Thorne Guy
The Drunkard

CHAPTER VI
GILBERT LOTHIAN'S DIARY

"It comes very glibly off the tongue to say, 'Put yourself in his position,' – 'What would you have done under the circumstances?' but if self-analysis is difficult, how much more so is it to appreciate the 'Ego' of another, to penetrate within the veil of the maimed and debased inner temple of the debauched inebriate?" – "The Psychology of the Alcoholic," by T. Claye Shawe, M.D., F.R.C.P., Lecturer on psychological medicine. St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

 
"Like one, that on a lonesome road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."
 

– Coleridge.

When Mary Lothian returned home to Mortland Royal she was very unwell. The strain of watching over Lady Davidson, and the wrench of a parting which in this world was to be a final one, proved more than she was able to endure.

She had been out of doors, imprudently, during that dangerous hour on the Riviera between sunset and nine o'clock. Symptoms of that curious light fever, with its sharp nervous pains, which is easily contracted at such times along the Côte d'Azur, began to show themselves.

Dr. Morton Sims was away in Paris for a few weeks upon a scientific engagement he was unable to refuse, and Mary was attended by Dr. Heywood, the general practitioner from Wordingham.

There was nothing very serious the matter, but the Riviera fever brings collapse and great depression of spirits with it. Mary remained in bed, lying there in a dreamy, depressed state of both physical and mental faculties. She read but little, preferred to be alone as much as possible, and found it hard to take a lively interest in anything at all.

Gilbert was attentive enough. He saw that every possible thing was done for her comfort. But his manner was nervous and staccato, though he made great efforts at calm. He was assiduous, eager to help and suggest, but there was no repose about him. In her great longing for rest and solitude – a necessary physical craving resulting upon her illness – Mary hardly wanted to see very much even of Gilbert. She was too weak and dispirited to remonstrate with him, but it was quite obvious to her experienced eyes that he was drinking heavily again.

His quite unasked-for references to the fact that he was taking nothing but a bottle of beer in the middle of the morning, a little claret at meals and a single whiskey and soda before going to bed, betrayed him at once. His tremulous anxiety, his furtive manner, the really horrible arrogation of gaiety and ease made upon a most anxious hope that he was deceiving her, told their own tale.

So did the heavy puffed face, yellowish red and with spots appearing upon it. His eyes seemed smaller as the surrounding tissues were dilated, they were yellowish, streaked with little veins of blood at the corners, and dull in expression.

His head jerked, his hands trembled and when he touched her they were hot and damp.

Her depression of mind, her sense of hopelessness, were greatly increased. Darkness seemed to be closing round her, and prayer – for it happens thus at times with even the most saintly souls – gave little relief.

"I shall be better soon," she kept repeating to herself. "The doctor says so. Then, when I am well, I shall be able to take poor Gillie really in hand. It won't be long now. Then I will save him with God's help."

In her present feebleness she knew that it was useless to attempt to do anything in this direction. So she pretended to believe her husband, said nothing at all, and prayed earnestly to recover her health that she might set about the task of succour.

She did not know, had not the very slightest idea, of Lothian's real state. Nobody knew, nobody could know.

On his part, freed of all restraint, his mind a cave of horror, a chamber of torture, he drank with lonely and systematic persistence.

It was about this time that he began to make these notes in the form of a diary which long afterwards passed into the hands of Dr. Morton Sims. The record of heated horror, the extraordinary glimpse into an inferno incredible to the sane man, has proved of immense value to those who are engaged in studying the psychology of the inebriate.

From much that they contain, it is obvious that the author had no intention of letting them be seen by any other eyes than his own, at the time of writing them. Dr. Morton Sims had certainly suggested the idea in the first place, but there can be no doubt whatever that Lothian soon abandoned his original plan and wrote for the mere relief of doing so, and doubtless with a sinister fascination at the spectacle of his own mind thus revealed by subtle analysis and the record of a skilled pen. Alcoholised and impaired as his mind was, it was nevertheless quite capable of doing this accurately and forcibly, and there are many corroborative instances of such an occurrence. More than one medical man during the progress of a protracted death agony has left minute statements of his sensations for the good of Society.

