Thorne Guy
The Drunkard

Ingworth opened the door of the drawing room very quietly. Music had begun, and as he and Toftrees entered, Muriel Amberley was already half way through one of the preludes of Chopin.

Mrs. Amberley and Mrs. Toftrees were sitting close together and carrying on a vigorous, whispered conversation, despite the music. Mr. Amberley was by himself in a big arm-chair near the piano, and Lothian sat upon a settee of blue linen with Rita Wallace.

As he sank into a chair Toftrees glanced at Lothian.

The poet's face was unpleasant. When he had been talking to Amberley it had lighted up and had more than a hint of fineness. Now it was heavy again, veiled and coarsened. Lothian's head was nodding in time to the music. One well-shaped but rather red hand moved restlessly upon his knee. The man was struggling – Toftrees was certain of it – to appear as if the music was giving him intense pleasure. He was thinking about himself and how he looked to the other people in the room.

Drip, drip, drip! – it was the sad, graceful prelude in which the fall of rain is supposed to be suggested, the hot steady rain of the Mediterranean which had fallen at Majorca ever so many years ago and was falling now in sound, though he that caught its beauty was long since dust. Drip, drip! – and then the soft repetition which announced that the delicate and lovely vision had reached its close, that the august grey harmonies were over.

For a moment, there was silence in the drawing room.

Muriel's white fingers rested on the keys of the piano, the candles threw their light upwards upon the enigmatic maiden face. Her father sighed quietly – happily also as he looked at her – and the low buzz of Mrs. Amberley's and Mrs. Toftrees' talk became much more distinct.

Suddenly Gilbert Lothian jumped up from the settee. He hurried to the piano, his face flushed, his eyes liquid and bright.

It was consciously and theatrically done, an exaggeration of his bow in the dining room – not the right thing in the very least!

"Oh, thank you! Thank you!" he said in a high, fervent voice. "How wonderful that is! And you played it as Crouchmann plays it – the only interpretation! I know him quite well. We had supper together the other night after his concert, and he told me – no, that won't interest you. I'll tell you another time, remind me! Now, do play something else!"

He fumbled with the music upon the piano with tremulous and unsteady hands.

"Ah! here we are!" he cried, and there was an insistent note of familiarity in his voice. "The book of Valses! You know the twelfth of course? Tempo giusto! It goes like this .."

He began to hum, quite musically, and to wave his hands.

Muriel Amberley glanced quickly at her father and there was distress in her eyes.

Amberley was standing by the piano in a moment. He seemed very much master of himself, serene and dominant, by the side of Gilbert Lothian. His face was coldly civil and there was disgust in his eyes.

"I don't think my daughter will play any more, Mr. Lothian," he said.

An ugly look flashed out upon the poet's face, suspicion and realisation showed there for a second and passed.

He became nervous, embarrassed, almost pitiably apologetic. The savoir-faire which would have helped some men to take the rebuke entirely deserted him. There was something assiduous, almost vulgar, a frightened acceptance of the lash indeed, which immensely accentuated the sudden défaillance and break-down.

In the big drawing room no one spoke at all.

Then there was a sudden movement and stir. Gilbert Lothian was saying good-night.

He had remembered that he really had some work to do before going to bed, some letters to write, as a matter of fact. He was shaking hands with every one.

"I do hope that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you play some more Chopin before long, Miss Amberley! Thank you so much Mrs. Amberley – I'm going to write a poem about your beautiful Dining Room. I suppose we shall meet at the Authors' Club dinner on Saturday, Mr. Toftrees? – so interested to have met you at last."

.. The people in the drawing room heard him chattering vivaciously to Mr. Amberley, who had accompanied his departing guest into the hall.

No one said a single word. They heard the front door close, and the steps of the master of the house as he returned to them. They were all waiting.

When Amberley came in he made a courtly attempt at ignoring what had just occurred. The calm surface of the evening had been rudely disturbed – yes! For once even an Amberley party had gone wrong – there was to be no fun from this meeting of young folk to-night.

But it was Mrs. Amberley who spoke. She really could not help it. Mrs. Toftrees had been telling her of various rumours concerning Gilbert Lothian some time before the episode at the piano, and with all her tolerance Mrs. Amberley was thoroughly angry.

