The Drunkard

– I am sure of nothing now!

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

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

There are no more records of actual happenings.

Yet, nevertheless, while Gilbert Lothian was making this accurate diagnosis of his state, it is as well to remember that there is no prognosis.

He refuses to look into the future. He really refuses to give any indication of what is going on in the present. He puts down upon the page the symptoms of his disease. He catalogues the tortures he endures. But in regard to where his state is leading him in his life, what it is all going to result in, he says nothing whatever.

Psychologically this is absolutely corroborative and true.

He studies himself as a diseased subject and obviously takes a horrible pleasure in writing down all that he endures. But there are things and thoughts so terrible that even the most callous and most poisoned mind dare not chronicle them.

While the very last of what was Gilbert Lothian is finding an abnormal pleasure, and perhaps a terrible relief, in the surveyal of his extinguishing personality, the other self, the False Ego – the Fiend Alcohol – was busy with a far more dreadful business.

We may regard the excerpts already given, and the concluding ones to come, as really the last of Lothian – until his resurrection.

Sometimes a lamp upon the point of expiration flares up for a final second.

Then, with a splutter, it goes out. And in the circle of confining glass a dull red glow fades, disappears, and only an ugly, lifeless black circle of exhausted wick is left.

I didn't mean in making these notes – confound Morton Sims that he should have suggested such a thing to me! – Well, I didn't mean to bring in any daily happenings. My only idea was, for a sort of pitiful satisfaction to myself, to make a record of what I am going through. It has been a relief to me – that is quite certain. While I have been writing these notes I have had some of the placidity and quiet that I used to know when I was engaged upon purely literary pursuits. I can't write now – that is to say, I can't create. My poetic faculty seems quite to have left me. I write certain letters, to a certain person, but they are no longer the artistic and literary productions that they were in the first stages of my acquaintance with this person.

All the music that God gave me is gone out of me now.

Well, even this relief is passing, I have more in my mind and heart than will allow me to continue this fugitive journal.

Here, obviously, Lothian makes a slight reference to the ghastly obsession which, at this time, must have had him well within its grip.

Well, I will round it up with a few final words.

One thing that strikes me with horror and astonishment is that I have become quite unable to understand how what I am doing, the fact of what I have become, hurts, wounds and makes other people unhappy. I try to put myself – sympathetically – in the place of those who are around me and who must necessarily suffer by my behaviour. I can't do it. When I try to do it my mind seems full of grey wool. The other people seem a hundred miles away. Their sentiments, emotions, wishes – their love for me ..

It is significant that here Lothian uses the plural pronoun as if he was afraid of the singular.

– dwindle to vanishing point. I used to be able to be sympathetic to the sorrows and troubles of almost everyone I met. I remember once after helping a man in this village to die comfortably, after sitting with him for hours and hours and hours during the progress of a most loathsome disease after closing his eyes, paying for his poor burial and doing all I could to console his widow and his daughters, that the widow and the daughters spoke bitterly about me and my wife – who had been so good to them – because one of our servants had returned the cream they sent to the kitchen because it was of inferior quality. These poor women actually made themselves unpleasant. For a day at least I was quite angry. It seemed so absolutely ungrateful when my wife and I had done everything for them for so long. But, I remember quite well, how I thought out the whole petty little incident one night when I was out with Tumpany after the wild geese. We were waiting in a cold midnight when scurrying clouds passed beneath the moon. It was bitter cold and my gun barrels burnt like fire. I thought it out with great care, and on the icy marshes a sort of understanding of narrow brains and unimaginative natures came to me. The next day I told my servants to still continue taking cream from the widow, and I have been friendly and kind to her ever since.

But now, I can't possibly get into the mind of anyone else with sympathy.

I think only of myself, of my own desires, of my own state..

