Every Precaution

1

The blind pianist sat in the deserted café. His instrument was situated in one corner on a small square dais of wood. The floor of the café was of black stone, liberally sprinkled with sawdust. The general scheme of decoration of the café was green, as if to commemorate its consecration as a temple of the goddess Absinthe.

The only other person in the room was a too-faithful devotee of that extravagant mistress. She was a woman of between thirty and thirty-five years of age, no more; but her whole life had been eaten up in the service of the goddess. Skin, eye, and nerve testified alike to the tyranny of her idol. It was the custom in this café to prepare the absinthe in the adjoining bar; but this woman insisted on being supplied with the materials wholesale. Thus she was able to steep herself without interruption in the consumption of the faery poison which had rapt her from apprehension of human affairs into a world of her own fancy. She had paid the price of the pilgrimage. A greenish pallor, resembling that of the belly of a fish which has begun to decompose, overspread her emaciated features. Nervous tremblings, interrupted by occasional convulsive spasms, shook her limbs. Her lustreless eyes were horrible to look upon; for in them one could see not only the signs of confusion of actual sight, but also that dreadful preoccupation with things formless and fantastic which seems to lie beyond the bar of sanity.

The door swung open. Hand in hand, laughing merrily, two children tripped into the room. The girl was not a day over eighteen, fair, blue-eyed, and rosy as the fingers of the morn. One could see at a glance that she had never known a day's unhappiness, or sickness, or distress. The newness of the wedding ring on her plump finger was excuse for her exuberance, and so was the boy with her. He was perhaps twenty-five years old, gay, athletic, handsome as a god, yet with a finely intellectual type of face and the strong jaw and firm mouth that go with high moral character.

The proprietor himself, watching the café through the windowed door that led into the bar, came in to greet them, scenting persons of distinction. The young people seated themselves at one of the middle tables. The blind man began to play a tune. The proprietor took the order—two absinthes—and vanished. "Myra," said her husband, "I want you to have one absinthe, and to promise me that you will never take another. I am not one of those birds, who think that a woman should be innocent—by which they mean ignorant." The proprietor brought in the absinthe. "I should like you to listen," said the young man to him, "to what I am about to say: for you, as keeper of this house, hold a great responsibility toward your fellow-creatures." The good man bowed, and stood attentive. "Dearest," he continued, "we must not fly from evil, but resist it."

"I believe in education, and in experience; I want to see you full-armed in the battle of life. For, make no mistake, dear heart, life is a battle; we do not know, dove, how strenuous or how long; but we do know that sooner or later we must fall. Our success is to be gauged by our works done, and victories won, and by the children that we train to follow us in the fight! Now, sweet wife, I have brought you here to tell you of these things, knowing it for a quiet place. The boat leaves for Havana in an hour; and I wanted you to know, before we mix with other people, what plans I have made, what campaign I have designed. We have youth, health, and money in abundance; it is our duty to ourselves and to our race to take every precaution to preserve these advantages to our descendants. After our month or two of honey, we shall go to the house that my ancestors built long since by Lake Pasquaney. There the air is sweet and pure and keen; the people are simple and honest and highminded. The climate is perfect; every power of nature seems joined in gentle conspiracy to make life what it surely should be. The estate is spacious, the house well-ordered; there we can dwell, and found a new race—a Sun-race!—that shall combine physical health with moral vigour and spiritual well-being. We shall be the Adam and Eve of a new Eden—and forewarned as to the Serpent!"

"Words of gold, sir!" cried the keeper of the Absinthe House, warmly. "I wish I could have had your advantages. As it is, I wish you all happiness and success! Excuse me, Madame," he added quickly. "I am need at the bar." He bowed profoundly and went out.

Myra sipped her absinthe with a very wry face at the taste; but her eyes glowed marvellously as she drank in her husband's wise and noble words. She was the only child of distinguished parents, a grand old stock clear of all taint for centuries; a worthy mate indeed for the young man beside her. With all her heart she loved him; with her first love she loved him. She had been carefully guarded all her life; no flirtations had brushed the bloom from her purity; virgin in mind as in body she had given herself to Howard Poindexter—once and for ever. She had only one thought in life, to help him, to make him happy, to bear him healthy children.

She put her hand on his, and gazed into his eyes.

"Ten days more," she whispered, "to the anniversary of our first meeting—Christmas Day!"

Howard Poindexter raised his glass. "To Christmas Day!" he cried aloud.

The woman in the corner awoke from her apathy at the words. She came forward unsteadily, and rested her arms on the table, thrusting her face into Poindexter's. "Christmas Day ain't no private car," said she; "I've a string on Christmas Day myself." She went back to her table, brought over her bottle of absinthe, and sat it down on the marble with a determined gesture. "Days ain't nothing in my young life," she went on; "when the green goddess has got you, you don't care nothing about days. But Christmas day, oh yes! Come here, Toby!"

