"I will take a ten mile walk to-morrow," he said to himself, and resolutely wrenched his thoughts towards material things. There was, he remembered with a slight shudder, that appalling passage in a recent letter from Mrs. Daly—
. . . "Six weeks ago a tippler was put into an alms-house in this State. Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum, but had failed. At length he hit on one that was successful. He went into the wood yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon the block, and with an axe in the other struck it off at a single blow. With the stump raised and streaming he ran into the house and cried, 'Get some rum. Get some rum. My hand is off.' In the confusion and bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he plunged the bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his mouth, drank freely and exultantly exclaimed, 'Now I am satisfied!'"
Horrible! Why was it possible that men might poison themselves so? Would all the efforts of himself and his friends ever make such monstrous happenings cease? Oh, that it might be so!
They were breaking up stubborn land. The churches were against them, but the Home Secretary of the day was their friend—in the future the disease might be eradicated from society.
Oh, that it might be so! for the good of the human race!
How absolutely horrible it was that transparent, coloured liquids in bottles of glass—liquids that could be bought everywhere for a few pence—should have the devilish power to transform men, not to beasts, but to monsters.
The man of whom Mrs. Daly had written—hideously alcoholised and insane! Hancock, the Hackney murderer, poisoned, insane!
The doctor had been present at the post-mortem, after the execution. It had all been so pitiably clear to the trained eye! The liver, the heart, told him their tale very plainly. Any General Practitioner would have known. Ordinary cirrhosis, the scar tissue perfectly plain; the lime-salts deposited in the wasting muscles of the heart. But Morton Sims had found far more than this in that poisoned shell which had held, also, a poisoned soul. He had marked the little swellings upon the long nerve processes that run from the normal cell of the healthy brain. Something that looked like a little string of beads under the microscope had told him all he wanted to know.
And that little string of beads, the lesions which interfered with the proper passage of nerve impulses, the scraps of tissue which the section-cutter had thinned and given to the lens, had meant torture and death to a good woman.
How dreadfully women suffered! Their husbands and lovers and brothers became brutes to them. The women who were merely struck or beaten now and then were fortunate. The women whose lives were made one long ingenious torture were legion.