The Sea-Wolf

By Jack London

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Title: The Sea-Wolf

Author: Jack London

Release Date: October 15, 1997 [eBook #1074]
[Most recently updated: November 24, 2021]

Language: English


Produced by: David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-WOLF ***




                               THE SEA-WOLF


                                    BY
                               JACK LONDON

                                AUTHOR OF
               “THE CALL OF THE WILD,” “THE FAITH OF MEN,”
                                   ETC.

                                * * * * *

                            _POPULAR EDITION_.

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                            WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                                   1917

                                * * * * *

_First published_, _November_ 1904.

_New Impression_, _December_ 1904, _April_ 1908.

_Popular Edition_, _July_ 1910; _New Impressions_, _March_ 1912,
_September_ 1912, _November_ 1913, _May_ 1915, _May_ 1916, _July_ 1917.

                                * * * * *

             _Copyright_, _London_, _William Heinemann_, 1904




CHAPTER I


I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the
cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit.  He kept a summer cottage
in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied
it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When summer came on, he elected to sweat
out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to toil incessantly.  Had
it not been my custom to run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and
to stop over till Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning
would not have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay.

Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the _Martinez_ was a new
ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run between
Sausalito and San Francisco.  The danger lay in the heavy fog which
blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little
apprehension.  In fact, I remember the placid exaltation with which I
took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly beneath the
pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my
imagination.  A fresh breeze was blowing, and for a time I was alone in
the moist obscurity—yet not alone, for I was dimly conscious of the
presence of the pilot, and of what I took to be the captain, in the glass
house above my head.

I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labour which
made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation,
in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of the sea.  It was
good that men should be specialists, I mused.  The peculiar knowledge of
the pilot and captain sufficed for many thousands of people who knew no
more of the sea and navigation than I knew.  On the other hand, instead
of having to devote my energy to the learning of a multitude of things, I
concentrated it upon a few particular things, such as, for instance, the
analysis of Poe’s place in American literature—an essay of mine, by the
way, in the current _Atlantic_.  Coming aboard, as I passed through the
cabin, I had noticed with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the
_Atlantic_, which was open at my very essay.  And there it was again, the
division of labour, the special knowledge of the pilot and captain which
permitted the stout gentleman to read my special knowledge on Poe while
they carried him safely from Sausalito to San Francisco.

A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping out on
the deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental note of the
topic for use in a projected essay which I had thought of calling “The
Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.”  The red-faced man shot a
glance up at the pilot-house, gazed around at the fog, stumped across the
deck and back (he evidently had artificial legs), and stood still by my
side, legs wide apart, and with an expression of keen enjoyment on his
face.  I was not wrong when I decided that his days had been spent on the
sea.

“It’s nasty weather like this here that turns heads grey before their
time,” he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.

“I had not thought there was any particular strain,” I answered.  “It
seems as simple as A, B, C.  They know the direction by compass, the
distance, and the speed.  I should not call it anything more than
mathematical certainty.”

“Strain!” he snorted.  “Simple as A, B, C!  Mathematical certainty!”

He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as he
stared at me.  “How about this here tide that’s rushin’ out through the
Golden Gate?” he demanded, or bellowed, rather.  “How fast is she ebbin’?
What’s the drift, eh?  Listen to that, will you?  A bell-buoy, and we’re
a-top of it!  See ’em alterin’ the course!”

From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I could see
the pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity.  The bell, which had
seemed straight ahead, was now sounding from the side.  Our own whistle
was blowing hoarsely, and from time to time the sound of other whistles
came to us from out of the fog.

“That’s a ferry-boat of some sort,” the new-comer said, indicating a
whistle off to the right.  “And there!  D’ye hear that?  Blown by mouth.
Some scow schooner, most likely.  Better watch out, Mr. Schooner-man.
Ah, I thought so.  Now hell’s a poppin’ for somebody!”

The unseen ferry-boat was blowing blast after blast, and the mouth-blown
horn was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.

“And now they’re payin’ their respects to each other and tryin’ to get
clear,” the red-faced man went on, as the hurried whistling ceased.

His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement as he translated
into articulate language the speech of the horns and sirens.  “That’s a
steam-siren a-goin’ it over there to the left.  And you hear that fellow
with a frog in his throat—a steam schooner as near as I can judge,
crawlin’ in from the Heads against the tide.”

A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly ahead
and from very near at hand.  Gongs sounded on the _Martinez_.  Our
paddle-wheels stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then they
started again.  The shrill little whistle, like the chirping of a cricket
amid the cries of great beasts, shot through the fog from more to the
side and swiftly grew faint and fainter.  I looked to my companion for
enlightenment.

“One of them dare-devil launches,” he said.  “I almost wish we’d sunk
him, the little rip!  They’re the cause of more trouble.  And what good
are they?  Any jackass gets aboard one and runs it from hell to
breakfast, blowin’ his whistle to beat the band and tellin’ the rest of
the world to look out for him, because he’s comin’ and can’t look out for
himself!  Because he’s comin’!  And you’ve got to look out, too!  Right
of way!  Common decency!  They don’t know the meanin’ of it!”

I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he stumped
indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog.
And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite
mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes
of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their
steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their
way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident
speech the while their hearts are heavy with incertitude and fear.

The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh.  I too
had been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode clear-eyed
through the mystery.

“Hello! somebody comin’ our way,” he was saying.  “And d’ye hear that?
He’s comin’ fast.  Walking right along.  Guess he don’t hear us yet.
Wind’s in wrong direction.”

The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear the
whistle plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.

“Ferry-boat?” I asked.

He nodded, then added, “Or he wouldn’t be keepin’ up such a clip.”  He
gave a short chuckle.  “They’re gettin’ anxious up there.”

I glanced up.  The captain had thrust his head and shoulders out of the
pilot-house, and was staring intently into the fog as though by sheer
force of will he could penetrate it.  His face was anxious, as was the
face of my companion, who had stumped over to the rail and was gazing
with a like intentness in the direction of the invisible danger.

Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity.  The fog
seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a
steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed on
the snout of Leviathan.  I could see the pilot-house and a white-bearded
man leaning partly out of it, on his elbows.  He was clad in a blue
uniform, and I remember noting how trim and quiet he was.  His quietness,
under the circumstances, was terrible.  He accepted Destiny, marched hand
in hand with it, and coolly measured the stroke.  As he leaned there, he
ran a calm and speculative eye over us, as though to determine the
precise point of the collision, and took no notice whatever when our
pilot, white with rage, shouted, “Now you’ve done it!”

On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make
rejoinder necessary.

“Grab hold of something and hang on,” the red-faced man said to me.  All
his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the contagion of
preternatural calm.  “And listen to the women scream,” he said
grimly—almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been through the
experience before.

The vessels came together before I could follow his advice.  We must have
been struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the strange steamboat
having passed beyond my line of vision.  The _Martinez_ heeled over,
sharply, and there was a crashing and rending of timber.  I was thrown
flat on the wet deck, and before I could scramble to my feet I heard the
scream of the women.  This it was, I am certain,—the most indescribable
of blood-curdling sounds,—that threw me into a panic.  I remembered the
life-preservers stored in the cabin, but was met at the door and swept
backward by a wild rush of men and women.  What happened in the next few
minutes I do not recollect, though I have a clear remembrance of pulling
down life-preservers from the overhead racks, while the red-faced man
fastened them about the bodies of an hysterical group of women.  This
memory is as distinct and sharp as that of any picture I have seen.  It
is a picture, and I can see it now,—the jagged edges of the hole in the
side of the cabin, through which the grey fog swirled and eddied; the
empty upholstered seats, littered with all the evidences of sudden
flight, such as packages, hand satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout
gentleman who had been reading my essay, encased in cork and canvas, the
magazine still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence if I
thought there was any danger; the red-faced man, stumping gallantly
around on his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all comers;
and finally, the screaming bedlam of women.

This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my nerves.  It
must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man, for I have another
picture which will never fade from my mind.  The stout gentleman is
stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket and looking on curiously.
A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white faces and open mouths, is
shrieking like a chorus of lost souls; and the red-faced man, his face
now purplish with wrath, and with arms extended overhead as in the act of
hurling thunderbolts, is shouting, “Shut up!  Oh, shut up!”

I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next
instant I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were women
of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death upon
them and unwilling to die.  And I remember that the sounds they made
reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the butcher, and
I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy.  These women,
capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were
open-mouthed and screaming.  They wanted to live, they were helpless,
like rats in a trap, and they screamed.

The horror of it drove me out on deck.  I was feeling sick and squeamish,
and sat down on a bench.  In a hazy way I saw and heard men rushing and
shouting as they strove to lower the boats.  It was just as I had read
descriptions of such scenes in books.  The tackles jammed.  Nothing
worked.  One boat lowered away with the plugs out, filled with women and
children and then with water, and capsized.  Another boat had been
lowered by one end, and still hung in the tackle by the other end, where
it had been abandoned.  Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat
which had caused the disaster, though I heard men saying that she would
undoubtedly send boats to our assistance.

I descended to the lower deck.  The _Martinez_ was sinking fast, for the
water was very near.  Numbers of the passengers were leaping overboard.
Others, in the water, were clamouring to be taken aboard again.  No one
heeded them.  A cry arose that we were sinking.  I was seized by the
consequent panic, and went over the side in a surge of bodies.  How I
went over I do not know, though I did know, and instantly, why those in
the water were so desirous of getting back on the steamer.  The water was
cold—so cold that it was painful.  The pang, as I plunged into it, was as
quick and sharp as that of fire.  It bit to the marrow.  It was like the
grip of death.  I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface.  The taste of
the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with the acrid
stuff in my throat and lungs.

But it was the cold that was most distressing.  I felt that I could
survive but a few minutes.  People were struggling and floundering in the
water about me.  I could hear them crying out to one another.  And I
heard, also, the sound of oars.  Evidently the strange steamboat had
lowered its boats.  As the time went by I marvelled that I was still
alive.  I had no sensation whatever in my lower limbs, while a chilling
numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into it.  Small waves,
with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and into my
mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.

The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing chorus
of screams in the distance, and knew that the _Martinez_ had gone down.
Later,—how much later I have no knowledge,—I came to myself with a start
of fear.  I was alone.  I could hear no calls or cries—only the sound of
the waves, made weirdly hollow and reverberant by the fog.  A panic in a
crowd, which partakes of a sort of community of interest, is not so
terrible as a panic when one is by oneself; and such a panic I now
suffered.  Whither was I drifting?  The red-faced man had said that the
tide was ebbing through the Golden Gate.  Was I, then, being carried out
to sea?  And the life-preserver in which I floated?  Was it not liable to
go to pieces at any moment?  I had heard of such things being made of
paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
buoyancy.  And I could not swim a stroke.  And I was alone, floating,
apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness.  I confess that a
madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and
beat the water with my numb hands.

How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of
which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful
sleep.  When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw,
almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three
triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind.
Where the bow cut the water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I
seemed directly in its path.  I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.
The bow plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
over my head.  Then the long, black side of the vessel began slipping
past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands.  I tried to
reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my nails, but my
arms were heavy and lifeless.  Again I strove to call out, but made no
sound.

The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow
between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at the wheel,
and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar.
I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and
glanced out over the water in my direction.  It was a careless,
unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men do when they
have no immediate call to do anything in particular, but act because they
are alive and must do something.

But life and death were in that glance.  I could see the vessel being
swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel, and the
head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze struck the
water and casually lifted along it toward me.  His face wore an absent
expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that if his eyes did
light upon me he would nevertheless not see me.  But his eyes did light
upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang
to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and
round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some sort.
The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt
almost instantly from view into the fog.

I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power
of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was
rising around me.  A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing
nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.  When he was very near I heard
him crying, in vexed fashion, “Why in hell don’t you sing out?”  This
meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.




CHAPTER II


I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.  Sparkling
points of light spluttered and shot past me.  They were stars, I knew,
and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns.  As I reached
the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a
great gong struck and thundered.  For an immeasurable period, lapped in
the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous
flight.

