he last traces of my scurvy were vanishing before a
treatment of potatoes chewed raw.  I tackled every opening for
employment.  I tried to become a studio model, but there were too
many fine-bodied young fellows out of jobs.  I answered
advertisements of elderly invalids in need of companions.  And I
almost became a sewing machine agent, on commission, without
salary.  But poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times,
so I was forced to forgo that employment.

Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous
occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and
roustabout.  But winter was coming on, and the surplus labour army
was pouring into the cities.  Also I, who had romped along
carelessly through the countries of the world and the kingdom of
the mind, was not a member of any union.

I sought odd jobs.  I worked days, and half-days, at anything I
could get.  I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat
them, and laid them again.  Further, I took the civil service
examinations for mail carrier and passed first.  But alas! there
was no vacancy, and I must wait.  And while I waited, and in
between the odd jobs I managed to procure, I started to earn ten
dollars by writing a newspaper account of a voyage I had made, in
an open boat down the Yukon, of nineteen hundred miles in nineteen
days.  I didn't know the first thing about the newspaper game, but
I was confident I'd get ten dollars for my article.

But I didn't.  The first San Francisco newspaper to which I mailed
it never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript, but held on to
it.  The longer it held on to it the more certain I was that the
thing was accepted.

And here is the funny thing.  Some are born to fortune, and some
have fortune thrust upon them.  But in my case I was clubbed into
fortune, and bitter necessity wielded the club.  I had long since
abandoned all thought of writing as a career.  My honest intention
in writing that article was to earn ten dollars.  And that was the
limit of my intention.  It would help to tide me along until I got
steady employment.  Had a vacancy occurred in the post office at
that time, I should have jumped at it.

But the vacancy did not occur, nor did a steady job; and I
employed the time between odd jobs with writing a twenty-one-
thousand-word serial for the "Youth's Companion."  I turned it out
and typed it in seven days.  I fancy that was what was the matter
with it, for it came back.

It took some time for it to go and come, and in the meantime I
tried my hand at short stories.  I sold one to the "Overland
Monthly " for five dollars.  The "Black Cat" gave me forty dollars
for another.  The "Overland Monthly " offered me seven dollars and
a half, pay on publication, for all the stories I should deliver.
I got my bicycle, my watch, and my father's mackintosh out of pawn
and rented a typewriter.  Also, I paid up the bills I owed to the
several groceries that allowed me a small credit.  I recall the
Portuguese groceryman who never permitted my bill to go beyond
four dollars.  Hopkins, another grocer, could not be budged beyond
five dollars.

And just then came the call from the post office to go to work.
It placed me in a most trying predicament.  The sixty-five dollars
I could earn regularly every month was a terrible temptation.  I
couldn't decide what to do.  And I'll never be able to forgive the
postmaster of Oakland.  I answered the call, and I talked to him
like a man.  I frankly told him the situation.  It looked as if I
might win out at writing.  The chance was good, but not certain.
Now, if he would pass me by and select the next man on the
eligible list and give me a call at the next vacancy--

But he shut me off with: "Then you don't want the position?"

"But I do," I protested.  "Don't you see, if you will pass me over
this time--"

"If you want it you will take it," he said coldly.

Happily for me, the cursed brutality of the man made me angry.

"Very well," I said.  "I won't take it."



        CHAPTER XXVI


Having burned my ship, I plunged into writing.  I am afraid I
always was an extremist.  Early and late I was at it--writing,
typing, studying grammar, studying writing and all the forms of
writing, and studying the writers who succeeded in order to find
out how they succeeded.  I managed on five hours' sleep in the
twenty-four, and came pretty close to working the nineteen waking
hours left to me.  My light burned till two and three in the
morning, which led a good neighbour woman into a bit of
sentimental Sherlock-Holmes deduction.  Never seeing me in the
day-time, she concluded that I was a gambler, and that the light
in my window was placed there by my mother to guide her erring son
home.

The trouble with the beginner at the writing game is the long, dry
spells, when there is never an editor's cheque and everything
pawnable is pawned.  I wore my summer suit pretty well through
that winter, and the following summer experienced the longest,
dryest spell of all, in the period when salaried men are gone on
vacation and manuscripts lie in editorial offices until vacation
is over.