Such papers as these, for use in a book which has an appeal to all sorts of people, cannot, of course, be printed entire. There are things which it would serve no good purpose for the layman to know, valuable as they are to the patient students of morbid states. And what can be given is horrible enough.

The selected passages follow herewith, and with only such comment as is necessary to elucidate the text.

.. Last night a letter came from a stranger, one of the many that I get, thanking me for some of the poems in "Surgit Amari" which he said had greatly solaced and helped him throughout a period of mental distress. When I opened the letter it was after dinner, and I had dined well – my appetite keeps good at any rate, and while that is so there is no fear of it – according to the doctors and the medical books. I opened the letter and read it without much interest. I am not so touched and pleased by these letters as I used to be. Then, after I had said good-night to my wife, I went into the library. After two or three whiskies and a lot of cigarettes the usual delusion of greatness and power came over me. I know, of course, that I have great power and am in a way celebrated, but at ordinary times I have no overmastering consciousness and bland, suave pride in this. When I am recovering from the effects of too much alcohol I doubt everything. My own work seems to me trivial and worthless, void of life and imitations of greater work.

Well, I had the usual quickening, but vague and incoherent sense of greatness, and I picked up the letter again. I walked up and down the room smoking furiously, and then I had some more whiskey. The constant walking up and down the room, by the way, is a well-marked symptom of my state. The nerves refuse me calm. I can't sit down for long, even with the most alluring book. Some thought comes into my mind like a stone thrown suddenly into a pool, and before I am aware of it I am marching up and down the room like a forest beast in a cage. When I had read the letter twice more I sat down and wrote a most effusive reply to my correspondent. I almost wept as I read it. I went into high things, I revealed myself and my innermost thoughts with the grave kindness and wish to be of help that a great and good man; intimate with a lesser and struggling man; might use.

In the morning I read the letter which I had thought so wonderful. As usual, I tore it up. It was written in a handwriting which might have betrayed drunkenness to a child. Long words lacked a syllable, words ending in "ing" were concluded by a single stroke, the letter "l" was the same size as the letter "e" and could not be distinguished from it. But what was worse, was the sickly sentiment, expressed in the most feeble sloppy prose.

It was sort of educated Chadband or Stiggins and there was an appalling lack of reticence.

It is a marked symptom of my state, that when I am drunk I always want to write effusive letters to strangers or mere acquaintances. Sometimes, if I have been reading a book that I liked, I sit down and turn out pages of gush to the unknown author, hailing him as a brother and a master. Thank goodness I always tear the wretched things up next day. It is a good thing I live in the country. In London these wretched letters, which I am impelled to write, would be in some adjacent pillar box before I realised what I had done.

Oh, to be a sane man, a member of the usual sane army of the world who never do these things!

The above passage must have been re-read some time after it was written and been the raison d'être of what follows. The various passages are only occasionally dated, but their chronological order can be determined with some certainty by these few dates, changes of handwriting, and above all by the progress and interplay of thought.

It had not occurred to me before, with any strength that is, how very far my inner life diverges now from ordinary paths! It is, I see in a moment such as the present when I am able to contemplate it, utterly abnormal. I am glad to realise this for a time. It is so intensely interesting from the psychologist's point of view. I can so very, very rarely realise it. Immediately that I slip back into the abnormal life, long custom and habit reassert themselves and I become quite unaware that it is abnormal. I live mechanically according to the bizarre and fantastic rules imposed upon me by drink. Now, for a time, I have a breathing space. I have left the dim green places under the sea and my head is above water. I see the blue sky and feel the winds of the upper world upon my face. I used to belong up there, now I am an inhabitant of the under world, where the krakens and the polyps batten in their sleep and no light comes.

 

I will therefore use my little visit to "glimpse the moon" like the Prince of Denmark's sepulchral father. I will catalogue the ritual of the under world which has me fast.

I will, that is, write as much as I can. Before very long my eyes will be tired and little black specks will dance in front of them. The dull pain in my side – cirrhosis of course – which is quiet and feeding now – will begin again. Something in my head, at the back of the skull on the left hand side – so it seems – will begin to throb and ache. Little shooting pains will come in my knees and round about my ankles and drops of perspiration which taste bitter as brine will roll down my face. And, worse than all, the fear of It will commence. Slight "alcoholic tremors" will hint of what might be. After a few minutes I shall feel that it is going to be.