But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself
it must be.  My rhythm grew shorter and shorter.  I was jerked from swing
to counter swing with irritating haste.  I could scarcely catch my
breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens.  The gong
thundered more frequently and more furiously.  I grew to await it with a
nameless dread.  Then it seemed as though I were being dragged over
rasping sands, white and hot in the sun.  This gave place to a sense of
intolerable anguish.  My skin was scorching in the torment of fire.  The
gong clanged and knelled.  The sparkling points of light flashed past me
in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were
dropping into the void.  I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened
my eyes.  Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me.  My mighty
rhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea.  The
terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
clattered with each leap of the ship.  The rasping, scorching sands were
a man’s hard hands chafing my naked chest.  I squirmed under the pain of
it, and half lifted my head.  My chest was raw and red, and I could see
tiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.

“That’ll do, Yonson,” one of the men said.  “Carn’t yer see you’ve
bloomin’ well rubbed all the gent’s skin orf?”

The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased
chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet.  The man who had spoken to
him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost
effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with
his mother’s milk.  A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty
gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty
ship’s galley in which I found myself.

“An’ ’ow yer feelin’ now, sir?” he asked, with the subservient smirk
which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.

For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped by
Yonson to my feet.  The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was grating
horribly on my nerves.  I could not collect my thoughts.  Clutching the
woodwork of the galley for support,—and I confess the grease with which
it was scummed put my teeth on edge,—I reached across a hot cooking-range
to the offending utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the
coal-box.

The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand a
steaming mug with an “’Ere, this’ll do yer good.”  It was a nauseous
mess,—ship’s coffee,—but the heat of it was revivifying.  Between gulps
of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and bleeding chest and
turned to the Scandinavian.

“Thank you, Mr. Yonson,” I said; “but don’t you think your measures were
rather heroic?”

It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than of my
words, that he held up his palm for inspection.  It was remarkably
calloused.  I passed my hand over the horny projections, and my teeth
went on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation produced.

“My name is Johnson, not Yonson,” he said, in very good, though slow,
English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.

There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.

“Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” I corrected, and reached out my hand for his.

He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg to the
other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.

“Have you any dry clothes I may put on?” I asked the cook.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, with cheerful alacrity.  “I’ll run down an’ tyke
a look over my kit, if you’ve no objections, sir, to wearin’ my things.”

He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness and
smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily.
In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to learn, was
probably the most salient expression of his personality.

“And where am I?” I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be one of
the sailors.  “What vessel is this, and where is she bound?”

“Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,” he answered, slowly and
methodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidly
observing the order of my queries.  “The schooner _Ghost_, bound
seal-hunting to Japan.”

“And who is the captain?  I must see him as soon as I am dressed.”

Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed.  He hesitated while he groped in
his vocabulary and framed a complete answer.  “The cap’n is Wolf Larsen,
or so men call him.  I never heard his other name.  But you better speak
soft with him.  He is mad this morning.  The mate—”

But he did not finish.  The cook had glided in.

“Better sling yer ’ook out of ’ere, Yonson,” he said.  “The old man’ll be
wantin’ yer on deck, an’ this ayn’t no d’y to fall foul of ’im.”

Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the cook’s
shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous wink as
though to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for me to be
soft-spoken with the captain.

Hanging over the cook’s arm was a loose and crumpled array of
evil-looking and sour-smelling garments.

“They was put aw’y wet, sir,” he vouchsafed explanation.  “But you’ll
’ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the fire.”

Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and aided
by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen undershirt.  On the
instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from the harsh contact.  He
noticed my involuntary twitching and grimacing, and smirked:

“I only ’ope yer don’t ever ’ave to get used to such as that in this
life, ’cos you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ’ave, more like a
lydy’s than any I know of.  I was bloomin’ well sure you was a gentleman
as soon as I set eyes on yer.”

I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me this
dislike increased.  There was something repulsive about his touch.  I
shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted.  And between this and the smells
arising from various pots boiling and bubbling on the galley fire, I was
in haste to get out into the fresh air.  Further, there was the need of
seeing the captain about what arrangements could be made for getting me
ashore.

A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured with
what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running and
apologetic fire of comment.  A pair of workman’s brogans encased my feet,
and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-out
overalls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other.
The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil had there clutched for the
Cockney’s soul and missed the shadow for the substance.

“And whom have I to thank for this kindness?” I asked, when I stood
completely arrayed, a tiny boy’s cap on my head, and for coat a dirty,
striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back and the sleeves
of which reached just below my elbows.

The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating smirk
on his face.  Out of my experience with stewards on the Atlantic liners
at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was waiting for his tip.
From my fuller knowledge of the creature I now know that the posture was
unconscious.  An hereditary servility, no doubt, was responsible.

“Mugridge, sir,” he fawned, his effeminate features running into a greasy
smile.  “Thomas Mugridge, sir, an’ at yer service.”

“All right, Thomas,” I said.  “I shall not forget you—when my clothes are
dry.”

A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.

Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
stepped out on deck.  I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.  A
puff of wind caught me,—and I staggered across the moving deck to a
corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support.  The schooner, heeled
over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into the
long Pacific roll.  If she were heading south-west as Johnson had said,
the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from the south.  The fog
was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the
water. I turned to the east, where I knew California must lie, but could
see nothing save low-lying fog-banks—the same fog, doubtless, that had
brought about the disaster to the _Martinez_ and placed me in my present
situation.  To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust
above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse.  In the
south-west, and almost in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some
vessel’s sails.

Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediate
surroundings.  My first thought was that a man who had come through a
collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I
received.  Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously across the
top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.

Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.  There, on a
hatch, a large man was lying on his back.  He was fully clothed, though
his shirt was ripped open in front.  Nothing was to be seen of his chest,
however, for it was covered with a mass of black hair, in appearance like
the furry coat of a dog.  His face and neck were hidden beneath a black
beard, intershot with grey, which would have been stiff and bushy had it
not been limp and draggled and dripping with water.  His eyes were
closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open,
his breast, heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
breath.  A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a matter
of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the end of a rope,
hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its contents over the prostrate
man.

Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely chewing
the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me from
the sea.  His height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten and a
half; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of this, but
of his strength.  And yet, while he was of massive build, with broad
shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength as
massive.  It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of the
kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because of his
heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order.  Not that in
appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like.  What I am striving to
express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical
semblance.  It was a strength we are wont to associate with things
primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our
tree-dwelling prototypes to have been—a strength savage, ferocious, alive
in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the
elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been
moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the
head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in
the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod
of a finger.

Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who paced up
and down.  He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet struck the deck
squarely and with surety; every movement of a muscle, from the heave of
the shoulders to the tightening of the lips about the cigar, was
decisive, and seemed to come out of a strength that was excessive and
overwhelming.  In fact, though this strength pervaded every action of
his, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater strength that lurked
within, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, but
which might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the rage
of a lion or the wrath of a storm.

The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned encouragingly
at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man who
paced up and down by the hatchway.  Thus I was given to understand that
he was the captain, the “Old Man,” in the cook’s vernacular, the
individual whom I must interview and put to the trouble of somehow
getting me ashore.  I had half started forward, to get over with what I
was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a more violent
suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who was lying on his
back.  He wrenched and writhed about convulsively.  The chin, with the
damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the back muscles stiffened
and the chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive effort to get
more air.  Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin was
taking on a purplish hue.

The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and gazed
down at the dying man.  So fierce had this final struggle become that the
sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over him and stared
curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping its contents to
the deck.  The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch with his heels,
straightened out his legs, and stiffened in one great tense effort, and
rolled his head from side to side.  Then the muscles relaxed, the head
stopped rolling, and a sigh, as of profound relief, floated upward from
his lips.  The jaw dropped, the upper lip lifted, and two rows of
tobacco-discoloured teeth appeared.  It seemed as though his features had
frozen into a diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.

Then a most surprising thing occurred.  The captain broke loose upon the
dead man like a thunderclap.  Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuous
stream.  And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions of
indecency.  Each word was a blasphemy, and there were many words.  They
crisped and crackled like electric sparks.  I had never heard anything
like it in my life, nor could I have conceived it possible.  With a turn
for literary expression myself, and a penchant for forcible figures and
phrases, I appreciated, as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiar
vividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors.  The
cause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man, who was
mate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco, and then had
the poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage and leave Wolf
Larsen short-handed.

It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was
shocked.  Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been repellent
to me.  I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the heart, and, I might
just as well say, a giddiness.  To me, death had always been invested
with solemnity and dignity.  It had been peaceful in its occurrence,
sacred in its ceremonial.  But death in its more sordid and terrible
aspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted till now.  As I
say, while I appreciated the power of the terrific denunciation that
swept out of Wolf Larsen’s mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked.  The
scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse.  I should
not have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled
and flared up in smoke and flame.  But the dead man was unconcerned.  He
continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery and
defiance.  He was master of the situation.




CHAPTER III


Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun.  He relighted
his cigar and glanced around.  His eyes chanced upon the cook.

“Well, Cooky?” he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the temper
of steel.

“Yes, sir,” the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and apologetic
servility.

“Don’t you think you’ve stretched that neck of yours just about enough?
It’s unhealthy, you know.  The mate’s gone, so I can’t afford to lose you
too.  You must be very, very careful of your health, Cooky.  Understand?”

His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his previous
utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip.  The cook quailed under it.

“Yes, sir,” was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared into
the galley.

At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest of the
crew became uninterested and fell to work at one task or another.  A
number of men, however, who were lounging about a companion-way between
the galley and hatch, and who did not seem to be sailors, continued
talking in low tones with one another.  These, I afterward learned, were
the hunters, the men who shot the seals, and a very superior breed to
common sailor-folk.

“Johansen!” Wolf Larsen called out.  A sailor stepped forward obediently.
“Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up.  You’ll find some old
canvas in the sail-locker.  Make it do.”

“What’ll I put on his feet, sir?” the man asked, after the customary “Ay,
ay, sir.”

“We’ll see to that,” Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice in a
call of “Cooky!”

Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.

“Go below and fill a sack with coal.”

“Any of you fellows got a Bible or Prayer-book?” was the captain’s next
demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the companion-way.

They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I did
not catch, but which raised a general laugh.

Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors.  Bibles and Prayer-books
seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to pursue the
quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with the information
that there was none.

The captain shrugged his shoulders.  “Then we’ll drop him over without
any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the burial
service at sea by heart.”

By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me.  “You’re a
preacher, aren’t you?” he asked.

The hunters,—there were six of them,—to a man, turned and regarded me.  I
was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow.  A laugh went up at my
appearance,—a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the dead man
stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that was as rough
and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse feelings
and blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor
gentleness.

Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight
glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite
close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of the
man as apart from his body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I had heard
him spew forth.  The face, with large features and strong lines, of the
square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first sight;
but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish, and a
conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual
strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being.  The jaw,
the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above
the eyes,—these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to
speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond
and out of sight.  There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no
determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some
pigeon-hole with others of similar type.

The eyes—and it was my destiny to know them well—were large and handsome,
wide apart as the true artist’s are wide, sheltering under a heavy brow
and arched over by thick black eyebrows.  The eyes themselves were of
that baffling protean grey which is never twice the same; which runs
through many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine; which
is grey, dark and light, and greenish-grey, and sometimes of the clear
azure of the deep sea.  They were eyes that masked the soul with a
thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at rare moments, and allowed
it to rush up as though it were about to fare forth nakedly into the
world on some wonderful adventure,—eyes that could brood with the
hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points
of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow
chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften
and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and
compelling, which at the same time fascinate and dominate women till they
surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.

But to return.  I told him that, unhappily for the burial service, I was
not a preacher, when he sharply demanded:

“What do you do for a living?”

I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I ever
canvassed it.  I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself
had sillily stammered, “I—I am a gentleman.”

His lip curled in a swift sneer.

“I have worked, I do work,” I cried impetuously, as though he were my
judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of
my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.

“For your living?”

There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was
quite beside myself—“rattled,” as Furuseth would have termed it, like a
quaking child before a stern school-master.

“Who feeds you?” was his next question.

“I have an income,” I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my tongue
the next instant.  “All of which, you will pardon my observing, has
nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about.”

