The Drunkard

The man was nothing loth. The lit window of his house invited him.

"Thank you, sir," he said, sobered now by the keen night wind, "then I'll say good-night."

– "Night Tumpany."

"G'night, sir."

Lothian tramped away into the dark.

The sailor stood for a moment with his hand upon the latch of his house door, listening to the receding footsteps.

"What's wrong with him?" he asked himself. "He speaks different like. Yesterday morning old Trust seemed positive afraid of him! Never saw such a thing before! And to-night he seems like a stranger somehow. I felt queer, in a manner of speaking, as I walked alongside of him. But what a bloody fool I am!" Tumpany concluded, using the richest adjective he knew, as his master's footsteps died away and were lost.

In less than ten minutes Lothian stood upon the edge of the vast marshes.

It was a ghostly place and hour. The wind wailed over the desolate miles like a soul sick for the love it had failed to win in life. The wide creeks with their cliff-like sides of black mud were brimming with sullen tidal water, touched here and there by faint moonbeams – lemon colour on lead.

Night birds passed high over head with a whistle of wings, heard, but not seen in the gloom. From distant Wordingham to far Blackney beyond which were the cliffs of Sherringham and Cromer, for twelve miles or more, perhaps not a dozen human beings were out upon the marshes.

A few bold wildfowlers in their frail punts with the long tapering guns in the bows, might be "setting to birds"; enduring the bitter cold, risking grave danger, and pursuing the wildest and most wary of living things with supreme endurance throughout the night.

Once the wind brought two deep booms to Lothian. His trained ear knew and located the sound at once. One of the Wordingham fowlers was out upon the flats three miles away, and had fired his double eight-bore, the largest shoulder gun that even a strong man can use.

But the saltings were given over to the night and the things of the night.

The plovers called, "'Tis dark and late." "'Tis late and dark."

The wind sobbed coldly; wan clouds sped to hood the moon with darkness. Brown hares crouched among the coarse marrum grasses, the dun owls were afloat upon the air, sounding their oboe notes, and always the high unseen flight of whistling ducks went on all over the desolate majesty of the marshes.

And beyond it all, through it all, could be heard the hollow organs of the sea.

Lothian was walking rapidly. His breathing was heavy and muffled. He skirted the marsh and did not go upon it, passing along the grass slope of foreshore which even a full marsh tide never conquered; going back upon his own trail, parallel to the village.

There were sharp pricking pains in his knees and ankles. Hot sweat clotted his clothes to his body and rained down his face. But he was unaware of this. His alarming physical condition was as nothing.

He went on through the dark, hurriedly, like a man in ambush.

Now and then he stumbled at inequalities of the ground or caught his foot in furze roots. Obscene words escaped him when this happened. They burst from between the hot cracked lips, mechanical and thin. The weak complaints of some poor filthy-minded ghost!

He knew nothing of what he said.

But with knife-winds upon his face, thin needles in his joints; sodden flesh quivering with nervous tremors and wet with warm brine, he went onwards with purpose.

He was in the Amnesic Dream-phase.

Every foul and bestial impulse which is hidden in the nature of man was riotous and awake.

The troglodytes showed themselves at last.

All the unnameable, unthinkable things that lie deep below the soul, far below the conscience, in the lowest and sealed cellars of personality, had burst from their hidden prisons.

The Temple of the Holy Ghost was full of the squeaking, gibbering Powers of utmost, nethermost Hell.

– These are similes which endeavour to hint at the frightful Truth.

Science sums it up in a simple statement. Lothian was now in "The Amnesic dream-phase."

He came to where a grass road bounded by high hedges led down to the foreshore.

Crouching under the sentinel hedge of the road's end, he lit a match and looked at his watch.

It was fifteen minutes past ten o'clock.

Old Phœbe Hannett and her daughter, the servants of Morton Sims at the "Haven," would now be fast in slumber. Christopher, the doctor's personal servant, was in Paris with his master.

The Person who walked in a Dream turned up the unused grass-grown road.

He was now at the East end of the village.

The path brought him out upon the highroad a hundred yards above the rectory, Church, and the schools. From there it was a gentle descent to the very centre of the village, where the "Haven" was.

There were no lights nor lamp-posts in the village. By now every one would be gone to bed..

There came a sudden sharp chuckle into the night. Something was congratulating itself with glee that it had put water-boots with india-rubber soles upon its feet; noiseless soles that would make no sound upon the gravelled ways about the familiar house that had belonged to Admiral Custance.

.. Lothian lifted the latch of the gate which led to the short gravel-drive of the "Haven" with delicate fingers. An expert handles a blown bird's-egg so.

It rose. It fell. Not a crack came from the slowly-pushed gate which fell back into its place with no noise, leaving the night-comer inside.

The gables of the house rose black and stark against the sky. The attic-windows where old dame Hannett and her daughter slept were black. They were fast in sleep now.

The night-intruder set his gun carefully against the stone pillar of the gate. Then he tripped over the pneumatic lawns before the house with almost a dance in his step.

He frisked over the lawns, avoiding the chocolate patches that meant flower-beds, with complacent skill.

Just then no clouds obscured the moon, which rode high before the advancing figure.

A fantastic shadow followed Lothian, coquetting with the flower beds, popping this way and that, but ever at his heels.

It threw itself about in swimming areas of grey vagueness and then concentrated itself into a black patch with moving outlines.

There was an ecstasy about this dancing shadow.

And now, the big building which had been a barn and which Admiral Custance had re-built and put to various uses, cut wedge-like into the lit sky.

The Shadow crept close to the Dream Figure and crouched at its heels.

It seemed to be spurring that figure on, to be whispering in its ear..