Страница:
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- Следующая »
- Последняя >>
(1913)
It all came to me one election day. It was on a warm California
afternoon, and I had ridden down into the Valley of the Moon from
the ranch to the little village to vote Yes and No to a host of
proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of
California. Because of the warmth of the day I had had several
drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting
it. Then I had ridden up through the vine-clad hills and rolling
pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farm-house in time for
another drink and supper.
"How did you vote on the suffrage amendment?" Charmian asked.
"I voted for it."
She uttered an exclamation of surprise. For, be it known, in my
younger days, despite my ardent democracy, I had been opposed to
woman suffrage. In my later and more tolerant years I had been
unenthusiastic in my acceptance of it as an inevitable social
phenomenon.
"Now just why did you vote for it?" Charmian asked.
I answered. I answered at length. I answered indignantly. The
more I answered, the more indignant I became. (No; I was not
drunk. The horse I had ridden was well named "The Outlaw." I'd
like to see any drunken man ride her.)
And yet--how shall I say?--I was lighted up, I was feeling "good,"
I was pleasantly jingled.
"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition," I
said. "It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only,
who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn----"
"But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn," Charmian
interpolated.
"I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend
than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is
the king of liars. He is the frankest truthsayer. He is the
august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in
league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and
to death. He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams. He is the
enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life's wisdom. He
is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth."
And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got
it.
I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain
every thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell,
crouched ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight a
jail-break. And every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-
cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear, white
light of alcohol. John Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage,
giving away the choicest secrets on himself. And I was his
spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past
life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It
was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master
of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly
capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so
John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of
intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth,
flinging purple passages into the monotony of one's days.
I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my
constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born
with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this
matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired
taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a
dreadfully repugnant thing--more nauseous than any physic. Even
now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its
"kick." And from the age of five to that of twenty-five I had not
learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of unwilling
apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously
tolerant of alcohol, to make me, in the heart and the deeps of me,
desirous of alcohol.
I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first
intoxications and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing
that in the end had won me over--namely, the accessibility of
alcohol. Not only had it always been accessible, but every
interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. A newsboy on
the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in far lands, always
where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and
dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and
days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the
place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men
gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the
mouth of the cave.
I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been
barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals
escaped from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves,
the sacred precincts taboo to women under pain of death. As a
youth, by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of
woman's influence into the wide free world of men. All ways led
to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew
together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world.
"The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the
accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol.
I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at
the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty
years to implant that desire; and for ten years more that desire
has grown. And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything
but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry. Yet
when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of
intellectual pessimism.
"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John
Barleycorn must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is
the curse of it. The so-called truths of life are not true. They
are the vital lies by which life lives, and John Barleycorn gives
them the lie."
"Which does not make toward life," Charmian said.
"Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it.
John Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the
amendment to-day. I read back in my life and saw how the
accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it. You see,
comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by
alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives
him resistlessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers
are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual
repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the
hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they
learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to
learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because
alcohol was so accessible. The women know the game. They pay for
it--the wives and sisters and mothers. And when they come to
vote, they will vote for prohibition. And the best of it is that
there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation. Not
having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward alcohol, it
will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more abundant for the
manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay, and life more
abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the
lives of the young men."
"Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women
coming?" Charmian asked. "Why not write it so as to help the
wives and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote?"
"The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'" I sneered--or, rather, John
Barleycorn sneered; for he sat with me there at table in my
pleasant, philanthropic jingle, and it is a trick of John
Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer without an instant's
warning.
"No," said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so
many women have learned to do. "You have shown yourself no
alcoholic, no dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who
has made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of
rubbing shoulders with him. Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic
Memoirs.'"
And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all
sympathy; and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by
understanding me and whom and what I write about. In the first
place, I am a seasoned drinker. I have no constitutional
predisposition for alcohol. I am not stupid. I am not a swine.
I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I have used my judgment
in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor do I stagger.
In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the normal,
average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I
have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant
excessivist, the dipsomaniac.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the
man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten
numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread,
tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in
the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is
the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never
staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is
doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may
bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see
intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and
that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition
that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and
gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the
neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a
terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs
unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for
himself but one freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day of
his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of
which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of
things--the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour.
His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the
grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after
immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of
death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination.
They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die
when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into
believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving
the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating
heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white
logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not
even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he
knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He
is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-
dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at
by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into
the scrap-heap at the end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the
penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John
Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler,
easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He
sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and
inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends
the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks
upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a
pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions.
He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and
life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of
a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--in
the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and
shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their
frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.
No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms,
like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-
dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of
chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one
difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he
may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for
a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide,
quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the
years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever
escapes making the just, due payment.
I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot
day, and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from
the house, half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And
be sure you don't spill it," was the parting injunction.
It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top,
and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over
the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a
very precious thing. Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully
good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house?
Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then
this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And,
anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs
and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would
know whether I had drunk or spilled it.
I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down
and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was
disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not
reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I
remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they
drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid
beneath. It wasn't good at all. But still I drank. The grown-
ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the
size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it my breath
held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather
difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it
down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.
I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste
would come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of
that long half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that
was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made to foam
afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to
the brim.
And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide
thirst of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started
up the plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I
remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the
shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so
violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me
afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped
disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me in
his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the
world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea
mingled with an appalling conviction of sin.
I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father
roused me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and
dragged wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the
weight of my limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating
that extended to my throat and brain. My condition was like that
of one who had gone through a battle with poison. In truth, I had
been poisoned.
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in
beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-
ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't
mind it; but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil.