My difficulty was that I had no one to advise me.  I didn't know a
soul who had written or who had ever tried to write.  I didn't
even know one reporter.  Also, to succeed at the writing game, I
found I had to unlearn about everything the teachers and
professors of literature of the high school and university had
taught me.  I was very indignant about this at the time; though
now I can understand it.  They did not know the trick of
successful writing in the years 1895 and 1896.  They knew all
about "Snow Bound" and "Sartor Resartus"; but the American editors
of 1899 did not want such truck.  They wanted the 1899 truck, and
offered to pay so well for it that the teachers and professors of
literature would have quit their jobs could they have supplied it.

I struggled along, stood off the butcher and the grocer, pawned my
watch and bicycle and my father's mackintosh, and I worked.  I
really did work, and went on short commons of sleep.  Critics have
complained about the swift education one of my characters, Martin
Eden, achieved.  In three years, from a sailor with a common
school education, I made a successful writer of him.  The critics
say this is impossible.  Yet I was Martin Eden.  At the end of
three working years, two of which were spent in high school and
the university and one spent at writing, and all three in studying
immensely and intensely, I was publishing stories in magazines
such as the "Atlantic Monthly," was correcting proofs of my first
book (issued by Houghton, Mifflin Co.), was selling sociological
articles to "Cosmopolitan" and "McClure's," had declined an
associate editorship proffered me by telegraph from New York City,
and was getting ready to marry.

Now the foregoing means work, especially the last year of it, when
I was learning my trade as a writer.  And in that year, running
short on sleep and tasking my brain to its limit, I neither drank
nor cared to drink.  So far as I was concerned, alcohol did not
exist.  I did suffer from brain-fag on occasion, but alcohol never
suggested itself as an ameliorative.  Heavens! Editorial
acceptances and cheques were all the amelioratives I needed.  A
thin envelope from an editor in the morning's mail was more
stimulating than half a dozen cocktails.  And if a cheque of
decent amount came out of the envelope, such incident in itself
was a whole drunk.

Furthermore, at that time in my life I did not know what a
cocktail was.  I remember, when my first book was published,
several Alaskans, who were members of the Bohemian Club,
entertained me one evening at the club in San Francisco.  We sat
in most wonderful leather chairs, and drinks were ordered.  Never
had I heard such an ordering of liqueurs and of highballs of
particular brands of Scotch.  I didn't know what a liqueur or a
highball was, and I didn't know that "Scotch" meant whisky.  I
knew only poor men's drinks, the drinks of the frontier and of
sailor-town--cheap beer and cheaper whisky that was just called
whisky and nothing else.  I was embarrassed to make a choice, and
the steward nearly collapsed when I ordered claret as an after-
dinner drink.



        CHAPTER XXVII


As I succeeded with my writing, my standard of living rose and my
horizon broadened.  I confined myself to writing and typing a
thousand words a day, including Sundays and holidays; and I still
studied hard, but not so hard as formerly.  I allowed myself five
and one-half hours of actual sleep.  I added this half-hour
because I was compelled.  Financial success permitted me more time
for exercise.  I rode my wheel more, chiefly because it was
permanently out of pawn; and I boxed and fenced, walked on my
hands, jumped high and broad, put the shot and tossed the caber,
and went swimming.  And I learned that more sleep is required for
physical exercise than for mental exercise.  There were tired
nights, bodily, when I slept six hours; and on occasion of very
severe exercise I actually slept seven hours.  But such sleep
orgies were not frequent.  There was so much to learn, so much to
be done, that I felt wicked when I slept seven hours.  And I
blessed the man who invented alarm clocks.

And still no desire to drink.  I possessed too many fine faiths,
was living at too keen a pitch.  I was a socialist, intent on
saving the world, and alcohol could not give me the fervours that
were mine from my ideas and ideals.  My voice, on account of my
successful writing, had added weight, or so I thought.  At any
rate, my reputation as a writer drew me audiences that my
reputation as a speaker never could have drawn.  I was invited
before clubs and organisations of all sorts to deliver my message.
I fought the good fight, and went on studying and writing, and was
very busy.

Up to this time I had had a very restricted circle of friends.
But now I began to go about.  I was invited out, especially to
dinner, and I made many friends and acquaintances whose economic
lives were easier than mine had been.  And many of them drank.  In
their own houses they drank and offered me drink.  They were not
drunkards any of them.  They just drank temperately, and I drank
temperately with them as an act of comradeship and accepted
hospitality.  I did not care for it, neither wanted it nor did not
want it, and so small was the impression made by it that I do not
remember my first cocktail nor my first Scotch highball.

