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.
« Table of contents |