GILBERT LOTHIAN'S DIARY
"It comes very glibly off the tongue to say, 'Put yourself in his
position,'--'What would you have done under the circumstances?' but
if self-analysis is difficult, how much more so is it to appreciate
the 'Ego' of another, to penetrate within the veil of the maimed
and debased inner temple of the debauched inebriate?"--"_The
Psychology of the Alcoholic_," by T. Claye Shawe, M.D., F.R.C.P.,
Lecturer on psychological medicine. St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
London.
"Like one, that on a lonesome road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."
--_Coleridge._
When Mary Lothian returned home to Mortland Royal she was very unwell.
The strain of watching over Lady Davidson, and the wrench of a parting
which in this world was to be a final one, proved more than she was
able to endure.
She had been out of doors, imprudently, during that dangerous hour on
the Riviera between sunset and nine o'clock. Symptoms of that curious
light fever, with its sharp nervous pains, which is easily contracted
at such times along the Côte d'Azur, began to show themselves.
Dr. Morton Sims was away in Paris for a few weeks upon a scientific
engagement he was unable to refuse, and Mary was attended by Dr.
Heywood, the general practitioner from Wordingham.
There was nothing very serious the matter, but the Riviera fever brings
collapse and great depression of spirits with it. Mary remained in bed,
lying there in a dreamy, depressed state of both physical and mental
faculties. She read but little, preferred to be alone as much as
possible, and found it hard to take a lively interest in anything at
all.
Gilbert was attentive enough. He saw that every possible thing was done
for her comfort. But his manner was nervous and staccato, though he
made great efforts at calm. He was assiduous, eager to help and
suggest, but there was no repose about him. In her great longing for
rest and solitude--a necessary physical craving resulting upon her
illness--Mary hardly wanted to see very much even of Gilbert. She was
too weak and dispirited to remonstrate with him, but it was quite
obvious to her experienced eyes that he was drinking heavily again.
His quite unasked-for references to the fact that he was taking nothing
but a bottle of beer in the middle of the morning, a little claret at
meals and a single whiskey and soda before going to bed, betrayed him
at once. His tremulous anxiety, his furtive manner, the really horrible
arrogation of gaiety and ease made upon a most anxious hope that he was
deceiving her, told their own tale.
So did the heavy puffed face, yellowish red and with spots appearing
upon it. His eyes seemed smaller as the surrounding tissues were
dilated, they were yellowish, streaked with little veins of blood at
the corners, and dull in expression.
His head jerked, his hands trembled and when he touched her they were
hot and damp.
Her depression of mind, her sense of hopelessness, were greatly
increased. Darkness seemed to be closing round her, and prayer--for it
happens thus at times with even the most saintly souls--gave little
relief.
"I shall be better soon," she kept repeating to herself. "The doctor
says so. Then, when I am well, I shall be able to take poor Gillie
really in hand. It won't be long now. Then I will save him with God's
help."
In her present feebleness she knew that it was useless to attempt to do
anything in this direction. So she pretended to believe her husband,
said nothing at all, and prayed earnestly to recover her health that
she might set about the task of succour.
She did not know, had not the very slightest idea, of Lothian's real
state. Nobody knew, nobody could know.
On his part, freed of all restraint, his mind a cave of horror, a
chamber of torture, he drank with lonely and systematic persistence.
It was about this time that he began to make these notes in the form of
a diary which long afterwards passed into the hands of Dr. Morton Sims.
The record of heated horror, the extraordinary glimpse into an inferno
incredible to the sane man, has proved of immense value to those who
are engaged in studying the psychology of the inebriate.
From much that they contain, it is obvious that the author had no
intention of letting them be seen by any other eyes than his own, at
the time of writing them. Dr. Morton Sims had certainly suggested the
idea in the first place, but there can be no doubt whatever that
Lothian soon abandoned his original plan and wrote for the mere relief
of doing so, and doubtless with a sinister fascination at the spectacle
of his own mind thus revealed by subtle analysis and the record of a
skilled pen. Alcoholised and impaired as his mind was, it was
nevertheless quite capable of doing this accurately and forcibly, and
there are many corroborative instances of such an occurrence. More than
one medical man during the progress of a protracted death agony has
left minute statements of his sensations for the good of Society.