Instead of obeying, the man gave a horrible grimace, and set his fingers on the keys. "Hark! the herald angels sing," he chanted to his own accompaniment; and he played the words and music with a cynicism so repulsive that the new-comers set their teeth in horror. It was a performance icily devilish. The absintheuse laughed with a sort of senseless malice. "Come here, Toby!" she repeated. The blind pianist began to grope his way towards the party, guided by the sound of her voice. "It was Christmas Day I met this dog-goned blind grink, wasn't it, Toby? Five years ago! And that night I gave him what took his eyes out; he never saw New Year, curse him! Didn't I, Toby?"

The bride shrank back, appalled. She would have fled the café; the foul coarse accents and the revolting smell of the hag disgusted her almost to nausea. But her husband held her with his eye. It was necessary that she should see degradation at its limit that she might avoid its very shadow, yet perchance understand and lend her aid to those in danger of it.

"Do you love me, Toby?" The blind man reached his arms toward her. "Shucks! quit fooling!" she growled. "I love him, too, but not to go dippy. I should worry! See here, mister, you and your precautions. Don't you take no precautions but just one, and that's to drink this green muck till you're blind. Then you don't have no more troubles. I'll show you here's to Christmas Day!" She took up the bottle, and put her blanched lips to the neck, drank nearly half of it. "Here, drink, Toby, you ———" she ended with a foul oath, "here's fog-goned Christmas Day!" She brought the bottle down upon his skull. It smashed into a hundred pieces. The blood gushed in every direction from the blind man's head. She sank into a chair, and fell into a silly drunken laughter. Suddenly she was convulsed by an epileptoid spasm, and fell writhing on the floor, twisting off the legs of the chairs in her agony, and snapping at the air.

The proprietor rushed in at the noise of the crashing glass, and the blind man's awful scream; two waiters followed him. One raised the bleeding head of the pianist; the other grappled with the cursing madwoman on the floor.

Poindexter threw a dollar bill upon the table, caught up his bride, and fled with her from the abominable scene.

The proprietor chacked him, "I must have your name, sir," he said, "if the man dies the police will have to come in. You were an eye-witness of the attack." The young husband drew a card from his case.

          Howard Poindexter,

               Concord Towers,

                    Bristol, N.H.

He read slowly. Poindexter nodded, and hurried out.

He knew it would not be necessary to exact a promise from his young wife as to the acquisition of the absinthe habit.

2

A year later. No—not quite a year: the first cold wind had not yet touched the delta of the Mississippi. The 'Green Hour' silently announced itself—the yellow of sunset mingling with the blue, so that the gazer might remember to seek out the Old Absinthe House, and take his apéritif.

In the café the blind pianist still strummed; save for the scars of the gashes, time and fate had passed over him, and left him scatheless. He may have seemed happier than of old; his song was a little more spontaneous and his fingers lighter on the keys. His love increased with every injury done to him by its object; and so, it may be, did hers also.

At the same table as before the woman still say, apparently unchanged. Her poisoning was one degree more chronic: she was a little nearer to cachexia; but no one could have said whether she was good for one year more or forty, not even the celebrated alienist who was chatting with the proprietor at a table in the opposite corner.

"I had hoped," he was saying, "that you could have shown me a really advanced case of absinthism, one is which hallucinations are constant. I have never seen one in America. In fact, not since I left Paris thirty years ago. I want to make some personal observations to complete my book on insanity."

"That girl's pretty near it at times," said the proprietor; "just before last Christmas she made a murderous assault on the pianist there; broke a bottle over his head, quite without provocation, apparently for fun!"

"Insanity's a funny thing; I could tell you of some strange cases. Our lives and reasons hang literally by far less than a hair, by the inexplicable and even indecipherable hieroglyphs of subtle molecular changes in the cells of the brain. Perfectly normal healthy people sometimes act in the maddest fashion, under apparently slight derangement of a function, or even under purely physiological stimulus.

"There's the boy, you know, who got a splinter of wood under his toenail, and had violent fits of mania as long as he was standing. Forced on to a bed, ne became quite sane, had no memory of what had happened save that he 'felt a little odd'; but he went off into mania again directly there was pressure on the toe!

"Even a simple matter like pregnancy in a perfectly healthy woman may have the most astounding consequences. Doctor Henry Maudsley quotes two cases offered by Shencks; in one, the woman wanted to bite the bare arms of a barber, and made her husband offer him money to allow it; in the other she was consumed by a raging passion to devour her husband himself, and actually killed him, and pickled him, and banqueted on him at her leisure for a month! This case, curiously enough, has been precisely parallelled in America quite recently—within a month or so, in fact—a man named Howard Poindexter."

"He was sitting here with his bride," interrupted the innkeeper, "sitting at this very table when Norah there broke the bottle over Toby's head. He had been explaining how to avoid misfortune by virtue and prudence; he said he had taken every precaution."

The two men sat in silence. Then they were conscious of the presence of the absintheuse at their elbows. "And the moral is, gentlemen," she slobbered with an insane giggle, "that you might just as well join me in another glass to the little green goddess."

They drank; but it is not recorded what deity the alienist invoked.

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