The Drunkard Part 18

Nothing whatever would jar. He was not in the mood to write home now--to compose details of his time in Town, to edit and alter the true record for the inspection of loving eyes.

"My darling!" he said to himself as he drank the second whiskey and soda which had been brought to him since he had come in, but there was an uncomfortable feeling in the back of his mind that the words did not ring true.

More than ever exhilarated, as excited as a boy, he jumped into the motor-car when it arrived, and glided swiftly westwards, congratulating himself a dozen times on the idle impulse which had sent him to Kensington. He began to wonder how it had come.

The impulse to bring the book himself had been with him all day. It had taken him till lunch time at least to put himself in any way right--to _appear_ right even. With a sick and bitter mind he had gone through the complex physical ritual necessary after the night before--the champagne at eight, the Turkish bath, the hair-dresser's in Regent Street where fast men slunk with hot and shaking hands to have the marks of their vices ironed out of their faces with vibrating hammers worked by electricity.

All through the morning, the bitter, naked, grinning truth about himself had been horribly present--no new visitor, but the same leering ghost he knew so well.

Escape was impossible until the b.e.s.t.i.a.l sequence of his morning cure had run its course. Coming down the bedroom stairs into the club there was the disgusting and anxious consciousness that his movements were automatic and jerky, the real fear of meeting any one--the longing to bolt upstairs again and hide. Then a tremendous effort of will had forced him to go on. Facial control was--as ever--the most difficult thing. When he pa.s.sed the waiters in the smoking room he must screw his face into the appearance of absorbed thought, freeze the twitching mouth and the flickering eyes into immobility. He had hummed a little tune as he had sat down at a table and ordered a brandy and soda, starting as if from a reverie when it was brought him, and making a remark about the weather in a voice of effusive geniality which embarra.s.sed the well-trained servant.

By lunch time the convulsive glances in the mirror, the nervous straying of the hand to the hair, the see-saw of the voice had all gone. Black depression, fear, self-pity, had vanished. The events of the night before became like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope, far away, and as if they concerned some one quite other than himself.

He had not exactly forgotten the shame of his behaviour at the Amberleys' house. But, as he always did after events of this sort, and they were becoming far more general than he realised, he had pushed the thought away in some attic of the brain and closed the door. He would have these memories out some day--soon. It would not be pleasant, but it must of course be done. Then he would put everything right with himself, destroy all these corpses, and emerge into the free sunlight for ever more.

But not to-day. He must put himself _quite_ right to-day. When he _was_ right then he wouldn't have another drink all day. Yes! then by to-morrow, after a quiet, pensive night, he would throw off all his habits as if he were throwing an old pair of gloves over a wall. He knew well what he could do! He knew himself better than any one else knew him.

But not to-day. "Inshallah Bukra!"--"Please G.o.d, to-morrow!"

It had all seemed perfectly natural, though it happened over and over again, and to-morrow never came.

He did not know that this was but one more definite symptom of his poisoned state, as definite as the shaking hand, the maudlin midnight invocations of G.o.d, the frequent physical nausea of the morning, even.

And if the man is to be understood and his history to become real in all its phases, then these things must be set down truly and without a veil.

It was a joy to watch her pleasure as they swung out of London in the twenty-horse power Ford he had hired.

She did not say much but leant back on the luxurious cushions by his side. There was a dream of happiness upon her face, and Lothian also felt that he was living in a dream, that it was all part of the painted scenes of sleep.

The early evening was still and quiet. The Western sky, a faint copper-green with friths and locks of purple, was as yet unfired. In the long lights the landscape still retained its colour unaltered by the dying splendours of sunset. The engines of the car were running sweetly in a monotonous and drowsy hum, the driver sat motionless in front as they droned through the quiet villages and up and down the long white ribands of the road. It was an hour of unutterable content.

