The Project Gutenberg EBook of John Barleycorn, by Jack London
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Title: John Barleycorn
Author: Jack London
Release Date: March 28, 2008 [EBook #318]
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN BARLEYCORN ***
JOHN BARLEYCORN
by
Jack London (1876-1916)
1913
CHAPTER I
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.'"
CHAPTER II
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.
CHAPTER III
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.
CHAPTER IV
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.
CHAPTER V
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.
CHAPTER VI
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 harpooner was only nineteen years old
(and I have never had anything but his own word that he was a harpooner);
but he had been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to
address as I paddled around the yacht at a wistful distance. Would I
take Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner, on the
opium-smuggler Idler? WOULD I!
The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail, and invited us aboard. I
played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so that it would not
mar the yacht's white paint, dropping the skiff astern on a long painter,
and making the painter fast with two nonchalant half-hitches.
We went below. It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen. The
clothing on the wall smelled musty. But what of that? Was it not the
sea-gear of men?--leather jackets lined with corduroy, blue coats of
pilot cloth, sou'westers, sea-boots, oilskins. And everywhere was in
evidence the economy of space--the narrow bunks, the swinging tables, the
incredible lockers. There were the tell-tale compass, the sea-lamps in
their gimbals, the blue-backed charts carelessly rolled and tucked away,
the signal-flags in alphabetical order, and a mariner's dividers jammed
into the woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat,
inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a harpooner
and a runaway English sailor who said his name was Scotty.
The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen, and the sailor, aged
seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like men. The
harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a drink, and Scotty
searched his pockets for dimes and nickels. Then the harpooner carried
away a pink flask to be filled in some blind pig, for there were no
licensed saloons in that locality. We drank the cheap rotgut out of
tumblers. Was I any the less strong, any the less valiant, than the
harpooner and the sailor? They were men. They proved it by the way they
drank. Drink was the badge of manhood. So I drank with them, drink by
drink, raw and straight, though the damned stuff couldn't compare with a
stick of chewing taffy or a delectable "cannon-ball." I shuddered and
swallowed my gorge with every drink, though I manfully hid all such
symptoms.
Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon. All I had was twenty
cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret regret at the
enormous store of candy it could have bought. The liquor mounted in the
heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty and the harpooner was upon
running the Easting down, gales off the Horn and pamperos off the Plate,
lower topsail breezes, southerly busters, North Pacific gales, and of
smashed whaleboats in the Arctic ice.
"You can't swim in that ice water," said the harpooner confidentially to
me. "You double up in a minute and go down. When a whale smashes your
boat, the thing to do is to get your belly across an oar, so that when
the cold doubles you you'll float."
"Sure," I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that I, too,
would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic Ocean. And,
truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable information, and
filed it away in my brain, where it persists to this day.
But I couldn't talk--at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen, and had
never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to the two
sea-dogs, and show my manhood by drinking with them, fairly and squarely,
drink and drink.
The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the harpooner
poured through the pent space of the Idler's cabin and through my brain
like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in imagination I lived my years
to come and rocked over the wild, mad, glorious world on multitudinous
adventures.
We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were as if we
had known each other for years and years, and we pledged ourselves to
years of future voyagings together. The harpooner told of misadventures
and secret shames. Scotty wept over his poor old mother in Edinburgh--a
lady, he insisted, gently born--who was in reduced circumstances, who had
pinched herself to pay the lump sum to the ship-owners for his
apprenticeship, whose sacrificing dream had been to see him a merchantman
officer and a gentleman, and who was heartbroken because he had deserted
his ship in Australia and joined another as a common sailor before the
mast. And Scotty proved it. He drew her last sad letter from his pocket
and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I wept with him,
and swore that all three of us would ship on the whaleship Bonanza, win a
big pay-day, and, still together, make a pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay
our store of money in the dear lady's lap.
And, as John Barleycorn heated his way into my brain, thawing my
reticence, melting my modesty, talking through me and with me and as me,
my adopted twin brother and alter ego, I, too, raised my voice to show
myself a man and an adventurer, and bragged in detail and at length of
how I had crossed San Francisco Bay in my open skiff in a roaring
southwester when even the schooner sailors doubted my exploit. Further,
I--or John Barleycorn, for it was the same thing--told Scotty that he
might be a deep-sea sailor and know the last rope on the great deep-sea
ships, but that when it came to small-boat sailing I could beat him hands
down and sail circles around him.
The best of it was that my assertion and brag were true. With reticence
and modesty present, I could never have dared tell Scotty my small-boat
estimate of him. But it is ever the way of John Barleycorn to loosen the
tongue and babble the secret thought.
Scotty, or John Barleycorn, or the pair, was very naturally offended by
my remarks. Nor was I loath. I could whip any runaway sailor seventeen
years old. Scotty and I flared and raged like young cockerels, until the
harpooner poured another round of drinks to enable us to forgive and make
up. Which we did, arms around each other's necks, protesting vows of
eternal friendship--just like Black Matt and Tom Morrisey, I remembered,
in the ranch kitchen in San Mateo. And, remembering, I knew that I was
at last a man--despite my meagre fourteen years--a man as big and manly
as those two strapping giants who had quarrelled and made up on that
memorable Sunday morning of long ago.
By this time the singing stage was reached, and I joined Scotty and the
harpooner in snatches of sea songs and chanties. It was here, in the
cabin of the Idler, that I first heard "Blow the Man Down," "Flying
Cloud," and "Whisky, Johnny, Whisky." Oh, it was brave. I was beginning
to grasp the meaning of life. Here was no commonplace, no Oakland
Estuary, no weary round of throwing newspapers at front doors, delivering
ice, and setting up ninepins. All the world was mine, all its paths were
under my feet, and John Barleycorn, tricking my fancy, enabled me to
anticipate the life of adventure for which I yearned.
We were not ordinary. We were three tipsy young gods, incredibly wise,
gloriously genial, and without limit to our powers. Ah!--and I say it
now, after the years--could John Barleycorn keep one at such a height, I
should never draw a sober breath again. But this is not a world of free
freights. One pays according to an iron schedule--for every strength the
balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every
fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For
every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad
magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times,
with savage usury added.
Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water. They
are mutually destructive. They cannot co-exist. And John Barleycorn,
mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to organic chemistry
as we mortals are. We pay for every nerve marathon we run, nor can John
Barleycorn intercede and fend off the just payment. He can lead us to
the heights, but he cannot keep us there, else would we all be devotees.
And there is no devotee but pays for the mad dances John Barleycorn pipes.
Yet the foregoing is all in after wisdom spoken. It was no part of the
knowledge of the lad, fourteen years old, who sat in the Idler's cabin
between the harpooner and the sailor, the air rich in his nostrils with
the musty smell of men's sea-gear, roaring in chorus: "Yankee ship come
down de ribber--pull, my bully boys, pull!"
We grew maudlin, and all talked and shouted at once. I had a splendid
constitution, a stomach that would digest scrap-iron, and I was still
running my marathon in full vigour when Scotty began to fail and fade.
His talk grew incoherent. He groped for words and could not find them,
while the ones he found his lips were unable to form. His poisoned
consciousness was leaving him. The brightness went out of his eyes, and
he looked as stupid as were his efforts to talk. His face and body
sagged as his consciousness sagged. (A man cannot sit upright save by an
act of will.) Scotty's reeling brain could not control his muscles. All
his correlations were breaking down. He strove to take another drink,
and feebly dropped the tumbler on the floor. Then, to my amazement,
weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back and immediately
snored off to sleep.
