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(I think the place was Haywards. It may have been San Leandro or
Niles. And, to save me, I can't remember whether the Hancock Fire
Brigade was a republican or a democratic organisation. But
anyway, the politicians who ran it were short of torch-bearers,
and anybody who would parade could get drunk if he wanted to.)
"The town'll be wide open," Joe Goose went on. "Booze? It'll run
like water. The politicians have bought the stocks of the
saloons. There'll be no charge. All you got to do is walk right
up and call for it. We'll raise hell."
At the hall, on Eighth Street near Broadway, we got into the
firemen's shirts and helmets, were equipped with torches, and,
growling because we weren't given at least one drink before we
started, were herded aboard the train. Oh, those politicians had
handled our kind before. At Haywards there were no drinks either.
Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night.
We paraded. Then the saloons were opened. Extra barkeepers had
been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drink-
drenched and unwiped bar. There was no time to wipe the bar, nor
wash glasses, nor do anything save fill glasses. The Oakland
water-front can be real thirsty on occasion.
This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too
slow for us. The drink was ours. The politicians had bought it
for us. We'd paraded and earned it, hadn't we? So we made a flank
attack around the end of the bar, shoved the protesting barkeepers
aside, and helped ourselves to bottles.
Outside, we knocked the necks of the bottles off against the
concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned
discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I
still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all
he could get--especially when it didn't cost anything. We shared
our bottles with others, and drank a good portion ourselves, while
I drank most of all. And I didn't like the stuff. I drank it as
I had drunk beer at five, and wine at seven. I mastered my qualms
and downed it like so much medicine. And when we wanted more
bottles, we went into other saloons where the free drink was
flowing, and helped ourselves.
I haven't the slightest idea of how much I drank--whether it was
two quarts or five. I do know that I began the orgy with half-
pint draughts and with no water afterward to wash the taste away
or to dilute the whisky.
Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with
drunks from the water-front of Oakland. When train time came,
there was a round-up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the
impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon,
and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade.
I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my
legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my
lungs panting for air.
My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain
told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I
remained at the rear of the procession. I left the ranks and ran
down a pathway beside the road under broad-spreading trees.
Nelson pursued me, laughing. Certain things stand out, as in
memories of nightmare. I remember those trees especially, and my
desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell,
roars of laughter went up from the other drunks. They thought I
was merely antic drunk. They did not dream that John Barleycorn
had me by the throat in a death-clutch. But I knew it. And I
remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that
I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not
know. It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators
who thought I was cutting up tricks for their entertainment.
And running there under the trees, I fell and lost consciousness.
What happened afterward, with one glimmering exception, I had to
be told. Nelson, with his enormous strength, picked me up and
dragged me on and aboard the train. When he had got me into a
seat, I fought and panted so terribly for air that even with his
obtuseness he knew I was in a bad way. And right there, at any
moment, I know now, I might have died. I often think it is the
nearest to death I have ever been. I have only Nelson's
description of my behaviour to go by.
I was scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire
and suffocation, and I wanted air. I madly wanted air. My
efforts to raise a window were vain, for all the windows in the
car were screwed down. Nelson had seen drink-crazed men, and
thought I wanted to throw myself out. He tried to restrain me,
but I fought on. I seized some man's torch and smashed the glass.
Now there were pro-Nelson and anti-Nelson factions on the Oakland
water-front, and men of both factions, with more drink in them
than was good, filled the car. My smashing of the window was the
signal for the antis. One of them reached for me, and dropped me,
and started the fight, of all of which I have no knowledge save
what was told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow
that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body,
Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows
in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all fight
had its course.
This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing
that could have happened to me. My violent struggles had only
accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart, and
increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs.
After the fight was over and I came to, I did not come to myself.
I was no more myself than a drowning man is who continues to
struggle after he has lost consciousness. I have no memory of my
actions, but I cried " Air! Air!" so insistently, that it dawned
on Nelson that I did not contemplate self-destruction. So he
cleared the jagged glass from the window-ledge and let me stick my
head and shoulders out. He realised, partially, the seriousness
of my condition. and held me by the waist to prevent me from
crawling farther out. And for the rest of the run in to Oakland I
kept my head and shoulders out, fighting like a maniac whenever he
tried to draw me inside.
And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came. My
sole recollection, from the time I fell under the trees until I
awoke the following evening, is of my head out of the window,
facing the wind caused by the train, cinders striking and burning
and blinding me, while I breathed with will. All my will was
concentrated on breathing--on breathing the air in the hugest
lung-full gulps I could, pumping the greatest amount of air into
my lungs in the shortest possible time. It was that or death, and
I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most
intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I
was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for
life.
All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a
water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been
called in. And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the
others, deeming me merely "sleeping off my drunk," had let me lie
there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as
every doctor knows, has died of the sudden impact of a quart or
more of whisky. Usually one reads of them so dying, strong
drinkers, on account of a wager. But I didn't know--then. And so
I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good
fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed
over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit,
dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the
discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another
year to come.
Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and
wisely alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that
intervening score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a
shave I ran, how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a
century that has been mine. And, oh, it wasn't John Barleycorn's
fault that he didn't get me that night of the Hancock Fire
Brigade.
It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to
sea. My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little
responsible for this. I still drank and frequented saloons--
practically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my
opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous
things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too,
fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and
were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad
trains, and bar-rooms, one must use judgment. To get drunk after
the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with
discretion. No more quarts of whisky for me.
What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first
vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his
devotees. It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two
phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time. It struck me, from
watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were
living was more destructive than that lived by the average man.
John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime.
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of
doing sober. And this wasn't the worst of it. It was the penalty
that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon-mates I drank
with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent
and lunatic things when they were drunk. And then the police
gathered them in and they vanished from our ken. Sometimes I
visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed
across the bay to put on the felon's stripes. And time and again
I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-
DONE IT." And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the
most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-
hardened soul.
The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual
drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent
provocation. When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions
that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.
Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on
occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes
it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo
while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the
circumstances, might just as easily have been his head.
So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a
bad way of living. It made toward death too quickly to suit my
youth and vitality. And there was only one way out of this
hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out. The sealing
fleet was wintering in San Francisco Bay, and in the saloons I met
skippers, mates, hunters, boat-steerers, and boat-pullers. I met
the seal-hunter, Pete Holt, and agreed to be his boat-puller and
to sign on any schooner he signed on. And I had to have half a
dozen drinks with Pete Holt there and then to seal our agreement.
And at once awoke all my old unrest that John Barleycorn had put
to sleep. I found myself actually bored with the saloon life of
the Oakland water-front, and wondered what I had ever found
fascinating in it. Also, with this death-road concept in my
brain, I began to grow afraid that something would happen to me
before sailing day, which was set for some time in January. I
lived more circumspectly, drank less deeply, and went home more
frequently. When drinking grew too wild, I got out. When Nelson
was in his maniacal cups, I managed to get separated from him.
On the 12th of January, 1893, I was seventeen, and the 20th of
January I signed before the shipping commissioner the articles of
the Sophie Sutherland, a three topmast sealing schooner bound on a
voyage to the coast of Japan. And of course we had to drink on
it. Joe Vigy cashed my advance note, and Pete Holt treated, and I
treated, and Joe Vigy treated, and other hunters treated. Well,
it was the way of men, and who was I, just turned seventeen, that
I should decline the way of life of these fine, chesty, man-grown
men?