Once they stopped in a village and drew up before the inn. It was a lovely place. A bell was tolling for evensong in the grey church and they saw the vicar pa.s.s under the lych-gate with slow footsteps. One of the long, painted windows was caught by the sun and gleamed like a red diamond. The road fell to a pond where green water-flags were growing and waxen-white water-lilies floated. Beyond it was a willow wood.

The driver sat on a bench before the inn and drank his beer, but Gilbert and Rita pa.s.sed through it into a garden that there was. The flowers were just beginning to cense the still air and the faint sound of a water-wheel down the river came to them--_tic, tac, lorelei!_

She would have milk, "Milk that one cannot get in London," and even he asked for no poison in this tranquil garden.

Clematis hung the gables like tapestry of Tyrian purple. There were beds of red crocketed hollyhock and a hedge of honeysuckle with a hundred yellow trumpet mouths. At their feet were the flowers of belamour.

"Men have died, trying to find this place which we have found," he said.

A red-admiral floated by upon its fans of vermilion and black as Gilbert quoted, and a faint echo from the water-mill answered him.

_Tic--tac--lorelei!_

"Magician! half an hour ago we were in London!"

"You are happy?"

"I can't find anything to say--yet. It is perfect."

She leant back with a deep sigh and closed her eyes, and he was well content to say nothing, for in all the garden she seemed to him the most perfect thing, rosa-amorosa, the queen of all the roses!

It was as a flower he looked at her, no more. It was all a dream, of course. It had come in dream-fashion, it would go in the fashion of a dream. At that moment she was not a warm human girl with a lovely face.

She was not the clever, lonely, subtle-simple maiden in the house of books. She was a flower he had met.

His mind began to weave words, the shuttle to glide in the loom of the poet, but words came to him that were not his own.

"Come hither, Child! and rest; This is the end of day, Behold the weary West!

"Now are the flowers confest Of slumber; sleep as they!

Come hither, Child! and rest."

And then he sighed, for he thought of the other poet who had written those lines and of what had brought him to his dreadful death.

Why did thoughts like these come into the flower garden?

How true--even here--were the words he had put upon the t.i.tle-page of the book which had made him famous--

"_Say, brother, have you not full oft Found, even as the Roman did, That in Life's most delicious cup Surgit Amari Aliquid!_"

The girl heard him sigh and turned quickly. She saw that her friend's face was overcast.

It was so much to her, this moment, she was so happy since she had stepped from the hot streets of the city into fairyland with the Magician, that there must be no single shadow.

"Come!" she said gaily, "this is perfect but there are other perfect things waiting. Wave your wand again, Prospero, and change the magic scene."

Lothian jumped up from his seat.

"Yes! on into the sunset. You are right. We must go before we are satisfied. That's the whole art of living--Miranda!"

Her eyes twinkled with mischief.

"How old you have grown all of a sudden," she said, but as they pa.s.sed through the inn once more he thought with wonder that if six years were added to his age he might have been her father in very fact. Many a man of forty-one or two had girls as old as she.

He sent her to the motor, on pretence of stopping to pay for the milk, but in the little bar-parlour he hurriedly ordered whiskey--"a large one, yes, only half the soda."

The landlord poured it out with great speed, understanding immediately.

He must have been used to this furtive taking in of the fuel, here was another accustomed acolyte of alcohol.

"Next stop Brighton, sir," he said with a genial wink.

Lothian's melancholy pa.s.sed away like a stone falling through water as the car started once more. He said something wildly foolish and discovered, with a throb of amazement and recognition, that she could play! He had never met a girl before who could play, as he liked to play.

There was a strain of impish, freakish humour in Lothian which few people understood, which few _sensible_ people ever can understand. It is hardly to be defined, it seems incredibly childish and mad to the majority of folk, but it sweetens life to those who have it. And such people are very rare, so that when one meets another there is a surprised and delighted welcome, a freemason's greeting, a shout of joy in Laughter Land!

"Good heavens!" he said, "and you can play then!"

There was no need to mention the name of the game--it has none indeed--but Rita understood. Her sweet face wrinkled into impish mischief and she nodded.