Front matter (continued 6)

Gilbert ate nothing at the Carlton, but drank again. Distinguished still, an arresting personality in any room, his face had become deeply flushed and rather satyr-like as he watched Rita with longing, wonder, and an uneasy suspicion that only added fuel to the flame.

It was after midnight when he drove her home and they parted upon the steps of Queens Mansions.

He staggered a little in the fresh air as he stood there, though Rita in her excitement did not notice it. He had drunk enough during that day and night to have literally killed two ordinary men.

"To-morrow!" he said, trying to put something that he knew was not there into his dull voice. "To-morrow night."

"To-morrow!" she replied. "At the same time," and evading his clumsy attempt at an embrace, she swirled into the hall of the flat with a last kiss of her hand.

And even Prince, at the club, had never seen "Mr. Gilbert" so brutishly intoxicated as he was that night.

CHAPTER III

THIRST

Lothian had taken chambers for a short time in St. James' and near his club. Prince, the valet, had found the rooms for him and the house, indeed, was kept by the man's brother.

Gilbert would not stay at the club. Rita could not come to him there. He wanted a place where he could be really alone with her.

During the first few days, though they met each night and Gilbert ransacked London to give her varied pleasure, Rita would not come and dine in his chambers. "I couldn't possibly, Gilbert dear," she would say, and the refusal threw him into a suppressed fever of anger and irritation.

He dare show little or nothing of it, however. Always he had a haunting fear that he might lose her. If she was silent or seemed cold he trembled inwardly and redoubled his efforts to please, to gratify her slightest whim, to bring her back to gaiety and a caressing, half lover-like manner.

She knew it thoroughly and would play upon him like a piano, striking what chords she wished.

He spent money like water, and in hardly any time at all, the girl whose salary was thirty-five shillings a week found a delirious joy in expensive wines and foods, in rare flowers, in what was to her an astounding vie de luxe. If they went to a theatre—"Gilbert, we simply must have the stage box. I'm not in the mood to sit anywhere else to-night,"—and the stage box it was.

There is a shop in Bond Street where foolish people buy cigarettes which cost three pence or four pence each and a box of a hundred is bought for two guineas or so. Rita wouldn't smoke any others. Rita knew no more about wine than she did about astronomy, but she would pucker her pretty brows over the carte des vins in this or that luxurious restaurant, and invariably her choice would fall upon the most expensive. Once, it was at the Ritz, she noticed the word Tokay—a costly Johannesburger wine—and asked Gilbert what it was. He explained, and then, to interest her, went on to tell of the Imperial Tokay, the priceless wine which is almost unobtainable.

"But surely one could get it here?" she had said eagerly.

"It's not on the card, dear."

"Do ask, Gilbert!"

He asked. A very special functionary was called, who hesitated, hummed and hawed. "There was some of the wine in the cellars, a half bin, just as there was some of the famous White Hermitage—but, but"—he whispered in Gilbert's ear, "The King of Spain, um um um—The Grand Duke Alexis—you'll understand, sir, 'm 'm."

They were favoured with a bottle at last. Rita was triumphant. Gilbert didn't touch it. Rita drank two glasses and it cost five pounds.

Lothian did not care twopence. He had been poor after he left Oxford. His father, the solicitor, who never seemed to understand him or to care much about him, had made him an infinitesimal allowance during the young man's journalistic days. Then, when the old man died he had left his son a comfortable income. Mary had money also. The house at Mortland Royal was their own, they lived in considerable comfort but neither had really expensive tastes and they did not spend their mutual income by a long way. Gilbert's poems had sold largely also. He was that rare bird, a poet who actually made money—probably because he could have done very well without it.

It did not, therefore, incommode him in the least to satisfy every whim of Rita's. If it amused her to have wine at five pounds a bottle, what on earth did it matter? Frugal in his tastes and likings himself—save only in a quantity of cheap poison he procured—he was lavish for others. Although, thinking it would amuse him, his wife had begged him to buy a motor-car he had always been too lazy or indifferent to do so.

So he had plenty of money. If Rita Wallace had been one of the devouring harpies of Paris, who—if pearls really would melt in champagne—would drink nothing else, Gilbert could have paid the piper for a few weeks at any rate.

But Rita was curious. He would have given her anything. Over and over again he had pressed her to have things—bracelets, a ring, a necklace. She had refused with absolute decision.

She had let him give her a box of gloves, flowers she could not have enough of, the more costly the amusement of the night the better she seemed to like it. But that was all.

In his madness, his poisoned madness, he would have sold his house to give her diamonds had she asked for them—she would not even let him make her a present of a trumpery silver case for cigarettes.

She was baffling, elusive, he could not understand her. For several days she had refused to dine alone with him in his rooms.

One night, when he was driving her home after the dinner at the Ritz and a box at the Comedy theatre, he had pressed her urgently. She had once more refused.

And then, something unveiled and brutal had risen within him. The wave of alcohol submerged all decency and propriety of speech. He was furiously, coarsely angry.

"Damn you!" he said. "What are you afraid of?—of compromising yourself? If there were half a dozen people in London who knew or cared what you did, you've done that long ago. And for heaven's sake don't play Tartuffe with me. Haven't I been kissing you as much as ever I wanted to for the last three days? Haven't you kissed me? You'll dine with me to-morrow night in St. James' Street or I'll get out of town at once and chuck it all. I've been an ass to come at all. I'm beginning to see that now. I've been leaving the substance for the shadow."

She answered nothing to this brutal tirade for a minute or two.

The facile anger died away from him. He cursed himself for his insane folly in jeopardising everything and felt compunction for his violence.

He was just about to explain and apologise when he heard a chuckle from the girl at his side.

He turned swiftly to her. Her face was alight with pleasure, mingled with an almost tender mischief. She laughed aloud.

"Of course I'll come, Gilbert dear," she said softly—"since you command me!"

He realised at once that, like all women, she found joy in abdication when it was forced upon her. The dominant male mind had won in this little contest. He had bullied her roughly. It was a new sensation and she liked it.

But when she dined in the rooms and he tried to accomplish artificially what he had achieved spontaneously, she was on her guard and it was quite ineffectual.

They sat at a little round table. The dinner was simple, but perfectly served. During the meal, for once,—once again—he had talked like his old self, brilliantly touching upon literary things and illuminating much that had been dark to her before with that splendour of intellect which came back to him to-night for a space; and brought a trace of spirituality to his coarsening face.

And after dinner he had made her play to him on the little Bord piano against the wall. She was not a good pianist but she was efficient, and certain things that she knew well, and felt, she played well.

With some technical accomplishment she certainly rendered the "Bees' Wedding" of Mendelssohn with astonishing vivacity that night. The elfin humour of the thing harmonised so much with certain aspects of her own temperament!

The swarming bees of Fairyland were in the room!

And then, with merry malice, and at Gilbert's suggestion, she improvised a Podley Polonaise.

Then she gave a little melody of Dvôrak that she knew—"A mad scarlet thing by Dvôrak," he quoted to her, and finally, at Gilbert's urgent request, she attempted the Troisième Ballade of Chopin.

It reminded him of the first night on which he had met her, at the Amberleys' house. She did not play it well but his imagination filled the lacunae; his heated mind rose to a wild ecstasy of longing.

He put his arm round her and embraced her with tears in his eyes.

"Sweetheart," he said, "you are wonderful! See! We are alone here together, perfectly alone, perfectly happy. Let us always be for each other. Dear, I will sacrifice everything for you. You complete me. You were made for me. Come away with me, come with me for ever and ever. My wife will divorce me and we can be married; always to be together."

He had declared himself, and his wicked wish at last. He made an open proffer of his shameful love.

There was not a single thought in his mind of Mary, her deep devotion, her love and trust. He brushed aside the supreme gift that God had allowed him as a man brushes away an insect from his face.

All that the girl had said in answer was that he must not talk in such a way. Of course it could never be. They must be content as they were, hard as it was. "I am very sorry, Gilbert dear, you can never know how sorry I am. But you know I care for you. That must be all."

He had sent her home by herself that night, paying the cabman and giving him the address in Kensington.

Then for an hour before going to bed he had walked up and down his sitting room in a welter of hope, fear, regret, desire, wonder and deep perplexity.

He had now lost all sense of honour, all measure of proportion. His desire filled him and racked his very bones. Sometimes he almost hated Rita; always he longed for her to be his, his very own.

Freed from all possible restraint, lord of himself—"that heritage of woe!"—he was now drinking more deeply, more madly than ever before in his life.

He was abnormal in an abnormal world which his insanity created. The savage torture he inflicted on himself shall be only indicated here. There are deeper hells yet, blacknesses more profound in which we shall see this unhappy soul!

Suffice it to say that for three red weeks he drove the chariot of his ruin more recklessly and furiously than ever towards hell.

And the result, as far as his blistering hunger was concerned, was always the same.

The girl led him on and repulsed him alternately. He never advanced a step towards his desire. Yet the longing grew in intensity and never left him for a moment.