I will define all that I mean by "It" another time.

Well, then I shall send "It" and all the smaller "Its" to the right about. I shall have two or three strong pegs. Then physical pains, all mental horrors, will disappear at once. But I shall be back again under the sea nevertheless. I shan't realise, as I am realising now, the abnormality of my life. But I should say that I have an hour at least before I need have any more whiskey, before that becomes imperative. So here goes for a revelation more real and minute than de Quincey, though, lamentable fact! in most inferior prose!

Here this passage ends. It is obvious from what follows that the period of expected freedom came to an end long before the author expected. Excited by what he proposed to do, he had spent too much of his brief energy in explaining it. Mechanically he had taken more drink to preserve himself upon the surface – the poisoned mind entirely forgetting what it had just set down – and with mathematic certainty the alcohol had plunged the poet once more beneath the ruining waters.

The next entry, undated, is written in a more precise and firmer handwriting. It recalls the small and beautiful caligraphy of the old days. There is no preamble to the bald and hideous confession of mental torture.

I wish that my imagination was not so horribly acute and vivid when it is directed towards horrors – as indeed it always seems to be now. I wish, too, that I had never talked curiously to loquacious medical friends and read so many medical books.

I am always making amateur, and probably perfectly ridiculous, tests for Locomotor Ataxy and General Paralysis – always shrinking in nameless fear from what so often seems the inevitable onslaught of "It."

Meanwhile, with these fears never leaving me for a moment, to what an infinity of mad superstitions I am slave! How I strive, by a bitter, and (really) hideously comic, ritual to stave off the inevitable.

Oh, I used to love God and trust in Him. I used to pray to Jesus. Now, like any aborigine I only seek to ward off evil, to propitiate the Devil and the Powers of the Air, to drag the Holy Trinity into a forced compliance with my conjuring tricks. I can hardly distinguish the devil from God. Both seem my antagonists. Hardly able to distinguish Light from dark, I employ myself with dirty little conjuring tricks. I well know that all these are the phantasms of a disordered brain! I am not really fool enough to believe that God can be propitiated or Satan kept at bay by movements: touchings and charms.

But I obey my demon.

These things are a foolish network round my every action and thought. I can't get out of the net.

Touching, I do not so much mind. In me it is a symptom of alcoholism, but greater people have known it as a mere nervous affection quite apart from drink. Dr. Johnson used to stop and return to touch lamp-posts. In "Lavengro," Borrow has words to say about this impulse – I think it is in Lavengro or it may be in the Spanish book. Borrow used to "touch wood." I began it a long time ago, in jest at something young Ingworth said. I did it as one throws spilt salt over one's shoulder or avoids seeing the new moon through glass. Together with the other things I have to do now, it has become an obsession. I carry little stumps of pencil in all my pockets. Whenever a thought of coming evil, a radiation from the awful cloud of Apprehension comes to me, then I can thrust a finger into the nearest pocket and touch wood. Only a fortnight ago I was frightened out of my senses by the thought that I had never been really touching wood at all. The pencil stumps were all varnished. I had been touching varnish! It took me an hour to scrape all the varnish off with a pocket knife. I must have about twenty stumps in constant use. At night I always put one in the pocket of my pyjama coat – one wakes up with some fear – but, half asleep and lying as I do upon my left side, the pocket is often under me and I can't get to the wood quickly. So I keep my arm stretched out all night and my hand can touch the wooden top of a chair by the bed in a second. I made Tumpany sand-paper all the varnish off the top of the chair too. He thought I was mad. I suppose I am, as a matter of fact. But though I am perfectly aware of the damnable foolishness of it, these things are more real to me than the money-market to a business man.

If it were only this compulsion to touch wood I should not mind. But there are other tyrannies coincident which are more urgent and compelling. My whole mind – at times – seems taken up by the necessity for ritual actions. I have no time for quiet thought. Everything is broken in upon. There is the Sign of the Cross. I have linked even that in the chain of my terrors. I touch wood and then I make this sign. I do it so often that I have invented all sorts of methods of doing it secretly in public, and quickly when I am alone. I do it in a sort of imaginary way. For instance, I bend my head and in so doing draw an imaginary line with my right eye upon the nearest wall, or upon the page of the book that I am reading. Then I move my head from side to side and make another fictitious line to complete the cross. A propos of making the sign, the imaginary lines nearly always go crooked in my brain. This especially so when I am doing it on a book. I follow two lines of type on both pages and use the seam of the binding between them to make the down strokes. But it hardly ever comes right the first time. I begin to notice people looking at me curiously as I try to get it right and my head moves about. If they only knew!