Well, I had a house.  When one is asked into other houses, he
naturally asks others into his house.  Behold the rising standard
of living.  Having been given drink in other houses, I could
expect nothing else of myself than to give drink in my own house.
So I laid in a supply of beer and whisky and table claret.  Never
since that has my house not been well supplied.

And still, through all this period, I did not care in the
slightest for John Barleycorn.  I drank when others drank, and
with them, as a social act.  And I had so little choice in the
matter that I drank whatever they drank.  If they elected whisky,
then whisky it was for me.  If they drank root beer or
sarsaparilla, I drank root beer or sarsaparilla with them.  And
when there were no friends in the house, why, I didn't drink
anything.  Whisky decanters were always in the room where I wrote,
and for months and years I never knew what it was, when by myself,
to take a drink.

When out at dinner I noticed the kindly, genial glow of the
preliminary cocktail.  It seemed a very fitting and gracious
thing.  Yet so little did I stand in need of it, with my own high
intensity and vitality, that I never thought it worth while to
have a cocktail before my own meal when I ate alone.

On the other hand, I well remember a very brilliant man, somewhat
older than I, who occasionally visited me.  He liked whisky, and I
recall sitting whole afternoons in my den, drinking steadily with
him, drink for drink, until he was mildly lighted up and I was
slightly aware that I had drunk some whisky.  Now why did I do
this? I don't know, save that the old schooling held, the training
of the old days and nights glass in hand with men, the drinking
ways of drink and drinkers.

Besides, I no longer feared John Barleycorn.  Mine was that most
dangerous stage when a man believes himself John Barleycorn's
master.  I had proved it to my satisfaction in the long years of
work and study.  I could drink when I wanted, refrain when I
wanted, drink without getting drunk, and to cap everything I was
thoroughly conscious that I had no liking for the stuff.  During
this period I drank precisely for the same reason I had drunk with
Scotty and the harpooner and with the oyster pirates--because it
was an act that men performed with whom I wanted to behave as a
man.  These brilliant ones, these adventurers of the mind, drank.
Very well.  There was no reason I should not drink with them--I
who knew so confidently that I had nothing to fear from John
Barleycorn.

And the foregoing was my attitude of mind for years.  Occasionally
I got well jingled, but such occasions were rare.  It interfered
with my work, and I permitted nothing to interfere with my work.
I remember, when spending several months in the East End of
London, during which time I wrote a book and adventured much
amongst the worst of the slum classes, that I got drunk several
times and was mightily wroth with myself because it interfered
with my writing.  Yet these very times were because I was out on
the adventure-path where John Barleycorn is always to be found.

Then, too, with the certitude of long training and unholy
intimacy, there were occasions when I engaged in drinking bouts
with men.  Of course, this was on the adventure-path in various
parts of the world, and it was a matter of pride.  It is a queer
man-pride that leads one to drink with men in order to show as
strong a head as they.  But this queer man-pride is no theory.  It
is a fact.

For instance, a wild band of young revolutionists invited me as
the guest of honour to a beer bust.  It is the only technical beer
bust I ever attended.  I did not know the true inwardness of the
affair when I accepted.  I imagined that the talk would be wild
and high, that some of them might drink more than they ought, and
that I would drink discreetly.  But it seemed these beer busts
were a diversion of these high-spirited young fellows whereby they
whiled away the tedium of existence by making fools of their
betters.  As I learned afterward, they had got their previous
guest of honour, a brilliant young radical, unskilled in drinking,
quite pipped.

When I found myself with them, and the situation dawned on me, up
rose my queer man-pride.  I'd show them, the young rascals.  I'd
show them who was husky and chesty, who had the vitality and the
constitution, the stomach and the head, who could make most of a
swine of himself and show it least.  These unlicked cubs who
thought they could out-drink ME!

You see, it was an endurance test, and no man likes to give
another best.  Faugh! it was steam beer.  I had learned more
expensive brews.  Not for years had I drunk steam beer; but when I
had, I had drunk with men, and I guessed I could show these
youngsters some ability in beer-guzzling.  And the drinking began,
and I had to drink with the best of them.  Some of them might lag,
but the guest of honour was not permitted to lag.