He tried hard to fathom Rita's character, to get at the springs of her thoughts. He failed utterly, and for two reasons.

Firstly, he was in no state to see anything steadily. The powers of insight and analysis were alike deserting him. His mind had been affected before. Now his brain was becoming affected.

One morning, with shaking hand, bloodshot eyes and a bottle of whiskey before him on the table, he sat down to write out what he thought of Rita. The accustomed pen and paper, the material implements of his power, might bring him back what he seemed to be losing.

This is what he wrote, in large unsteady characters, entirely changed from the neat beautiful caligraphy of the past.

"Passionate and yet calculating at the same time; eager to rule and capable of ruling, though occasionally responsive to the right control; generous in confidence and trust, though with suspicion never very far away.

"Merrily false and frankly furtive in many of the actions of life. A dear egoist! yet capable of self-abandoning enthusiasm, a brilliant embryo really wanting the guiding hand and master brain but reluctant to accept them until the last moment."

There was more of it, all compact of his hopes and fears, an entirely false conception of her, an emanation of poison which, nevertheless, affords some indication of his mental state.

The sheet concluded:—

"A white and graceful yacht seriously setting out into dangerous waters with no more certainty than hangs upon the result of a toss up or the tinkle of a tambourine. Deeply desiring a pilot, but unwilling that he should come aboard too soon and spoil the fun of beating up into the wind to see what happens. Weak, but not with the charm of dependence and that trusting weakness which stiffens a man's arm."

A futile, miserable dissection with only a half-grain of truth in it.

Gilbert knew it for what it was directly it had been written. He crumpled it up with a curse and flung it into the fireplace.

Yet the truth about the girl was simple enough. She was only an exceptionally clever and attractive example of a perfectly well-defined and numerous type.

Lothian was ignorant of the type, had never suspected its existence in his limited experience of young women, that was all.

Rita Wallace was just this. Heredity had given her a quick, good brain and an infinite capacity for enjoyment. It was an accident also that she was a very lovely girl. All beautiful people are spoiled. Rita was spoiled at school. Girls and mistresses alike adored her. With hardly any interregnum she had been plumped into Podley's Pure Literature Library and begun to earn her own living.

She lived with a good, commonplace girl who worshipped her.

Except that she could attract them and that on the whole they were silly moths she knew nothing of men. Her heart, unawakened as yet save by school-girl affections, was a kind and tender little organ. But, with all her beauty and charm she was essentially shallow, from want of experience rather than from lack of temperament.

Gilbert Lothian had come to her as the most wonderful personality she had ever known. His letters were things that any girl in the world might be proud of receiving. He was giving her, now, a time which, upon each separate evening, was to her like a page out of the "Arabian Nights." Every day he gave her a tablet upon which "Sesame" was written.

Had he been free to ask her honourably, she would have married Gilbert within twenty-four hours, had it been possible. He was delightful to be with. She liked him to kiss her and say adoring things to her. Even his aberrations—of which of course she had become aware—only excited her interest. The bad boy drank far too many whiskies and sodas. Of course! She would cure him of that. If any one had told her that her nightly and delightful companion was an inebriate approaching the last stages of lingering sanity, Rita would have laughed in her informant's face.

She knew what a drunkard was! It was a horrid wretch who couldn't walk straight and who said, "My dearsh"—like the amusing pictures in "Punch."

Poor dear Gilbert's wife would be in a fury if she knew. But fortunately she didn't know, and she wasn't in England. Meanwhile, for a short time, life was entrancing, and why worry about the day after to-morrow?

It was ridiculous of Gilbert to want her to run away with him. That would be really wicked. He might kiss her as much as he liked, and when Mrs. Lothian came back they could still go on much as before. Certainly they would continue being friends and he would write her beautiful letters again.

"I'm a wicked little devil," she said to herself once or twice with a naughty inward chuckle, "but dear old Gilbert is so perfectly sweet, and I can do just what I like with him!"

Nearly three weeks had gone by. Gilbert and Rita had been together every evening, on the Saturday afternoons when she was free of Podley's Library, and for the whole of Sunday.

Gilbert had almost exhausted his invention in thinking out surprises for her night after night.

There had been many dull moments and hours when pleasure trembled in the balance. But no night had been quite a failure. The position was this.

Lothian, almost convinced that Rita was unassailable, assailed her still. She was sweet to him, gave her caresses but not herself. They had arrived at a curious sort of understanding. He bewailed with bitter and burning regret that he could not marry her. Lightly, only half sincerely, but to please him, she joined in his sorrow.

She had been seen about with him, constantly, in all sorts of places, and that London that knew him was beginning to talk. Of this Rita was perfectly unconscious.

He had written to his wife at Nice, letters so falsely sympathetic that he felt she must suspect something. He followed up every letter with a long, costly telegram. A telegram is not autograph and the very lesions of the prose conceal the lesions of the sender's dull intention. His physical state was beginning to be so alarming that he was putting himself constantly under the influence of bromide and such-like drugs. He went regularly to the Turkish Bath in Jermyn Street, had his face greased and hammered in the Haymarket each morning, and fought with a constantly growing terror against an advancing horror which he trembled to think might not be far off now.

Delirium Tremens.

But when Rita met him at night, drugs, massage and alcohol had had their influence and kept him still upon the brink.

In his well-cut evening clothes, with his face a little fatter, a little redder perhaps, he was still her clever, debonnair Gilbert.

A necessity to her now.

CHAPTER IV

THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS

Three weeks passed. There was no change in the relations of Rita Wallace and Gilbert Lothian.

She was gay, tender, silent by turns, and her thirst for pleasure seemed unquenchable. She yielded nothing. Things were as they were. He was married: there was no more to be said, they must "dree their wierd"—endure their lot.

Often the man smiled bitterly to hear her girlish wisdom, uttered with almost complacent finality. It was not very difficult for her to endure. She had no conception of the dreadful state into which he had come, the torture he suffered.

When he was alone—during the long evil day when he could not see her—the perspiration his heated blood sent out upon his face and body seemed like the very night dews of the grave. He was the sensualist of whom Ruskin speaks, the sensualist with the shroud about his feet. All day long he fought for sufficient mastery over himself to go through the evening, fought against the feverish disease of parched throat and wandering eyes; senseless, dissolute, merciless.

And one dreadful flame burned steadily in the surrounding gloom—

"Je me nourris de flammes" was the proud motto of an ancient ducal house in Burgundy. With grimmer meaning Lothian might have taken it for his own during these days.

He had heard from his wife that she was coming home almost at once. Lady Davidson had rallied. There was every prospect of her living for a month or two more. Sir Harold Davidson was on his way home from India. He would go to her at once and it was now as certain as such things can be that he would be in time.

Mary wrote with deep sadness. To bid her beloved sister farewell on this earth was heart-rending. "And yet, darling,"—so the letter had run—"how marvellous it is to know, not to just hope, but to know that I shall meet Dorothy again and that we shall see Jesus. When I think of that, tears of happiness mingle with the tears of sorrow. Sweet little Dorothy will be waiting for us when we too go, my dearest, dearest husband. God keep you, beloved. Day and night I pray for my dear one."

This letter had stabbed the man's soul through and through. It had been forwarded from Mortland Royal and was brought to him as he lay in bed at breakfast time. His heavy tears had bedewed the pillow upon which he lay. "Like bitter wine upon a sponge was the savour of remorse."

Shuddering and sobbing he had crawled out of bed and seized the whiskey bottle which stood upon the dressing table—his sole comforter, hold-fast and standby now; very blood of his veins.

And then, warmth, comfort—remorse and shame fading rapidly away—oblivion and a heavy sleep or stupor till long after midday.

He must go home at once. He must be at home to receive Mary. And, in the quiet country among familiar sights and sounds, he would have time to think. He could write to Rita again. He could say things upon paper with a force and power that escaped him à vive voix. He could pull himself together, too, recruit his physical faculties. He realised, with an ever growing dread, in what a shocking state he was.

Yes, he would go home. There would be peace there, some sort of kindly peace for a day or two. What would happen when Mary returned, how he would feel about her, what he would do, he did not ask. Sufficient for the day!

He longed for a few days' peace. No more late midnights—sleep. No nights of bitter hollow pleasure and longing. He would be among his quiet books again in his pleasant little library. He would talk wildfowling with Tumpany and they would go through the guns together. The Dog Trust who loved him should sleep on his bed.

It was Saturday. He was going down to Norfolk by the five o'clock train from St. Pancras. He would be able to dine on board—and have what drinks he wanted en route. The dining-car stewards on that line knew him well. He would arrive at Wordingham by a little after nine. By ten he might be in bed in his peaceful old house.

The Podley Library closed at 12:30 on Saturday. He was to call for Rita, when they were to lunch together, and at five she would come to the station to see him off. It was a dull, heavy day. London was chilly, there was a gloom over the metropolis; leaden opaque light fell from a sky that was ashen. It was as though cold thunder lurked somewhere up above, as Lothian drove to Kensington.