That such a thing should have happened in her house, before Muriel and her girl friend – oh! it was unthinkable!

"So Mr. Gilbert Lothian has gone," she said with considerable emphasis.

"Yes, dear," Mr. Amberley answered as he sat down again, willing enough that nothing more should be said.

But it was not to be so.

"We can never have him here again," said the angry lady.

Amberley shook his head. "Very unfortunate, extremely unfortunate," he murmured.

"I cannot understand it. Such a thing has never happened here before. Now I understand why Mr. Lothian hides himself in the country and never goes about. Il y avait raison!"

"I don't say that genius is any excuse for this sort of thing," Amberley replied uneasily, "and Lothian has genius – but one must take more than one thing into consideration .."

He paused, not quite knowing how to continue the sentence, and genuinely sorry and upset. His glance fell upon Herbert Toftrees, and he had a sort of feeling that the novelist might help him out.

"Don't you think so, Toftrees?" he asked.

The novelist surveyed the room with his steady grey eyes, marshalling his hearers as it were.

"But let us put his talent aside," he said. "Think of him as an ordinary person in our own rank of life – Mrs. Amberley's guest. Certainly he could not have taken anything here to have made him in the strange state he is in. Surely he must have known that he was not fit to come to a decent house."

"I shall give his poems away," Muriel Amberley said with a little shudder. "I can never read them again. And I did love them so! I wish you hadn't asked Mr. Lothian to come here, Father."

"There is one consolation," said Mrs. Toftrees in a hard voice; "the man must be realising what he has done. He was not too far gone for that!"

A new voice broke into the talk. It came from young Dickson Ingworth who had slid into the seat by Rita Wallace when Lothian went to the piano.

He blushed and stammered as he spoke, but there was a fine loyalty in his voice.

"It seems rather dreadful, Mrs. Amberley," he said, quite thinking that he was committing literary suicide as he did so. "It is dreadful of course. But Gilbert is such a fine chap when he's – when he's, all right! You can't think! And then, 'Surgit Amari'! Don't let's forget he wrote 'The Loom' – 'Delicate Threads! O fairest in life's tissue,'" he quoted from the celebrated verse.

Then Rita Wallace spoke. "He is great," she said. "He is manifesting himself in his own way. That is all. To me, at any rate, the meeting with Mr. Lothian has been wonderful."

Mrs. Toftrees stared with undisguised dislike of such assertions on the part of a young girl.

But Mrs. Amberley, always kind and generous-hearted, had been pleased and touched by Dickson Ingworth's defence of his friend and master. She quite realised what the lad stood to lose by doing it, and what courage on his part it showed. And when Rita Wallace chimed in, Mrs. Amberley dismissed the whole occurrence from her mind as she beamed benevolently at the two young people on the sofa.

"Let's forget all about it," she said. "Mrs. Toftrees, help me to make my husband sing. He can only sing one song but he sings it excellently – 'In cellar cool' – just the thing for a hot night. Joseph! do as I tell you!"

The little group of people rearranged themselves, as Muriel sat down at the piano to accompany her father.

"Le metier de poëte laisse a désirer," Toftrees murmured to his wife with a sneer which almost disguised the atrocious accent of his French.

CHAPTER III
SHAME IN "THE ROARING GALLANT TOWN"

 
– "Is it for this I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?"
 
 
"'Très volontiers' repartit le démon. 'Vous aimez
les tableaux changeants; je veux vous contenter.'"
 

– Le Sage.

When the door of the house had closed after him, and with Mr. Amberley's courteous but grave good-night ringing in his ears, Gilbert Lothian walked briskly away across the Square.

It was very hot. The July sun, that tempest of fire which had passed over the town during the day, had sucked up all the sweetness from the air and it was sickly, like air under a blanket which has been breathed many times. As it often is in July, London had been delightfully fresh at dawn, when the country waggons were bringing the sweet-peas and the roses to market, and although his mind had not been fresh as the sun rose over St. James' where he was staying, Lothian had enjoyed the early morning from the window of his bedroom. It had been clear and scentless, like a field with the dew upon it, in the country from which he had come five days ago.