But he disregarded my protest.

“Who earned it?  Eh?  I thought so.  Your father.  You stand on dead
men’s legs.  You’ve never had any of your own.  You couldn’t walk alone
between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals.
Let me see your hand.”

His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and
accurately, or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had
stepped two paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it up
for inspection.  I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers tightened,
without visible effort, till I thought mine would be crushed.  It is hard
to maintain one’s dignity under such circumstances.  I could not squirm
or struggle like a schoolboy.  Nor could I attack such a creature who had
but to twist my arm to break it.  Nothing remained but to stand still and
accept the indignity.  I had time to notice that the pockets of the dead
man had been emptied on the deck, and that his body and his grin had been
wrapped from view in canvas, the folds of which the sailor, Johansen, was
sewing together with coarse white twine, shoving the needle through with
a leather contrivance fitted on the palm of his hand.

Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.

“Dead men’s hands have kept it soft.  Good for little else than
dish-washing and scullion work.”

“I wish to be put ashore,” I said firmly, for I now had myself in
control.  “I shall pay you whatever you judge your delay and trouble to
be worth.”

He looked at me curiously.  Mockery shone in his eyes.

“I have a counter proposition to make, and for the good of your soul.  My
mate’s gone, and there’ll be a lot of promotion.  A sailor comes aft to
take mate’s place, cabin-boy goes for’ard to take sailor’s place, and you
take the cabin-boy’s place, sign the articles for the cruise, twenty
dollars per month and found.  Now what do you say?  And mind you, it’s
for your own soul’s sake.  It will be the making of you.  You might learn
in time to stand on your own legs, and perhaps to toddle along a bit.”

But I took no notice.  The sails of the vessel I had seen off to the
south-west had grown larger and plainer.  They were of the same
schooner-rig as the _Ghost_, though the hull itself, I could see, was
smaller.  She was a pretty sight, leaping and flying toward us, and
evidently bound to pass at close range.  The wind had been momentarily
increasing, and the sun, after a few angry gleams, had disappeared.  The
sea had turned a dull leaden grey and grown rougher, and was now tossing
foaming whitecaps to the sky.  We were travelling faster, and heeled
farther over.  Once, in a gust, the rail dipped under the sea, and the
decks on that side were for the moment awash with water that made a
couple of the hunters hastily lift their feet.

“That vessel will soon be passing us,” I said, after a moment’s pause.
“As she is going in the opposite direction, she is very probably bound
for San Francisco.”

“Very probably,” was Wolf Larsen’s answer, as he turned partly away from
me and cried out, “Cooky!  Oh, Cooky!”

The Cockney popped out of the galley.

“Where’s that boy?  Tell him I want him.”

“Yes, sir;” and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and disappeared down
another companion-way near the wheel.  A moment later he emerged, a
heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, with a glowering,
villainous countenance, trailing at his heels.

“’Ere ’e is, sir,” the cook said.

But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the cabin-boy.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“George Leach, sir,” came the sullen answer, and the boy’s bearing showed
clearly that he divined the reason for which he had been summoned.

“Not an Irish name,” the captain snapped sharply.  “O’Toole or McCarthy
would suit your mug a damn sight better.  Unless, very likely, there’s an
Irishman in your mother’s woodpile.”

I saw the young fellow’s hands clench at the insult, and the blood crawl
scarlet up his neck.

“But let that go,” Wolf Larsen continued.  “You may have very good
reasons for forgetting your name, and I’ll like you none the worse for it
as long as you toe the mark.  Telegraph Hill, of course, is your port of
entry.  It sticks out all over your mug.  Tough as they make them and
twice as nasty.  I know the kind.  Well, you can make up your mind to
have it taken out of you on this craft.  Understand?  Who shipped you,
anyway?”

“McCready and Swanson.”

“Sir!” Wolf Larsen thundered.

“McCready and Swanson, sir,” the boy corrected, his eyes burning with a
bitter light.

“Who got the advance money?”

“They did, sir.”

“I thought as much.  And damned glad you were to let them have it.
Couldn’t make yourself scarce too quick, with several gentlemen you may
have heard of looking for you.”

The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant.  His body bunched
together as though for a spring, and his face became as an infuriated
beast’s as he snarled, “It’s a—”

“A what?” Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his voice, as though
he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken word.

The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper.  “Nothin’, sir.  I take it
back.”

“And you have shown me I was right.”  This with a gratified smile.  “How
old are you?”

“Just turned sixteen, sir.”

“A lie.  You’ll never see eighteen again.  Big for your age at that, with
muscles like a horse.  Pack up your kit and go for’ard into the fo’c’sle.
You’re a boat-puller now.  You’re promoted; see?”

Without waiting for the boy’s acceptance, the captain turned to the
sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the corpse.
“Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, never mind; you’re mate just the same.  Get your traps aft into
the mate’s berth.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” was the cheery response, as Johansen started forward.

In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.  “What are you
waiting for?” Wolf Larsen demanded.

“I didn’t sign for boat-puller, sir,” was the reply.  “I signed for
cabin-boy.  An’ I don’t want no boat-pullin’ in mine.”

“Pack up and go for’ard.”

This time Wolf Larsen’s command was thrillingly imperative.  The boy
glowered sullenly, but refused to move.

Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen’s tremendous strength.  It was
utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the ticks of
two seconds.  He had sprung fully six feet across the deck and driven his
fist into the other’s stomach.  At the same moment, as though I had been
struck myself, I felt a sickening shock in the pit of my stomach.  I
instance this to show the sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the
time, and how unused I was to spectacles of brutality.  The cabin-boy—and
he weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least—crumpled up.  His
body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick.  He
lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck
alongside the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed
about in agony.

“Well?” Larsen asked of me.  “Have you made up your mind?”

I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was now
almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards away.
It was a very trim and neat little craft.  I could see a large, black
number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures of pilot-boats.

“What vessel is that?” I asked.

“The pilot-boat _Lady Mine_,” Wolf Larsen answered grimly.  “Got rid of
her pilots and running into San Francisco.  She’ll be there in five or
six hours with this wind.”

“Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.”

“Sorry, but I’ve lost the signal book overboard,” he remarked, and the
group of hunters grinned.