He had paid for his rooms and arranged for his luggage to be taken to the station where a man was to meet him with it a little before five.

Then he had crossed St. James' Street and spent a waiting hour at his club. For some reason or other, this morning he had more control over his nerves. There was a lull in his rapid physical progress downwards. Perhaps it was that he had at any rate made some decision in his mind. He was going to do something definite. He was going home. That was something to grasp at—a real fact—and it steadied him a little.

He had smoked a cigar in the big smoking room of the club. It was rather early yet and there was hardly any one there. Two whiskies and sodas had been sufficient for the hour.

The big room, however, was so dark that all the electric lamps were turned on and he read the newspapers in an artificial daylight that harmonised curiously with the dull, numbed peace of the nerves which had come to him for a short time.

He opened Punch and there was a joke about him—a merry little paragraph at the bottom of the column. It was the fourth or fifth time his name had appeared in the paper. He remembered how delighted he and Mary had been when it first happened. It meant so definitely that one had "got there."

He read it now without the slightest interest.

He glanced at the Times. Many important things were happening at home and abroad, but he gazed at all the news with a lack-lustre eye. Usually a keen and sympathetic observer of what went on in the world, for three weeks now he hadn't opened a paper.

As he closed the broad, crackling sheet on its mahogany holding rod, his glance fell upon the Births, Deaths and Marriages column.

A name among the deaths captured his wandering attention. A Mr. James Bethune Dickson Ingworth, C.B., was dead at Hampton Hall in Wiltshire. It was Dicker's uncle, of course! The boy would come into his estate now.

"It's a good thing for him," Lothian thought. "I don't suppose he's back from Italy yet. The old man must have died quite suddenly. I hope he'll settle down and won't be quite so uppish in the future."

He was thinking drowsily, and quite kindly of Dickson, when he suddenly remembered something Mary had said on the night before she went to Nice.

He had tried to make mischief between them—so he had! And then there was that scene in the George at Wordingham, which Lothian had forgotten until now.

"What a cock-sparrow Beelzebub the lad really is," he said in his mind. "And yet I liked him well enough. Even now he's not important enough to dislike. Rita likes him. She often talks of him. He took her out to dinner—yes, so he did—to some appalling little place in Wardour Street. She was speaking of it yesterday. He's written to her from Milan and Rome, too. She wanted to show me the letters and she was cross because I wasn't interested. She tried to pique me and I wouldn't be! What was it she said, oh, 'he's such nice curly hair.'"

He gazed into the empty fireplace before which he was sitting in a huge chair of green leather. The remembered words had struck some chords of memory. He frowned and puzzled over it in his drowsy numbed state, and then it came to him suddenly. Of course! The barmaid at Wordingham, Molly what's-her-name whom all the local bloods were after, had said just the same thing about Ingworth.

Little fools! They were all alike, fluffy little duffers. . . .

He looked up at the clock. It was twenty minutes to one. He had to meet Rita at the library as the hour struck.

He started. The door leading into the outside world shut with a clang. His chains fell into their place once more upon the limbs of his body and soul.

He called a waiter, gulped down another peg, and got into a cab for the Podley Institute.

The pleasant numbness had gone from him now. Once more he was upon the rack. What he saw with his mental vision was as the wild phantasmagoria of a dream . . . a dark room in which a magic lantern is being worked, and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. Pictures as disconnected as a pack of cards.

Rita was waiting upon the steps of the Institute.

She wore a simple coat and skirt of dark brown tweed with a green line in it. Her face was pale. Her eyes were without sparkle—she also was exhausted by pleasure, come to the end of the Arabian Nights.

She got into the taxi-cab which was trembling with the power of the unemployed engines below it.

Tzim, tzim, tzim!

"Where shall we go, Gilbert?" she said, in a languid, uninterested voice.

He answered her in tones more cold and bloodless than her own. "I don't know, Rita, and I don't care. Ce que vous voulez, Mademoiselle des livres sans reproche!"

She turned her white face on him for a moment, almost savage with impotent petulance. Then she thrust her head out of the window and coiled round to the waiting driver.

"Go to Madame Tussaud's," she cried.

Tzim, tzim, bang-bang-bang, and then a long melancholy drone as the rows of houses slid backwards.

Gilbert turned on her. "Why did you say that?" he asked bitterly.

"What difference does it make?" she replied. "You didn't seem to care where we went for this last hour or two. I said the first thing that came into my mind. I suppose we can get lunch at Madame Tussaud's. I've never been there before. At any rate, I expect they can manage a sponge cake for us. I don't want anything more."

—"Yes, it's better for us both. It's a relief to me to think that the end has come. No, Rita dear, I don't want your hand. Let us make an end now—a diminuendo. It must be. Let it be. You've said it often yourself."

She bit her lips for a second. Then her eyes flashed. She put her arms round his neck and drew him to her. "You shan't!" she said. "You shan't glide away from me like this."

Every nerve in his body began to tremble. His skin pricked and grew hot.

"What will you give?" he asked in a muffled voice.

"I? What I choose to give!" she replied. "Gillie, I'll do what I like with you."

She shrank back in the corner of the cab with a little cry. Lothian's face was red and blazing with anger.

"No names like that, Rita!" he said roughly. "You shan't call me that."

It was a despairing cry of drowning conscience, honour bleeding to death, dissolving dignity and manhood.

However much he might long for her: however strongly he was enchained, it was a blot, an indignity, an outrage, that this girl should call him by the familiar home name. That was Mary's name for him. Mrs. Gilbert Lothian alone had the right to say that.

Just then the taxi-metre stopped outside the big red erection in the Marylebone Road, an unusual and fantastic silhouette against the heavy sky.

They went in together, and there was a chill over them both. They felt, on this grey day, as people who have lived for pleasure, sensation, and have fed too long on honeycomb, must ever feel; the bitterness of the fruit with the fair red and yellow rind. Ashes were in their mouths, an acrid flavour within their souls.

It is always and for ever thus, if men could only realise it. Since the Cross rose in the sky, the hectic joys of sin have been mingled with bitterness, torture, cold.

The frightful "Colloque Sentimental" of Verlaine expresses these two people, at this moment, well enough. Written by a temperamental saint turned satyr and nearly always influenced by drink; translated by a young English poet whose wings were always beating in vain against the prison wall he himself had built; you have these sad companions. . . .

And on such a day as this, with such a weight as this upon their tired hearts, they entered the halls of Waxwork and stood forlorn among that dumb cloistered company.

They passed through "Room No. 1. Commencing Right-hand side" and their steps echoed upon the floor. On this day and at this hour hardly any visitors were there; only a few groups moved from figure to figure and talked in hissing whispers as if they were in some church.

All around them they saw lifeless and yet half convincing dolls in rich tarnished habiliments. They walked, as it were, in a mausoleum of dead kings, and the livid light which fell upon them from the glass roof above made the sordid unreality more real.

"There's Charles the First," Rita said drearily.

Gilbert glanced at the catalogue. "He was fervently pious, a faithful husband, a fond parent, a kind master, and an enthusiastic lover and patron of the fine arts."

"How familiar that sort of stuff sounds," she answered. "It's written for the schools which come here to see history in the flesh—or wax rather. Every English school girl of the upper middle classes has been brought here once in her life. Oh, here's Milton! What does it say about him?"

—"Sold his immortal poem 'Paradise Lost' for the sum of five pounds," Lothian answered grimly.

"Much better to be a modern poet, Gilbert dear! But I'm disappointed. These figures don't thrill one at all. I always thought one was thrilled and astonished here."

"So you will be, Cupid, soon. Don't you see that all these people are only names to us. Here they are names dressed up in clothes and with pink faces and glass eyes. They're too remote. Neither of us is going to connect that thing"—he flung a contemptuous movement of his thumb at Milton—"with 'Lycidas.' We shall be interested soon, I'm sure. But won't you have something to eat?"

"No. I don't want food. After all, this is strange and fantastic. We've lots more to see yet, and these kings and queens are only for the schools. Let's explore and explore. And let's talk about it all as we go, Gilbert! Talk to me as you do in your letters. Talk to me as you did at the beginning, illuminating everything with your mind. That's what I want to hear once again!"

She thrust her arm in his, and desire fled away from him. The Dead Sea Fruit, the "Colloque Sentimental" existed no more, but, humour, the power of keen, incisive phrase awoke in him.

Yes, this was better!—their two minds with play and interplay. It would have been a thousand times better if it had never been anything else save this.

They wandered into the Grand Saloon, made their bow to Sir Thomas Lipton—"Wog and I find his tea really the best and cheapest," Rita said—decided that the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suave, but uninteresting face, admired the late Mr. Dan Leno, who was posed next to Sir Walter Scott, and gazed without much interest at the royal figures in the same room.

King George the Fifth and his spouse; the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn—Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert, K.G., K.T., K.P., G.C.M.C.; Princess Royal of England—Her Royal Highness Princess Louise Victoria Alexandra Dagmar; and, next to these august people, little Mr. Dan Leno!