The harpooner and I drank on, grinning in a superior way to each other
over Scotty's plight. The last flask was opened, and we drank it between
us, to the accompaniment of Scotty's stertorous breathing. Then the
harpooner faded away into his bunk, and I was left alone, unthrown, on
the field of battle.
I was very proud, and John Barleycorn was proud with me. I could carry
my drink. I was a man. I had drunk two men, drink for drink, into
unconsciousness. And I was still on my two feet, upright, making my way
on deck to get air into my scorching lungs. It was in this bout on the
Idler that I discovered what a good stomach and a strong head I had for
drink--a bit of knowledge that was to be a source of pride in succeeding
years, and that ultimately I was to come to consider a great affliction.
The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks
without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can
take many glasses without betraying a sign, who must take numerous
glasses in order to get the "kick."
The sun was setting when I came on the Idler's deck. There were plenty
of bunks below. I did not need to go home. But I wanted to demonstrate
to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff astern. The last of
a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze
of forty miles an hour. I could see the stiff whitecaps, and the suck
and run of the current was plainly visible in the face and trough of each
one.
I set sail, cast off, took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my hand,
and headed across channel. The skiff heeled over and plunged into it
madly. The spray began to fly. I was at the pinnacle of exaltation. I
sang "Blow the Man Down" as I sailed. I was no boy of fourteen, living
the mediocre ways of the sleepy town called Oakland. I was a man, a god,
and the very elements rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to my will.
The tide was out. A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened between
the boat-wharf and the water. I pulled up my centreboard, ran full tilt
into the mud, took in sail, and, standing in the stern, as I had often
done at low tide, I began to shove the skiff with an oar. It was then
that my correlations began to break down. I lost my balance and pitched
head-foremost into the ooze. Then, and for the first time, as I
floundered to my feet covered with slime, the blood running down my arms
from a scrape against a barnacled stake, I knew that I was drunk. But
what of it? Across the channel two strong sailormen lay unconscious in
their bunks where I had drunk them. I WAS a man. I was still on my
legs, if they were knee-deep in mud. I disdained to get back into the
skiff. I waded through the mud, shoving the skiff before me and
yammering the chant of my manhood to the world.
I paid for it. I was sick for a couple of days, meanly sick, and my arms
were painfully poisoned from the barnacle scratches. For a week I could
not use them, and it was a torture to put on and take off my clothes.
I swore, "Never again!" The game wasn't worth it. The price was too
stiff. I had no moral qualms. My revulsion was purely physical. No
exalted moments were worth such hours of misery and wretchedness. When I
got back to my skiff, I shunned the Idler. I would cross the opposite
side of the channel to go around her. Scotty had disappeared. The
harpooner was still about, but him I avoided. Once, when he landed on
the boat-wharf, I hid in a shed so as to escape seeing him. I was afraid
he would propose some more drinking, maybe have a flask full of whisky in
his pocket.
And yet--and here enters the necromancy of John Barleycorn--that
afternoon's drunk on the Idler had been a purple passage flung into the
monotony of my days. It was memorable. My mind dwelt on it continually.
I went over the details, over and over again. Among other things, I had
got into the cogs and springs of men's actions. I had seen Scotty weep
about his own worthlessness and the sad case of his Edinburgh mother who
was a lady. The harpooner had told me terribly wonderful things of
himself. I had caught a myriad enticing and inflammatory hints of a
world beyond my world, and for which I was certainly as fitted as the two
lads who had drunk with me. I had got behind men's souls. I had got
behind my own soul and found unguessed potencies and greatnesses.
Yes, that day stood out above all my other days. To this day it so
stands out. The memory of it is branded in my brain. But the price
exacted was too high. I refused to play and pay, and returned to my
cannon-balls and taffy-slabs. The point is that all the chemistry of my
healthy, normal body drove me away from alcohol. The stuff didn't agree
with me. It was abominable. But, despite this, circumstance was to
continue to drive me toward John Barleycorn, to drive me again and again,
until, after long years, the time should come when I would look up John
Barleycorn in every haunt of men--look him up and hail him gladly as
benefactor and friend. And detest and hate him all the time. Yes, he is
a strange friend, John Barleycorn.
CHAPTER VII
I was barely turned fifteen, and working long hours in a cannery. Month
in and month out, the shortest day I ever worked was ten hours. When to
ten hours of actual work at a machine is added the noon hour; the walking
to work and walking home from work; the getting up in the morning,
dressing, and eating; the eating at night, undressing, and going to bed,
there remains no more than the nine hours out of the twenty-four required
by a healthy youngster for sleep. Out of those nine hours, after I was
in bed and ere my eyes drowsed shut, I managed to steal a little time for
reading.
But many a night I did not knock off work until midnight. On occasion I
worked eighteen and twenty hours on a stretch. Once I worked at my
machine for thirty-six consecutive hours. And there were weeks on end
when I never knocked off work earlier than eleven o'clock, got home and
in bed at half after midnight, and was called at half-past five to dress,
eat, walk to work, and be at my machine at seven o'clock whistle blow.
No moments here to be stolen for my beloved books. And what had John
Barleycorn to do with such strenuous, Stoic toil of a lad just turned
fifteen? He had everything to do with it. Let me show you. I asked
myself if this were the meaning of life--to be a work-beast? I knew of no
horse in the city of Oakland that worked the hours I worked. If this
were living, I was entirely unenamoured of it. I remembered my skiff,
lying idle and accumulating barnacles at the boat-wharf; I remembered the
wind that blew every day on the bay, the sunrises and sunsets I never
saw; the bite of the salt air in my nostrils, the bite of the salt water
on my flesh when I plunged overside; I remembered all the beauty and the
wonder and the sense-delights of the world denied me. There was only one
way to escape my deadening toil. I must get out and away on the water.
I must earn my bread on the water. And the way of the water led
inevitably to John Barleycorn. I did not know this. And when I did
learn it, I was courageous enough not to retreat back to my bestial life
at the machine.
I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of
adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay,
from raided oyster-beds and fights at night on shoal and flat, to markets
in the morning against city wharves, where peddlers and saloon-keepers
came down to buy. Every raid on an oyster-bed was a felony. The penalty
was State imprisonment, the stripes and the lockstep. And what of that?
The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine. And there
was vastly more romance in being an oyster pirate or a convict than in
being a machine slave. And behind it all, behind all of me with youth
abubble, whispered Romance, Adventure.
So I interviewed my Mammy Jennie, my old nurse at whose black breast I
had suckled. She was more prosperous than my folks. She was nursing
sick people at a good weekly wage. Would she lend her "white child" the
money? WOULD SHE? What she had was mine.
Then I sought out French Frank, the oyster pirate, who wanted to sell, I
had heard, his sloop, the Razzle Dazzle. I found him lying at anchor on
the Alameda side of the estuary near the Webster Street bridge, with
visitors aboard, whom he was entertaining with afternoon wine. He came
on deck to talk business. He was willing to sell. But it was Sunday.
Besides, he had guests. On the morrow he would make out the bill of sale
and I could enter into possession. And in the meantime I must come below
and meet his friends. They were two sisters, Mamie and Tess; a Mrs.
Hadley, who chaperoned them; "Whisky" Bob, a youthful oyster pirate of
sixteen; and "Spider" Healey, a black-whiskered wharf-rat of twenty.
Mamie, who was Spider's niece, was called the Queen of the Oyster
Pirates, and, on occasion, presided at their revels. French Frank was in
love with her, though I did not know it at the time; and she steadfastly
refused to marry him.
