Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river. He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.
“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some fools I’ve come across in my time?”
He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased, concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.
Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.
“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”
“Ned!”
“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit forward.”
The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment like a porpoise, and disappeared.
“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.
“Keep down!” whispered his friend.