as if we had known each other for years and years, and we pledged
ourselves to years of future voyagings together. The harpooner
told of misadventures and secret shames. Scotty wept over his
poor old mother in Edinburgh–a lady, he insisted, gently born–
who was in reduced circumstances, who had pinched herself to pay
the lump sum to the ship-owners for his apprenticeship, whose
sacrificing dream had been to see him a merchantman officer and a
gentleman, and who was heartbroken because he had deserted his
ship in Australia and joined another as a common sailor before the
mast. And Scotty proved it. He drew her last sad letter from his
pocket and wept over it as he read it aloud. The harpooner and I
wept with him, and swore that all three of us would ship on the
whaleship Bonanza, win a big pay-day, and, still together, make a
pilgrimage to Edinburgh and lay our store of money in the dear
lady’s lap.
And, as John Barleycorn heated his way into my brain, thawing my
reticence, melting my modesty, talking through me and with me and
as me, my adopted twin brother and alter ego, I, too, raised my
voice to show myself a man and an adventurer, and bragged in
detail and at length of how I had crossed San Francisco Bay in my
open skiff in a roaring southwester when even the schooner sailors
doubted my exploit. Further, I–or John Barleycorn, for it was
the same thing–told Scotty that he might be a deep-sea sailor and
know the last rope on the great deep-sea ships, but that when it
came to small-boat sailing I could beat him hands down and sail
circles around him.
The best of it was that my assertion and brag were true. With
reticence and modesty present, I could never have dared tell
Scotty my small-boat estimate of him. But it is ever the way of
John Barleycorn to loosen the tongue and babble the secret
thought.
Scotty, or John Barleycorn, or the pair, was very naturally
offended by my remarks. Nor was I loath. I could whip any
runaway sailor seventeen years old. Scotty and I flared and raged
like young cockerels, until the harpooner poured another round of
drinks to enable us to forgive and make up. Which we did, arms
around each other’s necks, protesting vows of eternal friendship–
just like Black Matt and Tom Morrisey, I remembered, in the ranch
kitchen in San Mateo. And, remembering, I knew that I was at last
a man–despite my meagre fourteen years–a man as big and manly as
those two strapping giants who had quarrelled and made up on that
memorable Sunday morning of long ago.
By this time the singing stage was reached, and I joined Scotty
and the harpooner in snatches of sea songs and chanties. It was
here, in the cabin of the Idler, that I first heard “Blow the Man
John Barleycorn
19
Down,” “Flying Cloud,” and “Whisky, Johnny, Whisky.” Oh, it was
brave. I was beginning to grasp the meaning of life. Here was no
commonplace, no Oakland Estuary, no weary round of throwing
newspapers at front doors, delivering ice, and setting up
ninepins. All the world was mine, all its paths were under my
feet, and John Barleycorn, tricking my fancy, enabled me to
anticipate the life of adventure for which I yearned.
We were not ordinary. We were three tipsy young gods, incredibly
wise, gloriously genial, and without limit to our powers. Ah!–
and I say it now, after the years–could John Barleycorn keep one
at such a height, I should never draw a sober breath again. But
this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an
iron schedule–for every strength the balanced weakness; for every
high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an
equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping
long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one
must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times, with savage usury
added.
Intenseness and duration are as ancient enemies as fire and water.
They are mutually destructive. They cannot co-exist. And John
Barleycorn, mighty necromancer though he be, is as much a slave to
organic chemistry as we mortals are. We pay for every nerve
marathon we run, nor can John Barleycorn intercede and fend off
the just payment. He can lead us to the heights, but he cannot
keep us there, else would we all be devotees. And there is no
devotee but pays for the mad dances John Barleycorn pipes.
Yet the foregoing is all in after wisdom spoken. It was no part
of the knowledge of the lad, fourteen years old, who sat in the
Idler’s cabin between the harpooner and the sailor, the air rich
in his nostrils with the musty smell of men’s sea-gear, roaring in
chorus: “Yankee ship come down de ribber–pull, my bully boys,
pull!”
We grew maudlin, and all talked and shouted at once. I had a
splendid constitution, a stomach that would digest scrap-iron, and
I was still running my marathon in full vigour when Scotty began
to fail and fade. His talk grew incoherent. He groped for words
and could not find them, while the ones he found his lips were
unable to form. His poisoned consciousness was leaving him. The
brightness went out of his eyes, and he looked as stupid as were
his efforts to talk. His face and body sagged as his
consciousness sagged. (A man cannot sit upright save by an act of
will.) Scotty’s reeling brain could not control his muscles. All
his correlations were breaking down. He strove to take another
drink, and feebly dropped the tumbler on the floor. Then, to my
amazement, weeping bitterly, he rolled into a bunk on his back and
immediately snored off to sleep.
The harpooner and I drank on, grinning in a superior way to each
other over Scotty’s plight. The last flask was opened, and we
drank it between us, to the accompaniment of Scotty’s stertorous
breathing. Then the harpooner faded away into his bunk, and I was
left alone, unthrown, on the field of battle.
John Barleycorn
20
I was very proud, and John Barleycorn was proud with me. I could
carry my drink. I was a man. I had drunk two men, drink for
drink, into unconsciousness. And I was still on my two feet,
upright, making my way on deck to get air into my scorching lungs.
It was in this bout on the Idler that I discovered what a good
stomach and a strong head I had for drink–a bit of knowledge that
was to be a source of pride in succeeding years, and that
ultimately I was to come to consider a great affliction. The
fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of
drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the
one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign, who must
take numerous glasses in order to get the “kick.”
The sun was setting when I came on the Idler’s deck. There were
plenty of bunks below. I did not need to go home. But I wanted
to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff
astern. The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in
the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour. I could see
the stiff whitecaps, and the suck and run of the current was
plainly visible in the face and trough of each one.
I set sail, cast off, took my place at the tiller, the sheet in my
hand, and headed across channel. The skiff heeled over and
plunged into it madly. The spray began to fly. I was at the
pinnacle of exaltation. I sang “Blow the Man Down” as I sailed.
I was no boy of fourteen, living the mediocre ways of the sleepy
town called Oakland. I was a man, a god, and the very elements
rendered me allegiance as I bitted them to my will.
The tide was out. A full hundred yards of soft mud intervened
between the boat-wharf and the water. I pulled up my centreboard,
ran full tilt into the mud, took in sail, and, standing in the
stern, as I had often done at low tide, I began to shove the skiff
with an oar. It was then that my correlations began to break
down. I lost my balance and pitched head-foremost into the ooze.
Then, and for the first time, as I floundered to my feet covered
with slime, the blood running down my arms from a scrape against a
barnacled stake, I knew that I was drunk. But what of it? Across
the channel two strong sailormen lay unconscious in their bunks
where I had drunk them. I WAS a man. I was still on my legs, if
they were knee-deep in mud. I disdained to get back into the