French Frank poured a tumbler of red wine from a big demijohn to drink to
our transaction. I remembered the red wine of the Italian rancho, and
shuddered inwardly. Whisky and beer were not quite so repulsive. But
the Queen of the Oyster Pirates was looking at me, a part-emptied glass
in her own hand. I had my pride. If I was only fifteen, at least I
could not show myself any less a man than she. Besides, there were her
sister, and Mrs. Hadley, and the young oyster pirate, and the whiskered
wharf-rat, all with glasses in their hands. Was I a milk-and-water sop?
No; a thousand times no, and a thousand glasses no. I downed the
tumblerful like a man.
French Frank was elated by the sale, which I had bound with a
twenty-dollar goldpiece. He poured more wine. I had learned my strong
head and stomach, and I was certain I could drink with them in a
temperate way and not poison myself for a week to come. I could stand as
much as they; and besides, they had already been drinking for some time.
We got to singing. Spider sang "The Boston Burglar" and "Black Lulu."
The Queen sang "Then I Wisht I Were a Little Bird." And her sister Tess
sang "Oh, Treat My Daughter Kindily." The fun grew fast and furious. I
found myself able to miss drinks without being noticed or called to
account. Also, standing in the companionway, head and shoulders out and
glass in hand, I could fling the wine overboard.
I reasoned something like this: It is a queerness of these people that
they like this vile-tasting wine. Well, let them. I cannot quarrel with
their tastes. My manhood, according to their queer notions, must compel
me to appear to like this wine. Very well. I shall so appear. But I
shall drink no more than is unavoidable.
And the Queen began to make love to me, the latest recruit to the oyster
pirate fleet, and no mere hand, but a master and owner. She went upon
deck to take the air, and took me with her. She knew, of course, but I
never dreamed, how French Frank was raging down below. Then Tess joined
us, sitting on the cabin; and Spider, and Bob; and at the last, Mrs.
Hadley and French Frank. And we sat there, glasses in hand, and sang,
while the big demijohn went around; and I was the only strictly sober one.
And I enjoyed it as no one of them was able to enjoy it. Here, in this
atmosphere of bohemianism, I could not but contrast the scene with my
scene of the day before, sitting at my machine, in the stifling, shut-in
air, repeating, endlessly repeating, at top speed, my series of
mechanical motions. And here I sat now, glass in hand, in warm-glowing
camaraderie, with the oyster pirates, adventurers who refused to be
slaves to petty routine, who flouted restrictions and the law, who
carried their lives and their liberty in their hands. And it was through
John Barleycorn that I came to join this glorious company of free souls,
unashamed and unafraid.
And the afternoon seabreeze blew its tang into my lungs, and curled the
waves in mid-channel. Before it came the scow schooners, wing-and-wing,
blowing their horns for the drawbridges to open. Red-stacked tugs tore
by, rocking the Razzle Dazzle in the waves of their wake. A sugar barque
towed from the "boneyard" to sea. The sun-wash was on the crisping
water, and life was big. And Spider sang:
"Oh, it's Lulu, black Lulu, my darling,
Oh, it's where have you been so long?
Been layin' in jail,
A-waitin' for bail,
Till my bully comes rollin' along."
There it was, the smack and slap of the spirit of revolt, of adventure,
of romance, of the things forbidden and done defiantly and grandly. And
I knew that on the morrow I would not go back to my machine at the
cannery. To-morrow I would be an oyster pirate, as free a freebooter as
the century and the waters of San Francisco Bay would permit. Spider had
already agreed to sail with me as my crew of one, and, also, as cook
while I did the deck work. We would outfit our grub and water in the
morning, hoist the big mainsail (which was a bigger piece of canvas than
any I had ever sailed under), and beat our way out the estuary on the
first of the seabreeze and the last of the ebb. Then we would slack
sheets, and on the first of the flood run down the bay to the Asparagus
Islands, where we would anchor miles off shore. And at last my dream
would be realised: I would sleep upon the water. And next morning I
would wake upon the water; and thereafter all my days and nights would be
on the water.
And the Queen asked me to row her ashore in my skiff, when at sunset
French Frank prepared to take his guests ashore. Nor did I catch the
significance of his abrupt change of plan when he turned the task of
rowing his skiff over to Whisky Bob, himself remaining on board the
sloop. Nor did I understand Spider's grinning side-remark to me: "Gee!
There's nothin' slow about YOU." How could it possibly enter my boy's
head that a grizzled man of fifty should be jealous of me?
CHAPTER VIII
We met by appointment, early Monday morning, to complete the deal, in
Johnny Heinhold's "Last Chance "--a saloon, of course, for the
transactions of men. I paid the money over, received the bill of sale,
and French Frank treated. This struck me as an evident custom, and a
logical one--the seller, who receives, the money, to wet a piece of it in
the establishment where the trade was consummated. But, to my surprise,
French Frank treated the house. He and I drank, which seemed just; but
why should Johnny Heinhold, who owned the saloon and waited behind the
bar, be invited to drink? I figured it immediately that he made a profit
on the very drink he drank. I could, in a way, considering that they
were friends and shipmates, understand Spider and Whisky Bob being asked
to drink; but why should the longshoremen, Bill Kelley and Soup Kennedy,
be asked?
Then there was Pat, the Queen's brother, making a total of eight of us.
It was early morning, and all ordered whisky. What could I do, here in
this company of big men, all drinking whisky? "Whisky," I said, with the
careless air of one who had said it a thousand times. And such whisky! I
tossed it down. A-r-r-r-gh! I can taste it yet.
And I was appalled at the price French Frank had paid--eighty cents.
EIGHTY CENTS! It was an outrage to my thrifty soul. Eighty cents--the
equivalent of eight long hours of my toil at the machine, gone down our
throats, and gone like that, in a twinkling, leaving only a bad taste in
the mouth. There was no discussion that French Frank was a waster.
I was anxious to be gone, out into the sunshine, out over the water to my
glorious boat. But all hands lingered. Even Spider, my crew, lingered.
No hint broke through my obtuseness of why they lingered. I have often
thought since of how they must have regarded me, the newcomer being
welcomed into their company standing at bar with them, and not standing
for a single round of drinks.
French Frank, who, unknown to me, had swallowed his chagrin since the day
before, now that the money for the Razzle Dazzle was in his pocket, began
to behave curiously toward me. I sensed the change in his attitude, saw
the forbidding glitter in his eyes, and wondered. The more I saw of men,
the queerer they became. Johnny Heinhold leaned across the bar and
whispered in my ear, "He's got it in for you. Watch out."
I nodded comprehension of his statement, and acquiescence in it, as a man
should nod who knows all about men. But secretly I was perplexed.
Heavens! How was I, who had worked hard and read books of adventure, and
who was only fifteen years old, who had not dreamed of giving the Queen
of the Oyster Pirates a second thought, and who did not know that French
Frank was madly and Latinly in love with her--how was I to guess that I
had done him shame? And how was I to guess that the story of how the
Queen had thrown him down on his own boat, the moment I hove in sight,
was already the gleeful gossip of the water-front? And by the same token,
how was I to guess that her brother Pat's offishness with me was anything
else than temperamental gloominess of spirit?
Whisky Bob got me aside a moment. "Keep your eyes open," he muttered.
"Take my tip. French Frank's ugly. I'm going up river with him to get a
schooner for oystering. When he gets down on the beds, watch out. He
says he'll run you down. After dark, any time he's around, change your
anchorage and douse your riding light. Savve?"
