t this maniacal trick John
Barleycorn played me is nothing uncommon.  An absolute statistic
of the per centage of suicides due to John Barleycorn would be
appalling.  In my case, healthy, normal, young, full of the joy of
life, the suggestion to kill myself was unusual; but it must be
taken into account that it came on the heels of a long carouse,
when my nerves and brain were fearfully poisoned, and that the
dramatic, romantic side of my imagination, drink-maddened to
lunacy, was delighted with the suggestion.  And yet, the older,
more morbid drinkers, more jaded with life and more disillusioned,
who kill themselves, do so usually after a long debauch, when
their nerves and brains are thoroughly poison-soaked.



        CHAPTER XIII


So I left Benicia, where John Barleycorn had nearly got me, and
ranged wider afield in pursuit of the whisper from the back of
life to come and find.  And wherever I ranged, the way lay along
alcohol-drenched roads.  Men still congregated in saloons.  They
were the poor-man's clubs, and they were the only clubs to which I
had access.  I could get acquainted in saloons.  I could go into a
saloon and talk with any man.  In the strange towns and cities I
wandered through, the only place for me to go was the saloon.  I
was no longer a stranger in any town the moment I had entered a
saloon.

And right here let me break in with experiences no later than last
year.  I harnessed four horses to a light trap, took Charmian
along, and drove for three months and a half over the wildest
mountain parts of California and Oregon.  Each morning I did my
regular day's work of writing fiction.  That completed, I drove on
through the middle of the day and the afternoon to the next stop.
But the irregularity of occurrence of stopping-places, coupled
with widely varying road conditions, made it necessary to plan,
the day before, each day's drive and my work.  I must know when I
was to start driving in order to start writing in time to finish
my day's output.  Thus, on occasion, when the drive was to be
long, I would be up and at my writing by five in the morning.  On
easier driving days I might not start writing till nine o'clock.

But how to plan? As soon as I arrived in a town, and put the
horses up, on the way from the stable to the hotel I dropped into
the saloons.  First thing, a drink--oh, I wanted the drink, but
also it must not be forgotten that, because of wanting to know
things, it was in this very way I had learned to want a drink.
Well, the first thing, a drink.  "Have something yourself," to the
barkeeper.  And then, as we drink, my opening query about roads
and stopping-places on ahead.

"Let me see," the barkeeper will say, "there's the road across
Tarwater Divide.  That used to be good.  I was over it three years
ago.  But it was blocked this spring.  Say, I'll tell you what.
I'll ask Jerry----" And the barkeeper turns and addresses some man
sitting at a table or leaning against the bar farther along, and
who may be Jerry, or Tom, or Bill.  "Say, Jerry, how about the
Tarwater road? You was down to Wilkins last week."

And while Bill or Jerry or Tom is beginning to unlimber his
thinking and speaking apparatus, I suggest that he join us in the
drink.  Then discussions arise about the advisability of this road
or that, what the best stopping-places may be, what running time I
may expect to make, where the best trout streams are, and so
forth, in which other men join, and which are punctuated with more
drinks.

Two or three more saloons, and I accumulate a warm jingle and come
pretty close to knowing everybody in town, all about the town, and
a fair deal about the surrounding country.  I know the lawyers,
editors, business men, local politicians, and the visiting
ranchers, hunters, and miners, so that by evening, when Charmian
and I stroll down the main street and back, she is astounded by
the number of my acquaintances in that totally strange town.

And thus is demonstrated a service John Barleycorn renders, a
service by which he increases his power over men.  And over the
world, wherever I have gone, during all the years, it has been the
same.  It may be a cabaret in the Latin Quarter, a cafe in some
obscure Italian village, a boozing ken in sailor-town, and it may
be up at the club over Scotch and soda; but always it will be
where John Barleycorn makes fellowship that I get immediately in
touch, and meet, and know.  And in the good days coming, when John
Barleycorn will have been banished out of existence along with the
other barbarisms, some other institution than the saloon will have
to obtain, some other congregating place of men where strange men
and stranger men may get in touch, and meet, and know.

But to return to my narrative.  When I turned my back on Benicia,
my way led through saloons.  I had developed no moral theories
against drinking, and I disliked as much as ever the taste of the
stuff.  But I had grown respectfully suspicious of John
Barleycorn.  I could not forget that trick he had played on me--on
me who did not want to die.  So I continued to drink, and to keep
a sharp eye on John Barleycorn, resolved to resist all future
suggestions of self-destruction.

