"Not before morning,"
I said, and with a few strokes was out upon the tide and pulling down
the river. I saw him standing there above in the moonlight, still
wondering, until he faded in the dim haze behind. My boat was a
light Thames dingey, so that although I felt the tide running up
against me, it nevertheless made fair progress. What decided me to
pull against the tide rather than float quietly upwards I do not know
to this day. So deadened and vague was all my thought, that it
probably never occurred to me to correct the direction in which the
first few strokes had taken me. I was conscious of nothing but a row
of lights gliding past me on either hand, of here and there a tower
or tall building, that stood up for an instant against the sky and
then swam slowly out of sight, of the creaking of my sculls in the
ungreased rowlocks, and, above all, the white shimmer of the moon
following my boat as it swung downwards.
I remember now that, in a childish way, I tried to escape this
persistent brilliance that still clung to my boat's side with every
stroke I took; that somehow a dull triumph possessed me when for a
moment I slipped beneath the shadow of a bridge, or crept behind a
black and silent hull.
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