The governor never issued the order to clear the streets,and Axel and I wandered on from drink to drink.After a time,in some of the antics,getting hazy myself,I lost him.I drifted along,making new acquaintances,downing more drinks,getting hazier and hazier.I remember,somewhere,sitting in a circle with Japanese fishermen,Kanaka boat-steerers from our own vessels,and a young Danish sailor fresh from cowboying in the Argentine and with a penchant for native customs and ceremonials.And with due and proper and most intricate Japanese ceremonial we of the circle drank saki,pale,mild,and lukewarm,from tiny porcelain bowls.
And,later,I remember the runaway apprentices--boys of eighteen and twenty,of middle class English families,who had jumped their ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners.They were healthy,smooth-skinned,clear-eyed,and they were young--youths like me,learning the way of their feet in the world of men.And they WERE men.No mild saki for them,but square faces illicitly refilled with corrosive fire that flamed through their veins and burst into conflagrations in their heads.I remember a melting song they sang,the refrain of which was:
"'Tis but a little golden ring,I give it to thee with pride,Wear it for your mother's sake When you are on the tide."They wept over it as they sang it,the graceless young scamps who had all broken their mothers'prides,and I sang with them,and wept with them,and luxuriated in the pathos and the tragedy of it,and struggled to make glimmering inebriated generalisations on life and romance.And one last picture I have,standing out very clear and bright in the midst of vagueness before and blackness afterward.We--the apprentices and I--are swaying and clinging to one another under the stars.We are singing a rollicking sea song,all save one who sits on the ground and weeps;and we are marking the rhythm with waving square faces.From up and down the street come far choruses of sea-voices similarly singing,and life is great,and beautiful and romantic,and magnificently mad.
And next,after the blackness,I open my eyes in the early dawn to see a Japanese woman,solicitously anxious,bending over me.She is the port pilot's wife and I am lying in her doorway.I am chilled and shivering,sick with the after-sickness of debauch.
And I feel lightly clad.Those rascals of runaway apprentices!
They have acquired the habit of running away.They have run away with my possessions.My watch is gone.My few dollars are gone.
My coat is gone.So is my belt.And yes,my shoes.
And the foregoing is a sample of the ten days I spent in the Bonin Islands.Victor got over his lunacy,rejoined Axel and me,and after that we caroused somewhat more discreetly.And we never climbed that lava path among the flowers.The town and the square faces were all we saw.
One who has been burned by fire must preach about the fire.Imight have seen and healthily enjoyed a whole lot more of the Bonin Islands,if I had done what I ought to have done.But,as Isee it,it is not a matter of what one ought to do,or ought not to do.It is what one DOES do.That is the everlasting,irrefragable fact.I did just what I did.I did what all those men did in the Bonin Islands.I did what millions of men over the world were doing at that particular point in time.I did it because the way led to it,because I was only a human boy,a creature of my environment,and neither an anaemic nor a god.Iwas just human,and I was taking the path in the world that men took--men whom I admired,if you please;full-blooded men,lusty,breedy,chesty men,free spirits and anything but niggards in the way they foamed life away.
And the way was open.It was like an uncovered well in a yard where children play.It is small use to tell the brave little boys toddling their way along into knowledge of life that they mustn't play near the uncovered well.They'll play near it.Any parent knows that.And we know that a certain percentage of them,the livest and most daring,will fall into the well.The thing to do--we all know it--is to cover up the well.The case is the same with John Barleycorn.All the no-saying and no-preaching in the world will fail to keep men,and youths growing into manhood,away from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere accessible,and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the connotation of manliness,and daring,and great-spiritedness.
The only rational thing for the twentieth-century folk to do is to cover up the well;to make the twentieth century in truth the twentieth century,and to relegate to the nineteenth century and all the preceding centuries the things of those centuries,the witch-burnings,the intolerances,the fetiches,and,not least among such barbarisms.John Barleycorn.
