Thorne Guy
The Drunkard

– "I am most interested" ..

"Well then, what we want to do is to root out drunkenness by eliminating inebriates from society by a process of Artificial Selection. It is within the power of science to evolve a sober race. We must forbid inebriates to have children and make it penal for them to do so."

Medley started. "Forbid them to marry?" he asked.

"It would be futile. Drunkenness often develops after marriage. There is only one way – by preventing Drunkards from reproducing their like – by forbidding the procreation of children by them. If drunkards were taken before magistrates sitting in secret session, and, on conviction, were warned that the procreation of children would subject them to this or that penalty, then the birthrate of drunkards would certainly fall immensely."

"But innumerable drunkards would inevitably escape the meshes of the law."

"Yes. But that is an argument against all laws. And this law would be more perfect in its operation than any other, for if the drunken father evaded it in one generation, the drunken son would be taken in the next."

The Priest said nothing for a moment. The latent distrust and dislike of science which is an inherent part of the life and training of so many Priests, was blazing up in him with a fury of antagonism. What impious interference with the laws of God was this? It seemed a profanation, horrible!

Like all good Christians of his temper of mind, he was quite unable to realise that God might be choosing to work in this way, and by the human hands of men. He had not the slightest conception of the great truth that every new discovery of Science and each fresh extension of its operations is not in the least antagonistic to Christianity when surveyed by the clear, unbiassed mind.

Mr. Medley was a dog-lover. He was a member of the Kennel-Club, and sent dogs to shows. He knew that, in order to breed a long-tailed variety of dogs, it would be ridiculous to preserve carefully all the short-tailed individuals and pull vigorously at their tails. He exercised the privilege of Artificial Selection carefully enough in his own kennels, but the mere proposal that such a thing should be done in the case of human beings seemed impious to him.

Dr. Morton Sims was also incapable of realising that his scheme for the betterment of the race was perfectly in accordance with the Christian Philosophy.

But Morton Sims was not a professing Christian and was not concerned with the Christian aspect. Mr. Medley was, and although one of his favourite hymns began, "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," he was really chilled to the bone for a minute at the words of the Scientist. He remained silent for a moment or so.

"But that seems to me quite horrible," he said, at length. "It is opposed to the best instincts of human nature – as horrible as Malthusianism, as horrible and as impracticable."

His expression as he looked at his guest was wistful. "I don't want to be discourteous," it seemed to say, "but this is really my thought."

"Perhaps," the other answered with a half-sigh. He was well used to encounter just such a voice, just such a shocked countenance as that of his host – "But by 'best instincts' people often mean strong prejudices. Our scheme is undoubtedly Malthusian. I am no believer in Malthusianism as a check to what is called 'over-population.' That does seem to me immoral. Nature requires no help in that regard. But Inebriety is an evil the extent of which no one but an expert can possibly measure. The ordinary man simply doesn't know! But supposing I admit what you say. Let us agree that my scheme is horrible, that in a sense it is immoral – or a-moral – that it is possibly impracticable.

"The alternative is more horrible and more immoral still. There is absolutely no choice between Temperance Reform, by the abolition of drink, and Temperance Reform by the abolition of the drunkard. An ill thing is not rendered worse by being bravely confronted. An unavoidable evil is not made more evil by being turned to good account. It rests with us to extract what good we can from the evil. Horrible? Immoral? Perhaps; but we are confronted by two horrors and two immoralities, and we are compelled to make a choice. Which is best; to live safe because strong, or to tremble behind fortifications; to be temperate by Nature or sober by Law?"

.. They stood in the quiet sunlit library, with its placid books and pictures irradiated by the light of approaching noon.

The slim, bearded man in his grey suit, faced the dry, elderly clergyman. His voice rang with challenge, his whole personality was redolent of ardour, conviction, an aroma of the War he spent his life in waging far away from this quiet room of books.

For years, this had been Medley's home. Each night, with his Horace and his pipe, he spent the happy, sober hours between dinner and bedtime here. His sermons were written on the old oak table. Over the high carved marble of the mantel the engraving of Our Lord knocking at the weed-grown door of a human heart, had looked down upon all his familiar, quiet evenings. In summer the long windows were open and the moonlight washed the lawns with silver, and the shadows of the trees seemed like pieces of black velvet nailed to the grass.

