She Buildeth Her House

by Will Levington Comfort

He could feel his liver, a hot turgid weight; even, mark its huge boundary upon the surface of his body. Back of his teeth, began the burning insatiable passage, collapsing for alcohol in every inch of its coiled length; its tissues forming an articulate appeal in his brain: "You have filled us with burning for weeks and months, until we have come to rely upon the false fire. Take this away suddenly now and we must die. We cannot keep you warm, even alive, without more of the fuel which destroyed us. We do not want much—just enough to help us until we rebuild our own energy." And his brain reiterated a warning of its own. "I, too, am charred and helpless. The devils run in and out and over. I have no resistance. I shall open entirely to them—unless you strengthen me with fire. You are doing a very wicked and dangerous thing in stopping short like this. Deserted of me, you are destitute, indeed."

Charter felt his unshaven mouth. It was soft and fallen like an imbecile's. A man in hell does not curse himself. He saw himself giving. He felt that he was giving up life and its every hope, but the fear of madness, or driveling idiocy, was worse than this. He would drink for nerve to kill himself decently. The abject powerlessness of his will was the startling revelation. He had played with his will many times, used it to drink when its automatic action was to refrain. Always he had felt it to be unbreakable, until now. He was a yellow, cowering elemental, more hideous and pitiable than prohibition-orator ever depicted in his most dreadful scare-climax. There is no will when Nature turns loose her dogs of fear upon a sick and shattered spirit—no more will than in the crisis of pneumonia or typhoid.

He wrapped the bed-clothes about him and staggered to the medicine-case. There was no pure alcohol; no wood-alcohol luckily. However, a quart bottle of liver-tonic—turkey rhubarb, gum guaiac, and aloes, steeped in Holland gin. A teaspoonful before meals is the dose—for the spring of the year. An old family remedy, this,—one of the bitterest and most potent concoctions ever shaken in a bottle, a gold-brown devil that gagged full-length. The inconceivable organic need for alcohol worked strangely, since Charter's stomach retained a half-tumbler of this horrible dosage. Possibly, it could not have held straight whiskey at once. Internally cleansed, he, of course, responded immediately to the warmth. Plans for whiskey instantly awoke in his brain. He touched the button which connected with his man in the stable; then waited by a rear window until the other appeared.

"Bob," he called down shakily, "have you got any whiskey?"

"The half of a half-pint, sir."

"Bring it up quickly. Here—watch close—I'm tossing down my latch-key."

The key left his hand badly. He could have embraced Bob for finding it in the dark as he did. Charter then sat down—still with the bed-clothes wrapped about him—to wait for the other's step. He felt close to death in the silence.... Bob poured and held the single drink to his lips. Charter sat still, swallowing for a moment. Part remained within him.

"Now, Bob," he said, "run across the street to Dr. Whipple, and tell him I need some whiskey. Tell him he needn't come over—unless he wants to. I'm ill, and I've got to get out of here. Hurry back."

He dared not return to bed now—fear of dreams. To draw on parts of his clothing was an heroic achievement, but he could not bend forward to put on stockings or shoes without overturning his stomach, the lining of which was sore as a festering wound. His nostrils, with their continual suggestions, now tortured him with a certain half-cooked odor of his own inner tissues. The consciousness of having lost his will—that he was thirty years old, and shortly to be drunk again—became the nucleus for every flying storm-cloud in his brain. He knew what it would be now. He would drink regularly, fatten, redden, and betray every remnant of good left within him—more and more distended and brutalized—until his heart stopped or his liver hardened. And the great work? He tried to smile at this. Those who had looked for big things from his maturity had chosen a musty vessel. He would write of the loves of the flesh, and of physical instincts—one of the common—with a spark of the old genius now and then to light up the havoc—that he might writhe! Yes, he would never get past that—the instantaneous flash of his real self to lift him where he belonged—so he would not forget to suffer—when he fell back.... "I'll break that little system," he muttered angrily, as to an enemy in the room, "I'll drink my nerve back and shoot my head off...." But bigger, infinitely more important, than any of these thoughts, was the straining of every sense for Bob's step in the hall—Bob with the whiskey from his never-failing friend, Dr. Whipple.... Yes, he had chosen whiskey to drive out the God-stuff from his soul. What a dull, cheap beast he was!

The day was breaking—a sweet summer morning. He wrapped the bed-clothes closer about him, and lifted the window higher. The nostrils that had brought him so much of squalor and horror now expanded to the new life of the day—vitality that stirred flowers and foliage, grasses and skies to beauty; the blessed morning winds, lit with faint glory. The East was a great, gray butterfly's wing, shot with quivering lines of mauve and gold. It shamed the hulk huddled at the window. Bob's foot on the stairs was the price of his brutality.