Thorne Guy
The Drunkard

Some one, was it not rather something? was shaking him warmly by the hand. A strained voice was greeting him. Yet he felt as if he were sawing at the arm of a great doll, not a live thing in which blood still circulated and systole and diastole still kept the soul co-ordinate and co-incident.

Then that also went. The precipitate of long control was dropped into the clouded vessel of thought and it cleared again. The fantastic imaginings, the natural horror of a kind and sensitive man at being where he was, passed away.

The keen scientist stood in the cell now, alert to perform the duty for which he was there.

The room was of a fair size. In one corner was a low bed, with a blanket, sheet and pillow.

In the centre, a deal table stood. A wooden chair, from which the convict had just risen, stood by the table, and upon it were a Bible, some writing materials, and a novel – bound in the dark-green of the prison library – by "Enid and Herbert Toftrees."

Hancock wore a drab prison suit, which was grotesquely ill-fitting. He was of medium height, and about twenty-five years of age. He was fat, with a broad-shouldered corpulence which would have been less noticeable in a man who was some inches taller. His face was ordinarily clean-shaven, but there was now a disfiguring stubble upon it, a three weeks' growth which even the scissors of the prison-barber had not been allowed to correct and which gave him a sordid and disgusting aspect. The face was fattish, but even the bristling hairs, which squirted out all over the lower part, could not quite disguise a curious suggestion of contour about it. It should have been a pure oval, one would have thought, and in the gas-light, as the head moved, it almost seemed to have that for fugitive instants. It was a contour veiled by a dreadful something that was, but ought not to have been there.

The eyes were grey and had a certain capability of expression. It was now enigmatic and veiled.

The mouth was by far the most real and significant feature of the face. In all faces, mouths generally are. The murderer's mouth was small. It was clearly and definitely cut, with an undefinable hint of breeding in it which nothing else about the man seemed to warrant. But despite the approach to beauty which, in another face, it might have had, slyness and egotism lurked in every curve.

.. "So that's how it first began, Doctor. First one with one, then one with another. You know!"

The conversation was in full swing now.

The doll had come to life – or it was not quite a doll yet and some of the life that was ebbing from it still remained.

The voice was low, confidential, horribly "just between you and me." But it was a pleased voice also, full of an eager and voluble satisfaction, – the last chance of toxic insanity to explain itself!

The lurid swan-song of a conceited and poisoned man.

.. "Business was going well. There seemed no prospect of a child just then, so Mary got in with Church work at St. Philip's. That brought a lot more customers to the shop too. Fancy soaps, scents and toilette articles and all that. Dr. Mitchell of Hackney, was a church-warden at St. Philip's and in time all his prescriptions came to me. No one had a better chance than I did. And Mary was that good to me." ..

Two facile, miserable tears rolled from the man's glazing eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

"You can't think, sir, being a bachelor. Anything I'd a mind to fancy! Sweet-breads she could cook a treat, and Burgundy we used to 'ave – California wine, 'Big Bush' brand in flagons at two and eight. And never before half-past seven. Late dinner you might have called it, while my assistant was in the shop. And after that I'd play to her on the violin. Nothing common, good music – 'Orer pro Nobis' and 'Rousoh's Dream.' You never heard me play did you? I was in the orchestra of the Hackney Choral Society. I remember one day .."

"And then?" the Doctor said, gently.

He had already gathered something, but not all that he had come to gather. The minutes were hurrying by.

The man looked up at the doctor with a sudden glance, almost of hatred. For a single instant the abnormal egoism of the criminal, swelled out upon the face and turned it into the mask of a devil.

Dr. Morton Sims spoke in a sharp, urgent voice.

"Why did you ask me to come here, Hancock?" he said. "You know that I am glad to be here, if I can be of any use to you. But you don't seem to want the sort of sympathetic help that the chaplain here could give you far better than I can. What do you want to say to me? Have you really anything to say? If you have, be a man and say it!"

There was a brief but horrible interlude.

"Well, you are cruel, doctor, not 'arf! – and me with only an hour or two to live," – the man said with a cringing and sinister grin.

The doctor frowned and looked at the man steadily. Then he asked a sudden question.

"Who were your father and mother?" he said.

The convict looked at the doctor with startled eyes.

"Who told you?" he asked. "I thought nobody knew!"

