The Drunkard

"He has absolutely refused to see the Chaplain? I read so in to-night's paper."

"Yes. Some of them do you know. The religious sense isn't developed at all in him. It will be all the easier for him to-morrow."

"How so?"

"So many of them become religious on the edge of the drop simply out of funk – nervous collapse and a sort of clutching at a chance in the next world. They often struggle and call out when they're being pinioned. It's impossible to give them any sort of anæsthetic."

"Is that done then? I didn't know."

"It's not talked about, of course, sir. It's quite unofficial and it's not generally known. But we nearly always give them something if it's possible, and then they know nothing of what's happening."

Sims nodded. "The best way," he said sadly, "the lethal chamber would be better still."

There was a momentary silence between the two men. The prison doctor felt instinctively that his distinguished visitor shrank from the ordeal before him and was bracing himself to go through with it. He was unwilling to interrupt such a famous member of his profession. It was an event to meet him, a thing which he would always remember.

Suddenly Sims rose from his chair. "Now, then," he said with a rather wan smile, "take me to the poor fellow."

Dr. Marriott opened the door and made a sign to the waiting warder.

Together the three men went to the end of the passage.

Another door was unlocked and they found themselves in a low stone hall, with a roof of heavily barred ground glass.

There was a door on each side of the place.

"That's the execution room," said Dr. Marriott in a whisper, pointing to one of the doors. "The other's the condemned cell. It's only about ten steps from one to the other. The convict, of course, never knows that. But from the time he leaves his cell to the moment of death is rarely more than forty-five seconds."

The voice of the prison doctor, though very low in key, was not subdued by any note of awe. The machinery of Death had no terrors for him. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, with an unconscious note of the showman. The curator of a museum might have shown his treasures thus to an intelligent observer. For a second of time – so strange are the operations of the memory cells – another and far distant scene grew vivid in the mind of Morton Sims.

Once more he was paying his first visit to Rome, and had been driven from his hotel upon the Pincio to the nine o'clock Mass at St. Peter's. A suave guide had accompanied him, and among the curious crowd that thronged the rails, had told in a complacent whisper of this or that Monsignore who said or served the Mass.

Dr. Marriott went to the door opposite to the one he had pointed out as the death-chamber.

He moved aside a hanging disc of metal on a level with his eyes, and peered through a glass-covered spy-hole into the condemned cell.

After a scrutiny of some seconds, he slid the disc into its place and rapped softly upon the door. Almost immediately it was opened a foot or so, silently, as the door of a sick-room is opened by one who watches within. There was a whispered confabulation, and a warder came out.

"This gentleman," said the Medical Officer, "as you have already been informed by the Governor, is to have an interview with the convict absolutely alone. You, and the man with you, are to sit just outside the cell and to keep it under continual observation through the glass. If you think it necessary you are to enter the cell at once. And at the least gesture of this gentleman you will do so too. But otherwise, Dr. Morton Sims is to be left alone with the prisoner for an hour. You quite understand?"

"Perfectly, sir."

"You anticipate no trouble? – how is he?"

"Quiet as a lamb, sir. There's no fear of any trouble with him. He's cheerful and he's been talking a lot about himself – about his violin playing mostly, and a week he had in Paris. His hands are twitching a bit, but less than usual with them."

"Very well. Jones will remain here and will fetch me at once if I am wanted. Now take Dr. Morton Sims in."

The door was opened. A gust of hot air came from within as Morton Sims hesitated for a moment upon the threshold.

The warm air, indeed, was upon his face, but once again the chill was at his heart. Lean and icy fingers seemed to grope about it.

At the edge of what abysmal precipice, and the end of what sombre perspective of Fate was he standing?

From youth upwards he had travelled the goodly highways of life. He had walked in the clear light, the four winds of heaven had blown upon him. Sunshine and Tempest, Dawn and Dusk, fair and foul weather had been his portion in common with the rest of the wayfaring world.

But now he had strayed from out the bright and strenuous paths of men. The brave high-road was far, far away. He had entered a strange and unfamiliar lane. The darkness had deepened. He had come into a marsh of miasmic mist lit up by pale fires that were not of heaven and where dreadful presences thronged the purple gloom.

