But later in the day, while Sangree went off in the canoe to fish the pools near the larger islands, and Joan still lay, bandaged and resting, in her tent, Dr. Silence called me and the tutor and proposed a walk to the granite slabs at the far end. Mrs. Maloney sat on a stump near her daughter, and busied herself energetically with alternate nursing and painting.
“We’ll leave you in charge,” the doctor said with a smile that was meant to be encouraging, “and when you want us for lunch, or anything, the megaphone will always bring us back in time.”
For, though the very air was charged with strange emotions, every one talked quietly and naturally as with a definite desire to counteract unnecessary excitement.
“I’ll keep watch,” said the plucky Bo’sun’s Mate, “and meanwhile I find comfort in my work.” She was busy with the sketch she had begun on the day after our arrival. “For even a tree,” she added proudly, pointing to her little easel, “is a symbol of the divine, and the thought makes me feel safer.” We glanced for a moment at a daub which was more like the symptom of a disease than a symbol of the divine—and then took the path round the lagoon.
At the far end we made a little fire and lay round it in the shadow of a big boulder. Maloney stopped his humming suddenly and turned to his companion.
“And what do you make of it all?” he asked abruptly.
“In the first place,” replied John Silence, making himself comfortable against the rock, “it is of human origin, this animal; it is undoubted lycanthropy.”
His words had the effect precisely of a bombshell. Maloney listened as though he had been struck.
“You puzzle me utterly,” he said, sitting up closer and staring at him.
“Perhaps,” replied the other, “but if you’ll listen to me for a few moments you may be less puzzled at the end—or more. It depends how much you know. Let me go further and say that you have underestimated, or miscalculated, the effect of this primitive wild life upon all of you.”
“In what way?” asked the clergyman, bristling a trifle.
“It is strong medicine for any town-dweller, and for some of you it has been too strong. One of you has gone wild.” He uttered these last words with great emphasis.
“Gone savage,” he added, looking from one to the other.
Neither of us found anything to reply.
“To say that the brute has awakened in a man is not a mere metaphor always,” he went on presently.
“Of course not!”
“But, in the sense I mean, may have a very literal and terrible significance,” pursued Dr. Silence. “Ancient instincts that no one dreamed of, least of all their possessor, may leap forth—”
“Atavism can hardly explain a roaming animal with teeth and claws and sanguinary instincts,” interrupted Maloney with impatience.
“The term is of your own choice,” continued the doctor equably, “not mine, and it is a good example of a word that indicates a result while it conceals the process; but the explanation of this beast that haunts your island and attacks your daughter is of far deeper significance than mere atavistic tendencies, or throwing back to animal origin, which I suppose is the thought in your mind.”
“You spoke just now of lycanthropy,” said Maloney, looking bewildered and anxious to keep to plain facts evidently; “I think I have come across the word, but really—really—it can have no actual significance today, can it? These superstitions of mediaeval times can hardly—”
He looked round at me with his jolly red face, and the expression of astonishment and dismay on it would have made me shout with laughter at any other time. Laughter, however, was never farther from my mind than at this moment when I listened to Dr. Silence as he carefully suggested to the clergyman the very explanation that had gradually been forcing itself upon my own mind.
“However mediaeval ideas may have exaggerated the idea is not of much importance to us now,” he said quietly, “when we are face to face with a modern example of what, I take it, has always been a profound fact. For the moment let us leave the name of any one in particular out of the matter and consider certain possibilities.”
We all agreed with that at any rate. There was no need to speak of Sangree, or of any one else, until we knew a little more.
“The fundamental fact in this most curious case,” he went on, “is that the ‘Double’ of a man—”
“You mean the astral body? I’ve heard of that, of course,” broke in Maloney with a snort of triumph.
“No doubt,” said the other, smiling, “no doubt you have;—that this Double, or fluidic body of a man, as I was saying, has the power under certain conditions of projecting itself and becoming visible to others. Certain training will accomplish this, and certain drugs likewise; illnesses, too, that ravage the body may produce temporarily the result that death produces permanently, and let loose this counterpart of a human being and render it visible to the sight of others.
“Every one, of course, knows this more or less today; but it is not so generally known, and probably believed by none who have not witnessed it, that this fluidic body can, under certain conditions, assume other forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the moulding by thought and wish.”
“I follow you perfectly,” said Maloney, looking as if he would much rather be chopping firewood elsewhere and singing.
“And there are some persons so constituted,” the doctor went on with increasing seriousness, “that the fluid body in them is but loosely associated with the physical, persons of poor health as a rule, yet often of strong desires and passions; and in these persons it is easy for the Double to dissociate itself during deep sleep from their system, and, driven forth by some consuming desire, to assume an animal form and seek the fulfilment of that desire.”
