f the medicine
chest swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled
face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and
hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and
covered his eyes with his hand. He was trembling violently.

For he was a man who was at war with the world. He was so preoccupied
with this tremendous conflict that the disturbance in Europe scarcely
sounded in his ears. He was a man without faith and without desire of
hope. In the years behind him lay the wreckage of honour, when he had
gone out east to the China Coast and never gone back. Revenge, he had
called it, and called it still, for unascertained and undefined
injuries. Since then he had had freedom. He had hugged the thought of
the woman, who had imagined herself so clever at blinding him, working
in poverty to keep herself and her brat. Her brat, ha--ha! Away out
there in China, a thousand miles up an immense river, in the home
river-port of his country ship, he said ha--ha! and fell to improving
himself. Driven to devise a mode of existence both unsocial and
unintellectual, he had stumbled upon strange things in human life. He
accumulated vast stocks of scandal about humanity, and delved into
repositories of knowledge which most men avoid and forget. Those and the
pipe, which led him into another life altogether, the life of
irresponsible dreams, wherein a man's mind, released from the body yet
retaining the desires of the body, ranges forth into twilights of
oblivion, clutching here and there at strange seductive shapes and
thrilling to voices not heard before. Captain Rannie, out there, was
much happier than many men who hold their souls in leash and render
their accounts exactly. He sailed up and down his great river, a mystery
to the Chinamen of the crew, a joke among the Europeans. It did not
become apparent to him or anybody else that anything was happening to
him. Nothing was happening to him save that the lacquer and varnish and
ornament of his conventional upbringing in England were nearly all gone,
and underneath there was nothing save himself, a timid, sensitive,
sensual, quarrelsome creature with a disposition that seemed to rational
people to have gone rancid with the heat. They bore with him because he
was used to the work, and he was a warm man in silver dollars, too, they
said. But the country-ships began to go home. The colossal freights out
of England could not be res