The Lash Part 10

The crowd closed in, holding him securely. Micky mused with corrugated brow. Thus far the only evidences of his indulgence were an unusual sparkle of the eye, a crimsoned countenance and a bewildering flow of language.

"'a.s.signment,'" cogitated Micky, "what does that mean? Where have I heard that word? Let me forget before I remember already. Let us drink to forget. Vat iss, Fatty?"

Fatty gulped despairingly. There was no hope. "Birch beer," he murmured resignedly. There sounded a universal groan.

"Birch beer!" echoed O'Byrn, in a positive squeal. "I wonder if the mixer hasn't got some Mellin's food? Siphon some milk into him; do, the sweet thing! No, I'll tell you what you'll drink, Fatty. It'll be a Mamie Taylor, with me!"

There was unanimous approval registered in a strident roar. Despite Stearns' protest the "chemist" was urged to mix him a Mamie, Fatty finally becoming silenced in meek submission. Resolving to "shake the bunch" at the first favorable moment, he gazed doubtfully at the seductive mixture in his gla.s.s. Micky held up his Mamie and soliloquized.

"This Mamie is a jade," he remarked, with an air of finality that effectually settled the matter. "She's that smooth and insinuating, so agreeable, that it seems as if you could drink her all night, so you generally do. Plain whisky's more honest. It's got that old, shivery yah-yah taste to it that keeps warnin' you all the time to sidetrack, so you're apt to do it before you get telescoped by the D T's. But these blamed fancy flips are what play the devil with a fellow. They're come-ons, clear from champagne to ginger ale splits. They taste so pretty that the next is a necessity, and after that, in the pleasant salve to the palate, you lose count. Take Mamie here. She's the worst in the push. You can gauge your capacity in any other line except on her.

She figures her own capacity and the figures always lie, as you realize next morning. Much is a sufficiency, always. More is a superfluperosity.

"In this connection, Mamie reminds me of a story of an old man up north who had slipped from grace for some years and never thought any more of the religious teachings of childhood till trouble switched in, though that's common enough. But along came a famine time and everyone was livin' on short commons. The old man was urged to make a family prayer for some of the necessities. He wasn't used to it and shied considerable, but it was need that egged him on. Well, he got started O.

K. with 'O Lord, send us a bar'l o' pork. Send us a bar'l o' sugar. Send us a bar'l o'--o'--pepper--Oh, h.e.l.l! that's too much pepper!' was the way he rang off.

"Now that's what I'll be sayin' about Mamie, too much of her, when I come to, but such is her infernal fascination that--" He broke off with a wild clutch at Fatty's receding coat tail. Stearns had seized the favorable moment to escape. He got out before Micky could catch him. As...o...b..rn was about to shoot through the door in pursuit of him, it swung inward and a familiar figure confronted the little Irishman.

"Well, Micky," remarked d.i.c.k dryly, "don't you think you've had enough?

Better come along."

For answer O'Byrn tried to drag d.i.c.k to the bar. "Come on, old man," he shouted. "Get in! There's Mamies to burn."

d.i.c.k had heard of his co-worker's outbreak and hurried from the office in quest of him, chancing to learn where he was. Micky had talked with him previously, regarding his weakness, and d.i.c.k knew what its uninterrupted continuance would mean.

"Come home, Micky," he urged, "before you get maudlin. Bunk in and get a good night's rest and you'll be all right for work tomorrow." He led Micky insistently out of the wine room, unmindful of the protests of O'Byrn's companions. They pa.s.sed through the office to the street.

Micky had been quiet for a moment but now his libations rea.s.serted their influence. He struggled with d.i.c.k, voicing sundry curses.

"What d' ye mean?" he demanded. "Let me go, I'm going back. Mind your own business, can't you?"

"Shut up!" growled d.i.c.k fiercely. "Can't you see people are looking at us? Close your face and come along like a gentleman, for, I tell you, you're going home!"

Then something happened. Before Micky's haggard eyes appeared mistily, taking swift and tangible substance, a girl's face, young and lovely, just now convulsed with horror. Then it was gone, leaving a leaden weight in Micky's breast, while the vapors rose sluggishly from his benumbed brain. Reason, shrinking and ashamed, looked out from his hot eyes. He braced defiantly though hopelessly.

"It's all right, d.i.c.k, I'll go home," he said in a strange low tone and they walked in silence down the street.

CHAPTER XI

IN THE MORNING

Micky awoke late that morning with a persistent, painful throbbing in his head, fevered eyes and a parched throat. The symptoms held an arid familiarity which was swiftly allied with self contempt, as sleep yielded full place to awakened consciousness. For O'Byrn would never be calloused. As he once expressed it, his career was best epitomized in Ade's graphic epigram, "Life is a series of relapses and recoveries."

