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.