Now his mind was like a field in the full sun of noon, parched and full of hot odours.

He was perfectly aware that he had made a faux pas. How far it went, whether he was not exaggerating it, he did not know. The semi-intoxicated person – more especially when speech and gait are more or less normal, as in his case – is quite incapable of gauging the impression he makes on others. In lax and tolerant circles where no outward indication is given him of his state, he goes on his way pleased and confident that he has made an excellent impression, sure that no one has found him out.

But his cunning and self-congratulation quite desert him when he is openly snubbed or reproved. "Was I very far gone?" he afterwards asks some confidential friend who may have been present at his discomfiture. And whatever form the answer may take, the drunkard is abnormally interested in all the details of the event. Born of the toxic influences in his blood, there is a gaunt and greedy vanity which insists upon the whole scene being re-enacted and commented upon.

Lothian had no one to tell him how far he had gone, precisely what impression he had made upon his hosts and their guests. He felt with a sense of injury that Dickson Ingworth ought to have come away with him. The young man owed so much to him in the literary life! It was a treachery not to have come away with him.

As he got into a cab and told the man to drive him as far as Piccadilly Circus, he was still pursuing this train of thought. He had taken Ingworth to the Amberleys', and now the cub was sitting in the drawing room there, with those charming girls! quite happy and at ease. He, Gilbert Lothian himself! was out of it all, shut out from that gracious house and those cultured people whom he had been so glad to meet.

.. Again he heard the soft closing of the big front door behind him, and his skin grew hot at the thought. The remembrance of Amberley's quiet courtesy, but entire change of manner in the hall, was horrible. He felt as if he had been whipped. The dread of a slight, the fear of a quarrel, which is a marked symptom of the alcoholic – is indeed his torment and curse through life – was heavy upon Lothian now.

The sense of impotence was sickening. What a weak fool he had been to break down and fly like that. To run away! What faltering and trembling incapacity for self-assertion he had shown. He had felt uneasy with the very servant who gave him his opera hat!

And what had he done after all? Very little, surely.

That prelude of Chopin always appealed to him strongly. He had written about it; Crouchmann had played it privately for him and pointed out new beauties. Certainly he had only met Miss Amberley for the first time that night and he may have been a little over-excited and effusive. His thoughts – a poet's thoughts after all – had come too quickly for ordered expression. He was too Celtic in manner, too artistic for these staid cold folk.

He tried to depreciate the Amberleys in his thoughts. Amberley was only a glorified trades-man after all! Lothian tried to call up within him that bitter joy which comes from despising that which we really respect or desire. "Yes! damn the fellow! He lived on poets and men of letters – privileged people, the salt of the earth, the real forces of life!"

And yet he ought to have stayed on and corrected his mistake. He had made himself ridiculous in front of four women – he didn't care about the men so much – and that was horribly galling.

As the cab swung down Regent Street, Lothian was sure that if his nerves had not weakened for a moment he would never have given himself away. It was, he felt, very unfortunate. He knew, as he could not help knowing, that not only had he a mind and power of a rare, high quality, but that he possessed great personal charm. What he did not realise was how utterly all these things fled from him when he was not quite sober. Certainly at this moment he was unable to comprehend it in the slightest. Realisation would come later, at the inevitable punishment hour.

He over-paid his cabman absurdly. The man's quick and eager deference pleased him. He was incapable of any sense of proportion, and he felt somehow or other reinstated in his own opinion by this trivial and bought servility.

He looked at his watch. It was not very much after ten, and he became conscious of how ridiculously early he had fled from the Amberleys'. But as he stood on the pavement – in the very centre of the pleasure-web of London with its roar and glare – he pushed such thoughts resolutely from him and turned into a luxurious "lounge," celebrated among fast youths and pleasure-seekers, known by an affectionate nick-name at the Universities, in every regimental mess or naval ward-room in Great Britain.

As he went down a carpeted passage he saw himself in the long mirror that lined it. He looked quite himself, well-dressed, prosperous, his face under full control and just like any other smart man about town.

At this hour, there were not many people in the place. It would become crowded and noisy later on.

