Chapter III: Psychology of the Inebriate, and the Letter of Jewelled Words

"Verbosa ac grandis epistola venit a Capreis."

--_Juvenal._

It was three days after the accident.

Gilbert lay in bed. His head was crossed with bandages, his wrist was wrapped with lint and a wet compress was upon the ankle of his strained left foot.

The windows of his bedroom were wide to the sun and air of the morning. There were two pleasant droning sounds. A bee was flying round the room, and down below in the garden Tumpany was mowing the strip of lawn before the house. Gilbert was very tranquil. He was wrapped round with a delicious peace of mind and body. He seemed to be floating in some warm ether of peace.

There was a table by the side of his bed. In a slender vase upon it was a single marguerite daisy with its full green stem, its rays of white--Chinese white in a box of colours--round the central gold. Close to his hand, upon the white turned down sheet was a copy of "John Inglesant." It was a book he loved and could always return to, and he had had his copy bound in most sumptuous purple.

Mary came into the bedroom.

She was carrying a little tray upon which there was a jug of milk and a bottle of soda water. There was a serene happiness upon her face. She had him now--the man she loved! He was hers, her own without possibility of interference. She was his Providence, he depended utterly upon her.

There are not many women like this in life, but there are some. Perhaps they were more frequent in the days of the past. Women who have no single thought of Self: women whose thoughts are always prayers: women in whose veins love takes the place of blood, whose hearts are cisterns of sweet charity, whose touch means healing, whose voices are like harps that sound forgiveness and devotion alone.

She put the tray upon the bedside table and sat down upon the bed, taking his unwounded hand in hers, stroking it with the soft cushions of her fingers, holding up its well-shaped plumpness as if it were a toy.

"There is something so comic about your hands, darling!" she said. "They are so nice and fat and jolly. They make me want to laugh!"

To Gilbert his wife's happy voice seemed but part of the dream-like peace which lay upon him. He was drowsy with incense. How fresh and fragrant she was! he thought idly. He pulled her down to him and kissed her and the gilded threads of her hair brushed his forehead. Her lips were cool as violets with the dew upon their petals. She belonged to him. She was part of the pleasant furniture of the room, the hour!

"How are you feeling, darling? You're looking so much better!"

"My head hurts a little, but not much. But my nerves are ever so much better. Look how steady my hand is." He held it out with childish pride.

"And you'll see, Molly dear, that when I'm shaved, my complexion will be quite nice again! It's a horrid nuisance not to be able to shave. Do I look very bad?"

"No, you wicked image! You're a vain little wretch, Gillie, really!"

"I'm quite sure that I'm not. But, Molly, it's so nice to be feeling better. Master of one's self. Not frightened about things."

"Of course it is, you old stupid! If you were always good how much happier you'd be! Take my advice. Do what I tell you, and everything will come right. You've got a great big brain, but you're a silly boy, too! Think how much more placid you are now. Never take any more spirits again!"

"No, I won't, darling. I promise you I won't."

"That's right, dear. And this nice new doctor will help you. You like him, don't you?"

"Molly! What a dear simple fool you are! _Like_ him? You don't in the least realise who he is. It's Morton Sims, Morton Sims himself! He's a fearfully important person. Twice, they say, he's refused to take a baronetcy. He's come down here to do research work. It's an enormous condescension on his part to come and plaster up my head. It's really rather like Lord Rosebery coming to shave one! And he'll send in a bill for about fifty pounds!"

"He won't, Gillie dear. I'm sure. But if he does, what's the use of worrying? I'll pay it out of my own money, and I've got nearly as much as you--nasty miser!"

They laughed together at this. Mary had three or four hundreds a year of her own, Gilbert a little more, independently of what he earned by writing. Mary was mean with her money. That is to say, she saved it up to give to poorer people and debated with herself about a new frock like a chancellor of the Exchequer about the advisability of a fresh tax. And Lothian didn't care and never thought about money. He had no real sense of personal property. He liked spending money. He was extravagant for other people. If he bought a rare book, a special Japanese colour-print, any desirable thing--he generally gave it away to some one at once. He really liked people with whom he came into contact to have delightful things quite as much as he liked to have them himself.

Nor was this an outcome of the poisoned state of his body, his brain, and--more terrible than all!--of his mind. It was genuine human kindness, an eager longing that others should enjoy things that he himself enjoyed so poignantly.

But what he gave must be the things that _he_ liked, though to all _necessity_ he was liberal. A sick poor person without proper nourishment, a child without a toy, some wretched tramp without tobacco for his pipe--to him these were all tragedies, equal in their appeal to his charity. And this was because of his trained power of psychology, his profound insight into the minds of others, though even that was marred by a Rousseau-like belief that every one was good and decent at heart! Still, the need of the dying village consumptive for milk and calf's-foot jelly, was no more vivid in his mind than the need of the tramp for a smoke. As far as he was able, it was his Duty, his happy duty, to satisfy the wants of both.

Mary was different.

The consumptive, yes! Stout flannel shirts for old shepherds who must tend the birth of lambs on bitter Spring midnights. Food for the tramp, too--no dusty wayfarer should go unsatisfied from the Lothians' house! But not the subsequent shilling for beer and shag and the humble luxury of the Inn kitchen that Gilbert would have bestowed.

