in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor do I stagger.
In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the normal,
average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I
have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant
excessivist, the dipsomaniac.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the
man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten
numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread,
tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in
the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is
the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most
pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never
staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is
doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may
bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see
intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and
that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition
that he strips away the husks of life’s healthiest illusions and
gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the
neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn’s subtlest
power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a
terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs
unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for
himself but one freedom–namely, the anticipating of the day of
his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of
which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of
things–the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour.
His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the
grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after
immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of
death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination.
They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die
when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into
believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving
the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating
heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white
logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event
happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not
even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls–immortality. But he
knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He
is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-
dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at
by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into
the scrap-heap at the end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the
penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John
Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler,
easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He
sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and
John Barleycorn
6
inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends
the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks
upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a
pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions.
He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and
life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of
a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends–in
the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and
shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their
frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness.
No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms,
like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-
dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of
chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one
difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he
may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for
a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide,
quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the
years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever
escapes making the just, due payment.
CHAPTER III
I was five years old the first time I got drunk. It was on a hot
day, and my father was ploughing in the field. I was sent from
the house, half a mile away, to carry to him a pail of beer. “And
be sure you don’t spill it,” was the parting injunction.
It was, as I remember it, a lard pail, very wide across the top,
and without a cover. As I toddled along, the beer slopped over
the rim upon my legs. And as I toddled, I pondered. Beer was a
very precious thing. Come to think of it, it must be wonderfully
good. Else why was I never permitted to drink of it in the house?
Other things kept from me by the grown-ups I had found good. Then
this, too, was good. Trust the grown-ups. They knew. And,
anyway, the pail was too full. I was slopping it against my legs
and spilling it on the ground. Why waste it? And no one would
know whether I had drunk or spilled it.
I was so small that, in order to negotiate the pail, I sat down
and gathered it into my lap. First I sipped the foam. I was
disappointed. The preciousness evaded me. Evidently it did not
reside in the foam. Besides, the taste was not good. Then I
remembered seeing the grown-ups blow the foam away before they
drank. I buried my face in the foam and lapped the solid liquid
beneath. It wasn’t good at all. But still I drank. The grown-
ups knew what they were about. Considering my diminutiveness, the
size of the pail in my lap, and my drinking out of it my breath
held and my face buried to the ears in foam, it was rather
difficult to estimate how much I drank. Also, I was gulping it
down like medicine, in nauseous haste to get the ordeal over.
I shuddered when I started on, and decided that the good taste
would come afterward. I tried several times more in the course of
John Barleycorn
7
that long half-mile. Then, astounded by the quantity of beer that
was lacking, and remembering having seen stale beer made to foam
afresh, I took a stick and stirred what was left till it foamed to
the brim.
And my father never noticed. He emptied the pail with the wide
thirst of the sweating ploughman, returned it to me, and started
up the plough. I endeavoured to walk beside the horses. I
remember tottering and falling against their heels in front of the
shining share, and that my father hauled back on the lines so
violently that the horses nearly sat down on me. He told me
afterward that it was by only a matter of inches that I escaped
disembowelling. Vaguely, too, I remember, my father carried me in
his arms to the trees on the edge of the field, while all the
world reeled and swung about me, and I was aware of deadly nausea
mingled with an appalling conviction of sin.
I slept the afternoon away under the trees, and when my father
roused me at sundown it was a very sick little boy that got up and
dragged wearily homeward. I was exhausted, oppressed by the
weight of my limbs, and in my stomach was a harp-like vibrating
that extended to my throat and brain. My condition was like that
of one who had gone through a battle with poison. In truth, I had
been poisoned.
In the weeks and months that followed I had no more interest in
beer than in the kitchen stove after it had burned me. The grown-
ups were right. Beer was not for children. The grown-ups didn’t
mind it; but neither did they mind taking pills and castor oil.
As for me, I could manage to get along quite well without beer.
Yes, and to the day of my death I could have managed to get along
quite well without it. But circumstance decreed otherwise. At
every turn in the world in which I lived, John Barleycorn
beckoned. There was no escaping him. All paths led to him. And