oal and dumped it on the plates.  But while
I did this for the day coal, the night coal I had to pile against
the wall of the fire-room.  Now the fire-room was small.  It had
been planned for a night coal-passer.  So I had to pile the night
coal higher and higher, buttressing up the heap with stout planks.
Toward the top of the heap I had to handle the coal a second time,
tossing it up with a shovel.

I dripped with sweat, but I never ceased from my stride, though I
could feel exhaustion coming on.  By ten o'clock in the morning,
so much of my body's energy had I consumed, I felt hungry and
snatched a thick double-slice of bread and butter from my dinner
pail.  This I devoured, standing, grimed with coal-dust, my knees
trembling under me.  By eleven o'clock, in this fashion I had
consumed my whole lunch.  But what of it? I realised that it would
enable me to continue working through the noon hour.  And I worked
all the afternoon.  Darkness came on, and I worked under the
electric lights.  The day fireman went off and the night fireman
came on.  I plugged away.

At half-past eight, famished, tottering, I washed up, changed my
clothes, and dragged my weary body to the car.  It was three miles
to where I lived, and I had received a pass with the stipulation
that I could sit down as long as there were no paying passengers
in need of a seat.  As I sank into a corner outside seat I prayed
that no passenger might require my seat.  But the car filled up,
and, half-way in, a woman came on board, and there was no seat for
her.  I started to get up, and to my astonishment found that I
could not.  With the chill wind blowing on me, my spent body had
stiffened into the seat.  It took me the rest of the run in to
unkink my complaining joints and muscles and get into a standing
position on the lower step.  And when the car stopped at my corner
I nearly fell to the ground when I stepped off.

I hobbled two blocks to the house and limped into the kitchen.
While my mother started to cook, I plunged into bread and butter;
but before my appetite was appeased, or the steak fried, I was
sound asleep.  In vain my mother strove to shake me awake enough
to eat the meat.  Failing in this, with the assistance of my
father she managed to get me to my room, where I collapsed dead
asleep on the bed.  They undressed me and covered me up.  In the
morning came the agony of being awakened.  I was terribly sore,
and, worst of all, my wrists were swelling.  But I made up for my
lost supper, eating an enormous breakfast, and when I hobbled to
catch my car I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day
before.

Work! Let any youth just turned eighteen try to out-shovel two
man-grown coal-shovellers.  Work! Long before midday I had eaten
the last scrap of my huge lunch.  But I was resolved to show them
what a husky young fellow determined to rise could do.  The worst
of it was that my wrists were swelling and going back on me.
There are few who do not know the pain of walking on a sprained
ankle.  Then imagine the pain of shovelling coal and trundling a
loaded wheelbarrow with two sprained wrists.

Work! More than once I sank down on the coal where no one could
see me, and cried with rage, and mortification, and exhaustion,
and despair.  That second day was my hardest, and all that enabled
me to survive it and get in the last of the night coal at the end
of thirteen hours was the day fireman, who bound both my wrists
with broad leather straps.  So tightly were they buckled that they
were like slightly flexible plaster casts.  They took the stresses
and pressures which hitherto had been borne by my wrists, and they
were so tight that there was no room for the inflammation to rise
in the sprains.

And in this fashion I continued to learn to be an electrician.
Night after night I limped home, fell asleep before I could eat my
supper, and was helped into bed and undressed.  Morning after
morning, always with huger lunches in my dinner pail, I limped out
of the house on my way to work.

I no longer read my library books.  I made no dates with the
girls.  I was a proper work beast.  I worked, and ate, and slept,
while my mind slept all the time.  The whole thing was a
nightmare.  I worked every day, including Sunday, and I looked far
ahead to my one day off at the end of a month, resolved to lie
abed all that day and just sleep and rest up.

The strangest part of this experience was that I never took a
drink nor thought of taking a drink.  Yet I knew that men under
hard pressure almost invariably drank.  I had seen them do it, and
in the past had often done it myself.  But so sheerly non-
alcoholic was I that it never entered my mind that a drink might
be good for me.  I instance this to show how entirely lacking from
my make-up was any predisposition toward alcohol.  And the point
of this instance is that later on, after more years had passed,
contact with John Barleycorn at last did induce in me the
alcoholic desire.