Then another and more satisfactory way – for the imaginary method always makes my head ache for a second or two – I accomplish with the thumb of my right hand moving vertically down the first joint of the index finger, and then laterally. I can do this as often as I like and no one can possibly see me. I have a little copper Cross too, with "In hoc vinces" graved upon it. But I don't like using this much. It is too concrete. It reminds me of the use I am making of the symbol of salvation. "In hoc vinces"! Not I. There are times when I think that I am surely doomed.

But I think that the worst of all the foul, senseless, and yet imperative petty lordships I endure, is the dominion of the two numbers. The Dominion of The Two Numbers! – capital letters shall indicate this! For some reason or other I have for years imagined mystical virtue in the number 7 and some maleficent influence in the number 13. These, of course, are old superstitions, but they, and all the others, ride me to a weariness of spirit which is near death.

Although I got my first in "Lit. Hum." at Oxford, have read almost everything, and can certainly say that I am a man of wide culture and knowledge, Figures always gave me aversion and distaste. I got an open scholarship at my college and was as near as nothing ploughed in the almost formal preliminary exam of Responsions by Arithmetic. I can't add up my bank-book correctly even now, and I have no sense whatever of financial amounts and affairs.

But I am a slave to the good but stern fairy 7 and the hell-hag 13.

I attempt lightness and the picturesque. There is really nothing of the sort about my unreasoning and mad servitude. It's bitter, naked, grinning truth.

In my bath I sponge myself seven times – first. Then I begin again, but I stop at six in the second series and cross myself upon the breast with the bath sponge. Seven and six make thirteen. If I did not cancel out that thirteen by the sign of the Cross I should walk in fear of some dreadful thing all day.

Every time I drink I sip seven times first and then again seven times. When six times comes in the second seven, I make the Cross with my head. My right hand is holding the glass so that the thumb and finger joint method won't work. It would be disastrous to make the sign with the left hand.

That is another thing… I use my left hand as little as I can. It frightens me. I always raise a glass to my lips with the right hand. If I use the left hand owing to momentary thoughtlessness, I have to go through a lengthy purification of wood-touching, crossing, and counting numbers.

All my habits re-act one upon the other and the rules are added to daily until they have become appallingly intricate. A failure in one piece of ritual entails all sorts of protracted mental and physical gestures in order to put it right.

I wonder if other men who drink know this heavy, unceasing slavery which makes the commonest actions of life a burden?

I suppose so. It must be so. All drugs have specific actions. Men don't tell, of course. Neither do I! Sometimes, though, when I have gone to some place like the Café Royal, or perhaps one of the clubs which are used by fast men, I have had a disgusting glee when I met men whom I knew drank heavily to think that they had their secrets – must have them – as well as I.

On reading through these notes that I have been making now and then, I am, of course, horrified at what they really seem to mean. Put down in black and white they convey – or at least they would convey to anyone who saw them – nothing but an assurance of the fact that I am mad. Yet I am not really mad. I have two lives… I see that I have referred constantly to "It." I have promised myself to define exactly what I mean by "IT."

I am writing this immediately after lunch. I didn't get up till eleven o'clock. I am under the influence of twenty-five grains of ammonium bromide. I had a few oysters for lunch and nothing else. I am just about as normal as any man in my state can hope to be.

Nevertheless when I come to try and define "It" for myself I am conscious of a deep horror and distrust. My head is above water, I am sane, but so powerful is the influence of the continual FEAR under which I live my days and nights, that even now I am afraid.

"It" is a protean thing. More often than not it is a horrible dread of that Delirium Tremens which I have never had, but ought to have had long ago. I have read up the symptoms until I know each one of them. When I am in a very nervous and excited condition – when, for example, I could not face anybody at all and must be alone in my room with my bottle of whiskey – I stare at the wall to see if rats or serpents are running up it. I peer into the corners of the library to detect sheeted corpses standing there. I do not see anything of the sort. Even the imaginings of my fear cannot create them. I am, possibly, personally immune from Delirium Tremens, some people are. All the same, the fear of it racks me and tears me a hundred times a day. If it really seized me it surely would be almost enjoyable! Nothing, at any rate, can be more utterly dreadful than the continual apprehension.