Such papers as these, for use in a book which has an appeal to all
sorts of people, cannot, of course, be printed entire. There are things
which it would serve no good purpose for the layman to know, valuable
as they are to the patient students of morbid states. And what can be
given is horrible enough.
The selected passages follow herewith, and with only such comment as is
necessary to elucidate the text.
. . . Last night a letter came from a stranger, one of the many
that I get, thanking me for some of the poems in "Surgit Amari"
which he said had greatly solaced and helped him throughout a
period of mental distress. When I opened the letter it was after
dinner, and I had dined well--my appetite keeps good at any rate,
and while that is so there is no fear of it--according to the
doctors and the medical books. I opened the letter and read it
without much interest. I am not so touched and pleased by these
letters as I used to be. Then, after I had said good-night to my
wife, I went into the library. After two or three whiskies and a
lot of cigarettes the usual delusion of greatness and power came
over me. I know, of course, that I have great power and am in a way
celebrated, but at ordinary times I have no overmastering
consciousness and bland, suave pride in this. When I am recovering
from the effects of too much alcohol I doubt everything. My own
work seems to me trivial and worthless, void of life and imitations
of greater work.
Well, I had the usual quickening, but vague and incoherent sense of
greatness, and I picked up the letter again. I walked up and down
the room smoking furiously, and then I had some more whiskey. The
constant walking up and down the room, by the way, is a well-marked
symptom of my state. The nerves refuse me calm. I can't sit down
for long, even with the most alluring book. Some thought comes into
my mind like a stone thrown suddenly into a pool, and before I am
aware of it I am marching up and down the room like a forest beast
in a cage. When I had read the letter twice more I sat down and
wrote a most effusive reply to my correspondent. I almost wept as I
read it. I went into high things, I revealed myself and my
innermost thoughts with the grave kindness and wish to be of help
that a great and good man; intimate with a lesser and struggling
man; might use.
In the morning I read the letter which I had thought so wonderful.
As usual, I tore it up. It was written in a handwriting which might
have betrayed drunkenness to a child. Long words lacked a syllable,
words ending in "ing" were concluded by a single stroke, the letter
"l" was the same size as the letter "e" and could not be
distinguished from it. But what was worse, was the sickly
sentiment, expressed in the most feeble sloppy prose.
It was sort of educated Chadband or Stiggins and there was an
appalling lack of reticence.
It is a marked symptom of my state, that when I am drunk I always
want to write effusive letters to strangers or mere acquaintances.
Sometimes, if I have been reading a book that I liked, I sit down
and turn out pages of gush to the unknown author, hailing him as a
brother and a master. Thank goodness I always tear the wretched
things up next day. It is a good thing I live in the country. In
London these wretched letters, which I am impelled to write, would
be in some adjacent pillar box before I realised what I had done.
Oh, to be a sane man, a member of the usual sane army of the world
who never do these things!
The above passage must have been re-read some time after it was written
and been the _raison d'être_ of what follows. The various passages
are only occasionally dated, but their chronological order can be
determined with some certainty by these few dates, changes of
handwriting, and above all by the progress and interplay of thought.
It had not occurred to me before, with any strength that is, how
very far my inner life diverges now from ordinary paths! It is, I
see in a moment such as the present when I am able to contemplate
it, utterly abnormal. I am glad to realise this for a time. It is
so intensely interesting from the psychologist's point of view. I
can so very, very rarely realise it. Immediately that I slip back
into the abnormal life, long custom and habit reassert themselves
and I become quite unaware that it is abnormal. I live mechanically
according to the _bizarre_ and fantastic rules imposed upon me
by drink. Now, for a time, I have a breathing space. I have left
the dim green places under the sea and my head is above water. I
see the blue sky and feel the winds of the upper world upon my
face. I used to belong up there, now I am an inhabitant of the
under world, where the krakens and the polyps batten in their sleep
and no light comes.
I will therefore use my little visit to "glimpse the moon" like the
Prince of Denmark's sepulchral father. I will catalogue the ritual
of the under world which has me fast.