I had often noticed the day fireman staring at me in a curious
way.  At last, one day, he spoke.  He began by swearing me to
secrecy.  He had been warned by the superintendent not to tell me,
and in telling me he was risking his job.  He told me of the day
coal-passer and the night coal-passer, and of the wages they had
received.  I was doing for thirty dollars a month what they had
received eighty dollars for doing.  He would have told me sooner,
the fireman said, had he not been so certain that I would break
down under the work and quit.  As it was, I was killing myself,
and all to no good purpose.  I was merely cheapening the price of
labour, he argued, and keeping two men out of a job.

Being an American boy, and a proud American boy, I did not
immediately quit.  This was foolish of me, I know; but I resolved
to continue the work long enough to prove to the superintendent
that I could do it without breaking down.  Then I would quit, and
he would realise what a fine young fellow he had lost.

All of which I faithfully and foolishly did.  I worked on until
the time came when I got in the last of the night coal by six
o'clock.  Then I quit the job of learning electricity by doing
more than two men's work for a boy's wages, went home, and
proceeded to sleep the clock around.

Fortunately, I had not stayed by the job long enough to injure
myself--though I was compelled to wear straps on my wrists for a
year afterward.  But the effect of this work orgy in which I had
indulged was to sicken me with work.  I just wouldn't work.  The
thought of work was repulsive.  I didn't care if I never settled
down.  Learning a trade could go hang.  It was a whole lot better
to royster and frolic over the world in the way I had previously
done.  So I headed out on the adventure-path again, starting to
tramp East by beating my way on the railroads.



        CHAPTER XXI


But behold! As soon as I went out on the adventure-path I met John
Barleycorn again.  I moved through a world of strangers, and the
act of drinking together made one acquainted with men and opened
the way to adventures.  It might be in a saloon with jingled
townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed
with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out.
Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state, such as Iowa was in
1894, when I wandered up the main street of Des Moines and was
variously invited by strangers into various blind pigs--I remember
drinking in barber-shops, plumbing establishments, and furniture
stores.

Always it was John Barleycorn.  Even a tramp, in those halcyon
days, could get most frequently drunk.  I remember, inside the
prison at Buffalo, how some of us got magnificently jingled, and
how, on the streets of Buffalo after our release, another jingle
was financed with pennies begged on the main-drag.

I had no call for alcohol, but when I was with those who drank, I
drank with them.  I insisted on travelling or loafing with the
livest, keenest men, and it was just these live, keen ones that
did most of the drinking.  They were the more comradely men, the
more venturous, the more individual.  Perhaps it was too much
temperament that made them turn from the commonplace and humdrum
to find relief in the lying and fantastic sureties of John
Barleycorn.  Be that as it may, the men I liked best, desired most
to be with, were invariably to be found in John Barleycorn's
company.

In the course of my tramping over the United States I achieved a
new concept.  As a tramp, I was behind the scenes of society--aye,
and down in the cellar.  I could watch the machinery work.  I saw
the wheels of the social machine go around, and I learned that the
dignity of manual labour wasn't what I had been told it was by the
teachers, preachers, and politicians.  The men without trades were
helpless cattle.  If one learned a trade, he was compelled to
belong to a union in order to work at his trade.  And his union
was compelled to bully and slug the employers' unions in order to
hold up wages or hold down hours.  The employers' unions like-wise
bullied and slugged.  I couldn't see any dignity at all.  And when
a workman got old, or had an accident, he was thrown into the
scrap-heap like any worn-out machine.  I saw too many of this sort
who were making anything but dignified ends of life.

So my new concept was that manual labour was undignified, and that
it didn't pay.  No trade for me, was my decision, and no
superintendent's daughters.  And no criminality, I also decided.
That would be almost as disastrous as to be a labourer.  Brains
paid, not brawn, and I resolved never again to offer my muscles
for sale in the brawn market.  Brain, and brain only, would I
sell.