"Answer my question, Hancock. Only a few minutes remain."

"Will it be of use, sir?"

"Of use?"

"In your work – It was so that I could leave a warning to others, that I wanted to see you."

"Of great use, if you will tell me."

"Well, Doctor, I never thought to tell any one. It's always been a sore point with me, but I wasn't born legitimate! I tried hard to make up for it, and I did so too! No one was more respectable than I was in Hackney, until the drink came along and took me."

"Yes? Yes?" – The hunter was on the trail now, Heredity? Reversion? At last the game was flushed! – "Yes, tell me!"

"My father was a gentleman, Doctor. That's where I got my refined tastes. And that's where I got my love of drink – damn him! God Almighty curse him for the blood he gave me!"

"Yes? Yes?"

"My father was old Mr. Lothian, the solicitor of Grey's Inn Square. He was a well-known gentleman. My mother was his housekeeper, Eliza Hancock. My father was a widower when my mother went into his service. He had another son, at one of the big schools for gentlemen. That was his son by his real wife – Gilbert he was called, and what money was left went to him. My father was a drunkard. He never was sober – what you might rightly call sober – for years, I've heard .. Mother died soon after Mr. Lothian did. She left a hundred pounds with my Aunt, to bring me up and educate me. Aunt Ellen – but I'm a gentleman's son, Doctor! – drunken old swine he was too! What about my blood now? Wasn't my veins swollen with drink from the first? Christ! you ought to know – you with your job to know —Now are you happy? I'm not a love child, I'm a drink child, that's what I am! Son of old Mr. Lothian, the gentleman-drunkard, brother of his son who's a gentleman somewhere, I don't doubt! P'r'aps 'e mops it up 'imself! – shouldn't wonder, this – brother of mine!"

The man's voice had risen into a hoarse scream. "Have you got what you came to get?" he yelled. His eyes blazed, his mouth writhed.

There was a crash as the deal table was overturned, and he leapt at the doctor.

In a second the room was full of people. Dark figures held down something that yelled and struggled on the truckle bed.

It was done with wonderful deftness, quickness and experience… Morton Sims stood outside the closed door of the condemned cell. A muffled noise reached him from within, the prison doctor was standing by him and looking anxiously into his face.

– "I can't tell you how sorry I am, Dr. Morton Sims. I really can't say enough. I had no idea that the latent toxic influence was so strong.."

On the other side of the little glass-roofed hall the door was open. Another cell was shown, brilliantly lit. Two men, in their shirt-sleeves, were bending over a square, black aperture in the wooden floor. Some carpenters' tools were lying about.

An insignificant looking little man, with a fair moustache, was standing in the doorway.

"That'll be quite satisfactory, thank you," he was saying, "with just a drop of oil on the lever. And whatever you do, don't forget my chalk to mark where he's to stand."

From behind the closed door of the condemned cell a strangulated, muffled noise could still be heard.

"Not now!" said Dr. Marriott, as the executioner came up to him – "In half an hour. Now Dr. Morton Sims, please come away to my room. This must have been most distressing. I feel so much that it is my fault.".

The two men stood at the Prison gate, Sims was shaking hands with the younger doctor. "Thank you very much indeed," he was saying. "How could you possibly have helped it? – You'll take steps – ?"

"I'm going back to the cell now. It's incipient delirium tremens of course – after all this time too! I shall inject hyoscene and he will know nothing more at all. He will be practically carried to the shed – Good-night! Good-night, sir. I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting you again."

The luxurious car rolled away from the Citadel of Death and Shadows – down the hill into London and into Life.

The man within it was thinking deeply, sorting out and tabulating his impressions, sifting the irrelevant from what was of value, and making a précis of what he had gained.

There were a dozen minor notes to be made in his book when he reached home. The changing quality of the man's voice, the ebb and flow of uncontrolled emotion, the latent fear – "I must be present at the post mortem to-morrow," he said to himself as a new idea struck him. "There should be much to be learnt from an examination of the Peripheral Nerves. And the brain too – there will be interesting indications in the cerebellum, and the association fibres." ..

The carriage swung again into the familiar parts of town. As he looked out of the windows at the lights and movement, Morton Sims forgot the purely scientific side of thought. The kindly human side of him reasserted itself.

