The Drunkard

"They are the Upper Ten Commandments, not mine."

"Then I will go and command my dragon. I know where you live. Be ready in an hour!"

"How perfectly, perfectly sweet! And may we, oh, may we have a lobster mayonnaise for dinner?"

CHAPTER V

"FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE WAS GOING TO HAVE A GIRL FRIEND"

"Across the hills, and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day
The happy princess followed him."

    – Tennyson.
Lothian went back to his club in a taxi-cab, telling the man to drive at top speed. On the way he ordered a motor-car to go to Brighton and to call for him within twenty minutes.

He was in a state of great exhilaration. He had not had such an adventure as this for years – if ever before. A girl so lovely, so clever, so young – and particularly of his own social rank – he had never met, save for a short space of time and under the usual social conditions which forbade any real intimacy.

Even in the days before his marriage, flirtations, or indeed any companionship, with girls who were not of his class had not attracted him. He had never, unlike other men no less brilliant and gifted than himself, much cared for even the innocent side of Bohemian camaraderie with girls.

And to have a girl friend – and such a girl as Rita Wallace – was a delightful prospect. He saw himself responding to all sorts of simple feminine confidences, exploring reverently the unknown country of the Maiden mind, helping, protecting; unfolding new beauties for the young girl's delight. Yes! he would have a girl friend!

The thing should be ideal, pure and without a thought of harm. She understood him, she trusted herself to him at once and she should be repaid richly from the stores of his mind. None knew better than he what jewels he had to give to one who could recognise jewels when she saw them.

He changed his hat for a cap and had a coat brought down from his bedroom. Should he write a note to Mary at home? He had not sent her more than two telegrams of the "All going splendidly, too busy to write," kind, during the five days he had been in London. He decided that he would write a long letter to-morrow morning. Not to-night. To-night was to be one of pure, fresh pleasure. Every prospect pleased. Nothing whatever would jar. He was not in the mood to write home now – to compose details of his time in Town, to edit and alter the true record for the inspection of loving eyes.

"My darling!" he said to himself as he drank the second whiskey and soda which had been brought to him since he had come in, but there was an uncomfortable feeling in the back of his mind that the words did not ring true.

More than ever exhilarated, as excited as a boy, he jumped into the motor-car when it arrived, and glided swiftly westwards, congratulating himself a dozen times on the idle impulse which had sent him to Kensington. He began to wonder how it had come.

The impulse to bring the book himself had been with him all day. It had taken him till lunch time at least to put himself in any way right – to appear right even. With a sick and bitter mind he had gone through the complex physical ritual necessary after the night before – the champagne at eight, the Turkish bath, the hair-dresser's in Regent Street where fast men slunk with hot and shaking hands to have the marks of their vices ironed out of their faces with vibrating hammers worked by electricity.

All through the morning, the bitter, naked, grinning truth about himself had been horribly present – no new visitor, but the same leering ghost he knew so well.

Escape was impossible until the bestial sequence of his morning cure had run its course. Coming down the bedroom stairs into the club there was the disgusting and anxious consciousness that his movements were automatic and jerky, the real fear of meeting any one – the longing to bolt upstairs again and hide. Then a tremendous effort of will had forced him to go on. Facial control was – as ever – the most difficult thing. When he passed the waiters in the smoking room he must screw his face into the appearance of absorbed thought, freeze the twitching mouth and the flickering eyes into immobility. He had hummed a little tune as he had sat down at a table and ordered a brandy and soda, starting as if from a reverie when it was brought him, and making a remark about the weather in a voice of effusive geniality which embarrassed the well-trained servant.

By lunch time the convulsive glances in the mirror, the nervous straying of the hand to the hair, the see-saw of the voice had all gone. Black depression, fear, self-pity, had vanished. The events of the night before became like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, and as if they concerned some one quite other than himself.