Oh, certainly, I savve'd. I nodded my head, and, as one man to another,
thanked him for his tip; and drifted back to the group at the bar. No; I
did not treat. I never dreamed that I was expected to treat. I left
with Spider, and my ears burn now as I try to surmise the things they
must have said about me.
I asked Spider, in an off-hand way, what was eating French Frank. "He's
crazy jealous of you," was the answer. "Do you think so?" I said, and
dismissed the matter as not worth thinking about.
But I leave it to any one--the swell of my fifteen-years-old manhood at
learning that French Frank, the adventurer of fifty, the sailor of all
the seas of all the world, was jealous of me--and jealous over a girl
most romantically named the Queen of the Oyster Pirates. I had read of
such things in books, and regarded them as personal probabilities of a
distant maturity. Oh, I felt a rare young devil, as we hoisted the big
mainsail that morning, broke out anchor, and filled away close-hauled on
the three-mile beat to windward out into the bay.
Such was my escape from the killing machine-toil, and my introduction to
the oyster pirates. True, the introduction had begun with drink, and the
life promised to continue with drink. But was I to stay away from it for
such reason? Wherever life ran free and great, there men drank. Romance
and Adventure seemed always to go down the street locked arm in arm with
John Barleycorn. To know the two, I must know the third. Or else I must
go back to my free library books and read of the deeds of other men and
do no deeds of my own save slave for ten cents an hour at a machine in a
cannery.
No; I was not to be deterred from this brave life on the water by the
fact that the water-dwellers had queer and expensive desires for beer and
wine and whisky. What if their notions of happiness included the strange
one of seeing me drink? When they persisted in buying the stuff and
thrusting it upon me, why, I would drink it. It was the price I would
pay for their comradeship. And I didn't have to get drunk. I had not
got drunk the Sunday afternoon I arranged to buy the Razzle Dazzle,
despite the fact that not one of the rest was sober. Well, I could go on
into the future that way, drinking the stuff when it gave them pleasure
that I should drink it, but carefully avoiding over-drinking.
CHAPTER IX
Gradual as was my development as a heavy drinker among the oyster
pirates, the real heavy drinking came suddenly, and was the result, not
of desire for alcohol, but of an intellectual conviction.
The more I saw of the life, the more I was enamoured of it. I can never
forget my thrills the first night I took part in a concerted raid, when
we assembled on board the Annie--rough men, big and unafraid, and
weazened wharf-rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the
law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff low
voices, and "Big" George with revolvers strapped about his waist to show
that he meant business.
Oh, I know, looking back, that the whole thing was sordid and silly. But
I was not looking back in those days when I was rubbing shoulders with
John Barleycorn and beginning to accept him. The life was brave and
wild, and I was living the adventure I had read so much about.
Nelson, "Young Scratch" they called him, to distinguish him from "Old
Scratch," his father, sailed in the sloop Reindeer, partners with one
"Clam." Clam was a dare-devil, but Nelson was a reckless maniac. He was
twenty years old, with the body of a Hercules. When he was shot in
Benicia, a couple of years later, the coroner said he was the
greatest-shouldered man he had ever seen laid on a slab.
Nelson could not read or write. He had been "dragged" up by his father
on San Francisco Bay, and boats were second nature with him. His
strength was prodigious, and his reputation along the water-front for
violence was anything but savoury. He had Berserker rages and did mad,
terrible things. I made his acquaintance the first cruise of the Razzle
Dazzle, and saw him sail the Reindeer in a blow and dredge oysters all
around the rest of us as we lay at two anchors, troubled with fear of
going ashore.
He was some man, this Nelson; and when, passing by the Last Chance
saloon, he spoke to me, I felt very proud. But try to imagine my pride
when he promptly asked me in to have a drink. I stood at the bar and
drank a glass of beer with him, and talked manfully of oysters, and
boats, and of the mystery of who had put the load of buckshot through the
Annie's mainsail.
We talked and lingered at the bar. It seemed to me strange that we
lingered. We had had our beer. But who was I to lead the way outside
when great Nelson chose to lean against the bar? After a few minutes, to
my surprise, he asked me to have another drink, which I did. And still
we talked, and Nelson evinced no intention of leaving the bar.
Bear with me while I explain the way of my reasoning and of my innocence.
First of all, I was very proud to be in the company of Nelson, who was
the most heroic figure among the oyster pirates and bay adventurers.
Unfortunately for my stomach and mucous membranes, Nelson had a strange
quirk of nature that made him find happiness in treating me to beer. I
had no moral disinclination for beer, and just because I didn't like the
taste of it and the weight of it was no reason I should forgo the honour
of his company. It was his whim to drink beer, and to have me drink beer
with him. Very well, I would put up with the passing discomfort.
So we continued to talk at the bar, and to drink beer ordered and paid
for by Nelson. I think, now, when I look back upon it, that Nelson was
curious. He wanted to find out just what kind of a gink I was. He
wanted to see how many times I'd let him treat without offering to treat
in return.
After I had drunk half a dozen glasses, my policy of temperateness in
mind, I decided that I had had enough for that time. So I mentioned that
I was going aboard the Razzle Dazzle, then lying at the city wharf, a
hundred yards away.
I said good-bye to Nelson, and went on down the wharf. But, John
Barleycorn, to the extent of six glasses, went with me. My brain tingled
and was very much alive. I was uplifted by my sense of manhood. I, a
truly-true oyster pirate, was going aboard my own boat after hob-nobbing
in the Last Chance with Nelson, the greatest oyster pirate of us all.
Strong in my brain was the vision of us leaning against the bar and
drinking beer. And curious it was, I decided, this whim of nature that
made men happy in spending good money for beer for a fellow like me who
didn't want it.
As I pondered this, I recollected that several times other men, in
couples, had entered the Last Chance, and first one, then the other, had
treated to drinks. I remembered, on the drunk on the Idler, how Scotty
and the harpooner and myself had raked and scraped dimes and nickels with
which to buy the whisky. Then came my boy code: when on a day a fellow
gave another a "cannon-ball" or a chunk of taffy, on some other day he
would expect to receive back a cannon-ball or a chunk of taffy.
That was why Nelson had lingered at the bar. Having bought a drink, he
had waited for me to buy one. I HAD, LET HIM BUY SIX DRINKS AND NEVER
ONCE OFFERED TO TREAT. And he was the great Nelson! I could feel myself
blushing with shame. I sat down on the stringer-piece of the wharf and
buried my face in my hands. And the heat of my shame burned up my neck
and into my cheeks and forehead. I have blushed many times in my life,
but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one.
And sitting there on the stringer-piece in my shame, I did a great deal
of thinking and transvaluing of values. I had been born poor. Poor I
had lived. I had gone hungry on occasion. I had never had toys nor
playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched
by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years
old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store
across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt.
When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it
was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it
without any outer garment. For the first time I mutinied against my
mother--mutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store
undershirt so all the world could see.
Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors
and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child,
with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has
been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have
were those I got for myself. My meagre childhood developed meagreness.
The first things I had been able to get for myself had been cigarette
pictures, cigarette posters, and cigarette albums. I had not had the
spending of the money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these
treasures. I traded duplicates with the other boys, and circulating, as
I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities for trading and
acquiring.
It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every
cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian Beauties,
Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prize
Fighters, etc. And each series I had three different ways: in the card
from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album.
Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I traded
for other things that boys valued and which they usually bought with
money given them by their parents. Naturally, they did not have the keen
sense of values that I had, who was never given money to buy anything. I
traded for postage-stamps, for minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for
marbles (I had a more magnificent collection of agates than I have ever
seen any boy possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful
worth at least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty
cents I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before he
could redeem them).