In winter the piled logs glowed upon the hearth and the bitter winds from the Marshes, sang like a flight of arrows round the house.

What was this that had come into the library, what new disturbing, insistent element? The Rector brought no such atmosphere into the house when he arrived. He would sip his coffee and smoke his pipe and linger for a gracious moment with the Singer of Mantua, or dispute about the true birthplace of him who sent Odysseus sailing over wine-coloured and enchanted seas.

An insistent voice seemed to be calling to the clergyman – "Awake from your slumber – your long slumber! Hear the words of Truth!"

He said nothing. His whole face showed reluctance, bewilderment, misease.

The far keener intelligence of the other noted it at once. The mind of the Medico-Psychologist appreciated the episode at its exact value. He had troubled a still pool, and to no good purpose. Words of his – even if they carried an uneasy conviction – would never rouse this man to action. Let it be so! Why waste time? The clergyman was a delightful survival, a "rare Bird" still!

"Well, that is my theory, at any rate, since you asked for it," Morton Sims said, the urgency and excitement quite gone from his voice. "And now, some more of the village, please!"

Mr. Medley smiled cheerfully. He became suddenly conscious of the light and comfortable morning again. He felt his feet upon the carpet, he was in a place that he knew.

"We'll go through the wicket-gate in the south wall," he said, with alacrity. "It's our nearest way, and there is a good view of the Manor House to be got from there. It's a fine old place, empty for most of the year, but always full for the shooting. Sir Ambrose McKee has it."

"The whiskey man?"

"Yes. The great distiller," Medley answered nervously – most anxious to sheer off from any further controversial subjects.

They went out into the village.

The old red-brick manor house was surveyed from a distance, and Morton Sims remarked absently upon its picturesqueness. His mind was occupied with other and far alien thoughts.

Then they went down the white dusty road – the bordering hedges were all pilm-powdered for there had been no rain for many days – to the centre of the village.

Four roads met there, East, South, West and North, and it was known to the village as "The Cross." On one side of the little central green was the Post office and general shop. On the other was the Mortland Royal Arms, and on the South, to the right of the old stone bridge, which ran over the narrow river, were the roof and chimneys of Gilbert Lothian's house nestling among the trees and with a vista of the orchard which stretched down to the stream.

"That's a nice little place," the doctor said. "Whose is that?"

"It's the house of our village celebrity," Mr. Medley replied – with a rather hostile crackle in his voice, or at least the other thought so.

"Our local celebrity," Medley continued, "Mr. Gilbert Lothian, the poet."

Neither the face nor the voice of the doctor changed at all. But his mind came to attention. This was a moment he had been waiting for.

"Oh, I know," he said, with an assumed indifference which he was well aware would have its effect of provocation upon the simple mind of the Priest. "The name is quite familiar to me. Bishop Moultrie sent me a book of Lothian's poems last winter. And now that I come to think of it, O'Donnell told me that Mr. Lothian lived here. What sort of a man is he?"

Medley hesitated. "Well," he said at length, "the truth is that I don't like him much personally, and I don't understand him in any way. I speak with prejudice I'm afraid, and I do not wish that any words of mine should make you share it."

"Oh, we all have our likes and dislikes. Every one has his private Dr. Fell and it can't be helped. But tell me about Lothian. I will remember your very honest warning! Don't you like his work?"

"I confess I see very little in it, Doctor. But then, my taste is old-fashioned and not in accord with modern literary movements. My 'Christian Year' supplies all the religious verse I need."

"Keble wrote some fine verse," said the doctor tentatively.

"Exactly. Sound prosody and restrained style! There is fervour and feeling in Lothian's work. It is impossible to deny it. But it's too passionate and feverish. There is a savage, almost despairing, clutching at spiritual emotion which strikes me as thoroughly unhealthy. The Love of Jesus, the mysterious operations of the Holy Ghost – these seem to me no proper vehicles for words which are tortured into a wild and sensuous music. As I read the poems of Gilbert Lothian I am reminded of the wicked and yet beautiful verses of Swinburne, and of others who have turned their lyre to the praise of lust. The sentiment is different, but the method is the same. And I confess that it revolts me to see the verbal tricks and polished brilliance of modern Pagan writers adapted to a fugitive and delirious ecstasy of Christian Faith."

