Uttering some of those trite and commonplace remarks that are customary for use under such circumstances and yet are so futile to express one's real sentiments, you arise and undertake to pacify the infuriated creature with household remedies. You try to lure him away with a wad of medicated cotton stuck on the end of a parlor match. But arnica is evidently an acquired taste with him. He doesn't seem to care for it any more than you do. You begin to dress, using one hand to put your clothes on with and the other to hold the top of your head on. At this important juncture, the dog tears down the last remaining partitions and nails the woodchuck. The woodchuck is game—say what you will about the habits and customs of the woodchuck you have to hand it to him there—he's game as a lion. He fights back desperately. Intense excitement reigns throughout the vicinity. While the struggle wages you get your clothes on and wait for daylight to come, which it does in from eight to ten weeks. Norway is not the only place where the nights are six months long.
There is nobody waiting at the dentist's when you get there, it being early. You are willing to wait. At a barber shop it may be different but at a dentist's you are always willing to wait, like a gentleman. But the sinewy young man who is sitting in the front parlor reading the Hammer Thrower's Gazette, welcomes you with a false air of gaiety entirely out of keeping with the circumstances and invites you to step right in. He tells you that you are next. This is wrong—if you were next you would turn and flee like a deer. Not being next, you enter. Right from the start you seem to take a dislike to this young man. You catch him spitting in his hands and hitching his sleeves up as you are hanging up your hat. Besides he is too robust for a dentist. With those shoulders he ought to be a boiler maker or a safe mover or something of that sort. You resolve inwardly that next time you go to a dentist you are going to one of a more lady-like bearing and gentler demeanor. It seems a brutal thing that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavy lifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this muscular athlete has laid violent hands on your palpitating form and wadded it abruptly into the hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something like the one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up there and with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one side of you you behold quite a display of open plumbing and on the other side a tasty exhibit of small steel tools of assorted sizes. No matter which way your gaze may stray you'll be seeing something attractive.
You also take notice of an electric motor about large enough, you would say, to run a trolley car, which is purring nearby in a sinister and forbidding way. They are constantly making these little improvements in the dental profession. I have heard that fifty years ago a dentist traveled about over the country from place to place, sometimes pulling a tooth and sometimes breaking a colt. He practiced his art with an outfit consisting of two pairs of iron forceps—one pair being saber-toothed while the other pair was merely saw-fretted—and he gave a man the same kind of treatment he gave a horse, only he tied the horse's legs first. But now electricity is in general use and no dentist's establishment is complete without a dynamo attachment which makes a crooning sound when in operation and provides instrumental accompaniment to the song of the official canary.
I know why a barber in a country town is always learning to play on the guitar and I know why a man with an emotional Adam's apple always wears an open front collar. I know these things, but am debarred from telling them by reason of a solemn oath. But I have not yet been able to discover why every dentist keeps a canary in his office. Nor do I know why it is, just as you settle your neck back on a head rest that's every bit as comfortable as an anvil, and just as a dentist climbs into you as far as the arm pits and begins probing at the bottom of a tooth which has roots extending back behind your ears, like an old-fashioned pair of spectacles, that the canary bird should wipe his nose on a cuttle bone and dash into a melodious outburst of two hundred thousand twitters, all of them being twitters of the same size, shape, and color. For that matter, I don't even know what kind of an animal a cuttle is, although I should say from the shape of his bone as used by the canary instead of a pocket handkerchief, that he is circular and flat and stands on edge only with the utmost difficulty. If you will pardon my temporary digressions into the realm of natural history, we will now return to the main subject, which was your tooth.
The moment the muscular young man starts up his motor and gives the canary its music cue and begins pawing over his tool collection to pick out a good sharp one, you recover. All of a sudden you feel fine, and so does the tooth. Neither one of you ever felt better. The fox terrier must have killed the woodchuck and then committed suicide. You are about to mention this double tragedy and beg the young man's pardon for causing him any trouble and excuse yourself and go away, but just then he quits feeling of his biceps and suddenly seizes you by your features and undoes them. If you are where you can catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror you will immediately note how much the human face divine can be made to look like an old-fashioned red brick Colonial fire place.