As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer.
Yes, and to the day of my death I could have managed to get along
quite well without it. But circumstance decreed otherwise. At
every turn in the world in which I lived, John Barleycorn
beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him. And
it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings and
passing on with my tongue in my cheek, to develop in me a sneaking
liking for the rascal.
My next bout with John Barleycorn occurred when I was seven. This
time my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the
encounter. Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the
bleak sad coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It
was a wild, primitive countryside in those days; and often I heard
my mother pride herself that we were old American stock and not
immigrant Irish and Italians like our neighbours. In all our
section there was only one other old American family.
One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember, at
the Morrisey ranch. A number of young people had gathered there
from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there,
drinking since early dawn, and, some of them, since the night
before. The Morriseys were a huge breed, and there were many
strapping great sons and uncles, heavy-booted, big-fisted, rough-
voiced.
Suddenly there were screams from the girls and cries of "Fight!"
There was a rush. Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two
giants, flush-faced, with greying hair, were locked in each
other's arms. One was Black Matt, who, everybody said, had killed
two men in his time. The women screamed softly, crossed
themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding their eyes and peeping
through their fingers. But not I. It is a fair presumption that
I was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see that
wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight.
Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely
held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what
seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to
fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to
cement the new friendship in the kitchen.
Soon they were all talking at once, rumbling and roaring as big-
chested open-air men will, when whisky has whipped their
taciturnity. And I, a little shaver of seven, my heart in my
mouth, my trembling body strung tense as a deer's on the verge of
flight, peered wonderingly in at the open door and learned more of
the strangeness of men. And I marvelled at Black Matt and Tom
Morrisey, sprawled over the table, arms about each other's necks,
weeping lovingly.
The kitchen-drinking continued, and the girls outside grew
timorous. They knew the drink game, and all were certain that
something terrible was going to happen. They protested that they
did not wish to be there when it happened, and some one suggested
going to a big Italian rancho four miles away, where they could
get up a dance. Immediately they paired off, lad and lassie, and
started down the sandy road. And each lad walked with his
sweetheart--trust a child of seven to listen and to know the love-
affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a lad with a
lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been paired off
with me. We were the only children in this spontaneous affair.
Perhaps the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were
chits of girls, quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen, walking
with their fellows. But we were uniquely young, this little Irish
girl and I, and we walked hand in hand, and, sometimes, under the
tutelage of our elders, with my arm around her waist. Only that
wasn't comfortable. And I was very proud, on that bright Sunday
morning, going down the long bleak road among the sandhills. I,
too, had my girl, and was a little man.
The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was
hailed with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all,
and the long dining-room was partly cleared for dancing. And the
young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an
accordion. To me that music was divine. I had never heard
anything so glorious. The young Italian who furnished it would
even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the
accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for
me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed
at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there
was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed, the
Irish lads began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and
high spirits reigned. I noted that some of them staggered and
fell down in the dances, and that one had gone to sleep in a
corner. Also, some of the girls were complaining, and wanting to
leave, and others of the girls were titteringly complacent,
willing for anything to happen.
When our Italian hosts had offered me wine in a general sort of
way, I had declined. My beer experience had been enough for me,
and I had no inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in
anything related to it. Unfortunately, one young Italian, Peter,
an impish soul, seeing me sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of
the moment, half-filled a tumbler with wine and passed it to me.
He was sitting across the table from me. I declined. His face
grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine. And then
terror descended upon me--a terror which I must explain.
My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that
brunettes and all the tribe of dark-eyed humans were deceitful.
Needless to say, my mother was a blonde. Next, she was convinced
that the dark-eyed Latin races were profoundly sensitive,
profoundly treacherous, and profoundly murderous. Again and
again, drinking in the strangeness and the fearsomeness of the
world from her lips, I had heard her state that if one offended an
Italian, no matter how slightly and unintentionally, he was
certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back. That was her
particular phrase--"stab you in the back."
Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrisey
that morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the
spectacle of a knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned
to distinguish between facts and theories. My faith was implicit
in my mother's exposition of the Italian character. Besides, I
had some glimmering inkling of the sacredness of hospitality.
Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous Italian, offering me
hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I offended him
he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse kicked out
when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then, too,
this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my
mother talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew,
from the blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the
pale and genial blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few
drinks. At any rate, his eyes were brilliantly black and
sparkling with devilry. They were the mysterious, the unknown,
and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyse them and know their
prankishness? In them I visioned sudden death, and I declined the
wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes changed. They
grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of wine closer.
What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but
never have I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the
glass to my lips, and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not
kill me just then. That was a relief. But the wine was not. It
was cheap, new wine, bitter and sour, made of the leavings and
scrapings of the vineyards and the vats, and it tasted far worse
than beer. There is only one way to take medicine, and that is to
take it. And that is the way I took that wine. I threw my head
back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold the poison
down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and membranes.
Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He
half-filled a second tumbler and shoved it across the table.
Frozen with fear, in despair at the fate which had befallen me, I
gulped the second glass down like the first. This was too much
for Peter. He must share the infant prodigy he had discovered.
He called Dominick, a young moustached Italian, to see the sight.
This time it was a full tumbler that was given me. One will do
anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the qualms that rose
in my throat, and downed the stuff.
Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice
again he refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched
it disappear down my throat. By this time my exploits were
attracting attention. Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country
peasants who did not talk English, and who could not dance with
the Irish girls, surrounded me. They were swarthy and wild-
looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I knew they carried
knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus. And Peter
and Dominick made me show off for them.
Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly
mulish in having my own way, I should never have got in this
pickle. And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no
one to save me from my fate. How much I drank I do not know. My
memory of it is of an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a
murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine
passing across the bare boards of a wine-drenched table and going
down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back
was worse, and I must survive at any cost.
Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did
not collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was
frozen, I was paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was
to convey that never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I
was a poised and motionless receptacle for all that quantity of
wine. It lay inert in my fear-inert stomach. I was too
frightened, even, for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian
crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon that downed
wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It is not in the spirit
of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything
like it.
The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a
majority of the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I
found myself, at the door, beside my little maiden. She had not
had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the
titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and
began to mimic them. I thought this a great game, and I, too,
began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir up, while
my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at the
start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was
astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen
steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch,
and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me
this was excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the
ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in
the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced
girls.
I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more
fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide-open
mouth I panted for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side,
but my legs were leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my
heart and brain like a club. Had I been a weakling of a child, I
am confident that it would have killed me. As it was, I know I
was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could
hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was;
some were weeping--for themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful
way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I was
suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me
pant harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it
was four miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw
a small bridge across the road an infinite distance away. In
fact, it was not a hundred feet distant. When I reached it, I
sank down and lay on my back panting. The girls tried to lift me,
but I was helpless and suffocating. Their cries of alarm brought
Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded to resuscitate
me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the
squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him
away. And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that
Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there.
When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for
four miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite
the terrible strain on my heart and tissues, I continually
relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the
terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out. The most
frightful visions were realities to me. I saw murders committed,
and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and raved and fought.
My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such delirium, I
would hear my mother's voice: "But the child's brain. He will
lose his reason." And sinking back into delirium, I would take the
idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by
keepers, and surrounded by screeching lunatics.
One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk
of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's
Chinatown. In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground
through a thousand of these dens, and behind locked doors of iron
I suffered and died a thousand deaths. And when I would come upon
my father, seated at table in these subterranean crypts, gambling
with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all my outrage gave vent in
the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed, struggling against the
detaining hands, and curse my father till the rafters rang. All
the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive
countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never
dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my
lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and
gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.
It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night.
A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely
fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one
slept in the thin, frame farm-house that night when John
Barleycorn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had
no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was
stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to
heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day he does not
remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But my
brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every
pain as vital and terrible, as on that night.
I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had
been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very
wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how
was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very
words with which to express my psychology--how was I to tell my
mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for
my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes
and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the
sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.
In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points,
and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with
a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done
wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor
again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of
alcohol.
Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it
was, could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the
forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my
mother, ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-
ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke,
something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached.
Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in
the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest
and slept under the bridge, how So-and-So had slept out in the
sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who
fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I could see, there was no
shame anywhere. It had been something ticklishly, devilishly
fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and
labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast.
The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and
patted me on the back until I felt that I had done something
heroic. Peter and Dominick and the other Italians were proud of
my drinking prowess. The face of morality was not set against
drinking. Besides, everybody drank. There was not a teetotaler
in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school,
a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he
wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus there was no
spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely
physiological. I didn't like the damned stuff.
This physical loathing for alcohol I have never got over. But I
have conquered it. To this day I conquer it every time I take a
drink. The palate never ceases to rebel, and the palate can be
trusted to know what is good for the body. But men do not drink
for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for
is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much
the worse for the body.
And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest
spots in my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy
potato wagons, wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the
horses plodding slowly along the deep road through the sandhills,
one bright vision made the way never too long. The bright vision
was the saloon at Colma, where my father, or whoever drove, always
got out to get a drink. And I got out to warm by the great stove
and get a soda cracker. Just one soda cracker, but a fabulous
luxury. Saloons were good for something. Back behind the
plodding horses, I would take an hour in consuming that one
cracker. I took the smallest nibbles, never losing a crumb, and
chewed the nibble till it became the thinnest and most delectable
of pastes. I never voluntarily swallowed this paste. I just
tasted it, and went on tasting it, turning it over with my tongue,
spreading it on the inside of this cheek, then on the inside of
the other cheek, until, at the end, it eluded me and in tiny drops
and oozelets, slipped and dribbled down my throat. Horace
Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers.
I liked saloons. Especially I liked the San Francisco saloons.
They had the most delicious dainties for the taking--strange
breads and crackers, cheeses, sausages, sardines--wonderful foods
that I never saw on our meagre home-table. And once, I remember,
a barkeeper mixed me a sweet temperance drink of syrup and soda-
water. My father did not pay for it. It was the barkeeper's
treat, and he became my ideal of a good, kind man. I dreamed day-
dreams of him for years. Although I was seven years old at the
time, I can see him now with undiminished clearness, though I
never laid eyes on him but that one time. The saloon was south of
Market Street in San Francisco. It stood on the west side of the
street. As you entered, the bar was on the left. On the right,
against the wall, was the free lunch counter. It was a long,
narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were
small, round tables and chairs. The barkeeper was blue-eyed, and
had fair, silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skull-
cap. I remember he wore a brown Cardigan jacket, and I know
precisely the spot, in the midst of the array of bottles, from
which he took the bottle of red-coloured syrup. He and my father
talked long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshipped him. And
for years afterward I worshipped the memory of him.
Despite my two disastrous experiences, here was John Barleycorn,
prevalent and accessible everywhere in the community, luring and
drawing me. Here were connotations of the saloon making deep
indentations in a child's mind. Here was a child, forming its
first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and
desirable place. Stores, nor public buildings, nor all the
dwellings of men ever opened their doors to me and let me warm by
their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from
narrow shelves against the wall. Their doors were ever closed to
me; the saloon's doors were ever open. And always and everywhere
I found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on
busy thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter,
and in summer dark and cool. Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine
place, and it was more than that.