Morton Sims understood thoroughly. This was the obstinate and prejudiced voice of an older literary generation, suddenly become vindictively vocal.

"I know all that you mean," he said. "I don't agree with you in the least, but I appreciate your point of view. But let me keep myself out of the discussion for a moment. I am not what you would probably be prepared to call a professing Christian. But how about Moultrie? He sent me Lothian's poems first of all. I remember the actual evening last winter when they arrived. A contemporaneous circumstance has etched it into my memory with certainty. Moultrie is a deeply convinced Christian. He is a man of the widest culture also. Yet he savours his palate with every nuance, every elusive and delicate melody that the genius of Lothian gives us. How about Moultrie's attitude? – it is a very general one."

Mr. Medley laughed, half with apology, half with the grim humour which was personal to him.

"I quite admit all you say," he replied, "but, as I told you, I belong to another generation and I don't in the least mean to change or listen to the voice of the charmer! I am a prejudiced old fogey, in short! I am still so antiquated and foolish as to have a temperamental dislike for a French-man, for instance. I like a picture to tell a story, and I flatly refused to get into Moultrie's abominable automobile when he brought it to the Rectory the other day!"

Morton Sims was not in the least deceived by this half real, half mocking apologia. It was not merely a question of style that had roused this heat in the dry elderly man when he spoke of the things which he so greatly disliked in the poet's work. There was something behind this, and the doctor meant to find out what it was. He was in Mortland Royal, in the first instance, in order to follow up the problem of Gilbert Lothian. His choice of a country residence had been determined by the Poet's locality. Every instinct of the scientist and hunter was awake in him. He had dreadful reasons, reasons which he could never quite think of without a mental shudder, for finding out everything about the unknown and elusive genius who had given "Surgit Amari," to the world.

He looked his companion full in the face, and spoke in a compelling, searching voice that the other had not heard before.

"What's the real antagonism, Mr. Medley?" he said.

Then the clergyman spoke out.

"You press me," he said, "very well, I will tell you. I don't believe Lothian is a good man. It is a stern and terrible thing to say, – God grant I am mistaken! – but he appears to me to write of supreme things with insincerity. Not vulgarly, you'll understand. Not with his tongue in his cheek, but without the conviction that imposes conduct, and perhaps even with his heart in his mouth!"

"Conduct?"

".. I fear I am saying too much."

"Hardly to me! Then Mr. Lothian – ?"

"He drinks," the Priest said bluntly, "you're sure to hear of it in some indirect way since you are going to stay in the village for six months. But that's the truth of it!"

The face of Dr. Morton Sims suddenly became quite pale. His brown eyes glittered as if with an almost uncontrollable excitement.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and there was something so curious in his voice that the clergyman was alarmed at what he had said. He knew, and could know, nothing of what was passing in the other's mind. A scrupulously fair and honest man within his lights, he feared that he had made too harsh a statement – particularly to a man who thought that even an after-dinner glass of port was an error in hygiene!

"I don't mean to say that he gets drunk," Medley continued hastily, "but he really does excite himself and whip himself up to work by means of spirits."

The clergyman hesitated. The doctor spurred him on.

"Most interesting to the scientific man – please go on."

"Well, I don't know that there is much to say – I do hope I am not doing the man an injustice, because I am getting on for twice his age and envy the modern brilliance of his brain! But about a fortnight ago I went to see Crutwell – a poor fellow who is dying of phthisis – and found Lothian there. He was holding Crutwell's hand and talking to him about Paradise in a monotonous musical voice. He had been drinking. I saw it at once. His eyes were quite wild."

"But the patient was made happier?"

"Yes. He was. Happier, I freely confess it, than my long ministrations have ever been able to make him. But that is certainly not the point. It is very distressing to a parish Priest to meet with these things in his visitations. Do you know," here Mr. Medley gave a rueful chuckle, "I followed this alcoholic missioner the other day into the house of an old bed-ridden woman whom he helps to support. Lothian is extremely generous by the way. He would literally take off his coat and give it away – which really means, of course, that he has no conception of what money means.