This was the end of all things. A life of shame closed here – through that door where a living corpse was waiting for him "pent up in murderers' hole."

He felt a kindly and deprecating hand upon his arm.

"You will find it quite ordinary, really, sir. You needn't hesitate in the very least" – thus the consoling voice of Marriott.

Morton Sims walked into the cell.

Another warder who had been sitting there glided out. The door was closed. The doctor found himself heartily shaking hands with someone whom he did not seem to know.

And here again, as he was to remember exactly two years afterwards, under circumstances of supreme mental anguish and with a sick recognition of past experience, his sensation was without precedent.

Some one, was it not rather something? was shaking him warmly by the hand. A strained voice was greeting him. Yet he felt as if he were sawing at the arm of a great doll, not a live thing in which blood still circulated and systole and diastole still kept the soul co-ordinate and co-incident.

Then that also went. The precipitate of long control was dropped into the clouded vessel of thought and it cleared again. The fantastic imaginings, the natural horror of a kind and sensitive man at being where he was, passed away.

The keen scientist stood in the cell now, alert to perform the duty for which he was there.

The room was of a fair size. In one corner was a low bed, with a blanket, sheet and pillow.

In the centre, a deal table stood. A wooden chair, from which the convict had just risen, stood by the table, and upon it were a Bible, some writing materials, and a novel – bound in the dark-green of the prison library – by "Enid and Herbert Toftrees."

Hancock wore a drab prison suit, which was grotesquely ill-fitting. He was of medium height, and about twenty-five years of age. He was fat, with a broad-shouldered corpulence which would have been less noticeable in a man who was some inches taller. His face was ordinarily clean-shaven, but there was now a disfiguring stubble upon it, a three weeks' growth which even the scissors of the prison-barber had not been allowed to correct and which gave him a sordid and disgusting aspect. The face was fattish, but even the bristling hairs, which squirted out all over the lower part, could not quite disguise a curious suggestion of contour about it. It should have been a pure oval, one would have thought, and in the gas-light, as the head moved, it almost seemed to have that for fugitive instants. It was a contour veiled by a dreadful something that was, but ought not to have been there.

The eyes were grey and had a certain capability of expression. It was now enigmatic and veiled.

The mouth was by far the most real and significant feature of the face. In all faces, mouths generally are. The murderer's mouth was small. It was clearly and definitely cut, with an undefinable hint of breeding in it which nothing else about the man seemed to warrant. But despite the approach to beauty which, in another face, it might have had, slyness and egotism lurked in every curve.

.. "So that's how it first began, Doctor. First one with one, then one with another. You know!"

The conversation was in full swing now.

The doll had come to life – or it was not quite a doll yet and some of the life that was ebbing from it still remained.

The voice was low, confidential, horribly "just between you and me." But it was a pleased voice also, full of an eager and voluble satisfaction, – the last chance of toxic insanity to explain itself!

The lurid swan-song of a conceited and poisoned man.

.. "Business was going well. There seemed no prospect of a child just then, so Mary got in with Church work at St. Philip's. That brought a lot more customers to the shop too. Fancy soaps, scents and toilette articles and all that. Dr. Mitchell of Hackney, was a church-warden at St. Philip's and in time all his prescriptions came to me. No one had a better chance than I did. And Mary was that good to me." ..

Two facile, miserable tears rolled from the man's glazing eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.

"You can't think, sir, being a bachelor. Anything I'd a mind to fancy! Sweet-breads she could cook a treat, and Burgundy we used to 'ave – California wine, 'Big Bush' brand in flagons at two and eight. And never before half-past seven. Late dinner you might have called it, while my assistant was in the shop. And after that I'd play to her on the violin. Nothing common, good music – 'Orer pro Nobis' and 'Rousoh's Dream.' You never heard me play did you? I was in the orchestra of the Hackney Choral Society. I remember one day .."

"And then?" the Doctor said, gently.

He had already gathered something, but not all that he had come to gather. The minutes were hurrying by.

The man looked up at the doctor with a sudden glance, almost of hatred. For a single instant the abnormal egoism of the criminal, swelled out upon the face and turned it into the mask of a devil.

