The Beach of Dreams | Page 7

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 entr��e that was being passed 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