"At any rate, I went into old Sarah's cottage about half an hour after Lothian had been there. The old lady in question lived a jolly, wicked life until senile paralysis intervened. She is now quite a connoisseur in religion. I found her, on the occasion of which I speak, lying back upon her pillows with a perfectly rapturous expression on her wicked and wrinkled old face. 'Oh, Mr. Lothian's been, sir!' she said, 'Oh, 'twas beautiful! He gave me five shillings and then he knelt down and prayed. I never heard such praying – meaning no disrespect, sir, of course. But it was beautiful. The tears were rolling down Mr. Lothian's cheeks!' 'Mr. Lothian is very kind,' I said. 'He's wonnerful,' she replied, 'for he was really as drunk as a Lord the whole time, though he didn't see as I saw it. Fancy praying so beautiful and him like that. What a brain!'"

Morton Sims burst out laughing, he could not help it. "All the same," he said at length, "it's certainly rather scandalous."

Medley made a hurried deprecating movement of his hands. "No, no!" he said, "don't think that. I am over-emphasising things. Those two instances are quite isolated. In a general way Lothian is just like any one else. To speak quite frankly, Doctor, I'm not a safe guide when Gilbert Lothian is discussed."

"Yes?"

"For this reason. I admire and reverence Mrs. Lothian as I have never reverenced any other woman. Now and then I have met saint-like people, and the more saint-like they were – I hope I am not cynical – the less of comely humanity they seemed to have. Only once have I met a saint quietly walking this world with sane and happy footsteps. And that is Mary Lothian."

There was a catch and tremble in the voice of the elderly clergyman. Morton Sims, who had liked him from the first, now felt more drawn to him than at any other time during their morning talk and walk.

"Now you see why I am a little bitter about Gilbert Lothian! I don't think that he is worthy of such a perfect wife as he has got! I'll take you to tea with her this afternoon and you will see!"

"I should like to meet her very much. Lothian is not here then?"

"He has been away for a week or so, but he is returning to-night. Our old postman, who knows everything, told me so at least."

The two men continued their walk through the village until lunch time, when they separated.

At three o'clock a maid brought a note from the Rectory to the "Haven." In the letter Medley said that he had been summoned to Wordingham by telegram and could not take the doctor to call on Mrs. Lothian.

The doctor spent the afternoon reading in the garden. He took tea among the flowers there, and after dinner, as it was extremely hot, he once more sought his deck chair under the mulberry tree in front of the house. Not a breath of air stirred. Now and then a cockchafer boomed through the heavy dark, and at his feet some glowworms had lit their elfin lamps.

There was thunder in the air too, it was murmuring ten miles away over the Wash, and now and again the sky above the marshes was lit with flickering green and violet fires.

A definite depression settled down upon the doctor's spirits and something seemed to be like a load upon lungs and brain.

He always kept himself physically fit. In London, during his busy life, walking, which was the exercise he loved best, was not possible. So he fenced, and swam a good deal at the Bath Club, of which he was a member.

For three days now, he had taken no exercise whatever. He had been arranging his new household.

"Liver!" he thought to himself. "That is why I am melancholy and depressed to-night. And then the storm that is hanging about has its effect too. But hardly any one realises that the liver is the seat of the emotions! It should be said – more truly – that such a one died of a broken liver, not a broken heart!" ..

He sighed. His imaginings did not amuse him to-night. His vitality was lowered. That sick ennui which lies behind the thunder was upon him. As the storm grew nearer through the vast spaces of the night, so his psychic organism responded to its approach. Some uneasy imp had got into the barracks of his brain and was beating furiously upon the cerebral drum.

The vast and level landscape, the wide night, were alike to be dramatised by the storm.

And so, also, in the sphere of his thought, upon that secret stage where, after all, everything really happens, there was drama and disturbance. The level-minded scientist in Dr. Morton Sims drooped its head and bowed to the imperious onslaught. The man of letters in him awoke. Strange and fantastic influences were abroad this night and would have their way even with this cool sane person.