There was nothing to drink on the Sophie Sutherland, and we had
fifty-one days of glorious sailing, taking the southern passage in
the north-east trades to Bonin Islands. This isolated group,
belonging to Japan, had been selected as the rendezvous of the
Canadian and American sealing fleets. Here they filled their
water-barrels and made repairs before starting on the hundred
days' harrying of the seal-herd along the northern coasts of Japan
to Behring Sea.
Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle. The alcohol had been worked out of my
system, and from the moment the voyage began I had not known the
desire for a drink. I doubt if I even thought once about a drink.
Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and
the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks,
remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than
all the other passages of their adventurous lives.
In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He
was a broken skipper. John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was
winding up his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle.
His case made quite an impression on me. John Barleycorn did
other things beside kill a man. He hadn't killed Louis. He had
done much worse. He had robbed him of power and place and
comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of
the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath
lasted, which promised to be for a long time.
We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic
peaks, jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the
reefs to the land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down
where lay a score or more of sea-gypsies like ourselves. The
scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land.
Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and Japanese, in queerer
sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard. It was my first
foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and I
would see all I had read in the books come true. I was wild to
get ashore.
Victor and Axel, a Swede and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep
together. (And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we
were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway
that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava
slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing,
among the palms and flowers. We would go over that path, he said,
and we agreed, and we would see beautiful scenery, and strange
native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, what adventure at
the end. And Axel was keen to go fishing. The three of us agreed
to that, too. We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese
fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great
sport. As for me, I was keen for anything.
And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living
coral and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand. We
walked across the fringe of beach under the cocoanut-palms and
into the little town, and found several hundred riotous seamen
from all the world, drinking prodigiously, singing prodigiously,
dancing prodigiously--and all on the main street to the scandal of
a helpless handful of Japanese police.
Victor and Axel said that we'd have a drink before we started on
our long walk. Could I decline to drink with these two chesty
shipmates? Drinking together, glass in hand, put the seal on
comradeship. It was the way of life. Our teetotaler owner-
captain was laughed at, and sneered at, by all of us because of
his teetotalism. I didn't in the least want a drink, but I did
want to be a good fellow and a good comrade. Nor did Louis' case
deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching stuff down my throat.
John Barleycorn had thrown Louis to a nasty fall, but I was young.
My blood ran full and red; I had a constitution of iron; and--
well, youth ever grins scornfully at the wreckage of age.
Queer, fierce, alcoholic stuff it was that we drank. There was no
telling where or how it had been manufactured--some native
concoction most likely. But it was hot as fire, pale as water,
and quick as death with its kick. It had been filled into empty
"square-face" bottles which had once contained Holland gin, and
which still bore the fitting legend "Anchor Brand." It certainly
anchored us. We never got out of the town. We never went fishing
in the sampan. And though we were there ten days, we never trod
that wild path along the lava cliffs and among the flowers.
We met old acquaintances from other schooners, fellows we had met
in the saloons of San Francisco before we sailed. And each
meeting meant a drink; and there was much to talk about; and more
drinks; and songs to be sung; and pranks and antics to be
performed, until the maggots of imagination began to crawl, and it
all seemed great and wonderful to me, these lusty hard-bitten sea-
rovers, of whom I made one, gathered in wassail on a coral strand.
Old lines about knights at table in the great banquet halls, and
of those above the salt and below the salt, and of Vikings
feasting fresh from sea and ripe for battle, came to me; and I
knew that the old times were not dead and that we belonged to that
selfsame ancient breed.
By mid-afternoon Victor went mad with drink, and wanted to fight
everybody and everything. I have since seen lunatics in the
violent wards of asylums that seemed to behave in no wise
different from Victor's way, save that perhaps he was more
violent. Axel and I interfered as peacemakers, were roughed and
jostled in the mix-ups, and finally, with infinite precaution and
intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our chum down to the
boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner.
But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to
clean up the ship. He had the strength of several men, and he ran
amuck with it. I remember especially one man whom he got into the
chain-boxes but failed to damage through inability to hit him.
The man dodged and ducked, and Victor broke all the knuckles of
both his fists against the huge links of the anchor chain. By the
time we dragged him out of that, his madness had shifted to the
belief that he was a great swimmer, and the next moment he was
overboard and demonstrating his ability by floundering like a sick
porpoise and swallowing much salt water.
We rescued him, and by the time we got him below, undressed, and
into his bunk, we were wrecks ourselves. But Axel and I wanted to
see more of shore, and away we went, leaving Victor snoring. It
was curious, the judgment passed on Victor by his shipmates,
drinkers themselves. They shook their heads disapprovingly and
muttered: "A man like that oughtn't to drink." Now Victor was the
smartest sailor and best-tempered shipmate in the forecastle. He
was an all-round splendid type of seaman; his mates recognised his
worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John Barleycorn
metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the very
point these drinkers made. They knew that drink--and drink with a
sailor is always excessive--made them mad, but only mildly mad.
Violent madness was objectionable because it spoiled the fun of
others and often culminated in tragedy. From their standpoint,
mild madness was all right. But from the standpoint of the whole
human race, is not all madness objectionable? And is there a
greater maker of madness of all sorts than John Barleycorn?
But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of
entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable
drink talked of the afternoon's happenings. We liked the
quietness of that drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in,
several shipmates dropped in, and we had more quiet drinks.
Finally, just as we had engaged a Japanese orchestra, and as the
first strains of the samisens and taikos were rising, through the
paper-walls came a wild howl from the street. We recognised it.
Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood-shot eyes and
wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the
fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted
blood, anybody's blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went
through doorways, and we went through paper-walls--anything to get
away.
And after the place was half wrecked, and we had agreed to pay the
damage, leaving Victor partly subdued and showing symptoms of
lapsing into a comatose state, Axel and I wandered away in quest
of a quieter drinking-place. The main street was a madness.
Hundreds of sailors rollicked up and down. Because the chief of
police with his small force was helpless, the governor of the
colony had issued orders to the captains to have all their men on
board by sunset.
What! To be treated in such fashion! As the news spread among the
schooners, they were emptied. Everybody came ashore. Men who had
had no intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The
unfortunate governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch
for all hands. It was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to
see anybody try to put them on board. They went around inviting
the authorities to try to put them on board. In front of the
governor's house they were gathered thickest, bawling sea-songs,
circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels
and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood
in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was
too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It
was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was
license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-
rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper
houses of Japan.
The governor never issued the order to clear the streets, and Axel
and I wandered on from drink to drink. After a time, in some of
the antics, getting hazy myself, I lost him. I drifted along,
making new acquaintances, downing more drinks, getting hazier and
hazier. I remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle with Japanese
fishermen, Kanaka boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young
Danish sailor fresh from cowboying in the Argentine and with a
penchant for native customs and ceremonials. And with due and
proper and most intricate Japanese ceremonial we of the circle
drank saki, pale, mild, and lukewarm, from tiny porcelain bowls.
