Joan Thursday: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

Five hours later she awoke to startled apprehension of the facts, first that she must have dropped off to sleep without meaning to, next that Quard had not returned, finally that it was past four o'clock in the morning.

With a little shiver of sickening premonition she rose, slipped into a dressing-gown, called a bell-boy, and instructed him to look for her husband. Some time later the boy reported that the bar was closed and the gentleman not to be found.

It was broad daylight when Quard staggered in with the assistance of the same bell-boy and his negro dresser. His eyes were glazed, his face ghastly, his mind wandered: he was as helpless as a child. With the aid of the boys, Joan managed to undress the man and put him to bed. At once he fell asleep, with the cold stump of a half-burned cigar obstinately clenched between his teeth. It was an hour before the muscles of his jaw relaxed enough to release it.

Dressing, Joan left the hotel, swallowed some coffee and rolls, tasteless to her, in a nearby restaurant, and wandered about until eight o'clock, when she found a drug-store open, and consulted the clerk. He advised bromo seltzer and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Armed with these, she returned to her husband, and shortly after noon, daring to delay no longer, roused him by sprinkling cold water in his face—all other methods having failed even to interrupt his stertorous breathing. Even then it was some time before she could induce him to swallow the medicine, and it required no less than three powerful doses, together with much black coffee and followed by a cold bath, to restore him to presentable condition. In the end, however, she succeeded in getting him to the theatre in time for the matinée.

Through it all she uttered no single word of reproach, but waited on the man with at least every outward sign of sympathy and devotion.

His remorse (when another nap at the hotel after the matinée had brought him to more complete realization of what had happened) was touching and, as long as it lasted, unquestionably sincere. Joan accepted without comment his lame explanation as to the manner of his temptation and fall during an all-night session at poker "with the boys," and gave genuine credulity to his protestations that it would never, never happen again.

But three weeks later in Chicago he repeated the performance, though under somewhat less distressing circumstances. As before, he left her in the lobby, "to finish his cigar and chin with Soandso." Within an hour he was half-led, half-carried to their room, in a hopelessly sodden condition. The actor with whom he had been drinking accompanied him, apparently quite sober, but puzzled; and after Quard had been helped to bed, explained to the girl that her husband's collapse had been incomprehensibly due to no more than three drinks.

"I never seen nothin' like it!" the man expostulated, with an air of grievance. "There he was, standin' up against the bar, with his foot on the rail, laughin' and kiddin', same's the rest of us; and he'd only had three whiskeys—though I will say they was man-size drinks; and then, all of a sudden, he turns white as a sheet and starts mumblin' to himself, and we all thinks he's joshin' until he keels over, limp's a rag. If the stuff gets to him like that, he's got no business touchin' it, ever!"

These experiences continued at varying intervals; and presently Joan began to understand that Quard had not only primarily a weakness to tempt him, but a constitutional inability to assert his will-power after he had surrendered to the extent of a single drink. One modest dose of alcohol seemed to exercise upon him a sort of hypnotic power, driving him on whether he would or not to the next, the next, and the next—until the nadir of unconsciousness was reached. It was not that he invariably succumbed to moderate indulgence, but that once started he rarely stopped until his identity was completely submerged. Indeed, the way of alcohol with him seemed never twice to follow the same route; but its end was invariably the same.

Hoping against hope, fighting with him, pleading, reasoning, threatening with him, even praying, Joan endured for a long time—much longer than, in retrospective days, seemed possible even to her; for she was honestly fond of her husband, far more so than she was ever of any other living being save herself.