THE FELLOW.
Although I met him almost every day, I never cared to renew my
acquaintance with Clinton Bragg. The dislike was evidently mutual, for
while he never came in my way, I knew he made fun of me, as he did of
every one else, and I believe he had an ill word for whatever I did or
attempted.
Although it was said that he drank more than was good for him, he did
not have the appearance of a drunkard, and it seemed to me that when he
was drinking, he was anxious that everybody know it, and that he drank
more because it was contemptible and depraved than because he had an
appetite. A few of the sentimental people said that were it not for his
dissipating, he could greatly distinguish himself, and that he was very
talented; therefore I think he drank as an apology for his
worthlessness, knowing he could never accomplish what the people said he
could if he remained sober. He probably argued that if he kept his
breath smelling with liquor, he would only have to answer to the public
for that one fault (receiving at the same time a large amount of
sympathy, which a better man would have rejected), whereas if he kept
sober he would be compelled to answer to the charge of being an insolent
loafer, and a worthless vagabond.
From a long experience with it, I have come to believe that the question
of intemperance has never been treated with the intelligence which has
distinguished this country in most other particulars. We pet drunkards
too much, and a halo of sentimentality surrounds them, instead of the
disgust and contempt they deserve. If a man is a noted liar, or a noted
vagrant, society allows him to find his proper level, and reform himself
(since no one else can do it for him), but if he drinks too much, great
numbers of men and women who are perhaps temperate in nothing except
that they do not drink, attempt to reform him with kindness, although
that method prevails in nothing else. As a reason why he should not
dissipate, he is told what distinguished positions he could occupy but
for the habit, and while this is well-intended, the facts generally are
that the fellow is entirely worthless whether drunk or sober. The young
man who practises temperance in the whiskey and other particulars
because it is necessary in his ambition to be of use to himself and to
those around him, is entirely neglected that the disgusting pigs who
swill that which is ruinous to health, mind, and pocket may be
“encouraged,” and who perhaps only drink for the poor kind of attention
it insures them, and from being told of it so often, they come to
believe themselves that but for their dissipation they would be
wonderful fellows, so it often happens that their egotism is even more
detestable than their maudlin drunkenness. Many young men are thus led
into the false notion that great brains feed on stimulants, and regard
an appetite as intellectual.
The same mistaken people also talk too much about the allurements and
pleasures of drink; of the gilded palaces where drink is sold, and of
its pleasing effects, causing young men and boys who would otherwise
never have thought of it to be seized with an uncontrollable desire to
try the experiment for themselves, although there is nothing more
certain than that all of this is untrue. They visit these places, to
begin with, because they have been warned so frequently against them,
and before they find out--which they are certain to, sooner or
later--that whiskey is man’s enemy in every particular, and his friend
in nothing; that the “gilded palaces” in which it is sold are low dens
kept by men whose company is not desirable; that the reputed pleasure in
the cup is a myth; and that drinking is an evidence of depravity as
plainly marked as idleness and viciousness,--they form the habit, and
become saloon loafers. I firmly believe that hundreds of young men
become drunkards by misrepresentation of this sort, whereas the truth is
easier told, and would prove more effective in keeping them away.
The first step in a career of dissipation is not the first glass, as is
sometimes asserted, but a cultivation of saloon society. There is
nothing to do in a place where drink is sold, no other amusement or
excuse for being there, than to drink, gamble and gossip, and when a man
learns to relish the undesirable company common to such places, the
liquor habit follows as a matter of course, but not before. It is an
effort for most men to drink whiskey, even after they have become
accustomed to its use; it is naturally disgusting to every good quality,
and every good thought; it jars every healthy nerve as it is poured down
the throat; it looks hot and devilish in the bottle, and gurgles like a
demon’s laugh while it is being poured out, and until the young men of
the country are taught that drinking is low and vicious rather than
intellectual, we cannot hope for a reform in this grave matter.
I believe that familiarity with it breeds contempt, for I have noticed
that very few drunkard’s sons follow in the footsteps of their fathers,
and the men who sell it seldom drink it. Most drunkards are such
notorious liars that little can be told from their confessions, but if
accurate statistics could be collected, it would no doubt turn out that
most men having the habit formed it because they were particularly
warned against it. To say to a man that he shall not drink creates
within him a strong desire to drink to excess, and prohibitory laws
generally increase rather than decrease the consumption of liquor,
because of this strange peculiarity. We regulate other evils, and admit
they cannot be blotted out, but with strange inconsistency we insist
that liquor of every kind must be driven from the face of the earth;
that to regulate such a horrible evil is a compromise with the Devil,
and that efforts for its extermination only are worthy of temperate men
and women.
The most convincing argument for reform in any particular is necessity.
When a man says to himself, “I must quit this habit or starve,” or “I
can never obtain a position of trust in business, or a place of
respectability in society, until I convince the people of my
intelligence and manhood by reforming a habit which is the most
contemptible as well as injurious of all other habits,” he is on the
right road, and will in time accomplish a victory over himself, and the
best thing society can do for him--however heartless it may seem--is to
let him alone during his reformation, only visiting upon him its severe
contempt when he falls, for if the fall is hard and disagreeable, he
will be more careful the next time. When a man disgraces himself in any
other way, we insist that he must be humiliated, as sending him to jail
for petty larceny, or to public work for vagrancy; but when he becomes a
disgusting, beastly drunkard, we tell him in confidence that he is not
to blame, and that his enemies the saloon-keepers are responsible. The
man who sells the pistol or the poison is not to blame for the suicide,
nor is the man who sells the whiskey to blame for the drunkard.
