"What is madness? Who will lay down the line between madness and sanity?" demanded Nichols suddenly "They are like right and wrong, or good and evil .... much as you want to believe. If we dared for a moment to face the logic of existence, I think we should find that we're all a little mad, each in his own way. An entirely sane man would sort of puff out, like a candle. It's our madness that keeps us going, feeds the flame. The world's an illusion, anyway, of course; ergo, why aren't the maddest people the sanest? Certainly, the maddest man of all would be he who tried to define the states of the human mind.
"For that's beyond our province. They say, for instance, that Devereux is mad: what they mean is that they can't fathom him. His life, likewise, hasn't been charted. Well, what's the difficulty? All the lives and islands haven't been discovered yet. And there are certain bald facts, written in black-and-white records, that seem to support his claim...."
A waxy Chinaman changed our tea. Nichols gazed thoughtfully into the soft darkness beyond the terrace, getting his story under way.
"Devereux is no longer a young man, as you see" he began slowly "I'd say he was about our own age. He was born and reared, I believe, in our own New England, though I've never heard the name of his home town. I presume he had parents there once, brothers and sisters, maybe a sweetheart. The Devereuxs, you know, are a fine family, with strains of originality cropping out here and there, which might once in a while have amounted to genius in a free atmosphere. They're a high-strung breed. I'd be willing to affirm that, even before the episode of the island, this particular Devereux was a serious and romantic soul. Look at his face, hanging in the glow of that lantern. Temperament, sensibility, melancholy.... But what he was, and what he might have been, are both sunk in the tremendous distances of a lifetime, obscured by the apparition of an island, the wraith of a tragic destiny.
"He went to sea, in the wake of his generation. At the age of twenty-one, he had worked up from the forecastle to a room on the port side of the forward cabin; in due time he became first mate of the ship Evening Star. I forget who was captain of her, or what was the name of the second mate who managed to reach Callao in the whaleboat. Those who survived the disaster have vanished along with those who never returned, and Devereux alone has perpetuated the event in nautical history because of a madness that descended on him out of the sky.
"They sailed from New York for San Francisco in a year that is likewise immaterial, and had a long and tedious passage round the Horn. It was one of those unlucky and exasperating voyages, you know—calms, and even trade winds, and unseasonable storms; so that when they finally got headed north in the Pacific, they were a disheartened ship's company. The southeast trades in the Pacific failed them completely; whatever wind they found, from 20 south up to the line, came from the east and north; and with the best course they could make, the ship was crowded over far to the westward of the regular track. Then, as they approached the line, the northeast breeze settled down in earnest, and nothing for it but to hold her on a N.N.W. course, as close to the wind as possible on the starboard tack. They managed to weather the fringe of the South Sea Islands by a few hundred miles, and drifted across the line somewhere in the neighbourhood of 135° west longitude. Provisions and water were holding out well, though one hundred and seventy-five days had passed since they'd lost sight of Sandy Hook.
"One evening in the early dog-watch, they noticed a few land birds flying about the ship. Devereux told me they were quite excited over the incident for an hour or two, with the quick sympathy of sailors for an unusual manifestation of life-forces. The nearest land at that time was the Marquesas, five hundred miles away to the southward. Some of the men tried to entice the birds to alight on deck or in the rigging, but they didn't seem at all weary, and scorned the blandishments of food.
"'Wonderful creatures—birds' said the captain, as they were discussing the occurrence on the quarter-deck 'Five hundred miles isn't a drop in the bucket to them. All the bob-o'-links at home go to Brazil and back every winter'
"'They've probably run over from the Marquesas since supper' chimed in the second mate 'Half an hour from now they'll be back there, perching on some tree above an island beauty. God, I'd like to be a bird!'
"But Devereux demurred to their conclusion—he knew something of the habits of birds. 'That's all right in the migrating season, but these birds don't migrate' said he 'You can see that they aren't bound anywhere in particular. And land birds don't fly five hundred miles to sea for the fun of going back again. They do get tuckered, too. I think it's mighty strange'