worth, and respected him and liked him. Yet John Barleycorn
metamorphosed him into a violent lunatic. And that was the very
point these drinkers made. They knew that drink–and drink with a
sailor is always excessive–made them mad, but only mildly mad.
Violent madness was objectionable because it spoiled the fun of
others and often culminated in tragedy. From their standpoint,
mild madness was all right. But from the standpoint of the whole
human race, is not all madness objectionable? And is there a
greater maker of madness of all sorts than John Barleycorn?
But to return. Ashore, snugly ensconced in a Japanese house of
entertainment, Axel and I compared bruises, and over a comfortable
drink talked of the afternoon’s happenings. We liked the
quietness of that drink and took another. A shipmate dropped in,
several shipmates dropped in, and we had more quiet drinks.
Finally, just as we had engaged a Japanese orchestra, and as the
first strains of the samisens and taikos were rising, through the
paper-walls came a wild howl from the street. We recognised it.
Still howling, disdaining doorways, with blood-shot eyes and
wildly waving muscular arms, Victor burst upon us through the
fragile walls. The old amuck rage was on him, and he wanted
blood, anybody’s blood. The orchestra fled; so did we. We went
through doorways, and we went through paper-walls–anything to get
away.
And after the place was half wrecked, and we had agreed to pay the
damage, leaving Victor partly subdued and showing symptoms of
lapsing into a comatose state, Axel and I wandered away in quest
of a quieter drinking-place. The main street was a madness.
Hundreds of sailors rollicked up and down. Because the chief of
police with his small force was helpless, the governor of the
John Barleycorn
54
colony had issued orders to the captains to have all their men on
board by sunset.
What! To be treated in such fashion! As the news spread among the
schooners, they were emptied. Everybody came ashore. Men who had
had no intention of coming ashore climbed into the boats. The
unfortunate governor’s ukase had precipitated a general debauch
for all hands. It was hours after sunset, and the men wanted to
see anybody try to put them on board. They went around inviting
the authorities to try to put them on board. In front of the
governor’s house they were gathered thickest, bawling sea-songs,
circulating square faces, and dancing uproarious Virginia reels
and old-country dances. The police, including the reserves, stood
in little forlorn groups, waiting for the command the governor was
too wise to issue. And I thought this saturnalia was great. It
was like the old days of the Spanish Main come back. It was
license; it was adventure. And I was part of it, a chesty sea-
rover along with all these other chesty sea-rovers among the paper
houses of Japan.
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
John Barleycorn
55
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. I
might 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 I
see 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. I
was 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.
John Barleycorn
56
CHAPTER XVII
North we raced from the Bonin Islands to pick up the seal-herd,
and north we hunted it for a hundred days into frosty, mitten
weather and into and through vast fogs which hid the sun from us
for a week at a time. It was wild and heavy work, without a drink
or thought of drink. Then we sailed south to Yokohama, with a big
catch of skins in our salt and a heavy pay-day coming.
I was eager to be ashore and see Japan, but the first day was
devoted to ship’s work, and not until evening did we sailors land.
And here, by the very system of things, by the way life was
organised and men transacted affairs, John Barleycorn reached out
and tucked my arm in his. The captain had given money for us to