And, later, I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen
and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their
ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and
drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were
healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young--youths
like me, learning the way of their feet in the world of men. And
they WERE men. No mild saki for them, but square faces illicitly
refilled with corrosive fire that flamed through their veins and
burst into conflagrations in their heads. I remember a melting
song they sang, the refrain of which was:
"'Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother's sake
When you are on the tide."
They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who
had all broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and
wept with them, and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of
it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on
life and romance. And one last picture I have, standing out very
clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness
afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are swaying and clinging to
one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea
song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are
marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the
street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life
is great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad.
And next, after the blackness, I open my eyes in the early dawn to
see a Japanese woman, solicitously anxious, bending over me. She
is the port pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway. I am
chilled and shivering, sick with the after-sickness of debauch.
And I feel lightly clad. Those rascals of runaway apprentices!
They have acquired the habit of running away. They have run away
with my possessions. My watch is gone. My few dollars are gone.
My coat is gone. So is my belt. And yes, my shoes.
And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin
Islands. Victor got over his lunacy, rejoined Axel and me, and
after that we caroused somewhat more discreetly. And we never
climbed that lava path among the flowers. The town and the square
faces were all we saw.
One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire. I
might have seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the
Bonin Islands, if I had done what I ought to have done. But, as I
see it, it is not a matter of what one ought to do, or ought not
to do. It is what one DOES do. That is the everlasting,
irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I did what all those
men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of men over the
world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it
because the way led to it, because I was only a human boy, a
creature of my environment, and neither an anaemic nor a god. I
was just human, and I was taking the path in the world that men
took--men whom I admired, if you please; full-blooded men, lusty,
breedy, chesty men, free spirits and anything but niggards in the
way they foamed life away.
And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard
where children play. It is small use to tell the brave little
boys toddling their way along into knowledge of life that they
mustn't play near the uncovered well. They'll play near it. Any
parent knows that. And we know that a certain percentage of them,
the livest and most daring, will fall into the well. The thing to
do--we all know it--is to cover up the well. The case is the same
with John Barleycorn. All the no-saying and no-preaching in the
world will fail to keep men, and youths growing into manhood, away
from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere
accessible, and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the
connotation of manliness, and daring, and great-spiritedness.
The only rational thing for the twentieth-century folk to do is to
cover up the well; to make the twentieth century in truth the
twentieth century, and to relegate to the nineteenth century and
all the preceding centuries the things of those centuries, the
witch-burnings, the intolerances, the fetiches, and, not least
among such barbarisms. John Barleycorn.
North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd,
and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten
weather and into and through vast fogs which hid the sun from us
for a week at a time. It was wild and heavy work, without a drink
or thought of drink. Then we sailed south to Yokohama, with a big
catch of skins in our salt and a heavy pay-day coming.
I was eager to be ashore and see Japan, but the first day was
devoted to ship's work, and not until evening did we sailors land.
And here, by the very system of things, by the way life was
organised and men transacted affairs, John Barleycorn reached out
and tucked my arm in his. The captain had given money for us to
the hunters, and the hunters were waiting in a certain Japanese
public house for us to come and get it. We rode to the place in
rickshaws. Our own crowd had taken possession of it. Drink was
flowing. Everybody had money, and everybody was treating. After
the hundred days of hard toil and absolute abstinence, in the pink
of physical condition, bulging with health, over-spilling with
spirits that had long been pent by discipline and circumstance, of
course we would have a drink or two. And after that we would see
the town.
It was the old story. There were so many drinks to be drunk, and
as the warm magic poured through our veins and mellowed our voices
and affections we knew it was no time to make invidious
distinctions--to drink with this shipmate and to decline to drink
with that shipmate. We were all shipmates who had been through
stress and storm together, who had pulled and hauled on the same
sheets and tackles, relieved one another's wheels, laid out side
by side on the same jib-boom when she was plunging into it and
looked to see who was missing when she cleared and lifted. So we
drank with all, and all treated, and our voices rose, and we
remembered a myriad kindly acts of comradeship, and forgot our
fights and wordy squabbles, and knew one another for the best
fellows in the world.
Well, the night was young when we arrived in that public house,
and for all of that first night that public house was what I saw
of Japan--a drinking-place which was very like a drinking-place at
home or anywhere else over the world.
We lay in Yokohama harbour for two weeks, and about all we saw of
Japan was its drinking-places where sailors congregated.
Occasionally, some one of us varied the monotony with a more
exciting drunk. In such fashion I managed a real exploit by
swimming off to the schooner one dark midnight and going soundly
to sleep while the water-police searched the harbour for my body
and brought my clothes out for identification.
Perhaps it was for things like that, I imagined, that men got
drunk. In our little round of living what I had done was a
noteworthy event. All the harbour talked about it. I enjoyed
several days of fame among the Japanese boatmen and ashore in the
pubs. It was a red-letter event. It was an event to be
remembered and narrated with pride. I remember it to-day, twenty
years afterward, with a secret glow of pride. It was a purple
passage, just as Victor's wrecking of the tea-house in the Bonin
Islands and my being looted by the runaway apprentices were purple
passages.
The point is that the charm of John Barleycorn was still a mystery
to me. I was so organically a non-alcoholic that alcohol itself
made no appeal; the chemical reactions it produced in me were not
satisfying because I possessed no need for such chemical
satisfaction. I drank because the men I was with drank, and
because my nature was such that I could not permit myself to be
less of a man than other men at their favourite pastime. And I
still had a sweet tooth, and on privy occasions when there was no
man to see, bought candy and blissfully devoured it.
We hove up anchor to a jolly chanty, and sailed out of Yokohama
harbour for San Francisco. We took the northern passage, and with
the stout west wind at our back made the run across the Pacific in
thirty-seven days of brave sailing. We still had a big pay-day
coming to us, and for thirty-seven days, without a drink to addle
our mental processes, we incessantly planned the spending of our
money.
The first statement of each man--ever an ancient one in homeward-
bound forecastles--was: "No boarding-house sharks in mine." Next,
in parentheses, was regret at having spent so much money in
Yokohama. And after that, each man proceeded to paint his
favourite phantom. Victor, for instance, said that immediately he
landed in San Francisco he would pass right through the water-
front and the Barbary Coast, and put an advertisement in the
papers. His advertisement would be for board and room in some
simple working-class family. "Then," said Victor, "I shall go to
some dancing-school for a week or two, just to meet and get
acquainted with the girls and fellows. Then I'll get the run of
the different dancing crowds, and be invited to their homes, and
to parties, and all that, and with the money I've got I can last
out till next January, when I'll go sealing again."
No; he wasn't going to drink. He knew the way of it, particularly
his way of it, wine in, wit out, and his money would be gone in no
time. He had his choice, based on bitter experience, between
three days' debauch among the sharks and harpies of the Barbary
Coast and a whole winter of wholesome enjoyment and sociability,
and there wasn't any doubt of the way he was going to choose.
Said Axel Gunderson, who didn't care for dancing and social
functions: "I've got a good pay-day. Now I can go home. It is
fifteen years since I've seen my mother and all the family. When
I pay off, I shall send my money home to wait for me. Then I'll
pick a good ship bound for Europe, and arrive there with another
pay-day. Put them together, and I'll have more money than ever in
my life before. I'll be a prince at home. You haven't any idea
how cheap everything is in Norway. I can make presents to
everybody, and spend my money like what would seem to them a
millionaire, and live a whole year there before I'd have to go
back to sea."
