"For that is what it was. I stepped into that long, narrow affair, with its tall, gondola-like prow and absurd brass balls, and I left my youth behind on the hollow-sounding boards of that jetty. No, there is nothing to laugh at in a man of thirty-five leaving his youth behind. There are men who have seen their own daughters married, and retain for themselves the hearts of adventurous boys. From the formidable ramparts of half a century they can leap down and frolic with the young fellows who for the first time are in love, or seeing the world, or holding down a job, or reading Balzac. I cannot compete with such men. Youth fills me with awe. It is something I believe I had once, but I am not sure. I watch them nowadays, with their unerring cruelty of instinct, their clear egotism, their uncanny intuition and sophistication, and I wonder if I were ever like that, a sort of callow and clever young god! I wonder, too, whether a good deal of the modern misery and unhappiness isn't simply due to women being at a loss, as it were, to know just what the new and improved breed of young men want. All this talk of women themselves becoming modern is so much flub-dub. Look at Mrs. Evans. She was, and is, coeval with the Jurassic Period. And women are continually trying to get back there. You may ask me how I know this, and I can only tell you that I have an emotional conviction—the strongest conviction in the world, born of the tremendous experience which was coming upon me.
"And the first thing which, you might say, certified my new status as a grown-up human being, was my promise to go and see Captain Macedoine's daughter. I mean I made that promise without a shadow of reservation. In youth we hedge, we balk, we bilk, over and over again. Fidelity is unattractive to us. We cannot see that to keep a promise made to a woman is a species of spiritual strength. It may be a foolish promise made to a worthless woman, but that is of no importance. In youth we go on breaking away, breaking away, for one reason or another, until we have not even faith in ourselves, until we lose sight of the essential nature of true fidelity, which is a blind disregard of our own immediate well being. And I was astonished, as I sat in that boat and floated away into the gray void of the fog, with the girl, the shore, the sky, all gone, that she had infected me with her romantic view of life. I had always preserved a sort of semi-religious notion that love, for me personally you know, was bound to be an affair of highly respectable and virtuous character. I don't know why, I'm sure, but I had that illusion. But I discovered in that fog-bound boat that I knew very little about myself after all, that the future was absolutely unknown to me beyond the grand fact that I was going to the address which the girl had repeated twice in her musical contralto, and that I was mysteriously exalted about it.
"I was steering, you know, and had let things go a bit, I suppose, under the stress of my thoughts, when I realized the boatman was calling to me and waving an arm. I collected my wits and looked round. There was a methodical sound of oars and in a moment a large boat loomed close to us and I saw the ghostly figures of the four rowers, their bodies rising to full height as they plunged their oars in deep and then fell slowly backward to the thwarts. And as the boat moved forward again in one of its long, rhythmical surges and the stern of her came into the faint radiance of our small lantern I saw a bent figure with a fez lean suddenly forward, grasping the gunwale with one hand and his coat collar with the other and stare at us with a fixed, crouching intensity that was familiar. I was perfectly certain it was M. Nikitos, and in the mental excitement of wondering what he might be doing at that hour in a four-oared boat, I was turning my own craft round in a half circle. I heard voices in the fog, the voice of M. Nikitos giving strident orders and hoarse growls of assent from the toiling boatman. The sounds died away and I became aware of other sounds close by, the long hiss and slap of the sea against masonry, and voices. Voices clamouring and protesting and calling aimlessly and interjecting unheeded remarks into other voices engaged in torrential vituperation. And then my boatman stood up suddenly, his tall form rising and falling into the fog like some comic contrivance as the swell tossed the boat perilously near the sea-wall, and uttered a sharp, monosyllabic comment. The voices ceased as though by magic, and a grave question came out of the invisible air, which my boatman, leaning out and laying hold of the stones, answered in a quiet and competent fashion. You must understand that I had not seen this man, yet he had already made that impression upon me. The whole business to me, a strange and somewhat exalted Englishman sitting in a reeling row-boat and wondering whether he was about to be dashed to pieces against the stones, savoured of a carefully rehearsed performance. And when a flight of balustraded marble steps came into dim view and a tall figure in silk pajamas, a fur overcoat, and a fez came slowly down into the light of our lantern I gave up and just waited for things to happen. Up above I could now descry the chorus which had been creating such an uproar, a motley collection of male and female retainers in various stages of undress, and holding a number of alarming looking weapons, standing in a row looking down at us in astonishment. And I was just feeling exasperated at being so completely in the dark because I could not understand a word these people were saying, when the tall bizarre person in the fur coat and pajamas leaned over and said:
"'I understand you are an Englishman from one of the ships?'
"'Yes,' I said. 'That is so. What is the matter, may I ask?'
"'An attempt,' said he, 'at robbery and perhaps upon my life. You saw a boat?'
"'Yes,' I said, 'we saw a boat. Was that the man who has been attempting robbery?'
"'The leader,' said he; 'we have the others,' he looked at his retainers, who looked down at us in a most theatrical way.
"'Do you know who he was—the leader?' I asked. All this time I was sitting in the dancing boat while the boatman fended her off with his long arms.
"'No, I regret not.'