I will, that is, write as much as I can. Before very long my eyes
will be tired and little black specks will dance in front of them.
The dull pain in my side--cirrhosis of course--which is quiet and
feeding now--will begin again. Something in my head, at the back of
the skull on the left hand side--so it seems--will begin to throb
and ache. Little shooting pains will come in my knees and round
about my ankles and drops of perspiration which taste bitter as
brine will roll down my face. And, worse than all, the fear of It
will commence. Slight "alcoholic tremors" will hint of what might
be. After a few minutes I shall feel that it is going to be.
I will define all that I mean by "It" another time.
Well, then I shall send "It" and all the smaller "Its" to the right
about. I shall have two or three strong pegs. Then physical pains,
all mental horrors, will disappear at once. But I shall be back
again under the sea nevertheless. I shan't realise, as I am
realising now, the abnormality of my life. But I should say that I
have an hour at least before I need have any more whiskey, before
that becomes imperative. So here goes for a revelation more real
and minute than de Quincey, though, lamentable fact! in most
inferior prose!
Here this passage ends. It is obvious from what follows that the period
of expected freedom came to an end long before the author expected.
Excited by what he proposed to do, he had spent too much of his brief
energy in explaining it. Mechanically he had taken more drink to
preserve himself upon the surface--the poisoned mind entirely
forgetting what it had just set down--and with mathematic certainty the
alcohol had plunged the poet once more beneath the ruining waters.
The next entry, undated, is written in a more precise and firmer
handwriting. It recalls the small and beautiful caligraphy of the old
days. There is no preamble to the bald and hideous confession of mental
torture.
I wish that my imagination was not so horribly acute and vivid when
it is directed towards horrors--as indeed it always seems to be
now. I wish, too, that I had never talked curiously to loquacious
medical friends and read so many medical books.
I am always making amateur, and probably perfectly ridiculous,
tests for Locomotor Ataxy and General Paralysis--always shrinking
in nameless fear from what so often seems the inevitable onslaught
of "It."
Meanwhile, with these fears never leaving me for a moment, to what
an infinity of mad superstitions I am slave! How I strive, by a
bitter, and (really) hideously comic, ritual to stave off the
inevitable.
Oh, I used to love God and trust in Him. I used to pray to Jesus.
Now, like any aborigine I only seek to ward off evil, to propitiate
the Devil and the Powers of the Air, to drag the Holy Trinity into
a forced compliance with my conjuring tricks. _I can hardly
distinguish the devil from God._ Both seem my antagonists.
Hardly able to distinguish Light from dark, I employ myself with
dirty little conjuring tricks. I well know that all these are the
phantasms of a disordered brain! I am not really fool enough to
believe that God can be propitiated or Satan kept at bay by
movements: touchings and charms.
But I obey my demon.
These things are a foolish network round my every action and
thought. I can't get out of the net.
Touching, I do not so much mind. In me it is a symptom of
alcoholism, but greater people have known it as a mere nervous
affection quite apart from drink. Dr. Johnson used to stop and
return to touch lamp-posts. In "Lavengro," Borrow has words to say
about this impulse--I think it is in Lavengro or it may be in the
Spanish book. Borrow used to "touch wood." I began it a long time
ago, in jest at something young Ingworth said. I did it as one
throws spilt salt over one's shoulder or avoids seeing the new moon
through glass. Together with the other things I _have_ to do
now, it has become an obsession. I carry little stumps of pencil in
all my pockets. Whenever a thought of coming evil, a radiation from
the awful cloud of Apprehension comes to me, then I can thrust a
finger into the nearest pocket and touch wood. Only a fortnight ago
I was frightened out of my senses by the thought that I had never
been really touching wood at all. The pencil stumps were all
varnished. I had been touching varnish! It took me an hour to
scrape all the varnish off with a pocket knife. I must have about
twenty stumps in constant use. At night I always put one in the
pocket of my pyjama coat--one wakes up with some fear--but, half
asleep and lying as I do upon my left side, the pocket is often
under me and I can't get to the wood quickly. So I keep my arm
stretched out all night and my hand can touch the wooden top of a
chair by the bed in a second. I made Tumpany sand-paper all the
varnish off the top of the chair too. He thought I was mad. I
suppose I am, as a matter of fact. But though I am perfectly aware
of the damnable foolishness of it, these things are more real to me
than the money-market to a business man.
