"'It does. Get a night's sleep and you'll see it in the same light. You have had an accumulation of romantic impacts, and I expect a sea-going life leaves one very much at the mercy of stray impressions. A ship's surgeon once remarked to me that no human intellect could survive a nautical training.' And he laughed again.
"That," said Mr. Spenlove, "was how he talked. A provocative, positive sort of man. There was, if you will excuse the simile, something antiseptic in his character. I could have driven about and talked to him all day. He was charged with sane opinions on life. Humorous, too. When I suggested that Captain Macedoine might not survive his daughter's death, he made the whimsical remark that illusions of grandeur act like an anæsthetic upon the patient's emotions. And I shall not forget the last remark he uttered as I stood beside his carriage to say farewell. The red roofs and domes of the city stretched away below us and I could see the smoke coming over the warehouse from the _Manola's_ funnel. He had promised to do certain things for me. If you climb up some day to the Protestant cemetery you will find out what some of those things were. And he was good enough to express a hope that I might come to Saloniki again. I replied that I had profited immensely by his conversation and he nodded, saying:
"'Yes, that's right. But what you really need, you know, is what old-fashioned people in England call the consolation of religion.'
"'That is a novel prescription for a doctor,' I retorted.
"'Perhaps it is,' he admitted, holding out his hand, 'but depend upon it, nothing else will do.'
"'You know the usual stereotyped advice is to get married?'
"'You would still need the consolation of religion,' he remarked, dryly. 'No, the fact is, real love is too uncertain, too uncommon.'
"'A fact,' he insisted, simply. 'I once picked up the works of a young Arab poetess who afterward slew herself in her lover's arms. And the burden of all her songs was that the only logical culmination of love, if it be genuine, is death. I offer you that for your Western mind to ponder. Good-bye and good luck.'
"And there I was," said Mr. Spenlove, lighting a fresh cigarette, "with a whole brand-new set of consolatory impressions to brood upon, left to pursue my way back to the ship and take up a safe and humdrum existence once more. The episode was over, and it would be unwise to try and make it anything else. And I had been presented with a novel and extremely impracticable test of love which preoccupied by its stark beauty. I had the sudden fancy, as I climbed the ruined wall that runs down from the Citadel and started to thread the narrow streets toward the port, of that Arab poetess, buried in a fragrant and silent garden among cypresses, and her lover, whom I pictured an infidel, keeping her in memory by a bronze statuette. I saw it on a table in his room, a tiny thing of delicate art, the exquisite creature depicted at the supreme moment of death and passion. For of course the lover would not adopt that extreme view of his obligations toward love. Full of regret he would continue a mediocre existence....