Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/56

The long seclusion in the skerries had made Strindberg more taciturn than he usually was. It was difficult to get under way a conversation that might carry him along. He did not wish to discuss the subject of belles lettres; he thought the subject was below his dignity. I tried to tell about Herman Gorter's new literary achievements and about Walt Whitman, the great American author,—the two new planets about which my life revolved during these two years.

But Strindberg cared for neither of them. It interested him far more to hear about the red Indians with whom I had come in contact the year before out there in the wild west. An individual with much of the primitive man in him as he was, he seems always to have sympathized with these tactitum, mystic people of the wilds, and this in spite of the fact that it was not until towards the end of his life that he thought he had made the interesting discovery that the Indians probably were descendants of the Phoenicians and that Indian word-roots are of a purely Hebrew and Greek origin.

What at this time was of particular interest to him as regards the Indians was whether their reticence in the council was a sign of concentrated mental activity or its very opposite. He suddenly asked me if I had not ascertained this while I was among them.

Of course I had not made any direct inquiries of the kind since I was not aware of the fact that this was an unexplored field. But to judge by what I had seen of Indians, I had been able to come to the conclusion that they have the power of thinking so secretly