I returned to California with the firm intention of developing my
brain.  This meant school education.  I had gone through the
grammar school long ago, so I entered the Oakland High School.  To
pay my way I worked as a janitor.  My sister helped me, too; and I
was not above mowing anybody's lawn or taking up and beating
carpets when I had half a day to spare.  I was working to get away
from work, and I buckled down to it with a grim realisation of the
paradox.

Boy and girl love was left behind, and, along with it, Haydee and
Louis Shattuck, and the early evening strolls.  I hadn't the time.
I joined the Henry Clay Debating Society.  I was received into the
homes of some of the members, where I met nice girls whose skirts
reached the ground.  I dallied with little home clubs wherein we
discussed poetry and art and the nuances of grammar.  I joined the
socialist local where we studied and orated political economy,
philosophy, and politics.  I kept half a dozen membership cards
working in the free library and did an immense amount of
collateral reading.

And for a year and a half on end I never took a drink, nor thought
of taking a drink.  I hadn't the time, and I certainly did not
have the inclination.  Between my janitor-work, my studies, and
innocent amusements such as chess, I hadn't a moment to spare.  I
was discovering a new world, and such was the passion of my
exploration that the old world of John Barleycorn held no
inducements for me.

Come to think of it, I did enter a saloon.  I went to see Johnny
Heinhold in the Last Chance, and I went to borrow money.  And
right here is another phase of John Barleycorn.  Saloon-keepers
are notoriously good fellows.  On an average they perform vastly
greater generosities than do business men.  When I simply had to
have ten dollars, desperate, with no place to turn, I went to
Johnny Heinhold.  Several years had passed since I had been in his
place or spent a cent across his bar.  And when I went to borrow
the ten dollars I didn't buy a drink, either.  And Johnny Heinhold
let me have the ten dollars without security or interest.

More than once, in the brief days of my struggle for an education,
I went to Johnny Heinhold to borrow money.  When I entered the
university, I borrowed forty dollars from him, without interest,
without security, without buying a drink.  And yet--and here is
the point, the custom, and the code--in the days of my prosperity,
after the lapse of years, I have gone out of my way by many a long
block to spend across Johnny Heinhold's bar deferred interest on
the various loans.  Not that Johnny Heinhold asked me to do it, or
expected me to do it.  I did it, as I have said, in obedience to
the code I had learned along with all the other things connected
with John Barleycorn.  In distress, when a man has no other place
to turn, when he hasn't the slightest bit of security which a
savage-hearted pawn-broker would consider, he can go to some
saloon-keeper he knows.  Gratitude is inherently human.  When the
man so helped has money again, depend upon it that a portion will
be spent across the bar of the saloon-keeper who befriended him.

Why, I recollect the early days of my writing career, when the
small sums of money I earned from the magazines came with tragic
irregularity, while at the same time I was staggering along with a
growing family--a wife, children, a mother, a nephew, and my Mammy
Jennie and her old husband fallen on evil days.  There were two
places at which I could borrow money; a barber shop and a saloon.
The barber charged me five per cent. per month in advance.  That
is to say, when I borrowed one hundred dollars, he handed me
ninety-five.  The other five dollars he retained as advance
interest for the first month.  And on the second month I paid him
five dollars more, and continued so to do each month until I made
a ten strike with the editors and lifted the loan.

The other place to which I came in trouble was the saloon.  This
saloon-keeper I had known by sight for a couple of years.  I had
never spent my money in his saloon, and even when I borrowed from
him I didn't spend any money.  Yet never did he refuse me any sum
I asked of him.  Unfortunately, before I became prosperous, he
moved away to another city.  And to this day I regret that he is
gone.  It is the code I have learned.  The right thing to do, and
the thing I'd do right now did I know where he is, would be to
drop in on occasion and spend a few dollars across his bar for old
sake's sake and gratitude.

This is not to exalt saloon-keepers.  I have written it to exalt
the power of John Barleycorn and to illustrate one more of the
myriad ways by which a man is brought in contact with John
Barleycorn until in the end he finds he cannot get along without
him.