In strange towns I made immediate acquaintances in the saloons.
When I hoboed, and hadn't the price of a bed, a saloon was the
only place that would receive me and give me a chair by the fire.
I could go into a saloon and wash up, brush my clothes, and comb
my hair.  And saloons were always so damnably convenient.  They
were everywhere in my western country.

I couldn't go into the dwellings of strangers that way.  Their
doors were not open to me; no seats were there for me by their
fires.  Also, churches and preachers I had never known.  And from
what I didn't know I was not attracted toward them.  Besides,
there was no glamour about them, no haze of romance, no promise of
adventure.  They were the sort with whom things never happened.
They lived and remained always in the one place, creatures of
order and system, narrow, limited, restrained.  They were without
greatness, without imagination, without camaraderie.  It was the
good fellows, easy and genial, daring, and, on occasion, mad, that
I wanted to know--the fellows, generous-hearted and -handed, and
not rabbit-hearted.

And here is another complaint I bring against John Barleycorn.  It
is these good fellows that he gets--the fellows with the fire and
the go in them, who have bigness, and warmness, and the best of
the human weaknesses.  And John Barleycorn puts out the fire, and
soddens the agility, and, when he does not more immediately kill
them or make maniacs of them, he coarsens and grossens them,
twists and malforms them out of the original goodness and fineness
of their natures.

Oh!--and I speak out of later knowledge--Heaven forefend me from
the most of the average run of male humans who are not good
fellows, the ones cold of heart and cold of head who don't smoke,
drink, or swear, or do much of anything else that is brase, and
resentful, and stinging, because in their feeble fibres there has
never been the stir and prod of life to well over its boundaries
and be devilish and daring.  One doesn't meet these in saloons,
nor rallying to lost causes, nor flaming on the adventure-paths,
nor loving as God's own mad lovers.  They are too busy keeping
their feet dry, conserving their heart-beats, and making unlovely
life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity.

And so I draw the indictment home to John Barleycorn.  It is just
those, the good fellows, the worth while, the fellows with the
weakness of too much strength, too much spirit, too much fire and
flame of fine devilishness, that he solicits and ruins.  Of
course, he ruins weaklings; but with them, the worst we breed, I
am not here concerned.  My concern is that it is so much of the
best we breed whom John Barleycorn destroys.  And the reason why
these best are destroyed is because John Barleycorn stands on
every highway and byway, accessible, law-protected, saluted by the
policeman on the beat, speaking to them, leading them by the hand
to the places where the good fellows and daring ones forgather and
drink deep.  With John Barleycorn out of the way, these daring
ones would still be born, and they would do things instead of
perishing.

Always I encountered the camaraderie of drink.  I might be walking
down the track to the water-tank to lie in wait for a passing
freight-train, when I would chance upon a bunch of "alki-stiffs."
An alki-stiff is a tramp who drinks druggist's alcohol.
Immediately, with greeting and salutation, I am taken into the
fellowship.  The alcohol, shrewdly blended with water, is handed
to me, and soon I am caught up in the revelry, with maggots
crawling in my brain and John Barleycorn whispering to me that
life is big, and that we are all brave and fine--free spirits
sprawling like careless gods upon the turf and telling the two-by-
four, cut-and-dried, conventional world to go hang.



        CHAPTER XIV


Back in Oakland from my wanderings, I returned to the water-front
and renewed my comradeship with Nelson, who was now on shore all
the time and living more madly than before.  I, too, spent my time
on shore with him, only occasionally going for cruises of several
days on the bay to help out on short-handed scow-schooners.

The result was that I was no longer reinvigorated by periods of
open-air abstinence and healthy toil.  I drank every day, and
whenever opportunity offered I drank to excess; for I still
laboured under the misconception that the secret of John
Barleycorn lay in drinking to bestiality and unconsciousness.  I
became pretty thoroughly alcohol-soaked during this period.  I
practically lived in saloons; became a bar-room loafer, and worse.

And right here was John Barleycorn getting me in a more insidious
though no less deadly way than when he nearly sent me out with the
tide.  I had a few months still to run before I was seventeen; I
scorned the thought of a steady job at anything; I felt myself a
pretty tough individual in a group of pretty tough men; and I
drank because these men drank and because I had to make good with
them.  I had never had a real boyhood, and in this, my precocious
manhood, I was very hard and woefully wise.  Though I had never
known girl's love even, I had crawled through such depths that I
was convinced absolutely that I knew the last word about love and
life.  And it wasn't a pretty knowledge.  Without being
pessimistic, I was quite satisfied that life was a rather cheap
and ordinary affair.