And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had
read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the
ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity,
atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and
desire to outswine the swine.

And when the session broke up I was still on my feet, and I
walked, erect, unswaying--which was more than can be said of some
of my hosts.  I recall one of them in indignant tears on the
street corner, weeping as he pointed out my sober condition.
Little he dreamed the iron clutch, born of old training, with
which I held to my consciousness in my swimming brain, kept
control of my muscles and my qualms, kept my voice unbroken and
easy and my thoughts consecutive and logical.  Yes, and mixed up
with it all I was privily a-grin.  They hadn't made a fool of me
in that drinking bout.  And I was proud of myself for the
achievement.  Darn it, I am still proud, so strangely is man
compounded.

But I didn't write my thousand words next morning.  I was sick,
poisoned.  It was a day of wretchedness.  In the afternoon I had
to give a public speech.  I gave it, and I am confident it was as
bad as I felt.  Some of my hosts were there in the front rows to
mark any signs on me of the night before.  I don't know what signs
they marked, but I marked signs on them and took consolation in
the knowledge that they were just as sick as I.

Never again, I swore.  And I have never been inveigled into
another beer bust.  For that matter, that was my last drinking
bout of any sort.  Oh, I have drunk ever since, but with more
wisdom, more discretion, and never in a competitive spirit.  It is
thus that the seasoned drinker grows seasoned.

To show that at this period in my life drinking was wholly a
matter of companionship, I remember crossing the Atlantic in the
old Teutonic.  It chanced, at the start, that I chummed with an
English cable operator and a younger member of a Spanish shipping
firm.  Now the only thing they drank was "horse's neck"--a long,
soft, cool drink with an apple peel or an orange peel floating in
it.  And for that whole voyage I drank horse's, necks with my two
companions.  On the other hand, had they drunk whisky, I should
have drunk whisky with them.  From this it must not be concluded
that I was merely weak.  I didn't care.  I had no morality in the
matter.  I was strong with youth, and unafraid, and alcohol was an
utterly negligible question so far as I was concerned.



        CHAPTER XXVIII


Not yet was I ready to tuck my arm in John Barleycorn's.  The
older I got, the greater my success, the more money I earned, the
wider was the command of the world that became mine and the more
prominently did John Barleycorn bulk in my life.  And still I
maintained no more than a nodding acquaintance with him.  I drank
for the sake of sociability, and when alone I did not drink.
Sometimes I got jingled, but I considered such jingles the mild
price I paid for sociability.

To show how unripe I was for John Barleycorn, when, at this time,
I descended into my slough of despond, I never dreamed of turning
to John Barleycorn for a helping hand.  I had life troubles and
heart troubles which are neither here nor there in this narrative.
But, combined with them, were intellectual troubles which are
indeed germane.

Mine was no uncommon experience.  I had read too much positive
science and lived too much positive life.  In the eagerness of
youth I had made the ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too
relentlessly.  I had torn her veils from her, and the sight was
too terrible for me to stand.  In brief, I lost my fine faiths in
pretty well everything except humanity, and the humanity I
retained faith in was a very stark humanity indeed.

This long sickness of pessimism is too well known to most of us to
be detailed here.  Let it suffice to state that I had it very bad.
I meditated suicide coolly, as a Greek philosopher might.  My
regret was that there were too many dependent directly upon me for
food and shelter for me to quit living.  But that was sheer
morality.  What really saved me was the one remaining illusion--
the PEOPLE.

The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had
failed me.  Success--I despised it.  Recognition--it was dead
ashes.  Society, men and women above the ruck and the muck of the
water-front and the forecastle--I was appalled by their unlovely
mental mediocrity.  Love of woman--it was like all the rest.
Money--I could sleep in only one bed at a time, and of what worth
was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day when I could eat
only one? Art, culture--in the face of the iron facts of biology
such things were ridiculous, the exponents of such things only the
more ridiculous.

From the foregoing it can be seen how very sick I was.  I was born
a fighter.  The things I had fought for had proved not worth the
fight.  Remained the PEOPLE.  My fight was finished, yet something
was left still to fight for--the PEOPLE.

