“Wormwood!” — The little green fairy — All right when you know it, but
— The hour of absinthe — Awful effects — Marie Corelli — St. John the Divine — Arrack and bhang not to be encouraged — Plain water — The original intoxicant — Sacred beverage of the mild Hindu — Chi Chi — Kafta, an Arabian delight — Friends as whisky agents — Effervescent Glenlivet — The peat-reek — American bar-keeper and his best customer — “Like swallerin’ a circ’lar saw and pullin’ it up again” — Castor-oil anecdote — “Haste to the wedding!”
We will now proceed to consider certain weird potations, some of which I have personally tested, others of which not all the wealth of Golconda, Peru, and Throgmorton Street would induce me to sample of my own accord, and all of which bring more or less trouble in their wake.
Gall and wormwood have been closely allied from time immemorial; and it is in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that the consumption of
Absinthe
should be almost entirely confined to France. And what is absinthe? Merely alcohol, in {116} which have been macerated for a week or so the pounded leaves and flowering tops of wormwood, together with angelica root, sweet-flag root, star-anise, and other aromatics. The liquor is then distilled, and the result is the decoctions sacred to the “little green fairy,” who has accomplished even more manslaughter than the Mahdi, the Khalifa, and the Peculiar People, put together. Of all the liqueurs absinthe is the most pernicious; and with many other sins it occupies some time in taking possession of its victim. Like Mr. Chevalier’s hero, you “have to know it fust,” and after that the rest is easy. Like golf, “scorching,” and gambling, once you “get” absinthe, it gets you, and never leaves you whilst you last; and there is a weird, almost tragic, look about the milky liquid, when diluted with water, as to suggest smoke, and brimstone, and flames, with a demon rising from their midst. But it is only “the little green fairy”; who is, however, as deadly and determined as any demon.
The best absinthe is made in the canton of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and is not made entirely from Wormwood proper, but from a mixture of plants related to it—such as Southernwood (“Old Man”), and another which takes its name from the invulnerable Achilles. But the merry Swiss boy knows a trick worth two of drinking absinthe; so the French get the most of it, whilst some goes to America, and some to the foreign quarters of our great metropolis. The French soldiers learnt to appreciate it, from drinking it as a febrifuge, during the Algerian campaign, 1832–47, and it afterwards became, {117} gradually, a popular drink on the boulevards, where the five o’clock gossip-hour at the cafés came to be known as “the hour of absinthe.” Its use is now forbidden in the French army and navy, and no wonder. The evil effects of drinking it are very apparent: utter derangement of the digestive system, weakened frame, limp muscles, pappy brain, jumpy heart, horrible dreams and hallucinations, with paralysis or idiocy to bring down the curtain.
In that seductive, though gruesome book, Wormwood, Marie Corelli gives a most graphic picture of an absintheur, once a gay young banker, who, through trouble of no ordinary kind, gradually came under the spell of the “green fairy.” I forget how many murders he committed; but his awful experiences and hallucinations will never leave anybody who has read the book. He is haunted for some days by a leopard who accompanies him on his walks abroad, and who lies down at the foot of his bed at night-time—the “jim-jams,” in fact, in their worst form.
“There are two terrible verses,” says a writer on the subject, “in the Revelations of St. John.