social end, entertain on board, be entertained ashore by planters,
traders, governors, captains of war vessels, kinky-headed cannibal
kings, and prime ministers sometimes fortunate enough to be clad
in cotton shifts.
Of course I drank. I drank with my guests and hosts. Also, I
drank by myself. Doing the work of five men, I thought, entitled
me to drink. Alcohol was good for a man who over-worked. I noted
its effect on my small crew, when, breaking their backs and hearts
at heaving up anchor in forty fathoms, they knocked off gasping
and trembling at the end of half an hour and had new life put into
them by stiff jolts of rum. They caught their breaths, wiped
their mouths, and went to it again with a will. And when we
careened the Snark and had to work in the water to our necks
between shocks of fever, I noted how raw trade rum helped the work
along.
And here again we come to another side of many-sided John
Barleycorn. On the face of it, he gives something for nothing.
Where no strength remains he finds new strength. The wearied one
rises to greater effort. For the time being there is an actual
accession of strength. I remember passing coal on an ocean
steamer through eight days of hell, during which time we coal-
passers were kept to the job by being fed with whisky. We toiled
half drunk all the time. And without the whisky we could not have
passed the coal.
This strength John Barleycorn gives is not fictitious strength.
It is real strength. But it is manufactured out of the sources of
strength, and it must ultimately be paid for, and with interest.
But what weary human will look so far ahead? He takes this
apparently miraculous accession of strength at its face value.
And many an overworked business and professional man, as well as a
harried common labourer, has travelled John Barleycorn’s death
road because of this mistake.
CHAPTER XXXIII
I went to Australia to go into hospital and get tinkered up, after
which I planned to go on with the voyage. And during the long
weeks I lay in hospital, from the first day I never missed
alcohol. I never thought about it. I knew I should have it again
when I was on my feet. But when I regained my feet I was not
cured of my major afflictions. Naaman’s silvery skin was still
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103
mine. The mysterious sun-sickness, which the experts of Australia
could not fathom, still ripped and tore my tissues. Malaria still
festered in me and put me on my back in shivering delirium at the
most unexpected moments, compelling me to cancel a double lecture
tour which had been arranged.
So I abandoned the Snark voyage and sought a cooler climate. The
day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of
course. I drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals.
I drank Scotch highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was
drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn
I could take up with him or let go of him whenever I pleased, just
as I had done all my life.
After a time, for cooler climate, I went down to southermost
Tasmania in forty-three South. And I found myself in a place
where there was nothing to drink. It didn’t mean anything. I
didn’t drink. It was no hardship. I soaked in the cool air, rode
horseback, and did my thousand words a day save when the fever
shock came in the morning.
And for fear that the idea may still lurk in some minds that my
preceding years of drinking were the cause of my disabilities, I
here point out that my Japanese cabin boy, Nakata, still with me,
was rotten with fever, as was Charmian, who in addition was in the
slough of a tropical neurasthenia that required several years of
temperate climates to cure, and that neither she nor Nakata drank
or ever had drunk.
When I returned to Hobart Town, where drink was obtainable, I
drank as of old. The same when I arrived back in Australia. On
the contrary, when I sailed from Australia on a tramp steamer
commanded by an abstemious captain, I took no drink along, and had
no drink for the forty-three days’ passage. Arrived in Ecuador,
squarely under the equatorial sun, where the humans were dying of
yellow fever, smallpox, and the plague, I promptly drank again–
every drink of every sort that had a kick in it. I caught none of
these diseases. Neither did Charmian nor Nakata who did not
drink.
Enamoured of the tropics, despite the damage done me, I stopped in
various places, and was a long while getting back to the splendid,
temperate climate of California. I did my thousand words a day,
travelling or stopping over, suffered my last faint fever shock,
saw my silvery skin vanish and my sun-torn tissues healthily knit
again, and drank as a broad-shouldered chesty man may drink.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Back on the ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, I resumed my steady
drinking. My programme was no drink in the morning; first drink-
time came with the completion of my thousand words. Then, between
that and the midday meal, were drinks numerous enough to develop a
pleasant jingle. Again, in the hour preceding the evening meal, I
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104
developed another pleasant jingle. Nobody ever saw me drunk, for
the simple reason that I never was drunk. But I did get a jingle
twice each day; and the amount of alcohol I consumed every day, if
loosed in the system of one unaccustomed to drink, would have put
such a one on his back and out.
It was the old proposition. The more I drank, the more I was
compelled to drink in order to get an effect. The time came when
cocktails were inadequate. I had neither the time in which to
drink them nor the space to accommodate them. Whisky had a more
powerful jolt. It gave quicker action with less quantity.
Bourbon or rye, or cunningly aged blends, constituted the pre-
midday drinking. In the late afternoon it was Scotch and soda.
My sleep, always excellent, now became not quite so excellent. I
had been accustomed to read myself back asleep when I chanced to
awake. But now this began to fail me. When I had read two or
three of the small hours away and was as wide awake as ever, I
found that a drink furnished the soporific effect. Sometimes two
or three drinks were required.
So short a period of sleep then intervened before early morning
rising that my system did not have time to work off the alcohol.
As a result I awoke with mouth parched and dry, with a slight
heaviness of head, and with a mild nervous palpitation in the
stomach. In fact I did not feel good. I was suffering from the
morning sickness of the steady, heavy drinker. What I needed was
a pick-me-up, a bracer. Trust John Barleycorn, once he has broken
down a man’s defences! So it was a drink before breakfast to put
me right for breakfast–the old poison of the snake that has
bitten one! Another custom begun at this time was that of the
pitcher of water by the bedside to furnish relief to my scorched
and sizzling membranes.
I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from
alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol. If I
travelled to out-of-the-way places, I declined to run the risk of
finding them dry. I took a quart, or several quarts, along in my
grip. In the past I had been amazed by other men guilty of this
practice. Now I did it myself unblushingly. And when I got out
with the fellows, I cast all rules by the board. I drank when
they drank, what they drank, and in the same way they drank.
I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me.
The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was
no time, in all my waking time, that I didn’t want a drink. I
began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by
taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was
not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with
a drink.
The gravity of this I realised too well. I made new rules.
Resolutely I would refrain from drinking until my work was done.
But a new and most diabolical complication arose. The work
refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn’t be done. I
had to drink in order to do it. I was beginning to fight now. I
had the craving at last, and it was mastering me. I would sit at