Such was her wise penuriousness in its calm economy of the angels!

Yet, her husband had his economy also. Odd as it was, it was part of his temperament. If he had bought a rare and perfect object of art, and then met some one who he saw longed for it, but couldn't afford to have it in the ordinary way, he took a real delight in giving it. But it would have been easier for him to lop off a hand than to present one of the Toftrees' novels to any one who was thirsting for something to read. He would have thought it immoral to do so.

He had a great row with his wife when she presented a gaudy pair of pink-gilt vases to an ex-housemaid who was about to be married.

"But dear, she's _delighted_," Mary had said.

"You've committed a crime! It's disgraceful. Oblige me by never doing anything of the sort again. Why didn't you give her a ham?"

"Molly, may I have a cigarette?"

"Hadn't you better have a pipe? The doctor said that you smoked far too many cigarettes and that they were bad for you."

For three days Lothian had had nothing to drink but a glass of Burgundy at lunch and dinner. Lying in bed, perfectly tranquil, calling upon no physical resources, the sense of nerve-rest within him was grateful and profound.

But the inebriate lives almost entirely upon momentary sensation. The slightest recrudescence of health makes him forget the horrors of the past.

In the false calm of his quiet room, his tended state, the love and care surrounding him, Gilbert had already come to imagine that he was what he hoped to be in his saner moments. He had, at the moment, not the least desire for a drink. In three days he was already complacent and felt himself strong!

Yet his nerves were still unstable and every impulse was on a hair trigger, so to speak.

The fact became evident at once.

He knew well enough that when he began to smoke pipes the most pressing desire of the other narcotic, alcohol, became numbed. Cigarettes stimulated that desire, or at least accompanied it. He could not live happily without cigarettes.

He knew that Mary knew this also--experience of him had given her the sad knowledge--and he was quite certain that Dr. Morton Sims must know too.

The extraordinary transitions of the drunkard from one mental state to another are more symptomatic than any other thing about him. Gilbert's face altered and became sullen. A sharp and acid note tuned his voice.

"I see," he said, "you've been talking me over with Morton Sims. Thank you so _very_ much!"

He began to brag about himself, a thing he would have been horrified to do to any one but Mary. Even with her it was a weak weapon, and sometimes in his hands a mean and cruel one too.

". . . You were kind enough to marry me, but you don't in the least seem to understand whom you have married! Is my art nothing to you? Do you realise who I am at all--in any way? Of course you don't! You're too big a fool to do so. But other women know! At any rate, I beg you will not talk over your husband with stray medical men who come along. You might spare me that at least. I should have thought you would have had more sense of personal dignity than that!"

She winced at the cruelty of his words, at the wounding bitterness which he knew so well how to throw into his voice. But she showed no sign of it. He was a poisoned man, and she knew it. Morton Sims had made it plainer than ever to her at their talks downstairs during the last three days. It wasn't Gillie who said these hard things, it was the Fiend Alcohol that lurked within him and who should be driven out. . . .

It wasn't her Gilbert, really!

In her mind she said one word. "Jesus!" It was a prayer, hope, comfort and control. The response was instant.

That secret help had been discovered long since by her. Of her own searching it had come, and then, one day she had picked up one of her husband's favourite books and had read of this very habit she had acquired.

"Inglesant found that repeating the name of Jesus simply in the
lonely nights kept his brain quiet when it was on the point of
distraction, being of the same mind as Sir Charles Lucas when 'Many
times calling upon the sacred name of Jesus,' he was shot dead at
Colchester."

The spiritual telegraphy that goes on between Earth and Heaven, from God to His Saints is by no means understood by the World.

"You old duffer," Mary said. "Really, you are a perfect blighter--as you so often call me! Haven't you just been boasting about feeling so much better? And, fat wretch! am I not doing everything possible for you. _Of course_ I've talked you over with the doctor. We're going to make you right! We're going to make you slim and beautiful once more. My dear thing! it's all arranged and settled. Don't bubble like a frog! Don't look at your poor Missis as if she were a nasty smell! It's no use, Gillie dear, we've got you now!"

No momentary ill-humour could stand against this. He was, after all, quite dependent upon the lady with the golden hair who was sitting upon his bed.

And it was with no more Oriental complacence, but with a very humble-minded reverence, that the poet drew his wife to him and kissed her once more.

". . . But I may have a cigarette, Molly?"

"Of course you may, if you want one. It was only a general sort of remark that the doctor made. A few cigarettes can't harm any one. Don't I have two every day myself--since you got me into the habit? But you've been smoking fifty a day, for _weeks_ before you went to town."

"Oh, Molly! What utter rot! I _never_ have!"

"But you _have_, Gilbert. You smoke the Virginian ones in the tins of fifty. You always have lots of tins, but you never think how they come into the house. I order them from the grocer in Wordingham. They're put down in the monthly book--so you see I _know_!"

"Fifty a day! Of course, it's appalling."

"Well, you're going to be a good boy now, a perfect angel. Here you are, here are three cigarettes for you. And you're going to have a sweet-bread for lunch and I'm going to cook it for you myself!"

"Dear old dear!"