By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching
and gone to live in the city. And here, at ten, I began on the
streets as a newsboy. One of the reasons for this was that we
needed the money. Another reason was that I needed the exercise.
I had found my way to the free public library, and was reading
myself into nervous prostration. On the poor ranches on which I
had lived there had been no books. In ways truly miraculous, I
had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them I had
devoured. One was the life of Garfield; the second, Paul du
Chaillu's African travels; the third, a novel by Ouida with the
last forty pages missing; and the fourth, Irving's "Alhambra."
This last had been lent me by a school-teacher. I was not a
forward child. Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for
more. When I returned the "Alhambra" to the teacher I hoped she
would lend me another book. And because she did not--most likely
she deemed me unappreciative--I cried all the way home on the
three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch. I waited and
yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I nerved
myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached
the necessary pitch of effrontery.
And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free
library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. Here
were thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books, and some
were even better. Libraries were not concerned with children in
those days, and I had strange adventures. I remember, in the
catalogue, being impressed by the title, "The Adventures of
Peregrine Pickle." I filled an application blank and the librarian
handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of
Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally
history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I
read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at
table, I read as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess
while the other boys were playing. I began to get the "jerks." To
everybody I replied: "Go away. You make me nervous."
And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy. I had no
time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to
fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an
imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic.
Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon.
And I was in and out of many a one. I remember, in those days, on
the east side of Broadway, between Sixth and Seventh, from corner
to corner, there was a solid block of saloons.
In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices,
laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than common every-day where nothing
happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even
lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big
policemen came shouldering in. Great moments, these, for me, my
head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant
adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I
trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in
the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables
or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.
And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned
them and licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard
boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they
might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful,
and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know. In
the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible;
and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to
participate in such affairs?
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges,
whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social
approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of
fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that
something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and
groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be,
for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot. I had
no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess
that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and
stale grief.
Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely
tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and
drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I
didn't like the stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper
on an ice-wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon
attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds.
Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening
paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and
tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie
Harper's bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to
refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when
she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper.
The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper,
according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we
had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for
beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I
noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching
scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the
boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of
ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam
beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink
beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There
was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out
of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so
good. I was always aware that I was missing something.
What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I
could buy five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious
lastingness. I could chew and worry a single one for an hour.
Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy
for five cents each. It required a quarter of a day properly to
absorb one of them. And many a day I made my entire lunch off one
of those slabs. In truth, I found food there, but not in beer.
But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my
second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen,
my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with
tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard
skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I
wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the
commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a-thrill with
romance and adventure, dreaming of wild life in the wild man-
world. Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-
world was entangled with alcohol.
So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was
a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me,
from an English ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on
another ship to San Francisco; and now he wanted to see about
getting a berth on a whaler. Across the estuary, near where the
whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht Idler. The caretaker was a
harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship
Bonanza. Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to call upon
the harpooner?
Would I! Hadn't I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?--
the big sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it
had been engaged in smuggling opium. And the harpooner who was
caretaker! How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom.
He never had to leave the water. He slept aboard the Idler each
night, while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed. The
It all came to me one election day. It was on a warm California
afternoon, and I had ridden down into the Valley of the Moon from
the ranch to the little village to vote Yes and No to a host of
proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of
California. Because of the warmth of the day I had had several
drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting
it. Then I had ridden up through the vine-clad hills and rolling
pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farm-house in time for
another drink and supper.
"How did you vote on the suffrage amendment?" Charmian asked.
"I voted for it."
She uttered an exclamation of surprise. For, be it known, in my
younger days, despite my ardent democracy, I had been opposed to
woman suffrage. In my later and more tolerant years I had been
unenthusiastic in my acceptance of it as an inevitable social
phenomenon.
"Now just why did you vote for it?" Charmian asked.
I answered. I answered at length. I answered indignantly. The
more I answered, the more indignant I became. (No; I was not
drunk. The horse I had ridden was well named "The Outlaw." I'd
like to see any drunken man ride her.)
And yet--how shall I say?--I was lighted up, I was feeling "good,"
I was pleasantly jingled.
"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition," I
said. "It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only,
who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn----"
"But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn," Charmian
interpolated.
"I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend
than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is
the king of liars. He is the frankest truthsayer. He is the
august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in
league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and
to death. He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams. He is the
enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life's wisdom. He
is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth."
And Charmian looked at me, and I knew she wondered where I had got
it.
I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain
every thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell,
crouched ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight a
jail-break. And every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-
cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear, white
light of alcohol. John Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage,
giving away the choicest secrets on himself. And I was his
spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past
life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It
was mine to pick and choose. I was a lord of thought, the master
of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly
capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so
John Barleycorn tricks and lures, setting the maggots of
intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth,
flinging purple passages into the monotony of one's days.
I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my
constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born
with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this
matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired
taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a
dreadfully repugnant thing--more nauseous than any physic. Even
now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its
"kick." And from the age of five to that of twenty-five I had not
learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of unwilling
apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously
tolerant of alcohol, to make me, in the heart and the deeps of me,
desirous of alcohol.
I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first
intoxications and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing
that in the end had won me over--namely, the accessibility of
alcohol. Not only had it always been accessible, but every
interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. A newsboy on
the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in far lands, always
where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and
dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and
days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the
place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men
gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the
mouth of the cave.
I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been
barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals
escaped from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves,
the sacred precincts taboo to women under pain of death. As a
youth, by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of
woman's influence into the wide free world of men. All ways led
to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew
together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world.