"The very thing I'm going to do," declared Red John. "It's three
years since I've received a line from home and ten years since I
was there. Things are just as cheap in Sweden, Axel, as in
Norway, and my folks are real country folk and farmers. I'll send
my pay-day home and ship on the same ship with you for around the
Horn. We'll pick a good one."
And as Axel Gunderson and Red John painted the pastoral delights
and festive customs of their respective countries, each fell in
love with the other's home place, and they solemnly pledged to
make the journey together, and to spend, together, six months in
the one's Swedish home and six months in the other's Norwegian
home. And for the rest of the voyage they could hardly be pried
apart, so infatuated did they become with discussing their plans.
Long John was not a home-body. But he was tired of the
forecastle. No boarding-house sharks in his. He, too, would get
a room in a quiet family, and he would go to a navigation school
and study to be a captain. And so it went. Each man swore that
for once he would be sensible and not squander his money. No
boarding-house sharks, no sailor-town, no drink, was the slogan of
our forecastle.
The men became stingy. Never was there such economy. They
refused to buy anything more from the slopchest. Old rags had to
last, and they sewed patch upon patch, turning out what are called
"homeward-bound patches " of the most amazing proportions. They
saved on matches, even, waiting till two or three were ready to
light their pipes from the same match.
As we sailed up the San Francisco water-front, the moment the port
doctors passed us, the boarding-house runners were alongside in
whitehall boats. They swarmed on board, each drumming for his own
boarding-house, and each with a bottle of free whisky inside his
shirt. But we waved them grandly and blasphemously away. We
wanted none of their boarding-houses and none of their whisky. We
were sober, thrifty sailormen, with better use for our money.
Came the paying off before the shipping commissioner. We emerged
upon the sidewalk, each with a pocketful of money. About us, like
buzzards, clustered the sharks and harpies. And we looked at each
other. We had been seven months together, and our paths were
separating. One last farewell rite of comradeship remained. (Oh,
it was the way, the custom.) "Come on, boys," said our sailing
master. There stood the inevitable adjacent saloon. There were a
dozen saloons all around. And when we had followed the sailing
master into the one of his choice, the sharks were thick on the
sidewalk outside. Some of them even ventured inside, but we would
have nothing to do with them.
There we stood at the long bar--the sailing master, the mate, the
six hunters, the six boat-steerers, and the five boat-pullers.
There were only five of the last, for one of our number had been
dropped overboard, with a sack of coal at his feet, between two
snow squalls in a driving gale off Cape Jerimo. There were
nineteen of us, and it was to be our last drink together. With
seven months of men's work in the world, blow high, blow low,
behind us, we were looking on each other for the last time. We
knew it, for sailors' ways go wide. And the nineteen of us, drank
the sailing master's treat. Then the mate looked at us with
eloquent eyes and called another round. We liked the mate just as
well as the sailing master, and we liked them both. Could we
drink with one, and not the other?
And Pete Holt, my own hunter (lost next year in the Mary Thomas,
with all hands), called a round. The time passed, the drinks
continued to come on the bar, our voices rose, and the maggots
began to crawl. There were six hunters, and each insisted, in the
sacred name of comradeship, that all hands drink with him just
once. There were six boat-steerers and five boat-pullers and the
same logic held with them. There was money in all our pockets,
and our money was as good as any man's, and our hearts were as
free and generous.
Nineteen rounds of drinks. What more would John Barleycorn ask in
order to have his will with men? They were ripe to forget their
dearly cherished plans. They rolled out of the saloon and into
the arms of the sharks and harpies. They didn't last long. From
two days to a week saw the end of their money and saw them being
carted by the boarding-house masters on board outward-bound ships.
Victor was a fine body of a man, and through a lucky friendship
managed to get into the life-saving service. He never saw the
dancing-school nor placed his advertisement for a room in a
working-class family. Nor did Long John win to navigation school.
By the end of the week he was a transient lumper on a river
steamboat. Red John and Axel did not send their pay-days home to
the old country. Instead, and along with the rest, they were
scattered on board sailing ships bound for the four quarters of
the globe, where they had been placed by the boarding-house
masters, and where they were working out advance money which they
had neither seen nor spent.
What saved me was that I had a home and people to go to. I
crossed the bay to Oakland, and, among other things, took a look
at the death-road. Nelson was gone--shot to death while drunk and
resisting the officers. His partner in that affair was lying in
prison. Whisky Bob was gone. Old Cole, Old Smoudge, and Bob
Smith were gone. Another Smith, he of the belted guns and the
Annie, was drowned. French Frank, they said, was lurking up
river, afraid to come down because of something he had done.
Others were wearing the stripes in San Quentin or Folsom. Big
Alec, the King of the Greeks, whom I had known well in the old
Benicia days, and with whom I had drunk whole nights through, had
killed two men and fled to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom
I had sailed on the Fish Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung
through the back and had died a lingering death complicated with
tuberculosis. And so it went, a very lively and well-patronised
road, and, from what I knew of all of them, John Barleycorn was
responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the Annie.
My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I
didn't like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the
drinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the
Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater
understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oats
and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the family
needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hour
day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in
the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise
of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And
here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of
innocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from month
end to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and with
labour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I needed
diversion, excitement, something beyond the books and the
mechanical toil.
I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there
was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too
late. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I
had bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I
was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men
I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possessed
a sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over,
I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, the
Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated.
This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped me
mentally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Their
meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced
their wholesome morality and healthful sports.
In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All
the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--
thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too
much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is
eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be
the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more
virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go
to saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime,
we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now.
I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum
machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other
ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had
my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I
was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.
And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we
became chums.
Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently
devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a
sophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis
was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls.
With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't
know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This
was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And
when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of
his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the
sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play
this game.
"Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is,
you must get a girl."
Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the
expense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in
their home life. He had the entree to no girl's home. And of
course, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarly
circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go to
dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good places
for getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He was a
blacksmith's apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I.
We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this,
and bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes,
there remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum that
varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We
whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was
left of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-
adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair's Park and back--twenty
cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two--thirty cents;
or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which for
two cost only twenty cents.
I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned
for money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn't
care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my
philosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable with
the lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of
scores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar
to drink with me.
But how to get a girl? There was no girl's home to which Louis
could take me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knew
none. And Louis' several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway,
in the very human nature of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn't
turn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl-
friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and
ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.
"You'll have to do like I did," he said finally. "I got these by
getting them. You'll have to get one the same way."
And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I were
hard situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board and
maintain a decent appearance. We met each other in the evening,
after the day's work, on the street corner, or in a little candy
store on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here we
bought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel's worth of
"red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy--all we
could get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into a
saloon.)
But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I
was to select her and make myself acquainted with her. We
strolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us,
strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strolling
Niles. And, to save me, I can't remember whether the Hancock Fire
Brigade was a republican or a democratic organisation. But
anyway, the politicians who ran it were short of torch-bearers,
and anybody who would parade could get drunk if he wanted to.)
"The town'll be wide open," Joe Goose went on. "Booze? It'll run
like water. The politicians have bought the stocks of the
saloons. There'll be no charge. All you got to do is walk right
up and call for it. We'll raise hell."