"Yes, I am. And Tumpany wants to see you. Will you see him? Dr. Morton Sims won't be here for another half hour."

"Yes, I'll have Tumpany up. Best chap I know, Tumpany is. But why's the doctor coming? My head's healed up all right now."

There was a whimsical note in his voice as he asked the question.

"You know, darling! He wants to have a long talk with you."

"Apropos of the reformation stakes I suppose."

"To give you back your wonderful brain in peace, darling!" she answered, bending down, catching him to her breast in her sweet arms.

". . . Gillie! Gillie! I love you so!"

"And now suppose you send up Tumpany, dear."

"Yes, at once."

She went away, smiling and kissing her hand, hoping with an intensity of hope which burned within her like a flame, that when the doctor came and talked to Gilbert as had been arranged, the past might be wiped out and a new life begun in this quiet village of East England.

In a minute there was a knock at the bedroom door.

"Come in," Gilbert called out.

Tumpany entered.

Upon the red face of that worthy person there was a grin of sheer delight as he made his bow and scrape.

Then he held up his right arm. He was grasping a leash of mallard, and the metallic blue-green and white upon the wings of the ducks shone in the sun.

Gilbert leapt in his bed, and then put his hand to his bandaged head with a half groan.--"Good God!" he cried, "how the deuce did you get those?"

"First of August, sir. Wildfowling begins!"

"Heavens! so it is. I ought to have been out! I never thought about the date. Damn you for pitching me out of the dog-cart, William!"

"Yessir! You've told me so before," Tumpany answered, his face reflecting the smile upon his master's.

"What are they, flappers?"

"No, sir, mature birds. I was out on the marshes before daylight. The birds were coming off the meils--and North Creake flat. First day since February, sir! You know what I was feeling like!"

"Don't I, oh, don't I, by Jove! Now tell me. What were you using?"

"Well, sir, I thought I would fire at nothing but duck on the first day. Just to christen the day, sir. So I used five and a half and smokeless diamond. Your cartridges."

"What gun?"

"Well, I used my old pigeon gun, sir. It's full choke, both barrels and on the meils it's always a case of long shots."

"Why didn't you have one of my guns? The long-chambered twelve, or the big Greener ten-bore--they're there in the cupboard in the gun room, you've got the key! Did a whole sord of mallard come over, or were those three stragglers?"

"A sord, sir. The two drakes were right and left shots and this duck came down too. As I said to the mistress just now, 'last year,' I said, 'Mr. Gilbert and I were out for two mornings after the first of August and we never brought back nothing but a brace of curlew--and now here's a leash of duck, M'm.'"

"If you'd had a bigger gun, and a sord came over, you'd have got a bag, William! Why the devil didn't you take the ten-bore?"

"Well, sir, I won't say as I didn't go and have a look at 'im in the gun room--knowing how they're flighting just now and that a big gun would be useful. But with you lying in bed I couldn't do it. So I went out and shot just for the honour of the house, as it were."

"Well, I shall be up in a day or two, William, and I'll see if I can't wipe your eye!"

"I hope you will, sir, I'm sure. There's quite a lot of mallard about, early as it is."

"I'll get among them soon, Tumpany!"

"Yessir--the Mistress I think, sir, and the doctor."

Tumpany's ears were keen, like those of most wildfowlers,--he heard voices coming along the passage towards the bedroom.

The door opened and Morton Sims came in with Mary.

He shook hands with Gilbert, admired Tumpany's leash of duck, and then, left alone with the poet, sat down upon the bed.

The two men regarded each other with interest. They were both "personalities" and both of them made their mark in their several ways.

"Good heavens!" the doctor was thinking. "What a brilliant brain's hidden behind those lint bandages! This is the man who can make the throat swell with sorrow and the heart leap high with hope! With all my learning and success, I can only bring comfort to people's bowels or cure insomnia. This fellow here can heal souls--like a priest! Even for me--now and then--he has unlocked the gates of fairyland."

"Good Lord!" Gilbert said to himself. "What wouldn't I give to be a fellow like this fellow. He is great. He can put a drug into one's body and one's soul awakes! He's got a magic wand. He waves it, and sanity returns. He pours out of a bottle and blind eyes once more see God, dull ears hear music! I go and get drunk at Amberleys' house and cringe before a Toftrees, Mon Dieu! This man can never go away from a house without leaving a sense of loss behind him."

--"Well, how are you, Mr. Lothian?"

"Much better, thanks, Doctor. I'm feeling quite fit, in fact."

"Yes, but you're not, you know. I made a complete examination of you yesterday, you remember, and now I've tabulated the results."

"Tell me then."

"If you weren't who you are, I wouldn't tell you at all, being who you are, I will."

Lothian nodded. "Fire away!" he said with his sweet smile, his great charm of manner--all the greater for the enforced abstinence of the last three days--"I shan't funk anything you tell me."

"Very well, then. Your liver is beginning--only beginning--to be enlarged. You've got a more or less permanent catarrh of the stomach, and a permanent catarrh of the throat and nasal passages from membranes inflamed by alcohol and constant cigarette smoking. And there is a hint of coming heart trouble, too."