Then I have another and always constant fear – these fears, I want to insist, are fantastically intermingled with all the crossings, wood-touchings and frantic calculations I have to do each minute of my life. The other fear is that of Prison.

Now I know perfectly well that I have done nothing in my life that could ever bring me near prison. All the same I cannot now hear a strange voice without a start of dread. A knock at the front door of my house unnerves me horribly. I open the door of whatever room I am in and listen with strained, furtive attention, slinking back and closing the door with a sob of relief when I realise that it is nothing more than the postman or the butcher's boy. I can hardly bear to read a novel now, because I so constantly meet with the word "arrest."

 

"He was arrested in the middle of his conversation," – "She placed an arresting hand upon his arm." .. These phrases which constantly occur in every book I read fill me with horror. A wild phantasmagoria of pictures passes through my mind. I see myself being led out of my house with gyves upon my wrists like the beastly poem Hood made upon "Eugene Aram." Then there is the drive into Wordingham in a cab. All the officials at the station who know me so well cluster round. I am put into a third class carriage and the blinds are pulled down. At St. Pancras, where I am also known, it is worse. The next day there is the Magistrate's Court and all the papers full of my affair. I know it is all fantastic nonsense – moonshine, wild dream. But it is so appallingly real to me that I sometimes long to have got the trial over and to be sitting with shaven head, wearing coarse prison clothes, in a lonely cell.

Then, I think to myself, I should really have peace. The worst would have happened and there would be an end of it all. There would be an end of deadly Fear.

I remember " – " telling me at Bruges, where so many mauvais sujets go to kill themselves with alcohol, that wherever he went, night and day, he was always afraid of a tiger that would suddenly appear. He had never experienced Delirium Tremens either. He knew how mad and fantastic this apprehension was but he was quite unable to get rid of it.

At other times I have the Folie de Grandeur.

My reading has told me that this is the sure sign of approaching General Paralysis. General paralysis means that one's brain goes, that one loses control of one's limbs and all acts of volition go. One is simply alive, that is all. One is alive and yet one is fed and pushed about, and put into this place or that as the entomologist would use a snail. So, in all my wild imaginings the grisly fear is never far away.

The imaginings are, in themselves, not without interest to a student of the dreadful thing I have become.

I always start from one point. That is that I have become suddenly enormously rich. I have invented all sorts of ways in which this might happen, but lately, in order to save trouble, and to have a base to start from I have arranged that Rockefeller, the American oil person, has been so intrigued by something that I have written that he presents me with two million pounds.

I start in the possession of two million pounds. I buy myself a baronetcy at once and I also purchase some historic estate. I live the life of the most sporting and beneficent country gentleman that ever was! I see myself correcting the bucolic errors of my colleagues on the Bench at Quarter Sessions. I am a Providence to all the labourers and small farmers. My name is acclaimed throughout the county of which I am almost immediately made Lord Lieutenant.

After about five minutes of this prospect I get heartily sick of it.

I buy a yacht then. It is as big as an Atlantic liner. I fit it up and make it the most perfect travelling palace the world has ever seen. I go off in it to sail round the globe – to see all the most beautiful things in the world, to suck the last drop of honey that the beauty of unknown seas, fairy continents, fortunate islands can yield. During this progress I am accompanied by charming and beautiful women. Some are intellectual, some are artistic – all are beautiful and charming. I, I myself, am the central star around which all this assiduous charm and loveliness revolve.

Another, and very favourite set of pictures, is the one in which I receive the two millions from Mr. Rockefeller – or whoever he is – and immediately make a public renunciation of it. With wise fore-thought I found great pensions for underpaid clergy. I inaugurate societies by means of which authors who could do really artistic work, but are forced to pot-boil in order to live, may take a cheque and work out their great thoughts without any worldly embarrassments. I myself reserve one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds a year and go and work among the poor in an East-end slum. At the same time I am most anxious that this great renunciation should be widely spoken of. I must be interviewed in all the papers. The disdainful nobility of my sacrifice for Christ's sake must be well advertised.