Although I doubt it in my heart of hearts, I must put it upon record that I still have a curious and ineradicable belief that I can, by a mere effort of volition, get rid of all the horrors that surround me and become good and normal once more. When I descend into the deepest depths of all I am yet conscious of a little jerky, comfortable, confidential nudge from something inside me. "You'll be all right," it says. "When you want to stop you will be able to all right!" This false confidence, though I know it to be utterly false, never deserts me in moments of exhilarated drunkenness.

And finally, I add, that when my brain is becoming exhausted the last moment before stupor creeps over it, I constantly make the most supreme and picturesque pronunciations of my wickedness.

I could not pray the words aloud – or at least if I did they would be somewhat tumbled and incoherent – but I mentally pray them. I wring my hands, I abase my soul and mind, I say the Pater Noster and the Credo, I stretch out my hot hands, and I give it all up for ever and ever and ever.

I tumble into bed with a sigh of unutterable relief.

The Fiend that stands beside my bed on all ordinary nights assumes the fantastic aspect of an angel. I fall into my drunken sleep, murmuring that "there is joy in Heaven when one sinner repenteth."

I wake up in the morning full of evil thoughts, blear-eyed, and trembling. I am a mockery of humanity, longing, crying for poison.

There is only a dull and almost contemptuous memory of the religious ecstasies of the night before. My dreams, my confession, have not the slightest influence upon me. I don't fall again into ruining habits – I continue them, without restraint, without sorrow.

I will write no more. I am adding another Fear to all the other Fears. I have been making a true picture of what I am, and it is so awful that even my blinded eyes cannot bear to look upon it.

Thus these notes, in varying handwriting, indicating the ebb and flow of poison within the brain, cease and say no more.

At the bottom of the last page – which was but half filled by the concluding words of the Confession – there is something most terribly significant, most horrible to look at in the light of after events.

There is a greenish splash upon the glossy paper, obviously whiskey was spilt there.

Beginning in the area of the splashed circle, the ink running, a word of four letters is written.

Two letters are cloudy, the others sharp and clear.

The word is "Rita."

A little lower down, and now right at the bottom of the page, the word is repeated again in large tremulous handwriting, three times. "Rita, Rita, Rita!"

The last "Rita" sprawls and tumbles towards the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Two exclamation marks follow it, and it is heavily underscored three times.

CHAPTER VII

INGWORTH REDUX: TOFTREES COMPLACENS

"Les absents ont toujours tort."

    – Proverb.

Mr. Herbert Toftrees was at work in the splendidly furnished library of his luxuriously appointed flat at Lancaster Gate – or at least that is how he would have put it in one of his stories, while, before her Remington in the breakfast room Mrs. Herbert Toftrees would have rapped out a detailed description of the furniture.

The morning was dark and foggy. The London pavements had that disgustingly cold-greasy feeling beneath the feet that pedestrians in town know well at this time of year.

Within the library, with its double windows that shut out all noise, a bright fire of logs burned in the wide tiled hearth. One electric pendant lit the room and another burned in a silver lamp upon the huge writing table covered with crimson leather at which the author sat.

The library was a luxurious place. The walls were covered with books – mostly in series. The Complete Scott, the Complete Dickens, the Complete Thackeray reposed in gilded fatness upon the shelves. Between the door and one of the windows one saw every known encyclopedia, upon another wall-space were the shelves containing those classical French novels with which "culture" is supposed to have a nodding acquaintance – in translations.

Toftrees threw away his cigarette and sank into his padded chair. The outside world was raw and cold. Here, the fire of logs was red, the lamps threw a soft radiance throughout the room, and the keyboard of the writing-machine had a dapper invitation.

"Confound it, I must work," Toftrees said aloud, and at once proceeded to do so.

To his left, upon the table, in something like an exaggerated menu holder was a large piece of white cardboard. At the moment Toftrees and his wife were engaged in tossing off "Claire" which went into its fifth hundred thousand, at six-pence, within the year.

The sheet of cardboard bore the names of the principal characters in the story, and what they looked like, in case the prolific author should forget. There was also marked upon the card, in red ink, exactly how far Toftrees had got with the plot – which was copied out in large round hand, for instant reference, by his secretary upon another card.