The Lost Weekend Read Online Free PDF Page A

bathroom he snapped on the light and confronted himself in the glass. The large childish eyes stared back, eager and searching; the cheeks were flushed, the mouth half-open in suspense. He studied every feature of that alert countenance, so wide awake that it seemed it would never sleep again. Surely there would be some sign, some mark, some tiny line or change denoting a new maturity, perhaps? He scanned the forehead, the mouth, the staring eyes, in vain. The face looked back at him as clear, as heartbreakingly youthful, as before.
    He was moved and amused as he recalled that moment—a moment that had been repeated dozens and dozens of times in all his long adolescence. He picked up the glass and drank it to the bottom. A fancy came to him. Suppose the clear vision in the bathroom mirror could fade (as in some trick movie) and be replaced by this image over the bar. Suppose that lad— Suppose time could be all mixed up so that the child of twenty years ago could look into the bathroom mirror and see himself reflected at thirty-three, as he saw himself now. What would he think, that boy? Would he have accepted it—is this what he dreamed of becoming? Would he accept it for a moment? In his emotion and embarrassment he glanced away and signaled to Sam to pour him another.
    The men at the end of the bar had gone. Gloria sat at a table in the back, filing her nails. He watched her, indifferent about her now; then fearing that she might see him looking and take it as an invitation to come forward again, he turned back to the bar, automatically picking up the new drink that had been set before him.
    Or wait—of
course
he would accept it! It was all crystal clear,like a revelation (suddenly he was feeling brighter, more alert and clear mentally, than he ever had in his life). That kid, could he have seen this face, the man of today, certainly would have accepted it—he would have loved it! The idol of the boy had been Poe and Keats, Byron, Dowson, Chatterton—all the gifted miserable and reckless men who had burned themselves out in tragic brilliance early and with finality. Not for him the normal happy genius living to a ripe old age (genius indeed! How could a genius be happy, normal—above all, long-lived?), acclaimed by all (or acclaimed in his lifetime?), enjoying honor, love, obedience, troops of friends (“I must not look to have”). The romantic boy would have been satisfied, he would have responded with all his ardent youthful soul. There was a poetic justice in those disillusioned eyes and the boy would have known it and nodded in happy recognition.
    In the next instant came disgust (self-disgust and scorn; self-reproach for inflating the image of himself out of all proportion to the miserable truth); and in the very next, the brilliant idea. Oh, brilliant! As it swept over him and took possession of his excited brain—so feverishly alert that it seemed his perceptions could, at this moment, grasp any problem in the world—he fidgeted in suspense, shifted from one foot to the other, and made an effort to calm himself. Now wait a moment, just let me order another drink and think this out slowly—it’s coming too fast.…
    A story of that boy and this man—a long short story—a classic of form and content—a
Death in Venice
, artistically only, not in any other way—the title: “In a Glass.” What else could it be?—the glass of the title meaning at first the whisky glass he was drinking from, out of which grew the multitude of fancies; then the idea blurring and merging gradually, subtly, with the glass of the mirror till finally the title comes to mean in the reader’s mind only the glass over the bar through which the protagonist looks back on his youth. “In a Glass”—it would begin with a man standing in a 2nd Avenue bar on just such an October afternoonas this, just such a man as he, drinking a glass of whisky, several glasses, and looking at his reflection in the mirror over the bar. Thoughts