"The chief wants to see you."
It was the office boy of my Sunday editor who spoke. I had a standing start, but I beat him back to the desk by three feet. The chief glared at me, hid his income tax blank in a drawer, and said mildly:
"Benson, go get an interview with Bacchus on prohibition."
My ears stiffened like a man's in the heart of the Sahara who has just been told there was a brewery on the other side of the next sandheap.
"You mean, boss, Bacchus, the original rum hound?" I falsettoed, my voice seeming to come out of my eyes.
"Why, you don't think I mean the president of the Fudge Union, do you?" he said, hiding his patent space cutter in a drawer.
He swivelled around to his Give-Them-the-Gate list. I knew the interview was over. I knew I had to get that interview with Bacchus or sign up somewhere else. I ambled up Broadway.
"What! you never heard of psychometry?"
I turned quickly. Two men, arguing excitedly, disappeared in the crowd. But the word "psychometry" remained. Was it a hunch?
What in the name of the Sacred Soup of Siam was psychometry? I turned into the nearest branch public library and feverishly turned the leaves of the dictionary. Psychometry is the big trick among the Occult Squad. It is "divination by touch." If you have psychometric powers you can call up the history of a man or an object by holding it in your hand. Hold your sweetheart's fan and all her flirtations will swim into your brain. Press a dollar of your landlord's in your hand and his profiteering crimes will be yours.
A great thought-flash illuminated me. Maybe I had that power — maybe I was a born psychometrist.
Another tremendous thought opened its barrage on me. If I had that power, why couldn't I by holding a bottle of old Burgundy in my fist and letting my cerebrum and cerebellum float on their backs in my consciousness evoke Bacchus and interview him?
But the bottle of Burgundy? It was as rare as tobacco in a ten-cent pack of Mahomet cigarettes, worth its weight in radium, and the lamps of the Eighteenth Amendment sleuths were full upon me.
One thought pumps another out of the old pipes of our memory.
I knew the butler in the mansion of "Old Pale Ale" Smith, the millionaire clubman up the Avenue. He and his family were at Palm Beach. Would the butler let me in old "Pale Ale's" wine cellar, estimated to contain about a billion dollars' worth of joy-juice?
Easiest thing ever. Tom Pourboire not only let me in the cellar, but spread a table for me down there, and yanked out a bottle of old Burgundy. I was his bona-fide guest, under the law; he should worry and so forth.
I buried my fist in the dust of the bottle of the unopened wine — I wasn't after the drink this time — and called:
"Oh, Bacchus, God of Booze, be with me now! You've done me many a rotten turn before the Ginmillennium set in — now you can do me a good turn. Appear, dear old Bac.!"
There was a terrible commotion away back in the dark of the vast cellar. Boxes and casks rumbled and fell. Into the light walked Bacchus. He was flesh and blood!
I knew he was Bacchus instinctively, although he had a Jack Dempsey hair cut, wore a bartender's white apron, a sport shirt, and a Japanese silk crêpe tie.
His face was the image of the late Johnny Walker.
In his hand he carried a large bottle of wine with the Latin inscription in huge letters burned in the glass:
"From the cellars of Nero, Chateau Orgy, Anno 61."
He took a seat on a cask of whiskey after shaking hands with me and addressing me as "Benson old pal."
"Talk low and quick," he said. "I've got old John Barleycorn, Grandfather Gambrinus and Little Lord Absinthe back in that corner. We're hiding from the raiders. Ain't this a great disguise? I dress according to the country I'm in. We're trying to drink up everything Old Pale Ale has in his cellar before he gets back from the beach.
"The gang back there are sick — it's a big job drinking all the stored stuff. You know I could always carry it. Where there's a wine there's a way with me."
"Well, go ahead, Benson, and spill your wheeze."
"What are you doing on earth, anyway, Bac., old boy?" I asked, looking at my questionnaire in my hat.
"Well, you humans put it over on us when the Great War got going. Mars took over all the gods and put Olympus on a war basis. He said as this was the biggest job he'd ever pulled off, he wanted clear heads about him, and that all the gods had to cut out late hours and all drink. Of course he was looking straight at me.