How infinitely sad it was! How deep the underlying horror of this sordid life-tragedy at the close of which he had been assisting!

Who should say, who could define, the true responsibility of the man they were killing up there on the North London Hill?

Predisposition to Alcohol, Reversion, Heredity! – was not the drunken old solicitor, long since dust, the true murderer of the gentle-mannered girl in Hackney?

Lothian, the father of Gilbert Lothian the poet! the poet who certainly knew nothing of what was being done to the young man in the prison, who had probably never heard of his existence even.

The "Fiend Alcohol" at work once more, planting ghastly growths behind the scutcheons of every family!

A cunning murderer with a poisoned mind and body on one side, the brilliant young poet in the sunlight of success and high approbation upon the other!

Mystery of mysteries that God should allow so foul a thing to dominate and tangle the fair threads and delicate tissues of life!

"Well, that's that!" said the doctor, in a phrase he was fond of using when he dosed an episode in his mind. "I'll make my notes on Hancock's case and forget it until I find it necessary to use them in my work. And I'll lock up the poems Moultrie has sent me and I won't look at the book again for a month. Then I shall be able to read the verses for themselves and without any arrière-penseé.

"But, I wonder .. ?"

The brougham stopped at the doctor's house in Russell Square.

BOOK ONE
LOTHIAN IN LONDON

 
"Myself, arch traitor to myself,
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go."
 

CHAPTER I
UNDER THE WAGGON-ROOF. A DINNER IN BRYANSTONE SQUARE

 
"Le véritable Amphitryon est l'Amphitryon où l'on dine."
 

– Molière.

It was a warm night in July when Mr. Amberley, the publisher, entertained a few friends at dinner to meet Gilbert Lothian, the poet.

Although the evening was extremely sultry and the houses of the West End were radiating the heat which they had stored up from the sun-rays during the day, Mr. Amberley's dining room was deliciously cool.

The house was one of those roomy old-fashioned places still to be found unspoiled in Bryanstone Square, and the dining room, especially, was notable. It was on the first floor, over-looking the square, a long and lofty room with a magnificent waggon-roof which was the envy of every one who saw it, and gave the place extraordinary distinction.

The walls were panelled with oak, which had been stained a curious green, that was not olive nor ash-green but partook of both – the veritable colour, indeed, of the grey-green olive trees that one sees on some terrace of the Italian Alps at dawn.

The pictures were very few, considering the size of the room, and they were all quite modern – "In the movement" – as shrewd Mr. Amberley was himself.

A portrait of Mrs. Amberley by William Nicholson, which was quite famous in its way, displayed all the severe pregnancy and almost solemn reserve of this painter. There was a pastel of Prydes' which showed – rather suggested – a squalid room in which a gentleman of 1800, with a flavour of Robert Macaire about him, stood in the full rays of the wine and honey-coloured light of an afternoon sun.

Upon yet another panel was a painting upon silk by Charles Conder, inspired of course, by Watteau, informed by that sad and haunting catching after a fairyland never quite reached, which is the distinctive note of Conder's style, and which might well have served for an illustration to a grotesque fantasy of Heine.

Mrs. Amberley loved this painting. She had a Pater-like faculty of reading into – or from – a picture, something which the artist never thought about at all, and she used to call this little masterpiece "An Ode of Horace in Patch, Powder and Peruque!" She adored these perfectly painted little snuff-box deities who wandered through shadowy mists of amethyst and rouge-de-fer in a fantastic wood.

It is extremely interesting to discover, know of, or to sit at ease in a room which, in its way, is historic, and this is what the Amberleys' guests always felt, and were meant to feel.

In its present form, and with its actual decorations, this celebrated room only dated from some fifteen years back. The Waggon-roof alone remained unaltered from its earlier periods.

The Publishing house of Ince and Amberley had been a bulwark of the Victorian era, and not without some growing celebrity in the earlier Georgian Period.

Lord Byron had spoken well of the young firm once, Rogers was believed to have advanced them money, and when that eminent Cornish pugilist "The Lamorna Cove" wrote his reminiscences they were published by Ince and Amberley, while old Lord Alvanley himself contributed a preface.

From small beginnings came great things. The firm grew and acquired a status, and about this time, or possibly a little later, the dining-room at Bryanstone Square had come into being.

