I didn't care to play at being drunk any more.There was no more fun in me.My eyes were beginning to swim,and with wide-open mouth I panted for air.A girl led me by the hand on either side,but my legs were leaden.The alcohol I had drunk was striking my heart and brain like a club.Had I been a weakling of a child,Iam confident that it would have killed me.As it was,I know Iwas nearer death than any of the scared girls dreamed.I could hear them bickering among themselves as to whose fault it was;some were weeping--for themselves,for me,and for the disgraceful way their lads had behaved.But I was not interested.I was suffocating,and I wanted air.To move was agony.It made me pant harder.Yet those girls persisted in making me walk,and it was four miles home.Four miles!I remember my swimming eyes saw a small bridge across the road an infinite distance away.In fact,it was not a hundred feet distant.When I reached it,Isank down and lay on my back panting.The girls tried to lift me,but I was helpless and suffocating.Their cries of alarm brought Larry,a drunken youth of seventeen,who proceeded to resuscitate me by jumping on my chest.Dimly I remember this,and the squalling of the girls as they struggled with him and dragged him away.And then I knew nothing,though I learned afterward that Larry wound up under the bridge and spent the night there.
When I came to,it was dark.I had been carried unconscious for four miles and been put to bed.I was a sick child,and,despite the terrible strain on my heart and tissues,I continually relapsed into the madness of delirium.All the contents of the terrible and horrible in my child's mind spilled out.The most frightful visions were realities to me.I saw murders committed,and I was pursued by murderers.I screamed and raved and fought.
My sufferings were prodigious.Emerging from such delirium,Iwould hear my mother's voice:"But the child's brain.He will lose his reason."And sinking back into delirium,I would take the idea with me and be immured in madhouses,and be beaten by keepers,and surrounded by screeching lunatics.
One thing that had strongly impressed my young mind was the talk of my elders about the dens of iniquity in San Francisco's Chinatown.In my delirium I wandered deep beneath the ground through a thousand of these dens,and behind locked doors of iron I suffered and died a thousand deaths.And when I would come upon my father,seated at table in these subterranean crypts,gambling with Chinese for great stakes of gold,all my outrage gave vent in the vilest cursing.I would rise in bed,struggling against the detaining hands,and curse my father till the rafters rang.All the inconceivable filth a child running at large in a primitive countryside may hear men utter was mine;and though I had never dared utter such oaths,they now poured from me,at the top of my lungs,as I cursed my father sitting there underground and gambling with long-haired,long-nailed Chinamen.
It is a wonder that I did not burst my heart or brain that night.
A seven-year-old child's arteries and nerve-centres are scarcely fitted to endure the terrific paroxysms that convulsed me.No one slept in the thin,frame farm-house that night when John Barleycorn had his will of me.And Larry,under the bridge,had no delirium like mine.I am confident that his sleep was stupefied and dreamless,and that he awoke next day merely to heaviness and moroseness,and that if he lives to-day he does not remember that night,so passing was it as an incident.But my brain was seared for ever by that experience.Writing now,thirty years afterward,every vision is as distinct,as sharp-cut,every pain as vital and terrible,as on that night.
I was sick for days afterward,and I needed none of my mother's injunctions to avoid John Barleycorn in the future.My mother had been dreadfully shocked.She held that I had done wrong,very wrong,and that I had gone contrary to all her teaching.And how was I,who was never allowed to talk back,who lacked the very words with which to express my psychology--how was I to tell my mother that it was her teaching that was directly responsible for my drunkenness?Had it not been for her theories about dark eyes and Italian character,I should never have wet my lips with the sour,bitter wine.And not until man-grown did I tell her the true inwardness of that disgraceful affair.
In those after days of sickness,I was confused on some points,and very clear on others.I felt guilty of sin,yet smarted with a sense of injustice.It had not been my fault,yet I had done wrong.But very clear was my resolution never to touch liquor again.No mad dog was ever more afraid of water than was I of alcohol.
Yet the point I am making is that this experience,terrible as it was,could not in the end deter me from forming John Barleycorn's cheek-by-jowl acquaintance.All about me,even then,were the forces moving me toward him.In the first place,barring my mother,ever extreme in her views,it seemed to me all the grown-ups looked upon the affair with tolerant eyes.It was a joke,something funny that had happened.There was no shame attached.
Even the lads and lassies giggled and snickered over their part in the affair,narrating with gusto how Larry had jumped on my chest and slept under the bridge,how So-and-So had slept out in the sandhills that night,and what had happened to the other lad who fell in the ditch.As I say,so far as I could see,there was no shame anywhere.It had been something ticklishly,devilishly fine--a bright and gorgeous episode in the monotony of life and labour on that bleak,fog-girt coast.
The Irish ranchers twitted me good-naturedly on my exploit,and patted me on the back until I felt that I had done something heroic.Peter and Dominick and the other Italians were proud of my drinking prowess.The face of morality was not set against drinking.Besides,everybody drank.There was not a teetotaler in the community.Even the teacher of our little country school,a greying man of fifty,gave us vacations on the occasions when he wrestled with John Barleycorn and was thrown.Thus there was no spiritual deterrence.My loathing for alcohol was purely physiological.I didn't like the damned stuff.