Indeed all my Folies de Grandeur are nothing else but exaggerated megalomania. I must be in the centre of the picture always. Spartan or Sybarite I must be glorified.

Another symptom which is very marked is that of spasmodic and superstitious prayer. When my heated brain falls away from its kaleidoscopic pictures of grandeur owing to sheer weariness; when my wire-tight nerves are strained to breaking point by the despotism of "touchings," the tyranny of "Thirteen" and "Seven," the nervous misery of the Sign of the Cross, I try to sum up all the ritual and to escape the whole welter of false obligation by spasmodic prayer. I suppose that I say "God-the-Father-help-me" about two or three hundred times a day. I shut my eyes and throw the failing consciousness of myself into the back of my head, and then I say it – in a sort of hot feverish horror, "God-the-Father-help-me." I vary this, too. When my thoughts or my actions have been more despicable than usual, I jerk up an appeal to God the Father. When fluid sentiment is round me it is generally Jesus on whom I call.

.. I cannot write any more of this, it is too horrible even to write. But God knows how true it is!

This morning I went out for a walk. I was feeling wretchedly ill. I had to go to the Post Office and there I met little O'Donnell, the Rector, and dear old Medley his curate. It was torture to talk to them, to preserve an ordinary appearance. I felt that old Medley's eyes were on me the whole time. I like him very much. I know every corner of his good simple mind as if I had lived in it. He is a good man, and I can't help liking him. He dislikes and distrusts me intensely, however. He doesn't know enough – like Morton Sims for instance – to understand that I want to be good, that I am of his company really. The Rector himself was rather too charming. He fussed away about my poems, asked after Dorothy Davidson at Nice, purred out something that the Duke of Perth had said to him about the verses I had in the "Spectator" a month ago. Yet O'Donnell must know that I drink badly. Neither he nor Medley know, of course, how absolutely submerged I really am. No one ever realises that about a "man who drinks" until they read of his death in the paper. Only doctors, wives, experienced eyes know.

I funked Medley's keen old eyes in the Post Office and I couldn't help disgust at O'Donnell's humbug, as I thought it, though it may have been meant kindly. Curious! to fear one good man because he detects and reprobates one's wickedness, to feel contempt for another because he is civil.

I hurried away from them and went into the Mortland Royal Arms. Two strong whiskies gave myself back to me. I felt a stupid desire to meet the two clergymen again, with my nerves under proper control – to show them that I was myself.

Going back home, however, another nerve wave came over me. I knew how automatic and jerky my movements were really. I knew that each movement of my legs was dictated by a conscious exercise of command from the brain. I imagined that everyone I met – a few labourers – must know it and observe it also. I realise, now that I am safe in my study again, that this was nonsense. They couldn't have seen – or could they?

– I am sure of nothing now!

.. It is half an hour ago since I wrote the last words. I began to feel quite drunk and giddy for a moment. I concentrated my intelligence upon the "Telegraph" until the lines became clear and I was appreciating what I read. Now I am fairly "possible" I think. Reading a passage in the leading article aloud seems to tell me that my voice is under control. My face twitched a little when I looked in the mirror over the mantel-shelf, but if I have a biscuit, and go to my room and sponge my face, I think that I shall be able to preserve sufficient grip on myself to see Mary for ten minutes now. Directly my eyes go wrong – I can feel when they are beginning to betray me – I will make an excuse and slip away. Then I'll lunch, and sleep till tea-time. After two cups of strong tea and the sleep, I shall be outwardly right for an hour at least. I might have tea taken up to her room and sit by the bed – if she doesn't want candles brought in. I can be quite all right in the dusk.

The next entry of these notes dates, from obvious evidence, three or four days afterwards. They are all written on the loose sheets of thick and highly glazed white paper, which Lothian, always sumptuous in the tools of his work, invariably used. It will be seen that the last paragraphs have, for a moment, strayed into a reminiscence of the hour. That is to say they have recorded not only continuous sensations, but those which were proper to an actual experience. The Notes do so no more. The closing paragraphs that are exhibited here once more fall back into the key of almost terrified interest with which this keen, incisive mind surveys its own ruin.