* * * * *
If it were only this compulsion to touch wood I should not mind.
But there are other tyrannies coincident which are more urgent and
compelling. My whole mind--at times--seems taken up by the
necessity for ritual actions. I have no time for quiet thought.
Everything is broken in upon. There is the Sign of the Cross. I
have linked even _that_ in the chain of my terrors. I touch
wood and then I make this sign. I do it so often that I have
invented all sorts of methods of doing it secretly in public, and
quickly when I am alone. I do it in a sort of imaginary way. For
instance, I bend my head and in so doing draw an imaginary line
with my right eye upon the nearest wall, or upon the page of the
book that I am reading. Then I move my head from side to side and
make another fictitious line to complete the cross. A propos of
making the sign, the imaginary lines nearly always go crooked in my
brain. This especially so when I am doing it on a book. I follow
two lines of type on both pages and use the seam of the binding
between them to make the down strokes. But it hardly ever comes
right the first time. I begin to notice people looking at me
curiously as I try to get it right and my head moves about. If they
only knew!
Then another and more satisfactory way--for the imaginary method
always makes my head ache for a second or two--I accomplish with
the thumb of my right hand moving vertically down the first joint
of the index finger, and then laterally. I can do this as often as
I like and no one can possibly see me. I have a little copper Cross
too, with "In hoc vinces" graved upon it. But I don't like using
this much. It is too concrete. It reminds me of the use I am making
of the symbol of salvation. "In hoc vinces"! Not I. There are times
when I think that I am surely doomed.
But I think that the worst of all the foul, senseless, and yet
imperative petty lordships I endure, is the dominion of the two
numbers. The Dominion of The Two Numbers!--capital letters shall
indicate this! For some reason or other I have for years imagined
mystical virtue in the number 7 and some maleficent influence in
the number 13. These, of course, are old superstitions, but they,
and all the others, ride me to a weariness of spirit which is near
death.
Although I got my first in "Lit. Hum." at Oxford, have read almost
everything, and can certainly say that I am a man of wide culture
and knowledge, Figures always gave me aversion and distaste. I got
an open scholarship at my college and was as near as nothing
ploughed in the almost formal preliminary exam of Responsions by
Arithmetic. I can't add up my bank-book correctly even now, and I
have no sense whatever of financial amounts and affairs.
But I am a slave to the good but stern fairy 7 and the hell-hag 13.
I attempt lightness and the picturesque. There is really nothing of
the sort about my unreasoning and mad servitude. It's bitter,
naked, grinning truth.
In my bath I sponge myself seven times--first. Then I begin again,
but I stop at six in the second series and cross myself upon the
breast with the bath sponge. Seven and six make thirteen. If I did
not cancel out that thirteen by the sign of the Cross I should walk
in fear of some dreadful thing all day.
Every time I drink I sip seven times first and then again seven
times. When six times comes in the second seven, I make the Cross
with my head. My right hand is holding the glass so that the thumb
and finger joint method won't work. It would be disastrous to make
the sign with the left hand.
That is another thing. . . . I use my left hand as little as I can.
It frightens me. I _always_ raise a glass to my lips with the right
hand. If I use the left hand owing to momentary thoughtlessness,
I have to go through a lengthy purification of wood-touching,
crossing, and counting numbers.
All my habits re-act one upon the other and the rules are added to
daily until they have become appallingly intricate. A failure in
one piece of ritual entails all sorts of protracted mental and
physical gestures in order to put it right.
I wonder if other men who drink know this heavy, unceasing slavery
which makes the commonest actions of life a burden?
I suppose so. It must be so. All drugs have specific actions. Men
don't tell, of course. Neither do I! Sometimes, though, when I have
gone to some place like the Café Royal, or perhaps one of the clubs
which are used by fast men, I have had a disgusting glee when I met
men whom I knew drank heavily to think that they had their
secrets--must have them--as well as I.
