He was young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard face.  All day long, at sea or in harbour, he could be seen walking hastily up and down the after-deck, wearing an intense, spiritually rapt expression, which was caused by a perpetual consciousness of unpleasant physical sensations in his internal economy.  For he was a confirmed dyspeptic.  His view of my case was very simple.  He said it was nothing but deranged liver.  Of course!  He suggested I should stay for another trip and meantime dose myself with a certain patent medicine in which his own belief was absolute.  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll buy you two bottles, out of my own pocket.  There.  I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

I believe he would have perpetrated the atrocity (or generosity) at the merest sign of weakening on my part.  By that time, however, I was more discontented, disgusted, and dogged than ever.  The past eighteen months, so full of new and varied experience, appeared a dreary, prosaic waste of days.  I felt—­how shall I express it?—­that there was no truth to be got out of them.

What truth?  I should have been hard put to it to explain.  Probably, if pressed, I would have burst into tears simply.  I was young enough for that.

Next day the Captain and I transacted our business in the Harbour Office.  It was a lofty, big, cool, white room, where the screened light of day glowed serenely.  Everybody in it—­the officials, the public—­were in white.  Only the heavy polished desks gleamed darkly in a central avenue, and some papers lying on them were blue.  Enormous punkahs sent from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and upon our perspiring heads.

The official behind the desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, “Sign off and on again?” my Captain answered, “No!  Signing off for good.”  And then his grin vanished in sudden solemnity.  He did not look at me again till he handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been my passports for Hades.

While I was putting them away he murmured some question to the Captain, and I heard the latter answer good-humouredly: 

“No.  He leaves us to go home.”

“Oh!” the other exclaimed, nodding mournfully over my sad condition.

I didn’t know him outside the official building, but he leaned forward the desk to shake hands with me, compassionately, as one would with some poor devil going out to be hanged; and I am afraid I performed my part ungraciously, in the hardened manner of an impenitent criminal.

No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days.  Being now a man without a ship, and having for a time broken my connection with the sea—­become, in fact, a mere potential passenger—­it would have been more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to stay at an hotel.  There it was, too, within a stone’s throw of the Harbour Office, low, but somehow palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim grass plots.  I would have felt a passenger indeed in there!  I gave it a hostile glance and directed my steps toward the Officers’ Sailors’ Home.