But while I was discovering this one last tie to bind me to life,
in my extremity, in the depths of despond, walking in the valley
of the shadow, my ears were deaf to John Barleycorn.  Never the
remotest whisper arose in my consciousness that John Barleycorn
was the anodyne, that he could lie me along to live.  One way only
was uppermost in my thought--my revolver, the crashing eternal
darkness of a bullet.  There was plenty of whisky in the house--
for my guests.  I never touched it.  I grew afraid of my revolver--
afraid during the period in which the radiant, flashing vision of
the PEOPLE was forming in my mind and will.  So obsessed was I
with the desire to die that I feared I might commit the act in my
sleep, and I was compelled to give my revolver away to others who
were to lose it for me where my subconscious hand might not find
it.

But the PEOPLE saved me.  By the PEOPLE was I handcuffed to life.
There was still one fight left in me, and here was the thing for
which to fight.  I threw all precaution to the winds, threw myself
with fiercer zeal into the fight for socialism, laughed at the
editors and publishers who warned me and who were the sources of
my hundred porterhouses a day, and was brutally careless of whose
feelings I hurt and of how savagely I hurt them.  As the "well-
balanced radicals" charged at the time, my efforts were so
strenuous, so unsafe and unsane, so ultra-revolutionary, that I
retarded the socialist development in the United States by five
years.  In passing, I wish to remark, at this late date, that it
is my fond belief that I accelerated the socialist development in
the United States by at least five minutes.

It was the PEOPLE, and no thanks to John Barleycorn, who pulled me
through my long sickness.  And when I was convalescent came the
love of woman to complete the cure and lull my pessimism asleep
for many a long day, until John Barleycorn again awoke it.  But in
the meantime, I pursued Truth less relentlessly, refraining from
tearing her last veils aside even when I clutched them in my hand.
I no longer cared to look upon Truth naked.  I refused to permit
myself to see a second time what I had once seen.  And the memory
of what I had that time seen I resolutely blotted from my mind.

And I was very happy.  Life went well with me, I took delight in
little things.  The big things I declined to take too seriously.
I still read the books, but not with the old eagerness.  I still
read the books to-day, but never again shall I read them with that
old glory of youthful passion when I harked to the call from over
and beyond that whispered me on to win to the mystery at the back
of life and behind the stars.

The point of this chapter is that, in the long sickness that at
some time comes to most of us, I came through without any appeal
for aid to John Barleycorn.  Love, socialism, the PEOPLE--
healthful figments of man's mind--were the things that cured and
saved me.  If ever a man was not a born alcoholic, I believe that
I am that man.  And yet--well, let the succeeding chapters tell
their tale, for in them will be shown how I paid for my previous
quarter of a century of contact with ever-accessible John
Barleycorn.



        CHAPTER XXIX


After my long sickness my drinking continued to be convivial.  I
drank when others drank and I was with them.  But, imperceptibly,
my need for alcohol took form and began to grow.  It was not a
body need.  I boxed, swam, sailed, rode horses, lived in the open
an arrantly healthful life, and passed life insurance examinations
with flying colours.  In its inception, now that I look back upon
it, this need for alcohol was a mental need, a nerve need, a good-
spirits need.  How can I explain?

It was something like this.  Physiologically, from the standpoint
of palate and stomach, alcohol was, as it had always been,
repulsive.  It tasted no better than beer did when I was five,
than bitter claret did when I was seven.  When I was alone,
writing or studying, I had no need for it.  But--I was growing
old, or wise, or both, or senile as an alternative.  When I was in
company I was less pleased, less excited, with the things said and
done.  Erstwhile worth-while fun and stunts seemed no longer worth
while; and it was a torment to listen to the insipidities and
stupidities of women, to the pompous, arrogant sayings of the
little half-baked men.  It is the penalty one pays for reading the
books too much, or for being oneself a fool.  In my case it does
not matter which was my trouble.  The trouble itself was the fact.
The condition of the fact was mine.  For me the life, and light,
and sparkle of human intercourse were dwindling.

I had climbed too high among the stars, or, maybe, I had slept too
hard.  Yet I was not hysterical nor in any way overwrought.  My
pulse was normal.  My heart was an amazement of excellence to the
insurance doctors.  My lungs threw the said doctors into
ecstasies.  I wrote a thousand words every day.  I was
punctiliously exact in dealing with all the affairs of life that
fell to my lot.  I exercised in joy and gladness.  I slept at
night like a babe.  But--

Well, as soon as I got out in the company of others I was driven
to melancholy and spiritual tears.  I could neither laugh with nor
at the solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor
could I laugh, nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage,
with the silly superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath
all their silliness and softness, were as primitive, direct, and
deadly in their pursuit of biological destiny as the monkeys women
were before they shed their furry coats and replaced them with the
furs of other animals.

