I tried hard to make out more of his still obscured face for there was a note of irony in his voice. "I believe we'd all be better off if everyone were to accept things philosophically. Responsible people will find a way to end our troubles eventually and in the meantime madness and violence—" I waved my hand to the French coast behind—"don't help at all."
"Ah," he said without pausing in his rowing, "men alone, then, will solve Man's problem."
"Who else?"
"Who Else, indeed?"
The smuggler's answer or confirmation or whatever the equivocal echo was irritated me. "You think our problems can be solved from the outside?"
He managed to shrug his shoulders without breaking the rhythm of his arms. "Perhaps my English is unequal to understanding what you mean by outside. All the forces I know are represented within."
I was baffled and switched the subject to more immediate themes. "Are we about halfway, do you think?"
The light now exposed him fully. His hands were small and I doubted if the arms extending from them were muscular, but he radiated an air of great vitality. His face was lined, his eyes fierce under outthrust eyebrows, his lips—where the crisp waves of his beard permitted them to show—stern, but his whole demeanor was not unkindly.
"It is easy to measure how far we have come, but who can say how far we have to go?"
This metaphysical doubletalk annoyed me. "I don't know what is happening to people," I said. "Either they act like those over there," I gestured toward the Republic One and Indivisible, "or else they become mystics."