She has nor chick nor child to mother.
Her idea of a life beyond this vale is crude and uncomfortable. She went two Sundays to the Finnish church and had a surprising lusty doctrine of eternal fire rammed down her throat: she took the Finn minister’s word for it and quitted the fold, preferring to live this life unhampered by flaming anticipation. All her material treasure she works for with mops and scrubbing-brushes at thirty-five cents an hour.
Other roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint bottles.
Josephina is what is called a white liner. Which means that she has drunk so long, so much, so regularly that whiskey, rum, gin and brandy have no or negligible effects upon her. To achieve her intoxicating aim she must drink pure alcohol.
By the same token I eschew many a tame poet: I must have John Keats.
What the poetry of John Keats does to me I know.
What the distilled waters of her choice do to Josephina it pleases me to imagine while I watch her clean my walls and floor and windows.
She works strongly, steadily, quietly till I pronounce the room clean. Then she stops, carries the pails and other things downstairs to the kitchen, removes a big brass pin from the rear of her dingy skirt which had held it back and doubled over her darkling petticoat, re-dons an antique rain-coat and bad hat, ties her clinking silver into the corner of a decadent handkerchief, bids me good-evening with a grave blond Finn bow and goes out into the dusk. She takes her way through alleys and short-cuts to the side door of a ‘Finlander’ gin-palace in the Finn quarter of the town. And there she lays out her day’s wage in the pint bottles of her delight. As many pint bottles as her few dollars will buy, so many she buys. She ventures her all in the name of passionate thirst taking no thought of the morrow. She then seeks out some alley with a dark door-step and there she does her drinking. It would not do to go home with her alcoholic wealth because the husband might be there who, like the alphabetic vintner, would ‘drink all himself.’ So she drinks away in pint-bottle-ish peace, sitting alone in the gloom of the alleyway door-step, in her limp rain-coat and bad hat and her stolid Finn self-sufficience.
Because I like Josephina it charms me to think of the happiness that must be hers as she sits emptying pint bottles into herself and the white strong fire-water begins to work.