I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes.  I had seen the
frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very
probably receive the same, if not worse.  As I say, I debated with
myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life.  I ran
to the side, waving my arms and shouting:

“_Lady Mine_ ahoy!  Take me ashore!  A thousand dollars if you take me
ashore!”

I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering.
The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips.  I did not turn my head,
though I expected every moment a killing blow from the human brute behind
me.  At last, after what seemed centuries, unable longer to stand the
strain, I looked around.  He had not moved.  He was standing in the same
position, swaying easily to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh
cigar.

“What is the matter?  Anything wrong?”

This was the cry from the _Lady Mine_.

“Yes!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs.  “Life or death!  One thousand
dollars if you take me ashore!”

“Too much ’Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!” Wolf Larsen
shouted after.  “This one”—indicating me with his thumb—“fancies
sea-serpents and monkeys just now!”

The man on the _Lady Mine_ laughed back through the megaphone.  The
pilot-boat plunged past.

“Give him hell for me!” came a final cry, and the two men waved their
arms in farewell.

I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner
swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us.  And she would
probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours!  My head seemed
bursting.  There was an ache in my throat as though my heart were up in
it.  A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt spray on my lips.
The wind puffed strongly, and the _Ghost_ heeled far over, burying her
lee rail.  I could hear the water rushing down upon the deck.

When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering to
his feet.  His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed pain.
He looked very sick.

“Well, Leach, are you going for’ard?” Wolf Larsen asked.

“Yes, sir,” came the answer of a spirit cowed.

“And you?” I was asked.

“I’ll give you a thousand—” I began, but was interrupted.

“Stow that!  Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy?  Or do I
have to take you in hand?”

What was I to do?  To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not
help my case.  I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes.  They might
have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they
contained.  One may see the soul stir in some men’s eyes, but his were
bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea itself.

“Well?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Say ‘yes, sir.’”

“Yes, sir,” I corrected.

“What is your name?”

“Van Weyden, sir.”

“First name?”

“Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.”

“Age?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

“That’ll do.  Go to the cook and learn your duties.”

And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to
Wolf Larsen.  He was stronger than I, that was all.  But it was very
unreal at the time.  It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it.
It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible
nightmare.

“Hold on, don’t go yet.”

I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.

“Johansen, call all hands.  Now that we’ve everything cleaned up, we’ll
have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.”

While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under
the captain’s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a
hatch-cover.  On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up,
were lashed a number of small boats.  Several men picked up the
hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side, and
rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard.  To the feet was
attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.

I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and
awe-inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at
any rate.  One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates
called “Smoke,” was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths
and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth
to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf-chorus or the barking of
hell-hounds.  The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below
rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together.
There was an ominous and worried expression on their faces.  It was
evident that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a
captain and begun so inauspiciously.  From time to time they stole
glances at Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of
the man.

He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off.  I ran my eyes
over them—twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man at the wheel
and myself.  I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it appeared my
fate to be pent up with them on this miniature floating world for I knew
not how many weeks or months.  The sailors, in the main, were English and
Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order.  The
hunters, on the other hand, had stronger and more diversified faces, with
hard lines and the marks of the free play of passions.  Strange to say,
and I noted it at once, Wolf Larsen’s features showed no such evil
stamp.  There seemed nothing vicious in them.  True, there were lines,
but they were the lines of decision and firmness.  It seemed, rather, a
frank and open countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by
the fact that he was smooth-shaven.  I could hardly believe—until the
next incident occurred—that it was the face of a man who could behave as
he had behaved to the cabin-boy.

At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff struck
the schooner and pressed her side under.  The wind shrieked a wild song
through the rigging.  Some of the hunters glanced anxiously aloft.  The
lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the sea, and as the
schooner lifted and righted the water swept across the deck wetting us
above our shoe-tops.  A shower of rain drove down upon us, each drop
stinging like a hailstone.  As it passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the
bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck.

“I only remember one part of the service,” he said, “and that is, ‘And
the body shall be cast into the sea.’  So cast it in.”

He ceased speaking.  The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed,
puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony.  He burst upon them in
a fury.

“Lift up that end there, damn you!  What the hell’s the matter with you?”

They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a
dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea.  The coal
at his feet dragged him down.  He was gone.

“Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, “keep all hands on
deck now they’re here.  Get in the topsails and jibs and make a good job
of it.  We’re in for a sou’-easter.  Better reef the jib and mainsail
too, while you’re about it.”

In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders and
the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts—all naturally
confusing to a landsman such as myself.  But it was the heartlessness of
it that especially struck me.  The dead man was an episode that was past,
an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal,
while the ship sped along and her work went on.  Nobody had been
affected.  The hunters were laughing at a fresh story of Smoke’s; the men
pulling and hauling, and two of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was
studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely,
buried sordidly, and sinking down, down—

Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me.  Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly
and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.  I
held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San
Francisco and the California coast.  Rain-squalls were driving in
between, and I could scarcely see the fog.  And this strange vessel, with
its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and
out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
Pacific expanse.




CHAPTER IV


What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner _Ghost_, as I strove to
fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain.  The
cook, who was called “the doctor” by the crew, “Tommy” by the hunters,
and “Cooky” by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person.  The difference worked
in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from
him.  Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
domineering and bellicose.  In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman
with a skin soft as a “lydy’s,” but only an ordinary and very worthless
cabin-boy.

He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was
supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance
concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a
source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him.  He refused to take into
consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was
accustomed to had been.  This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt
toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with
more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.

This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
_Ghost_, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an “’owlin’
sou’-easter.”  At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table
in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea
and cooked food down from the galley.  In this connection I cannot
forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.

“Look sharp or you’ll get doused,” was Mr. Mugridge’s parting injunction,
as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in the hollow of
the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread.  One of the hunters, a
tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time from
the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships
sleeping quarters) to the cabin.  Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking
his everlasting cigar.

“’Ere she comes.  Sling yer ’ook!” the cook cried.