"The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the
accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol.
I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at
the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty
years to implant that desire; and for ten years more that desire
has grown. And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything
but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry. Yet
when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of
intellectual pessimism.
"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John
Barleycorn must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is
the curse of it. The so-called truths of life are not true. They
are the vital lies by which life lives, and John Barleycorn gives
them the lie."
"Which does not make toward life," Charmian said.
"Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it.
John Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the
amendment to-day. I read back in my life and saw how the
accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it. You see,
comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by
alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives
him resistlessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers
are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual
repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the
hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they
learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to
learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because
alcohol was so accessible. The women know the game. They pay for
it--the wives and sisters and mothers. And when they come to
vote, they will vote for prohibition. And the best of it is that
there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation. Not
having access to alcohol, not being predisposed toward alcohol, it
will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more abundant for the
manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay, and life more
abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the
lives of the young men."
"Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women
coming?" Charmian asked. "Why not write it so as to help the
wives and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote?"
"The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'" I sneered--or, rather, John
Barleycorn sneered; for he sat with me there at table in my
pleasant, philanthropic jingle, and it is a trick of John
Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer without an instant's
warning.
"No," said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so
many women have learned to do. "You have shown yourself no
alcoholic, no dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who
has made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of
rubbing shoulders with him. Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic
Memoirs.'"
And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all
sympathy; and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by
understanding me and whom and what I write about. In the first
place, I am a seasoned drinker. I have no constitutional
predisposition for alcohol. I am not stupid. I am not a swine.
I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I have used my judgment
in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor do I stagger.
In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the normal,
average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I
have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant
excessivist, the dipsomaniac.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the
man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten
numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread,
tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in
the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is
the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never
staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is
doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may
bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see
intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and
that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition
that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and
gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the
neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a
terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs
unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for
himself but one freedom--namely, the anticipating of the day of
his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of
which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of
things--the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour.
His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the
grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after
immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of
death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination.
They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die
when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into
believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving
the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating
heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white
logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not
even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls--immortality. But he
knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He
is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-
dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at
by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into
the scrap-heap at the end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the
penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John
Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler,
easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He
sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and
inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends
the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks
upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a
pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions.
He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and
life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of
a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends--in
the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and
shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their
frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.
No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms,
like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-
dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of
chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one
difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he
may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for
a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide,
quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the
years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever
escapes making the just, due payment.
I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot
day, and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from
the house, half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. "And
be sure you don't spill it," was the parting injunction.
It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top,
and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over
the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a
very precious thing. Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully
good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house?
Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then
this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And,
anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs
and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would
know whether I had drunk or spilled it.
I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down
and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was
disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not
reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I
remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they
drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid
beneath. It wasn't good at all. But still I drank. The grown-
ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the
size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it my breath
held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather
difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it
down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.
I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste
would come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of
that long half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that
was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made to foam
afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to
the brim.
And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide
thirst of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started
up the plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I
remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the
shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so
violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me
afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped
disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me in
his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the
world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea
mingled with an appalling conviction of sin.
I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father
roused me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and
dragged wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the
weight of my limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating
that extended to my throat and brain. My condition was like that
of one who had gone through a battle with poison. In truth, I had
been poisoned.
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in
beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-
ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn't
mind it; but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil.
As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer.
Yes, and to the day of my death I could have managed to get along
quite well without it. But circumstance decreed otherwise. At
every turn in the world in which I lived, John Barleycorn
beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him. And
it took twenty years of contact, of exchanging greetings and
passing on with my tongue in my cheek, to develop in me a sneaking
liking for the rascal.
My next bout with John Barleycorn occurred when I was seven. This
time my imagination was at fault, and I was frightened into the
encounter. Still farming, my family had moved to a ranch on the
bleak sad coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. It
was a wild, primitive countryside in those days; and often I heard
my mother pride herself that we were old American stock and not
immigrant Irish and Italians like our neighbours. In all our
section there was only one other old American family.
One Sunday morning found me, how or why I cannot now remember, at
the Morrisey ranch. A number of young people had gathered there
from the nearer ranches. Besides, the oldsters had been there,
drinking since early dawn, and, some of them, since the night
before. The Morriseys were a huge breed, and there were many
strapping great sons and uncles, heavy-booted, big-fisted, rough-
voiced.
Suddenly there were screams from the girls and cries of "Fight!"
There was a rush. Men hurled themselves out of the kitchen. Two
giants, flush-faced, with greying hair, were locked in each
other's arms. One was Black Matt, who, everybody said, had killed
two men in his time. The women screamed softly, crossed
themselves, or prayed brokenly, hiding their eyes and peeping
through their fingers. But not I. It is a fair presumption that
I was the most interested spectator. Maybe I would see that
wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight.
Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely
held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what
seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to
fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to
cement the new friendship in the kitchen.
Soon they were all talking at once, rumbling and roaring as big-
chested open-air men will, when whisky has whipped their
taciturnity. And I, a little shaver of seven, my heart in my
mouth, my trembling body strung tense as a deer's on the verge of
flight, peered wonderingly in at the open door and learned more of
the strangeness of men. And I marvelled at Black Matt and Tom
Morrisey, sprawled over the table, arms about each other's necks,
weeping lovingly.
The kitchen-drinking continued, and the girls outside grew
timorous. They knew the drink game, and all were certain that
something terrible was going to happen. They protested that they
did not wish to be there when it happened, and some one suggested
going to a big Italian rancho four miles away, where they could
get up a dance. Immediately they paired off, lad and lassie, and
started down the sandy road. And each lad walked with his
sweetheart--trust a child of seven to listen and to know the love-
affairs of his countryside. And behold, I, too, was a lad with a
lassie. A little Irish girl of my own age had been paired off
with me. We were the only children in this spontaneous affair.