I'd trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it over in
a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something that was worth
something. I was famous as a trader. I was notorious as a miser. I
could even make a junkman weep when I had dealings with him. Other boys
called me in to sell for them their collections of bottles, rags, old
iron, grain, and gunny-sacks, and five-gallon oil-cans--aye, and gave me
a commission for doing it.
And this was the thrifty, close-fisted boy, accustomed to slave at a
machine for ten cents an hour, who sat on the stringer-piece and
considered the matter of beer at five cents a glass and gone in a moment
with nothing to show for it. I was now with men I admired. I was proud
to be with them. Had all my pinching and saving brought me the
equivalent of one of the many thrills which had been mine since I came
among the oyster pirates? Then what was worth while--money or thrills?
These men had no horror of squandering a nickel, or many nickels. They
were magnificently careless of money, calling up eight men to drink
whisky at ten cents a glass, as French Frank had done. Why, Nelson had
just spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us.
Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave decision. I
was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance.
Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it
as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my
comradeship with these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong
drink.
I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson still
stood outside. "Come on and have a beer," I invited. Again we stood at
the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I who paid ten cents!
a whole hour of my labour at a machine for a drink of something I didn't
want and which tasted rotten. But it wasn't difficult. I had achieved a
concept. Money no longer counted. It was comradeship that counted.
"Have another?" I said. And we had another, and I paid for it. Nelson,
with the wisdom of the skilled drinker, said to the barkeeper, "Make mine
a small one, Johnny." Johnny nodded and gave him a glass that contained
only a third as much as the glasses we had been drinking. Yet the charge
was the same--five cents.
By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance didn't
hurt me much. Besides, I was learning. There was more in this buying of
drinks than mere quantity. I got my finger on it. There was a stage
when the beer didn't count at all, but just the spirit of comradeship of
drinking together. And, ha!--another thing! I, too, could call for small
beers and minimise by two-thirds the detestable freightage with which
comradeship burdened one.
"I had to go aboard to get some money," I remarked casually, as we drank,
in the hope Nelson would take it as an explanation of why I had let him
treat six consecutive times.
"Oh, well, you didn't have to do that," he answered. "Johnny'll trust a
fellow like you--won't you, Johnny!"
"Sure," Johnny agreed, with a smile.
"How much you got down against me?" Nelson queried.
Johnny pulled out the book he kept behind the bar, found Nelson's page,
and added up the account of several dollars. At once I became possessed
with a desire to have a page in that book. Almost it seemed the final
badge of manhood.
After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson
decided to go. We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the wharf
to the Razzle Dazzle. Spider was just building the fire for supper.
"Where'd you get it?" he grinned up at me through the open companion.
"Oh, I've been with Nelson," I said carelessly, trying to hide my pride.
Then an idea came to me. Here was another one of them. Now that I had
achieved my concept, I might as well practise it thoroughly. "Come on,"
I said, "up to Johnny's and have a drink."
Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down. Clam was Nelson's partner,
and he was a fine, brave, handsome, moustached man of thirty--everything,
in short, that his nickname did not connote. "Come on," I said, "and
have a drink." He came. As we turned into the Last Chance, there was
Pat, the Queen's brother, coming out.
"What's your hurry?" I greeted him. "We're having a drink. Come on
along." "I've just had one," he demurred. "What of it?--we're having one
now," I retorted. And Pat consented to join us, and I melted my way into
his good graces with a couple of glasses of beer. Oh! I was learning
things that afternoon about John Barleycorn. There was more in him than
the bad taste when you swallowed him. Here, at the absurd cost of ten
cents, a gloomy, grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy,
was made into a good friend. He became even genial, his looks were
kindly, and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and
oyster-bed gossip.
"Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered
schooners. Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker, carelessly,
casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had just occurred to me.
Looking back, I am confident that the only one there who guessed I was a
tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny Heinhold.
"Where'd he get it?" I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny.
"Oh, he's been sousin' here with Nelson all afternoon," was Johnny's
answer.
I never let on that I'd heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper was
giving me a recommendation as a man. "HE'S BEEN SOUSIN' HERE WITH NELSON
ALL AFTERNOON." Magic words! The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a
beer glass!
I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought the
Razzle Dazzle. The glasses were filled and we were ready to drink.
"Have something yourself, Johnny," I said, with an air of having intended
to say it all the time, but of having been a trifle remiss because of the
interesting conversation I had been holding with Clam and Pat.
Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive, the
strides I was making in my education, and poured himself whisky from his
private bottle. This hit me for a moment on my thrifty side. He had
taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us were drinking five-cent
drinks! But the hurt was only for a moment. I dismissed it as ignoble,
remembered my concept, and did not give myself away.
"You'd better put me down in the book for this," I said, when we had
finished the drink. And I had the satisfaction of seeing a fresh page
devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round of drinks amounting
to thirty cents. And I glimpsed, as through a golden haze, a future
wherein that page would be much charged, and crossed off, and charged
again.
I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny
redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink. He treated us
around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had arithmetically
evened things up handsomely.
"Let's go around to the St. Louis House," Spider suggested when we got
outside. Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone home, and
Clam had gone upon the Reindeer to cook supper.
So around Spider and I went to the St. Louis House--my first visit--a
huge bar-room, where perhaps fifty men, mostly longshoremen, were
congregated. And there I met Soup Kennedy for the second time, and Bill
Kelley. And Smith, of the Annie, drifted in--he of the belt-buckled
revolvers. And Nelson showed up. And I met others, including the Vigy
brothers, who ran the place, and, chiefest of all, Joe Goose, with the
wicked eyes, the twisted nose, and the flowered vest, who played the
harmonica like a roystering angel and went on the most atrocious tears
that even the Oakland water-front could conceive of and admire.
As I bought drinks--others treated as well--the thought flickered across
my mind that Mammy Jennie wasn't going to be repaid much on her loan out
of that week's earnings of the Razzle Dazzle. "But what of it?" I
thought, or rather, John Barleycorn thought it for me. "You're a man and
you're getting acquainted with men. Mammy Jennie doesn't need the money
as promptly as all that. She isn't starving. You know that. She's got
other money in the bank. Let her wait, and pay her back gradually."
And thus it was I learned another trait of John Barleycorn. He inhibits
morality. Wrong conduct that it is impossible for one to do sober, is
done quite easily when one is not sober. In fact, it is the only thing
one can do, for John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between
one's immediate desires and long-learned morality.
I dismissed my thought of debt to Mammy Jennie and proceeded to get
acquainted at the trifling expense of some trifling money and a jingle
that was growing unpleasant. Who took me on board and put me to bed that
night I do not know, but I imagine it must have been Spider.
CHAPTER X
And so I won my manhood's spurs. My status on the water-front and with
the oyster pirates became immediately excellent. I was looked upon as a
good fellow, as well as no coward. And somehow, from the day I achieved
that concept sitting on the stringer-piece of the Oakland City Wharf, I
have never cared much for money. No one has ever considered me a miser
since, while my carelessness of money is a source of anxiety and worry to
some that know me.
So completely did I break with my parsimonious past that I sent word home
to my mother to call in the boys of the neighbourhood and give to them
all my collections. I never even cared to learn what boys got what
collections. I was a man now, and I made a clean sweep of everything
that bound me to my boyhood.