You see, John Barleycorn was blunting me.  The old stings and
prods of the spirit were no longer sharp.  Curiosity was leaving
me.  What did it matter what lay on the other side of the world?
Men and women, without doubt, very much like the men and women I
knew; marrying and giving in marriage and all the petty run of
petty human concerns; and drinks, too.  But the other side of the
world was a long way to go for a drink.  I had but to step to the
corner and get all I wanted at Joe Vigy's.  Johnny Heinhold still
ran the Last Chance.  And there were saloons on all the corners
and between the corners.

The whispers from the back of life were growing dim as my mind and
body soddened.  The old unrest was drowsy.  I might as well rot
and die here in Oakland as anywhere else.  And I should have so
rotted and died, and not in very long order either, at the pace
John Barleycorn was leading me, had the matter depended wholly on
him.  I was learning what it was to have no appetite.  I was
learning what it was to get up shaky in the morning, with a
stomach that quivered, with fingers touched with palsy, and to
know the drinker's need for a stiff glass of whisky neat in order
to brace up.  (Oh! John Barleycorn is a wizard dopester.  Brain
and body, scorched and jangled and poisoned, return to be tuned up
by the very poison that caused the damage.)

There is no end to John Barleycorn's tricks.  He had tried to
inveigle me into killing myself.  At this period he was doing his
best to kill me at a fairly rapid pace.  But, not satisfied with
that, he tried another dodge.  He very nearly got me, too, and
right there I learned a lesson about him--became a wiser, a more
skilful drinker.  I learned there were limits to my gorgeous
constitution, and that there were no limits to John Barleycorn.  I
learned that in a short hour or two he could master my strong
head, my broad shoulders and deep chest, put me on my back, and
with a devil's grip on my throat proceed to choke the life out of
me.

Nelson and I were sitting in the Overland House.  It was early in
the evening, and the only reason we were there was because we were
broke and it was election time.  You see, in election time local
politicians, aspirants for office, have a way of making the rounds
of the saloons to get votes.  One is sitting at a table, in a dry
condition, wondering who is going to turn up and buy him a drink,
or if his credit is good at some other saloon and if it's worth
while to walk that far to find out, when suddenly the saloon doors
swing wide, and enters a bevy of well-dressed men, themselves
usually wide and exhaling an atmosphere of prosperity and
fellowship.

They have smiles and greetings for everybody--for you, without the
price of a glass of beer in your pocket, for the timid hobo who
lurks in the corner and who certainly hasn't a vote, but who may
establish a lodging-house registration.  And do you know, when
these politicians swing wide the doors and come in, with their
broad shoulders, their deep chests, and their generous stomachs
which cannot help making them optimists and masters of life, why,
you perk right up.  It's going to be a warm evening after all, and
you know you'll get a souse started at the very least.

And--who knows?--the gods may be kind, other drinks may come, and
the night culminate in glorious greatness.  And the next thing you
know, you are lined up at the bar, pouring drinks down your throat
and learning the gentlemen's names and the offices which they hope
to fill.

It was during this period, when the politicians went their saloon
rounds, that I was getting bitter bits of education and having
illusions punctured--I, who had pored and thrilled over "The Rail-
Splitter," and "From Canal Boy to President." Yes, I was learning
how noble politics and politicians are.

Well, on this night, broke, thirsty, but with the drinker's faith
in the unexpected drink, Nelson and I sat in the Overland House
waiting for something to turn up, especially politicians.  And
there entered Joe Goose--he of the unquenchable thirst, the wicked
eyes, the crooked nose, the flowered vest.

"Come on, fellows--free booze--all you want of it.  I didn't want
you to miss it."

"Where?" we wanted to know.

"Come on.  I'll tell you as we go along.  We haven't a minute to
lose." And as we hurried up town, Joe Goose explained: "It's the
Hancock Fire Brigade.  All you have to do is wear a red shirt and
a helmet, and carry a torch.

They're going down on a special train to Haywards to parade."