Lothian laughed, frankly enough. "I know all that," he said. "Really, Doctor, there's nothing very dreadful in that. I'm as strong as a horse, really!"

"Yes, you are, in one way. Your constitution is a fine one. I was talking to your man-servant yesterday and I know what you are able to go through when you are shooting in the winter. I would not venture upon such risks myself even."

"Then everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds?" Gilbert answered lightly, feeling sure that the other would take him.

"Unfortunately, in your case, it's _not_," Morton Sims replied. "You seem to forget two things about 'Candide'--that Dr. Pangloss was a failure and a fool, and that one must cultivate one's garden! Voltaire was a wise man!"

Gilbert dropped his jesting note.

"You've something to say to me," he answered, "probably a good deal more. Say it. Say anything you like, and be quite certain that I shan't be offended."

"I will. It's this, Mr. Lothian. Your stomach will go on digesting and your heart performing its functions long after your brain has gone."

Then there was silence in the sunlit bedroom.

"You think that?" Lothian said at length, in a quiet voice.

"I know it. You are on the verge of terrible nervous and mental collapse. I'm going to be brutal, but I'm going to speak the truth. Three months more of drinking as you have been of late and, for all effective purposes you go out!"

Gilbert's face flushed purple with rage.

"How dare you say such a thing to me, sir?" he cried. "How dare you tell me, tell _me_, that I have been drinking heavily. You are certainly wise to say it when there is no witness here!"

Morton Sims smiled sadly. He was quite unmoved by Lothian's rage. It left him cool. But when he spoke, there was a hypnotic ring in his voice which caught at the weak and tremulous will of the man upon the bed and held it down.

"Now really, Mr. Lothian!" he said, "what on earth is the use of talking like that to me? It means nothing. It does not express your real thought. Can you suppose that your condition is not an open book to _me_? You know that you wouldn't speak as you're doing if your nerves weren't in a terrible state. You have one of the finest minds in England; don't bring it to irremediable ruin for want of a helping hand."

Lothian lay back on his pillow breathing quickly. He felt that his hands were trembling and he pushed them under the clothes. His legs were twitching and a spasm of cramp-pain shot into the calf of one of them.

"Look here, Doctor," he said after a moment, "I spoke like a fool, which I'm not. I have been rather overdoing it lately. My work has been worrying me and I've been trying to whip myself up with alcohol."

Morton Sims nodded. "Well, we'll soon put you right," he said.

Mary Lothian had told him the true history of the case. For three years, at least, her husband had been drinking steadily, silent, persistent, lonely drinking. For a long time, a period of months to her own fear and horror-quickened knowledge, Lothian had been taking a quantity of spirits which she estimated at two-thirds of a bottle a day. Without enlightening her, and adding what an inebriate of this type could easily procure in addition, the doctor put the true quantity at about a bottle and a half--say for the last two months certainly.

He knew also, that whatever else Lothian might do, either now or when he became more confidential, he would lie about the _quantity_ of spirits he was in the habit of consuming. Inebriates always do.

"Of course," he said, talking in a quiet man-of-the-world voice, "_I_ know what a strain such work as yours must be, and there is certainly temptation to stimulate flagging energies with some drug. Hundreds of men do it, doctors too!--literary men, actors, legal men!"

He noted immediately the slight indication of relief in the patient, who thought he had successfully deceived him, and he saw also that sad and doubting anxiety in the eyes, which says so poignantly, "what must I do to be saved?"

Could he save this man?

Everything was against it, his history, his temperament, the length to which he had already gone. The whole stern and horrible statistics of experience were dead against it.

But he could, and would, try. There was a chance.

A great doctor must think more rapidly than a general upon the field of battle; as quickly indeed as one who faces a deadly antagonist with the naked foil. There was one way in which to treat this man. He must tell him more about the psychology--and even if necessary the pathology--of his own case than he could tell any ordinary patient.

"I'll tell you something," he said, "and I expect your personal experience will back me up. You've no 'craving' for alcohol I expect? On the sensual side there's no sense of indulging in a pleasurable self-gratification?"

Lothian's face lighted up with interest and surprise. "Not a _bit_," he said excitedly, "that's exactly where people make a mistake! I don't mind telling you that when I've taken more than I ought, people, my wife and so on, have remonstrated with me. But none of them ever seem to understand. They talk about a 'craving' and so on. Religious people, even the cleverest, don't seem to understand. I've heard Bishop Moultrie preach a temperance sermon and talk about the 'vice' of indulgence, the hideous 'craving' and all that. But it never seemed to explain anything to me, nor did it to all the men who drink too much, I ever met."

"There _is_ no craving," the Doctor answered quietly--"in the sense these people use the word. And there is no vice. It is a disease. They mean well, they even effect some cures, but they are misinformed."

"Well, it's very hard to answer them at any rate. One somehow knows within oneself that they're all wrong, but one can't explain."

"I can explain to you--I couldn't explain to, well to your man Tumpany for instance, _he_ couldn't understand."

"Tumpany only drinks beer," Lothian answered in a tone of voice that a traveller in Thibet would use in speaking of some one who had ventured no further from home than Boulogne.

It was another indication, an unconscious betrayal. His defences were fast breaking down.