On reading through these notes that I have been making now and
then, I am, of course, horrified at what they really seem to mean.
Put down in black and white they convey--or at least they would
convey to anyone who saw them--nothing but an assurance of the fact
that I am mad. Yet I am not really mad. I have two lives. . . . I
see that I have referred constantly to "It." I have promised myself
to define exactly what I mean by "IT."
I am writing this immediately after lunch. I didn't get up till
eleven o'clock. I am under the influence of twenty-five grains of
ammonium bromide. I had a few oysters for lunch and nothing else. I
am just about as normal as any man in my state can hope to be.
Nevertheless when I come to try and define "It" for myself I am
conscious of a deep horror and distrust. My head is above water, I
am sane, but so powerful is the influence of the continual FEAR
under which I live my days and nights, that even now I am afraid.
"It" is a protean thing. More often than not it is a horrible dread
of that Delirium Tremens which I have never had, but ought to have
had long ago. I have read up the symptoms until I know each one of
them. When I am in a very nervous and excited condition--when, for
example, I could not face anybody at all and must be alone in my
room with my bottle of whiskey--I stare at the wall to see if rats
or serpents are running up it. I peer into the corners of the
library to detect sheeted corpses standing there. I do not see
anything of the sort. Even the imaginings of my fear cannot create
them. I am, possibly, personally immune from Delirium Tremens, some
people are. All the same, the fear of it racks me and tears me a
hundred times a day. If it really seized me it surely would be
almost enjoyable! Nothing, at any rate, can be more utterly
dreadful than the continual apprehension.
Then I have another and always constant fear--these fears, I want
to insist, are fantastically intermingled with all the crossings,
wood-touchings and frantic calculations I have to do each minute of
my life. The other fear is that of Prison.
Now I know perfectly well that I have done nothing in my life that
could ever bring me near prison. All the same I cannot now hear a
strange voice without a start of dread. A knock at the front door
of my house unnerves me horribly. I open the door of whatever room
I am in and listen with strained, furtive attention, slinking back
and closing the door with a sob of relief when I realise that it is
nothing more than the postman or the butcher's boy. I can hardly
bear to read a novel now, because I so constantly meet with the
word "arrest."
"He was arrested in the middle of his conversation,"--"She placed
an arresting hand upon his arm." . . . These phrases which
constantly occur in every book I read fill me with horror. A wild
phantasmagoria of pictures passes through my mind. I see myself
being led out of my house with gyves upon my wrists like the
beastly poem Hood made upon "Eugene Aram." Then there is the drive
into Wordingham in a cab. All the officials at the station who know
me so well cluster round. I am put into a third class carriage and
the blinds are pulled down. At St. Pancras, where I am also known,
it is worse. The next day there is the Magistrate's Court and all
the papers full of my affair. I know it is all fantastic
nonsense--moonshine, wild dream. But it is so appallingly real to
me that I sometimes long to have got the trial over and to be
sitting with shaven head, wearing coarse prison clothes, in a
lonely cell.
Then, I think to myself, I should really have peace. The worst
would have happened and there would be an end of it all. There
would be an end of deadly Fear.
I remember "----" telling me at Bruges, where so many _mauvais
sujets_ go to kill themselves with alcohol, that wherever he
went, night and day, he was always afraid of a tiger that would
suddenly appear. He had never experienced Delirium Tremens either.
He knew how mad and fantastic this apprehension was but he was
quite unable to get rid of it.
* * * * *
At other times I have the Folie de Grandeur.
My reading has told me that this is the sure sign of approaching
General Paralysis. General paralysis means that one's brain goes,
that one loses control of one's limbs and all acts of volition go.
One is simply alive, that is all. One is alive and yet one is fed
and pushed about, and put into this place or that as the
entomologist would use a snail. So, in all my wild imaginings the
grisly fear is never far away.
The imaginings are, in themselves, not without interest to a
student of the dreadful thing I have become.
I always start from one point. That is that I have become suddenly
enormously rich. I have invented all sorts of ways in which this
might happen, but lately, in order to save trouble, and to have a
base to start from I have arranged that Rockefeller, the American
oil person, has been so intrigued by something that I have written
that he presents me with two million pounds.
