Part 12 (1/2)
or ”he drinks.” Whether he or she says it with sympathetic sorrow, or abhorrence, the bald statement rarely leads to any further train of thought.
It is very difficult for the ordinary person to realise that the mental processes are _sui generis_ a Kingdom--though with a debased coinage--which requires considerable experience before it can always be recognised from the ring of true metal.
Alcoholism so changes the mental life of any one that it results in an ego which has _special_ external and internal characteristics.
And so, in order to appreciate fully this history of Gilbert Lothian--to note the difference between the man as he was known and as he really was--it must always be kept in mind under what influence he moves through life, and that his steps have strayed into a dreadful kingdom unknown and unrealised by happier men.
He had pa.s.sed out of one great Palace of Drink.
Had he been as he supposed himself to be, he would have sought rest at once. He would have hurried joyously from temptation in this freedom from his chains.
Instead of that, the question he asked himself was, ”What shall I do now?”
The glutton crams himself at certain stated periods. But when repletion comes he stops eating. The habit is rhythmic and periodically certain.
But the Drunkard--his far more sorrowful and lamentable brother--has not even this half-saving grace. In common with the inordinate smoker--whose harm is physical and not mental--the inebriate drinks as long as he is able to, until he is incapacitated. ”Where shall I go now?”
If G.o.d does indeed give human souls to His good angels, as gardens to weed and tend, that thought must have brought tears of pity to the eyes of the august beings who were battling for Gilbert Lothian.
Their hour was not yet.
They were to see the temple of the Paraclete fall into greater ruin and disaster than ever before. The splendid spires and pinnacles, the whole serene beauty of soul and body which had made this Temple a high landmark when G.o.d first built it, were crumbling to decay.
Deep down among the strong foundations the enemy was at work. The spire--the ”Central-one”--which sprang up towards Heaven was deeply undermined. Still--save to the eyes of experts--its glory rose unimpaired. But it was but a lovely sh.e.l.l with no longer any grip upon its base of weakened Will. And the bells in the wind-swept height of the Tower no longer rang truly. On red dawns or on pearl-grey evenings the message they sent over the country-side was beginning to be false.
There was no peace when they tolled the Angelus.
In oriel or great rose-window the colour of the painted gla.s.s was growing dim. The clear colour was fading, though here and there it was shot with baleful fire which the Artist had never painted there,--like the blood-shot eyes of the man who drinks.
A miasmic mist had crept into the n.o.ble s.p.a.ces of the aisles. The vast supporting pillars grew insubstantial and seemed to tremble as the vapour eddied round them. A black veil was quickly falling before the Figure above the Altar, and the seven dim lamps of the Sanctuary burned with green and flickering light.
The bells of a Great Mind's Message, which had been cast with so much silver in them, rang an increasing dissonance. The trumpets of the organ echoed with a harsh note in the far clerestory; the flutes were false, the _dolce_ stop no longer sweet. The great pipes of the pedal organ muttered and stammered in their ma.s.sive voices, as if dark advisers whispered in the ear of the musician who controlled them.
Lothian had pa.s.sed from one great Palace of Drink. ”Where shall I go?”
he asked himself again, and immediately his eye fell upon another, the brilliant illumination upon the facade of a well-known ”Theatre of Varieties.”
His hot eye-b.a.l.l.s drank in the flaring signs, and telegraphed both an impulse and a memory to his brain.
”Yes!” he said. ”I will revisit the 'Kingdom.' There is still two thirds of an hour before the performance will be over. How well I used to know it! What a nightly haunt it used to be. Surely, even now, there will be some people I know there? ... I'll go in and see!”
As Lothian turned in at the princ.i.p.al doors of the most celebrated Music Hall in the world, his pulses began to quicken.
--The huge foyer, the purple carpets, with their wreaths of laurel in a purple which was darker yet, the gleaming marble stairway, with its wide and n.o.ble sweep, how familiar all this dignified splendour was, he thought as he entered the second Palace of Drink which flung wide its doors to him this night.
A palace of drink and l.u.s.t, vast and beautiful! for those who brought poisoned blood and vicious desires within its portals! Here, banished from the pagan groves and the sunlit temples of their ancient glory--banished also from the German pine-woods where Heine saw them in pallid life under the full moon--Venus, Bacchus and Silenus held their unholy court.
For all the world--save only for a few wise men to whom they were but symbols--Venus and Bacchus were deities once.
When the Acropolis cut into the blue sky of h.e.l.las with its white splendour these were the chiefest to whom men prayed, and they ruled the lives of all.
And, day by day, new temples rise in their honour. Once they were wors.h.i.+pped with blythe body and blinded soul. Now the tired body and the besotted brain alone pay them reverence. But great are their temples still.