Morton Sims felt the keen, almost æsthetic pleasure the artist knows when he is doing good work. Already this mind was responsive to the skilled touch and the expected, melancholy music sounding from that injured instrument.

"He seems a very good sort, that fellow of yours," the doctor continued indifferently, and then, with a more eager and confidential manner, "But let me explain where the ordinary temperance people are wrong. First, tell me, haven't you at times quarrelled with friends, because you've become suspicious of them, and have imagined some treacherous and concealed motive in the background?"

"I don't know that I've quarrelled much."

"Well, perhaps not. But you've felt suspicious of people a good deal. You've wondered whether people were thinking about you. In all sorts of little ways you've had these thoughts constantly. Perhaps if a correspondent who generally signs himself 'yours sincerely' has inadvertently signed 'yours truly' you have worried a good deal and invented all sorts of reasons. If some person of position you know drives past you, and his look or wave of the hand does not appear to be as cordial as usual, don't you invent all kinds of distressing reasons to account for what you imagine?"

Lothian nodded.

His face was flushed again, his eyes--rather yellow and bloodshot still--were markedly startled, a little apprehensive.

"If this man knew so much, a wizard who saw into the secret places of the mind, what more might he not know?"

But it was impossible for him to realise the vast knowledge and supreme skill of the pleasant man with the cultured voice who sat on the side of the bed.

The fear was perfectly plain to Morton Sims.

"May I have a cigarette?" he said, taking his case from his pocket.

Lothian became more at ease at once.

"Well,"--puff-puff--"these little suspicions are characteristic of the disease. The man who is suffering from it says that these feelings of resistance cannot arise in himself. Therefore, they must be caused by somebody. Who more likely then than by those who are in social contact with him?"

"I see that and it's very true. Perhaps truer than you can know!" Lothian said with a rather bitter smile. "But how does all this explain what we were talking about at first. The 'Craving' and all that?"

"I am coming to it now. I had to make the other postulate first. In this way. We have seen in this suspicion--one of many instances--that an entirely fictitious world is created in the mind of a man by alcohol. It is one in which he _must_ live. It is peopled with unrealities and phantasies. As he goes on drinking, this world becomes more and more complex. Then, when a man becomes in a state which we call 'chronic alcoholism' a new Ego, a new self is created. _This new personality fails to recognise that it was ever anything else_--mark this well--_and proceeds to harmonise everything with the new state_. And now, as the new consciousness, the new Ego, is the compelling mind of the moment, the Inebriate is terrified at any weakening in it. _The preservation of this new Ego seems to be his only guard against the_ imagined _pitfalls and treacheries_. Therefore he does all in his power to strengthen his defences. He continues alcohol, because it is to him the only possible agent by which he can _keep grasp of his identity_. For him it is no poison, no excess. It sustains his very being. His _stomach_ doesn't crave for it, as the ignorant will tell you. It has no _sensual_ appeal. Lots of inebriates hate the taste of alcohol. In advanced stages it is quite a matter of indifference to a man what form of alcohol he drinks. If he can't get whiskey, he will drink methylated spirit. He takes the drug simply because of the necessity for the maintenance of a condition the falsity of which he is unable to appreciate."

Lothian lay thinking.

The lucid statement was perfectly clear to him and absorbingly interesting in its psychology. He was a profound psychologist himself, though he did not apply his theories personally, a spectator of others, turning away from the contemplation of himself during the past years in secret terror of what he might find there.

How new this was, yet how true. It shed a flood of light upon so much that he had failed to understand!

"Thank you," he said simply. "I feel certain that what you say is true."

Morton Sims nodded with pleasure. "Perhaps nothing is quite true," he said, "but I think we are getting as near truth in these matters as we can. What we have to do, is to let the whole of the public know too. When once it is thoroughly understood what Inebriety is, then the remedy will be applied, the only remedy."

"And that is?"

"I'll tell you our theories at my next visit. You must be quiet now."

"But there are a dozen questions I want to ask you--and my own case?"

"I am sending you some medicine, and we will talk more next time. And, if you like, I will send you a paper upon the Psychology of the Alcoholic, which I read the other day before the Society for the Study of Alcoholism. It may interest you. But don't necessarily take it all for gospel! I'm only feeling my way."

"I'll compare it with such experiences as I have had--though of course I'm not what you'd call an _inebriate_." There was a lurking undercurrent of suspicion creeping into his voice once more.

"Of course not! Did I ever say so, Mr. Lothian! But what you propose will be of real value to me, if I may have your conclusions."

Lothian was flattered. He would show this great scientist how entirely capable he could be of understanding and appreciating his researches. He would collaborate with him. It would be new and exhilarating!

"I'll make notes," he replied, "and please use them as you will!"

The doctor rose. "Thanks," he answered. "It will be a help. But what we really require is an alcoholic De Quincey to detail in his graphic manner the memories of his past experiences--a man who has the power and the courage to lay open the cravings and the writhings of his former slavery, and to compare them with his emancipated self."

Lothian started. When the kindly, keen-faced man had gone, he lay long in thought.

In the afternoon Mary came to him. "Do you mind if I leave you for an hour or two, dear?" she asked. "I have some things to get and I thought I would drive into Wordingham."

"Of course not, I shall be quite all right."