The inherent manliness would always wage war against the little red devil that sought malevolently to wither it. It would be a pitifully checkered fight, but whatever the issue,--even should the world, which never understands, write him down a wreck at the end,--a few who knew him best, and understood, would know that Micky tried. Who will question, in a world where so many drift, that in the simple will to try lies victory?

Micky lay quiet for some moments after awaking, palms pressed to his burning temples, swollen eyes gazing sombrely up at the ceiling of his small, plainly furnished room. The hot sun poured in at the window, before which the shade had not been drawn. The boy, for he was scarcely more, wandered in dreary retrospect through a world of gray memories.

How gray, how bleak, to be sure! At the very outset the recollection of a childhood saddened by the frequent sight of a woman in tears; a woman with a pale, worn face and eyes that held the inexpressible pathos of a forlorn hope deferred, his mother. His father, did the world still hold him? O'Byrn told himself fiercely that it could not be, that earth must long since have wearied of such an excrescence and cast it forth to annihilation.

To the woman with the pale, worn face and tired eyes, the woman who was now at rest, he owed his upbringing. From the time that he could not remember, when she and her baby were deserted by the husband and father, till the hour when she lay wasted in her final illness, she had toiled for the boy, to give him clothes, sustenance, schooling. Micky remembered with a dull ache at his heart how in the supreme hour the poor tired eyes had watched in vain for one who came not, how the wan lips had in delirium whispered a dishonored name. Then the end, and the ensuing picture of a little newsvender, led sobbing from the new-filled grave of the truest friend he would ever know.

And this other, the being who had left a frail weakling to bear the brunt alone, for what must the son thank him? For the inherited fiend's appet.i.te that marred him, no more. The son well knew that the craving was the intensified replica of the father's crowning vice. He had learned, moreover, that the parent had deemed it a witty thing to ply the son with toddy while in his cradle. The son took to it with an avidity of grave presage, but which delighted the tippling parent. This was the heritage from his father, a heritage that held in fee wastes of black bog and hungry mire, with death squatting grimly in the midst.

Ah, what a goodly patrimony he had left, this absent one; what wealth indeed!

The boy in the bed winced as beneath the impact of a blow. He struck clenched hands together fiercely. "Oh, G.o.d!" he breathed, the tone combining the bitter venom of a curse with the agonized entreaty of a prayer.

A moment more he lay in silence, vague eyes fixed on a gray and resurrected past. He stirred uneasily. "Ah, well, this won't do!" he muttered, and flinging off the coverings he rolled off upon the floor.

The sunlight dazzled his eyes and he blinked like a bat as he drew the shade. He swayed unsteadily for a moment, wincing as a sharp pain stabbed his throbbing head, dying in needle-like p.r.i.c.kings just behind the eyes. With a discouraged groan he made his way to the wash stand, and emptying the pitcher into the bowl, plunged his fevered head into the refreshing contents and held it there. It was very pleasant, the coolness, and a brisk rubbing with a crash towel added decidedly to the relief. Dressing with shaking fingers, he was finally ready and left the house, blinking swollen eyes owlishly in the clear sunlight. He stopped at a restaurant just long enough to swallow a cupful of black coffee in order to neutralize a bevy of differing tastes that tenanted his mouth, vying in stale mustiness. Again he sought the open air, wandering aimlessly.

Clearly the coffee was not enough, for his head throbbed worse than before. Involuntarily he steadied it with one hand, to keep it on, while he put into Kelly's drug store for a bromo. Kelly's was popular with the boys. It was open nights and they could buy whisky in the back room, after all the other places were closed, and secure bromo over the soda water fountain in the morning.

Micky absorbed his bromo in a gloomy, introspective mood. The bracer, as it is generally understood, he was minded this morning to avoid as if it had been a pestilence. He was wont to say that a bracer was to him but a limited stop-over, that he would be sure to be traveling again before noon. He had travelled far enough this trip, far enough to menace a future, which had never seemed so bright. Disquieting recollections gnawed at Micky's mind. A girl's face, eloquent with horror and disgust, seen as through a mist in the lighted street, confronted his shamed, wakened consciousness, while he writhed inwardly. And, too, his post with the Courier? Had he lost it? How much lat.i.tude would they extend to drunkards?

A drunkard! He shuddered at the repellent thought, yet what else was he?

