Then
you're aground and quite helpless. What a pity!"
He lifted his glass and drank it off, then thrust it out to be
refilled. "Life as the world lives it--bah!" he dismissed it with
the scorn of one who counts himself divested of all illusions.
"Life would be an infernal bore if it were not for its paradoxes.
Now you, Captain Barnaby, would never dream that in becoming dead to
the world--in other people's belief--I have become intensely alive.
There are opened up infinite possibilities--"
He drank again and eyed me darkly, and then went on in his
crack-brained way. "What is life but a challenge to pretense, a
constant exercise in duplicity, with so few that come to master it
as an art? Every one goes about with something locked deep in his
heart. Take yourself, Captain Barnaby. You have your secrets--hidden
from me, from all the world--which, if they could be dragged out of
you--"
His deep-set eyes bored through the darkness upon me. Hunched up in
the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an
animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine
my mental balance with his sophistry.
"I'm a plain man of the sea," I rejoined, bluntly. "I take life as
it comes."
He smiled derisively, drained his glass, and held it out again.
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