Biographical
reminiscence, part the first: It was only a few months before composing the foregoing
that I had my first experience of intoxicating beverages and their strange
intestinal chemistry. I was walking through the Stephen’s Green on a summer
evening and conducting a conversation with a man called Kelly, then a student,
hitherto a member of the farming class and now a private in the armed forces
of the King. He was addicted to unclean expressions in ordinary conversation
and spat continually, always fouling the flowerbeds on his way through the
Green with a mucous deposit dislodged with a low grunting from the interior of
his windpipe. In some respects he was a coarse man but he was lacking in
malice or ill-humour. He suggested that we should drink a
number of jars or pints of plain porter in Grogan’s public house. I
derived considerable pleasure from the casual quality of his suggestion and
observed that it would probably
do us no harm, thus expressing my whole-hearted concurrence by a figure
of speech.
He turned to me with a facetious wry expression and showed me a penny
and a six pence in his rough hand.
I am thirsty, he said. I have a sixpence. Therefore I buy a pint.
I immediately recognized this as an intimation that I should pay for my
own porter.
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being
based on licensed premises.
Licensed premises is right, he replied, spitting heavily. I saw that my
witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind.
We sat in Grogan’s with our faded overcoats finely disarrayed on easy chairs
in the mullioned snug. I gave a shilling and two pennies to a civil man who
brought us in return two glasses of black porter, imperial pint pleasure.
I adjusted the glasses to the front of
each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion. It was my first
taste of porter.
Innumerable
persons with whom I had conversed had represented to me that spirituous
liquors and intoxicants generally had an adverse effect on the senses and the
body and that those who became addicted to stimulants in youth were unhappy
throughout their lives and met with death at the end a drunkard’s fall,
expiring ingloriously at the stair-bottom in a welter of blood and puke.