is it you have waited so long?"

"I'm afraid youve made a mistake in me, my friend," I told him jovially,
"we shan't be making an illegal entry. I am resident in England and can
come home at any time."

He was silent; from disappointment, I concluded. "Never mind, I'll pay
you as much as a refugee--within reason."

"You are a follower of reason, sir?"

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."

"You find questions without immediate answers mystical, sir?"

"I like my questions to be susceptible to an answer of some kind."

"You are a man of thought."

It amused me to speak intimately to this stranger. "I have lived inside
myself a great many years. Naturally my mind has not been idle all the
while."

"You have not married?"

"I never had the time."

"Ah." He rowed quietly for some moments. "'Never had the time,'" he
repeated thoughtfully.

"You think marriage is important?"

"A man without