There, in broad daylight, I saw Maloney deliberately creep closer to the fire and heap the wood on. We gathered in to the heat, and to each other, and listened to Dr. Silence’s voice as it mingled with the swish and whirr of the wind about us, and the falling of the little waves.
“For instance, to take a concrete example,” he resumed; “suppose some young man, with the delicate constitution I have spoken of, forms an overpowering attachment to a young woman, yet perceives that it is not welcomed, and is man enough to repress its outward manifestations. In such a case, supposing his Double be easily projected, the very repression of his love in the daytime would add to the intense force of his desire when released in deep sleep from the control of his will, and his fluidic body might issue forth in monstrous or animal shape and become actually visible to others. And, if his devotion were dog-like in its fidelity, yet concealing the fires of a fierce passion beneath, it might well assume the form of a creature that seemed to be half dog, half wolf—”
“A werewolf, you mean?” cried Maloney, pale to the lips as he listened.
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 today 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 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 seance. 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 someone 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. I recalled the expression of his face as I had seen it once or twice, notably on that occasion of the evening prayer, and an involuntary shudder ran down my spine.
At that very instant he turned and saw us where we lay, and his face broke into a smile, so that his teeth showed white in the sun. He looked in his element, and exceedingly attractive. He called out something about his fish, and soon after passed out of sight into the lagoon.
For a time none of us said a word.
“And the cure?” ventured Maloney at length.
“Is not to quench this savage force,” replied Dr. Silence, “but to steer it better, and to provide other outlets. This is the solution of all these problems of accumulated force, for this force is the raw material of usefulness, and should be increased and cherished, not by separating it from the body by death, but by raising it to higher channels. the best and quickest cure of all,” he went on, speaking very gently and with a hand upon the clergyman’s arm, “is to lead it towards its object, provided that object is not unalterably hostile—to let it find rest where—”
He stopped abruptly, and the eyes of the two men met in a single glance of comprehension.
“Joan?” Maloney exclaimed, under his breath.
“Joan!” replied John Silence.
* * * *
We all went to bed early. the day had been unusually warm, and after sunset a curious hush descended on the island. Nothing was audible but that faint, ghostly singing which is inseparable from a pinewood even on the stillest day—a low, searching sound, as though the wind had hair and trailed it o’er the world.
With the sudden cooling of the atmosphere a sea fog began to form. It appeared in isolated patches over the water, and then these patches slid together and a white wall advanced upon us. Not a breath of air stirred; the firs stood like flat metal outlines; the sea became as oil. the whole scene lay as though held motionless by some huge weight in the air; and the flames from our fire—the largest we had ever made—rose upwards, straight as a church steeple.
As
I followed the rest of our party tent-wards, having kicked the embers of the fire into safety, the advance guard of the fog was creeping slowly among the trees, like white arms feeling their way. Mingled with the smoke was the odor of moss and soil and bark, and the peculiar flavor of the Baltic, half salt, half brackish, like the smell of an estuary at low water.
It is difficult to say why it seemed to me that this deep stillness masked an intense activity; perhaps in every mood lies the suggestion of its opposite, so that I became aware of the contrast of furious energy, for it was like moving through the deep pause before a thunderstorm, and I trod gently lest by breaking a twig or moving a stone I might set the whole scene into some sort of tumultuous movement. Actually, no doubt, it was nothing more than a result of overstrung nerves.
There was no more question of undressing and going to bed than there was of undressing and going to bathe. Some sense in me was alert and expectant. I sat in my tent and waited. And at the end of half an hour or so my waiting was justified, for the canvas suddenly shivered, and someone tripped over the ropes that held it to the earth. John Silence came in.
The effect of his quiet entry was singular and prophetic: it was just as though the energy lying behind all this stillness had pressed forward to the edge of action. This, no doubt, was merely the quickening of my own mind, and had no other justification; for the presence of John Silence always suggested the near possibility of vigorous action, and as a matter of fact, he came in with nothing more than a nod and a significant gesture.
He sat down on a corner of my ground-sheet, and I pushed the blanket over so that he could cover his legs. He drew the flap of the tent after him and settled down, but hardly had he done so when the canvas shook a second time, and in blundered Maloney.
“Sitting in the dark?” he said self-consciously, pushing his head inside, and hanging up his lantern on the ridge-pole nail. “I just looked in for a smoke. I suppose—”
The First Algernon Blackwood Megapack: 36 Classic Tales of the Supernatural Page 118