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 Ishould 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 Iwanted 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 Ihave 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,Itook no before breakfast eye-opener,no bed-going nightcap.And Ihaven'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.
