Josephina would seem never to have had a bath. She cleans windows and
floors and rugs for thirty-five cents an hour. She would regard it as
a fantastic waste of time and soap to clean herself for nothing.
I own in a still flawed life one phase which is an endless treasure
of beauty and power and charm and light: my love for John Keats.
The Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more
still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink.
There begins a curious line of similitude between us.
I feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner
with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap.
And Josephina has been found many a time by Butte policemen sitting
alone joyous and very drunk, in dark alleys with empty pint bottles
strewn all about her.
In my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober
has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the
acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more
lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native
braininess, and to alcohol’s having rotting effects on human mental
tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry
savior.
I like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for
Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.
There seems no other pleasure in life for her.
The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page
Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.
The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her:
she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum.
Her body can bring her no delight: there’s no lightness to it, no
tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the
Dianas love theirs.
A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.
Her food is merely her fodder.
Love and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each
other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her
personality is not conducive to lovers.
She has nor chick nor child to mother.
Her idea of a life beyond this vale is crude and uncomfortable. She
went two Sundays to the Finnish church and had a surprising lusty
doctrine of eternal fire rammed down her throat: she took the Finn
minister’s word for it and quitted the fold, preferring to live this
life unhampered by flaming anticipation. All her material treasure
she works for with mops and scrubbing-brushes at thirty-five cents an
hour.
Other roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint
bottles.
Josephina is what is called a white liner. Which means that she
has drunk so long, so much, so regularly that whiskey, rum, gin
and brandy have no or negligible effects upon her. To achieve her
intoxicating aim she must drink pure alcohol.
By the same token I eschew many a tame poet: I must have John Keats.
What the poetry of John Keats does to me I know.
What the distilled waters of her choice do to Josephina it pleases me
to imagine while I watch her clean my walls and floor and windows.
She works strongly, steadily, quietly till I pronounce the room
clean. Then she stops, carries the pails and other things downstairs
to the kitchen, removes a big brass pin from the rear of her dingy
skirt which had held it back and doubled over her darkling petticoat,
re-dons an antique rain-coat and bad hat, ties her clinking silver
into the corner of a decadent handkerchief, bids me good-evening with
a grave blond Finn bow and goes out into the dusk. She takes her
way through alleys and short-cuts to the side door of a ‘Finlander’
gin-palace in the Finn quarter of the town. And there she lays out
her day’s wage in the pint bottles of her delight. As many pint
bottles as her few dollars will buy, so many she buys. She ventures
her all in the name of passionate thirst taking no thought of the
morrow. She then seeks out some alley with a dark door-step and
there she does her drinking. It would not do to go home with her
alcoholic wealth because the husband might be there who, like the
alphabetic vintner, would ‘drink all himself.’ So she drinks away in
pint-bottle-ish peace, sitting alone in the gloom of the alleyway
door-step, in her limp rain-coat and bad hat and her stolid Finn
self-sufficience.
Because I like Josephina it charms me to think of the happiness that
must be hers as she sits emptying pint bottles into herself and the
white strong fire-water begins to work.
Before having her drinks she is unelated and uninformed like a
corpse coldly electrified by a storage battery. As she drinks and
drinks on she remains outwardly unchanged as the way is with her
race--but within! The changes that come to pass in the heavy person
of Josephina as the white flames wash down her walls!
Into her dull veins pours a hot stream like melted seething copper
and it heats her knees till she knows she _has_ knees and that they
are white and very beautiful: and it heats her legs and her back and
her breasts till they glow with the double-glow of an Aphrodite’s in
a reluctant Adonis’s arms: it heats her eyes and temples and throat
till she feels herself a radiant girl: it heats the crown of her
head till she feels something like a brain there: it heats her heart
and stomach till she’s filled with a gay gust for life: it heats her
imagination till she even imagines herself in love with her hard
Finn husband since he is not by to beat her and so dispel the fancy:
it heats a sense of humor into her till she laughs suddenly and
heartily at some fugitive funniness that had lain long frozen in her
memory: it heats a hundred little human carburetors in her which send
a wreathe of vapors up into her drab being to flush it with misty
golds and thin blues and rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary
soul awakes--a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be--and is
wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops
and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from
doorsteps--to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!
Nearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the
doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The
policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long
familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with
a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this
world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun’s
chromosphere burns like mad--but her body, unable to cope with the
virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.
A quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body
laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered
on the paving-stones beside it--but her astral shape, lit by the
subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The
policeman calls the ‘wagon’ and Josephina is taken up by several
ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her
to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands
jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police judge who glances at
her uninterestedly for the several-hundredth time and says five days.
The five days can not be pleasant days but Josephina owns a robust
sporting spirit. She gives not so much as the shrug of a shoulder
either at going into jail or coming out of it. A black eye from her
husband, a broken arm from a drunken fall, a filthy sojourn in jail:
all one to her. She accepts them as she accepts all of her life, with
an immense psychic calm. But she takes strongly to drink to translate
herself out of it. And let her drink.
I know how she feels for I take to John Keats. I don’t myself care
much for strong drink. I drink a little of it at irregular intervals,
but, by and large, I drink without éclat. In this mountain altitude
whiskey makes me sick, champagne makes me dizzy and gin is a pungent
punishment. One morning after reading of Josephina’s white-line
distinction in a police-court column I tasted some alcohol, but it
had a varnish flavor and had strangling effects on my throat. It
made me marvel at Josephina’s prowess. I like absinthe in its bitter
strength mostly because to sit sipping it feels restfully forbidden.
Port wine is a brackish medicine, I hate the stickiness of cordials,
and a cocktail I like chiefly to contemplate. So much for me and
strong drink.
Josephina on the other hand does not care for John Keats. I sounded
her on poetry in some of its human aspects: there was nobody at home.
Her own enlightened north country has some poets of borealic iron and
brain-brawn and beauty: to Josephina’s wooden intellect their books
are eternally closed.
But the Demon Rum looses a heated flood of poetry upon her, which I
can but vision and not feel.
I am incapable of strong drink even as Josephina is incapable of
John Keats.
We are quits there.