At the hall, on Eighth Street near Broadway, we got into the
firemen's shirts and helmets, were equipped with torches, and,
growling because we weren't given at least one drink before we
started, were herded aboard the train. Oh, those politicians had
handled our kind before. At Haywards there were no drinks either.
Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night.
We paraded. Then the saloons were opened. Extra barkeepers had
been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drink-
drenched and unwiped bar. There was no time to wipe the bar, nor
wash glasses, nor do anything save fill glasses. The Oakland
water-front can be real thirsty on occasion.
This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too
slow for us. The drink was ours. The politicians had bought it
for us. We'd paraded and earned it, hadn't we? So we made a flank
attack around the end of the bar, shoved the protesting barkeepers
aside, and helped ourselves to bottles.
Outside, we knocked the necks of the bottles off against the
concrete curbs, and drank. Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned
discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity. I hadn't. I
still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all
he could get--especially when it didn't cost anything. We shared
our bottles with others, and drank a good portion ourselves, while
I drank most of all. And I didn't like the stuff. I drank it as
I had drunk beer at five, and wine at seven. I mastered my qualms
and downed it like so much medicine. And when we wanted more
bottles, we went into other saloons where the free drink was
flowing, and helped ourselves.
I haven't the slightest idea of how much I drank--whether it was
two quarts or five. I do know that I began the orgy with half-
pint draughts and with no water afterward to wash the taste away
or to dilute the whisky.
Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with
drunks from the water-front of Oakland. When train time came,
there was a round-up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the
impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon,
and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade.
I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my
legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my
lungs panting for air.
My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain
told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I
remained at the rear of the procession. I left the ranks and ran
down a pathway beside the road under broad-spreading trees.
Nelson pursued me, laughing. Certain things stand out, as in
memories of nightmare. I remember those trees especially, and my
desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell,
roars of laughter went up from the other drunks. They thought I
was merely antic drunk. They did not dream that John Barleycorn
had me by the throat in a death-clutch. But I knew it. And I
remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that
I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not
know. It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators
who thought I was cutting up tricks for their entertainment.
And running there under the trees, I fell and lost consciousness.
What happened afterward, with one glimmering exception, I had to
be told. Nelson, with his enormous strength, picked me up and
dragged me on and aboard the train. When he had got me into a
seat, I fought and panted so terribly for air that even with his
obtuseness he knew I was in a bad way. And right there, at any
moment, I know now, I might have died. I often think it is the
nearest to death I have ever been. I have only Nelson's
description of my behaviour to go by.
I was scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire
and suffocation, and I wanted air. I madly wanted air. My
efforts to raise a window were vain, for all the windows in the
car were screwed down. Nelson had seen drink-crazed men, and
thought I wanted to throw myself out. He tried to restrain me,
but I fought on. I seized some man's torch and smashed the glass.
Now there were pro-Nelson and anti-Nelson factions on the Oakland
water-front, and men of both factions, with more drink in them
than was good, filled the car. My smashing of the window was the
signal for the antis. One of them reached for me, and dropped me,
and started the fight, of all of which I have no knowledge save
what was told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow
that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body,
Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows
in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all fight
had its course.
This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing
that could have happened to me. My violent struggles had only
accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart, and
increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs.
After the fight was over and I came to, I did not come to myself.
I was no more myself than a drowning man is who continues to
struggle after he has lost consciousness. I have no memory of my
actions, but I cried " Air! Air!" so insistently, that it dawned
on Nelson that I did not contemplate self-destruction. So he
cleared the jagged glass from the window-ledge and let me stick my
head and shoulders out. He realised, partially, the seriousness
of my condition. and held me by the waist to prevent me from
crawling farther out. And for the rest of the run in to Oakland I
kept my head and shoulders out, fighting like a maniac whenever he
tried to draw me inside.
And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came. My
sole recollection, from the time I fell under the trees until I
awoke the following evening, is of my head out of the window,
facing the wind caused by the train, cinders striking and burning
and blinding me, while I breathed with will. All my will was
concentrated on breathing--on breathing the air in the hugest
lung-full gulps I could, pumping the greatest amount of air into
my lungs in the shortest possible time. It was that or death, and
I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most
intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I
was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for
life.
All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a
water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been
called in. And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the
others, deeming me merely "sleeping off my drunk," had let me lie
there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as
every doctor knows, has died of the sudden impact of a quart or
more of whisky. Usually one reads of them so dying, strong
drinkers, on account of a wager. But I didn't know--then. And so
I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good
fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed
over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit,
dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the
discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another
year to come.
Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and
wisely alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that
intervening score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a
shave I ran, how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a
century that has been mine. And, oh, it wasn't John Barleycorn's
fault that he didn't get me that night of the Hancock Fire
Brigade.
It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to
sea. My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little
responsible for this. I still drank and frequented saloons--
practically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my
opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous
things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too,
fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and
were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad
trains, and bar-rooms, one must use judgment. To get drunk after
the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with
discretion. No more quarts of whisky for me.
What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first
vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his
devotees. It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two
phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time. It struck me, from
watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were
living was more destructive than that lived by the average man.
John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime.
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of
doing sober. And this wasn't the worst of it. It was the penalty
that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon-mates I drank
with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent
and lunatic things when they were drunk. And then the police
gathered them in and they vanished from our ken. Sometimes I
visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed
across the bay to put on the felon's stripes. And time and again
I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-
DONE IT." And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the
most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-
hardened soul.
The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual
drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent
provocation. When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions
that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.
Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on
occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes
it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo
while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the
circumstances, might just as easily have been his head.
So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a
bad way of living. It made toward death too quickly to suit my
youth and vitality. And there was only one way out of this
hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out. The sealing
fleet was wintering in San Francisco Bay, and in the saloons I met
skippers, mates, hunters, boat-steerers, and boat-pullers. I met
the seal-hunter, Pete Holt, and agreed to be his boat-puller and
to sign on any schooner he signed on. And I had to have half a
dozen drinks with Pete Holt there and then to seal our agreement.
And at once awoke all my old unrest that John Barleycorn had put
to sleep. I found myself actually bored with the saloon life of
the Oakland water-front, and wondered what I had ever found
fascinating in it. Also, with this death-road concept in my
brain, I began to grow afraid that something would happen to me
before sailing day, which was set for some time in January. I
lived more circumspectly, drank less deeply, and went home more
frequently. When drinking grew too wild, I got out. When Nelson
was in his maniacal cups, I managed to get separated from him.
On the 12th of January, 1893, I was seventeen, and the 20th of
January I signed before the shipping commissioner the articles of
the Sophie Sutherland, a three topmast sealing schooner bound on a
voyage to the coast of Japan. And of course we had to drink on
it. Joe Vigy cashed my advance note, and Pete Holt treated, and I
treated, and Joe Vigy treated, and other hunters treated. Well,
it was the way of men, and who was I, just turned seventeen, that
I should decline the way of life of these fine, chesty, man-grown
men?
There was nothing to drink on the Sophie Sutherland, and we had
fifty-one days of glorious sailing, taking the southern passage in
the north-east trades to Bonin Islands. This isolated group,
belonging to Japan, had been selected as the rendezvous of the
Canadian and American sealing fleets. Here they filled their
water-barrels and made repairs before starting on the hundred
days' harrying of the seal-herd along the northern coasts of Japan
to Behring Sea.
Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle. The alcohol had been worked out of my
system, and from the moment the voyage began I had not known the
desire for a drink. I doubt if I even thought once about a drink.
Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and
the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks,
remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than
all the other passages of their adventurous lives.
In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis. He
was a broken skipper. John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was
winding up his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle.
His case made quite an impression on me. John Barleycorn did
other things beside kill a man. He hadn't killed Louis. He had
done much worse. He had robbed him of power and place and
comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of
the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath
lasted, which promised to be for a long time.
We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic
peaks, jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the
reefs to the land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down
where lay a score or more of sea-gypsies like ourselves. The
scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land.
Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and Japanese, in queerer
sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard. It was my first
foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and I
would see all I had read in the books come true. I was wild to
get ashore.
Victor and Axel, a Swede and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep
together. (And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we
were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway
that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava
slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing,
among the palms and flowers. We would go over that path, he said,
and we agreed, and we would see beautiful scenery, and strange
native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, what adventure at
the end. And Axel was keen to go fishing. The three of us agreed
to that, too. We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese
fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great
sport. As for me, I was keen for anything.
And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living
coral and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand. We
walked across the fringe of beach under the cocoanut-palms and
into the little town, and found several hundred riotous seamen
from all the world, drinking prodigiously, singing prodigiously,
dancing prodigiously--and all on the main street to the scandal of
a helpless handful of Japanese police.
Victor and Axel said that we'd have a drink before we started on
our long walk. Could I decline to drink with these two chesty
shipmates? Drinking together, glass in hand, put the seal on
comradeship. It was the way of life. Our teetotaler owner-
captain was laughed at, and sneered at, by all of us because of
his teetotalism. I didn't in the least want a drink, but I did
want to be a good fellow and a good comrade. Nor did Louis' case
deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching stuff down my throat.
John Barleycorn had thrown Louis to a nasty fall, but I was young.
My blood ran full and red; I had a constitution of iron; and--
well, youth ever grins scornfully at the wreckage of age.
Queer, fierce, alcoholic stuff it was that we drank. There was no
telling where or how it had been manufactured--some native
concoction most likely. But it was hot as fire, pale as water,
and quick as death with its kick. It had been filled into empty
"square-face" bottles which had once contained Holland gin, and
which still bore the fitting legend "Anchor Brand." It certainly
anchored us. We never got out of the town. We never went fishing
in the sampan. And though we were there ten days, we never trod
that wild path along the lava cliffs and among the flowers.
We met old acquaintances from other schooners, fellows we had met
in the saloons of San Francisco before we sailed. And each
meeting meant a drink; and there was much to talk about; and more
drinks; and songs to be sung; and pranks and antics to be
performed, until the maggots of imagination began to crawl, and it
all seemed great and wonderful to me, these lusty hard-bitten sea-
rovers, of whom I made one, gathered in wassail on a coral strand.
Old lines about knights at table in the great banquet halls, and
of those above the salt and below the salt, and of Vikings
feasting fresh from sea and ripe for battle, came to me; and I
knew that the old times were not dead and that we belonged to that
selfsame ancient breed.
By mid-afternoon Victor went mad with drink, and wanted to fight
everybody and everything. I have since seen lunatics in the
violent wards of asylums that seemed to behave in no wise
different from Victor's way, save that perhaps he was more
violent. Axel and I interfered as peacemakers, were roughed and
jostled in the mix-ups, and finally, with infinite precaution and
intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our chum down to the
boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner.
But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to
clean up the ship. He had the strength of several men, and he ran
amuck with it. I remember especially one man whom he got into the
chain-boxes but failed to damage through inability to hit him.
The man dodged and ducked, and Victor broke all the knuckles of
both his fists against the huge links of the anchor chain. By the
time we dragged him out of that, his madness had shifted to the
belief that he was a great swimmer, and the next moment he was
overboard and demonstrating his ability by floundering like a sick
porpoise and swallowing much salt water.
We rescued him, and by the time we got him below, undressed, and
into his bunk, we were wrecks ourselves. But Axel and I wanted to
see more of shore, and away we went, leaving Victor snoring. It
was curious, the judgment passed on Victor by his shipmates,
drinkers themselves. They shook their heads disapprovingly and
muttered: "A man like that oughtn't to drink." Now Victor was the
smartest sailor and best-tempered shipmate in the forecastle. He
was an all-round splendid type of seaman; his mates recognised his
worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John Barleycorn
metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the very
point these drinkers made. They knew that drink--and drink with a
sailor is always excessive--made them mad, but only mildly mad.
Violent madness was objectionable because it spoiled the fun of
others and often culminated in tragedy. From their standpoint,
mild madness was all right. But from the standpoint of the whole
human race, is not all madness objectionable? And is there a
greater maker of madness of all sorts than John Barleycorn?
But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of
entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable
drink talked of the afternoon's happenings. We liked the
quietness of that drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in,
several shipmates dropped in, and we had more quiet drinks.
Finally, just as we had engaged a Japanese orchestra, and as the
first strains of the samisens and taikos were rising, through the
paper-walls came a wild howl from the street. We recognised it.
Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood-shot eyes and
wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the
fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted
blood, anybody's blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went
through doorways, and we went through paper-walls--anything to get
away.
And after the place was half wrecked, and we had agreed to pay the
damage, leaving Victor partly subdued and showing symptoms of
lapsing into a comatose state, Axel and I wandered away in quest
of a quieter drinking-place. The main street was a madness.
Hundreds of sailors rollicked up and down. Because the chief of
police with his small force was helpless, the governor of the
colony had issued orders to the captains to have all their men on
board by sunset.
What! To be treated in such fashion! As the news spread among the
schooners, they were emptied. Everybody came ashore. Men who had
had no intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The
unfortunate governor's ukase had precipitated a general debauch
for all hands. It was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to
see anybody try to put them on board. They went around inviting
the authorities to try to put them on board. In front of the
governor's house they were gathered thickest, bawling sea-songs,
circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels
and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood
in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was
too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It
was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was
license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-
rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper
houses of Japan.
The governor never issued the order to clear the streets, and Axel
and I wandered on from drink to drink. After a time, in some of
the antics, getting hazy myself, I lost him. I drifted along,
making new acquaintances, downing more drinks, getting hazier and
hazier. I remember, somewhere, sitting in a circle with Japanese
fishermen, Kanaka boat-steerers from our own vessels, and a young
Danish sailor fresh from cowboying in the Argentine and with a
penchant for native customs and ceremonials. And with due and
proper and most intricate Japanese ceremonial we of the circle
drank saki, pale, mild, and lukewarm, from tiny porcelain bowls.
And, later, I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen
and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their
ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and
drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were
healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young--youths
like me, learning the way of their feet in the world of men. And
they WERE men. No mild saki for them, but square faces illicitly
refilled with corrosive fire that flamed through their veins and
burst into conflagrations in their heads. I remember a melting
song they sang, the refrain of which was:
"'Tis but a little golden ring,
I give it to thee with pride,
Wear it for your mother's sake
When you are on the tide."
