Through a Glass Lightly/The Confession
THE CONFESSION OF A
WATER DRINKER
THE CONFESSION OF A
WATER DRINKER
They tell me of our only Sarah that she keeps, or kept, in full evidence in her living-room the coffin which she predestinated as her ultimate abiding-place. Ascribe this act of innocuous bravado either to her innate youthfulness of disposition, or to her philosopher’s contempt of death, and it shall pass for what it is worth. But it is with anything but a light heart, and with nothing of the philosopher in my nature that I find myself suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, constrained to read—or write—my own burial service, or, at the least, to be present at my own interment. For it seems that that better part of me, that which I most loved and valued, has evanished from my life, so that I am now become a new thing. A degenerate regeneration has taken place, and a novissiinus homunculus reigns in the stead of the old Noah. Only a sennight since, and I was even as that dear man in the story, who, led by his host through flower gardens, stables, picture galleries and museums, in mute and earless apathy, murmured at the end of his itinerary, in reply to his disappointed conductor, that he cared for nowt but drink. And now—now I have become a teetotaller; arid the pity of it lies here, that I have become one not from conviction, but from constraint. For upon one of those nefarious days which come to most, and wreck not a few of us, it became a matter of necessity to insure that life so much enjoyed and loved, that life which in my own foolish way I had considered so emphatically “first-rate.” But the raising of lucre was necessary, and in the train of necessity, with obvious insistence, came the insurance office. So it happened that I filled up a great white sheet with evasive answers to impertinent questions, and gave references to certain of my friends who, I thought, would lie the firmest for me. But the worst was yet to be. For I was despatched to some wretched studio, or drug trap, near Grosvenor Square, to be examined by the consulting physician to the inquisition. And straightway he bade me strip mother-naked, and not Adam, nor yet Eve, felt the rigour of exposure more keenly than I in this parlour of the damned. And Æsculapius forced an ear-trumpet, which he called by another name, into my ribs, and pounded me with his rude fingers and aggressive thumbs. He hurt me, he bruised me, he insulted me, he probed me with questions as searching as a small-tooth comb, as debasing as the catechism itself. And then he bade me put on my discarded garments again, and, as he opened the door for my ignominious exit, conjured me, as I valued my life, to drink no more wine or strong drink. A week later I heard from the insurance company that my life being only a second-rate one a higher premium would be demanded. From that moment began suffering. For years back had I been an authority on all that in sunny climates and happy lands had been expressed from the grape. At every house where the cellar was renowned I had been received with open arms and bounteous glasses. The last bottle of the ’47 port had gone down my throat of throats as a nation’s darling is borne with solemn requiem to ancient abbey or historic cathedral. The mysteries of Bordeaux and Burgundian vintages had been my special delight. I had been found in the front rank at the gathering of the ’89 champagnes. I had already girded my palatal loins for the crucial testing and sifting of the ’93 clarets. My verdict had been sought expectantly and received respectfully. My obiter dictum that the old Madeira had sunk into his dotage and had become tart and peevish degraded him instanter into the second-class, so that he became the drink of those who were yet young and uninitiate. And now Death, on the pale horse Insurance, has bid me stand and deliver, and offers me life only on the degrading terms of abject teetotalism. All is over; no longer do I descend—oh! facilis et amabilis descensus—into the cellar and watch with silent joy the removal, for my own immediate delectation, of the “storied urn”; no longer does my “animated bust” glow with strange prospective and speculative yearnings. No more do I watch the solemn decantation which from a mere habit has risen into the dignity of a rite—a rite which has its acolytes as well as its high priest, who was none other than I. Vanished, alas! is that bittersweet anxiety of gaze lest the crust should be broken, the sediment too disturbed and thick. Not now am I fitted to pronounce the verdict which had satisfied myself and host. Alas! nuper idoneus vixi Lyæo! We—let the kindly plural shelter my singular aberration—we have become a degraded thing that has taken to drinking soda-water, or H2O tempered with flavour of toast; our cup is filled, but only with misery and aqua pura, and yet—for a drinker’s crown of sorrow is remembering wetter days—an ironclad of the first class had floated in the champagne we have drank in the past. As we write, the 1893 vintage of claret is coming on. It is to be the best vintage since 1875. We had been careful to secure a lease in perpetuity at a peppercorn rent of a great empty cellar free from vibration and all disturbance. This it was our glorious intention to fill from ground to rafter (our shirts having been all pawned) with the splendid promises which Margaux utters and Lafite re-echoes. Of what avails it now? We have taken the vine leaves from out of our hair and our second-rate life refuses to be comforted. The soda-water spits its little puny, restless, damnable bubbles against the cold white glass of a degenerate child of Bacchus, a glass which once had glowed and gleamed with alternate ruby and amber gold. Of what avails all our learning now? What boots it that we have learned to love, if death, in the guise of an insurance company’s doctor, has robbed us of our beloved? Take us—no, me—up tenderly, treat me with care. Bring out your grocer’s Marsala, your cheapest Gilbey sherry (his dearest is as good as you may drink). Palm off upon us your second-day claret, your corked port, your dotaged Madeira. It is all one to us. Good wine and bad wine are alike now. It is all sour, all bad. “D you, waiter; why can’t you bring us that Salutaris water?” To compose an epitaph on our own dead self is impossible. We can but adopt that of another who died, like ourselves, of a broken heart: “Here lies one whose name was writ in soda-water.”
