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.