"Well, be sure and ring for anything you want."

"Very well. I shall probably sleep. By the way, I thought of asking Dickson Ingworth down for a few days. There are some duck about, you know, and he can bring his gun."

"Do, darling, if you would like him."

"Very well, then. I wonder if you'd write a note for me, explaining that I'm in bed, but shall be up to-morrow. Supposing you ask him to come in a couple of days."

"Yes, I will," she replied, kissing him with her almost maternal, protective air, "and I'll post it in Wordingham."

When she had left the room he began to smoke slowly.

He felt a certain irritation at all this love and regard, a discontent. Mary was always the same. With his knowledge of her, he could predict with absolute accuracy what she would do in almost every given moment.

She would do the right thing, the kind and wise thing, but the certain, the predicted thing. She lived from a great depth of being and peace personified was hers, the peace of God indeed!--but--

"She has no changes, no surprises," he thought, "all even surface, even depth."

He admired all her care and watchfulness of him with deep æsthetic pleasure. It was beautiful and he loved beauty. But now and then, it bored him as applied to himself. After six months of the unchanging gold and blue of Italy and Greece, he remembered how he had longed for a grey, weeping sky, with ashen cirrus clouds, heaped tumuli of smoke-grey and cold pearl. And sometimes after a lifeless, rotting autumn and an iron-winter, how every fibre cried out for the sun and the South!

He remembered that a man of letters, who had got into dreadful trouble and had served a period of imprisonment, had remarked to him that the food of penal servitude was plentiful and good, but that it was its dreadful monotony that made it a contributory torture.

And who could live for ever upon honey-comb? Not he at any rate.

Mary was "always her sweet self"--just like a phrase in a girl's novel. There were men who liked that, and preferred it, of course. Even when she was angry with him, he knew exactly how the quarrel would go--a tune he had heard many times before. The passion of their early love had faded; as it must always do. She was beautiful and desirable still, but too calm, too peaceful, sometimes!

This was one of those times. One must be trained to appreciate Heaven properly, Paradise must be experienced first--otherwise, would not almost every one want a little holiday sometimes? He thought of a meeting of really good people, men and women--one stumbled in upon such a thing now and then. How appallingly dull they generally were! Did they never crave for madder music and stronger wine?

. . . He could not read. Restless and rebellious thoughts occupied his mind.

The Fiend Alcohol was at work once more, though Lothian had no suspicion of it. The new and evil Ego, created by alcohol, which the doctor had told him of, was awake within him, asserting itself, stirring uneasily, finding its identity diminishing, its vitality lowered and thus clamant for its rights.

And if this, in all its horror, is not true demoniacal possession, what else is? What more does the precise scientific language of those who study the psychology of the inebriate mean than "He was possessed of a Devil"?

The fiend, the new Ego, went on with its work as the poet lay there and the long lights of the summer afternoon filled the room with gold-dust.

The house was absolutely still. Mary had given orders that there was to be no noise at all, "in order that the Master might sleep, if he could."

It was a summer's afternoon, the scent of some flowers below in the garden came up to Gilbert with a curious familiarity. What _was_ the scent? What memory, which would not come, was it trying to evoke?

A motor-car droned through the village beyond the grounds.

Memory leaped up in a moment.

Of course! The ride to Brighton, the happy afternoon with Rita Wallace.

That was it! He had thought of her a good deal on the journey down from London--until he had sat in the dining car with those shooting men from Thetford and had had too many whiskeys and sodas. During the last three days in bed, she had not "occurred" to him vividly. Yet all the time there had been something at the back of his mind of which he had been conscious, but was unable to explain to himself. The nasty knock on his head, when he had taken a toss from the dogcart, was the reason, no doubt.

Yet, there had been a distinct sense of hidden thought-treasure, something to draw upon as it were. And now he knew! and abandoned himself to the luxury of the discovery.

He must write to her, of course. He had promised to do so at once. Already she would be wondering. He would write her a wonderful letter. Such a letter as few men could write, and certainly such as she had never received. He would put all he knew into it. His sweet girl-friend should marvel at the jewelled words.

The idea excited him. His pulses began to beat quicker, his eyes grew brighter. But he would not do it now. Night was the time for such a present as he would make for her, when all the house was sleeping and Mary was in her own room. Then, in the night-silence, his brain should be awake, weaving a coloured tapestry of prose with words for threads, this new, delicious impulse of friendship the shuttle to carry them.

Like some coarser epicure, arranging and gloating over the details of a feast to come, he made his plans.

He pressed the electric button at the side of the bed and Blanche, the housemaid, answered the summons.

"Where is Tumpany, Blanche?" he asked.

"In the garden, sir."

"Well, tell him to come up, please. I want to speak to him."

In a minute or two heavy steps resounded down the corridor, accompanied by a curious scuffling noise. There was a knock, the door opened, a yelp of joy, and the Dog Trust had leapt upon the bed and was rolling over and over upon the counterpane, licking his master's hands, making loving dashes for his face, his faithful little heart bursting with emotions he was quite unable to express.

"Thought you'd like to see him, sir," said Tumpany. "He know'd you'd come back right enough, and he's been terrible restless."

Lothian captured the dog at last, and held him pressed to his side.

