Not yet was I ready to tuck my arm in John Barleycorn's. The older I
got, the greater my success, the more money I earned, the wider was the
command of the world that became mine and the more prominently did John
Barleycorn bulk in my life. And still I maintained no more than a
nodding acquaintance with him. I drank for the sake of sociability, and
when alone I did not drink. Sometimes I got jingled, but I considered
such jingles the mild price I paid for sociability.
To show how unripe I was for John Barleycorn, when, at this time, I
descended into my slough of despond, I never dreamed of turning to John
Barleycorn for a helping hand. I had life troubles and heart troubles
which are neither here nor there in this narrative. But, combined with
them, were intellectual troubles which are indeed germane.
Mine was no uncommon experience. I had read too much positive science
and lived too much positive life. In the eagerness of youth I had made
the ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too relentlessly. I had torn her
veils from her, and the sight was too terrible for me to stand. In
brief, I lost my fine faiths in pretty well everything except humanity,
and the humanity I retained faith in was a very stark humanity indeed.
This long sickness of pessimism is too well known to most of us to be
detailed here. Let it suffice to state that I had it very bad. I
meditated suicide coolly, as a Greek philosopher might. My regret was
that there were too many dependent directly upon me for food and shelter
for me to quit living. But that was sheer morality. What really saved
me was the one remaining illusion--the PEOPLE.
The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had failed me.
Success--I despised it. Recognition--it was dead ashes. Society, men
and women above the ruck and the muck of the water-front and the
forecastle--I was appalled by their unlovely mental mediocrity. Love of
woman--it was like all the rest. Money--I could sleep in only one bed at
a time, and of what worth was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day
when I could eat only one? Art, culture--in the face of the iron facts of
biology such things were ridiculous, the exponents of such things only
the more ridiculous.
From the foregoing it can be seen how very sick I was. I was born a
fighter. The things I had fought for had proved not worth the fight.
Remained the PEOPLE. My fight was finished, yet something was left still
to fight for--the PEOPLE.
But while I was discovering this one last tie to bind me to life, in my
extremity, in the depths of despond, walking in the valley of the shadow,
my ears were deaf to John Barleycorn. Never the remotest whisper arose
in my consciousness that John Barleycorn was the anodyne, that he could
lie me along to live. One way only was uppermost in my thought--my
revolver, the crashing eternal darkness of a bullet. There was plenty of
whisky in the house--for my guests. I never touched it. I grew afraid
of my revolver--afraid during the period in which the radiant, flashing
vision of the PEOPLE was forming in my mind and will. So obsessed was I
with the desire to die that I feared I might commit the act in my sleep,
and I was compelled to give my revolver away to others who were to lose
it for me where my subconscious hand might not find it.
But the PEOPLE saved me. By the PEOPLE was I handcuffed to life. There
was still one fight left in me, and here was the thing for which to
fight. I threw all precaution to the winds, threw myself with fiercer
zeal into the fight for socialism, laughed at the editors and publishers
who warned me and who were the sources of my hundred porterhouses a day,
and was brutally careless of whose feelings I hurt and of how savagely I
hurt them. As the "well-balanced radicals" charged at the time, my
efforts were so strenuous, so unsafe and unsane, so ultra-revolutionary,
that I retarded the socialist development in the United States by five
years. In passing, I wish to remark, at this late date, that it is my
fond belief that I accelerated the socialist development in the United
States by at least five minutes.
It was the PEOPLE, and no thanks to John Barleycorn, who pulled me
through my long sickness. And when I was convalescent came the love of
woman to complete the cure and lull my pessimism asleep for many a long
day, until John Barleycorn again awoke it. But in the meantime, I
pursued Truth less relentlessly, refraining from tearing her last veils
aside even when I clutched them in my hand. I no longer cared to look
upon Truth naked. I refused to permit myself to see a second time what I
had once seen. And the memory of what I had that time seen I resolutely
blotted from my mind.
And I was very happy. Life went well with me, I took delight in little
things. The big things I declined to take too seriously. I still read
the books, but not with the old eagerness. I still read the books
to-day, but never again shall I read them with that old glory of youthful
passion when I harked to the call from over and beyond that whispered me
on to win to the mystery at the back of life and behind the stars.
The point of this chapter is that, in the long sickness that at some time
comes to most of us, I came through without any appeal for aid to John
Barleycorn. Love, socialism, the PEOPLE--healthful figments of man's
mind--were the things that cured and saved me. If ever a man was not a
born alcoholic, I believe that I am that man. And yet--well, let the
succeeding chapters tell their tale, for in them will be shown how I paid
for my previous quarter of a century of contact with ever-accessible John
Barleycorn.