Its walls were not panelled then in delicate green. They were covered with rich plum-coloured paper festooned by roses of high-gilt. In the pictures, with their heavy frames of gold, the dogs and stags of Landseer were let loose, or the sly sleek gipsies of Mr. Frith told rustic fortunes beneath the spreading chestnut trees.

But Browning had dined there – in the later times – an inextinguishable fire just covered with a sprinkling of grey ash. With solemn ritual, Charles Dickens had brewed milk punch in an old bowl of Lowestoft china, still preserved in the drawing-room. The young Robert Cecil, in his early Saturday Review days, had cracked his walnuts and sipped his "pint of port" with little thought of the high destiny to which he should come, and Alfred Tennyson, then Bohemian and unknown, had been allowed to vent that grim philosophy which is the reaction of all imaginative and sensitive natures against the seeming impossibility of success and being understood.

The traditions of Ince and Amberley – its dignified and quiet home was in Hanover Square – had always been preserved.

Its policy, at the same time, had continually altered with the passage of years and the change of the public taste. Yet, so carefully, and indeed so genuinely, had this been accomplished that none of the historic prestige of the business had been lost. It still stood as a bulwark of the old dignified age. A young modern author, whatever his new celebrity, felt that to be published by Ince and Amberley hall-marked him as it were.

Younger firms, greedy of his momentary notoriety, might offer him better terms – and generally did – but Ince and Amberley conferred the Accolade!

He was admitted to the Dining Room.

John Amberley (the Inces had long since disappeared), at fifty was a great publisher, and a charming man of the world. He was one of the personalities of London, carrying out what heredity and natural aptitude had fitted him to do, and was this evening entertaining some literary personages of the day in the famous Dining Room.

The Waggon-roof, which had looked down upon just such gatherings as these for generations, would, if it could have spoken, have discovered no very essential difference between this dinner party and others in the past. True, the walls were differently coloured and pictures which appealed to a different set of artistic conventions were hanging upon them.

The people who were accustomed to meet round the table in 19 – were not dressed as other gatherings had been. There was no huge silver epergne in the centre of that table now. Nor did the Amberley at one end of it display his mastery of ritual carving.

But the talk was the same. Words only were different. The guests' vocabularies were wider and less restrained. It was the music of piano and the pizzicato plucking of strings – there was no pompous organ note, no ore rotundo any more. They all talked of what they had done, were doing, and hoped to do. There was a hurry of the mind, inherent in people of their craft and like a man running, in all of them. The eyes of some of them burned like restless ghosts as they tried to explain themselves, display their own genius, become prophets and acquire honour in the heart of their own country.

Yes! it had always been so!

The brightest and most lucent brains had flashed into winged words and illuminated that long handsome room.

And ever, at the head of the long table, there had been a bland, listening Amberley, catching, tasting and sifting the idea, analysing the constituents of the flash, balancing the brilliant theory against the momentary public taste. A kind, uncreative, managing Amberley! A fair and honest enough Amberley in the main. Serene, enthroned and necessary.

The publisher was a large man, broad in the shoulder and slightly corpulent. There was something Georgian about him – he cultivated it rather, and was delighted when pleated shirts became again fashionable for evening wear. He had a veritable face of the Regency, more especially in profile, sensual, fine, a thought gluttonous and markedly intelligent.

His voice was authoritative but bland, and frequently capable of a sympathetic interest which was almost musical. His love of letters was deep and genuine, his taste catholic and excellent, while many an author found real inspiration and intense pleasure in his personal praise.

This was the cultured and human side of him, and he had another – the shrewd business man of Hanover Square.

He was not, to use the slang of the literary agent, a "knifer." He paid die market price without being generous and he was perfectly honest in all his dealings.

But his business in life was to sell books, and he permitted himself no experiments in failure. A writer – whether he produced good work or popular trash – must generally have his definite market and his more or less assured position, before Ince and Amberley would take him up.

It was distinctly something for a member of the upper rank and files to say in the course of conversation, "Ince and Amberley are doing my new book, you know."

To-night Amberley, as he sat at the head of his table towards the close of dinner, was in high good humour, and very pleasant with himself and his guests.