They wept over it as they sang it, the graceless young scamps who
had all broken their mothers' prides, and I sang with them, and
wept with them, and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of
it, and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on
life and romance. And one last picture I have, standing out very
clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness
afterward. We--the apprentices and I--are swaying and clinging to
one another under the stars. We are singing a rollicking sea
song, all save one who sits on the ground and weeps; and we are
marking the rhythm with waving square faces. From up and down the
street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing, and life
is great, and beautiful and romantic, and magnificently mad.
And next, after the blackness, I open my eyes in the early dawn to
see a Japanese woman, solicitously anxious, bending over me. She
is the port pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway. I am
chilled and shivering, sick with the after-sickness of debauch.
And I feel lightly clad. Those rascals of runaway apprentices!
They have acquired the habit of running away. They have run away
with my possessions. My watch is gone. My few dollars are gone.
My coat is gone. So is my belt. And yes, my shoes.
And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin
Islands. Victor got over his lunacy, rejoined Axel and me, and
after that we caroused somewhat more discreetly. And we never
climbed that lava path among the flowers. The town and the square
faces were all we saw.
One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire. I
might have seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the
Bonin Islands, if I had done what I ought to have done. But, as I
see it, it is not a matter of what one ought to do, or ought not
to do. It is what one DOES do. That is the everlasting,
irrefragable fact. I did just what I did. I did what all those
men did in the Bonin Islands. I did what millions of men over the
world were doing at that particular point in time. I did it
because the way led to it, because I was only a human boy, a
creature of my environment, and neither an anaemic nor a god. I
was just human, and I was taking the path in the world that men
took--men whom I admired, if you please; full-blooded men, lusty,
breedy, chesty men, free spirits and anything but niggards in the
way they foamed life away.
And the way was open. It was like an uncovered well in a yard
where children play. It is small use to tell the brave little
boys toddling their way along into knowledge of life that they
mustn't play near the uncovered well. They'll play near it. Any
parent knows that. And we know that a certain percentage of them,
the livest and most daring, will fall into the well. The thing to
do--we all know it--is to cover up the well. The case is the same
with John Barleycorn. All the no-saying and no-preaching in the
world will fail to keep men, and youths growing into manhood, away
from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere
accessible, and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the
connotation of manliness, and daring, and great-spiritedness.
The only rational thing for the twentieth-century folk to do is to
cover up the well; to make the twentieth century in truth the
twentieth century, and to relegate to the nineteenth century and
all the preceding centuries the things of those centuries, the
witch-burnings, the intolerances, the fetiches, and, not least
among such barbarisms. John Barleycorn.
North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd,
and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten
weather and into and through vast fogs which hid the sun from us
for a week at a time. It was wild and heavy work, without a drink
or thought of drink. Then we sailed south to Yokohama, with a big
catch of skins in our salt and a heavy pay-day coming.
I was eager to be ashore and see Japan, but the first day was
devoted to ship's work, and not until evening did we sailors land.
And here, by the very system of things, by the way life was
organised and men transacted affairs, John Barleycorn reached out
and tucked my arm in his. The captain had given money for us to
the hunters, and the hunters were waiting in a certain Japanese
public house for us to come and get it. We rode to the place in
rickshaws. Our own crowd had taken possession of it. Drink was
flowing. Everybody had money, and everybody was treating. After
the hundred days of hard toil and absolute abstinence, in the pink
of physical condition, bulging with health, over-spilling with
spirits that had long been pent by discipline and circumstance, of
course we would have a drink or two. And after that we would see
the town.
It was the old story. There were so many drinks to be drunk, and
as the warm magic poured through our veins and mellowed our voices
and affections we knew it was no time to make invidious
distinctions--to drink with this shipmate and to decline to drink
with that shipmate. We were all shipmates who had been through
stress and storm together, who had pulled and hauled on the same
sheets and tackles, relieved one another's wheels, laid out side
by side on the same jib-boom when she was plunging into it and
looked to see who was missing when she cleared and lifted. So we
drank with all, and all treated, and our voices rose, and we
remembered a myriad kindly acts of comradeship, and forgot our
fights and wordy squabbles, and knew one another for the best
fellows in the world.
Well, the night was young when we arrived in that public house,
and for all of that first night that public house was what I saw
of Japan--a drinking-place which was very like a drinking-place at
home or anywhere else over the world.
We lay in Yokohama harbour for two weeks, and about all we saw of
Japan was its drinking-places where sailors congregated.
Occasionally, some one of us varied the monotony with a more
exciting drunk. In such fashion I managed a real exploit by
swimming off to the schooner one dark midnight and going soundly
to sleep while the water-police searched the harbour for my body
and brought my clothes out for identification.
Perhaps it was for things like that, I imagined, that men got
drunk. In our little round of living what I had done was a
noteworthy event. All the harbour talked about it. I enjoyed
several days of fame among the Japanese boatmen and ashore in the
pubs. It was a red-letter event. It was an event to be
remembered and narrated with pride. I remember it to-day, twenty
years afterward, with a secret glow of pride. It was a purple
passage, just as Victor's wrecking of the tea-house in the Bonin
Islands and my being looted by the runaway apprentices were purple
passages.
The point is that the charm of John Barleycorn was still a mystery
to me. I was so organically a non-alcoholic that alcohol itself
made no appeal; the chemical reactions it produced in me were not
satisfying because I possessed no need for such chemical
satisfaction. I drank because the men I was with drank, and
because my nature was such that I could not permit myself to be
less of a man than other men at their favourite pastime. And I
still had a sweet tooth, and on privy occasions when there was no
man to see, bought candy and blissfully devoured it.
We hove up anchor to a jolly chanty, and sailed out of Yokohama
harbour for San Francisco. We took the northern passage, and with
the stout west wind at our back made the run across the Pacific in
thirty-seven days of brave sailing. We still had a big pay-day
coming to us, and for thirty-seven days, without a drink to addle
our mental processes, we incessantly planned the spending of our
money.
The first statement of each man--ever an ancient one in homeward-
bound forecastles--was: "No boarding-house sharks in mine." Next,
in parentheses, was regret at having spent so much money in
Yokohama. And after that, each man proceeded to paint his
favourite phantom. Victor, for instance, said that immediately he
landed in San Francisco he would pass right through the water-
front and the Barbary Coast, and put an advertisement in the
papers. His advertisement would be for board and room in some
simple working-class family. "Then," said Victor, "I shall go to
some dancing-school for a week or two, just to meet and get
acquainted with the girls and fellows. Then I'll get the run of
the different dancing crowds, and be invited to their homes, and
to parties, and all that, and with the money I've got I can last
out till next January, when I'll go sealing again."
No; he wasn't going to drink. He knew the way of it, particularly
his way of it, wine in, wit out, and his money would be gone in no
time. He had his choice, based on bitter experience, between
three days' debauch among the sharks and harpies of the Barbary
Coast and a whole winter of wholesome enjoyment and sociability,
and there wasn't any doubt of the way he was going to choose.
Said Axel Gunderson, who didn't care for dancing and social
functions: "I've got a good pay-day. Now I can go home. It is
fifteen years since I've seen my mother and all the family. When
I pay off, I shall send my money home to wait for me. Then I'll
pick a good ship bound for Europe, and arrive there with another
pay-day. Put them together, and I'll have more money than ever in
my life before. I'll be a prince at home. You haven't any idea
how cheap everything is in Norway. I can make presents to
everybody, and spend my money like what would seem to them a
millionaire, and live a whole year there before I'd have to go
back to sea."