There are likely to be several things you would like to talk about. You are full of thoughts seeking utterance. For one thing you want to tell him you don't think the brand of soap he uses on his hands is going to agree with you at all. You probably don't care personally for the way your barber's thumb tastes either, but a barber's thumb is Peaches Melba alongside of a dentist's. Before you can say anything though he discovers a cavity or orifice of some sort in the base of your tooth. It seems to give him pleasure. Filled with intense gratification by this discovery and fired moreover by the impetuous ardor of the chase, he grabs up a crochet needle with a red hot stinger on the end of it and jabs it down your tooth to a point about opposite where your suspenders fork in the back.
You have words with him then, or at least you start to have words with him, but he puts his knee in your chest and tells you that it really doesn't hurt at all, but is only your imagination, and utters other soothing remarks of that general nature. He then exchanges the crochet needle for a kind of an instrument with a burr on the end of it. This instrument first came into use at the time of the Spanish Inquisition but has since been greatly improved on and brought right up to date. He takes this handy little utensil and proceeds to stir up your imagination some more. You again try to say something, speaking in a muffled tone, but he is not listening. He is calling to a brother assassin in the adjoining room to come and see a magnificent example of a prime old-vatted triple X exposed nerve. So the Second Grave Digger rests his tools against the palate of his victim and comes in.
As nearly as you can gather from hearsay evidence, you not being an eye witness yourself, one of them harpoons the nerve just back of the gills with a nutpick—remember please it is your nerve that they are taking all these liberties with—and pulls it out of its retreat and the other man takes a tack hammer and tries to beat its brains out. Any time he misses the nerve he hits you, so his average is still a thousand, and it is fine practice for him. A pleasant time is had by everybody present except you and the nerve. The nerve wraps its hind legs around your breastbone and hangs on desperately. You perspire freely and make noises like a drunken Zulu trying to sing a Swedish folk song while holding a spoonful of hot mush in his mouth.
In time becoming wearied even of these congenial diversions and tiring of the shop talk that has been going on, the second dentist returns to his original prey and the party who has you in charge tries a new experiment. He arms himself with a kind of an automatic hammering machine, somewhat similar to the steam riveter used in constructing steel office buildings, except that this one is more compact and can deliver about eighty-five more blows to the second. Thus equipped, he descends far below your high water mark and engages in aquatic sports and pastimes for a considerable period of time. It seems to you that you never saw a man who could go down and stay down as long as this young man can. You begin to feel that you misjudged his real vocation in life when you decided that he ought to be a boiler maker. You know that he was intended for pearl fishing. He's a natural born deep sea diver. He doesn't even have to come up to breathe, but stays below, knee deep in your tide wash, merrily knocking chunks off your lowermost coral reefs with his little steam riveter and having a perfectly lovely time.
You are overflowing copiously and you wish he would take the time to stop and bail you out. You abhor the idea of being drowned as an inside job. But no, he keeps right on and along about here it is customary for you to swoon away.
On recovering, you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and another that have been left in the wings. You also judge that the insulation is burning off of an electric fixture somewhere up stage.
All this time the tooth is still offering resistance, and eventually the dentist comes out in front once more and makes a little curtain speech to you. He has just ascertained that what the tooth really needed was not filling but pulling. He thought at first that it should be filled and that is what he has been doing—filling it—but now he knows that pulling is the indicated procedure. He does not understand how a tooth that seemed so open could have deceived him. Nevertheless he will now pull the tooth.
He pulls her. She does her level best but he pulls her. He harvests small sections of the gum from time to time and occasionally he stops long enough to loosen up the roots as far down as your floating ribs. But he pulls her. He spares no pains to pull that tooth. Or if he spares any you are not able subsequently to remember what they were. You utter various loud sounds in a strange and incomprehensible language and he lays back and braces his knees against your lower jaw, and the tooth utters the death rattle and begins picking the cover-lid. And then he gives one final heave and breaks the roots away from the lower part of your spinal column to which they were adhering, and emerges into the open panting but triumphant, and holds his trophy up for you to look at. If you didn't know it was your tooth you would take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected by the janitor.
It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You never want to see it again.
As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement there was to a tooth.
As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out.
Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to keep.