The Beach of Dreams | Page 7

de Warens, "why, Cléo, 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 Cléo, "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 entrée 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