It is no more remarkable that men drink too much than that men eat too
much, and die, before their time, of dyspepsia. The one we regard as a
glutton, and despise him that he does not use the knowledge God has
given him to better advantage, but the other is fondled and pitied until
he is made to feel almost comfortable in his disgrace. The result is
that men are oftener cured of excessive eating than of excessive
drinking. We never think of punishing the grocer for selling unhealthy
but palatable food, but we are very severe on the men who sell palatable
but demoralizing drink. Men have frequently been cured of kleptomania by
a term in jail, and of lying and loafing by the contempt of the people
among whom they live, and the same rule applied to drunkards would be
equally satisfactory in its results.
Because temperance is right, too many insist that it must prevail,
although the experience of ages proves that it never was, and never will
become a common virtue. We might reason with equal goodness of heart
that because children are pretty and healthy, they should never be
stricken down with disease, and die, although our sorrowing hearts tell
us that the reverse is the rule.
In everything else we profit from experience, but we seem to have
learned nothing from the past in dealing with intemperance. The methods
used for its suppression now are exactly the same as were used hundreds
of years ago, although we know them to be ineffective. As a sensible
people, as a people desiring the good of the unfortunate, we cannot
afford to practise methods which we know beforehand will be of no avail.
Intemperance is growing too rapidly to admit of an unsatisfactory
pretence that we have discharged our duty, and while the theory advanced
by the writer of this may not be the best one, it is certain that the
one generally adopted is wrong, for the people are disheartened and
discouraged because with all their work they have accomplished nothing.
Clinton Bragg was this sort of a drunkard, and drank whiskey for no
other reason than that everybody said it wasn’t good for him. It was
known that he always drank large quantities of water after using his
bottle, as if the liquor had set fire to his throat, and the water was
intended to put it out. While I never knew him to be helplessly
intoxicated, he was frequently under the influence of his bottle, or
pretended to be, although I have seen him sober very suddenly, and I
always thought he was dissatisfied that the people did not talk more
about his dissipation, as they did of Fin Wilkinson’s, the town
drunkard, who was often on the streets in danger of being run over by
wagons.
Every two or three months he received an allowance of money from his
father, which he expended selfishly but lavishly as long as it lasted,
but for a few weeks before his money came, and while he was without it,
he was a more decent fellow, and it occurred to me that had he been
compelled to make his own way in the world, he might in time have
developed into a respectable man. But as it was he had no friends, and
spent the mornings of his days in sleeping, and his nights in aimless
excursions over the country, riding a horse as mean and vicious as
himself. A decent man would not have owned the animal, for he had a
reputation for biting and kicking, but Bragg lavished upon him the
greatest attention, and was delighted to hear occasionally that he had
injured a stable boy. It was a pleasure to Bragg to know that his horse
laid back his ears in anger at the approach of any one, in the street or
on the road, and his master teased him for hours to cultivate his
devilish disposition.
Where he went on these excursions nobody ever knew except that I knew
he frequently rode by Barker’s mill, as if on his way to the Shepherds,
galloping back the same way at a late hour, to create the impression
that he was so popular there that he only got away with difficulty,
though I believe he usually rode aimlessly about to be different from
other men, for while he often rode that way, it was only on rare
occasions that he went to the house of the minister.
Bragg was educated, and when he talked to the town people at all it was
to point out their ignorance, which he did with a bitter tongue. If he
was seated in front of the usual loitering places on a summer evening,
which he sometimes did because there was nothing else to do, he made
everybody uncomfortable by intently watching for opportunity to
insolently point out mistakes, and if he ever read or studied at all it
was for this purpose. Occasionally there came to the town a traveller
who was his equal in information, who beat him in argument and
threatened to whip him for an insolent dog, which afforded the people
much satisfaction. I remember a commercial traveller who sold the
merchants nearly all their goods because he once threw a plate of soup
in Bragg’s face at the hotel table, and then, leading him out into the
yard by the ear, gave him a sound beating; but I do not remember what
the occasion of the difficulty between them was, though it was probably
no more than his ordinary impudence.
He had an office and apartments over a leather store a few doors above
the place where I worked, in front of which there was a porch, and he
sat out upon this, when the weather was pleasant, for hours at a time,
smoking cigars, and spitting spitefully into the street. The only man I
ever knew who visited his rooms was the leather dealer, who called on
Bragg once every three months to collect his rent. It was a part of the
town gossip that this man said the rooms were splendidly furnished, but
always darkened with rich and heavy curtains at the windows, and that it
was full of stuffed snakes, lizards, bats, and other hideous things;
that his match-safe was a human skull, and that a grinning skeleton hung
against the wall, which rattled and wildly swung its arms and legs every
time a draft or a visitor came in at the door. It was also related that
by means of ingenious strings he made the skeleton shake or nod its
head, and point with its arms, and I have imagined that when he was in
his apartments he employed himself in causing the figure to nod its head
in response to the assertion that Clinton Bragg was a fine fellow, or
shake it violently when asked if Clinton Bragg was a worthless dog, as
the people said.
Occasionally people who had lines to run knocked at his door in response
to the sign, “C. BRAGG, C. Engineer,” but even if he was at home he
would not let them in, for he had no intention of walking over the
prairie in the hot sun when he put out the sign. I never knew of his
doing anything in his line, although he might have been a great deal
employed, and finally no one applied there for admission except the
saddler for his rent, and a lame negro who swept and cleaned his
apartments, although it was quite generally believed that the Devil
called on him every bad night.