The white and green tiles of the walls gleamed softly in the shaded lights, electric fans and a huge block of ice upon a pedestal kept the air cool. There were palms which refreshed the eye and upon the porphyry counter at which he was served there was a mass of mauve hydrangea in a copper bowl.

He drank a whiskey and soda very quickly – that was to remove the marked physical exhaustion which had begun to creep over him – ordered another and lit a cigarette.

His nerves responded with magical quickness to the spirit. All day long he had been feeding them with the accustomed poison. The strain of the last half hour had used up more vitality than he had been aware.

For the second time that night – a night so infinitely more eventful than he knew – he became master of himself, calm, happy, even, in the sense of power returned, and complete correspondence with his environment.

The barmaid who served him was – like most of these Slaves of the Still in this part of London – an extremely handsome girl. Her face was painted – all these girls paint their faces – but it was done merely to conceal the pallor and ravages wrought upon it by a hard and feverish life. Lothian felt an immense pity for her, symbolic as she was of all the others, and the few remarks he made were uttered with an instinctive deference and courtesy.

He had been married seven years before this time, and had at once retired into the country with his wife where, by slow degrees, he had felt his way to the work which had at last made him celebrated. But in the past he had known the under side of London well and had chosen it deliberately as his milieu.

It had in no way been forced upon him. Struggling journalist and author as he was, good houses had been open to him, for he was a member of a well-known family and had made many friends at Oxford.

But the other life was so much easier! If its pleasures were coarse, they were hot and strong! For years, as many a poet has done before him, he lived a bad life, tolerant of vice in himself and others, kind, generous often, but tossed and worn by his passions – rivetting the chains link by link upon his soul – until he had met and married Mary.

And no one knew better than he the horrors of life behind the counters of a bar.

He turned away, as two fresh-faced lads came noisily up to the counter, turned away with a sigh of pity. He was quite unconscious – though he would have been interested at the psychological fact – that the girl had wondered at his manner and thought him affected and dull.

She would much rather have been complimented and chaffed. She understood that. Life is full of anodynes. Mercifully enough the rank and file of the oppressed are not too frequently conscious of their miseries. There is a half-truth in the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss, and if fettered limbs go lame, the chains are not always clanking.

The poor barmaid went to bed that night in an excellent humour, for the two lads Lothian had seen brought her some pairs of gloves. And if she had known of Lothian's pity she would have resented it bitterly.

"Like the fellow's cheek," she would have said.

Lothian, as he believed, had absolutely recovered his own normal personality. He admitted now, as he left the "lounge," that he had not been his true self at the Amberleys'.

"At this moment, as I stand here," he said to himself, "'I am the Captain of my Soul,'" not in the least understanding that when he spoke of his own "soul" he meant nothing more than his five senses.

The man thought he was normal. He was not. On the morrow, when partially recovering from the excesses of to-day, there was a possibility that he might become normal – for a brief period, and until he began to drink again.

For him to become really himself, perfectly clean from the stigmata of the inebriate mind, would have taken him at least six months of total abstinence from alcohol.

Lothian's health, though impaired, had by no means broken down.

A strong constitution, immense vitality, had preserved it, up to this point. At this period, though a poisoned man, an alcoholised body, there were frequent times of absolute normality – when he was, for certain definite spaces of time by the clock, exactly as he would have been had he never become a slave to alcohol at all.

As he stood upon the pavement of Piccadilly Circus, he felt and believed that such a time had come now.

He was mistaken. All that was happening was that there was a temporary lull in the ebb and flow of alcohol in his veins. The brain cells were charged up to a certain point with poison. At this point they gave a false impression of security.

It must be remembered, and it cannot be too strongly insisted on, that the mental processes of the inebriate are definite, and are induced.

The ordinary person says of an inebriate simply that "he is a drunkard" or "he drinks." Whether he or she says it with sympathetic sorrow, or abhorrence, the bald statement rarely leads to any further train of thought.

It is very difficult for the ordinary person to realise that the mental processes are sui generis a Kingdom – though with a debased coinage – which requires considerable experience before it can always be recognised from the ring of true metal.

Alcoholism so changes the mental life of any one that it results in an ego which has special external and internal characteristics.