The ladies had not yet gone away, coffee was being served at the table, and almost every one was smoking a cigarette. The party was quite a small one. There were only five guests, who, with Mr. and Mrs. Amberley and their only daughter Muriel, made up eight people in all. There was nothing ceremonious about it, and, though three of the guests were well known in the literary world, none of these were great, while the remaining couple were merely promising beginners.

There was, therefore, considerable animation and gaiety round this hospitable table, with its squat candlesticks, of dark-green Serpentine and silver, the topaz-coloured shades, its gleaming surface of dark mahogany (Mrs. Amberley had eagerly adopted the new habit of having no white table-cloth), its really interesting old silver, and the square mats of pure white Egyptian linen in front of each person.

In age, with the exception of Mr. Amberley and his wife, every one was young, while both host and hostess showed in perfection that modern grace of perfect correspondence with environment which seems to have quite banished the evidences of time's progress among the folk of to-day who know every one, appreciate everything and are extremely well-to-do.

On Amberley's right hand sat Mrs. Herbert Toftrees, while her husband was at the other end of the table at the right hand of his hostess – Gilbert Lothian, the guest of the evening, being on Mrs. Amberley's left.

Mr. and Mrs. Toftrees were novelists whose combined names were household words all over England. Their books were signed by both of them – "Enid and Herbert Toftrees" and they were quite at the head of their own peculiar line of business. They knew exactly what they were doing – "selling bacon" they called it to their intimate friends – and were two of the most successful trades-people in London. Unlike other eminent purveyors of literary trash they were far too clever not to know that neither of them had a trace of the real fire, and if their constant and cynical disclaimer of any real talent sometimes seemed to betray a hidden sore, it was at least admirably truthful.

They were shallow, clever, amusing people whom it was always pleasant to meet. They entertained a good deal and the majority of their guests were literary men and women of talent who fluttered like moths round the candle of their success. The talented writers who ate their dinners found a bitter joy in cursing a public taste which provided the Toftrees with several thousands a year, but they returned again and again, in the effort to find out how it was done.

They also had visions of just such another delightful house in Lancaster Gate, an automobile identical in its horse-power and appointments, and were certain that if they could only learn the recipe and trick, wrest the magic formula from these wizards of the typewriter, all these things might be theirs also!

The Herbert Toftrees themselves always appeared – in the frankest and kindest way – to be in thorough sympathy with such aspirations. Their candour was almost effusive. "Any one can do what we do" was their attitude. Herbert Toftrees himself, a young man with a rather carefully-cultivated, elderly manner, was particularly impressive. He had a deep voice and slow enunciation, which, when he was upon his own hearthrug almost convinced himself.

"There is absolutely no reason," he would say, in tones which carried absolute conviction to his hearer at the moment, "why you shouldn't be making fifteen hundred a year in six months."

But that was as far as it went. That was the voice of the genial host dispensing wines, entrées and advice, easy upon his own hearth, the centre of the one picture where he was certain of supremacy.

But let eager and hungry genius call next day for definite particulars, instructions as to the preparations of a "popular" plot, hints as to the shop-girl's taste in heroines, – with hopes of introductory letters to the great firms who buy serials – and the greyest of grey dawns succeeded the rosy-coloured night.

It was all vague and cloudy now. General principles were alone vouchsafed – indeed who shall blame the tradesman for an adroit refusal to give away the secrets of the shop?

Genius retired – it happened over and over again – cursing successful mediocrity for its evasive cleverness, and with a deep hidden shame that it should have stooped so low, and so ineffectually! .. "That's very true. What Toftrees says is absolutely true," Mr. Amberley said genially, turning to young Dickson Ingworth, who was sitting by his daughter Muriel.

He nodded to the eager youth with a little private encouragement and hint of understanding which was very flattering. It was as who should say, "Here you are at my house. For the first time you have been admitted to the Dining Room. I have taken you up, I am going to publish a book of yours and see what you are made of. Gather honey while you may, young Dickson Ingworth!"

Ingworth blushed slightly as the great man's encouraging admonitions fell upon him. He was not down from Oxford more than a year. He had written very little, Gilbert Lothian was backing him and introducing him to literary circles in town, he was abnormally conscious of his own good fortune, all nervous anxiety to be adequate – all ears.

"Yes, sir," he said, with the pleasant boyish deference of an undergraduate to the Provost of his college – it sat gracefully upon his youth and was gracefully said.