I start in the possession of two million pounds. I buy myself a
baronetcy at once and I also purchase some historic estate. I live
the life of the most sporting and beneficent country gentleman that
ever was! I see myself correcting the bucolic errors of my
colleagues on the Bench at Quarter Sessions. I am a Providence to
all the labourers and small farmers. My name is acclaimed
throughout the county of which I am almost immediately made Lord
Lieutenant.
After about five minutes of this prospect I get heartily sick of
it.
I buy a yacht then. It is as big as an Atlantic liner. I fit it up
and make it the most perfect travelling palace the world has ever
seen. I go off in it to sail round the globe--to see all the most
beautiful things in the world, to suck the last drop of honey that
the beauty of unknown seas, fairy continents, fortunate islands can
yield. During this progress I am accompanied by charming and
beautiful women. Some are intellectual, some are artistic--all are
beautiful and charming. I, I myself, am the central star around
which all this assiduous charm and loveliness revolve.
Another, and very favourite set of pictures, is the one in which I
receive the two millions from Mr. Rockefeller--or whoever he
is--and immediately make a public renunciation of it. With wise
fore-thought I found great pensions for underpaid clergy. I
inaugurate societies by means of which authors who could do really
artistic work, but are forced to pot-boil in order to live, may
take a cheque and work out their great thoughts without any worldly
embarrassments. I myself reserve one hundred and fifty or two
hundred pounds a year and go and work among the poor in an East-end
slum. At the same time I am most anxious that this great
renunciation should be widely spoken of. I must be interviewed in
all the papers. The disdainful nobility of my sacrifice for
Christ's sake must be well advertised.
Indeed all my Folies de Grandeur are nothing else but exaggerated
megalomania. I must be in the centre of the picture always. Spartan
or Sybarite I must be glorified.
* * * * *
Another symptom which is very marked is that of spasmodic and
superstitious prayer. When my heated brain falls away from its
kaleidoscopic pictures of grandeur owing to sheer weariness; when
my wire-tight nerves are strained to breaking point by the
despotism of "touchings," the tyranny of "Thirteen" and "Seven,"
the nervous misery of the Sign of the Cross, I try to sum up all
the ritual and to escape the whole welter of false obligation by
spasmodic prayer. I suppose that I say "God-the-Father-help-me"
about two or three hundred times a day. I shut my eyes and throw
the failing consciousness of myself into the back of my head, and
then I say it--in a sort of hot feverish horror,
"God-the-Father-help-me." I vary this, too. When my thoughts or my
actions have been more despicable than usual, I jerk up an appeal
to God the Father. When fluid _sentiment_ is round me it is
generally Jesus on whom I call.
. . . I cannot write any more of this, it is too horrible even to
write. But God knows how true it is!
* * * * *
This morning I went out for a walk. I was feeling wretchedly ill. I
had to go to the Post Office and there I met little O'Donnell, the
Rector, and dear old Medley his curate. It was torture to talk to
them, to preserve an ordinary appearance. I felt that old Medley's
eyes were on me the whole time. I like him very much. I know every
corner of his good simple mind as if I had lived in it. He is a
good man, and I can't help liking him. He dislikes and distrusts me
intensely, however. He doesn't know enough--like Morton Sims for
instance--to understand that I want to be good, that I am of his
company really. The Rector himself was rather too charming. He
fussed away about my poems, asked after Dorothy Davidson at Nice,
purred out something that the Duke of Perth had said to him about
the verses I had in the "Spectator" a month ago. Yet O'Donnell must
know that I drink badly. Neither he nor Medley know, of course, how
absolutely submerged I really am. No one ever realises that about a
"man who drinks" until they read of his death in the paper. Only
doctors, wives, experienced eyes know.
I funked Medley's keen old eyes in the Post Office and I couldn't
help disgust at O'Donnell's humbug, as I thought it, though it may
have been meant kindly. Curious! to fear one good man because he
detects and reprobates one's wickedness, to feel contempt for
another because he is civil.