And I was not pessimistic.  I swear I was not pessimistic.  I was
merely bored.  I had seen the same show too often, listened too
often to the same songs and the same jokes.  I knew too much about
the box office receipts.  I knew the cogs of the machinery behind
the scenes so well that the posing on the stage, and the laughter
and the song, could not drown the creaking of the wheels behind.

It doesn't pay to go behind the scenes and see the angel-voiced
tenor beat his wife.  Well, I'd been behind, and I was paying for
it.  Or else I was a fool.  It is immaterial which was my
situation.  The situation is what counts, and the situation was
that social intercourse for me was getting painful and difficult.
On the other hand, it must be stated that on rare occasions, on
very rare occasions, I did meet rare souls, or fools like me, with
whom I could spend magnificent hours among the stars, or in the
paradise of fools.  I was married to a rare soul, or a fool, who
never bored me and who was always a source of new and unending
surprise and delight.  But I could not spend all my hours solely
in her company.

Nor would it have been fair, nor wise, to compel her to spend all
her hours in my company.  Besides, I had written a string of
successful books, and society demands some portion of the
recreative hours of a fellow that writes books.  And any normal
man, of himself and his needs, demands some hours of his fellow
men.

And now we begin to come to it.  How to face the social
intercourse game with the glamour gone? John Barleycorn.  The ever
patient one had waited a quarter of a century and more for me to
reach my hand out in need of him.  His thousand tricks had failed,
thanks to my constitution and good luck, but he had more tricks in
his bag.  A cocktail or two, or several, I found, cheered me up
for the foolishness of foolish people.  A cocktail, or several,
before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly at things which
had long since ceased being laughable.  The cocktail was a prod, a
spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits.  It recrudesced
the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination
so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the
liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the
satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to
talk.

A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good
companion with one.  I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged
myself to merriment.  And the thing began so imperceptibly that I,
old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was
leading me.  I was beginning to call for music and wine; soon I
should be calling for madder music and more wine.

It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for
the pre-dinner cocktail.  I WANTED it, and I was CONSCIOUS that I
wanted it.  I remember, while war-corresponding in the Far East,
of being irresistibly attracted to a certain home.  Besides
accepting all invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in
almost every afternoon.  Now, the hostess was a charming woman,
but it was not for her sake that I was under her roof so
frequently.  It happened that she made by far the finest cocktail
procurable in that large city where drink-mixing on the part of
the foreign population was indeed an art.  Up at the club, down at
the hotels, and in other private houses, no such cocktails were
created.  Her cocktails were subtle.  They were masterpieces.
They were the least repulsive to the palate and carried the most
"kick." And yet, I desired her cocktails only for sociability's
sake, to key myself to sociable moods.  When I rode away from that
city, across hundreds of miles of rice-fields and mountains, and
through months of campaigning, and on with the victorious Japanese
into Manchuria, I did not drink.  Several bottles of whisky were
always to be found on the backs of my pack-horses.  Yet I never
broached a bottle for myself, never took a drink by myself, and
never knew a desire to take such a drink.  Oh, if a white man came
into my camp, I opened a bottle and we drank together according to
the way of men, just as he would open a bottle and drink with me
if I came into his camp.  I carried that whisky for social
purposes, and I so charged it up in my expense account to the
newspaper for which I worked.

Only in retrospect can I mark the almost imperceptible growth of
my desire.  There were little hints then that I did not take,
little straws in the wind that I did not see, little incidents the
gravity of which I did not realise.

For instance, for some years it had been my practice each winter
to cruise for six or eight weeks on San Francisco Bay.  My stout
sloop yacht, the Spray, had a comfortable cabin and a coal stove.
A Korean boy did the cooking, and I usually took a friend or so
along to share the joys of the cruise.  Also, I took my machine
along and did my thousand words a day.  On the particular trip I
have in mind, Cloudesley and Toddy came along.  This was Toddy's
first trip.  On previous trips Cloudesley had elected to drink
beer; so I had kept the yacht supplied with beer and had drunk
beer with him.

