of our care-free island life, from his beard and Shakespeare rehearsals to my own whiskers and uncut hair, my Shelley moods and my intense Yoga experiments....
Much of the charm of our lonely life vanished when, with high summer, the people came up to their camps and houses on the other islands. The solitude was then disturbed by canoes, sailing-boats, steam-launches; singing and shouting broke the deep silences; camp-fires in a dozen directions blazed at night. Many of these people we had known well in Toronto, but no one called on us. Sometimes we would paddle to some distant camp-fire, lying on the water just outside the circle of light, and recognizing acquaintances, even former customers of Hub and Dairy and the Sporting Goods Emporium, but never letting ourselves be seen. Everybody knew we were living on the island; yet avoidance was mutual. We were in disgrace, it seemed, and chiefly because of the Hub--not because of our conduct with regard to it, but, apparently, because we had left the town suddenly without saying good-bye to all and sundry. This abrupt disappearance had argued something wrong, something we were ashamed of. All manner of wild tales reached us, most of them astonishingly remote from the truth.
This capacity for invention and imaginative detail of most ingenious sort, using the tiniest insignificant item of truth as starting point, suggests that even the dullest people must have high artistic faculties tucked away somewhere in them. Many of these tales we traced to their source--usually a person the world considered devoid of fancy, even dull. Here, evidently, possessing genuine creative power, were unpublished novelists with distinct gifts of romance and fantasy who had missed their real vocation. The truth about us was, indeed, far from glorious, but these wild tales made us feel almost supermen. Many years later I met other instances of this power that dull, even stupid people could keep carefully hidden till the right opportunity for production offers--I was credited, to name the best, with superhuman powers of Black Magic,
whatever that may be, and of sorcery. It was soon after
