No More Learning

He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather
more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a
week for two days. On those occasions the native woman tended him
while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began
reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it to the end, beating
time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of
his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag
of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told
me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had
descended--a Virgil in the Shades, he said--and that, in return for
my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new
Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a
horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.

"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you
of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but I make no
doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage. "

"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said.

"I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you have
no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you
have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk.
But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe
me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme. "

He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--

"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing good
and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not? "

When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in
a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his
hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.

"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations! "

"Have you so many, then, McIntosh? "

"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and
literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which
reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the
Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has
it.