For several days previous to the coming of the _Cora Andrews_ I had been slipping up pretty badly on my "absinthe reform" program. It was largely the fault, I think, of a positively infernal spell of weather. The ozone-laden trade winds, falling light after a spell of low barometer, had finally failed altogether. Kai was lapped in sluggish moisture-saturated airs that clung like a wet blanket. The Gargantuan popcorn-like piles of the trade clouds were replaced by strata of miasmic mists which awakened all the latent fevers in a man's body and mind. The sea, slatily slick of surface, heaved in oily, indolent smoothness, sliding over the reef without sound or foam. The brooding, ominous sullenness was all-pervading, oppressive with sinister suggestion.
Everyone on the island was drinking heavily, and mostly alone. No tipsy choruses boomed out from under the sounding-board of Jackson's sheet-iron roof. Even "Slant" Allen failed to appear for his wild end-of-the-afternoon dashes up and down the beach. Rona dropped in languidly one afternoon to say that Bell was tilting the bottle more frequently than she had ever known him to do before, and that for three days he had missed his early morning plunge from the reef.
"Too much walkee with Jo'nnee Walkah, Whitnee," she punned in a feeble flicker of pleasantry. "I veh-ry much worree along Bel-la."
She needn't have worried, though. _He_, at least, had the stuff in him for a proper finish.
It was only to be expected that I should seek solace in a time like this by snuggling closer than ever into the enfolding arms of the "Green Lady." That fickle jade was at her best--and her worst. Never had she winged me to loftier pinnacles of sensuous delight; never had she dropped me to profounder depths of horror and despond. The night before the _Cora_ came marked a new "high"; also a new "low." I dropped like a plummet straight from a pea-green grotto full of lilies of the valley, maiden's hair ferns and ambrosia-breathed houri to the fire-scorched cliffs ringing the mouth of the Bottomless Pit. I knew that Pit of old. Most of the early hours of my mornings for the last five years had been spent in trying to keep from being pushed into it.