"Poor little man," Rita said, looking at the sad face of the comedian. "Why should they put him here with the King and the Queen? Do they just plant their figures anywhere in this show?"

Gilbert shook his head. In this abnormal place—one of the strangest and most psychologically interesting places in the world—his freakish humour was to the fore.

"What a little stupid you are, Rita!" he said. "The man who arranges these groups is one of the greatest philosophers and students of humanity who ever lived. In this particular case the ghost of Heine must have animated him. The court jester! The clown of the monarch—I believe he did once perform at Sandringham—set cheek by jowl with the great people he amused. It completes the picture, does it not?"

"No, Gilbert, since you pretend to see a design in the arrangement, I don't think it does complete the picture. Why should a mere little comic man be set to intrude—?"

He caught her up with whimsical grace. "Oh, but you don't see it at all!" he cried, and his vibrating voice, to which the timbre and life had returned, rang through "Room No. 2."

—"This place is designed for the great mass of the population. They all visit it. It is a National Institution. People like you and me only come to it out of curiosity or by chance. It's out of our beat. Therefore, observe the genius of the plan! The Populace has room in its great stupid heart for only a few heroes. The King is always one, and the popular comedian of the music halls is always another. These, with Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Toftrees, satisfy all the hunger for symbols to be adored. Thus Dan Leno in this splendid company. Room No. 2 is really a subtle and ironic comment upon the psychology of the crowd!"

Rita laughed happily. "But where are the Toftrees?" she said.

"In the Chamber of Horrors, probably, for murdering the public taste. We are sure to find them here, seated before two Remingtons and with the actual books with which the crime was committed on show."

"Oh, I've heard about the 'Chamber of Horrors.' Can we go, Gilbert? Do let's go. I want to be thrilled. It's such a funereal day."

"Yes it is, grey as an old nun. I'm sorry I was unkind in the cab, dear. Forgive me."

"I'll forgive you anything. I'm so unhappy, Gilbert. It's dreadful to think of you being gone. All my days and my nights will be grey now. However shall I do without you?"

There was genuine desolation in her voice. He believed that she really regretted his departure and not the loss of the pleasures he had been giving her. His blood grew hot once more—for a single moment—and he was about to embrace her, for they were alone in the room.

And then listlessness fell upon him before he had time to put his wish into action. His poisoned mind was vibrating too quickly. An impulse was born, only to be strangled in the brain before the nerves could telegraph it to the muscles. His whole machinery was loose and out of control, the engines running erratically and not in tune. They could not do their work upon the fuel with which he fed them.

He shuddered. His heart was a coffer of ashes and within it, most evil paramours, dwelt the quenchless flame and the worm that dieth not.

. . . They went through other ghostly halls, thronged by a silent company which never moved nor spake. They came to the entrance of that astounding mausoleum of wickedness, The Chamber of Horrors.

There they saw, as in a faint light under the sea, the legion of the lost, the horrible men and women who had gone to swell the red quadrilles of hell.

In long rows, sitting or standing, with blood-stained knives and hangmen's ropes in front of them, in their shameful resurrection they inhabited this place of gloom and death.

Here, was a man in shirt-sleeves, busy at work in a homely kitchen lit by a single candle. Alone at midnight and with sweat upon his face he was breaking up the floor; making a deep hole in which to put something covered with a spotted shroud which lay in a bedroom above.

There, was the "most extraordinary relic in the world," the knife of the guillotine that decapitated Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and twenty thousand human beings besides.

The strange precision of portraiture, the somewhat ghastly art which had moulded these evil faces was startlingly evident in its effect upon the soul.

When a great novelist or poet creates an evil personality it shocks and terrifies us, but it is never wholly evil. We know of the monster's antecedents and environment. However stern we may be in our attitude towards the crime, sweet charity and deep understanding of the motives of human action often give us glimmerings which enable us to pity a lamentable human being who is a brother of ours whatever he may have done.

But here? No. All was sordid and horrible.

Gilbert and Rita saw rows upon rows of faces which differed in every way one from the other and were yet dreadfully alike.

For these great sinister dolls, so unreal and so real, had all a likeness. The smirk of cruelty and cunning seemed to lie upon the waxen masks. Colder than life, far colder than death, they gave forth emanations which struck the very heart with woe and desolation.

To many visitors the Chamber of Horrors is all its name signifies. But it is a place of pleasure nevertheless. The skin creeps but the sensation is pleasant. It provides a thrill like a switchback railway. But it is not a place that artists and imaginative people can enter and easily forget. It epitomises the wages of sin. It ought to be a great educational force. Young criminals should be taken there between stern guardians, to learn by concrete evidence which would appeal to them as no books or sermons could ever do, the Nemesis that waits upon unrepentant ways.

The man and the girl who had just entered were both in a state of nervous tension. They were physically exhausted, one by fierce indulgence in poison, the other by three weeks of light and feverish pleasure.

And more than this.

Each, in several degree, knew that they were doing wrong, that they had progressed far down the primrose path led by the false flute-players.

"I couldn't have conceived it was so, so unnerving, Gilbert," Rita said, shrinking close to him.

"It is pretty beastly," Lothian answered. "It's simply a dictionary of crime though, that's all—rather too well illustrated."

"I don't want to know of these horrors. One sees them in the papers, but it means little or nothing. How dreadful life is though, under the surface!"

Gilbert felt a sudden pang of pity for her, so young and fair, so frightened now.—Ah! he knew well how dreadful life was—under the surface!

For a moment, in that tomb-like place a vision came to him, sunlit and splendid, calm and beautiful.

He saw his life as it might be—as doubtless God meant it to be, a favoured, fortunate and happy life, for God does not, in His inscrutable wisdom chastise all men. Well-to-do, brilliant of mind, with trained capacity to exact every drop of noble joy from life; blessed with a sweet and beautiful woman to watch over him and complement him; did ever a man have a fairer prospect, a luckier chance?

His Hell was so real. Heaven was so near. He had but to say, "I will not," and the sun would rise again upon his life. To the end he would walk dignified, famous, happy, loving and deeply-loved—if only he could say those words.

A turn of the hand would banish the Fiend Alcohol for ever and ever!

But even as the exaltation of the thought animated him, the dominant false Ego, crushed momentarily by heavenly inspiration, growled and fought for life.

Immediately the longing for alcohol burned within him. They had been nearly an hour among the figures. Lothian longed for drink, to satisfy no mere physical craving, but to keep the Fiend within quiescent.

He had come to that alternating state—the author of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" has etched it upon the plate for all time—when he must drug the devil in order to have a little license in which to speak the words and think the thoughts of a clean man leading a Christian life.

So the vision of what might be faded and went. The present asserted itself, and asserted itself merely as a brutish desire for poison.

All these mental changes and re-adjustments took place in a mere second of time.

Rita had hardly made an end of speaking before he was ready with an answer.

"Poor little Rita," he said. "It was your choice you know. It is horrible. But I expect that the weather, and the inexorable fact that we have to part this afternoon for a time, has something to do with it. Oh, and then we haven't lunched. There's a great influence in lunch. I want a drink badly, too. Let's go."

Rita was always whimsical. She loved to assert herself. She wanted to go at least as ardently as her companion, but she did not immediately agree.

"Soon," she said. "Look here, Gilbert, we'll meet at the door. I'm going to flit down this aisle of murderers on the other side. You go down this side. And if you meet the Libricides—Toftrees et femme I mean, call out!"

She vanished with noiseless tread among the stiff ranks of figures.

Gilbert walked slowly down his own path, looking into each face in turn.

. . . This fat matronly woman, a sort of respectable Mrs. Gamp who probably went regularly to Church, was a celebrated baby farmer. She "made angels" by pressing a gimlet into the soft skulls of her charges—there was the actual gimlet—and save for a certain slyness, she had the face of a quite motherly old thing. Yet she, too, had dropped through the hole in the floor—like all her companions here. . . .

He turned away from all the faces with an impatient shudder.

He ought never to have come here. He was a donkey ever to have let Rita come here. Where was she?—he was to meet her at the end of this horrid avenue. . . .

But the place was large. Rita had disappeared among the waxen ghosts. The door must be this way. . . .

He pressed onwards, walking silently—as one does in a place of the dead—but disregarding with averted eyes, the leers, the smiles, the complacent appeal, of the murderers who had paid their debt to the justice of the courts.

He was beginning to be most unpleasantly affected.

Walking onwards, he suddenly heard Rita's voice. It was higher in key than usual—whom was she speaking to? His steps quickened.

. . . "Gilbert, how silly to try and frighten me! It's not cricket in this horrid place, get down at once—oh!"

The girl shrieked. Her voice rang through the vault-like place.

Gilbert ran, turned a corner, and saw Rita.

She was swaying from side to side. Her face was quite white, even the lips were bloodless. She was staring with terrified eyes to where upon the low dais and behind the confining rail a figure was standing—a wax-work figure.

Gilbert caught the girl by the hands. They were as cold as ice.

"Dear!" he said in wild agitation. "What is it? I'm here, don't be frightened. What is it, Rita?"

