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
appetite 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, God!" 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 prickings 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 latitude 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 appetite 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 gratitude
to Dick. 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 Dick some time before.
"This thing has played the devil with me, Dick," 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 bumpers 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," Dick 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 appetite 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 glass and let it
alone, but oftener the first glass 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, Dick," 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, Dick, it's hell!"
There had ensued a silence, broken by Dick'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.
Dick 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 Dick 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.