第30章 CHAPTER XIV(3)

What happened afterward,with one glimmering exception,I had to be told.Nelson,with his enormous strength,picked me up and dragged me on and aboard the train.When he had got me into a seat,I fought and panted so terribly for air that even with his obtuseness he knew I was in a bad way.And right there,at any moment,I know now,I might have died.I often think it is the nearest to death I have ever been.I have only Nelson's description of my behaviour to go by.

I was scorching up,burning alive internally,in an agony of fire and suffocation,and I wanted air.I madly wanted air.My efforts to raise a window were vain,for all the windows in the car were screwed down.Nelson had seen drink-crazed men,and thought I wanted to throw myself out.He tried to restrain me,but I fought on.I seized some man's torch and smashed the glass.

Now there were pro-Nelson and anti-Nelson factions on the Oakland water-front,and men of both factions,with more drink in them than was good,filled the car.My smashing of the window was the signal for the antis.One of them reached for me,and dropped me,and started the fight,of all of which I have no knowledge save what was told me afterward,and a sore jaw next day from the blow that put me out.The man who struck me went down across my body,Nelson followed him,and they say there were few unbroken windows in the wreckage of the car that followed as the free-for-all fight had its course.

This being knocked cold and motionless was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me.My violent struggles had only accelerated my already dangerously accelerated heart,and increased the need for oxygen in my suffocating lungs.

After the fight was over and I came to,I did not come to myself.

I was no more myself than a drowning man is who continues to struggle after he has lost consciousness.I have no memory of my actions,but I cried "Air!Air!"so insistently,that it dawned on Nelson that I did not contemplate self-destruction.So he cleared the jagged glass from the window-ledge and let me stick my head and shoulders out.He realised,partially,the seriousness of my condition.and held me by the waist to prevent me from crawling farther out.And for the rest of the run in to Oakland Ikept my head and shoulders out,fighting like a maniac whenever he tried to draw me inside.

And here my one glimmering streak of true consciousness came.My sole recollection,from the time I fell under the trees until Iawoke the following evening,is of my head out of the window,facing the wind caused by the train,cinders striking and burning and blinding me,while I breathed with will.All my will was concentrated on breathing--on breathing the air in the hugest lung-full gulps I could,pumping the greatest amount of air into my lungs in the shortest possible time.It was that or death,and I was a swimmer and diver,and I knew it;and in the most intolerable agony of prolonged suffocation,during those moments Iwas conscious,I faced the wind and the cinders and breathed for life.

All the rest is a blank.I came to the following evening,in a water-front lodging-house.I was alone.No doctor had been called in.And I might well have died there,for Nelson and the others,deeming me merely "sleeping off my drunk,"had let me lie there in a comatose condition for seventeen hours.Many a man,as every doctor knows,has died of the sudden impact of a quart or more of whisky.Usually one reads of them so dying,strong drinkers,on account of a wager.But I didn't know--then.And so I learned;and by no virtue nor prowess,but simply through good fortune and constitution.Again my constitution had triumphed over John Barleycorn.I had escaped from another death-pit,dragged myself through another morass,and perilously acquired the discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many another year to come.

Heavens!That was twenty years ago,and I am still very much and wisely alive;and I have seen much,done much,lived much,in that intervening score of years;and I shudder when I think how close a shave I ran,how near I was to missing that splendid fifth of a century that has been mine.And,oh,it wasn't John Barleycorn's fault that he didn't get me that night of the Hancock Fire Brigade.