"I am very glad to see the old chap again. Look here, William, just you go quietly over to the Mortland Arms, don't look as if you were going on any special errand,--but you know--and get a bottle of whiskey. Draw the cork and put it back in the bottle so that I can take it out with my fingers when I want to. Then bring it quietly up here."

"Yessir," said Tumpany. "That'll be all right, sir," and departed with a somewhat ludicrous air of secrecy and importance that tickled his master's sense of humour and made him smile.

It was by no means the first time that Tumpany had carried out these little confidential missions.

In ten minutes the man was back again, with the bottle.

"Shall I leave the dog, sir?"

"Yes, you may as well. He's quite happy."

Tumpany went away.

Gilbert rose from bed, the bottle in his hand, and looked round for a hiding-place. The wardrobe! That would do. He put it in one of the big inside pockets of a shooting-coat which was hanging there and carefully closed the door.

As he did so, he caught sight of his face in the panel-mirror. It was sly and unpleasant. Something horrible seemed to be peeping out.

He shook his head and a slight blush came to his cheeks.

The eyes under the bandaged brow, the smirk upon the clear-cut mouth. . . . "Beastly!" he said aloud, as if speaking of some one else--as indeed he really was, had he but realised it.

Now he would sleep, to be fresh for the night. Bromide--always a good friend, though not so certain in its action as in the past--Ammonium Bromide should paralyse his racing brain to sleep.

He dissolved five tablets in a little water and drank the mixture.

When Mary came noiselessly into the room, three hours later, he was sleeping calmly. One arm was round the Dog Trust, who was sleeping too.

Her husband looked strangely youthful and innocent. A faint smile hung about his lips and her whole heart went out to him as he slept.

* * * * *

It was after midnight.

Deep peace brooded over the poet's household. Only he was awake. The dog slumbered in his kennel, the servants in their rooms, the Sweet Chatelaine of the Old House lay in tranquil sleep in her own chamber.

. . . On a small oak table by Gilbert's bedside, three tall candles were burning in holders of silver. Upon it also was an open bottle of whiskey, the carafe of water from the washstand and a bedroom tumbler.

The door was locked.

Gilbert was sitting up in bed. Upon his raised knees a pad of white paper was resting. In his hand was a stylographic pen of red vulcanite, and a third of the page was covered with small delicate writing.

His face was flushed but quite motionless. His whole body in its white pyjama suit was perfectly still. The only movement was that of the hand travelling over the page, the only sound that of the dull grinding of the stylus, as it went this way and that.

There was something sinister about this automaton in the bed with its moving hand. And in our day there is always something a little fantastic and unreal about candlelight. . . .

How absolutely still the night was! Not a breath of air stirred.

The movements, the stir and tumult of the mind of the person so rigid in the bed were not heard.

_What_ was it, _who_ was it, that was writing in the bed?

Who can say?

Was it Gilbert Lothian, the young and kindly-natured man who reverenced all things that were pure, beautiful and of good report?

Or was it that dreadful other self, the Being created out of poison, that was laying sure and stealthy fingers upon the Soul, that "glorious Devil large of heart and brain"?

Who can tell?

The subtle knowledge of the great doctor could not have said, the holy love of the young matron could not have divined.

These things are hidden yet, and still will be.

The hump of the bed-clothes sank. The pad fell flat. The figure stretched out towards the table, there was the stealthy trickle of liquid, the gurgle of a body, drinking.

Then the bed-clothes rose once more, the pad went to its place, the figure stiffened; and the red pen moved obedient to that which controlled it, setting down the jewelled words upon the page.

--The first of the long series of letters that the Girl of the Library was destined to receive! Not the most beautiful perhaps, not the most wonderful. Passion was not born yet, and if love was, there was no concrete word of it here. No one but Gilbert Lothian ever knew what was born on that fated midnight, when he wrote this first subtle letter, deadly for this girl to receive, perhaps, from such a man, at such a time in her life.

A love letter without a word of love.

These are passages from the letter:--

. . . "So, Rita, I am going to write a great poem for you. Will you
take it from your friend? I think you will, for it will be made for
you in the first place and wrought with all my skill.

"I am going to call it 'A Lady in a Library.' No one will know the
innermost inwardness of it but just you and me. Will not that be
delightful, Rita mia amica? When you answer this letter, say that
it will be delightful, please!

"'A Lady in a Library!' Are not the words wonderful--say it quietly
to yourself--'A Lady in a Library!'"

This was the poem which appeared two months afterwards in the _English Review_ and definitely established Gilbert Lothian's claim to stand in the very forefront of the poets of his decade. It is certain to live long. More than one critic of the highest standing has printed his belief that it will be immortal, and many lovers of the poet's work think so too.

. . . "The Lady and the Poet meet in a Library upon a golden
afternoon. She is the very Spirit and Genius of the place. She has
drawn beauty from many brave books. They have told her their
secrets as she moves among them, and lavished all their store upon
her. Some of the beauty which they hold has passed into her face,
and the rosy tints of youth become more glorious.

"Oh, they have been very generous!

"The thin volume of Keats gave her eyes their colour, but an old
and sober-backed edition of Coleridge opened its dun boards and
robbed the magic stanzas of 'Kubla Khan' to give them their mystery
and wonder.