But on this cruise the situation was different.  Toddy was so
nicknamed because of his diabolical cleverness in concocting
toddies.  So I brought whisky along--a couple of gallons.  Alas!
Many another gallon I bought, for Cloudesley and I got into the
habit of drinking a certain hot toddy that actually tasted
delicious going down and that carried the most exhilarating kick
imaginable.

I liked those toddies.  I grew to look forward to the making of
them.  We drank them regularly, one before breakfast, one before
dinner, one before supper, and a final one when we went to bed.
We never got drunk.  But I will say that four times a day we were
very genial.  And when, in the middle of the cruise, Toddy was
called back to San Francisco on business, Cloudesley and I saw to
it that the Korean boy mixed toddies regularly for us according to
formula.

But that was only on the boat.  Back on the land, in my house, I
took no before breakfast eye-opener, no bed-going nightcap.  And I
haven't drunk hot toddies since, and that was many a year ago.
But the point is, I LIKED those toddies.  The geniality of which
they were provocative was marvellous.  They were eloquent
proselyters for John Barleycorn in their own small insidious way.
They were tickles of the something destined to grow into daily and
deadly desire.  And I didn't know, never dreamed--I, who had lived
with John Barleycorn for so many years and laughed at all his
unavailing attempts to win me.



        CHAPTER XXX


Part of the process of recovering from my long sickness was to
find delight in little things, in things unconnected with books
and problems, in play, in games of tag in the swimming pool, in
flying kites, in fooling with horses, in working out mechanical
puzzles.  As a result, I grew tired of the city.  On the ranch, in
the Valley of the Moon, I found my paradise.  I gave up living in
cities.  All the cities held for me were music, the theatre, and
Turkish baths.

And all went well with me.  I worked hard, played hard, and was
very happy.  I read more fiction and less fact.  I did not study a
tithe as much as I had studied in the past.  I still took an
interest in the fundamental problems of existence, but it was a
very cautious interest; for I had burned my fingers that time I
clutched at the veils of Truth and wrested them from her.  There
was a bit of lie in this attitude of mine, a bit of hypocrisy; but
the lie and the hypocrisy were those of a man desiring to live.  I
deliberately blinded myself to what I took to be the savage
interpretation of biological fact.  After all, I was merely
forswearing a bad habit, forgoing a bad frame of mind.  And I
repeat, I was very happy.  And I add, that in all my days,
measuring them with cold, considerative judgment, this was, far
and away beyond all other periods, the happiest period of my life.

But the time was at hand, rhymeless and reasonless so far as I can
see, when I was to begin to pay for my score of years of dallying
with John Barleycorn.  Occasionally guests journeyed to the ranch
and remained a few days.  Some did not drink.  But to those who
did drink, the absence of all alcohol on the ranch was a hardship.
I could not violate my sense of hospitality by compelling them to
endure this hardship.  I ordered in a stock--for my guests.

I was never interested enough in cocktails to know how they were
made.  So I got a bar-keeper in Oakland to make them in bulk and
ship them to me.  When I had no guests I didn't drink.  But I
began to notice, when I finished my morning's work, that I was
glad if there were a guest, for then I could drink a cocktail with
him.

Now I was so clean of alcohol that even a single cocktail was
provocative of pitch.  A single cocktail would glow the mind and
tickle a laugh for the few minutes prior to sitting down to table
and starting the delightful process of eating.  On the other hand,
such was the strength of my stomach, of my alcoholic resistance,
that the single cocktail was only the glimmer of a glow, the
faintest tickle of a laugh.  One day, a friend frankly and
shamelessly suggested a second cocktail.  I drank the second one
with him.  The glow was appreciably longer and warmer, the
laughter deeper and more resonant.  One does not forget such
experiences.  Sometimes I almost think that it was because I was
so very happy that I started on my real drinking.