I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door
slide shut with a bang.  Then I saw Henderson leaping like a madman for
the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till he was many feet
higher than my head.  Also I saw a great wave, curling and foaming,
poised far above the rail.  I was directly under it.  My mind did not
work quickly, everything was so new and strange.  I grasped that I was in
danger, but that was all.  I stood still, in trepidation.  Then Wolf
Larsen shouted from the poop:

“Grab hold something, you—you Hump!”

But it was too late.  I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might have
clung, and was met by the descending wall of water.  What happened after
that was very confusing.  I was beneath the water, suffocating and
drowning.  My feet were out from under me, and I was turning over and
over and being swept along I knew not where.  Several times I collided
against hard objects, once striking my right knee a terrible blow.  Then
the flood seemed suddenly to subside and I was breathing the good air
again.  I had been swept against the galley and around the steerage
companion-way from the weather side into the lee scuppers.  The pain from
my hurt knee was agonizing.  I could not put my weight on it, or, at
least, I thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg
was broken.  But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley
door:

“’Ere, you!  Don’t tyke all night about it!  Where’s the pot?  Lost
overboard?  Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!”

I managed to struggle to my feet.  The great tea-pot was still in my
hand.  I limped to the galley and handed it to him.  But he was consumed
with indignation, real or feigned.

“Gawd blime me if you ayn’t a slob.  Wot ’re you good for anyw’y, I’d
like to know?  Eh?  Wot ’re you good for any’wy?  Cawn’t even carry a bit
of tea aft without losin’ it.  Now I’ll ’ave to boil some more.

“An’ wot ’re you snifflin’ about?” he burst out at me, with renewed rage.
“’Cos you’ve ’urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma’s darlin’.”

I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and
twitching from the pain.  But I called up all my resolution, set my
teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to
galley without further mishap.  Two things I had acquired by my accident:
an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which I suffered for
weary months, and the name of “Hump,” which Wolf Larsen had called me
from the poop.  Thereafter, fore and aft, I was known by no other name,
until the term became a part of my thought-processes and I identified it
with myself, thought of myself as Hump, as though Hump were I and had
always been I.

It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen,
Johansen, and the six hunters.  The cabin was small, to begin with, and
to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the
schooner’s violent pitching and wallowing.  But what struck me most
forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men whom I
served.  I could feel my knee through my clothes, swelling, and swelling,
and I was sick and faint from the pain of it.  I could catch glimpses of
my face, white and ghastly, distorted with pain, in the cabin mirror.
All the men must have seen my condition, but not one spoke or took notice
of me, till I was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing
the dishes), when he said:

“Don’t let a little thing like that bother you.  You’ll get used to such
things in time.  It may cripple you some, but all the same you’ll be
learning to walk.

“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” he added.

He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary “Yes, sir.”

“I suppose you know a bit about literary things?  Eh?  Good.  I’ll have
some talks with you some time.”

And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and went up
on deck.

That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was sent to
sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk.  I was glad to get
out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet.  To my
surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there seemed no indications of
catching cold, either from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking
from the foundering of the _Martinez_.  Under ordinary circumstances,
after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a
trained nurse.

But my knee was bothering me terribly.  As well as I could make out, the
kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling.  As I sat
in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage,
smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at
it.

“Looks nasty,” he commented.  “Tie a rag around it, and it’ll be all
right.”

That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my
back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do
nothing but rest.  But I must do these men justice.  Callous as they were
to my suffering, they were equally callous to their own when anything
befell them.  And this was due, I believe, first, to habit; and second,
to the fact that they were less sensitively organized.  I really believe
that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as
much as they from a like injury.

Tired as I was,—exhausted, in fact,—I was prevented from sleeping by the
pain in my knee.  It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud.  At
home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and
elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression.  Like the
savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish
in little things.  I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot,
another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly;
and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.  Yet I
have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous
passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another
hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.  He held
that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.  The other
hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd,
narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on
the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother
was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their
nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay
in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.  But they
were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took
sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged
back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined
space.  Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their
reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.  In truth, there was
very little reasoning or none at all.  Their method was one of assertion,
assumption, and denunciation.  They proved that a seal pup could swim or
not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then
following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common
sense, nationality, or past history.  Rebuttal was precisely similar.  I
have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with
whom I was thrown in contact.  Intellectually they were children,
inhabiting the physical forms of men.

And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
offensive-smelling tobacco.  The air was thick and murky with the smoke
of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she
struggled through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I
been a victim to that malady.  As it was, it made me quite squeamish,
though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and
exhaustion.

As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.
It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar
and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should
be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.  Cabin-boy!  I had
never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life.  I had
lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a
scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income.  Violent life
and athletic sports had never appealed to me.  I had always been a
book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my childhood.  I
had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at
its start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof.  And
here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting,
potato-peeling, and dish-washing.  And I was not strong.  The doctors had
always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never
developed it or my body through exercise.  My muscles were small and
soft, like a woman’s, or so the doctors had said time and again in the
course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture
fads.  But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I
was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.

These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are
related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and
helpless _rôle_ I was destined to play.  But I thought, also, of my
mother and sisters, and pictured their grief.  I was among the missing
dead of the _Martinez_ disaster, an unrecovered body.  I could see the
head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the
Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, “Poor chap!”  And I could see
Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in
a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of
oracular and pessimistic epigrams.

And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and
falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner _Ghost_ was
fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific—and I
was on her.  I could hear the wind above.  It came to my ears as a
muffled roar.  Now and again feet stamped overhead.  An endless creaking
was going on all about me, the woodwork and the fittings groaning and
squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys.  The hunters were still
arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed.  The air was
filled with oaths and indecent expressions.  I could see their faces,
flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly
yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.
Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens of
animals in a menagerie.  Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the
walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the
racks.  It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone
years.  My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep.  And it was
a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.




CHAPTER V


But my first night in the hunters’ steerage was also my last.  Next day
Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen, and
sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took possession of
the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first day of the voyage, had
already had two occupants.  The reason for this change was quickly
learned by the hunters, and became the cause of a deal of grumbling on
their part.  It seemed that Johansen, in his sleep, lived over each night
the events of the day.  His incessant talking and shouting and bellowing
of orders had been too much for Wolf Larsen, who had accordingly foisted
the nuisance upon his hunters.

