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But tell me what I can do for my poor wife." It was indeed true, Ralph Williams was a changed man. The God who had heard the prayers of the father and son at the dying woman's bedside, and restored her to them, vouchsafed his mercy to the starving wife who prayed for her drink-sodden husband, and in answer to it the dulled conscience of the husband was aroused. Slowly Mrs.
I was muscular in those days, and he a meagre, attenuated, drink-sodden creature. I lifted him out of his bed in the antechamber and carried him into mine in the office. I found a coil of rope, and strapped him tightly in the chair-bedstead so that he could not move. I tied a scarf round his mouth so that he could not scream.
A hotel porter had helped me out of a similar plight in Breslau once years ago. This porter, with his red, drink-sodden face and tarnished gold braid, did not promise well, so far as a recommendation for a lodging for the night was concerned. Still... I suppose it was my mind dwelling on my experience at Breslau that made me address the man in German.
Which means, Monsieur," the poor woman went on with passionate misery, "that my child is to be reared up in the company of all that is most vile and most degraded in the disease-haunted slums of indigent Paris; that, with the connivance of that execrable fiend Marat, my only son will, mayhap, come back to me one day a potential thief, a criminal probably, a drink-sodden reprobate at best.
He looked back rapidly, looked down the avenue of a squalid and unlovely life, saw himself the child of drink-sodden and brutal parents, remembered the Board School with its unlovely surroundings, his struggles at a dreary trade, his running away and the fierce draughts of delight which the joy and freedom of the sea had brought to him on the morning when he had crept on deck, a stowaway, to be lashed with every rope-end and to do the dirty work of every one.
The customers could watch its functioning, long-necked still-pots, copper worms disappearing underground, a devil's kitchen alluring to drink-sodden work men in search of pleasant dreams. L'Assommoir was nearly empty at the lunch hour. Pere Colombe, a heavy man of forty, was serving a ten year old girl who had asked him to place four sous' worth of brandy into her cup.
After a time Krafft returned in company with a slouching, drink-sodden bummer of powerful build and lowering mien, the remains of a forceful personality. This individual shambled along in the wake of the dapper little Krafft quite meekly and submissively. "Here you are," said the latter briskly, and with a sort of nonchalant authority.
Stiffner's ragged grey head was on a cushion, and a broad maudlin smile on his red, drink-sodden face, the lower half of which was bordered by a dirty grey beard, like that of a frilled lizard. The red handkerchief twisted round his neck had a ghastly effect in the bright moonlight, making him look as if his throat was cut.
From that time on we see her, restraining her husband from his self-indulgent habits, improving his administration, crossing flooded rivers and leading attacks on elephants to save him from captivity; "a beautiful queen, beautifully dressed, clever beyond compare, contriving and scheming, plotting, planning, shielding and saving, doing all things for the man hidden in the pampered, drink-sodden carcass of the king; the man who, for her at any rate, always had a heart."
The whole place seemed to him hideous and loathsome in the extreme. What it all meant he could not understand; all that he knew was that this seemed like another hideous trap into which he and Lucile had fallen, and that he must fly from it fly at all costs, before he betrayed M. le Marquis still further to these drink-sodden brutes. Another moment, and he feared that he might faint.
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