood chuckled.

"Not at all. It's what you've been smoking all the evening. But you won't want to smoke again for another hour. Now have some whisky and soda to console you."

"Still science?" asked Hugh.

"Still science."

Hugh mixed himself a glassful, took a sip, and strongly shuddered.

"But it's poison!" he said.

"Not at all. It's a good whisky. But are you beginning to see something of the inwardness of M.O.M.? After a dose of it, as I shall prescribe it, you wouldn't be able to smoke or drink alcohol for three hours at least. Now, as I said, there's not only camomile but salt in M.O.M. That'll make them thirsty, and they'll be driven to drink water. Well, a lot of my fellows are constantly rheumatic, and if there is one thing more likely than another to help your rheumatism, it is drinking quantities of fluid. You know that. So incidentally—only incidentally, mind—M.O.M. is in future to be given to the rheumatic and gouty and acid, and, instead of smoking and drinking whisky and beer, they will drink water. I shan't tell them to do that—they would utterly despise water if recommended them—but they'll be thirsty."

Hugh sniffed at his whisky again, and again postponed it.

"Go on," he said.

"Well, three-quarters of my flock—not the young 'uns, of course, but the working-men and the slaving women, suffer most of all from fatigue, which they patch up with stimulants. Now, what's my prescription for them? Three tablespoonfuls of M.O.M. mixture in a pint of hot water, to be drunk with a teaspoon directly after supper. That will take them the best part of half an hour. I shall tell them to take it sitting down, not standing up, and with their eyes closed, I think. They won't want to go round to the pub. after that, and, being tired, they will, I hope, go to bed. Have you ever drunk hot camomile tea? It makes you sleep like a top. And in the middle of the night they will awake drowsily and drink some water. And they'll feel far brisker next morning than if they had spent half the night in the pub. They want to be brisk and not tired; they drink spirits because they are tired. But most of them love medicine, and they will give M.O.M. a trial, if it's only because I tell them to."

Attwood, not having partaken of camomile, lit another pipe.

"Even all this is only incidental," he said. "It certainly will do them good, but the real good it will do them will be their belief it's doing them good. That is far more important. That you don't believe, I expect, because you are blinded by your English ignorance. But if you had been through the Charcot School, you would recognise the illimitable power of suggestion. For dyspeptics, too! There's a lot of dyspepsia here, not among the very poorest, but chiefly among those who, when they feel rather unwell, set themselves down to get through a piece of beefsteak, which they think will strengthen them. For such I shall prescribe them M.O.M. half an hour before dinner. Have another try at the whisky, Hugh."

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

Such was the inception of M.O.M., and marvellous was the growth of its use and success. With the cachet of Attwood's name and recommendation, its success was unrivalled. Somehow drunkards, fatigued, dyspeptic, with the image of that cheerful and vital young giant in their mind, sat themselves meekly and hopefully down with bowls of the nauseous mixture and a tea-spoon, and sipped and shuddered, and shuddered and sipped. Greater yet was the army of those who had nothing the matter with them, but who, in the damp and sunless autumn, needed their vital force not increased, but aroused. Of this class were wives and daughters of tradesmen in comfortable but stuffy circumstances, and from them the marvellous healing and invigorating powers of the abominable mixture spread far and wide beyond the confines of Hackney, and a serious situation began to develop. For M.O.M. was not a patent medicine to be obtained "at every chemist's"—it was the brew of one man, prepared by himself on a secret recipe, to make which public, as he saw quite well, would be to rob his invention of its. efficacy. He gave it to members of his flock, but with the growing and imperious, demand for it, it was certainly ascertained that his flock sold it to other inquirers for it on advantageous terms, and applied for more. It was impossible that Mrs. East, for instance, had consumed a whole bottleful of the essence between Tuesday and Friday—she would have been no more than a brine-pickle if that was the case. It was impossible not to connect Bob Flash's new coat with the three bottles he had emptied in little less than a week, even accepting the incredible statement that his children preferred it to their bread and milk for supper! Already a large local chemist had offered to prepare the stuff in cauldrons, if only Henry Attwood would give him the recipe, supply it at a reasonable figure, and share the profits with its inventor. His conscience would not allow him to make a profit out of so fraudulent a decoction, even though the decoction—or, rather, the spirit in which the decoction was imbibed—produced such successful results. And all the time the demand grew unbridled, and Attwood lived in a briny atmosphere of camomile.

Then came the final and determining factor. On his holiday he saw Her for Whom he and the world were made, daughter of a small country squire, with eyes of night set in a flower-like face, and the inexorable need for human personal love shot up in him sudden and strong, like the flowering of an aloe. Marriage on four hundred and fifty pounds a year, with two rooms in a celibate mission in the East End, did not appear to a shrewd and impoverished father a practical scheme.

That is why we can all get M.O.M. at two-and-ninepence a bottle, and the larger size, containing twice the quantity, at four-and-sixpence.

 

Copyright, 1913, by E. F. Benson, in the United States of America.