(I think the place was Haywards.  It may have been San Leandro or
Niles.  And, to save me, I can't remember whether the Hancock Fire
Brigade was a republican or a democratic organisation.  But
anyway, the politicians who ran it were short of torch-bearers,
and anybody who would parade could get drunk if he wanted to.)

"The town'll be wide open," Joe Goose went on.  "Booze? It'll run
like water.  The politicians have bought the stocks of the
saloons.  There'll be no charge.  All you got to do is walk right
up and call for it.  We'll raise hell."

At the hall, on Eighth Street near Broadway, we got into the
firemen's shirts and helmets, were equipped with torches, and,
growling because we weren't given at least one drink before we
started, were herded aboard the train.  Oh, those politicians had
handled our kind before.  At Haywards there were no drinks either.
Parade first, and earn your booze, was the order of the night.

We paraded.  Then the saloons were opened.  Extra barkeepers had
been engaged, and the drinkers jammed six deep before every drink-
drenched and unwiped bar.  There was no time to wipe the bar, nor
wash glasses, nor do anything save fill glasses.  The Oakland
water-front can be real thirsty on occasion.

This method of jamming and struggling in front of the bar was too
slow for us.  The drink was ours.  The politicians had bought it
for us.  We'd paraded and earned it, hadn't we? So we made a flank
attack around the end of the bar, shoved the protesting barkeepers
aside, and helped ourselves to bottles.

Outside, we knocked the necks of the bottles off against the
concrete curbs, and drank.  Now Joe Goose and Nelson had learned
discretion with straight whisky, drunk in quantity.  I hadn't.  I
still laboured under the misconception that one was to drink all
he could get--especially when it didn't cost anything.  We shared
our bottles with others, and drank a good portion ourselves, while
I drank most of all.  And I didn't like the stuff.  I drank it as
I had drunk beer at five, and wine at seven.  I mastered my qualms
and downed it like so much medicine.  And when we wanted more
bottles, we went into other saloons where the free drink was
flowing, and helped ourselves.

I haven't the slightest idea of how much I drank--whether it was
two quarts or five.  I do know that I began the orgy with half-
pint draughts and with no water afterward to wash the taste away
or to dilute the whisky.

Now the politicians were too wise to leave the town filled with
drunks from the water-front of Oakland.  When train time came,
there was a round-up of the saloons.  Already I was feeling the
impact of the whisky.  Nelson and I were hustled out of a saloon,
and found ourselves in the very last rank of a disorderly parade.
I struggled along heroically, my correlations breaking down, my
legs tottering under me, my head swimming, my heart pounding, my
lungs panting for air.

My helplessness was coming on so rapidly that my reeling brain
told me I would go down and out and never reach the train if I
remained at the rear of the procession.  I left the ranks and ran
down a pathway beside the road under broad-spreading trees.
Nelson pursued me, laughing.  Certain things stand out, as in
memories of nightmare.  I remember those trees especially, and my
desperate running along under them, and how, every time I fell,
roars of laughter went up from the other drunks.  They thought I
was merely antic drunk.  They did not dream that John Barleycorn
had me by the throat in a death-clutch.  But I knew it.  And I
remember the fleeting bitterness that was mine as I realised that
I was in a struggle with death, and that these others did not
know.  It was as if I were drowning before a crowd of spectators
who thought I was cutting up tricks for their entertainment.

And running there under the trees, I fell and lost consciousness.
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 I
kept 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 I
awoke 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 I
was 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.



        CHAPTER XV


It was during the early winter of 1892 that I resolved to go to
sea.  My Hancock Fire Brigade experience was very little
responsible for this.  I still drank and frequented saloons--
practically lived in saloons.  Whisky was dangerous, in my
opinion, but not wrong.  Whisky was dangerous like other dangerous
things in the natural world.  Men died of whisky; but then, too,
fishermen were capsized and drowned, hoboes fell under trains and
were cut to pieces.  To cope with winds and waves, railroad
trains, and bar-rooms, one must use judgment.  To get drunk after
the manner of men was all right, but one must do it with
discretion.  No more quarts of whisky for me.

What really decided me to go to sea was that I had caught my first
vision of the death-road which John Barleycorn maintains for his
devotees.  It was not a clear vision, however, and there were two
phases of it, somewhat jumbled at the time.  It struck me, from
watching those with whom I associated, that the life we were
living was more destructive than that lived by the average man.