She gave a great sob of relief and clung to his hands. A trace of colour began to flow into her cheeks.

"Thank goodness," she said, gasping. "Oh, Gilbert, I'm a fool. I've been so frightened."

"But, dear, what by?"

"By that——"

She pointed at the big, still puppet immediately opposite her.

Gilbert turned quickly. For a moment he did not understand the cause of her alarm.

"I talked to it," she said with an hysterical laugh. "I thought it was you! I thought you'd got inside the railing and were standing there to frighten me."

Gilbert looked closely at the effigy. He was about to say something and then the words died away upon his lips.

It was as though he saw himself in a distorting glass—one of those nasty and reprehensible toys that fools give to children sometimes.

There was an undeniable look of him in the staring face of coloured wax. The clear-cut lips were there. The shape of the head was particularly reminiscent, the growing corpulence of body was indicated, the hair of the stiff wig waved as Lothian's living hair waved.

"Good God!" he said. "It is like me! Poor little girl—but you know I wouldn't frighten you for anything. But it is like! What an extraordinary thing. We looked for the infamous Toftrees! the egregious Herbert who has split so many infinitives in his time, and we find—Me!"

Rita was recovering. She laughed, but she held tightly to Gilbert's arm at the same time.

"Let's see who the person is—or was—" Gilbert went on, drawing the catalogue from his pocket.

"Key of the principal gate of the Bastille—no, that's not it. Number 365, oh, here we are! Hancock, the Hackney Murderer. A chemist in comfortable circumstances, he——"

Rita snatched the book from his hand. "I don't want to hear any more," she said. "Let's go away, quick!"

In half an hour they were lunching at a little Italian restaurant which they found in the vicinity. The day was still dark and lowering, but a risotto Milanese and something which looked like prawns in polenta, but wasn't, restored them to themselves.

There was a wine list in this quite snug little place, but the proprietor advanced and explained that he had no license and that money must be paid in advance before the camerière could fetch what was required from an adjacent public house.

It was a bottle of whiskey that Gilbert ordered, politely placed upon the table by a pathetic little Genoese whose face was sallow as spaghetti and who was quite unconscious that for the moment the Fiend Alcohol had borrowed his poor personality.

. . . "You must have a whiskey and soda, Rita. I dare not let you attempt any of the wines from the public house at the corner."

"I've never tried it in my life. But I will now, out of curiosity. I'll taste what you are so far too fond of."

Rita did so. "Horrible stuff," she said. "It's just like medicine."

Gilbert had induced the pleasant numbness again. "You've said exactly what it is," he replied in a dreamy voice.—"'Medicine for a mind diseased.'"

They hardly conversed at all after that.

The little restaurant with its red plush seats against the wall, its mirrors and hanging electric lights, was cosy. They lingered long over their coffee and cigarettes. No one else was there and the proprietor sidled up to them and began to talk. He spoke in English at first, and then Gilbert answered him in French.

Gilbert spoke French as it is spoken in Tours, quite perfectly. The Italian spoke it with the soft, ungrammatical fluency of his race.

The interlude pleased the tired, jaded minds of the sad companions, and it was with some fictitious reconstruction of past gaiety and animation that they drove to St. Pancras.

The train was in.

Gilbert's dressing-case was already placed in a first-class compartment, his portmanteau snug in the van.

When he walked up the long platform with Rita, a porter, the Guard of the train and the steward of the dining-car, were grouped round the open door.

He was well known. All the servants of the line looked out for him and gave him almost ministerial honours. They knew he was a "somebody," but were all rather vague as to the nature of his distinction.

He was "Mr. Gilbert Lothian" at least, and his bountiful largesse was generally spoken of.

The train was not due to start for six minutes. The acute guard, raising his cap, locked the door of the carriage.

Gilbert and Rita were alone in it for a farewell.

He took her in his arms and looked long and earnestly into the young lovely face.

He saw the tears gathering in her eyes.

"Have you been happy, sweetheart, with me?"

"Perfectly happy." There was a sob in the reply.

"You really do care for me?"

"Yes."

His breath came more quickly, he held her closer to him—only a little rose-faced girl now.

"Do you care for me more than for any other man you have ever met?"

She did not answer.

"Tell me, tell me! Do you?"

"Yes."

"Rita, my darling, say, if things had been different, if I were free to ask you to be my wife now, would you marry me?"

"Yes."

"Would you be my dear, dear love, as I yours, for ever and ever and ever?"

She clung to him in floods of tears. He had his answer. Each tear was an answer.

The guard of the train, looking the other way, opened the door with his key and coughed.

"Less than a minute more, sir," said the guard.

. . . "Once more, say it once more! You would be my wife if I were free?"

"I'd be your wife, Gilbert, and I'd love you—oh, what shall I do without you? How dull and dreadful everything is going to be now!"

"But I shall be back soon. And I shall write to you every day!"

"You will, won't you, dear? Write, write—" The train was almost moving.

It began to move. Gilbert leaned out of the window and waved his hand for a long time, to a forlorn little girl in a brown coat and skirt who stood upon the platform crying bitterly.

The waiter of the dining-car, knowing his man well, brought Lothian a large whiskey and soda before the long train was free of the sordid Northwest suburbs.

Lothian drank it, arranged about dinner, and sank back against the cushions. He lit a cigarette and drew the hot smoke deep into his lungs.

The train was out of the town area now. There was no more jolting and rattling over points. Its progress into the gathering night was a continuous roar.

Onwards through the gathering night. . . .

"I'd be your wife, Gilbert, and I'd love you—if you were free."

CHAPTER V

THE NIGHT JOURNEY FROM NICE WHEN MRS. DALY SPEAKS WORDS OF FIRE

A carriage was waiting outside a white and gilded hotel on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice.

The sun was just dipping behind the Esterelle mountains and the Mediterranean was the colour of wine. Already the Palais du Jetée was being illuminated and outlined itself in palest gold against the painted sky above the Cimiez heights, where the olive-coloured headland hides Villefranche and the sea-girt pleasure city of Monte Carlo.

The tall palms in the gardens which front the gleaming palaces of the Promenade were bronze gold in the fading light, and their fans clicked and rustled in a cool breeze which was eddying down upon the Queen of the Mediterranean from the Maritime Alps.

Mary Lothian came out of the hotel. Her face was pale and very sad. She had been crying. With her was a tall, stately woman of middle-age; grey-haired, with a massive calmness and peace of feature recalling the Athena of the Louvre or one of those noble figures of the Erectheum crowning the hill of the Acropolis at Athens.

She was Mrs. Julia Daly, who had been upon the Riviera for two months. Dr. Morton Sims had written to her. She had called upon Mary and the two had become fast friends.

Such time as Mary could spare from the sickbed of her sister, she spent in the company of this great-souled woman from America, and now Mrs. Daly, whose stay at Nice was over, was returning to London with her friend.

The open carriage drove off, by the gardens and jewellers' shops in front of the Casino and Opera House and down the Avenue de la Gare. The glittering cafés were full of people taking an apéritif before dinner. There was a sense of relaxation and repose over the pleasure city of the South, poured down upon it in a golden haze from the last level rays of the sun.

Outside one of the cafés, as the carriage turned to the station, some Italians were singing "O Soli Mio" to the accompaniment of guitars and a harp, with mellow, passionate voices.

The long green train rolled into the glass-roofed station, the brass-work of the carriage doors covered thick with oily dust from the Italian tunnels through which it had passed. The conductor of the sleeping-car portion found the two women their reserved compartment. Their luggage was already registered through to Charing Cross and they had only dressing bags with them.

As the train started again Mrs. Daly pulled the sliding door into its place, the curtains over it and the windows which looked out into the corridor. Then she switched on the electric light in the roof and also the lamp which stood on a little table at the other end.

"There, my dear," she said, "now we shall be quite comfortable."

She sat down by Mary, took her hand in hers and kissed her.

"I know what you are experiencing now," she said in her low rich voice, "and it is very bitter. But the separation is only for a short, short time. God wants her, and we shall all be in heaven together soon, Mrs. Lothian. And you're leaving her with her husband. It is a great mercy that he has come at last. They are best alone together. And see how brave and cheery he is!—There's a real man, a Christian soldier and gentleman if ever one lived. His wife's death won't kill him. It will make him live more strenuously for others. He will pass the short time between now and meeting her again in a high fever of righteous works and duty. There is no death."

Mary held the firm white hand.

"You comfort me," she said. "I thank God that you came to me in my affliction. Otherwise I should have been quite alone till Harold came."

"I'm real glad that dear good Morton Sims asked me to call. Edith Sims and I are like" . . . She broke off abruptly. "Like sisters," she was about to say, but would not.

Mary smiled. Her friend's delicacy was easy to understand. "I know," she answered, "like sisters! You needn't have hesitated. I am better now. All you tell me is just what I am sure of and it is everything. But one's heart grows faint at the moment of parting and the reassuring voice of a friend helps very much. I hope it doesn't mean that one's faith is weak, to long for a sympathetic and confirming voice?"

