there was a round-up of the saloons. Already I was feeling the
impact of the whisky. Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon,
and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade.
I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my
legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my
lungs panting for air.
My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain
told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I
remained at the rear of the procession. I left the ranks and ran
down a pathway beside the road under broad-spreading trees.
Nelson pursued me, laughing. Certain things stand out, as in
memories of nightmare. I remember those trees especially, and my
desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell,
roars of laughter went up from the other drunks. They thought I
was merely antic drunk. They did not dream that John Barleycorn
had me by the throat in a death-clutch. But I knew it. And I
remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that
I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not
know. It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators
who thought I was cutting up tricks for their entertainment.
And running there under the trees, I fell and lost consciousness.
What happened afterward, with one glimmering exception, I had to
be told. Nelson, with his enormous strength, picked me up and
dragged me on and aboard the train. When he had got me into a
seat, I fought and panted so terribly for air that even with his
obtuseness he knew I was in a bad way. And right there, at any
moment, I know now, I might have died. I often think it is the
nearest to death I have ever been. I have only Nelson’s
description of my behaviour to go by.
I was scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire
and suffocation, and I wanted air. I madly wanted air. My
efforts to raise a window were vain, for all the windows in the
car were screwed down. Nelson had seen drink-crazed men, and
thought I wanted to throw myself out. He tried to restrain me,
but I fought on. I seized some man’s torch and smashed the glass.
Now there were pro-Nelson and anti-Nelson factions on the Oakland
water-front, and men of both factions, with more drink in them
than was good, filled the car. My smashing of the window was the
signal for the antis. One of them reached for me, and dropped me,
and started the fight, of all of which I have no knowledge save
what was told me afterward, and a sore jaw next day from the blow
that put me out. The man who struck me went down across my body,
Nelson followed him, and they say there were few unbroken windows
in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all fight
had its course.
This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing
that could have happened to me. My violent struggles had only
accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart, and
increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs.
John Barleycorn
49
After the fight was over and I came to, I did not come to myself.
I was no more myself than a drowning man is who continues to
struggle after he has lost consciousness. I have no memory of my
actions, but I cried ” Air! Air!” so insistently, that it dawned
on Nelson that I did not contemplate self-destruction. So he
cleared the jagged glass from the window-ledge and let me stick my
head and shoulders out. He realised, partially, the seriousness
of my condition. and held me by the waist to prevent me from
crawling farther out. And for the rest of the run in to Oakland I
kept my head and shoulders out, fighting like a maniac whenever he
tried to draw me inside.
And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came. My
sole recollection, from the time I fell under the trees until I
awoke the following evening, is of my head out of the window,
facing the wind caused by the train, cinders striking and burning
and blinding me, while I breathed with will. All my will was
concentrated on breathing–on breathing the air in the hugest
lung-full gulps I could, pumping the greatest amount of air into
my lungs in the shortest possible time. It was that or death, and
I was a swimmer and diver, and I knew it; and in the most
intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation, during those moments I
was conscious, I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for
life.
All the rest is a blank. I came to the following evening, in a
water-front lodging-house. I was alone. No doctor had been
called in. And I might well have died there, for Nelson and the
others, deeming me merely “sleeping off my drunk,” had let me lie
there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours. Many a man, as
every doctor knows, has died of the sudden impact of a quart or
more of whisky. Usually one reads of them so dying, strong
drinkers, on account of a wager. But I didn’t know–then. And so
I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good
fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed
over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit,
dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the
discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another
year to come.
Heavens! That was twenty years ago, and I am still very much and
wisely alive; and I have seen much, done much, lived much, in that
intervening score of years; and I shudder when I think how close a
shave I ran, how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a
century that has been mine. And, oh, it wasn’t John Barleycorn’s
fault that he didn’t get me that night of the Hancock Fire
Brigade.
CHAPTER XV
It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to
sea. My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little
responsible for this. I still drank and frequented saloons–
practically lived in saloons. Whisky was dangerous, in my
John Barleycorn
50
opinion, but not wrong. Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous
things in the natural world. Men died of whisky; but then, too,
fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and
were cut to pieces. To cope with winds and waves, railroad
trains, and bar-rooms, one must use judgment. To get drunk after
the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with
discretion. No more quarts of whisky for me.
What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first
vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his
devotees. It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two
phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time. It struck me, from
watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were
living was more destructive than that lived by the average man.
John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime.
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of
doing sober. And this wasn’t the worst of it. It was the penalty
that must be paid. Crime was destructive. Saloon-mates I drank
with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent
and lunatic things when they were drunk. And then the police
gathered them in and they vanished from our ken. Sometimes I
visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed
across the bay to put on the felon’s stripes. And time and again
I heard the one explanation “IF I HADN’T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN’T A-
DONE IT.” And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the
most frightful things were done–things that shocked even my case-
hardened soul.
The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual
drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent
provocation. When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions
that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.
Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on
occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes
it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo
while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the
circumstances, might just as easily have been his head.
So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a
bad way of living. It made toward death too quickly to suit my
youth and vitality. And there was only one way out of this
hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out. The sealing