And so, in order to appreciate fully this history of Gilbert Lothian – to note the difference between the man as he was known and as he really was – it must always be kept in mind under what influence he moves through life, and that his steps have strayed into a dreadful kingdom unknown and unrealised by happier men.

He had passed out of one great Palace of Drink.

Had he been as he supposed himself to be, he would have sought rest at once. He would have hurried joyously from temptation in this freedom from his chains.

Instead of that, the question he asked himself was, "What shall I do now?"

The glutton crams himself at certain stated periods. But when repletion comes he stops eating. The habit is rhythmic and periodically certain.

But the Drunkard – his far more sorrowful and lamentable brother – has not even this half-saving grace. In common with the inordinate smoker – whose harm is physical and not mental – the inebriate drinks as long as he is able to, until he is incapacitated. "Where shall I go now?"

If God does indeed give human souls to His good angels, as gardens to weed and tend, that thought must have brought tears of pity to the eyes of the august beings who were battling for Gilbert Lothian.

Their hour was not yet.

They were to see the temple of the Paraclete fall into greater ruin and disaster than ever before. The splendid spires and pinnacles, the whole serene beauty of soul and body which had made this Temple a high landmark when God first built it, were crumbling to decay.

Deep down among the strong foundations the enemy was at work. The spire – the "Central-one" – which sprang up towards Heaven was deeply undermined. Still – save to the eyes of experts – its glory rose unimpaired. But it was but a lovely shell with no longer any grip upon its base of weakened Will. And the bells in the wind-swept height of the Tower no longer rang truly. On red dawns or on pearl-grey evenings the message they sent over the country-side was beginning to be false. There was no peace when they tolled the Angelus.

In oriel or great rose-window the colour of the painted glass was growing dim. The clear colour was fading, though here and there it was shot with baleful fire which the Artist had never painted there, – like the blood-shot eyes of the man who drinks.

A miasmic mist had crept into the noble spaces of the aisles. The vast supporting pillars grew insubstantial and seemed to tremble as the vapour eddied round them. A black veil was quickly falling before the Figure above the Altar, and the seven dim lamps of the Sanctuary burned with green and flickering light.

The bells of a Great Mind's Message, which had been cast with so much silver in them, rang an increasing dissonance. The trumpets of the organ echoed with a harsh note in the far clerestory; the flutes were false, the dolce stop no longer sweet. The great pipes of the pedal organ muttered and stammered in their massive voices, as if dark advisers whispered in the ear of the musician who controlled them.

Lothian had passed from one great Palace of Drink. "Where shall I go?" he asked himself again, and immediately his eye fell upon another, the brilliant illumination upon the façade of a well-known "Theatre of Varieties."

His hot eye-balls drank in the flaring signs, and telegraphed both an impulse and a memory to his brain.

"Yes!" he said. "I will revisit the 'Kingdom.' There is still two thirds of an hour before the performance will be over. How well I used to know it! What a nightly haunt it used to be. Surely, even now, there will be some people I know there? .. I'll go in and see!"

As Lothian turned in at the principal doors of the most celebrated Music Hall in the world, his pulses began to quicken.

– The huge foyer, the purple carpets, with their wreaths of laurel in a purple which was darker yet, the gleaming marble stairway, with its wide and noble sweep, how familiar all this dignified splendour was, he thought as he entered the second Palace of Drink which flung wide its doors to him this night.

A palace of drink and lust, vast and beautiful! for those who brought poisoned blood and vicious desires within its portals! Here, banished from the pagan groves and the sunlit temples of their ancient glory – banished also from the German pine-woods where Heine saw them in pallid life under the full moon – Venus, Bacchus and Silenus held their unholy court.

For all the world – save only for a few wise men to whom they were but symbols – Venus and Bacchus were deities once.

When the Acropolis cut into the blue sky of Hellas with its white splendour these were the chiefest to whom men prayed, and they ruled the lives of all.

And, day by day, new temples rise in their honour. Once they were worshipped with blythe body and blinded soul. Now the tired body and the besotted brain alone pay them reverence. But great are their temples still.

Such were the thoughts of Lothian – Lothian the Christian poet – and he was pleased that they should come to him.