I hurried away from them and went into the Mortland Royal Arms. Two
strong whiskies gave myself back to me. I felt a stupid desire to
meet the two clergymen again, with my nerves under proper
control--to show them that I was myself.
Going back home, however, another nerve wave came over me. I knew
how automatic and jerky my movements were really. I knew that each
movement of my legs was dictated by a _conscious_ exercise of
command from the brain. I imagined that everyone I met--a few
labourers--must know it and observe it also. I realise, now that I
am safe in my study again, that this was nonsense. They couldn't
have seen--or _could_ they?
--I am sure of nothing now!
. . . It is half an hour ago since I wrote the last words. I began
to feel quite drunk and giddy for a moment. I concentrated my
intelligence upon the "Telegraph" until the lines became clear and
I was appreciating what I read. Now I am fairly "possible" I think.
Reading a passage in the leading article aloud seems to tell me
that my voice is under control. My face twitched a little when I
looked in the mirror over the mantel-shelf, but if I have a
biscuit, and go to my room and sponge my face, I think that I shall
be able to preserve sufficient grip on myself to see Mary for ten
minutes now. Directly my eyes go wrong--I can feel when they are
beginning to betray me--I will make an excuse and slip away. Then
I'll lunch, and sleep till tea-time. After two cups of strong tea
and the sleep, I shall be outwardly right for an hour at least. I
might have tea taken up to her room and sit by the bed--if she
doesn't want candles brought in. I can be quite all right in the
dusk.
The next entry of these notes dates, from obvious evidence, three or
four days afterwards. They are all written on the loose sheets of thick
and highly glazed white paper, which Lothian, always sumptuous in the
tools of his work, invariably used. It will be seen that the last
paragraphs have, for a moment, strayed into a reminiscence of the hour.
That is to say they have recorded not only continuous sensations, but
those which were proper to an actual experience. The Notes do so no
more. The closing paragraphs that are exhibited here once more fall
back into the key of almost terrified interest with which this keen,
incisive mind surveys its own ruin.
There are no more records of actual happenings.
Yet, nevertheless, while Gilbert Lothian was making this accurate
diagnosis of his state, it is as well to remember that _there is no
prognosis_.
He _refuses to look into the future_. He really refuses to give any
indication of what is going on in the present. He puts down upon the
page the symptoms of his disease. He catalogues the tortures he
endures. But in regard to where his state is leading him in his life,
what it is all going to result in, he says nothing whatever.
Psychologically this is absolutely corroborative and true.
He studies himself as a diseased subject and obviously takes a horrible
pleasure in writing down all that he endures. But there are things and
thoughts so terrible that even the most callous and most poisoned mind
dare not chronicle them.
While the very last of what was Gilbert Lothian is finding an abnormal
pleasure, and perhaps a terrible relief, in the surveyal of his
extinguishing personality, the other self, the False Ego--the Fiend
Alcohol--was busy with a far more dreadful business.
We may regard the excerpts already given, and the concluding ones to
come, as really the last of Lothian--until his resurrection.
Sometimes a lamp upon the point of expiration flares up for a final
second.
Then, with a splutter, it goes out. And in the circle of confining
glass a dull red glow fades, disappears, and only an ugly, lifeless
black circle of exhausted wick is left.
I didn't mean in making these notes--confound Morton Sims that he
should have suggested such a thing to me!--Well, I didn't mean to
bring in any daily happenings. My only idea was, for a sort of
pitiful satisfaction to myself, to make a record of what I am going
through. It has been a relief to me--that is quite certain. While I
have been writing these notes I have had some of the placidity and
quiet that I used to know when I was engaged upon purely literary
pursuits. I can't write now--that is to say, I can't create. My
poetic faculty seems quite to have left me. I write certain
letters, to a certain person, but they are no longer the artistic
and literary productions that they were in the first stages of my
acquaintance with this person.
All the music that God gave me is gone out of me now.
Well, even this relief is passing, I have more in my mind and heart
than will allow me to continue this fugitive journal.
Here, obviously, Lothian makes a slight reference to the ghastly
obsession which, at this time, must have had him well within its grip.
Well, I will round it up with a few final words.