"No, it does not. God has made us like that. I know the value of a friend's word well. Nothing heartens one so. I have been in deep waters in my time, Mary. You must let me call you Mary, my dear."

"Oh, do, do! Yes, it is wonderful how words help, human living words."

"Nothing is more extraordinary in life than the power of the spoken word. How careful and watchful every one ought to be over words. Spoken, they always seem to me to have more lasting influence than words in a book. They pass through mind after mind. Just think, for instance, how when we meet a man or woman with a sincere intellectual belief which is quite opposed to our own, we are chilled into a momentary doubt of our own opinions—however strongly we may hold them. And when it is the other way about, what strength and comfort we get!"

"Thank you," Mary said simply, "you are very helpful. Dr. Morton Sims"—she hesitated for a moment—"Dr. Morton Sims told me something of your life. And of course I know all about your work, as the whole world knows. I know, dear Mrs. Daly, how much you have suffered. And it is because of that that you help me so, who am suffering too."

There was silence for a space. The train had stopped at Cannes and started again. Now it was winding and climbing the mountain valleys towards Toulon. But neither of the two women knew anything of it. They were alone in the quiet travelling room that money made possible for them. Heart was meeting heart in the small luxurious place in which they sat, remote from the outside world as if upon some desert island.

"Dear Morton Sims," the American lady said at length. "The utter sane goodness of that man! My dear, he is an angel of light, as near a perfect character as any one alive in the world to-day. And yet he doesn't believe in Jesus and thinks the Church and the Sacraments—I've been a member of the Episcopalian Church from girlhood—only make-believe and error."

"He is the finest natured man I have ever met," Mary answered. "I've only known him for a short time, but he has been so good and friendly. What a sad thing it is that he is an infidel. I don't use the word in the popular reprehensible sense, but as just what it means—without faith."

"It's a sad thing to us," Mrs. Daly said briskly, "but I have no fears for him. God hasn't given him the gift of Faith. Now that's all we can say about it. In the next world he will have to go through a probation and learn his catechism, so to speak, before he steps right into his proper place. But he won't be a catechumen long. His pure heart and noble life will tell where hearts and wills are weighed. There is a place by the Throne waiting for him."

"Oh, I am sure. He is wonderfully good. Indeed one seems to feel his goodness more than one does that of our clergyman at home, though Mr. Medley is a good man too!"

"Brains, my dear! Brains! Morton Sims, you see, is of the aristocracy. Your clergyman probably is not."

"Aristocracy?"

"The only aristocracy, the aristocracy of brain-power. Don't forget I'm an American woman, Mary! Goodness has the same value in Heaven however it is manifested upon earth. The question of bimetallism doesn't trouble God and His Angels. But a brilliant-minded Saint has certainly more influence down here than a fool-saint."

Mary nodded.

Such a doctrine as this was quite in accord with what she wished to think. She rejoiced to hear it spoken with such sharp lucidity. She also worshipped at a shrine, that of no saint, certainly, but where a flaming intellect illuminated the happenings of life. In his way, quite a different way, of course, she knew that Gilbert had a finer mind than even Morton Sims. And yet, Gilbert wasn't good, as he ought to be. . . . How these speculations and judgments coiled and recoiled upon themselves; puzzled weary minds and, when all was done, were very little good after all!

At any rate, she loved Gilbert more than anything or anybody in the world. So that was that!

But tears came into her eyes as she thought of her husband with deep and yearning love. If he would only give up alcohol! Why wouldn't he? To her, such an act seemed so simple and easy. Only a refusal, that was all! The young man who came to Jesus in the old days was asked to give up so much. Even for Jesus and immortality he found himself unable to do it. But Gilbert had only to give up one thing in order to be good and happy, to make her happy.

It was true that Dr. Morton Sims had told her many scientific facts, had explained and explained. He had definitely said that Gilbert was in the clutches of a disease; that Gilbert couldn't really help himself, that he must be cured as a man is cured of gout. And then, when she had asked the doctor how this was to be done, he had so little comfort to give. He had explained that all the advertised "cures"—even the ones backed up by people of name, bishops, magistrates, and so on, were really worthless. They administered other drugs in order to sober up the patient from alcohol. That was easy and possible—though only with the thorough co-operation of the patient. After a few weeks, when health appeared to be restored, and the will power was certainly strengthened, the "cure" did nothing more. The pre-disposition was not eradicated. That was an affair to be accomplished only by two or three years of abstinence and not always then.

—"I'll talk to Mrs. Daly about it," the sad wife said to herself. "She is a noble, Christian woman. She understands more than even the doctor. She must do so. She loves our Lord. Moreover she has given her life to the cause of temperance." . . .

But she must be careful and diplomatic. The natural reticence and delicacy of a well-bred woman shrank from the unveiling, not only of her own sorrow, but of a beloved's shame. The coarse, ill-balanced and bourgeois temperament bawls its sorrow and calls for sympathy from the sweepings of any Pentonville omnibus. It writes things upon a street wall and enjoys voluptuous public hysterics. The refined and gracious mind hesitates long before the least avowal.

"You said," she began, after a period of sympathetic silence, "that you had been in deep waters."

Julia Daly nodded. "I guess it's pretty well known," she said with a sigh. "That's the worst of a campaign like mine. It's partly because every one knows all about what you've gone through that they give you a hearing. In the States the papers are full of my unhappy story whenever I lecture in a new place. But I'm used to it now and it doesn't hurt me. Most of the stories are untrue, though. Mr. Daly was a pretty considerable ruffian when he was in drink. But he wasn't the monster he's been made out to be, and he couldn't help himself, poor, poisoned man. But which story have you read, Mary?"

"None at all. Only Dr. Morton Sims, when he wrote, told me that you had suffered, that your husband, that——"

"That Patrick was an alcoholic. Yes, that's the main fact. He did a dreadful thing when he became insane through drink. There's no need to speak of it. But I loved him dearly all the same. He might have been such a noble man!"

"Ah, that's just what I feel about my dear boy. He's not as bad as—as some people. But he does drink quite dreadfully. I hate telling you. It seems a sort of treachery to him. But you may be able to help me."

"I knew," Mrs. Daly said with a sigh. "The doctor has told me in confidence. I'd do anything to help you, dear girl. Your husband's poems have been such a help and comfort to me in hours of sadness and depression. Oh, what a dreadful scourge it is! this frightful thing that seizes on noble and ignoble minds alike! It is the black horror of the age, the curse of nations, the ruin of thousands upon thousands. If only the world would realise it!"

"No one seems to realise the horror except those who have suffered dreadfully from it."

"More people do than you think, Mary, but, still, they are an insignificant part of the whole. People are such fools! I was reading 'Pickwick' the other day, a great English classic and a work of genius, too, in its way, I suppose. The principal characters get drunk on every other page. Things are better now, as far as books are concerned, though the comic newspapers keep up their ghastly fun about drunken folk. But the cause of Temperance isn't a popular one, here or in my own country."

"A teetotaller is so often called a fanatic in England," Mary said.

"I know it well. But I say this, with entire conviction, absolute bed-rock certainty, my dear, the people who have joined together to go without alcohol themselves and to do all they can to fight it, are in the right whatever people may say of them. And it doesn't matter what people say either. As in all movements, there is a lot of error and mistaken energy. The Bands of Hope, the Blue Ribbon Army, the Rechabites are not always wise. Some of them make total abstinence into a religion and think that alcohol is the only Fiend to fight against. Most of them—as our own new scientific party think—are fighting on wrong lines. That's to say they are not doing a tenth as much good as they might do, because the scientific remedy has not become real to them. That will come though, if we can bring it about. But I tire you?"

"Please go on."

"Well, you know our theory. It is a certain remedy. You can't stop alcohol. But by making it a penal offence for drunkards to have children, drunkenness must be almost eliminated in time."

"Yes," Mary said. "Of course, I have read all about it. But I know so little of science. But what is the individual cure? Is there none, then? Oh, surely if it is a disease it can be cured? Dr. Morton Sims tried to be encouraging, but I could see that he didn't think there really was much chance for a man who is a slave to drink. It is splendid, of course, to think that some day it may all be eliminated by science. But meanwhile, when women's hearts are bleeding for men they love . . ."

Her voice broke and faltered. Her heart was too full for further speech.

The good woman at her side kissed her tenderly. "Do not grieve," she said. "Listen. I told you just now that so many of the great Temperance organisations err in their rejection of scientific advice and scientific means to a great end. They place their trust in God, forgetting that science only exists by God's will and that every discovery made by men is only God choosing to reveal Himself to those who search for Him. But the Scientists are wrong, too, in their rejection—in so many cases—of God. They do not see that Religion and Science are not only non-antagonistic, but really complement each other. It is beginning to be seen, though. In time it will be generally recognised. I read the admission of a famous scientist the other day, to this effect. He said, 'It is generally recognised that any form of treatment in which the "occult," the "supernatural," or anything secret or mysterious is allowed to play a dominant part in so neurotic an affection as inebriety, often succeeds.' And he closed a most helpful and able essay on the arrest of alcohol with something like these words:

"'The reference to agencies for the uplifting of the drink-victim would be sadly incomplete without a very definite acknowledgment of the incalculable assistance which the wise worker and unprejudiced physician may obtain by bringing to bear upon the whole life of the patient that Power, the majesty and mystery, the consolation and inspiration of which it is the mission of religion to reveal.'"

