The Drunkard

It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to death, dissolving dignity and manhood.

However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained, it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him by the familiar home name. That was Mary's name for him. Mrs. Gilbert Lothian alone had the right to say that.

Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy sky.

They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt, on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an acrid flavour within their souls.

It is always and for ever thus, if men could only realise it. Since the Cross rose in the sky, the hectic joys of sin have been mingled with bitterness, torture, cold.

The frightful "Colloque Sentimental" of Verlaine expresses these two people, at this moment, well enough. Written by a temperamental saint turned satyr and nearly always influenced by drink; translated by a young English poet whose wings were always beating in vain against the prison wall he himself had built; you have these sad companions..

Into the lonely park all frozen fast,
Awhile ago there were two forms who passed.

Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead,
Hardly shall a man hear the words they said.

Into the lonely park all frozen fast
There came two shadows who recall the past.

"Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?"
"Wherefore should I possess that memory?"

"Doth thy heart beat at my sole name alway?
Still dost thou see my soul in visions?" "Nay!" —

And on such a day as this, with such a weight as this upon their tired hearts, they entered the halls of Waxwork and stood forlorn among that dumb cloistered company.

They passed through "Room No. 1. Commencing Right-hand side" and their steps echoed upon the floor. On this day and at this hour hardly any visitors were there; only a few groups moved from figure to figure and talked in hissing whispers as if they were in some church.

All around them they saw lifeless and yet half convincing dolls in rich tarnished habiliments. They walked, as it were, in a mausoleum of dead kings, and the livid light which fell upon them from the glass roof above made the sordid unreality more real.

"There's Charles the First," Rita said drearily.

Gilbert glanced at the catalogue. "He was fervently pious, a faithful husband, a fond parent, a kind master, and an enthusiastic lover and patron of the fine arts."

"How familiar that sort of stuff sounds," she answered. "It's written for the schools which come here to see history in the flesh – or wax rather. Every English school girl of the upper middle classes has been brought here once in her life. Oh, here's Milton! What does it say about him?"

– "Sold his immortal poem 'Paradise Lost' for the sum of five pounds," Lothian answered grimly.

"Much better to be a modern poet, Gilbert dear! But I'm disappointed. These figures don't thrill one at all. I always thought one was thrilled and astonished here."

"So you will be, Cupid, soon. Don't you see that all these people are only names to us. Here they are names dressed up in clothes and with pink faces and glass eyes. They're too remote. Neither of us is going to connect that thing" – he flung a contemptuous movement of his thumb at Milton – "with 'Lycidas.' We shall be interested soon, I'm sure. But won't you have something to eat?"

"No. I don't want food. After all, this is strange and fantastic. We've lots more to see yet, and these kings and queens are only for the schools. Let's explore and explore. And let's talk about it all as we go, Gilbert! Talk to me as you do in your letters. Talk to me as you did at the beginning, illuminating everything with your mind. That's what I want to hear once again!"

She thrust her arm in his, and desire fled away from him. The Dead Sea Fruit, the "Colloque Sentimental" existed no more, but, humour, the power of keen, incisive phrase awoke in him.

Yes, this was better! – their two minds with play and interplay. It would have been a thousand times better if it had never been anything else save this.

They wandered into the Grand Saloon, made their bow to Sir Thomas Lipton – "Wog and I find his tea really the best and cheapest," Rita said – decided that the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suave, but uninteresting face, admired the late Mr. Dan Leno, who was posed next to Sir Walter Scott, and gazed without much interest at the royal figures in the same room.

King George the Fifth and his spouse; the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn – Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, K.G., K.T., K.P., G.C.M.C.; Princess Royal of England – Her Royal Highness Princess Louise Victoria Alexandra Dagmar; and, next to these august people, little Mr. Dan Leno!

"Poor little man," Rita said, looking at the sad face of the comedian. "Why should they put him here with the King and the Queen? Do they just plant their figures anywhere in this show?"