Perhaps the oldest couple might have been twenty. There were
chits of girls, quite grown up, of fourteen and sixteen, walking
with their fellows. But we were uniquely young, this little Irish
girl and I, and we walked hand in hand, and, sometimes, under the
tutelage of our elders, with my arm around her waist. Only that
wasn't comfortable. And I was very proud, on that bright Sunday
morning, going down the long bleak road among the sandhills. I,
too, had my girl, and was a little man.
The Italian rancho was a bachelor establishment. Our visit was
hailed with delight. The red wine was poured in tumblers for all,
and the long dining-room was partly cleared for dancing. And the
young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an
accordion. To me that music was divine. I had never heard
anything so glorious. The young Italian who furnished it would
even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the
accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for
me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed
at the amazingness of life. I was only a little lad, and there
was so much of life for me to learn. As the time passed, the
Irish lads began helping themselves to the wine, and jollity and
high spirits reigned. I noted that some of them staggered and
fell down in the dances, and that one had gone to sleep in a
corner. Also, some of the girls were complaining, and wanting to
leave, and others of the girls were titteringly complacent,
willing for anything to happen.
When our Italian hosts had offered me wine in a general sort of
way, I had declined. My beer experience had been enough for me,
and I had no inclination to traffic further in the stuff, or in
anything related to it. Unfortunately, one young Italian, Peter,
an impish soul, seeing me sitting solitary, stirred by a whim of
the moment, half-filled a tumbler with wine and passed it to me.
He was sitting across the table from me. I declined. His face
grew stern, and he insistently proffered the wine. And then
terror descended upon me--a terror which I must explain.
My mother had theories. First, she steadfastly maintained that
brunettes and all the tribe of dark-eyed humans were deceitful.
Needless to say, my mother was a blonde. Next, she was convinced
that the dark-eyed Latin races were profoundly sensitive,
profoundly treacherous, and profoundly murderous. Again and
again, drinking in the strangeness and the fearsomeness of the
world from her lips, I had heard her state that if one offended an
Italian, no matter how slightly and unintentionally, he was
certain to retaliate by stabbing one in the back. That was her
particular phrase--"stab you in the back."
Now, although I had been eager to see Black Matt kill Tom Morrisey
that morning, I did not care to furnish to the dancers the
spectacle of a knife sticking in my back. I had not yet learned
to distinguish between facts and theories. My faith was implicit
in my mother's exposition of the Italian character. Besides, I
had some glimmering inkling of the sacredness of hospitality.
Here was a treacherous, sensitive, murderous Italian, offering me
hospitality. I had been taught to believe that if I offended him
he would strike at me with a knife precisely as a horse kicked out
when one got too close to its heels and worried it. Then, too,
this Italian, Peter, had those terrible black eyes I had heard my
mother talk about. They were eyes different from the eyes I knew,
from the blues and greys and hazels of my own family, from the
pale and genial blues of the Irish. Perhaps Peter had had a few
drinks. At any rate, his eyes were brilliantly black and
sparkling with devilry. They were the mysterious, the unknown,
and who was I, a seven-year-old, to analyse them and know their
prankishness? In them I visioned sudden death, and I declined the
wine half-heartedly. The expression in his eyes changed. They
grew stern and imperious as he shoved the tumbler of wine closer.
What could I do? I have faced real death since in my life, but
never have I known the fear of death as I knew it then. I put the
glass to my lips, and Peter's eyes relented. I knew he would not
kill me just then. That was a relief. But the wine was not. It
was cheap, new wine, bitter and sour, made of the leavings and
scrapings of the vineyards and the vats, and it tasted far worse
than beer. There is only one way to take medicine, and that is to
take it. And that is the way I took that wine. I threw my head
back and gulped it down. I had to gulp again and hold the poison
down, for poison it was to my child's tissues and membranes.
Looking back now, I can realise that Peter was astounded. He
half-filled a second tumbler and shoved it across the table.
Frozen with fear, in despair at the fate which had befallen me, I
gulped the second glass down like the first. This was too much
for Peter. He must share the infant prodigy he had discovered.
He called Dominick, a young moustached Italian, to see the sight.
This time it was a full tumbler that was given me. One will do
anything to live. I gripped myself, mastered the qualms that rose
in my throat, and downed the stuff.
Dominick had never seen an infant of such heroic calibre. Twice
again he refilled the tumbler, each time to the brim, and watched
it disappear down my throat. By this time my exploits were
attracting attention. Middle-aged Italian labourers, old-country
peasants who did not talk English, and who could not dance with
the Irish girls, surrounded me. They were swarthy and wild-
looking; they wore belts and red shirts; and I knew they carried
knives; and they ringed me around like a pirate chorus. And Peter
and Dominick made me show off for them.
Had I lacked imagination, had I been stupid, had I been stubbornly
mulish in having my own way, I should never have got in this
pickle. And the lads and lassies were dancing, and there was no
one to save me from my fate. How much I drank I do not know. My
memory of it is of an age-long suffering of fear in the midst of a
murderous crew, and of an infinite number of glasses of red wine
passing across the bare boards of a wine-drenched table and going
down my burning throat. Bad as the wine was, a knife in the back
was worse, and I must survive at any cost.