John Barleycorn, by inhibiting morality, incited to crime.
Everywhere I saw men doing, drunk, what they would never dream of
doing sober.  And this wasn't the worst of it.  It was the penalty
that must be paid.  Crime was destructive.  Saloon-mates I drank
with, who were good fellows and harmless, sober, did most violent
and lunatic things when they were drunk.  And then the police
gathered them in and they vanished from our ken.  Sometimes I
visited them behind the bars and said good-bye ere they journeyed
across the bay to put on the felon's stripes.  And time and again
I heard the one explanation "IF I HADN'T BEEN DRUNK I WOULDN'T A-
DONE IT."  And sometimes, under the spell of John Barleycorn, the
most frightful things were done--things that shocked even my case-
hardened soul.

The other phase of the death-road was that of the habitual
drunkards, who had a way of turning up their toes without apparent
provocation.  When they took sick, even with trifling afflictions
that any ordinary man could pull through, they just pegged out.
Sometimes they were found unattended and dead in their beds; on
occasion their bodies were dragged out of the water; and sometimes
it was just plain accident, as when Bill Kelley, unloading cargo
while drunk, had a finger jerked off, which, under the
circumstances, might just as easily have been his head.

So I considered my situation and knew that I was getting into a
bad way of living.  It made toward death too quickly to suit my
youth and vitality.  And there was only one way out of this
hazardous manner of living, and that was to get out.  The sealing
fleet was wintering in San Francisco Bay, and in the saloons I met
skippers, mates, hunters, boat-steerers, and boat-pullers.  I met
the seal-hunter, Pete Holt, and agreed to be his boat-puller and
to sign on any schooner he signed on.  And I had to have half a
dozen drinks with Pete Holt there and then to seal our agreement.

And at once awoke all my old unrest that John Barleycorn had put
to sleep.  I found myself actually bored with the saloon life of
the Oakland water-front, and wondered what I had ever found
fascinating in it.  Also, with this death-road concept in my
brain, I began to grow afraid that something would happen to me
before sailing day, which was set for some time in January.  I
lived more circumspectly, drank less deeply, and went home more
frequently.  When drinking grew too wild, I got out.  When Nelson
was in his maniacal cups, I managed to get separated from him.

On the 12th of January, 1893, I was seventeen, and the 20th of
January I signed before the shipping commissioner the articles of
the Sophie Sutherland, a three topmast sealing schooner bound on a
voyage to the coast of Japan.  And of course we had to drink on
it.  Joe Vigy cashed my advance note, and Pete Holt treated, and I
treated, and Joe Vigy treated, and other hunters treated.  Well,
it was the way of men, and who was I, just turned seventeen, that
I should decline the way of life of these fine, chesty, man-grown
men?



        CHAPTER XVI


There was nothing to drink on the Sophie Sutherland, and we had
fifty-one days of glorious sailing, taking the southern passage in
the north-east trades to Bonin Islands.  This isolated group,
belonging to Japan, had been selected as the rendezvous of the
Canadian and American sealing fleets.  Here they filled their
water-barrels and made repairs before starting on the hundred
days' harrying of the seal-herd along the northern coasts of Japan
to Behring Sea.

Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle.  The alcohol had been worked out of my
system, and from the moment the voyage began I had not known the
desire for a drink.  I doubt if I even thought once about a drink.
Often, of course, the talk in the forecastle turned on drink, and
the men told of their more exciting or humorous drunks,
remembering such passages more keenly, with greater delight, than
all the other passages of their adventurous lives.

In the forecastle, the oldest man, fat and fifty, was Louis.  He
was a broken skipper.  John Barleycorn had thrown him, and he was
winding up his career where he had begun it, in the forecastle.
His case made quite an impression on me.  John Barleycorn did
other things beside kill a man.  He hadn't killed Louis.  He had
done much worse.  He had robbed him of power and place and
comfort, crucified his pride, and condemned him to the hardship of
the common sailor that would last as long as his healthy breath
lasted, which promised to be for a long time.

We completed our run across the Pacific, lifted the volcanic
peaks, jungle-clad, of the Bonin Islands, sailed in among the
reefs to the land-locked harbour, and let our anchor rumble down
where lay a score or more of sea-gypsies like ourselves.  The
scents of strange vegetation blew off the tropic land.
Aborigines, in queer outrigger canoes, and Japanese, in queerer
sampans, paddled about the bay and came aboard.  It was my first
foreign land; I had won to the other side of the world, and I
would see all I had read in the books come true.  I was wild to
get ashore.