"The very thing I'm going to do," declared Red John. "It's three
years since I've received a line from home and ten years since I
was there. Things are just as cheap in Sweden, Axel, as in
Norway, and my folks are real country folk and farmers. I'll send
my pay-day home and ship on the same ship with you for around the
Horn. We'll pick a good one."
And as Axel Gunderson and Red John painted the pastoral delights
and festive customs of their respective countries, each fell in
love with the other's home place, and they solemnly pledged to
make the journey together, and to spend, together, six months in
the one's Swedish home and six months in the other's Norwegian
home. And for the rest of the voyage they could hardly be pried
apart, so infatuated did they become with discussing their plans.
Long John was not a home-body. But he was tired of the
forecastle. No boarding-house sharks in his. He, too, would get
a room in a quiet family, and he would go to a navigation school
and study to be a captain. And so it went. Each man swore that
for once he would be sensible and not squander his money. No
boarding-house sharks, no sailor-town, no drink, was the slogan of
our forecastle.
The men became stingy. Never was there such economy. They
refused to buy anything more from the slopchest. Old rags had to
last, and they sewed patch upon patch, turning out what are called
"homeward-bound patches " of the most amazing proportions. They
saved on matches, even, waiting till two or three were ready to
light their pipes from the same match.
As we sailed up the San Francisco water-front, the moment the port
doctors passed us, the boarding-house runners were alongside in
whitehall boats. They swarmed on board, each drumming for his own
boarding-house, and each with a bottle of free whisky inside his
shirt. But we waved them grandly and blasphemously away. We
wanted none of their boarding-houses and none of their whisky. We
were sober, thrifty sailormen, with better use for our money.
Came the paying off before the shipping commissioner. We emerged
upon the sidewalk, each with a pocketful of money. About us, like
buzzards, clustered the sharks and harpies. And we looked at each
other. We had been seven months together, and our paths were
separating. One last farewell rite of comradeship remained. (Oh,
it was the way, the custom.) "Come on, boys," said our sailing
master. There stood the inevitable adjacent saloon. There were a
dozen saloons all around. And when we had followed the sailing
master into the one of his choice, the sharks were thick on the
sidewalk outside. Some of them even ventured inside, but we would
have nothing to do with them.
There we stood at the long bar--the sailing master, the mate, the
six hunters, the six boat-steerers, and the five boat-pullers.
There were only five of the last, for one of our number had been
dropped overboard, with a sack of coal at his feet, between two
snow squalls in a driving gale off Cape Jerimo. There were
nineteen of us, and it was to be our last drink together. With
seven months of men's work in the world, blow high, blow low,
behind us, we were looking on each other for the last time. We
knew it, for sailors' ways go wide. And the nineteen of us, drank
the sailing master's treat. Then the mate looked at us with
eloquent eyes and called another round. We liked the mate just as
well as the sailing master, and we liked them both. Could we
drink with one, and not the other?
And Pete Holt, my own hunter (lost next year in the Mary Thomas,
with all hands), called a round. The time passed, the drinks
continued to come on the bar, our voices rose, and the maggots
began to crawl. There were six hunters, and each insisted, in the
sacred name of comradeship, that all hands drink with him just
once. There were six boat-steerers and five boat-pullers and the
same logic held with them. There was money in all our pockets,
and our money was as good as any man's, and our hearts were as
free and generous.
Nineteen rounds of drinks. What more would John Barleycorn ask in
order to have his will with men? They were ripe to forget their
dearly cherished plans. They rolled out of the saloon and into
the arms of the sharks and harpies. They didn't last long. From
two days to a week saw the end of their money and saw them being
carted by the boarding-house masters on board outward-bound ships.
Victor was a fine body of a man, and through a lucky friendship
managed to get into the life-saving service. He never saw the
dancing-school nor placed his advertisement for a room in a
working-class family. Nor did Long John win to navigation school.
By the end of the week he was a transient lumper on a river
steamboat. Red John and Axel did not send their pay-days home to
the old country. Instead, and along with the rest, they were
scattered on board sailing ships bound for the four quarters of
the globe, where they had been placed by the boarding-house
masters, and where they were working out advance money which they
had neither seen nor spent.
What saved me was that I had a home and people to go to. I
crossed the bay to Oakland, and, among other things, took a look
at the death-road. Nelson was gone--shot to death while drunk and
resisting the officers. His partner in that affair was lying in
prison. Whisky Bob was gone. Old Cole, Old Smoudge, and Bob
Smith were gone. Another Smith, he of the belted guns and the
Annie, was drowned. French Frank, they said, was lurking up
river, afraid to come down because of something he had done.
Others were wearing the stripes in San Quentin or Folsom. Big
Alec, the King of the Greeks, whom I had known well in the old
Benicia days, and with whom I had drunk whole nights through, had
killed two men and fled to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom
I had sailed on the Fish Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung
through the back and had died a lingering death complicated with
tuberculosis. And so it went, a very lively and well-patronised
road, and, from what I knew of all of them, John Barleycorn was
responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the Annie.
My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I
didn't like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn't care for the
drinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the
Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater
understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oats
and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the family
needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hour
day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in
the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise
of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And
here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of
innocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from month
end to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and with
labour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I needed
diversion, excitement, something beyond the books and the
mechanical toil.
I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there
was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too
late. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I
had bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I
was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men
I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possessed
a sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over,
I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, the
Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated.
This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped me
mentally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Their
meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced
their wholesome morality and healthful sports.
In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All
the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--
thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too
much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is
eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be
the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more
virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go
to saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime,
we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now.
I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum
machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other
ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had
my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I
was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.
And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we
became chums.
Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently
devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a
sophisticated town boy. And I wasn't a town boy at all. Louis
was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls.
With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn't
know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This
was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And
when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of
his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the
sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play
this game.
"Well, there's only one thing to do," said Louis, "and that is,
you must get a girl."
Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the
expense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in
their home life. He had the entree to no girl's home. And of
course, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarly
circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go to
dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good places
for getting acquainted. We didn't have the money. He was a
blacksmith's apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I.
We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this,
and bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes,
there remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum that
varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We
whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was
left of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-
adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair's Park and back--twenty
cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two--thirty cents;
or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which for
two cost only twenty cents.
I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned
for money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn't
care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my
philosophy I completed the circle, finding myself as equable with
the lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of
scores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar
to drink with me.
But how to get a girl? There was no girl's home to which Louis
could take me and where I might be introduced to girls. I knew
none. And Louis' several girls he wanted for himself; and anyway,
in the very human nature of boys' and girls' ways, he couldn't
turn any of them over to me. He did persuade them to bring girl-
friends for me; but I found them weak sisters, pale and
ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.
"You'll have to do like I did," he said finally. "I got these by
getting them. You'll have to get one the same way."
And he initiated me. It must be remembered that Louis and I were
hard situated. We really had to struggle to pay our board and
maintain a decent appearance. We met each other in the evening,
after the day's work, on the street corner, or in a little candy
store on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here we
bought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel's worth of
"red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy--all we
could get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into a
saloon.)
But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I
was to select her and make myself acquainted with her. We
strolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us,
strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strolling