But to return to the run of my narrative.  Away from the
adventure-path, up to my ears in study, every moment occupied, I
lived oblivious to John Barleycorn's existence.  Nobody about me
drank.  If any had drunk, and had they offered it to me, I surely
would have drunk.  As it was, when I had spare moments I spent
them playing chess, or going with nice girls who were themselves
students, or in riding a bicycle whenever I was fortunate enough
to have it out of the pawnbroker's possession.

What I am insisting upon all the time is this: in me was not the
slightest trace of alcoholic desire, and this despite the long and
severe apprenticeship I had served under John Barleycorn.  I had
come back from the other side of life to be delighted with this
Arcadian simplicity of student youths and student maidens.  Also,
I had found my way into the realm of the mind, and I was
intellectually intoxicated.  (Alas! as I was to learn at a later
period, intellectual intoxication too.  has its katzenjammer.)



        CHAPTER XXII


Three years was the time required to go through the high school.
I grew impatient.  Also, my schooling was becoming financially
impossible.  At such rate I could not last out, and I did greatly
want to go to the state university.  When I had done a year of
high school, I decided to attempt a short cut.  I borrowed the
money and paid to enter the senior class of a "cramming joint" or
academy.  I was scheduled to graduate right into the university at
the end of four months, thus saving two years.

And how I did cram! I had two years' new work to do in a third of
a year.  For five weeks I crammed, until simultaneous quadratic
equations and chemical formulas fairly oozed from my ears.  And
then the master of the academy took me aside.  He was very sorry,
but he was compelled to give me back my tuition fee and to ask me
to leave the school.  It wasn't a matter of scholarship.  I stood
well in my classes, and did he graduate me into the university he
was confident that in that institution I would continue to stand
well.  The trouble was that tongues were gossiping about my case.
What! In four months accomplished two years' work! It would be a
scandal, and the universities were becoming severer in their
treatment of accredited prep schools.  He couldn't afford such a
scandal, therefore I must gracefully depart.

I did.  And I paid back the borrowed money, and gritted my teeth,
and started to cram by myself.  There were three months yet before
the university entrance examinations.  Without laboratories,
without coaching, sitting in my bedroom, I proceeded to compress
that two years' work into three months and to keep reviewed on the
previous year's work.

Nineteen hours a day I studied.  For three months I kept this
pace, only breaking it on several occasions.  My body grew weary,
my mind grew weary, but I stayed with it.  My eyes grew weary and
began to twitch, but they did not break down.  Perhaps, toward the
last, I got a bit dotty.  I know that at the time I was confident,
I had discovered the formula for squaring the circle; but I
resolutely deferred the working of it out until after the
examinations.  Then I would show them.

Came the several days of the examinations, during which time I
scarcely closed my eyes in sleep, devoting every moment to
cramming and reviewing.  And when I turned in my last examination
paper I was in full possession of a splendid case of brain-fag.  I
didn't want to see a book.  I didn't want to think or to lay eyes
on anybody who was liable to think.

There was but one prescription for such a condition, and I gave it
to myself--the adventure-path.  I didn't wait to learn the result
of my examinations.  I stowed a roll of blankets and some cold
food into a borrowed whitehall boat and set sail.  Out of the
Oakland Estuary I drifted on the last of an early morning ebb,
caught the first of the flood up bay, and raced along with a
spanking breeze.  San Pablo Bay was smoking, and the Carquinez
Straits off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as I picked up ahead
and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned with Nelson
in the unreefer Reindeer.

Benicia showed before me.  I opened the bight of Turner's
Shipyard, rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of
the patch of tules and the clustering fishermen's arks where in
the old days I had lived and drunk deep.

And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I
never dreamed for many a long year to come.  I had had no
intention of stopping at Benicia.  The tide favoured, the wind was
fair and howling--glorious sailing for a sailor.  Bull Head and
Army Points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Suisun Bay which
I knew was smoking.  And yet, when I laid eyes on those fishing
arks lying in the water-front tules, without debate, on the
instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and headed
for the shore.  On the instant, out of the profound of my brain-
fag, I knew what I wanted.  I wanted to drink.  I wanted to get
drunk.

