"I thought you told me last time that if I let you go you would not take another drink for a year.""I forgot," said "No.4", in a low voice.
"This officer says you resisted him?"
The officer looked stolidly at the prisoner as if it were a matter of not the slightest interest to him personally."Cursed me and abused me,"he said, dropping the words slowly as if he were checking off a schedule.
"I did not, your honor; indeed, I did not," said "No.4", quickly.
"I swear I did not; he is mistaken.Your honor does not believe I would tell you a lie! Surely I have not got so low as that."The justice turned his pencil in his hand doubtfully, and looked away.
"No.4" took in his position.He began again.
"I fell in with an old soldier, and we got to talking about the war --about old times." His voice was very soft."I will promise your honor that I won't take another drink for a year.Here, I'll take an oath to it.
Swear me." He seized the greasy little Bible on the desk before him, and handed it to the justice.The magistrate took it doubtfully.
He looked down at the prisoner half kindly, half humorously.
"You'll just break it." He started to lay the book down.
"No; I want to take the pledge," said "No.4", eagerly."Did I ever break a pledge I made to your honor?""Didn't you promise me not to come back here?""I have not been here for nine months.Besides, I did not come of my own free will," said "No.4", with a faint flicker of humor on his perspiring face.
"You were here two months ago, and you promised not to take another drink.""I forgot that.I did not mean to break it; indeed, I did not.
I fell in with ----"
The justice looked away, considered a moment, and ordered him back into the pen with, "Ten days, to cool off.""No.4" stood quite still till the officer motioned him to the gate, behind which the prisoners sat in stolid rows.Then he walked dejectedly back into the pen, and sat down by another drunkard.His look touched me, and I went around and talked to the magistrate privately.
But he was inexorable; he said he knew more of him than I did, and that ten days in jail would "dry him out and be good for him."I told him the story of the battle.He knew it already, and said he knew more than that about him; that he had been one of the bravest soldiers in the whole army; did not know what fear was;had once ridden into the enemy and torn a captured standard from its captors' hands, receiving two desperate bayonet-wounds in doing it;and had done other acts of conspicuous gallantry on many occasions.
I pleaded this, but he was obdurate; hard, I thought at the time, and told him so; told him he had been a soldier himself, and ought to be easier.He looked troubled, not offended; for we were friends, and I think he liked to see me, who had been a boy during the war, take up for an old soldier on that ground.But he stood firm.I must do him the justice to say that I now think it would not have made any difference if he had done otherwise.He had tried the other course many times.
"No.4" must have heard me trying to help him, for one day, about a month after that, he walked in on me quite sober, and looking somewhat as he did the first day I saw him, thanked me for what I had done for him; delivered one of the most impressive discourses on intemperance that I ever heard; and asked me to try to help him get work.He was willing to do anything, he said; that is, anything he could do.I got him a place with a friend of mine which he kept a week, then got drunk.We got hold of him, however, and sobered him up, and he escaped the police and the justice's court.
Being out of work, and very firm in his resolution never to drink again, we lent him some money -- a very little -- with which to keep along a few days, on which he got drunk immediately, and did fall into the hands of the police, and was sent to jail as before.This, in fact, was his regular round: into jail, out of jail; a little spell of sobriety, "an accidental fall", which occurred as soon as he could get a drop of liquor, and into jail again for thirty or sixty days, according to the degree of resistance he gave the police -- who always, by their own account, simply tried to get him to go home, and, by his, insulted him --and to the violence of the language he applied to them.In this he excelled;for although as quiet as possible when he was sober, when he was drunk he was a terror, so the police said, and his resources of vituperation were cyclopedic.He possessed in this particular department an eloquence which was incredible.His blasphemy was vast, illimitable, infinite.
He told me once that he could not explain it; that when he was sober he abhorred profanity, and never uttered an oath; when he was in liquor his brain took this turn, and distilled blasphemy in volumes.
He said that all of its energies were quickened and concentrated in this direction, and then he took not only pleasure, but pride in it.
He told me a good deal of his life.He had got very low at this time, much lower than he had been when I first knew him.
He recognized this himself, and used to analyze and discuss himself in quite an impersonal way.This was when he had come out of jail, and after having the liquor "dried out" of him.In such a state he always referred to his condition in the past as being something that never would or could recur; while on the other hand, if he were just over a drunk, he frankly admitted his absolute slavery to his habit.When he was getting drunk he shamelessly maintained, and was ready to swear on all the Bibles in creation, that he had not touched a drop, and never expected to do so again -- indeed, could not be induced to do it -- when in fact he would at the very time be reeking with the fumes of liquor, and perhaps had his pocket then bulging with a bottle which he had just emptied, and would willingly have bartered his soul to refill.
I never saw such absolute dominion as the love of liquor had over him.
He was like a man in chains.He confessed it frankly and calmly.