My reputation grew. When the story went around the water-front of how
French Frank had tried to run me down with his schooner, and of how I had
stood on the deck of the Razzle Dazzle, a cocked double-barrelled shotgun
in my hands, steering with my feet and holding her to her course, and
compelled him to put up his wheel and keep away, the water-front decided
that there was something in me despite my youth. And I continued to show
what was in me. There were the times I brought the Razzle Dazzle in with
a bigger load of oysters than any other two-man craft; there was the time
when we raided far down in Lower Bay, and mine was the only craft back at
daylight to the anchorage off Asparagus Island; there was the Thursday
night we raced for market and I brought the Razzle Dazzle in without a
rudder, first of the fleet, and skimmed the cream of the Friday morning
trade; and there was the time I brought her in from Upper Bay under a
jib, when Scotty burned my mainsail. (Yes; it was Scotty of the Idler
adventure. Irish had followed Spider on board the Razzle Dazzle, and
Scotty, turning up, had taken Irish's place.)
But the things I did on the water only partly counted. What completed
everything, and won for me the title of "Prince of the Oyster Beds," was
that I was a good fellow ashore with my money, buying drinks like a man.
I little dreamed that the time would come when the Oakland water-front,
which had shocked me at first would be shocked and annoyed by the devilry
of the things I did.
But always the life was tied up with drinking. The saloons are poor
men's clubs. Saloons are congregating places. We engaged to meet one
another in saloons. We celebrated our good fortune or wept our grief in
saloons. We got acquainted in saloons.
Can I ever forget the afternoon I met "Old Scratch," Nelson's father? It
was in the Last Chance. Johnny Heinhold introduced us. That Old Scratch
was Nelson's father was noteworthy enough. But there was more in it than
that. He was owner and master of the scow-schooner Annie Mine, and some
day I might ship as a sailor with him. Still more, he was romance. He
was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, raw-boned Viking, big-bodied and
strong-muscled despite his age. And he had sailed the seas in ships of
all nations in the old savage sailing days.
I had heard many weird tales about him, and worshipped him from a
distance. It took the saloon to bring us together. Even so, our
acquaintance might have been no more than a hand-grip and a word--he was
a laconic old fellow--had it not been for the drinking.
"Have a drink," I said, with promptitude, after the pause which I had
learned good form in drinking dictates. Of course, while we drank our
beer, which I had paid for, it was incumbent on him to listen to me and
to talk to me. And Johnny, like a true host, made the tactful remarks
that enabled us to find mutual topics of conversation. And of course,
having drunk my beer, Captain Nelson must now buy beer in turn. This led
to more talking, and Johnny drifted out of the conversation to wait on
other customers.
The more beer Captain Nelson and I drank, the better we got acquainted.
In me he found an appreciative listener, who, by virtue of book-reading,
knew much about the sea-life he had lived. So he drifted back to his
wild young days, and spun many a rare yarn for me, while we downed beer,
treat by treat, all through a blessed summer afternoon. And it was only
John Barleycorn that made possible that long afternoon with the old
sea-dog.
It was Johnny Heinhold who secretly warned me across the bar that I was
getting pickled and advised me to take small beers. But as long as
Captain Nelson drank large beers, my pride forbade anything else than
large beers. And not until the skipper ordered his first small beer did
I order one for myself. Oh, when we came to a lingering fond farewell, I
was drunk. But I had the satisfaction of seeing Old Scratch as drunk as
I. My youthful modesty scarcely let me dare believe that the hardened
old buccaneer was even more drunk.
And afterwards, from Spider, and Pat, and Clam, and Johnny Heinhold, and
others, came the tips that Old Scratch liked me and had nothing but good
words for the fine lad I was. Which was the more remarkable, because he
was known as a savage, cantankerous old cuss who never liked anybody.
(His very nickname, "Scratch," arose from a Berserker trick of his, in
fighting, of tearing off his opponent's face.) And that I had won his
friendship, all thanks were due to John Barleycorn. I have given the
incident merely as an example of the multitudinous lures and draws and
services by which John Barleycorn wins his followers.
CHAPTER XI
And still there arose in me no desire for alcohol, no chemical demand.
In years and years of heavy drinking, drinking did not beget the desire.
Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way of the men with whom I
lived. While away on my cruises on the bay, I took no drink along; and
while out on the bay the thought of the desirableness of a drink never
crossed my mind. It was not until I tied the Razzle Dazzle up to the
wharf and got ashore in the congregating places of men, where drink
flowed, that the buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of
drinks from other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood
rite.
Then, too, there were the times, lying at the city wharf or across the
estuary on the sand-spit, when the Queen, and her sister, and her brother
Pat, and Mrs. Hadley came aboard. It was my boat, I was host, and I
could only dispense hospitality in the terms of their understanding of
it. So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or Scotty, or whoever was my crew,
with the can for beer and the demijohn for red wine. And again, lying at
the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big
policemen and plain-clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in
the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with
squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in
bottles.
Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn. I valued him
extremely well for his associations, but not for the taste of him. All
the time I was striving to be a man amongst men, and all the time I
nursed secret and shameful desires for candy. But I would have died
before I'd let anybody guess it. I used to indulge in lonely debauches,
on nights when I knew my crew was going to sleep ashore. I would go up
to the Free Library, exchange my books, buy a quarter's worth of all
sorts of candy that chewed and lasted, sneak aboard the Razzle Dazzle,
lock myself in the cabin, go to bed, and lie there long hours of bliss,
reading and chewing candy. And those were the only times I felt that I
got my real money's worth. Dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't
buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store.
As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in
the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. Drunks were always
memorable. At such times things happened. Men like Joe Goose dated
existence from drunk to drunk. The longshoremen all looked forward to
their Saturday night drunk. We of the oyster boats waited until we had
disposed of our cargoes before we got really started, though a scattering
of drinks and a meeting of a chance friend sometimes precipitated an
accidental drunk.
In ways, the accidental drunks were the best. Stranger and more exciting
things happened at such times. As, for instance, the Sunday when Nelson
and French Frank and Captain Spink stole the stolen salmon boat from
Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek. Changes had taken place in the personnel
of the oyster boats. Nelson had got into a fight with Bill Kelley on the
Annie and was carrying a bullet-hole through his left hand. Also, having
quarrelled with Clam and broken partnership, Nelson had sailed the
Reindeer, his arm in a sling, with a crew of two deep-water sailors, and
he had sailed so madly as to frighten them ashore. Such was the tale of
his recklessness they spread, that no one on the water-front would go out
with Nelson. So the Reindeer, crewless, lay across the estuary at the
sandspit. Beside her lay the Razzle Dazzle with a burned mainsail and
Scotty and me on board. Whisky Bob had fallen out with French Frank and
gone on a raid "up river" with Nicky the Greek.
The result of this raid was a brand-new Columbia River salmon boat,
stolen from an Italian fisherman. We oyster pirates were all visited by
the searching Italian, and we were convinced, from what we knew of their
movements, that Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek were the guilty parties.
But where was the salmon boat? Hundreds of Greek and Italian fishermen,
up river and down bay, had searched every slough and tule patch for it.
When the owner despairingly offered a reward of fifty dollars, our
interest increased and the mystery deepened.
One Sunday morning old Captain Spink paid me a visit. The conversation
was confidential. He had just been fishing in his skiff in the old
Alameda ferry slip. As the tide went down, he had noticed a rope tied to
a pile under water and leading downward. In vain he had tried to heave
up what was fast on the other end. Farther along, to another pile, was a
similar rope, leading downward and unheavable. Without doubt, it was the
missing salmon boat. If we restored it to its rightful owner there was
fifty dollars in it for us. But I had queer ethical notions about honour
amongst thieves, and declined to have anything to do with the affair.