"Then even the doctors are coming round?" Mary said. "And it means exactly, you would say—?"

"I would tell you what has been proved without possibility of dispute a thousand times. I would tell you that when all therapeutic agencies have failed, the Holy Spirit has succeeded. The Power which is above every other power can do this. No loving heart need despair. However black the night that influence can enlighten it. Ask those who work among the desolate and oppressed; the outcast and forlorn, the drink-victims and criminals. Ask, here in England, old General Booth or Prebendary Carlile. Ask the clergy of the Church in the London Docks, ask the Nonconformist ministers, ask the Priests of the Italian Mission who work in the slums.

"They will tell you of daily miracles of conversion and transformations as marvellous and mystical as ever Jesus wrought when He was visible on earth. Mary! It goes on to-day, it does go on. There is the only cure, the only salvation. Jesus."

There was a passionate fervour in her voice, a divine light upon her face. She also prophesied, and the Spirit of God was upon her as upon the holy women of old.

And Mary caught that holy fire also. Her lips were parted, her eyes shone. She re-echoed the sacred Name.

"I would give my life to save Gilbert," she said.

"I have no dear one to save, now," the other answered. "But I would give a thousand lives if I had them to save America from Alcohol. I love my land! There is much about my country that the ordinary English man or woman has no glimmering of. Your papers are full of the extravagances and divorces of wealthy vulgarians—champagne corks floating on cess-pools. You read of trusts and political corruption. These are the things that are given prominence by the English newspapers. But of the deep true heart of America little is known here. We are not really a race of money-grubbers and cheap humourists. We are great, we shall be greater. The lamps of freedom burn clearly in the hearts of millions of people of whom Europe never hears. God is with us still! The Holy Spirit broods yet over the forests and the prairies, the mountains and the rivers of my land. Read the 'Choir Invisible' by James Lane Allen and learn of us who are America."

"I will, dear Mrs. Daly. How you have comforted me to-night! God sent you to me. I feel quite happy now about my darling sister. I feel much happier about my husband. Whatever this life has in store, there is always the hereafter. It seems very close to-night, the veil wears thin."

"We will rest, Mary, while these good thoughts and hopes remain within us. But before we go to bed, listen to this."

Julia Daly felt in her dressing bag and withdrew a small volume bound in vermilion morocco.

"It's your best English novel," she said, "far and away the greatest—Charles Reade's 'The Cloister and the Hearth,' I mean. I'm reading it for the fifth time. For five years now I have done so each year."

"For ever?" she began in her beautiful voice, that voice which had brought hope to so many weary hearts in the great Republic of the West.

"'For ever? Christians live "for ever," and love "for ever" but they never part "for ever." They part, as part the earth and sun, only to meet more brightly in a little while. You and I part here for life. And what is our life? One line in the great story of the Church, whose son and daughter we are; one handful in the sand of time, one drop in the ocean of "For ever." Adieu—for the little moment called "a life!" We part in trouble, we shall meet in peace; we part in a world of sin and sorrow, we shall meet where all is purity and love divine; where no ill passions are, but Christ is, and His Saints around Him clad in white. There, in the turning of an hour-glass, in the breaking of a bubble, in the passing of a cloud, she, and thou, and I shall meet again; and sit at the feet of angels and archangels, apostles and saints, and beam like them with joy unspeakable, in the light of the shadow of God upon His throne, for ever—and ever—and ever.'"

The two women undressed and said their prayers, making humble supplication at the Throne of Grace for themselves, those they loved and for all those from whom God was hidden.

And as the train bore them through Nimes and Arles, Avignon and the old Roman cities of southern France, they slept as simple children sleep.

CHAPTER VI

GILBERT LOTHIAN'S DIARY

"It comes very glibly off the tongue to say, 'Put yourself in his position,'—'What would you have done under the circumstances?' but if self-analysis is difficult, how much more so is it to appreciate the 'Ego' of another, to penetrate within the veil of the maimed and debased inner temple of the debauched inebriate?"—"The Psychology of the Alcoholic," by T. Claye Shawe, M.D., F.R.C.P., Lecturer on psychological medicine. St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

When Mary Lothian returned home to Mortland Royal she was very unwell. The strain of watching over Lady Davidson, and the wrench of a parting which in this world was to be a final one, proved more than she was able to endure.

She had been out of doors, imprudently, during that dangerous hour on the Riviera between sunset and nine o'clock. Symptoms of that curious light fever, with its sharp nervous pains, which is easily contracted at such times along the Côte d'Azur, began to show themselves.

Dr. Morton Sims was away in Paris for a few weeks upon a scientific engagement he was unable to refuse, and Mary was attended by Dr. Heywood, the general practitioner from Wordingham.

There was nothing very serious the matter, but the Riviera fever brings collapse and great depression of spirits with it. Mary remained in bed, lying there in a dreamy, depressed state of both physical and mental faculties. She read but little, preferred to be alone as much as possible, and found it hard to take a lively interest in anything at all.

Gilbert was attentive enough. He saw that every possible thing was done for her comfort. But his manner was nervous and staccato, though he made great efforts at calm. He was assiduous, eager to help and suggest, but there was no repose about him. In her great longing for rest and solitude—a necessary physical craving resulting upon her illness—Mary hardly wanted to see very much even of Gilbert. She was too weak and dispirited to remonstrate with him, but it was quite obvious to her experienced eyes that he was drinking heavily again.

His quite unasked-for references to the fact that he was taking nothing but a bottle of beer in the middle of the morning, a little claret at meals and a single whiskey and soda before going to bed, betrayed him at once. His tremulous anxiety, his furtive manner, the really horrible arrogation of gaiety and ease made upon a most anxious hope that he was deceiving her, told their own tale.

So did the heavy puffed face, yellowish red and with spots appearing upon it. His eyes seemed smaller as the surrounding tissues were dilated, they were yellowish, streaked with little veins of blood at the corners, and dull in expression.

His head jerked, his hands trembled and when he touched her they were hot and damp.

Her depression of mind, her sense of hopelessness, were greatly increased. Darkness seemed to be closing round her, and prayer—for it happens thus at times with even the most saintly souls—gave little relief.

"I shall be better soon," she kept repeating to herself. "The doctor says so. Then, when I am well, I shall be able to take poor Gillie really in hand. It won't be long now. Then I will save him with God's help."

In her present feebleness she knew that it was useless to attempt to do anything in this direction. So she pretended to believe her husband, said nothing at all, and prayed earnestly to recover her health that she might set about the task of succour.

She did not know, had not the very slightest idea, of Lothian's real state. Nobody knew, nobody could know.

On his part, freed of all restraint, his mind a cave of horror, a chamber of torture, he drank with lonely and systematic persistence.

It was about this time that he began to make these notes in the form of a diary which long afterwards passed into the hands of Dr. Morton Sims. The record of heated horror, the extraordinary glimpse into an inferno incredible to the sane man, has proved of immense value to those who are engaged in studying the psychology of the inebriate.

From much that they contain, it is obvious that the author had no intention of letting them be seen by any other eyes than his own, at the time of writing them. Dr. Morton Sims had certainly suggested the idea in the first place, but there can be no doubt whatever that Lothian soon abandoned his original plan and wrote for the mere relief of doing so, and doubtless with a sinister fascination at the spectacle of his own mind thus revealed by subtle analysis and the record of a skilled pen. Alcoholised and impaired as his mind was, it was nevertheless quite capable of doing this accurately and forcibly, and there are many corroborative instances of such an occurrence. More than one medical man during the progress of a protracted death agony has left minute statements of his sensations for the good of Society.

Such papers as these, for use in a book which has an appeal to all sorts of people, cannot, of course, be printed entire. There are things which it would serve no good purpose for the layman to know, valuable as they are to the patient students of morbid states. And what can be given is horrible enough.

The selected passages follow herewith, and with only such comment as is necessary to elucidate the text.

. . . Last night a letter came from a stranger, one of the many that I get, thanking me for some of the poems in "Surgit Amari" which he said had greatly solaced and helped him throughout a period of mental distress. When I opened the letter it was after dinner, and I had dined well—my appetite keeps good at any rate, and while that is so there is no fear of it—according to the doctors and the medical books. I opened the letter and read it without much interest. I am not so touched and pleased by these letters as I used to be. Then, after I had said good-night to my wife, I went into the library. After two or three whiskies and a lot of cigarettes the usual delusion of greatness and power came over me. I know, of course, that I have great power and am in a way celebrated, but at ordinary times I have no overmastering consciousness and bland, suave pride in this. When I am recovering from the effects of too much alcohol I doubt everything. My own work seems to me trivial and worthless, void of life and imitations of greater work.

