John Barleycorn | Page 9

So all that Italian crew looked on and marvelled at the infant
phenomenon that downed wine with the sang-froid of an automaton. It
is not in the spirit of braggadocio that I dare to assert they had never
seen anything like it.
The time came to go. The tipsy antics of the lads had led a majority of
the soberer-minded lassies to compel a departure. I found myself, at the
door, beside my little maiden. She had not had my experience, so she
was sober. She was fascinated by the titubations of the lads who strove
to walk beside their girls, and began to mimic them. I thought this a
great game, and I, too, began to stagger tipsily. But she had no wine to
stir up, while my movements quickly set the fumes rising to my head.
Even at the start, I was more realistic than she. In several minutes I was
astonishing myself. I saw one lad, after reeling half a dozen steps,
pause at the side of the road, gravely peer into the ditch, and gravely,
and after apparent deep thought, fall into it. To me this was
excruciatingly funny. I staggered to the edge of the ditch, fully
intending to stop on the edge. I came to myself, in the ditch, in process
of being hauled out by several anxious-faced girls.
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, I am confident that it
would have killed me. As it was, I know I was 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, I
sank 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, I would 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