Then he looked reverentially at Toftrees and waited to hear more.

Herbert Toftrees' face was large and clean shaven. His sleek hair was smoothly brushed over a somewhat protruding forehead. There was the coarse determined vigour about his brow that the bull-dog jaw is supposed to indicate in another type of face, and the eyes below were grey and steadfast. Toftrees stared at people with tremendous gravity. Only those who realised the shrewd emptiness behind them were able to discern what some one had once called their flickering "R.S.V.P. expression" – that latent hope that his vis-à-vis might not be finding him out after all!

"I mean it," Toftrees said in his resonant, and yet quiet voice. "There really is no reason, Mr. Ingworth, why you should not be making an income of at least eight or nine hundred a year in twelve months' time."

"Herbert has helped such a lot of boys," said Mrs. Toftrees, confidentially, to her host, although there was a slight weariness in her voice, the suggestion of a set phrase. "But who is Mr. Dickson Ingworth? What has he done? – he is quite good-looking, don't you think?"

"Oh, a boy, a mere boy!" the big red-faced publisher purred in an undertone. "Lothian brought him to me first in Hanover Square. In fact, Lothian asked if he might bring him here to-night. We are doing a little book of his – the first novel he will have had published."

Mrs. Toftrees pricked up her ears, so to say. She was really the business head of the Toftrees combination. Her husband did the ornamental part and provided the red-hot plots, but it was she who had invented and carried out the "note," and it was she who supervised the contracts. As Mr. Amberley was well aware, what this keen, pretty and well-dressed little woman didn't know about publishing was worth nothing whatever.

"Oh, really," she said, in genuine surprise. "Rather unusual for you, isn't it? Is the boy a genius then?"

Amberley shook his head. He hated everything the worthy Toftrees wrote – he had never been able to read more than ten lines of any of the half-dozen books he had published for them. But the Hanover Square side of him had a vast respect for the large sums the couple charmed from the pockets of the public no less than the handsome percentage they put into his own. And a confidential word on business matters with a pretty and pleasant little woman was not without allurement even under the Waggon-roof itself.

"Not at all. Not at all," he murmured into a pretty ear. "We are not paying the lad any advance upon royalties!" He laughed a well-fed laugh. "Ince and Amberley's list," he continued, "is accepted for itself!"

Mrs. Toftrees smiled back at him. "Of course," she murmured. "But I wasn't thinking of the financial side of it. Why? .. why are you departing from your usual traditions and throwing the shadow of your cloak over this fortunate boy? – if I may ask, of course!"

"Well," Amberley answered, and her keen ear detected – or thought that she detected – a slight reluctance in his voice… "Well, Lothian brought him to me, you know."

Mrs. Toftrees' face changed and Amberley saw it.

She was looking down the table to where Lothian was sitting. Her face was a little flushed, and the expression upon it – though not allowed to be explicit – was by no means agreeable. "Lothian's work is very wonderful," she said – and there was a question in her voice " – you think so, Mr. Amberley?"

Bryanstone Square, the Dining Room, asserted itself. Truth to tell, Amberley felt a little uncomfortable and displeased with himself. The fun of the dinner table – the cigarette moment – had rather escaped him. He had got young people round him to-night. He wanted them to be jolly. He had meant to be a good host, to forget his dignities, to unbend and be jolly with them – this fiction-mongering woman was becoming annoying.

"I certainly do, Mrs. Toftrees," he replied, with dignity, and a distinct tone of reproof in his voice.

Mrs. Toftrees, the cool tradeswoman, gave the great man a soothing smile of complete understanding and agreement.

Mr. Amberley turned to a girl upon his left who had been taken in by Dickson Ingworth and who had been carrying on a laughing conversation with him during dinner.

She was a pretty girl, a friend of his daughter Muriel. He liked pretty girls, and he smiled half paternally, half gallantly at her.

"Won't you have another cigarette, Miss Wallace?" he said, pushing a silver box towards her. "They are supposed to be rather wonderful. My cousin Eustace Amberley is in the Egyptian Army and an aide-de-camp to the Khedive. The Khedive receives the officers every month and every one takes away a box of five hundred when they leave the palace – His Highness' own peculiar brand. These are some of them, which Eustace sent me."