But French Frank had quarrelled with Whisky Bob, and Nelson was also an
enemy. (Poor Whisky Bob!--without viciousness, good-natured, generous,
born weak, raised poorly, with an irresistible chemical demand for
alcohol, still prosecuting his vocation of bay pirate, his body was
picked up, not long afterward, beside a dock where it had sunk full of
gunshot wounds.) Within an hour after I had rejected Captain Spink's
proposal, I saw him sail down the estuary on board the Reindeer with
Nelson. Also, French Frank went by on his schooner.
It was not long ere they sailed back up the estuary, curiously side by
side. As they headed in for the sandspit, the submerged salmon boat
could be seen, gunwales awash and held up from sinking by ropes fast to
the schooner and the sloop. The tide was half out, and they sailed
squarely in on the sand, grounding in a row, with the salmon boat in the
middle.
Immediately Hans, one of French Frank's sailors, was into a skiff and
pulling rapidly for the north shore. The big demijohn in the
stern-sheets told his errand. They couldn't wait a moment to celebrate
the fifty dollars they had so easily earned. It is the way of the
devotees of John Barleycorn. When good fortune comes, they drink. When
they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune
be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If
they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink. If their
love-making be crowned with success, they are so happy they needs must
drink. If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason. And if
they haven't anything to do at all, why, they take a drink, secure in the
knowledge that when they have taken a sufficient number of drinks the
maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have their
hands full with things to do. When they are sober they want to drink;
and when they have drunk they want to drink more.
Of course, as fellow comrades, Scotty and I were called in for the
drinking. We helped to make a hole in that fifty dollars not yet
received. The afternoon, from just an ordinary common summer Sunday
afternoon, became a gorgeous, purple afternoon. We all talked and sang
and ranted and bragged, and ever French Frank and Nelson sent more drinks
around. We lay in full sight of the Oakland water-front, and the noise
of our revels attracted friends. Skiff after skiff crossed the estuary
and hauled up on the sandspit, while Hans' work was cut out for him--ever
to row back and forth for more supplies of booze.
Then Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek arrived, sober, indignant, outraged
in that their fellow pirates had raised their plant. French Frank, aided
by John Barleycorn, orated hypocritically about virtue and honesty, and,
despite his fifty years, got Whisky Bob out on the sand and proceeded to
lick him. When Nicky the Greek jumped in with a short-handled shovel to
Whisky Bob's assistance, short work was made of him by Hans. And of
course, when the bleeding remnants of Bob and Nicky were sent packing in
their skiff, the event must needs be celebrated in further carousal.
By this time, our visitors being numerous, we were a large crowd
compounded of many nationalities and diverse temperaments, all aroused by
John Barleycorn, all restraints cast off. Old quarrels revived, ancient
hates flared up. Fight was in the air. And whenever a longshoreman
remembered something against a scow-schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an
oyster pirate remembered or was remembered, a fist shot out and another
fight was on. And every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks,
wherein the combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced
each other and pledged undying friendship.
And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and retrieve
an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the trip he sailed
with Clam. He had espoused Clam's side of the quarrel with Nelson.
Also, he had been drinking in the St. Louis House, so that it was John
Barleycorn who led him to the sandspit in quest of his old shirt. Few
words started the fray. He locked with Nelson in the cockpit of the
Reindeer, and in the mix-up barely escaped being brained by an iron bar
wielded by irate French Frank--irate because a two-handed man had
attacked a one-handed man. (If the Reindeer still floats, the dent of
the iron bar remains in the hard-wood rail of her cockpit.)
But Nelson pulled his bandaged hand, bullet-perforated, out of its sling,
and, held by us, wept and roared his Berserker belief that he could lick
Soup Kennedy one-handed. And we let them loose on the sand. Once, when
it looked as if Nelson were getting the worst of it, French Frank and
John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into the fight. Scotty protested and
reached for French Frank, who whirled upon him and fell on top of him in
a pummelling clinch after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In
the course of separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst
the rest of us. These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we
separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup Kennedy
fought on. Occasionally we returned to them and gave advice, such as,
when they lay exhausted in the sand, unable to strike a blow, "Throw sand
in his eyes." And they threw sand in each other's eyes, recuperated, and
fought on to successive exhaustions.
And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to
think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the
spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of buccaneers and
sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and
imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk. It was life raw and
naked, wild and free--the only life of that sort which my birth in time
and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a
promise. It was the beginning. From the sandspit the way led out
through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world,
where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon
boats, but for high purposes and romantic ends.
And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man like
French Frank get away with him, we, too, brawled and added to the
festivity of the sandspit. And Scotty threw up his job as crew, and
departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging to me. During
the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied in their bunks, the
schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high water and swung about to
their anchors. The salmon boat, still filled with rocks and water,
rested on the bottom.
In the morning, early, I heard wild cries from the Reindeer, and tumbled
out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the water-front laugh
for days. The beautiful salmon boat lay on the hard sand, squashed flat
as a pancake, while on it were perched French Frank's schooner and the
Reindeer. Unfortunately two of the Reindeer's planks had been crushed in
by the stout oak stem of the salmon boat. The rising tide had flowed
through the hole, and just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with
him. I lent a hand, and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the
damage.
Then Nelson cooked breakfast, and while we ate we considered the
situation. He was broke. So was I. The fifty dollars reward would
never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand beneath us.
He had a wounded hand and no crew. I had a burned main sail and no crew.
"What d'ye say, you and me?" Nelson queried. "I'll go you," was my
answer. And thus I became partners with "Young Scratch" Nelson, the
wildest, maddest of them all. We borrowed the money for an outfit of
grub from Johnny Heinhold, filled our water-barrels, and sailed away that
day for the oyster-beds.
CHAPTER XII
Nor have I ever regretted those months of mad devilry I put in with
Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed
with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his
joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his
pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent
with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she
ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open
continually. And we abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider
afield for our adventures.
And all this glorious passage in my life was made possible for me by John
Barleycorn. And this is my complaint against John Barleycorn. Here I
was, thirsting for the wild life of adventure, and the only way for me to
win to it was through John Barleycorn's mediation. It was the way of the
men who lived the life. Did I wish to live the life, I must live it the
way they did. It was by virtue of drinking that I gained that
partnership and comradeship with Nelson. Had I drunk only the beer he
paid for, or had I declined to drink at all, I should never have been
selected by him as a partner. He wanted a partner who would meet him on
the social side, as well as the work side of life.
I abandoned myself to the life, and developed the misconception that the
secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks, rising through the
successive stages that only an iron constitution could endure to final
stupefaction and swinish unconsciousness. I did not like the taste, so I
drank for the sole purpose of getting drunk, of getting hopelessly,
helplessly drunk. And I, who had saved and scraped, traded like a
Shylock and made junkmen weep; I, who had stood aghast when French Frank,
at a single stroke, spent eighty cents for whisky for eight men, I turned
myself loose with a more lavish disregard for money than any of them.
I remember going ashore one night with Nelson. In my pocket were one
hundred and eighty dollars. It was my intention, first, to buy me some
clothes, after that, some drinks. I needed the clothes. All I possessed
were on me, and they were as follows: a pair of sea-boots that
providentially leaked the water out as fast as it ran in, a pair of
fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton shirt, and a sou'wester. I had
no hat, so I had to wear the sou'wester, and it will be noted that I have
listed neither underclothes nor socks. I didn't own any.
