Red Pepper Burns

by Grace S. Richmond

It was the first of many similar trips. Arthur Chester may fairly have been said to spend the succeeding fortnight in the company of the Green Imp and its driver. From morning till night, and often in the night itself when he found it impossible to sleep, he was living in the open air by means of this device. Of walking, also, he did an increasing amount as his strength grew under the regimen Burns insisted upon. But for the first week, in spite of all the help his physician could give him, he found himself indeed involved in a fierce struggle—a struggle with shaken and unmanageable nerves; with a desperate craving for the soothing, uplifting effect of the drug to which he was forced to admit he had become perilously accustomed; with a black depression of spirit which was worse than anything else he had to combat.

It was at the worst of one of these periods of darkness that, alone with his patient upon a hilltop where the two had climbed, leaving the Green Imp at a point where the road had become impossible, Burns said suddenly:

“Ches, I believe, with all my care to give you the treatment I thought you needed, I've failed to point out the most potent remedy of all.”

Chester shook his head. “You've done everything, Red. All the trouble's with me. I'm so pitiably weak—so much weaker than I ever dreamed I could be. I can't seem to care whether I get out of this or not. All I want is to lie down and go to sleep—and never wake up.”

The last words came under his breath, but Burns heard them. He showed no sign of being startled, though this mood was a gloomier one than he had yet seen his patient succumb to. Instead, he went on talking in a tone of confidence:

“I ought to have known enough to apply this remedy, because it's one I've tried myself. If you could know, since the night you heard me make a certain vow, what a time I've had with myself to keep it, you'd understand that I know what it means to try to break up a habit. Mine's the habit of years. With my temper and some of my associations, intemperate profanity's been the easiest thing in the world to fall into. When things went wrong, out would come the oaths like water out of a spring—though that's a false comparison: like the filth out of a sewer, I'd better say.”

“We all swear more or less,” acknowledged Chester, his head in his hands.

“Not as I did—and you know it. I've been responsible for many a boy's taking it up, though I didn't realize it. Because I was athletic and in for sports with them, they thought I was the whole thing. They laughed when I got mad and ripped out a lot of language: they copied it. But I never heard myself as others hear me till that night I let go at the mother who'd ignorantly murdered her boy by disobeying orders. On the way home that night I woke up—came to myself—I don't know how. The stars were unusually bright, and I looked up at them and thought of that child's soul going back to its Maker.... and then thought of my curses following it and coming to His ear.”

A silence fell. When Burns broke it, it was in a voice deep with feeling.

“The next words I sent up to that ear were in a different shape. I think it was the first real prayer I'd ever said since the little parrot prayers my mother taught me. That was the first: it hasn't been the last. I don't suppose I say much that would sound like the preacher's language, but Ches, what I do believe is that—I get what I ask for. That's—help to fight my temptations. And profanity isn't the only one nor the toughest one to down.”