whole thing and
return on the tug. From all of which it must not be taken that I am a
vacillating type of man. On the contrary.

The trouble was that at no time, from the first thought of it, had I been
keen for the voyage. Practically the reason I was taking it was because
there was nothing else I was keen on. For some time now life had lost
its savour. I was not jaded, nor was I exactly bored. But the zest had
gone out of things. I had lost taste for my fellow-men and all their
foolish, little, serious endeavours. For a far longer period I had been
dissatisfied with women. I had endured them, but I had been too analytic
of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost ferocious devotion
to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them. And I had come to be
oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of art--a pompous
legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not only its devotees
but its practitioners.

In short, I was embarking on the _Elsinore_ because it was easier to than
not; yet everything else was as equally and perilously easy. That was
the curse of the condition into which I had fallen. That was why, as I
stepped upon the deck of the _Elsinore_, I was half of a mind to tell
them to keep my luggage where it was and bid Captain West and his
daughter good-day.

I almost think what decided me was the welcoming, hospitable smile Miss
West gave me as she started directly across the deck for the cabin, and
the knowledge that it must be quite warm in the cabin.

Mr. Pike, the mate, I had already met, when I visited the ship in Erie
Basin. He smiled a stiff, crack-faced smile that I knew must be painful,
but did not offer to shake hands, turning immediately to call orders to
half-a-dozen frozen-looking youths and aged men who shambled up from
somewhere in the waist of the ship. Mr. Pike had been drinking. That
was patent. His face was puffed and discoloured, and his large gray eyes
were bitter and bloodshot.

I lingered, with a sinking heart watching my belongings come aboard and
chiding my weakness of will which prevented me from uttering the few
words that would put a stop to it. As for the half-dozen men who were
now carrying the luggage aft into the cabin, they were unlike any concept
I had ever entertained of sailors. Certainly, on the liners, I had
observed nothing that resembled them.

One, a most vivid-faced youth of eighteen, smiled at me from a pair of
remarkable Ital