The Drunkard

We know all about the Dream Figure. Through the long pages of this chronicle we have learned how, and of what, It has been born.

And were it not that experts of the Middle Age – when Demonology was a properly recognised science – have stated that a devil has never a shadow, we should doubtless have been sure that it was our old friend, the Fiend Alcohol, that contracted and expanded with such fantastic measures over the moon-lit grass.

Lothian knew his way well about this domain.

Admiral Custance had been his good friend. Often in the old sailor's house, or in Lothian's, the two had tippled together and drank toasts to the supremacy which Queen Britannia has over the salt seas.

The lower floor of the barn had been used as a box-room for trunks and a general store-house, though the central floor-space was made into a court for Badminton; when nephews and nieces, small spars of Main and Mizzen and the co-lateral Yardarms, came to play upon a retired quarter-deck.

The upper floor had ever been sacred to the Admiral and his hobbies.

From below, the upper region was reached by a private stairway of wood outside the building. Of this entrance the sailor had always kept the key. A little wooden balcony ran round the angle of the building to where, at one end, a large window had been built in the wall.

Lothian went up the outside stairs noiselessly as a cat, and round the little gallery to the long window. Here he was in deep shadow.

The two leaves of the window did not quite meet. The wood had shrunk, the whole affair was rickety and old.

As he had anticipated, the night-comer had no difficulty in pushing the blade of his shooting knife through the crevice and raising the simple catch.

He stepped into the room, long empty and ghostly.

First, he closed the window again, and then let down the blue blind over it. A skylight in the sloped roof provided all the other light. Through this, now, faint and fleeting moonlights fell.

By the gallery door there was a mat. Lothian stepped gingerly to it and wiped the india-rubber boots he wore.

Then he took half a wax candle from a side-pocket and lit it. It was quite impossible that the light could be seen from outside, even if spectators there were, in the remote slumbering village.

In the corners of the long room, black-velvet shadows lurked as the yellow candle flame moved.

A huge spider with a body as big as sixpence ran up one canvas-covered wall. Despite the cold, the air was lifeless and there was a very faint aroma of chemical things in it.

On all sides were long deal tables covered with a multiplicity of unusual objects.

Under a big bell of glass, popped over it to keep the dust away, was a large microscope of intricate mechanism. Close by was a section-cutter that could almost make a paring of a soul for scrutiny. Leather cases stood here and there full of minute hypodermic syringes, and there was a box of thin glass tubes containing agents for staining the low protoplasmic forms of life which must be observed by those who wish to arm the world against the Fiend Alcohol.

At the far end of the room, on each side of the fireplace were two glass-fronted cupboards, lined with red baize. In one of them Admiral Custance had kept his guns.

These cupboards had been constructed by the village carpenter – who had also made the gun cupboard in Lothian's library. They were excellent cupboards and with ordinary locks and keys – the Mortland Royal carpenter, indeed, buying these accessories of his business of one pattern, and by the gross, from Messrs. Pashwhip and Moger's iron-mongery establishment in Wordingham.

Lothian took the key of his own gun cupboard from his waistcoat pocket. It fitted the hole of the cupboard here – on the right side of the fireplace, exactly as he had expected.

The glass doors swung open with a loud crack, and the contents on the shelves were clearly exposed to view.

Lothian set his candle down upon the edge of an adjacent table and thought for a moment.

During their intimate conversations – before Lothian's three weeks in London with Rita Wallace, while his wife was at Nice, Dr. Morton Sims had explained many things to him. The great man had been pleased to find in a patient, in an artist also, the capability of appreciating scientific truth and being interested in the methods by which it was sought.

Lothian knew therefore, that Morton Sims was patiently following and extending the experiments of Professor Fraenkel at his laboratory in Halle, varying the investigation of Deléarde and carrying it much farther.

Morton Sims was introducing alcohol into rabbits and guinea pigs, sub-cutaneously or into the stomach direct, exhibiting the alcohol in well-diluted forms and over long periods. He was then inoculating these alcoholised subjects, and subjects which had not been alcoholised, with the bacilli of consumption – tubercle bacilli – and diphtheria toxin – the poison produced by the diphtheria bacillus.

He was endeavouring to obtain indisputable evidence of increased susceptibility to infection in the animal body under alcoholic influences.

Of all this, Lothian was thoroughly aware. He stood now – if indeed it was Gilbert Lothian the poet who stood there – in front of an open cupboard; the cupboard he had opened by secrecy and fraud.

Upon those shelves, as he well knew, organic poisons of immeasurable potency were resting.

In those half-dozen squat phials of glass, surrounded with felt and with curious stoppers, an immense Death was lurking.

All the quick-firing guns of the navies of the world were not so powerful as one of these little glass receptacles.

The breath came thick and fast from the intruder. It went up in clouds from his heated body; vapourised into steam which looked yellow in the candlelight.

After a minute he drew near to the cupboard.

A trembling, exploring finger pushed among the phials. It isolated one.

Upon a label pasted on the glass, were two words in Greek characters, "διφθ. ποξιν."

Here, in this vessel of gelatinous liquid, lurked the destroying army of diphtheria bacilli, millions strong.

The man held up the candle and its light fell full upon the neat cursive Greek, so plain for him to read.

He stared at it with focussed eyes. His head was pushed forward a little and oscillated slowly from side to side. The sweat ran down it and fell with little splashes upon the floor.

Then his hand began to tremble and the light flickered and danced in the recesses of the cupboard.

He turned away, shaking, and set the candle end upon the table. It swayed, toppled over, flared for a moment and went out.

But he could not wait to light it again. His attendant devil was straying, he must be called back .. to help.

Lothian plunged his hand into his breast pocket and withdrew a flat flask of silver. It was full of undiluted whiskey.

He took a long steady pull, and the fire went through him instantly.

With firm fingers now, he screwed on the top of the flask and re-lit the candle stump. Then he took the marked phial from the cupboard shelf and set it on the table.

From a side pocket he took the little oil-bottle belonging to a travelling gun-case and unscrewed the top of that.

And now, with cunning knowledge, he takes the thick, grey woollen scarf from his neck and drenches a certain portion of its folds with raw whiskey from his flask. He binds the muffler round the throat and nose in such fashion that the saturated portion confines all the outlets of his breathing.

One must risk nothing one's self when one plays and conjures with the spawn and corruptions of death!

.. It is done, done with infinite nicety and care – no trembling fingers now.

The vial is unstopped, the tube within has poured a drop or two of its contents into the oil-bottle, the projecting needle of which is damp with death.

The cupboard is closed and locked again. Ah! there is candle grease upon the table! It is scraped up, to the minutest portion, with the blade of the shooting knife.