Dr. Morton Sims spoke in a sharp, urgent voice.

"Why did you ask me to come here, Hancock?" he said. "You know that I am glad to be here, if I can be of any use to you. But you don't seem to want the sort of sympathetic help that the chaplain here could give you far better than I can. What do you want to say to me? Have you really anything to say? If you have, be a man and say it!"

There was a brief but horrible interlude.

"Well, you are cruel, doctor, not 'arf! – and me with only an hour or two to live," – the man said with a cringing and sinister grin.

The doctor frowned and looked at the man steadily. Then he asked a sudden question.

"Who were your father and mother?" he said.

The convict looked at the doctor with startled eyes.

"Who told you?" he asked. "I thought nobody knew!"

"Answer my question, Hancock. Only a few minutes remain."

"Will it be of use, sir?"

"Of use?"

"In your work – It was so that I could leave a warning to others, that I wanted to see you."

"Of great use, if you will tell me."

"Well, Doctor, I never thought to tell any one. It's always been a sore point with me, but I wasn't born legitimate! I tried hard to make up for it, and I did so too! No one was more respectable than I was in Hackney, until the drink came along and took me."

"Yes? Yes?" – The hunter was on the trail now, Heredity? Reversion? At last the game was flushed! – "Yes, tell me!"

"My father was a gentleman, Doctor. That's where I got my refined tastes. And that's where I got my love of drink – damn him! God Almighty curse him for the blood he gave me!"

"Yes? Yes?"

"My father was old Mr. Lothian, the solicitor of Grey's Inn Square. He was a well-known gentleman. My mother was his housekeeper, Eliza Hancock. My father was a widower when my mother went into his service. He had another son, at one of the big schools for gentlemen. That was his son by his real wife – Gilbert he was called, and what money was left went to him. My father was a drunkard. He never was sober – what you might rightly call sober – for years, I've heard .. Mother died soon after Mr. Lothian did. She left a hundred pounds with my Aunt, to bring me up and educate me. Aunt Ellen – but I'm a gentleman's son, Doctor! – drunken old swine he was too! What about my blood now? Wasn't my veins swollen with drink from the first? Christ! you ought to know – you with your job to know —Now are you happy? I'm not a love child, I'm a drink child, that's what I am! Son of old Mr. Lothian, the gentleman-drunkard, brother of his son who's a gentleman somewhere, I don't doubt! P'r'aps 'e mops it up 'imself! – shouldn't wonder, this – brother of mine!"

The man's voice had risen into a hoarse scream. "Have you got what you came to get?" he yelled. His eyes blazed, his mouth writhed.

There was a crash as the deal table was overturned, and he leapt at the doctor.

In a second the room was full of people. Dark figures held down something that yelled and struggled on the truckle bed.

It was done with wonderful deftness, quickness and experience… Morton Sims stood outside the closed door of the condemned cell. A muffled noise reached him from within, the prison doctor was standing by him and looking anxiously into his face.

– "I can't tell you how sorry I am, Dr. Morton Sims. I really can't say enough. I had no idea that the latent toxic influence was so strong.."

On the other side of the little glass-roofed hall the door was open. Another cell was shown, brilliantly lit. Two men, in their shirt-sleeves, were bending over a square, black aperture in the wooden floor. Some carpenters' tools were lying about.

An insignificant looking little man, with a fair moustache, was standing in the doorway.

"That'll be quite satisfactory, thank you," he was saying, "with just a drop of oil on the lever. And whatever you do, don't forget my chalk to mark where he's to stand."

From behind the closed door of the condemned cell a strangulated, muffled noise could still be heard.

"Not now!" said Dr. Marriott, as the executioner came up to him – "In half an hour. Now Dr. Morton Sims, please come away to my room. This must have been most distressing. I feel so much that it is my fault.".

The two men stood at the Prison gate, Sims was shaking hands with the younger doctor. "Thank you very much indeed," he was saying. "How could you possibly have helped it? – You'll take steps – ?"