Looking back with the drinker's knowledge, I know now why I did
not collapse stupefied upon the table. As I have said, I was
frozen, I was paralysed, with fear. The only movement I made was
to convey that never-ending procession of glasses to my lips. I
was a poised and motionless receptacle for all that quantity of
wine. It lay inert in my fear-inert stomach. I was too
frightened, even, for my stomach to turn. So all that Italian
crew looked on and marvelled at the infant phenomenon that downed
wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It is not in the spirit
of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never seen anything
like it.
The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a
majority of the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I
found myself, at the door, beside my little maiden. She had not
had my experience, so she was sober. She was fascinated by the
titubations of the lads who strove to walk beside their girls, and
began to mimic them. I thought this a great game, and I, too,
began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to stir up, while
my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head. Even at the
start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was
astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen
steps, pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch,
and gravely, and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me
this was excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the
ditch, fully intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in
the ditch, in process of being hauled out by several anxious-faced
girls.
I didn't care to play at being drunk any more. There was no more
fun in me. My eyes were beginning to swim, and with wide-open
mouth I panted for air. A girl led me by the hand on either side,
but my legs were leaden. The alcohol I had drunk was striking my
heart and brain like a club. Had I been a weakling of a child, I
am confident that it would have killed me. As it was, I know I
was nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed. I could
hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was;
some were weeping--for themselves, for me, and for the disgraceful
way their lads had behaved. But I was not interested. I was
suffocating, and I wanted air. To move was agony. It made me
pant harder. Yet those girls persisted in making me walk, and it
was four miles home. Four miles! I remember my swimming eyes saw
a small bridge across the road an infinite distance away. In
fact, it was not a hundred feet distant. When I reached it, I
sank down and lay on my back panting. The girls tried to lift me,
but I was helpless and suffocating. Their cries of alarm brought
Larry, a drunken youth of seventeen, who proceeded to resuscitate
me by jumping on my chest. Dimly I remember this, and the
squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him
away. And then I knew nothing, though I learned afterward that
Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there.
When I came to, it was dark. I had been carried unconscious for
four miles and been put to bed. I was a sick child, and, despite
the terrible strain on my heart and tissues, I continually
relapsed into the madness of delirium. All the contents of the
terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out. The most
frightful visions were realities to me. I saw murders committed,
and I was pursued by murderers. I screamed and raved and fought.
My sufferings were prodigious. Emerging from such delirium, I
would hear my mother's voice: "But the child's brain. He will
lose his reason." And sinking back into delirium, I would take the
idea with me and be immured in madhouses, and be beaten by
keepers, and surrounded by screeching lunatics.
One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk
of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's
Chinatown. In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground
through a thousand of these dens, and behind locked doors of iron
I suffered and died a thousand deaths. And when I would come upon
my father, seated at table in these subterranean crypts, gambling
with Chinese for great stakes of gold, all my outrage gave vent in
the vilest cursing. I would rise in bed, struggling against the
detaining hands, and curse my father till the rafters rang. All
the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive
countryside may hear men utter was mine; and though I had never
dared utter such oaths, they now poured from me, at the top of my
lungs, as I cursed my father sitting there underground and
gambling with long-haired, long-nailed Chinamen.
It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night.
A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely
fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me. No one
slept in the thin, frame farm-house that night when John
Barleycorn had his will of me. And Larry, under the bridge, had
no delirium like mine. I am confident that his sleep was
stupefied and dreamless, and that he awoke next day merely to
heaviness and moroseness, and that if he lives to-day he does not
remember that night, so passing was it as an incident. But my
brain was seared for ever by that experience. Writing now, thirty
years afterward, every vision is as distinct, as sharp-cut, every
pain as vital and terrible, as on that night.
I was sick for days afterward, and I needed none of my mother's
injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future. My mother had
been dreadfully shocked. She held that I had done wrong, very
wrong, and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching. And how
was I, who was never allowed to talk back, who lacked the very
words with which to express my psychology--how was I to tell my
mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for
my drunkenness? Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes
and Italian character, I should never have wet my lips with the
sour, bitter wine. And not until man-grown did I tell her the
true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.
In those after days of sickness, I was confused on some points,
and very clear on others. I felt guilty of sin, yet smarted with
a sense of injustice. It had not been my fault, yet I had done
wrong. But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor
again. No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of
alcohol.
Yet the point I am making is that this experience, terrible as it
was, could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's
cheek-by-jowl acquaintance. All about me, even then, were the
forces moving me toward him. In the first place, barring my
mother, ever extreme in her views, it seemed to me all the grown-
ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes. It was a joke,
something funny that had happened. There was no shame attached.
Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in
the affair, narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest
and slept under the bridge, how So-and-So had slept out in the
sandhills that night, and what had happened to the other lad who
fell in the ditch. As I say, so far as I could see, there was no
shame anywhere. It had been something ticklishly, devilishly
fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and
labour on that bleak, fog-girt coast.
The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit, and
patted me on the back until I felt that I had done something
heroic. Peter and Dominick and the other Italians were proud of
my drinking prowess. The face of morality was not set against
drinking. Besides, everybody drank. There was not a teetotaler
in the community. Even the teacher of our little country school,
a greying man of fifty, gave us vacations on the occasions when he
wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown. Thus there was no
spiritual deterrence. My loathing for alcohol was purely
physiological. I didn't like the damned stuff.
This physical loathing for alcohol I have never got over. But I
have conquered it. To this day I conquer it every time I take a
drink. The palate never ceases to rebel, and the palate can be
trusted to know what is good for the body. But men do not drink
for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for
is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much
the worse for the body.