What else any man who allowed the infernal appet.i.te to lure him from duty to be performed? Not once but many times had he, O'Byrn, fallen by this standard. Repeatedly had he been cast off, with the goal of reputation and success in sight, because of the little red devil, who journeyed with him the broad land over, making its hateful presence known at riotous intervals that resulted in swift changes and shifts of scene for the little Irishman. If, indeed, he had not lost his post with the Courier, it was due to the fortunate interruption of a spree that might otherwise have lasted a week. O'Byrn's soul went out in grat.i.tude to d.i.c.k. Even though it should prove that he had lost both his place and his lady, it was a melancholy pleasure to Micky to have sobered so soon.

He thought with deep self-disgust of prior orgies; of wild days and wilder nights, piling deliriously upon each other while sleep was unknown, a stranger to be banished; when all things loomed distorted, unreal, through a red haze. So it would go until, with abused nature exhausted, he would sink into a sodden stupor. From this he would finally emerge a shaking wreck, with the blackest of memories and usually with the blankest of futures, for his job usually went with his spree. The latter was always of inconvenient length for the demands of a newspaper office.

Something of these horrors he had communicated to d.i.c.k some time before.

"This thing has played the devil with me, d.i.c.k," he had said. "I want excitement. Drinking is a means to the end. Then, first I know, it's an end to my means. That and my infernal itch for shifting have made me a scoffing and a byword. If I could get chained down, and lost my thirst, I might make good. I've come near it a lot of times and then the cussed coupling would break and I'd go slidin' down the grade again. Then it would be the b.u.mpers out. I guess it'll be that way till I'm backed onto the siding for good. But I'm headed right now, and, if you ever catch me toyin' with the lush, I want you to joyously jack my jeans clear to my lodgings. Knock me down, pick me up and knock me down again."

"That's all very well, Micky," d.i.c.k had replied with a remonstrating bellow of a laugh, "but I'm not enough of a pharisee for that, you know, for I'm no total abstainer myself."

"Yes, but you're about two-thirds of a one," replied the other. "You don't know what an appet.i.te means. You drink, when you drink at all, for good fellowship, because someone asks you to. Left to yourself, you'd never think of it. If you ever take too much, it means you're on the water wagon for a number of months, because you dread the feeling of the morning after. You're one of those lucky devils that can monkey with the stuff for a lifetime and never acquire the faintest vestige of a thirst. Now as for me, I can't coquette with it. I have to walk sideways past a saloon with my face turned the other way, across the street to the undertaker's. I've simply got to let it alone. Why? Because a lot of hard jolts have taught me that it's a lot stronger than I am unless it's held down with both hands. Sometimes I can take a gla.s.s and let it alone, but oftener the first gla.s.s is only a drop in the bucket that starts a demand to annex the whole well. Then there's a roaring Rip Van Winkle that I come out of a week or two later to find my job miles behind and me countin' ties and waitin' for a freight. That's the worst of it, d.i.c.k," with a red flush of shame. "It's thinkin' that you're just as liable to fall asleep at the switch, when you're on duty. Now that's what I'm carrying over the country with me. That's what I'm fightin'.

First one on top, then the other. But whichever way, d.i.c.k, it's h.e.l.l!"

There had ensued a silence, broken by d.i.c.k's voice, unwontedly sober.

"The gold cure, Micky, did you ever try it?"

"No!" with vigor, "and I never will! If I can't stand I'll go down, but it'll be alone. If I can't weather it without that, why then me to the dip-house, that's all. No artificial vacations in mine!"

Which, if perhaps wrong-headed, at least bespoke a plenitude of grit.

d.i.c.k had remembered Micky's request to deliver him, if need be, from the fascinations of the grape, and had complied with it in spirit, if not in letter, the night previous. O'Byrn had been firmly torn from the bibulous bevy with which he had started that afternoon and been escorted home. And though the prospect was dismal enough to the boy who stood, hands in pockets, on the curb, staring moodily at the asphalt, he was glad that d.i.c.k had looked him up. It might have been worse.

How bad was it, anyway? Micky drew a long breath, squared his shoulders and started for the office.

CHAPTER XII

WHY SHE CRIED

Mickey was not dismissed, though the city editor had a heart to heart talk with him. "We are not exactly sticklers for total abstinence here, O'Byrn," he said. "I am free to confess that I am ineligible to membership in the I. O. G. T. myself. But one thing the Courier does insist upon, which is that a man's indulgence must not be allowed to interfere with his work. I had important a.s.signments for you last night and had to place them in other hands. Besides, we were short of men.

When I accidentally learned, near press-time, of the real reason for your non-appearance, I was minded to let you go. But from what I learn I gather that it is something of a disease in your case. Cure yourself, my boy, for you're a good man and I've decided to give you another chance."