While they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the man who was to be
their comrade, sharer in all those perils and privations yet to come, was
tramping up and down the bare boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris
Street, wrestling desperately with his tragic thirst.
"Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the hand, and awaken my
deadened senses to the sting of anguish that has no name? Why could he not
have left me alone in this living death I had attained!" he cried. "When
first I took to the infernal, blessed liquor, it was for the sake of
respite from mental pain, torture unbearable. Then I was a man, only
unhappy. Now I am lower than the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, decent
brutes, because I desire the drink for its own sake, and find
gratification in physical degradation. O God, if Thou indeed art, and I
must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help to burst
the chains that fetter me! Help me to be free!"
He swallowed a great draught of water, and stumbled to the unused bed, and
threw himself across it, raging and panting, and defiant of the very Power
he invoked. And then, against hope, sleep came to him, drowning memory and
obliterating thought, and relieving physical suffering. The lines smoothed
out of the heavy forehead, and the grim mouth relaxed in the smile that
his dead mother had kissed, coming in with the shaded candle to look at
her sleeping boy.
Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart Yorkshireman, mighty
hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion in the reckless days of
bloodshed that were before the introduction of the Game Laws into South
Africa, was saying to the Colonel:
"Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away
all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of
times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our
leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow under his wing, in a
manner--bails him out when it is necessary, and, I believe, when the man
is sober enough, gives him work in his dispensary and allows him to
administer the anaesthetic when it's a question of a surgical operation.
Wonder he trusts him, for my part! Yet De Boursy-Williams is a remarkably
successful operator, and hardly ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that
he should have been called away to Cape Town at this juncture."
"He has left Dr. Saxham as _locum tenens_, I understand."