And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest
spots in my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy
potato wagons, wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the
horses plodding slowly along the deep road through the sandhills,
one bright vision made the way never too long. The bright vision
was the saloon at Colma, where my father, or whoever drove, always
got out to get a drink. And I got out to warm by the great stove
and get a soda cracker. Just one soda cracker, but a fabulous
luxury. Saloons were good for something. Back behind the
plodding horses, I would take an hour in consuming that one
cracker. I took the smallest nibbles, never losing a crumb, and
chewed the nibble till it became the thinnest and most delectable
of pastes. I never voluntarily swallowed this paste. I just
tasted it, and went on tasting it, turning it over with my tongue,
spreading it on the inside of this cheek, then on the inside of
the other cheek, until, at the end, it eluded me and in tiny drops
and oozelets, slipped and dribbled down my throat. Horace
Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers.
I liked saloons. Especially I liked the San Francisco saloons.
They had the most delicious dainties for the taking--strange
breads and crackers, cheeses, sausages, sardines--wonderful foods
that I never saw on our meagre home-table. And once, I remember,
a barkeeper mixed me a sweet temperance drink of syrup and soda-
water. My father did not pay for it. It was the barkeeper's
treat, and he became my ideal of a good, kind man. I dreamed day-
dreams of him for years. Although I was seven years old at the
time, I can see him now with undiminished clearness, though I
never laid eyes on him but that one time. The saloon was south of
Market Street in San Francisco. It stood on the west side of the
street. As you entered, the bar was on the left. On the right,
against the wall, was the free lunch counter. It was a long,
narrow room, and at the rear, beyond the beer kegs on tap, were
small, round tables and chairs. The barkeeper was blue-eyed, and
had fair, silky hair peeping out from under a black silk skull-
cap. I remember he wore a brown Cardigan jacket, and I know
precisely the spot, in the midst of the array of bottles, from
which he took the bottle of red-coloured syrup. He and my father
talked long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshipped him. And
for years afterward I worshipped the memory of him.
Despite my two disastrous experiences, here was John Barleycorn,
prevalent and accessible everywhere in the community, luring and
drawing me. Here were connotations of the saloon making deep
indentations in a child's mind. Here was a child, forming its
first judgments of the world, finding the saloon a delightful and
desirable place. Stores, nor public buildings, nor all the
dwellings of men ever opened their doors to me and let me warm by
their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from
narrow shelves against the wall. Their doors were ever closed to
me; the saloon's doors were ever open. And always and everywhere
I found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on
busy thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter,
and in summer dark and cool. Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine
place, and it was more than that.
By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching
and gone to live in the city. And here, at ten, I began on the
streets as a newsboy. One of the reasons for this was that we
needed the money. Another reason was that I needed the exercise.
I had found my way to the free public library, and was reading
myself into nervous prostration. On the poor ranches on which I
had lived there had been no books. In ways truly miraculous, I
had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them I had
devoured. One was the life of Garfield; the second, Paul du
Chaillu's African travels; the third, a novel by Ouida with the
last forty pages missing; and the fourth, Irving's "Alhambra."
This last had been lent me by a school-teacher. I was not a
forward child. Unlike Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for
more. When I returned the "Alhambra" to the teacher I hoped she
would lend me another book. And because she did not--most likely
she deemed me unappreciative--I cried all the way home on the
three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch. I waited and
yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I nerved
myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached
the necessary pitch of effrontery.
And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free
library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. Here
were thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books, and some
were even better. Libraries were not concerned with children in
those days, and I had strange adventures. I remember, in the
catalogue, being impressed by the title, "The Adventures of
Peregrine Pickle." I filled an application blank and the librarian
handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of
Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally
history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I
read mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at
table, I read as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess
while the other boys were playing. I began to get the "jerks." To
everybody I replied: "Go away. You make me nervous."
And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy. I had no
time to read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to
fight, busy learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an
imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic.
Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon.
And I was in and out of many a one. I remember, in those days, on
the east side of Broadway, between Sixth and Seventh, from corner
to corner, there was a solid block of saloons.
In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices,
laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than common every-day where nothing
happened. Here life was always very live, and, sometimes, even
lurid, when blows were struck, and blood was shed, and big
policemen came shouldering in. Great moments, these, for me, my
head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant
adventurers on sea and land. There were no big moments when I
trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors. But in
the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables
or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.
And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned
them and licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard
boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they
might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful,
and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know. In
the same way pirates, and shipwrecks, and battles were terrible;
and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to
participate in such affairs?
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges,
whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social
approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of
fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that
something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and
groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be,
for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot. I had
no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess
that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and
stale grief.
Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely
tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and
drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I
didn't like the stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper
on an ice-wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon
attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds.
Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening
paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and
tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie
Harper's bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to
refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when
she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper.
The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper,
according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we
had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for
beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I
noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching
scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the
boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of
ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam
beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink
beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There
was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn't sneak out
of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so
good. I was always aware that I was missing something.
What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I
could buy five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious
lastingness. I could chew and worry a single one for an hour.
Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy
for five cents each. It required a quarter of a day properly to
absorb one of them. And many a day I made my entire lunch off one
of those slabs. In truth, I found food there, but not in beer.
But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my
second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen,
my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with
tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard
skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I
wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the
commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a-thrill with
romance and adventure, dreaming of wild life in the wild man-
world. Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-
world was entangled with alcohol.
So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was
a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me,
from an English ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on
another ship to San Francisco; and now he wanted to see about
getting a berth on a whaler. Across the estuary, near where the
whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht Idler. The caretaker was a
harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship
Bonanza. Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to call upon
the harpooner?
Would I! Hadn't I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?--
the big sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it
had been engaged in smuggling opium. And the harpooner who was
caretaker! How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom.
He never had to leave the water. He slept aboard the Idler each
night, while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed. The