The call was imperative.  There was no uncertainty about it.  More
than anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind
wanted surcease from weariness in the way it knew surcease would
come.  And right here is the point.  For the first time in my life
I consciously, deliberately, desired to get drunk.  It was a new,
a totally different manifestation of John Barleycorn's power.  It
was not a body need for alcohol.  It was a mental desire.  My
over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget.

And here the point is drawn to its sharpest.  Granted my
prodigious brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past,
the thought would never have entered my mind to get drunk now.
Beginning with physical intolerance for alcohol, for years
drinking only for the sake of comradeship and because alcohol was
everywhere on the adventure-path, I had now reached the stage
where my brain cried out, not merely for a drink, but for a drunk.
And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my brain would not
have so cried out.  I should have sailed on past Bull Head, and in
the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind that
filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my
weary brain and rested and refreshed it.

So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the
arks.  Charley Le Grant fell on my neck.  His wife, Lizzie, folded
me to her capacious breast.  Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and all
the survivors of the old guard, got around me and their arms
around me.  Charley seized the can and started for Jorgensen's
saloon across the railroad tracks.  That meant beer.  I wanted
whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask.

Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and
back.  More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in,
fishermen, Greeks, and Russians, and French.  They took turns in
treating, and treated all around in turn again.  They came and
went, but I stayed on and drank with all.  I guzzled.  I swilled.
I ran the liquor down and joyed as the maggots mounted in my
brain.

And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever,
but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky.
He had just had a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle,
and knives had been drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on
maddening the fever of the memory with more whisky.  And while we
downed it, we remembered Nelson and that he had stretched out his
great shoulders for the last long sleep in this very town of
Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and remembered only
the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be filled and
drank again.

They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see
the brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar
of it.  And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books
nineteen hours a day for three solid months, Charley Le Grant
shifted my outfit into a big Columbia River salmon boat.  He added
charcoal and a fisherman's brazier, a coffee pot and frying pan,
and the coffee and the meat, and a black bass fresh from the water
that day.

They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon
boat.  Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail
set like a board.  Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted,
and Charley had no doubts.  He knew me of old, and knew that I
could sail as long as I could see.  They cast off my painter.  I
put the tiller up, filled away before it, and with dizzy eyes
checked and steadied the boat on her course and waved farewell.

The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a
fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea.  Suisun Bay was
white with wrath and sea-lump.  But a salmon boat can sail, and I
knew how to sail a salmon boat.  So I drove her into it, and
through it, and across, and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain
for all the books and schools.  Cresting seas filled me a foot or
so with water, but I laughed at it sloshing about my feet, and
chanted my disdain for the wind and the water.  I hailed myself a
master of life, riding on the back of the unleashed elements, and
John Barleycorn rode with me.  Amid dissertations on mathematics
and philosophy and spoutings and quotations, I sang all the old
songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the
oyster boats to be a pirate--such songs as: "Black Lulu," "Flying
Cloud," "Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly," "The Boston Burglar," "Come
all you Rambling, Gambling Men," "I Wisht I was a Little Bird,"
"Shenandoah," and "Ranzo, Boys, Ranzo."

Hours afterward, in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and
the San Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together, I took the New
York Cut-Off, skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past
Black Diamond, on into the San Joaquin, and on to Antioch, where,
somewhat sobered and magnificently hungry, I laid alongside a big
potato sloop that had a familiar rig.  Here were old friends
aboard, who fried my black bass in olive oil.  Then, too, there
was a meaty fisherman's stew, delicious with garlic, and crusty
Italian bread without butter, and all washed down with pint mugs
of thick and heady claret.

My salmon boat was a-soak, but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry
blankets and a dry bunk were mine; and we lay and smoked and
yarned of old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the
rigging and taut halyards drummed against the mast.



        CHAPTER XXIII


My cruise in the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready
to enter the university.  During the week's cruise I did not drink
again.  To accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old
friends, for as ever the adventure-path was beset with John
Barleycorn.  I had wanted the drink that first day, and in the
days that followed I did not want it.  My tired brain had
recuperated.  I had no moral scruples in the matter.  I was not
ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia, and
I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and
studies.

Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and
realised its significance.  At the time, and for a long time
afterward, I was to think of it only as a frolic.  But still
later, in the slough of brain-fag and intellectual weariness, I
was to remember and know the craving for the anodyne that resides
in alcohol.

In the meantime, after this one relapse at Benicia, I went on with
my abstemiousness, primarily because I didn't want to drink.  And
next, I was abstemious because my way led among books and students
where no drinking was.  Had I been out on the adventure-path, I
should as a matter of course have been drinking.  For that is the
pity of the adventure-path, which is one of John Barleycorn's
favourite stamping grounds.

I completed the first half of my freshman year, and in January of
1897 took up my courses for the second half.  But the pressure
from lack of money, plus a conviction that the university was not
giving me all that I wanted in the time I could spare for it,
forced me to leave.  I was not very disappointed.  For two years I
had studied, and in those two years, what was far more valuable, I
had done a prodigious amount of reading.  Then, too, my grammar
had improved.  It is true, I had not yet learned that I must say
"It is I"; but I no longer was guilty of a double negative in
writing, though still prone to that error in excited speech.

I decided immediately to embark on my career.  I had four
preferences: first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of
philosophic, economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and
last, and least, fiction writing.  I resolutely cut out music as
impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second,
third, and fourth choices simultaneously.  Heavens, how I wrote!
Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the
patient escaped fatal results.  The way I worked was enough to
soften my brain and send me to a mad-house.  I wrote, I wrote
everything--ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short
stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and
sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian
stanzas.  On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for
fifteen hours a day.  At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear
myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat.

And then there was the matter of typewriting.  My brother-in-law
owned a machine which he used in the day-time.  In the night I was
free to use it.  That machine was a wonder.  I could weep now as I
recollect my wrestlings with it.  It must have been a first model
in the year one of the typewriter era.  Its alphabet was all
capitals.  It was informed with an evil spirit.  It obeyed no
known laws of physics, and overthrew the hoary axiom that like
things performed to like things produce like results.  I'll swear
that machine never did the same thing in the same way twice.
Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce like
results.

How my back used to ache with it! Prior to that experience, my
back had been good for every violent strain put upon it in a none
too gentle career.  But that typewriter proved to me that I had a
pipe-stem for a back.  Also, it made me doubt my shoulders.  They
ached as with rheumatism after every bout.  The keys of that
machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it
sounded like distant thunder or some one breaking up the
furniture.  I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first
fingers to the elbows, while the ends of my fingers were blisters
burst and blistered again.  Had it been my machine I'd have
operated it with a carpenter's hammer.

The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at
the same time I was trying to master that machine.  It was a feat
of physical endurance and a brain storm combined to type a
thousand words, and I was composing thousands of words every day
which just had to be typed for the waiting editors.

Oh, between the writing and the typewriting I was well a-weary.  I
had brain and nerve fag, and body fag as well, and yet the thought
of drink never suggested itself.  I was living too high to stand
in need of an anodyne.  All my waking hours, except those with
that infernal typewriter, were spent in a creative heaven.  And
along with this I had no desire for drink because I still believed
in many things--in the love of all men and women in the matter of
man and woman love; in fatherhood; in human justice; in art--in
the whole host of fond illusions that keep the world turning
around.

But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting.  My
manuscripts made amazing round-trip records between the Pacific
and the Atlantic.  It might have been the weirdness of the
typewriting that prevented the editors from accepting at least one
little offering of mine.  I don't know, and goodness knows the
stuff I wrote was as weird as its typing.  I sold my hard-bought
school books for ridiculous sums to second-hand bookmen.  I
borrowed small sums of money wherever I could, and suffered my old
father to feed me with the meagre returns of his failing strength.

It didn't last long, only a few weeks, when I had to surrender and
go to work.  Yet I was unaware of any need for the drink anodyne.
I was not disappointed.  My career was retarded, that was all.
Perhaps I did need further preparation.  I had learned enough from
the books to realise that I had only touched the hem of
knowledge's garment.  I still lived on the heights.  My waking
hours, and most of the hours I should have used for sleep, were
spent with the books.



