“Oh, no, I am all right.”
“If you are all right, why, I am a great deal more all right. Now, let me see—it is getting so bungling—it is so awkward to trans—I mean, to read.”
“You may cut it out, if it be so bothering.”
“No, I shall go it rough—‘This one night, says the woman. One night? asks the man. Say, many, many nights; it is heartless to limit it to a single night.’”
“Who says that, the man or the woman?”
“The man, O-Nami-san, I think the woman does not want to go back to Venice, and the man is saying this to console her—‘In the memory of the man, who lay down on the midnight deck with his head on a coil of halyard, that instant—an instant like a hot drop of blood,—that instant in which he tightly held the woman’s hand in his, tossed like a great wave. Looking up into the black night, he resolved, come what may, to save the woman from the brink of forced marriage. With his mind made up, he closed his eyes....’”
“The woman?”
“‘Lost on the road, the woman seemed not to know whither she was wandering. Like a man sailing in the sky a captive, unfathomable mystery....’—the rest is so awkward to read, you see, it does not complete the sentence—‘only the unfathomable mystery’—isn’t there any verb?”
“Never mind a verb. Sensei, you don’t want any verb; that is quite enough.”
“Eh?”