He knew what was happening to him as the night grew hotter, the lightning more frequent. He, the Ego of him, was slipping away from the material plane and entering that psychic country which he knew of and dreaded for its strange allurements.

Imaginative by nature and temperament, with a something of the artist in him, it was his habit to starve and repress that side of him as much as he was able.

He knew the unfathomable gulf that separated the psychical from the physiological. It was in the sphere of physiology that his work lay, here he was great, there must be no divided allegiance.

There was a menacing stammer of thunder. A certain line of verse came into his mind, a line of Lothian's.

 
"Oh dreadful trumpets sounding,
Pealing and resounding,
From the hid battlements of eternity!"
 

"I will take a ten mile walk to-morrow," he said to himself, and resolutely wrenched his thoughts towards material things. There was, he remembered with a slight shudder, that appalling passage in a recent letter from Mrs. Daly —

.. "Six weeks ago a tippler was put into an alms-house in this State. Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum, but had failed. At length he hit on one that was successful. He went into the wood yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon the block, and with an axe in the other struck it off at a single blow. With the stump raised and streaming he ran into the house and cried, 'Get some rum. Get some rum. My hand is off.' In the confusion and bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he plunged the bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank freely and exultantly exclaimed, 'Now I am satisfied!'"

Horrible! Why was it possible that men might poison themselves so? Would all the efforts of himself and his friends ever make such monstrous happenings cease? Oh, that it might be so!

They were breaking up stubborn land. The churches were against them, but the Home Secretary of the day was their friend – in the future the disease might be eradicated from society.

Oh, that it might be so! for the good of the human race!

How absolutely horrible it was that transparent, coloured liquids in bottles of glass – liquids that could be bought everywhere for a few pence – should have the devilish power to transform men, not to beasts, but to monsters.

The man of whom Mrs. Daly had written – hideously alcoholised and insane! Hancock, the Hackney murderer, poisoned, insane!

The doctor had been present at the post-mortem, after the execution. It had all been so pitiably clear to the trained eye! The liver, the heart, told him their tale very plainly. Any General Practitioner would have known. Ordinary cirrhosis, the scar tissue perfectly plain; the lime-salts deposited in the wasting muscles of the heart. But Morton Sims had found far more than this in that poisoned shell which had held, also, a poisoned soul. He had marked the little swellings upon the long nerve processes that run from the normal cell of the healthy brain. Something that looked like a little string of beads under the microscope had told him all he wanted to know.

And that little string of beads, the lesions which interfered with the proper passage of nerve impulses, the scraps of tissue which the section-cutter had thinned and given to the lens, had meant torture and death to a good woman.

How dreadfully women suffered! Their husbands and lovers and brothers became brutes to them. The women who were merely struck or beaten now and then were fortunate. The women whose lives were made one long ingenious torture were legion.

Dr. Morton Sims was a bachelor. He was more. He was a man with a virgin mind. Devoted always to the line of work he had undertaken he had allowed nothing else to disturb his life. For him passion was explained by pathological and physiological occurrences. That is to say, passion in others. For himself, he had allowed nothing that was sensual to interfere with his progress, or to influence the wise order of his days.

Therefore, he reverenced women.

Hidden in his mind was that latent adoration that the Catholic feels about the Real Presence upon an altar.

A good Knight of Science, he was as pure and pellucid in thought upon these matters as any Knight who bore the descending Dove upon his shield and flung into the mêlée calling upon the name of the Paraclete.

In his own fashion, and with his own vision of what it was, Morton Sims, also, was one of those seeking the Holy Grail.

He adored his sister, a sweet woman made for love and motherhood but who had chosen the virgin life of renunciation that she might help the world.

Women! Yes, it was women who suffered. There were tears in his mind as he thought of Women. Before a good woman he always wished to kneel.

How heavy the night was!

He identified it with the sorrowful weight and pressure of the Fiend Alcohol upon the world. And there was a woman, here near him, a woman with a sweet and fragrant nature – so the old clergyman had said.

On her, too, the weight must be lying. For Mary Lothian there must be horror in the days..

