He had tasted something heavenly! The aroma of a soft, aged, velvety liquor was in his mouth; a liquor beyond the product of any human distillation; the liquor that one has dreamed of, forgotten in some ancient cask, bedded down in cobwebs in a warehouse, or hidden by one’s father through a lifetime.
The man was too shaken to be coherent. He began to stutter.
The chemist was undisturbed.
“Drink it,” he said.
Arnbush leaned over and drank off the fluid, And at once every sensation in his body changed: a warm glow extended to his fingers; there was soft, insidious stimulation, and the fatigue of his exertions vanished.
And there was more than this.
The ego in the man was elevated. It took on dominance and majesty; bothered and hectored, heretofore, it was now a king. And the spirit of the man, rising as though newly born in some womb of the sun, realized that this was the thing that every human creature tasting of liquors eternally longed for. It was the thing for which the world had been going to alcohol to seek—the supreme, moving motive of all drunkenness! It released, and strengthened, and ennobled that thing within the human body which every man thinks of as himself.
Or at least it seemed like that to Arnbush.
And there was with this heavenly taste of liquor the alluring enchantment of a drug. The world softened and became a place of pleasure, but it was the pleasure of a mental dominance, and it was the softness of a plastic kingdom. The individuality in the man was glorified.
What alcohol promised, this amazing fluid gave!