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.