Gilbert shook his head. In this abnormal place – one of the strangest and most psychologically interesting places in the world – his freakish humour was to the fore.

"What a little stupid you are, Rita!" he said. "The man who arranges these groups is one of the greatest philosophers and students of humanity who ever lived. In this particular case the ghost of Heine must have animated him. The court jester! The clown of the monarch – I believe he did once perform at Sandringham – set cheek by jowl with the great people he amused. It completes the picture, does it not?"

"No, Gilbert, since you pretend to see a design in the arrangement, I don't think it does complete the picture. Why should a mere little comic man be set to intrude – ?"

He caught her up with whimsical grace. "Oh, but you don't see it at all!" he cried, and his vibrating voice, to which the timbre and life had returned, rang through "Room No. 2."

– "This place is designed for the great mass of the population. They all visit it. It is a National Institution. People like you and me only come to it out of curiosity or by chance. It's out of our beat. Therefore, observe the genius of the plan! The Populace has room in its great stupid heart for only a few heroes. The King is always one, and the popular comedian of the music halls is always another. These, with Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Toftrees, satisfy all the hunger for symbols to be adored. Thus Dan Leno in this splendid company. Room No. 2 is really a subtle and ironic comment upon the psychology of the crowd!"

Rita laughed happily. "But where are the Toftrees?" she said.

"In the Chamber of Horrors, probably, for murdering the public taste. We are sure to find them here, seated before two Remingtons and with the actual books with which the crime was committed on show."

"Oh, I've heard about the 'Chamber of Horrors.' Can we go, Gilbert? Do let's go. I want to be thrilled. It's such a funereal day."

"Yes it is, grey as an old nun. I'm sorry I was unkind in the cab, dear. Forgive me."

"I'll forgive you anything. I'm so unhappy, Gilbert. It's dreadful to think of you being gone. All my days and my nights will be grey now. However shall I do without you?"

There was genuine desolation in her voice. He believed that she really regretted his departure and not the loss of the pleasures he had been giving her. His blood grew hot once more – for a single moment – and he was about to embrace her, for they were alone in the room.

And then listlessness fell upon him before he had time to put his wish into action. His poisoned mind was vibrating too quickly. An impulse was born, only to be strangled in the brain before the nerves could telegraph it to the muscles. His whole machinery was loose and out of control, the engines running erratically and not in tune. They could not do their work upon the fuel with which he fed them.

He shuddered. His heart was a coffer of ashes and within it, most evil paramours, dwelt the quenchless flame and the worm that dieth not.

.. They went through other ghostly halls, thronged by a silent company which never moved nor spake. They came to the entrance of that astounding mausoleum of wickedness, The Chamber of Horrors.

There they saw, as in a faint light under the sea, the legion of the lost, the horrible men and women who had gone to swell the red quadrilles of hell.

In long rows, sitting or standing, with blood-stained knives and hangmen's ropes in front of them, in their shameful resurrection they inhabited this place of gloom and death.

Here, was a man in shirt-sleeves, busy at work in a homely kitchen lit by a single candle. Alone at midnight and with sweat upon his face he was breaking up the floor; making a deep hole in which to put something covered with a spotted shroud which lay in a bedroom above.

There, was the "most extraordinary relic in the world," the knife of the guillotine that decapitated Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and twenty thousand human beings besides.

The strange precision of portraiture, the somewhat ghastly art which had moulded these evil faces was startlingly evident in its effect upon the soul.

When a great novelist or poet creates an evil personality it shocks and terrifies us, but it is never wholly evil. We know of the monster's antecedents and environment. However stern we may be in our attitude towards the crime, sweet charity and deep understanding of the motives of human action often give us glimmerings which enable us to pity a lamentable human being who is a brother of ours whatever he may have done.

But here? No. All was sordid and horrible.

Gilbert and Rita saw rows upon rows of faces which differed in every way one from the other and were yet dreadfully alike.