"One thing I will do," he said to the dark – and that he spoke aloud was sufficient indication of his state of mind – "I'll get hold of Gilbert Lothian while I am here. I'll save him at any rate, if I can. And it is quite obvious that he cannot be too far gone for salvation. I'll save him from an end no less frightful than that of his brother of whom he has probably never heard. The good woman he seems to have married shall be happy! The man's fine brain shan't be lost. This shall be my special experiment while I am down here. Coincidence, no less than good-will, makes that duty perfectly plain for me."

As he stood there, glad to have found some definite material thing with which to occupy his mind, a housemaid came through the French windows of the library. She hurried towards him, ghost-like in her white cap and apron.

"Are you there, sir?" she said, peering this way and that in the thick dark.

"Yes, here I am, Condon, what is it?"

"Please, sir, there's been an accident. A gentleman has been thrown out of a dog-cart. It's a Mr. Lothian. His man's here, and the gentleman's wife has heard you're in the village and there's no other doctor nearer than Wordingham."

"I'll come at once," Morton Sims said.

He hurried through the quiet library with its green-shaded reading lamp and went into the hall.

Tumpany was standing there, his cap held before him in two hands, naval-fashion. His round red face was streaming with perspiration, his eyes were frightened and he exhaled a strong smell of beer.

His hand went up mechanically and his left foot scraped upon the oilcloth of the hall as Morton Sims entered.

"Beg your pardon, sir," Tumpany began at once, "but I'm Mr. Gilbert Lothian's man. Master have had an accident. I was driving him home from the station when the horse stumbled just outside the village. Master was pitched out on his head. My mistress would be very grateful if you could come at once."

"Certainly, I will," Sims answered, looking at the man with a keen, experienced eye which made him shift uneasily upon his feet. "Wait here for a moment."

He hurried back into the library and put lint, cotton-wool and a pair of blunt-nosed scissors into a hand-bag. Then, calling for a candle and lighting it, he went out into the stable yard and up to the room above the big barn, emerging in a minute or two with a bottle of antiseptic lotion.

These were all the preparations he could make until he knew more. The thing might be serious or it might be little or nothing. Fortunately Lothian's house was not five minutes' walk from the "Haven." If instruments were required he could fetch them in a very short time.

As he left the house with Tumpany, he noticed that the man lurched upon the step. Quite obviously he was half intoxicated.

With a cunning born of long experience of inebriate men, the doctor affected a complete unconsciousness of what he had discovered. If he put the man upon his guard he would get nothing out of him, that was quite certain.

"He's made a direct statement so far," the doctor thought. "He's only on the border-land of intoxication. For as long as he thinks I have noticed nothing he will be coherent. Directly he realises that I have spotted his state he'll become confused and ashamed and he won't be able to tell me anything."

"This is very unfortunate," he said in a smooth and confidential voice. "I do hope it is nothing very serious. Of course I know your master very well by name."

"Yessir," Tumpany answered thickly, but with a perceptible note of pleasure in his voice. "Yessir, I should say Master is one of the best shots in Norfolk. You'd have heard of him, of course."

"But how did it happen?"

"This 'ere accident, sir?" said Tumpany rather vaguely, his mind obviously running upon his master's achievements among the wild geese of the marshes.

"Yes, the accident," the doctor answered in his smooth, kindly voice – though it would have given him great relief to have boxed the ears of his beery guide.

"I was driving master home, sir. It's not our trap. We don't keep one. We hires in the village, but the man as the trap belongs to couldn't go. So I drove, sir."

Movement had stirred up the fumes of alcohol in this barrel! Oh, the interminable repetitions, the horrid incapacity for getting to the point of men who were drunk! Lives of the utmost value had been lost by fools like this – great events in the history of the world had turned upon an extra pot of beer! But patience, patience!

"Yes, you drove, and the horse stumbled. Did the horse come right down?"

"I'm not much of a whip, sir, as you may say, though I know about ordinary driving. They say that a sailor-man is no good with a horse. But that isn't true."

Yet despite the irritation of his mind, the necessity for absolute self-control, the expert found time to make a note of this further instance of the intolerable egotism that alcohol induces in its slaves.

"But I expect you drove very well, indeed! Then the horse did not come right down!"

Just at the right moment, carefully calculated to have its effect, the doctor's voice became sharper and had a ring of command in it.