John Silence held up a restraining hand. “A werewolf,” he said, “is a
true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may
have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry
in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the
savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring
the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. As
in the case at hand, he may not know it----”

“It is not necessarily deliberate, then?” Maloney put in quickly, with
relief. “----It is hardly ever deliberate. It is the desires released in sleep
from the control of the will finding a vent. In all savage races it has
been recognised and dreaded, this phenomenon styled ‘Wehr Wolf,’ but
to-day it is rare. And it is becoming rarer still, for the world grows
tame and civilised, emotions have become refined, desires lukewarm, and
few men have savagery enough left in them to generate impulses of such
intense force, and certainly not to project them in animal form.”

“By Gad!” exclaimed the clergyman breathlessly, and with increasing
excitement, “then I feel I must tell you--what has been given to me in
confidence--that Sangree has in him an admixture of savage blood--of
Red Indian ancestry----”

“Let us stick to our supposition of a man as described,” the doctor
stopped him calmly, “and let us imagine that he has in him this
admixture of savage blood; and further, that he is wholly unaware of
his dreadful physical and psychical infirmity; and that he suddenly
finds himself leading the primitive life together with the object of
his desires; with the result that the strain of the untamed wild-man in
his blood----”

“Red Indian, for instance,” from Maloney. “Red Indian, perfectly,” agreed the doctor; “the result, I say, that
this savage strain in him is awakened and leaps into passionate life. What then?”

He looked hard at Timothy Maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him. “The wild life such as you lead it here on this island, for instance,
might quickly awaken his savage instincts--his buried instincts--and
with profoundly disquieting results.”

“You mean his Subtle Body, as you call it, might issue forth
automatically in deep sleep and seek the object of its desire?” I said,
coming to Maloney’s aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to
get words. “Precisely;--yet the desire of the man remaining utterly
unmalefic--pure and wholesome in every sense----”

“Ah!” I heard the clergyman gasp. “The lover’s desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out
in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean,” continued the doctor, striving
to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and
knowledge; “for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become
importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which
acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs,
to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. _Au fond_,
it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said--the
splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself----”

He paused a moment and looked into Maloney’s eyes. “To bathe in the very heart’s blood of the one desired,” he added with
grave emphasis. The fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but Maloney found
relief in a genuine shudder, and I saw him turn his head and look about
him from the sea to the trees. The wind dropped just at that moment and
the doctor’s words rang sharply through the stillness. “Then it might even kill?” stammered the clergyman presently in a
hushed voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that
sounded quite ghastly. “In the last resort it might kill,” repeated Dr. Silence. Then, after
another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how
little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: “And if the
Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that
physical body would wake an imbecile--an idiot--or perhaps never wake
at all.”

Maloney sat up and found his tongue. “You mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be
prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?” he asked, with
shaking voice. “He might be dead,” replied the other calmly. The tremor of a positive
sensation shivered in the air about us. “Then isn’t that the best way to cure the fool--the brute----?”
thundered the clergyman, half rising to his feet. “Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder,” was
the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the
weather. Maloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the fire and
coaxed up a blaze. “The greater part of the man’s life--of his vital forces--goes out with
this Double,” Dr. Silence resumed, after a moment’s consideration, “and
a considerable portion of the actual material of his physical body. So
the physical body that remains behind is depleted, not only of force,
but of matter. You would see it small, shrunken, dropped together, just
like the body of a materialising medium at a séance. Moreover, any mark
or injury inflicted upon this Double will be found exactly reproduced
by the phenomenon of repercussion upon the shrunken physical body lying
in its trance----”

“An injury inflicted upon the one you say would be reproduced also on
the other?” repeated Maloney, his excitement growing again. “Undoubtedly,” replied the other quietly; “for there exists all
the time a continuous connection between the physical body and the
Double--a connection of matter, though of exceedingly attenuated,
possibly of etheric, matter. The wound _travels_, so to speak, from one
to the other, and if this connection were broken the result would be
death.”

“Death,” repeated Maloney to himself, “death!” He looked anxiously at
our faces, his thoughts evidently beginning to clear. “And this solidity?” he asked presently, after a general pause; “this
tearing of tents and flesh; this howling, and the marks of paws? You
mean that the Double----?”

“Has sufficient material drawn from the depleted body to produce
physical results? Certainly!” the doctor took him up. “Although to
explain at this moment such problems as the passage of matter through
matter would be as difficult as to explain how the thought of a mother
can actually break the bones of the child unborn.”

Dr. Silence pointed out to sea, and Maloney, looking wildly about
him, turned with a violent start. I saw a canoe, with Sangree in the
stern-seat, slowly coming into view round the farther point. His hat
was off, and his tanned face for the first time appeared to me--to us
all, I think--as though it were the face of some one else. He looked
like a wild man. Then he stood up in the canoe to make a cast with the
rod, and he looked for all the world like an Indian.