He had not exactly forgotten the shame of his behaviour at the Amberleys' house. But, as he always did after events of this sort, and they were becoming far more general than he realised, he had pushed the thought away in some attic of the brain and closed the door. He would have these memories out some day – soon. It would not be pleasant, but it must of course be done. Then he would put everything right with himself, destroy all these corpses, and emerge into the free sunlight for ever more.

But not to-day. He must put himself quite right to-day. When he was right then he wouldn't have another drink all day. Yes! then by to-morrow, after a quiet, pensive night, he would throw off all his habits as if he were throwing an old pair of gloves over a wall. He knew well what he could do! He knew himself better than any one else knew him.

But not to-day. "Inshallah Bukra!" – "Please God, to-morrow!"

It had all seemed perfectly natural, though it happened over and over again, and to-morrow never came.

He did not know that this was but one more definite symptom of his poisoned state, as definite as the shaking hand, the maudlin midnight invocations of God, the frequent physical nausea of the morning, even.

And if the man is to be understood and his history to become real in all its phases, then these things must be set down truly and without a veil.

It was a joy to watch her pleasure as they swung out of London in the twenty-horse power Ford he had hired.

She did not say much but leant back on the luxurious cushions by his side. There was a dream of happiness upon her face, and Lothian also felt that he was living in a dream, that it was all part of the painted scenes of sleep.

The early evening was still and quiet. The Western sky, a faint copper-green with friths and locks of purple, was as yet unfired. In the long lights the landscape still retained its colour unaltered by the dying splendours of sunset. The engines of the car were running sweetly in a monotonous and drowsy hum, the driver sat motionless in front as they droned through the quiet villages and up and down the long white ribands of the road. It was an hour of unutterable content.

Once they stopped in a village and drew up before the inn. It was a lovely place. A bell was tolling for evensong in the grey church and they saw the vicar pass under the lych-gate with slow footsteps. One of the long, painted windows was caught by the sun and gleamed like a red diamond. The road fell to a pond where green water-flags were growing and waxen-white water-lilies floated. Beyond it was a willow wood.

The driver sat on a bench before the inn and drank his beer, but Gilbert and Rita passed through it into a garden that there was. The flowers were just beginning to cense the still air and the faint sound of a water-wheel down the river came to them —tic, tac, lorelei!

She would have milk, "Milk that one cannot get in London," and even he asked for no poison in this tranquil garden.

Clematis hung the gables like tapestry of Tyrian purple. There were beds of red crocketed hollyhock and a hedge of honeysuckle with a hundred yellow trumpet mouths. At their feet were the flowers of belamour.

"Men have died, trying to find this place which we have found," he said.

A red-admiral floated by upon its fans of vermilion and black as Gilbert quoted, and a faint echo from the water-mill answered him. Tic – tac – lorelei!

"Magician! half an hour ago we were in London!"

"You are happy?"

"I can't find anything to say – yet. It is perfect."

She leant back with a deep sigh and closed her eyes, and he was well content to say nothing, for in all the garden she seemed to him the most perfect thing, rosa-amorosa, the queen of all the roses!

It was as a flower he looked at her, no more. It was all a dream, of course. It had come in dream-fashion, it would go in the fashion of a dream. At that moment she was not a warm human girl with a lovely face. She was not the clever, lonely, subtle-simple maiden in the house of books. She was a flower he had met.

His mind began to weave words, the shuttle to glide in the loom of the poet, but words came to him that were not his own.

"Come hither, Child! and rest;
This is the end of day,
Behold the weary West!

"Now are the flowers confest
Of slumber; sleep as they!
Come hither, Child! and rest."

And then he sighed, for he thought of the other poet who had written those lines and of what had brought him to his dreadful death.

Why did thoughts like these come into the flower garden?

How true – even here – were the words he had put upon the title-page of the book which had made him famous —

"Say, brother, have you not full oft
Found, even as the Roman did,
That in Life's most delicious cup
Surgit Amari Aliquid!"