Victor and Axel, a Swede and a Norwegian, and I planned to keep
together.  (And so well did we, that for the rest of the cruise we
were known as the "Three Sports.") Victor pointed out a pathway
that disappeared up a wild canyon, emerged on a steep bare lava
slope, and thereafter appeared and disappeared, ever climbing,
among the palms and flowers.  We would go over that path, he said,
and we agreed, and we would see beautiful scenery, and strange
native villages, and find, Heaven alone knew, what adventure at
the end.  And Axel was keen to go fishing.  The three of us agreed
to that, too.  We would get a sampan, and a couple of Japanese
fishermen who knew the fishing grounds, and we would have great
sport.  As for me, I was keen for anything.

And then, our plans made, we rowed ashore over the banks of living
coral and pulled our boat up the white beach of coral sand.  We
walked across the fringe of beach under the cocoanut-palms and
into the little town, and found several hundred riotous seamen
from all the world, drinking prodigiously, singing prodigiously,
dancing prodigiously--and all on the main street to the scandal of
a helpless handful of Japanese police.

Victor and Axel said that we'd have a drink before we started on
our long walk.  Could I decline to drink with these two chesty
shipmates? Drinking together, glass in hand, put the seal on
comradeship.  It was the way of life.  Our teetotaler owner-
captain was laughed at, and sneered at, by all of us because of
his teetotalism.  I didn't in the least want a drink, but I did
want to be a good fellow and a good comrade.  Nor did Louis' case
deter me, as I poured the biting, scorching stuff down my throat.
John Barleycorn had thrown Louis to a nasty fall, but I was young.
My blood ran full and red; I had a constitution of iron; and--
well, youth ever grins scornfully at the wreckage of age.

Queer, fierce, alcoholic stuff it was that we drank.  There was no
telling where or how it had been manufactured--some native
concoction most likely.  But it was hot as fire, pale as water,
and quick as death with its kick.  It had been filled into empty
"square-face" bottles which had once contained Holland gin, and
which still bore the fitting legend "Anchor Brand." It certainly
anchored us.  We never got out of the town.  We never went fishing
in the sampan.  And though we were there ten days, we never trod
that wild path along the lava cliffs and among the flowers.

We met old acquaintances from other schooners, fellows we had met
in the saloons of San Francisco before we sailed.  And each
meeting meant a drink; and there was much to talk about; and more
drinks; and songs to be sung; and pranks and antics to be
performed, until the maggots of imagination began to crawl, and it
all seemed great and wonderful to me, these lusty hard-bitten sea-
rovers, of whom I made one, gathered in wassail on a coral strand.
Old lines about knights at table in the great banquet halls, and
of those above the salt and below the salt, and of Vikings
feasting fresh from sea and ripe for battle, came to me; and I
knew that the old times were not dead and that we belonged to that
selfsame ancient breed.

By mid-afternoon Victor went mad with drink, and wanted to fight
everybody and everything.  I have since seen lunatics in the
violent wards of asylums that seemed to behave in no wise
different from Victor's way, save that perhaps he was more
violent.  Axel and I interfered as peacemakers, were roughed and
jostled in the mix-ups, and finally, with infinite precaution and
intoxicated cunning, succeeded in inveigling our chum down to the
boat and in rowing him aboard our schooner.

But no sooner did Victor's feet touch the deck than he began to
clean up the ship.  He had the strength of several men, and he ran
amuck with it.  I remember especially one man whom he got into the
chain-boxes but failed to damage through inability to hit him.
The man dodged and ducked, and Victor broke all the knuckles of
both his fists against the huge links of the anchor chain.  By the
time we dragged him out of that, his madness had shifted to the
belief that he was a great swimmer, and the next moment he was
overboard and demonstrating his ability by floundering like a sick
porpoise and swallowing much salt water.

We rescued him, and by the time we got him below, undressed, and
into his bunk, we were wrecks ourselves.  But Axel and I wanted to
see more of shore, and away we went, leaving Victor snoring.  It
was curious, the judgment passed on Victor by his shipmates,
drinkers themselves.  They shook their heads disapprovingly and
muttered: "A man like that oughtn't to drink." Now Victor was the
smartest sailor and best-tempered shipmate in the forecastle.  He
was an all-round splendid type of seaman; his mates recognised his
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
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
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--m