"Milton bestowed the music of her voice, but it came from the
second volume in which Comus lies hid. Her smile was half Herrick
and half Heine, and her hair was spun in a 'Wood near Athens' by
the fairies--Tom III, _Opera Glmi Shakespeare, Editio e Libris
Podley!_--upon a night in Midsummer."

"Random thoughts, Cupid! random thoughts! They come to me like
moths through the still night, and I put them down for you. A
grey-fawn _Papillon de nuit_ is fluttering round my candles now and
sometimes he falls flapping and whirring on my paper like a tiny
clock-work toy. But I will not kill him. I am happy in writing
to my friend, distilling my friendship for you in the lonely
laboratory of self, so he shall go unharmed. His ancestors may have
feasted upon royal tapestries and laid their eggs in the purple
robes of kings!

"What are the moths like in Kensington this night, Cupid?--But of
course you are asleep now. I make a picture for myself of you
sleeping.

"The whole village is asleep now, save only me, and I am trying to
reconstruct our afternoon and evening together, five days ago or
was it six? It is more than ever possible to do that at midnight
and alone, though every detail is etched upon my memory and I am
only adding colour.

"How happy we were! It is so strange to me to think how instantly
we became friends--as we are agreed we are always to be, you and I.
And think of all we still have to find out about each other! There
are golden days coming in our friendship, all sorts of revelations
and surprises. There are so many enchanted places in the Kingdom of
Thought to which I have the key, so many doors I shall open for
you.

"Ours shall be a perfect friendship--of your bounty I crave again
what you have already given!--and I will build it up as an
artificer in rare woods or stained marbles, a carver of
moon-stones, a builder of temples in honey-coloured Travertine,
makes beautiful states in which the soul can dwell, out of
beautiful perishable things.

"How often do two people meet as you and I have met? Most rarely.
Men and women fall in love, sometimes too early, sometimes too
late. There is a brief summer, and then a long winter of calm grey
days which numb the soul into acquiescence, or stab the dull
tranquillity with the lightnings of tragedy and woe.

"We have the better part! We are to be friends, Rita, you and
I--that is the rivulet of repeated melody which runs through my
first letter to you. Some sad dawn will rise for me, when you tell
of something nearer and more poignant than anything I can offer
you. It will be a dawn in which, for you the trumpets, the sackbuts
and the psalteries of Heaven will sound. And your friend will bless
you; and retire to the back of the scene with a most graceful bow!

"In the last act of the play, when all the players appear as Nymphs
and Graces, and Seasons, your friend will be found wearing the rich
yet sober liveries of Autumn, saluting Spring and her Partner with
a courtly song, and a dance which expresses his sentiments
according to the best choreographic traditions.

"But, as he retires among the last red leaves of the year, and
walks jauntily down the forest rides as the setting sun shows the
trees already bare, he will know one thing, even if Spring does not
know it then--when she turns to her Partner.

"He will know that in her future life, his voice, his face, can
never be quite forgotten. Sometimes, at the feast, 'surgit amari
aliquid' that he is not present there with the wistful glance, the
hands that were ever reverent, the old familiar keys!

"For a brief instant of recollection, he will have for you
'_L'effet d'un clair-de-lune par une nuit d'été'_. And you will say
to yourself, '_Ami du temps passés, vos paroles me reviennent comme
un écho lointain, comme le son d'un cloche apporté par le vent; et
il me semble que vous êtes là quand je lis des passages d'amour
dans vos livres_'."

A click of glass against glass, the low sound of drinking, a black shadow parodied and repeated upon the ceiling in the candle-glow.

The letter is nearly finished now--the bottle is nearly empty.

"'Tiens!' I hear you say--by the way, Rita, where did you learn to
speak such perfect French? They tell me in Paris and, Mon Dieu! in
Tours even! that I speak well. Mais, toi! . . .

"Well 'How stupid!' I hear you say. 'Why does Gilbert strike this
note of the 'cello and the big sobbing flutes at the very beginning
of things?'

"Why, indeed? I hardly know myself. But it is very late now. The
curtains of the dark are already shaken by the birth-pangs of the
morning. Soon the jocund noises of dawn will begin.

"Let it be so for you and me. There are long and happy days coming
in our friendship. The end is not yet! Soon, quite soon, I will
return to London with a pocket-full of plans for pleasure, and the
magician's wand polished like the poker in the best parlour of an
evangelical household, and charged with the most superior magic!

"Meanwhile I shall write you my thoughts as you must send me yours.

"I kiss your hand,

"GILBERT LOTHIAN."

The figure rose from the bed, gathering the papers together, putting them into a drawer of the dressing-table.

It staggered a little.

"I'm drunk," came in a tired voice, from lips that were parched and dry.

With trembling hands the empty bottle was hidden, the glass washed out and replaced, the door noiselessly unlocked.

Then Lothian lurched to the open window.

It was as he had said, dawn was at hand. But a thick grey mist hid everything. Phantoms seemed to sway in it, speaking to each other with tiny doll-like squeaks.

There were no jocund noises as he crept back into bed and fell into a stupor, snoring loudly.

No jocund noises of Dawn.