All my habits re-act one upon the other and the rules are added to daily until they have become appallingly intricate. A failure in one piece of ritual entails all sorts of protracted mental and physical gestures in order to put it right.
I wonder if other men who drink know this heavy, unceasing slavery which makes the commonest actions of life a burden?
I suppose so. It must be so. All drugs have specific actions. Men don't tell, of course. Neither do I! Sometimes, though, when I have gone to some place like the Café Royal, or perhaps one of the clubs which are used by fast men, I have had a disgusting glee when I met men whom I knew drank heavily to think that they had their secrets—must have them—as well as I.
On reading through these notes that I have been making now and then, I am, of course, horrified at what they really seem to mean. Put down in black and white they convey—or at least they would convey to anyone who saw them—nothing but an assurance of the fact that I am mad. Yet I am not really mad. I have two lives. . . . I see that I have referred constantly to "It." I have promised myself to define exactly what I mean by "IT."
I am writing this immediately after lunch. I didn't get up till eleven o'clock. I am under the influence of twenty-five grains of ammonium bromide. I had a few oysters for lunch and nothing else. I am just about as normal as any man in my state can hope to be.
Nevertheless when I come to try and define "It" for myself I am conscious of a deep horror and distrust. My head is above water, I am sane, but so powerful is the influence of the continual FEAR under which I live my days and nights, that even now I am afraid.
"It" is a protean thing. More often than not it is a horrible dread of that Delirium Tremens which I have never had, but ought to have had long ago. I have read up the symptoms until I know each one of them. When I am in a very nervous and excited condition—when, for example, I could not face anybody at all and must be alone in my room with my bottle of whiskey—I stare at the wall to see if rats or serpents are running up it. I peer into the corners of the library to detect sheeted corpses standing there. I do not see anything of the sort. Even the imaginings of my fear cannot create them. I am, possibly, personally immune from Delirium Tremens, some people are. All the same, the fear of it racks me and tears me a hundred times a day. If it really seized me it surely would be almost enjoyable! Nothing, at any rate, can be more utterly dreadful than the continual apprehension.
Then I have another and always constant fear—these fears, I want to insist, are fantastically intermingled with all the crossings, wood-touchings and frantic calculations I have to do each minute of my life. The other fear is that of Prison.
Now I know perfectly well that I have done nothing in my life that could ever bring me near prison. All the same I cannot now hear a strange voice without a start of dread. A knock at the front door of my house unnerves me horribly. I open the door of whatever room I am in and listen with strained, furtive attention, slinking back and closing the door with a sob of relief when I realise that it is nothing more than the postman or the butcher's boy. I can hardly bear to read a novel now, because I so constantly meet with the word "arrest."
"He was arrested in the middle of his conversation,"—"She placed an arresting hand upon his arm." . . . These phrases which constantly occur in every book I read fill me with horror. A wild phantasmagoria of pictures passes through my mind. I see myself being led out of my house with gyves upon my wrists like the beastly poem Hood made upon "Eugene Aram." Then there is the drive into Wordingham in a cab. All the officials at the station who know me so well cluster round. I am put into a third class carriage and the blinds are pulled down. At St. Pancras, where I am also known, it is worse. The next day there is the Magistrate's Court and all the papers full of my affair. I know it is all fantastic nonsense—moonshine, wild dream. But it is so appallingly real to me that I sometimes long to have got the trial over and to be sitting with shaven head, wearing coarse prison clothes, in a lonely cell.