The Drunkard
While the conversation was thus kept up with wonderful pertinacity, considering that our vehicle was reeling and tumbling along the detestable road, pitching like a scow among the breakers in a lake-storm, our driver stopped before a vile little log-hut, over the door of which hung, crooked-wise, a board, setting forth that “wiskey and tabacky” were to be had there. The windows were broken, and the loud voice of some intoxicated wretch was heard from within, in one uninterrupted, torrent of oaths and blasphemies, so shocking in their variety, and so new to my ears, that I was really horror-struck.
After leaving the hut, the coach stopped again. I called to the driver in some terror, “You are not surely going to admit that drunken man into the coach?” He replied coolly, “O no, I an’t; don’t you be afeard!” In the next moment he opened the door, and the very wretch I stood in fear of was tumbled in head foremost, smelling of spirits, and looking—O most horrible! Expostulation was in vain. Without even listening, the driver shut the door, and drove on at a gallop. The rain was at this time falling in torrents, the road knee-deep in mud, the wild forest on either side of us dark, grim, impenetrable. Help there was none, nor remedy, nor redress, nor hope, but in patience. Here then was one of those inflictions to which speculative travellers are exposed now and then, appearing, for the time, to outweigh all the possible advantages of experience or knowledge bought at such a price.
I had never before in my whole life been obliged to endure the presence or proximity of such an object for two minutes together, and the astonishment, horror, disgust, even to sickness and loathing, which it now inspired, are really unspeakable. The Englishman placing himself in the middle seat, in front of his wife and myself, did his best to protect us from all possibility of contact with the object of our abomination; while the wretched being, aware of our adverse feeling, put on at one moment an air of chuckling self-complacency, and the next glared on us with ferocious defiance. When I had recovered myself sufficiently to observe, I could see that the man was not more than five-and-twenty, probably much younger, with a face and figure which must have been by nature not only fine, but uncommonly fine, though now deformed, degraded, haggard with filth and inflamed with inebriety—a dreadful and humiliating spectacle. Some glimmering remains of sense and decency prevented him from swearing and blaspheming when once in the coach; but he abused us horribly: his nasal accent, and his drunken objurgations against the old country, and all who came from it, betrayed his own birth and breeding to have been on the other side of the Niagara, or “down east.” Once he addressed some words to me, and, offended by my resolute silence, he exclaimed with a scowl, and a hiccup of abomination at every word, “I should like—to know—madam—how—I came under your diabolical influence?” Here my friend the emigrant, seeing my alarm, interposed, and a scene ensued, which, in spite of the horrors of this horrible propinquity, was irresistibly comic, and not without its pathetic significance too, now I think of it. The Englishman, forgetting that the condition of the man placed him for the time beyond the influence of reasoning or sympathy, began with grave and benevolent earnestness to lecture him on his profligate habits, expressing his amazement and his pity at seeing such a fine young man fallen into such evil ways, and exhorting him to amend,—the fellow, meanwhile, rolling himself from side to side with laughter. But suddenly his countenance changed, and he said, with a wistful expression, and the tears in his eyes, “Friend, do you believe in the devil?”
“Yes, I do,” replied the Englishman with solemnity.
“Then it’s your opinion, I guess, that a man may be tempted by the devil?”
“Yes, and I should suppose as how that has been your case, friend; though,” added he, looking at him from head to foot with no equivocal expression, “I think the devil himself might have more charity than to put a man in such a pickle.”
“What do you mean by that?” exclaimed the wretch fiercely, and for the first time uttering a horrid oath. The emigrant only replied by shaking his head significantly; and the other, after pouring forth a volley of abuse against the insolence of the “old country folk,” stretched himself on his back, and kicking up his legs on high, and setting his feet against the roof of the Coach, fell asleep in this attitude, and snored, till, at the end of a long hour, he was tumbled out at the door of another drinking hovel as he had tumbled in, and we saw him no more.