The Beach of Dreams Part 2

"Why?"

"Our engines can fight anything."

"Are there any natives in this place?"

"Only penguins and rabbits."

"Tell me," said Lagross, "that three-master we saw just now, would she be making for Kerguelen?"

"Oh, no, she must be out of her course and beating up north. She's not a whaler, and ships like that would keep north of the Crozets. Probably she was driven down by that big storm we had a week ago. We wouldn't be where we are only that I took those soundings south of Marion Island."

"And, after Kerguelen, what land shall we see next?" asked the old lady.

"New Amsterdam, madame," replied the Prince, "and after that the Sunda Islands and beautiful Java with its sun and palm trees."

Mademoiselle de Bromsart shivered slightly. She had been silent up to this, and she spoke now with eyes fixed far away as if viewing the picture of Java with its palms and sapphire skies.

"Could we not go there now?" asked she.

"In what way?" asked the Prince.

"Turn the ship round and leave this place behind," she replied.

"But why?"

"I don't know," said she, "perhaps it is what you say about Kerguelen, or perhaps it was the sight of that big ship all alone out there, but I feel--" she stopped short.

"Yes--"

"That ship frightened me."

"Frightened you," cried Madame de Warens, "why, Cleo, what is the matter with you to-night? You who are never frightened. I'm not easily frightened, but I admit I almost said my prayers in that storm, and you, you were doing embroidery."

"Oh, I am not frightened of storms or things in the ordinary way," said the girl half laughing. "Physical things have no power over me, an ugly face can frighten me more than the threat of a blow. It is a question of psychology. That ship produced on my mind a feeling as though I had seen desolation itself, and something worse."

"Something worse!" cried Madame de Warens, "what can be worse than desolation?"

"I don't know," said Cleo, "It also made me feel that I wanted to be far away from it and from here. Then, Monsieur le Prince, with his story of desolate Kerguelen, completed the feeling. It is strong upon me now."

"You do not wish to go to Kerguelen then?" said the Prince smiling as he helped himself to the entree that was being pa.s.sed round.

"Oh, monsieur, it is not a question of my wishes at all," replied the girl.

"But, excuse me," replied the owner of the _Gaston de Paris_, "it is entirely a question of your wishes. We are not a cargo boat, Captain Lepine is on the bridge, he has only to go into his chart house, set his course for New Amsterdam, and a turn of the wheel will put our stern to the south." He touched an electric bell push, attached to the table, as he spoke.

"And your soundings?" asked she.

"They can wait for some other time or some other man, sea depths are pretty constant."

A quarter-master appeared at the saloon door, came forward and saluted.

"Ask Captain Lepine to come aft," said the Prince. "I wish to speak to him."

"Wait," said Mademoiselle Bromsart. Then to her host. "No. I will not have the course altered for me. I am quite clear upon that point. What I said was foolish and it would pain me more than I can tell to have it acted upon. I really mean what I say."

He looked at her for a moment and seemed to glimpse something of the iron will that lay at the heart of her beauty and fragility.

"That will do," said he to the quarter-master. "You need not give my message."

Madame de Warens laughed. "That is what it is to be young," said she, "if an old woman like me had spoken of changing our course I doubt if your quarter-master would have been called, Monsieur. But I have no fads and fancies, thank heaven, I leave all that to the young women of to-day."

"Pardon me, madame," said Doctor Epinard speaking for almost the first time, "but in impressions produced by objects upon the mind there is no room for the term fancy. I speak of course of the normal mind free of disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the objects that form our environment."

"Is this a theory of your own, Epinard?" asked the Prince.

"It is, monsieur, and it may be bad or good but I adhere to it."

"You mean to say that man is composed entirely of environment, past and present?"

"Yes, monsieur, you have caught my meaning exactly. Past and present.

Man is nothing more than a concretion formed from emanations of all the objects whose emanations have impinged upon living tissue since, at the beginning of the world, living tissue was formed. He is the sunset he saw a million years ago, the water he swam in when he was a fish, the knight in armour he fought with when he was an ancestor, or rather he is a concretion of the light, touch and sound vibrations from these and a million other things. I have written the matter fully out in a thesis, which I hope to publish some day."

"Well, you may put my name down for a dozen copies," said the Prince, "for certainly the theory is less mad than some of the theories I have come across explaining the origin of mind."

"But what has all that to do with the ship?" asked Madame de Warens.

"Simply, madame, that the ship which one looked at as a structure of canvas and wood, once seen by Mademoiselle de Bromsart, has become part of her mind, just as it has become part of yours and mine, a logical and definite part of our minds; now, mark me, there was also the sunset and the storm clouds, those objects also became part of the mind of Mademoiselle de Bromsart, and the reasons interlying between all these objects produced in her a definite and painful impression. They were, in fact, all thinking something which she interpreted."

"It seemed to me," said the girl, "that I saw Loneliness itself, and for the first time, and I felt just now that it was following me. It was to escape from that absurd phantom that I suggested to Monsieur le Prince that we should alter our course."

"Well," said Madame de Warens, "your will has conquered the Phantom. Let us talk of something more cheerful."

"Listen!" said Mademoiselle de Bromsart. "It seems to me that the engines are going slower."

"You have a quick ear, mademoiselle," said the Prince, "they undoubtedly are. The Captain has reduced speed. Kerguelen is before us, or rather on our starboard bow, and daybreak will, no doubt, give us a view of it.

We do not want to be too close to it in the dark hours, that is why speed has been reduced."

Coffee was served at table and presently, amidst the fumes of cigarette smoke, the conversation turned to politics, the works of Anatole France, and other absorbing subjects. One might have fancied oneself in Paris but for the vibrations of the propeller, the heave of the sea, and the hundred little noises that mark the pa.s.sage of a ship under way.

Later Mademoiselle de Bromsart found herself in the smoking-room alone with her host, Madame de Warens having retired to her state-room and the others gone on deck.

The girl was doing some embroidery work which she had fetched from her cabin and the Prince was glancing at the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Presently he laid the book down.

"I was in earnest," said he.

"How?" she asked, glancing up from her work.

"When I proposed altering the course. Nothing would please me more than to spoil a plan of my own to please you."