"I'm going back to the cell now. It's incipient delirium tremens of course – after all this time too! I shall inject hyoscene and he will know nothing more at all. He will be practically carried to the shed – Good-night! Good-night, sir. I hope I may have the pleasure of meeting you again."

The luxurious car rolled away from the Citadel of Death and Shadows – down the hill into London and into Life.

The man within it was thinking deeply, sorting out and tabulating his impressions, sifting the irrelevant from what was of value, and making a précis of what he had gained.

There were a dozen minor notes to be made in his book when he reached home. The changing quality of the man's voice, the ebb and flow of uncontrolled emotion, the latent fear – "I must be present at the post mortem to-morrow," he said to himself as a new idea struck him. "There should be much to be learnt from an examination of the Peripheral Nerves. And the brain too – there will be interesting indications in the cerebellum, and the association fibres." ..

The carriage swung again into the familiar parts of town. As he looked out of the windows at the lights and movement, Morton Sims forgot the purely scientific side of thought. The kindly human side of him reasserted itself.

How infinitely sad it was! How deep the underlying horror of this sordid life-tragedy at the close of which he had been assisting!

Who should say, who could define, the true responsibility of the man they were killing up there on the North London Hill?

Predisposition to Alcohol, Reversion, Heredity! – was not the drunken old solicitor, long since dust, the true murderer of the gentle-mannered girl in Hackney?

Lothian, the father of Gilbert Lothian the poet! the poet who certainly knew nothing of what was being done to the young man in the prison, who had probably never heard of his existence even.

The "Fiend Alcohol" at work once more, planting ghastly growths behind the scutcheons of every family!

A cunning murderer with a poisoned mind and body on one side, the brilliant young poet in the sunlight of success and high approbation upon the other!

Mystery of mysteries that God should allow so foul a thing to dominate and tangle the fair threads and delicate tissues of life!

"Well, that's that!" said the doctor, in a phrase he was fond of using when he dosed an episode in his mind. "I'll make my notes on Hancock's case and forget it until I find it necessary to use them in my work. And I'll lock up the poems Moultrie has sent me and I won't look at the book again for a month. Then I shall be able to read the verses for themselves and without any arrière-penseé.

"But, I wonder .. ?"

The brougham stopped at the doctor's house in Russell Square.

BOOK ONE

LOTHIAN IN LONDON

"Myself, arch traitor to myself,My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,My clog whatever road I go."

CHAPTER I

UNDER THE WAGGON-ROOF. A DINNER IN BRYANSTONE SQUARE

"Le véritable Amphitryon est l'Amphitryon où l'on dine."– Molière.

It was a warm night in July when Mr. Amberley, the publisher, entertained a few friends at dinner to meet Gilbert Lothian, the poet.

Although the evening was extremely sultry and the houses of the West End were radiating the heat which they had stored up from the sun-rays during the day, Mr. Amberley's dining room was deliciously cool.

The house was one of those roomy old-fashioned places still to be found unspoiled in Bryanstone Square, and the dining room, especially, was notable. It was on the first floor, over-looking the square, a long and lofty room with a magnificent waggon-roof which was the envy of every one who saw it, and gave the place extraordinary distinction.

The walls were panelled with oak, which had been stained a curious green, that was not olive nor ash-green but partook of both – the veritable colour, indeed, of the grey-green olive trees that one sees on some terrace of the Italian Alps at dawn.

The pictures were very few, considering the size of the room, and they were all quite modern – "In the movement" – as shrewd Mr. Amberley was himself.

A portrait of Mrs. Amberley by William Nicholson, which was quite famous in its way, displayed all the severe pregnancy and almost solemn reserve of this painter. There was a pastel of Prydes' which showed – rather suggested – a squalid room in which a gentleman of 1800, with a flavour of Robert Macaire about him, stood in the full rays of the wine and honey-coloured light of an afternoon sun.

Upon yet another panel was a painting upon silk by Charles Conder, inspired of course, by Watteau, informed by that sad and haunting catching after a fairyland never quite reached, which is the distinctive note of Conder's style, and which might well have served for an illustration to a grotesque fantasy of Heine.