        CHAPTER XXIV


Out in the country, at the Belmont Academy, I went to work in a
small, perfectly appointed steam laundry.  Another fellow and
myself did all the work from sorting and washing to ironing the
white shirts, collars and cuffs, and the "fancy starch" of the
wives of the professors.  We worked like tigers, especially as
summer came on and the academy boys took to the wearing of duck
trousers.  It consumes a dreadful lot of time to iron one pair of
duck trousers.  And there were so many pairs of them.  We sweated
our way through long sizzling weeks at a task that was never done;
and many a night, while the students snored in bed, my partner and
I toiled on under the electric light at steam mangle or ironing
board.

The hours were long, the work was arduous, despite the fact that
we became past masters in the art of eliminating waste motion.
And I was receiving thirty dollars a month and board--a slight
increase over my coal-shovelling and cannery days, at least to the
extent of board, which cost my employer little (we ate in the
kitchen), but which was to me the equivalent of twenty dollars a
month.  My robuster strength of added years, my increased skill,
and all I had learned from the books, were responsible for this
increase of twenty dollars.  Judging by my rate of development, I
might hope before I died to be a night watchman for sixty dollars
a month, or a policeman actually receiving a hundred dollars with
pickings.

So relentlessly did my partner and I spring into our work
throughout the week that by Saturday night we were frazzled
wrecks.  I found myself in the old familiar work-beast condition,
toiling longer hours than the horses toiled, thinking scarcely
more frequent thoughts than horses think.  The books were closed
to me.  I had brought a trunkful to the laundry, but found myself
unable to read them.  I fell asleep the moment I tried to read;
and if I did manage to keep my eyes open for several pages, I
could not remember the contents of those pages.  I gave over
attempts on heavy study, such as jurisprudence, political economy,
and biology, and tried lighter stuff, such as history.  I fell
asleep.  I tried literature, and fell asleep.  And finally, when I
fell asleep over lively novels, I gave up.  I never succeeded in
reading one book in all the time I spent in the laundry.

And when Saturday night came, and the week's work was over until
Monday morning, I knew only one desire besides the desire to
sleep, and that was to get drunk.  This was the second time in my
life that I had heard the unmistakable call of John Barleycorn.
The first time it had been because of brain-fag.  But I had no
over-worked brain now.  On the contrary, all I knew was the dull
numbness of a brain that was not worked at all.  That was the
trouble.  My brain had become so alert and eager, so quickened by
the wonder of the new world the books had discovered to it, that
it now suffered all the misery of stagnancy and inaction.

And I, the long time intimate of John Barleycorn, knew just what
he promised me--maggots of fancy, dreams of power, forgetfulness,
anything and everything save whirling washers, revolving mangles,
humming centrifugal wringers, and fancy starch and interminable
processions of duck trousers moving in steam under my flying iron.
And that's it.  John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and
failure, to weariness and exhaustion.  He is the easy way out.
And he is lying all the time.  He offers false strength to the
body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they
are not and vastly fairer than what they are.

But it must not be forgotten that John Barleycorn is protean.  As
well as to weakness and exhaustion, does he appeal to too much
strength, to superabundant vitality, to the ennui of idleness.  He
can tuck in his arm the arm of any man in any mood.  He can throw
the net of his lure over all men.  He exchanges new lamps for old,
the spangles of illusion for the drabs of reality, and in the end
cheats all who traffic with him.

I didn't get drunk, however, for the simple reason that it was a
mile and a half to the nearest saloon.  And this, in turn, was
because the call to get drunk was not very loud in my ears.  Had
it been loud, I would have travelled ten times the distance to win
to the saloon.  On the other hand, had the saloon been just around
the corner, I should have got drunk.  As it was, I would sprawl
out in the shade on my one day of rest and dally with the Sunday
papers.  But I was too weary even for their froth.  The comic
supplement might bring a pallid smile to my face, and then I would
fall asleep.

