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 waiting 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.'"