And but too frequently their own friends show no pity towards them—nothing but stern and implacable resentment. Doubtless they have suffered much because of them, but what can justify a father in speaking of his son as ‘the accursed wretch that bears my name’? for in these words a wealthy gentleman living in Kennington replied to me when I wrote to him concerning his son, who was a clergyman and a dipsomaniac. In the depth of winter, with his toes peeping out through his old boots, this man had sought me out. I had given him food and a new pair of boots, and out of pity had appealed to his father. I might as well have appealed to an iceberg. ‘You may be able to work miracles,’ he had sneeringly added, and not even a cast-off coat would he give to his son.
But the most extraordinary dipsomaniac I have had to deal with was the man whom poor Kate Henessey knocked down in the prisoners’ room for insulting me. I did not have a promising introduction to this gentleman, but as I saw much of him afterwards, we became friendly, and he asked me to call on him. One morning, on my way to the court, I called at the address he gave. ‘Not at home,’ the landlady said. I called again in the afternoon. ‘Not returned yet,’ I was told. I felt interested in the man, for I had gathered from our conversation that he was an educated man of good family, and had been well-to-do. So next morning I called again. Seeing me persistent, the landlady invited me in, and asked me my business. When I told her who I was, and what was my errand, she asked me if I had a few minutes to spare. I told her that I had. We were then in a narrow, miserable passage, and, opening a door on the left, she told me to look in.
I took one step forward, and a pitiful sight met my eyes. A young man, tall, thin, and emaciated, was lying on a low pallet-bed; a clammy sweat stood on his brow, and his eyes were burning with an unnatural light. Only one look was required to tell that his sands were fast running out, and that consumption had almost done its work. I took one step forward, and said: ‘I am sorry to see you lying here like this. Can I do anything for you?’ ‘Only go away and don’t bother me,’ was his reply. I told him that I did not wish to trouble him, that I had called by his father’s request, but that I should be glad to do him any little service I could. He said that he only wanted to be let alone that he might die in peace. Seeing that he was not inclined for conversation, I withdrew, and had some talk with the landlady. She told me that the young man was the grandson of a celebrated British officer who had distinguished himself in the Peninsular War. The youth’s father was the only son of that officer, and had himself held a commission in a crack regiment. Their property was vested in trustees for the young man, the father receiving a weekly allowance and a further sum once a quarter. I was told how the father and mother, the youth and two sisters, lived in one room upstairs, and that father and mother had been away drinking for five days, and had left the boy to the care of his two sisters, one aged fifteen and the other five years. Being moved with pity for the dying youth, the landlady had given him that little room, and placed him there so that she might occasionally look to him. It was a dirty house in an awful neighbourhood. The woman herself looked coarse, and by no means tidy, but she had a kind, motherly heart, and had done her best for the lad.
Thinking a few nice grapes would be acceptable, I went out and obtained some, and came back to him. As I sat giving him a few, I heard the father and mother come in, and go tumbling upstairs. After a short time I went up to them, and, being invited, entered their den, for no other word can fitly describe it. I have been in many wretched places, but have seen nothing worse than their ‘home.’ The furniture consisted of three chairs—each bottomless—and a miserable table, on which were some stale bread and a dirty piece of cheese that the child of five (she had no shoes or stockings on) was pecking at with a fork. In the corner stood a small iron bedstead, covered with a quilt made up of portions of old clothing stitched indiscriminately together. No fire was alight, but the accumulated ashes of many days choked the hearth. The atmosphere was insufferable; the father drunk, the mother drunk, a female who had come in with them drunk also; and the poor lad lay dying below—all this made up such a scene of grotesque horror as fairly made me gasp.
It was some time before I could speak to them, and when I did it was in no measured terms, telling them that they were a scandal to humanity. Afterwards, when I spoke to them of their duty and responsibility to their son, they began to cry and wring their hands, repeating again and again: ‘Drink is damnation! Drink is damnation!’ while the wretched woman they had brought in joined her maudlin tears with theirs, and repeatedly wished that her husband would give up drink. Day by day I visited the youth for five days before I found the parents sober, and then I brought them, sober and miserable, to the bedside of the dying boy, and there they swore before God to touch no more drink while he lived, promising also to make his last days peaceful.
