“But women,” I suggested, when he had finished proclaiming booze the sole end of existence.

“Wimmen!” He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently.  “Wimmen is a thing my edication ‘as learnt me t’ let alone.  It don’t pay, matey; it don’t pay.  Wot’s a man like me want o’ wimmen, eh? jest you tell me.  There was my mar, she was enough, a-bangin’ the kids about an’ makin’ the ole man mis’rable when ’e come ‘ome, w’ich was seldom, I grant.  An’ fer w’y?  Becos o’ mar!  She didn’t make ’is ’ome ’appy, that was w’y.  Then, there’s the other wimmen, ’ow do they treat a pore stoker with a few shillin’s in ’is trouseys?  A good drunk is wot ’e’s got in ’is pockits, a good long drunk, an’ the wimmen skin ’im out of his money so quick ’e ain’t ’ad ’ardly a glass.  I know.  I’ve ‘ad my fling, an’ I know wot’s wot.  An’ I tell you, where’s wimmen is trouble—­screechin’ an’ carryin’ on, fightin’, cuttin’, bobbies, magistrates, an’ a month’s ’ard labour back of it all, an’ no pay-day when you come out.”

“But a wife and children,” I insisted.  “A home of your own, and all that.  Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on your knee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when she lays the table, and a kiss all round from the babies when they go to bed, and the kettle singing and the long talk afterwards of where you’ve been and what you’ve seen, and of her and all the little happenings at home while you’ve been away, and—­”

“Garn!” he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder.  “Wot’s yer game, eh?  A missus kissin’ an’ kids clim’in’, an’ kettle singin’, all on four poun’ ten a month w’en you ‘ave a ship, an’ four nothin’ w’en you ‘aven’t.  I’ll tell you wot I’d get on four poun’ ten—­a missus rowin’, kids squallin’, no coal t’ make the kettle sing, an’ the kettle up the spout, that’s wot I’d get.  Enough t’ make a bloke bloomin’ well glad to be back t’ sea.  A missus!  Wot for?  T’ make you mis’rable?  Kids?  Jest take my counsel, matey, an’ don’t ’ave ’em.  Look at me!  I can ‘ave my beer w’en I like, an’ no blessed missus an’ kids a-crying for bread.  I’m ‘appy, I am, with my beer an’ mates like you, an’ a good ship comin’, an’ another trip to sea.  So I say, let’s ’ave another pint.  Arf an’ arf’s good enough for me.”

Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of two-and-twenty, I think I have sufficiently indicated his philosophy of life and the underlying economic reason for it.  Home life he had never known.  The word “home” aroused nothing but unpleasant associations.  In the low wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he found sufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances and causes of masculine misery.  An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, and found it in drink.

A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker’s work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the end—­he saw it all as clearly as I, but it held no terrors for him.  From the moment of his birth, all the forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed his wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could not shake.