* * * * *
One thing that strikes me with horror and astonishment is that I
have become quite unable to understand how what I am doing, the
fact of what I have become, hurts, wounds and makes other people
unhappy. I try to put myself--sympathetically--in the place of
those who are around me and who must necessarily suffer by my
behaviour. _I can't do it._ When I try to do it my mind seems
full of grey wool. The other people seem a hundred miles away.
Their sentiments, emotions, wishes--their love for me . . .
It is significant that here Lothian uses the plural pronoun as if he
was afraid of the singular.
--dwindle to vanishing point. I used to be able to be sympathetic
to the sorrows and troubles of almost everyone I met. I remember
once after helping a man in this village to die comfortably, after
sitting with him for hours and hours and hours during the progress
of a most loathsome disease after closing his eyes, paying for his
poor burial and doing all I could to console his widow and his
daughters, that the widow and the daughters spoke bitterly about me
and my wife--who had been so good to them--because one of our
servants had returned the cream they sent to the kitchen because it
was of inferior quality. These poor women actually made themselves
unpleasant. For a day at least I was quite angry. It seemed so
absolutely ungrateful when my wife and I had done everything for
them for so long. But, I remember quite well, how I thought out the
whole petty little incident one night when I was out with Tumpany
after the wild geese. We were waiting in a cold midnight when
scurrying clouds passed beneath the moon. It was bitter cold and my
gun barrels burnt like fire. I thought it out with great care, and
on the icy marshes a sort of understanding of narrow brains and
unimaginative natures came to me. The next day I told my servants
to still continue taking cream from the widow, and I have been
friendly and kind to her ever since.
But now, I can't possibly get into the mind of anyone else with
sympathy.
I think only of myself, of my own desires, of my own state. . . .
* * * * *
Although I doubt it in my heart of hearts, I must put it upon
record that I still have a curious and ineradicable belief that I
can, by a mere effort of volition, get rid of all the horrors that
surround me and become good and normal once more. When I descend
into the deepest depths of all I am yet conscious of a little
jerky, comfortable, confidential nudge from something inside me.
"You'll be all right," it says. "When you want to stop you will be
able to all right!" This false confidence, though I know it to be
utterly false, never deserts me in moments of exhilarated
drunkenness.
And finally, I add, that when my brain is becoming exhausted the
last moment before stupor creeps over it, I constantly make the
most supreme and picturesque pronunciations of my wickedness.
I could not pray the words aloud--or at least if I did they would
be somewhat tumbled and incoherent--but I mentally pray them. I
wring my hands, I abase my soul and mind, I say the Pater Noster
and the Credo, I stretch out my hot hands, and I give it all up for
ever and ever and ever.
I tumble into bed with a sigh of unutterable relief.
The Fiend that stands beside my bed on all ordinary nights assumes
the fantastic aspect of an angel. I fall into my drunken sleep,
murmuring that "there is joy in Heaven when one sinner repenteth."
I wake up in the morning full of evil thoughts, blear-eyed, and
trembling. I am a mockery of humanity, longing, crying for poison.
There is only a dull and almost contemptuous memory of the
religious ecstasies of the night before. My dreams, my confession,
have not the slightest influence upon me. I don't fall again into
ruining habits--I continue them, without restraint, without sorrow.
* * * * *
I will write no more. I am adding another Fear to all the other
Fears. I have been making a true picture of what I am, and it is so
awful that even my blinded eyes cannot bear to look upon it.
Thus these notes, in varying handwriting, indicating the ebb and flow
of poison within the brain, cease and say no more.
At the bottom of the last page--which was but half filled by the
concluding words of the Confession--there is something most terribly
significant, most horrible to look at in the light of after events.
There is a greenish splash upon the glossy paper, obviously whiskey was
spilt there.
Beginning in the area of the splashed circle, the ink running, a word
of four letters is written.
Two letters are cloudy, the others sharp and clear.
The word is "Rita."
A little lower down, and now right at the bottom of the page, the word
is repeated again in large tremulous handwriting, three times. "Rita,
Rita, Rita!"
The last "Rita" sprawls and tumbles towards the bottom right-hand
corner of the page. Two exclamation marks follow it, and it is heavily
underscored three times.