I remember one day Charmian and I took a long ride over the
mountains on our horses.  The servants had been dismissed for the
day, and we returned late at night to a jolly chafing-dish supper.
Oh, it was good to be alive that night while the supper was
preparing, the two of us alone in the kitchen.  I, personally, was
at the top of life.  Such things as the books and ultimate truth
did not exist.  My body was gloriously healthy, and healthily
tired from the long ride.  It had been a splendid day.  The night
was splendid.  I was with the woman who was my mate, picnicking in
gleeful abandon.  I had no troubles.  The bills were all paid, and
a surplus of money was rolling in on me.  The future ever-widened
before me.  And right there, in the kitchen, delicious things
bubbled in the chafing-dish, our laughter bubbled, and my stomach
was keen with a most delicious edge of appetite.

I felt so good, that somehow, somewhere, in me arose an insatiable
greed to feel better.  I was so happy that I wanted to pitch my
happiness even higher.  And I knew the way.  Ten thousand contacts
with John Barleycorn had taught me.  Several times I wandered out
of the kitchen to the cocktail bottle, and each time I left it
diminished by one man's size cocktail.  The result was splendid.
I wasn't jingled, I wasn't lighted up; but I was warmed, I glowed,
my happiness was pyramided.  Munificent as life was to me, I added
to that munificence.  It was a great hour--one of my greatest.
But I paid for it, long afterwards, as you will see.  One does not
forget such experiences, and, in human stupidity, cannot be
brought to realise that there is no immutable law which decrees
that same things shall produce same results.  For they don't, else
would the thousandth pipe of opium be provocative of similar
delights to the first, else would one cocktail, instead of
several, produce an equivalent glow after a year of cocktails.

One day, just before I ate midday dinner, after my morning's
writing was done, when I had no guest, I took a cocktail by
myself.  Thereafter, when there were no guests, I took this daily
pre-dinner cocktail.  And right there John Barleycorn had me.  I
was beginning to drink regularly.  I was beginning to drink alone.
And I was beginning to drink, not for hospitality's sake, not for
the sake of the taste, but for the effect of the drink.

I WANTED that daily pre-dinner cocktail.  And it never crossed my
mind that there was any reason I should not have it.  I paid for
it.  I could pay for a thousand cocktails each day if I wanted.
And what was a cocktail--one cocktail--to me who on so many
occasions for so many years had drunk inordinate quantities of
stiffer stuff and been unharmed?

The programme of my ranch life was as follows: Each morning, at
eight-thirty, having been reading or correcting proofs in bed
since four or five, I went to my desk.  Odds and ends of
correspondence and notes occupied me till nine, and at nine sharp,
invariably, I began my writing.  By eleven, sometimes a few
minutes earlier or later, my thousand words were finished.
Another half-hour at cleaning up my desk, and my day's work was
done, so that at eleven-thirty I got into a hammock under the
trees with my mail-bag and the morning newspaper.  At twelve-
thirty I ate dinner and in the afternoon I swam and rode.

One morning, at eleven-thirty, before I got into the hammock, I
took a cocktail.  I repeated this on subsequent mornings, of
course, taking another cocktail just before I ate at twelve-
thirty.  Soon I found myself, seated at my desk in the midst of my
thousand words, looking forward to that eleven-thirty cocktail.

At last, now, I was thoroughly conscious that I desired alcohol.
But what of it? I wasn't afraid of John Barleycorn.  I had
associated with him too long.  I was wise in the matter of drink.
I was discreet.  Never again would I drink to excess.  I knew the
dangers and the pitfalls of John Barleycorn, the various ways by
which he had tried to kill me in the past.  But all that was past,
long past.  Never again would I drink myself to stupefaction.
Never again would I get drunk.  All I wanted, and all I would
take, was just enough to glow and warm me, to kick geniality alive
in me and put laughter in my throat and stir the maggots of
imagination slightly in my brain.  Oh, I was thoroughly master of
myself, and of John Barleycorn.



        CHAPTER XXXI


But the same stimulus to the human organism will not continue to
produce the same response.  By and by I discovered there was no
kick at all in one cocktail.  One cocktail left me dead.  There
was no glow, no laughter tickle.  Two or three cocktails were
required to produce the original effect of one.  And I wanted that
effect.  I drank my first cocktail at eleven-thirty when I took
the morning's mail into the hammock, and I drank my second
cocktail an hour later just before I ate.  I got into the habit of
crawling out of the hammock ten minutes earlier so as to find time
and decency for two more cocktails ere I ate.  This became
schedule--three cocktails in the hour that intervened between my
desk and dinner.  And these are two of the deadliest drinking
habits: regular drinking and solitary drinking.

I was always willin