isted. 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.

It was not difficult, he found, to discover the dealers in drugs and he
set out, as a buyer of tobacco. But although his first trip to Saloniki
and back to Alexandria was successful and enormously profitable, he
became aware that he was being uncomfortably shadowed, and he left again
in an Italian steamer. It was here he encountered Mr. Dainopoulos, bound
home from a business trip to Egypt; where he had been buying up cheap
the stocks of ship-chandlers who had been caught by the sudden
withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles for service in the north. Mr.
Dainopoulos had bought a small ship and now needed a commander.

So far, one might say, Captain Rannie had simply lived the life of many
of his condition, Englishmen who had grown soft and flaccid during their
long exiles and who now crept furtively along in the shadow of war,
neither very honest nor very crooked, ignoble and negligible. But as he
sat there now behind his locked door and heavy curtain, shading his eyes
with his hand, he faced the immediate future with dread. The sight of
Mr. Spokesly, bandaged and plastered, hurrying out to get on with the
work, made him see with painful clearness where he himself had fallen
and how problematic was the task ahead. He would not tackle a job like
this again, he told himself. Never again. He would get away out East
again with what he had already made and resume the old, safe, easy
river-life, receiving his stacks of "reading matter" from London,
reading until his brain was soft and soggy with foolish dreams. It was
the best life he knew and he longed to get back to it. After this
voyage. How he hated all this! When he came back into the world of
urgent men after one of his long periods of stupor, he was horrified at
the necessity of living at all, and sometimes