To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass a dozen
saloons. So I bought me the drinks first. I never got to the clothing
stores. In the morning, broke, poisoned, but contented, I came back on
board, and we set sail. I possessed only the clothes I had gone ashore
in, and not a cent remained of the one hundred and eighty dollars. It
might well be deemed impossible, by those who have never tried it, that
in twelve hours a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for
drinks. I know otherwise.
And I had no regrets. I was proud. I had shown them I could spend with
the best of them. Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong. I had
clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of
"Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction
from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil.
Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a
prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an
hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending
of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage,
then I'd like to know what is.
Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John Barleycorn
during this period, and shall only mention events that will throw light
on John Barleycorn's ways. There were three things that enabled me to
pursue this heavy drinking: first, a magnificent constitution far better
than the average; second, the healthy open-air life on the water; and
third, the fact that I drank irregularly. While out on the water, we
never carried any drink along.
The world was opening up to me. Already I knew several hundred miles of
the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and fishing hamlets on
the shores. Came the whisper to range farther. I had not found it yet.
There was more behind. But even this much of the world was too wide for
Nelson. He wearied for his beloved Oakland water-front, and when he
elected to return to it we separated in all friendliness.
I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my
headquarters. In a cluster of fishermen's arks, moored in the tules on
the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and vagabonds, and I
joined them. I had longer spells ashore, between fooling with salmon
fishing and making raids up and down bay and rivers as a deputy fish
patrolman, and I drank more and learned more about drinking. I held my
own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to
show the strength of my manhood. When, on a morning, my unconscious
carcass was disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I
had stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-front
talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another drink, I was
proud indeed. It was an exploit.
And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three solid
weeks, I was certain I had reached the top. Surely, in that direction,
one could go no farther. It was time for me to move on. For always,
drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that
this carousing and bay-adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was
my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling,
always calling, out and away over the world. It was not canniness on my
part. It was curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for
things wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What
was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was something
more, away and beyond. (And, in relation to my much later development as
a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the things at the back of life,
must be noted, for it was destined to play a dire part in my more recent
wrestlings with John Barleycorn.)
But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John
Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed abysses
of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o'clock in the morning, after
a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the
wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides sweep through Carquinez
Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled
overboard. There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was
borne away by the current. I was not startled. I thought the
misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed
condition the contact of the water with my skin soothed me like cool
linen.
And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering
fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been
morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that
they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect
rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known
girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; who had never
played in the wide joy-fields of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights
of philosophy, nor seen with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of
the gorgeous world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all,
lived all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the heels of
my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.
Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and it
didn't amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had lived for
months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation and the old
feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best, and I could see for
myself what it was worth. There were all the broken-down old bums and
loafers I had bought drinks for. That was what remained of life. Did I
want to become like them? A thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet
sadness over my glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not
seen the weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in
all the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their
sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.)
The water was delicious. It was a man's way to die. John Barleycorn
changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain. Away with tears
and regret. It was a hero's death, and by the hero's own hand and will.
So I struck up my death-chant and was singing it lustily, when the gurgle
and splash of the current-riffles in my ears reminded me of my more
immediate situation.
Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the Straits
widen out into what bay-farers call the "Bight of Turner's Shipyard." I
was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano wharf and on into the
bight. I knew of old the power of the suck which developed when the tide
swung around the end of Dead Man's Island and drove straight for the
wharf. I didn't want to go through those piles. It wouldn't be nice,
and I might lose an hour in the bight on my way out with the tide.
I undressed in the water and struck out with a strong, single-overhand
stroke, crossing the current at right-angles. Nor did I cease until, by
the wharf lights, I knew I was safe to sweep by the end. Then I turned
over and rested. The stroke had been a telling one, and I was a little
time in recovering my breath.
I was elated, for I had succeeded in avoiding the suck. I started to
raise my death-chant again--a purely extemporised farrago of a
drug-crazed youth. "Don't sing--yet," whispered John Barleycorn. "The
Solano runs all night. There are railroad men on the wharf. They will
hear you, and come out in a boat and rescue you, and you don't want to be
rescued." I certainly didn't. What? Be robbed of my hero's death?
Never. And I lay on my back in the starlight, watching the familiar
wharf-lights go by, red and green and white, and bidding sad sentimental
farewell to them, each and all.
When I was well clear, in mid-channel, I sang again. Sometimes I swam a
few strokes, but in the main I contented myself with floating and
dreaming long drunken dreams. Before daylight, the chill of the water
and the passage of the hours had sobered me sufficiently to make me
wonder what portion of the Straits I was in, and also to wonder if the
turn of the tide wouldn't catch me and take me back ere I had drifted out
into San Pablo Bay.
Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite sober,
and that I didn't in the least want to be drowned. I could make out the
Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare Island lighthouse.
I started to swim for the Solano shore, but was too weak and chilled, and
made so little headway, and at the cost of such painful effort, that I
gave it up and contented myself with floating, now and then giving a
stroke to keep my balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their
commotion on the surface of the water. And I knew fear. I was sober
now, and I didn't want to die. I discovered scores of reasons for
living. And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed
that I was going to drown anyway.
Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a parlous
condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where the swift ebbs
from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were fighting with each other,
and where, at that particular moment, they were fighting the flood tide
setting up against them from San Pablo Bay. A stiff breeze had sprung
up, and the crisp little waves were persistently lapping into my mouth,
and I was beginning to swallow salt water. With my swimmer's knowledge,
I knew the end was near. And then the boat came--a Greek fisherman
running in for Vallejo; and again I had been saved from John Barleycorn
by my constitution and physical vigour.
And, in passing, let me note that this maniacal trick John Barleycorn
played me is nothing uncommon. An absolute statistic of the per centage
of suicides due to John Barleycorn would be appalling. In my case,
healthy, normal, young, full of the joy of life, the suggestion to kill
myself was unusual; but it must be taken into account that it came on the
heels of a long carouse, when my nerves and brain were fearfully
poisoned, and that the dramatic, romantic side of my imagination,
drink-maddened to lunacy, was delighted with the suggestion. And yet,
the older, more morbid drinkers, more jaded with life and more
disillusioned, who kill themselves, do so usually after a long debauch,
when their nerves and brains are thoroughly poison-soaked.
CHAPTER XIII
So I left Benicia, where John Barleycorn had nearly got me, and ranged
wider afield in pursuit of the whisper from the back of life to come and
find. And wherever I ranged, the way lay along alcohol-drenched roads.
Men still congregated in saloons. They were the poor-man's clubs, and
they were the only clubs to which I had access. I could get acquainted
in saloons. I could go into a saloon and talk with any man. In the
strange towns and cities I wandered through, the only place for me to go
was the saloon. I was no longer a stranger in any town the moment I had
entered a saloon.
And right here let me break in with experiences no later than last year.
I harnessed four horses to a light trap, took Charmian along, and drove
for three months and a half over the wildest mountain parts of California
and Oregon. Each morning I did my regular day's work of writing fiction.
That completed, I drove on through the middle of the day and the
afternoon to the next stop. But the irregularity of occurrence of
stopping-places, coupled with widely varying road conditions, made it
necessary to plan, the day before, each day's drive and my work. I must
know when I was to start driving in order to start writing in time to
finish my day's output. Thus, on occasion, when the drive was to be
long, I would be up and at my writing by five in the morning. On easier
driving days I might not start writing till nine o'clock.
But how to plan? As soon as I arrived in a town, and put the horses up,
on the way from the stable to the hotel I dropped into the saloons.
First thing, a drink--oh, I wanted the drink, but also it must not be
forgotten that, because of wanting to know things, it was in this very
way I had learned to want a drink. Well, the first t