“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. An hour with this wind would get us there comfortably, and while Dr. Silence and Sangree fell into conversation, I sat and pondered over the
strange suggestions that had just been put into my mind concerning
the “Double,” and the possible form it might assume when dissociated
temporarily from the physical body. The whole way home these two chatted, and John Silence was as gentle
and sympathetic as a woman. I did not hear much of their talk, for the
wind grew occasionally to the force of a hurricane and the sails and
tiller absorbed my attention; but I could see that Sangree was pleased
and happy, and was pouring out intimate revelations to his companion in
the way that most people did--when John Silence wished them to do so. But it was quite suddenly, while I sat all intent upon wind and sails,
that the true meaning of Sangree’s remark about the animal flared up in
me with its full import. For his admission that he knew it was in pain
and starved was in reality nothing more or less than a revelation of
his deeper self. It was in the nature of a confession. He was speaking
of something that he knew positively, something that was beyond
question or argument, something that had to do directly with himself. “Poor starved beast” he had called it in words that had “come out of
their own accord,” and there had not been the slightest evidence of any
desire to conceal or explain away. He had spoken instinctively--from
his heart, and as though about his own self. And half an hour before sunset we raced through the narrow opening of
the lagoon and saw the smoke of the dinner-fire blowing here and there
among the trees, and the figures of Joan and the Bo’sun’s Mate running
down to meet us at the landing-stage. V

Everything changed from the moment John Silence set foot on that
island; it was like the effect produced by calling in some big doctor,
some great arbiter of life and death, for consultation. The sense of
gravity increased a hundredfold. Even inanimate objects took upon
themselves a subtle alteration, for the setting of the adventure--this
deserted bit of sea with its hundreds of uninhabited islands--somehow
turned sombre. An element that was mysterious, and in a sense
disheartening, crept unbidden into the severity of grey rock and dark
pine forest and took the sparkle from the sunshine and the sea. I, at least, was keenly aware of the change, for my whole being
shifted, as it were, a degree higher, becoming keyed up and alert. The figures from the background of the stage moved forward a little
into the light--nearer to the inevitable action. In a word this man’s
arrival intensified the whole affair. And, looking back down the years to the time when all this happened,
it is clear to me that he had a pretty sharp idea of the meaning of it
from the very beginning.