Well, I had the usual quickening, but vague and incoherent sense of greatness, and I picked up the letter again. I walked up and down the room smoking furiously, and then I had some more whiskey. The constant walking up and down the room, by the way, is a well-marked symptom of my state. The nerves refuse me calm. I can't sit down for long, even with the most alluring book. Some thought comes into my mind like a stone thrown suddenly into a pool, and before I am aware of it I am marching up and down the room like a forest beast in a cage. When I had read the letter twice more I sat down and wrote a most effusive reply to my correspondent. I almost wept as I read it. I went into high things, I revealed myself and my innermost thoughts with the grave kindness and wish to be of help that a great and good man; intimate with a lesser and struggling man; might use.

In the morning I read the letter which I had thought so wonderful. As usual, I tore it up. It was written in a handwriting which might have betrayed drunkenness to a child. Long words lacked a syllable, words ending in "ing" were concluded by a single stroke, the letter "l" was the same size as the letter "e" and could not be distinguished from it. But what was worse, was the sickly sentiment, expressed in the most feeble sloppy prose.

It was sort of educated Chadband or Stiggins and there was an appalling lack of reticence.

It is a marked symptom of my state, that when I am drunk I always want to write effusive letters to strangers or mere acquaintances. Sometimes, if I have been reading a book that I liked, I sit down and turn out pages of gush to the unknown author, hailing him as a brother and a master. Thank goodness I always tear the wretched things up next day. It is a good thing I live in the country. In London these wretched letters, which I am impelled to write, would be in some adjacent pillar box before I realised what I had done.

Oh, to be a sane man, a member of the usual sane army of the world who never do these things!

The above passage must have been re-read some time after it was written and been the raison d'être of what follows. The various passages are only occasionally dated, but their chronological order can be determined with some certainty by these few dates, changes of handwriting, and above all by the progress and interplay of thought.

It had not occurred to me before, with any strength that is, how very far my inner life diverges now from ordinary paths! It is, I see in a moment such as the present when I am able to contemplate it, utterly abnormal. I am glad to realise this for a time. It is so intensely interesting from the psychologist's point of view. I can so very, very rarely realise it. Immediately that I slip back into the abnormal life, long custom and habit reassert themselves and I become quite unaware that it is abnormal. I live mechanically according to the bizarre and fantastic rules imposed upon me by drink. Now, for a time, I have a breathing space. I have left the dim green places under the sea and my head is above water. I see the blue sky and feel the winds of the upper world upon my face. I used to belong up there, now I am an inhabitant of the under world, where the krakens and the polyps batten in their sleep and no light comes.

I will therefore use my little visit to "glimpse the moon" like the Prince of Denmark's sepulchral father. I will catalogue the ritual of the under world which has me fast.

I will, that is, write as much as I can. Before very long my eyes will be tired and little black specks will dance in front of them. The dull pain in my side—cirrhosis of course—which is quiet and feeding now—will begin again. Something in my head, at the back of the skull on the left hand side—so it seems—will begin to throb and ache. Little shooting pains will come in my knees and round about my ankles and drops of perspiration which taste bitter as brine will roll down my face. And, worse than all, the fear of It will commence. Slight "alcoholic tremors" will hint of what might be. After a few minutes I shall feel that it is going to be.

I will define all that I mean by "It" another time.

Well, then I shall send "It" and all the smaller "Its" to the right about. I shall have two or three strong pegs. Then physical pains, all mental horrors, will disappear at once. But I shall be back again under the sea nevertheless. I shan't realise, as I am realising now, the abnormality of my life. But I should say that I have an hour at least before I need have any more whiskey, before that becomes imperative. So here goes for a revelation more real and minute than de Quincey, though, lamentable fact! in most inferior prose!

Here this passage ends. It is obvious from what follows that the period of expected freedom came to an end long before the author expected. Excited by what he proposed to do, he had spent too much of his brief energy in explaining it. Mechanically he had taken more drink to preserve himself upon the surface—the poisoned mind entirely forgetting what it had just set down—and with mathematic certainty the alcohol had plunged the poet once more beneath the ruining waters.

The next entry, undated, is written in a more precise and firmer handwriting. It recalls the small and beautiful caligraphy of the old days. There is no preamble to the bald and hideous confession of mental torture.

I wish that my imagination was not so horribly acute and vivid when it is directed towards horrors—as indeed it always seems to be now. I wish, too, that I had never talked curiously to loquacious medical friends and read so many medical books.

I am always making amateur, and probably perfectly ridiculous, tests for Locomotor Ataxy and General Paralysis—always shrinking in nameless fear from what so often seems the inevitable onslaught of "It."

Meanwhile, with these fears never leaving me for a moment, to what an infinity of mad superstitions I am slave! How I strive, by a bitter, and (really) hideously comic, ritual to stave off the inevitable.

Oh, I used to love God and trust in Him. I used to pray to Jesus. Now, like any aborigine I only seek to ward off evil, to propitiate the Devil and the Powers of the Air, to drag the Holy Trinity into a forced compliance with my conjuring tricks. I can hardly distinguish the devil from God. Both seem my antagonists. Hardly able to distinguish Light from dark, I employ myself with dirty little conjuring tricks. I well know that all these are the phantasms of a disordered brain! I am not really fool enough to believe that God can be propitiated or Satan kept at bay by movements: touchings and charms.

But I obey my demon.

These things are a foolish network round my every action and thought. I can't get out of the net.

Touching, I do not so much mind. In me it is a symptom of alcoholism, but greater people have known it as a mere nervous affection quite apart from drink. Dr. Johnson used to stop and return to touch lamp-posts. In "Lavengro," Borrow has words to say about this impulse—I think it is in Lavengro or it may be in the Spanish book. Borrow used to "touch wood." I began it a long time ago, in jest at something young Ingworth said. I did it as one throws spilt salt over one's shoulder or avoids seeing the new moon through glass. Together with the other things I have to do now, it has become an obsession. I carry little stumps of pencil in all my pockets. Whenever a thought of coming evil, a radiation from the awful cloud of Apprehension comes to me, then I can thrust a finger into the nearest pocket and touch wood. Only a fortnight ago I was frightened out of my senses by the thought that I had never been really touching wood at all. The pencil stumps were all varnished. I had been touching varnish! It took me an hour to scrape all the varnish off with a pocket knife. I must have about twenty stumps in constant use. At night I always put one in the pocket of my pyjama coat—one wakes up with some fear—but, half asleep and lying as I do upon my left side, the pocket is often under me and I can't get to the wood quickly. So I keep my arm stretched out all night and my hand can touch the wooden top of a chair by the bed in a second. I made Tumpany sand-paper all the varnish off the top of the chair too. He thought I was mad. I suppose I am, as a matter of fact. But though I am perfectly aware of the damnable foolishness of it, these things are more real to me than the money-market to a business man.

If it were only this compulsion to touch wood I should not mind. But there are other tyrannies coincident which are more urgent and compelling. My whole mind—at times—seems taken up by the necessity for ritual actions. I have no time for quiet thought. Everything is broken in upon. There is the Sign of the Cross. I have linked even that in the chain of my terrors. I touch wood and then I make this sign. I do it so often that I have invented all sorts of methods of doing it secretly in public, and quickly when I am alone. I do it in a sort of imaginary way. For instance, I bend my head and in so doing draw an imaginary line with my right eye upon the nearest wall, or upon the page of the book that I am reading. Then I move my head from side to side and make another fictitious line to complete the cross. A propos of making the sign, the imaginary lines nearly always go crooked in my brain. This especially so when I am doing it on a book. I follow two lines of type on both pages and use the seam of the binding between them to make the down strokes. But it hardly ever comes right the first time. I begin to notice people looking at me curiously as I try to get it right and my head moves about. If they only knew!

Then another and more satisfactory way—for the imaginary method always makes my head ache for a second or two—I accomplish with the thumb of my right hand moving vertically down the first joint of the index finger, and then laterally. I can do this as often as I like and no one can possibly see me. I have a little copper Cross too, with "In hoc vinces" graved upon it. But I don't like using this much. It is too concrete. It reminds me of the use I am making of the symbol of salvation. "In hoc vinces"! Not I. There are times when I think that I am surely doomed.

But I think that the worst of all the foul, senseless, and yet imperative petty lordships I endure, is the dominion of the two numbers. The Dominion of The Two Numbers!—capital letters shall indicate this! For some reason or other I have for years imagined mystical virtue in the number 7 and some maleficent influence in the number 13. These, of course, are old superstitions, but they, and all the others, ride me to a weariness of spirit which is near death.

Although I got my first in "Lit. Hum." at Oxford, have read almost everything, and can certainly say that I am a man of wide culture and knowledge, Figures always gave me aversion and distaste. I got an open scholarship at my college and was as near as nothing ploughed in the almost formal preliminary exam of Responsions by Arithmetic. I can't add up my bank-book correctly even now, and I have no sense whatever of financial amounts and affairs.