Mrs. Amberley loved this painting. She had a Pater-like faculty of reading into – or from – a picture, something which the artist never thought about at all, and she used to call this little masterpiece "An Ode of Horace in Patch, Powder and Peruque!" She adored these perfectly painted little snuff-box deities who wandered through shadowy mists of amethyst and rouge-de-fer in a fantastic wood.

It is extremely interesting to discover, know of, or to sit at ease in a room which, in its way, is historic, and this is what the Amberleys' guests always felt, and were meant to feel.

In its present form, and with its actual decorations, this celebrated room only dated from some fifteen years back. The Waggon-roof alone remained unaltered from its earlier periods.

The Publishing house of Ince and Amberley had been a bulwark of the Victorian era, and not without some growing celebrity in the earlier Georgian Period.

Lord Byron had spoken well of the young firm once, Rogers was believed to have advanced them money, and when that eminent Cornish pugilist "The Lamorna Cove" wrote his reminiscences they were published by Ince and Amberley, while old Lord Alvanley himself contributed a preface.

From small beginnings came great things. The firm grew and acquired a status, and about this time, or possibly a little later, the dining-room at Bryanstone Square had come into being.

Its walls were not panelled then in delicate green. They were covered with rich plum-coloured paper festooned by roses of high-gilt. In the pictures, with their heavy frames of gold, the dogs and stags of Landseer were let loose, or the sly sleek gipsies of Mr. Frith told rustic fortunes beneath the spreading chestnut trees.

But Browning had dined there – in the later times – an inextinguishable fire just covered with a sprinkling of grey ash. With solemn ritual, Charles Dickens had brewed milk punch in an old bowl of Lowestoft china, still preserved in the drawing-room. The young Robert Cecil, in his early Saturday Review days, had cracked his walnuts and sipped his "pint of port" with little thought of the high destiny to which he should come, and Alfred Tennyson, then Bohemian and unknown, had been allowed to vent that grim philosophy which is the reaction of all imaginative and sensitive natures against the seeming impossibility of success and being understood.

The traditions of Ince and Amberley – its dignified and quiet home was in Hanover Square – had always been preserved.

Its policy, at the same time, had continually altered with the passage of years and the change of the public taste. Yet, so carefully, and indeed so genuinely, had this been accomplished that none of the historic prestige of the business had been lost. It still stood as a bulwark of the old dignified age. A young modern author, whatever his new celebrity, felt that to be published by Ince and Amberley hall-marked him as it were.

Younger firms, greedy of his momentary notoriety, might offer him better terms – and generally did – but Ince and Amberley conferred the Accolade!

He was admitted to the Dining Room.

John Amberley (the Inces had long since disappeared), at fifty was a great publisher, and a charming man of the world. He was one of the personalities of London, carrying out what heredity and natural aptitude had fitted him to do, and was this evening entertaining some literary personages of the day in the famous Dining Room.

The Waggon-roof, which had looked down upon just such gatherings as these for generations, would, if it could have spoken, have discovered no very essential difference between this dinner party and others in the past. True, the walls were differently coloured and pictures which appealed to a different set of artistic conventions were hanging upon them.

The people who were accustomed to meet round the table in 19 – were not dressed as other gatherings had been. There was no huge silver epergne in the centre of that table now. Nor did the Amberley at one end of it display his mastery of ritual carving.

But the talk was the same. Words only were different. The guests' vocabularies were wider and less restrained. It was the music of piano and the pizzicato plucking of strings – there was no pompous organ note, no ore rotundo any more. They all talked of what they had done, were doing, and hoped to do. There was a hurry of the mind, inherent in people of their craft and like a man running, in all of them. The eyes of some of them burned like restless ghosts as they tried to explain themselves, display their own genius, become prophets and acquire honour in the heart of their own country.

Yes! it had always been so!

The brightest and most lucent brains had flashed into winged words and illuminated that long handsome room.

And ever, at the head of the long table, there had been a bland, listening Amberley, catching, tasting and sifting the idea, analysing the constituents of the flash, balancing the brilliant theory against the momentary public taste. A kind, uncreative, managing Amberley! A fair and honest enough Amberley in the main. Serene, enthroned and necessary.