“In fact,

nothing at all, really,” he added, by way of further explanation.

“I am glad of that,” I heard the doctor murmur under

his breath, but so low that I only just caught the words, and Sangree

missed them altogether, as evidently he was meant to do.

“And now,” he cried, getting on his feet and shaking

himself with a | characteristic gesture, as though to shake out the

horror-and the mystery, “let us leave the problem till tomorrow and

enjoy this wind and sea and stars. I’ve been living lately in the

atmosphere of many people, and feel that I want to wash and be clean. I

propose a swim and then bed. Who’ll second me?” And two minutes later

we were all diving from the boat into cool, deep water, that reflected

a thousand moons as the waves broke away from us in countless ripples.

We slept in blankets under the open sky, Sangree and

I taking the outside places, and were up before sunrise to catch the

dawn wind. Helped by this early start we were half-way home by noon,

and then the wind shifted to a few points behind us so that we fairly

ran. In and out among a thousand islands, down narrow channels where we

lost the wind, out into open spaces where we had to take in a reef,

racing along under a hot and cloudless sky, we flew through the very

heart of the bewildering and lonely scenery.

“A real wilderness,” cried Dr. Silence from his seat

in the bows where he held the jib sheet. His hat was off, his hair

tumbled in the wind, and his lean brown face gave him the touch of an

Oriental. Presently he changed places with Sangree, and came down to

talk with me by the tiller.

“A wonderful region, all this world of islands,” he

said, waving his hand to the scenery rushing past us, “but doesn’t it

strike you there’s something lacking?”

“It’s—hard,” I answered, after a moment’s

reflection. “It has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without–-”

I hesitated to find the word I wanted.

John Silence nodded his head with approval.

“Exactly,” he said. “The picturesqueness of stage

scenery that is not real, not alive. It’s like a landscape by a clever

painter, yet without true imagination. Soulless—that’s the word you

wanted.”

“Something like that,” I answered, watching the

gusts of wind on the sails. “Not dead so much, as without soul. That’s

it.”

“Of course,” he went on, in a voice calculated, it

seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, “to live long in

a place like this— long and alone—might bring about a strange result

in some men.”

I suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose

and pricked up my ears.

“There’s no life here. These islands are mere dead

rocks pushed up from below the sea—not living land; and there’s

nothing really alive on them. Even the sea, this tideless, brackish

sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead. It’s all a pretty image of

life without the real heart and soul of life. To a man with too strong

desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might

happen.”

“Let her out a bit,” I shouted to Sangree, who was

coming aft. “The wind’s gusty and we’ve got hardly any ballast.”

He went back to the bows, and Dr. Silence continued—

“Here, I mean, a long sojourn would lead to

deterioration, to degeneration. The place is utterly unsoftened by

human influences, by any humanising associations of history, good or

bad. This landscape has never awakened into life; it’s still dreaming

in its primitive sleep.”

“In time,” I put in, “you mean a man living here

might become brutal?”

“The passions would run wild, selfishness become

supreme, the instincts coarsen and turn savage probably.”

“But–-“

“In other places just as wild, parts of Italy for

instance, where there are other moderating influences, it could not

happen. The character might grow wild, savage too in a sense, but with

a human wildness one could understand and deal with. But here, in a

hard place like this, it might be otherwise.” He spoke slowly, weighing

his words carefully.

I looked at him with many questions in my eyes, and

a precautionary cry to Sangree to stay in the fore part of the boat,

out of earshot.

“First of all there would come callousness to pain,

and indifference to the rights of others. Then the soul would turn

savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by

deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery—by

turning, like the landscape, soulless.”

“And a man with strong desires, you say, might

change?”

“Without being aware of it, yes; he might turn

savage, his instincts and desires turn animal. And if’—he lowered his

voice and turned for a moment towards the bows, and then continued in

his most weighty manner—”owing to delicate health or other

predisposing causes, his Double—you know what I mean, of course—his

etheric Body of Desire, or astral body, as some term it—that part in

which the emotions, passions and desires reside—if this, I say, were

for some constitutional reason loosely joined to his physical organism,

there might well take place an occasional projection–-“

Sangree came aft with a sudden rush, his face

aflame, but whether with wind or sun, or with what he had heard I

cannot say. In my surprise I let the tiller slip and the cutter gave a

great plunge as she came sharply into the wind and flung us all

together in a heap on the bottom. Sangree said nothing, but while he

scrambled up and made the jib sheet fast my companion found a moment to

add to his unfinished sentence the words, too low for any ear but mine—

“Entirely unknown to himself, however.”

We righted the boat and laughed, and then Sangree

produced the map and explained exactly where we were. Far away on the

horizon, across an open stretch of water, lay a blue cluster of islands

with our crescent-shaped home among them and the safe anchorage of the

lagoon.