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 resisted. Captain Rannie was ordered to take his ship home. Home! He funked horribly but he funked losing his job still more, and he took her home as far as Port Said, with a cargo of tobacco from Sumatra. But farther he would not go. He made himself ill, an easy trick with a well-stocked medicine chest, and no one suspected a man would be striving to avoid reaching England. It was generally just the other way round. He went to the hospital until the ship was gone and then became convalescent, moping about Port Said in his yellow pongee suits and enormous panama hat, smoking innumerable cigarettes and discovering among other things a new world of gigantic phantoms.