He tried to comfort her, and said it was no use talking about being dead. She could make him much happier by living, if she’d only give up the dreadful drink. He said they couldn’t go much lower than they’d got; now was the time to begin to go up again. If he tried and got work, would she keep straight, so that they could get a home together again?
“No; she knew she couldn’t,” she said. “It was no use. If she ever got any money again, she knew the temptation would be too strong for her—she’d tried over and over again to stop herself, and it was no use. She’d go away and leave Tom free, and then he might have a chance, and perhaps, some day, it might all come right; but she was sure, if she stopped with him, she would only keep him down as low as he was now, and perhaps bring him to worse, for she might bring him to crime.”
Tom didn’t argue any more with her, because it was no use: she was in that weak, low, dreadful state that people are in who have drunk a great deal and then can’t get it. Sometimes, in cases I have known of the sort, I’ve thought it would be a mercy, if people with that awful curse upon them, settled themselves quickly, for the sake of their friends and relations and those about them. If they are treated very skilfully when force is used to make them leave off, or if they are kept where they can’t get anything, and taken very great care of, they may, and do sometimes, get cured; but, as a rule, all the trouble and anxiety are of no use, and the dreadful end comes.
I have known such sad cases—most people in our line do know of them—that my heart has bled to think about them. It is such an awful thing—that slow, deliberate suicide by drink, those awful living wrecks, hardly human in their horribleness, that the poor victims of the disease—for it must be a disease—become.
I thought of what I knew while Tom Dexter was telling me his story, and I quite understood what an awful position it was for a man to be placed in: loving his wife as he did, and she loving him, and it all having come about through her grief at the loss of her boy, made it doubly terrible.
Really, it makes you shudder sometimes when you think what awful tragedies there are in some people’s lives; and oh, how thankful we ought to be who live peacefully and happily, and never know the dark and awful side that there is to life!
Tom told me that he himself almost gave up when he heard his wife talk like that, and the thought came into his head that it would be much better if they all three went to some nice quiet part of the canal, that was near where they were, and dropped in, and then there would be no more trouble for any of them.
He was thinking that when, as they were walking along, he met an old friend of his that he hadn’t seen for a long time—a man that had worked with him, but had married a widow who kept a public-house, and was now well off.
He saw that things were bad with Tom at a glance—he saw it by his face and his clothes, and the clothes of his wife and child; but he was a good fellow, and instead of passing by on the other side, as many would have done, he came up to Tom, and took his hand, and said, “Hullo, old fellow! I’m sorry to see you under water. What does it mean?”
Tom stopped a minute and talked to him, and told him as well as he could without “rounding on his missus,” as he called it, and then his friend said, “Well, Tom, I’m awfully sorry, old fellow. Look here! let me lend you a couple of sovereigns, and you can pay me back as soon as you get a bit straight.”