It showed how detached he was, what real command he had of himself. In the old wild days, before his marriage and celebrity, he had come to this place, and other places like it, to seize greedily upon pleasure, as a monkey seizes upon a nut. He came to survey it all now, to revisit the feverish theatre of his young follies with a bland Olympian attitude.

The poison was flattering him now, placing him upon a swaying pedestal for a moment. He was sucking in the best honey that worthless withering flowers could exude, and it was hot and sweet upon his tongue.

– Were any of the old set there after all? He hoped so. Not conscious of himself as a rule, without a trace of "side" and detesting ostentation or any display of his fame, he wanted to show off now. He wanted to console himself for his rebuff at the house in Bryanstone Square. Vulgar and envious adulation, interested praise from those who were still in the pit of obscurity from which his finer brain had helped him to escape, would be perfectly adequate to-night.

After the episode at the Amberleys', coarse flattery heaped on with a spade would be as ice in the desert.

And he found what he desired.

He passed slowly through the promenade, towards the door which led to the stalls, and the great lounge where, if anywhere, he would find people who knew him and whom he knew.

In a slowly-moving tide, like a weed-clogged wave, the women of the town ebbed and flowed from horn to horn of the moon-shaped crescent where they walk. Against the background of sea-purple and white, their dresses and the nodding plumes in their great hats moved languorously. Sickly perfumes, as from the fan of an odalisque, swept over them.

Many beautiful painted masks floated through the scented aisle of the theatre, as they had floated up and down the bronze corridors of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus in the far off days of St. Paul. A mourning thrill shivered up from the violins of the orchestra below; the 'cellos made their plaint, the cymbals rattled, the kettledrums spoke with deep vibrating voices.

.. So had the sistra clanked and droned in the old temple of bronze and silver before the altars of Artemis, – the old music, the eternal faces, ever the same!

A chill came to Lothian as he passed among these "estranged sad spectres of the night." He thought suddenly of his pure and gracious wife, alone in their little house in the country, he thought of the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed. For a moment or two his mind was like a darkened room in which a magic lantern is being operated and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. And then he was in the big lounge.

Yes, some of them were there! – a little older, perhaps, to his now much more critical eye, somewhat more bloated and coarsened, but the same still.

"Good heavens!" said a huge man with a blood red face, startling in its menace, like a bully looking into an empty room, "Why, here's old Lothian! Where in the world have you sprung from, my dear boy?"

Lothian's face lit up with pleasure and recognition. The big evil-faced man was Paradil, the painter of pastels, a wayward drunken creature who never had money in his pocket, but that he gave it away to every one. He was a man spoken of as a genius by those who knew. His rare pictures fetched large prices, but he hardly ever worked. He was soaked, dissolved and pickled in brandy.

A little elderly man like a diseased doll, came up and began to twitter. He was the husband of a famous dancer who performed at the theatre, a wit in his way, an adroit manager of his wife's affairs with other men, a man with a mind as hollow and bitter as a dried lemon.

He was a well-known figure in upper Bohemia. His name was constantly mentioned in the newspapers as an entrepreneur of all sorts of things, a popular, evil little man.

"Ah, Lothian," he said, as one or two other people came up and some one gave a copious order for drinks, "still alternating between the prayer book and the decanter? I must congratulate you on 'Surgit Amari.' I read it, and it made me green with envy to think how many thousand copies you had sold of it."

"You've kept the colour, Edgar," he said, looking into the little creature's face, but the words stabbed through him, nevertheless. How true they were – superficially – how they expressed – and must express – the view of his old disreputable companions. They envied him his cunning – as they thought it – they would have given their ears to have possessed the same power of profitable hypocrisy – as they thought it. Meanwhile they spoke virtuously to each other about him. "Gilbert Lothian the author of 'Surgit Amari'! – it would make a cat laugh!"

One can't throw off one's past like a dirty shirt – Gilbert began to wish he had not come here.

"I ought never to be seen in these places," he thought, forgetting that it was only the sting of the little man's malice that provoked the truth.

But Paradil, kindly Paradil with the bully's face and a heart bursting with dropsical good nature, speedily intervened.

Other men joined the circle; "rounds of drinks" were paid for by each person according to the ritual of such an occasion as this.