A week passed, and the father received his quarterly allowance, and with the money I persuaded him to take rooms close by, and furnish one comfortably for his son. This he did, and one bright day we got the doctor’s permission to move him on his bed to their new home. For another week there was quietude and some degree of comfort. My visits became acceptable to the poor lad, and in his better room we became close friends. I began to feel hopeful, but my hopes were soon to be dashed to the ground. One morning when I called, the bedroom door of the boy’s room was splintered, the hearthrug and other articles of comfort were gone, and his bloodshot eyes told of a fearful night. The drink madness had come upon the father, and he had broken into the room for anything portable and of value. He now seemed to lose all sense of restraint, and from this day till the death of his son nothing seemed too horrible for him. The new boots went off his little daughter’s feet; the elder girl was pushed into the street and told to get her own living; the dying son was assaulted and robbed of a little watch that was intended for a ‘keepsake’ for the sister. I shall not forget the morning after that assault. I saw at once that the poor boy was overwhelmed and exhausted. I asked him what was the matter. With his claw-like hands he turned down the sheet and pointed to his thin neck, and there on his throat were two red patches. Then he told me how the drink madness had come again on his father; how in the night he had come stealthily into his room, crept to his bedside, and put his hand under the pillow to take thence the little watch; how he had called out: ‘Oh, father, don’t take my watch!’ and then made an effort to keep it, and how his father took him by the throat and compelled him to give up the watch, which he took away. During the hours I spent with him the boy told me such stories of their sufferings that I wept when I heard them; told me of the unimaginable depths to which his father descended when the drink madness was upon him, and told me, with half-closed eyes and burning cheeks, of the loathsome occupation his father would sometimes follow to satisfy that drink-madness.
One morning in July the message came to me that I had been expecting. The landlady of the house where they lived came bareheaded and breathless begging of me to go at once; for the young man was dead and the father mad drunk, and she was afraid there would be murder or something almost as bad. I hurried there, and found a number of people congregated in front of the house. The front-door was open, so I ran direct to Johnny’s room. A desperate struggle had evidently taken place; the furniture was upset, the mattress thrown off the bed, and the dead body of the son lay on the floor close to the window. The elder girl stood confronting her father with a knife in her hand; the mother, weeping, followed me into the room, out of which her husband quickly went when he saw me.
Briefly this is what had taken place: the boy died soon after I left him the day before, and in a very short time the father had pawned all his clothes and stayed out during the night. He came back the next morning at nine o’clock drunk, and went up to the room where his son’s body lay, intending to take away the bed-clothing, etc. A struggle had thereupon ensued between the girl and her father for possession of them; and as he wanted the mattress, he had actually thrown the body on to the floor. A cheque for fifteen pounds was forwarded by the trustees for funeral expenses. A coffin was brought, but the rest of the money the father spent, never coming to the house till it was gone. More money was received from the trustees, and the day of the funeral came on. I had promised the youth to see the last of him and to be present at the funeral. The father did not come near the house that day, and it seemed as though the funeral would pass off quietly, but just as we got into the main road, he joined us in a cab. Soon there was a great shout, and a number of women closed around the cab; sticks and stones were thrown at him, and an effort made to drag him out and lynch him. He did get roughly handled, but the cabman, having a good horse, vigorously plied his whip, and drove through the crowd, waiting for us further on. There was no other disturbance, for in a few days the wife went down to the trustees and left her husband.
Three months afterwards I again met him, but this time he stood in the dock, when a serious charge was made and proved against him. The last view I had of him was as he stepped into the prison-van, to be conveyed to the punishment he so richly merited. So passed from my knowledge the worst dipsomaniac it has been my lot to meet with. Like Lucifer from heaven, he fell to the lowest depth, and evil became his good; for it is always so: the greater the height from which a man falls, the lower the depths to which he descends. As in the physical world, so in the moral world, there is a law of gravitation. I have tried to understand these men, and I have failed to do so. I have taken some measure of the force that impels them, but neither I nor anyone else other than a dipsomaniac can realize in anything approaching its fulness the might and dreadfulness of the power that inhabits them.