"John Barleycorn he said he could handle, because John could never handle himself. He didn't care much about Gambrinus, said he was only a German milkman after all. He didn't even argue with Little Lord Absinthe — just booted him into the Styx, where old Charon kept kicking him along in disgust. But for me he had some respect; said I was as ancient as the earth, the gods and everything else. Tapping me on the bean wouldn't do any good, so he granted me a vacation to the Earth till he got through with his job.
"I took the three of them back there with me, and I've certainly had my troubles ever since. Truth to tell, Benson, we've been so lit up since we landed that I don't know how I'll get that gang back. Pegasus has become an old spavin. We're stuck."
"How did prohibition in America hit you?" I went on in a business-like voice, giving him the second question in my hat.
Before Bacchus could answer a voice that sounded like a singing coal mine came over the top from the abysmal darkness of the cellar:
"Hoorah! Hoorah! I'm a guy in wrong. The Constitush has got me an' me bar-lee-corn!"
"Can it!" shouted Bacchus. "No wonder they've got you wandering from cellar to cellar."
"That's the guy that put me on the blink. Why, his breath blew out the fires of Vulcan one morning Up There," continued Bacchus, addressing me. "John was a low-brow, never could disguise himself and was always singing out of turn. It's the bad actors that kill all the fun, and that fellow has certainly been a bad actor, although when there's any sickness around there ain't a better friend than—"
"But about prohibition, Bac?" I insisted, my reportorial instinct on the alert.
"Let me tell you, Benson," said Bacchus, poking his bottle of Nero's finest under my nose to emphasize his opinions, "that prohibition serves you right. You disgraced a god — that's me. I invented the finest toothache and grouch killer ever known — me and Gambrinus; but you Americans chucked us and picked up with that rowdy John Barleycorn and his crazy pals. You took that roughneck to your own tables, introduced him to your families, and when he couldn't come to you, you invented Family Entrance and went to him, ramming me into hideous red-ink joints and keeping me alive on bum table d'hotes.
"It is written of old — by some wise guy or other — that no one can offend a god and get away with the goods. Why, I'm the oldest of the gods, the best and the healthiest. You made me a Cinderella and lavished all your love on that demon back there. Look at me now.
"Look at this rig I've got to dress in! Look how I've got to go sneaking around from cellar to cellar with that rowdy back there — and I a god, celebrated by poets and prophets in all ages, the friend of all real human beings, the father of laughter, the inventor of merriment. You've busted my heart — that's what you have!"
And dear old Bacchus began to blubber all over the cask. Near me a voice began to croak.
"I'm old! I'm old! I'm beer that's near. I'll go to Jersey to get up cheer!"
"That's old Gam," said Bacchus, drying his eyes. "He too's in bad with me."
"Will you come back, Bacchus?" I asked, that being the third question pasted in my hat.
"Did you ever hear of anything that didn't come back?" answered Bacchus, righting himself into something of his old-time form.
"As badly as you've treated me in this country, I'm going to stick. As a matter of fact, since Mars still has all his war measures in force up there, I've got to stick. I need America as much as you are going to need me. I am about twenty-thousand years old and I've traveled a bit, as your classical sharps will tell you.
"Well, Benson, I can tell you that there never was a nation or a people who tried to can me who didn't start toward a Davy Jones' locker, which is, as you know, quite different from a club locker.
"There never was one exception. The Eskimos never had any use for me — and look at them! Ice eaters and the North Pole for a bathtub, and never a drink of the old stuff to warm them up. Jack Frost has got their souls as well as their bodies, and it'll get yours if you don't look out. Where life flourishes there am I; where it begins to frost, I retire."
"What will be the ultimate effect of prohibition, Bac.?" I asked.
"Long faces, the dark brown taste of a universal mental grouch, and the disappearance of pleasure. Seriousness, my boy, has destroyed more people than even old John, back there."
"Are you and the crowd back there going to get away with all this stock?" I asked.
"Every bit of it without drawing a cork. When Old Pale Ale gets back his bottles will be as he left them, but there'll not be a drop in them."
"How's that done?"
"We absorb it by psychometric thirst." Bacchus replied with a tremendous guffaw.
His laugh was so loud that it startled me, and I took my hand off the bottle of Burgundy.
Bacchus had disappeared.
BENJAMIN DE CASSERES.