The Drunkard

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.