Although I did not yield to John Barleycorn while working in the
laundry, a certain definite result was produced.  I had heard the
call, felt the gnaw of desire, yearned for the anodyne.  I was
being prepared for the stronger desire of later years.

And the point is that this development of desire was entirely in
my brain.  My body did not cry out for alcohol.  As always,
alcohol was repulsive to my body.  When I was bodily weary from
shovelling coal the thought of taking a drink had never flickered
into my consciousness.  When I was brain-wearied after taking the
entrance examinations to the university, I promptly got drunk.  At
the laundry I was suffering physical exhaustion again, and
physical exhaustion that was not nearly so profound as that of the
coal-shovelling.  But there was a difference.  When I went coal-
shovelling my mind had not yet awakened.  Between that time and
the laundry my mind had found the kingdom of the mind.  While
shovelling coal my mind was somnolent.  While toiling in the
laundry my mind, informed and eager to do and be, was crucified.

And whether I yielded to drink, as at Benicia, or whether I
refrained, as at the laundry, in my brain the seeds of desire for
alcohol were germinating.



        CHAPTER XXV


After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the
Klondike.  It was the first gold rush into that region, the early
fall rush of 1897.  I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid
physical condition.  I remember, at the end of the twenty-eight-
mile portage across Chilcoot from Dyea Beach to Lake Linderman, I
was packing up with the Indians and out-packing many an Indian.
The last pack into Linderman was three miles.  I back-tripped it
four times a day, and on each forward trip carried one hundred and
fifty pounds.  This means that over the worst trails I daily
travelled twenty-four miles, twelve of which were under a burden
of one hundred and fifty pounds.

Yes, I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure-path again
in quest of fortune.  And of course, on the adventure-path, I met
John Barleycorn.  Here were the chesty men again, rovers and
adventurers, and while they didn't mind a grub famine, whisky they
could not do without.  Whisky went over the trail, while the flour
lay cached and untouched by the trail-side.

As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not
drinkers.  Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and
disgracefully when with other men.  In my personal medicine chest
was a quart of whisky.  I never drew the cork till six months
afterward, in a lonely camp, where, without anaesthetics, a doctor
was compelled to operate on a man.  The doctor and the patient
emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the
operation.

Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found
that my father was dead and that I was the head and the sole
bread-winner of a household.  When I state that I had passed coal
on a steamship from Behring Sea to British Columbia, and travelled
in the steerage from there to San Francisco, it will be understood
that I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy.

Times were hard.  Work of any sort was difficult to get.  And work
of any sort was what I had to take, for I was still an unskilled
labourer.  I had no thought of career.  That was over and done
with.  I had to find food for two mouths beside my own and keep a
roof over our heads--yes, and buy a winter suit, my one suit being
decidedly summery.  I had to get some sort of work immediately.
After that, when I had caught my breath, I might think about my
future.

Unskilled labour is the first to feel the slackness of hard times,
and I had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman.  With my
new responsibilities I didn't dare go to sea, and I failed to find
a job at laundrying.  I failed to find a job at anything.  I had
my name down in five employment bureaux.  I advertised in three
newspapers.  I sought out the few friends I knew who might be able
to get me work; but they were either uninterested or unable to
find anything for me.

The situation was desperate.  I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a
mackintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had
left to me.  It was and is my sole legacy in this world.  It had
cost fifteen dollars, and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars
on it.  And--oh, yes--a water-front comrade of earlier years
drifted along one day with a dress suit wrapped in newspapers.  He
could give no adequate explanation of how he had come to possess
it, nor did I press for an explanation.  I wanted the suit myself.
No; not to wear.  I traded him a lot of rubbish which, being
unpawnable, was useless to me.  He peddled the rubbish for several
dollars, while I pledged the dress-suit with my pawnbroker for
five dollars.  And for all I know the pawnbroker still has the
suit.  I had never intended to redeem it.

But I couldn't get any work.  Yet I was a bargain in the labour
market.  I was twenty-two years old, weighed one hundred and
sixty-five pounds stripped, every pound of which was excellent for
toil; and t