naval Germans too. He's established on that coast, and knows it by
heart. And he tried to drown me. Now what do you think?' He gazed at
me long and anxiously.



9 I Sign Articles

IT was not an easy question to answer, for the affair was utterly
outside all my experience; its background the sea, and its actual
scene a region of the sea of which I was blankly ignorant. There were
other difficulties that I could see perhaps better than Davies, an
enthusiast with hobbies, who had been brooding in solitude over his
dangerous adventure. Yet both narrative and theory (which have lost,
I fear, in interpretation to the reader) had strongly affected me;
his forcible roughnesses, tricks of manner, sudden bursts of ardour,
sudden retreats into shyness, making up a charm I cannot render. I
found myself continually trying to see the man through the boy, to
distinguish sober judgement from the hot-headed vagaries of youth.
Not that I dreamed for a moment of dismissing the story of his wreck
as an hallucination. His clear blue eyes and sane simplicity threw
ridicule on such treatment.

Evidently, too, he wanted my help, a matter that might well have
influenced my opinion on the facts, had he been other than he was.
But it would have taken a 'finished and finite clod' to resist the
attraction of the man and the enterprise; and I take no credit
whatever for deciding to follow him, right or wrong. So, when I
stated my difficulties, I knew very well that we should go.