After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble through my
second day on the _Ghost_.  Thomas Mugridge routed me out at half-past
five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed out his dog;
but Mr. Mugridge’s brutality to me was paid back in kind and with
interest.  The unnecessary noise he made (I had lain wide-eyed the whole
night) must have awakened one of the hunters; for a heavy shoe whizzed
through the semi-darkness, and Mr. Mugridge, with a sharp howl of pain,
humbly begged everybody’s pardon.  Later on, in the galley, I noticed
that his ear was bruised and swollen.  It never went entirely back to its
normal shape, and was called a “cauliflower ear” by the sailors.

The day was filled with miserable variety.  I had taken my dried clothes
down from the galley the night before, and the first thing I did was to
exchange the cook’s garments for them.  I looked for my purse.  In
addition to some small change (and I have a good memory for such things),
it had contained one hundred and eighty-five dollars in gold and paper.
The purse I found, but its contents, with the exception of the small
silver, had been abstracted.  I spoke to the cook about it, when I went
on deck to take up my duties in the galley, and though I had looked
forward to a surly answer, I had not expected the belligerent harangue
that I received.

“Look ’ere, ’Ump,” he began, a malicious light in his eyes and a snarl in
his throat; “d’ye want yer nose punched?  If you think I’m a thief, just
keep it to yerself, or you’ll find ’ow bloody well mistyken you are.
Strike me blind if this ayn’t gratitude for yer!  ’Ere you come, a pore
mis’rable specimen of ’uman scum, an’ I tykes yer into my galley an’
treats yer ’ansom, an’ this is wot I get for it.  Nex’ time you can go to
’ell, say I, an’ I’ve a good mind to give you what-for anyw’y.”

So saying, he put up his fists and started for me.  To my shame be it, I
cowered away from the blow and ran out the galley door.  What else was I
to do?  Force, nothing but force, obtained on this brute-ship.  Moral
suasion was a thing unknown.  Picture it to yourself: a man of ordinary
stature, slender of build, and with weak, undeveloped muscles, who has
lived a peaceful, placid life, and is unused to violence of any sort—what
could such a man possibly do?  There was no more reason that I should
stand and face these human beasts than that I should stand and face an
infuriated bull.

So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication and
desiring to be at peace with my conscience.  But this vindication did not
satisfy.  Nor, to this day can I permit my manhood to look back upon
those events and feel entirely exonerated.  The situation was something
that really exceeded rational formulas for conduct and demanded more than
the cold conclusions of reason.  When viewed in the light of formal
logic, there is not one thing of which to be ashamed; but nevertheless a
shame rises within me at the recollection, and in the pride of my manhood
I feel that my manhood has in unaccountable ways been smirched and
sullied.

All of which is neither here nor there.  The speed with which I ran from
the galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank down
helplessly at the break of the poop.  But the Cockney had not pursued me.

“Look at ’im run!  Look at ’im run!” I could hear him crying.  “An’ with
a gyme leg at that!  Come on back, you pore little mamma’s darling.  I
won’t ’it yer; no, I won’t.”

I came back and went on with my work; and here the episode ended for the
time, though further developments were yet to take place.  I set the
breakfast-table in the cabin, and at seven o’clock waited on the hunters
and officers.  The storm had evidently broken during the night, though a
huge sea was still running and a stiff wind blowing.  Sail had been made
in the early watches, so that the _Ghost_ was racing along under
everything except the two topsails and the flying jib.  These three
sails, I gathered from the conversation, were to be set immediately after
breakfast.  I learned, also, that Wolf Larsen was anxious to make the
most of the storm, which was driving him to the south-west into that
portion of the sea where he expected to pick up with the north-east
trades.  It was before this steady wind that he hoped to make the major
portion of the run to Japan, curving south into the tropics and north
again as he approached the coast of Asia.

After breakfast I had another unenviable experience.  When I had finished
washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried the ashes up on
deck to empty them.  Wolf Larsen and Henderson were standing near the
wheel, deep in conversation.  The sailor, Johnson, was steering.  As I
started toward the weather side I saw him make a sudden motion with his
head, which I mistook for a token of recognition and good-morning.  In
reality, he was attempting to warn me to throw my ashes over the lee
side.  Unconscious of my blunder, I passed by Wolf Larsen and the hunter
and flung the ashes over the side to windward.  The wind drove them back,
and not only over me, but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen.  The next
instant the latter kicked me, violently, as a cur is kicked.  I had not
realized there could be so much pain in a kick.  I reeled away from him
and leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition.  Everything
was swimming before my eyes, and I turned sick.  The nausea overpowered
me, and I managed to crawl to the side of the vessel.  But Wolf Larsen
did not follow me up.  Brushing the ashes from his clothes, he had
resumed his conversation with Henderson.  Johansen, who had seen the
affair from the break of the poop, sent a couple of sailors aft to clean
up the mess.

Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different sort.
Following the cook’s instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen’s
state-room to put it to rights and make the bed.  Against the wall, near
the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books.  I glanced over them,
noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De
Quincey.  There were scientific works, too, among which were represented
men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin.  Astronomy and physics were
represented, and I remarked Bulfinch’s _Age of Fable_, Shaw’s _History of
English and American Literature_, and Johnson’s _Natural History_ in two
large volumes.  Then there were a number of grammars, such as Metcalf’s,
and Reed and Kellogg’s; and I smiled as I saw a copy of _The Dean’s
English_.

I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen of
him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them.  But when I came to
make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped apparently as he had
sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition.  It was
open at “In a Balcony,” and I noticed, here and there, passages
underlined in pencil.  Further, letting drop the volume during a lurch of
the ship, a sheet of paper fell out.  It was scrawled over with
geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.

It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one
would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality.  At
once he became an enigma.  One side or the other of his nature was
perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.  I
had already remarked that his language was excellent, marred with an
occasional slight inaccuracy.  Of course, in common speech with the
sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly bristled with errors, which was
due to the vernacular itself; but in the few words he had held with me it
had been clear and correct.

This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me, for
I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.

“I have been robbed,” I said to him, a little later, when I found him
pacing up and down the poop alone.

“Sir,” he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.

“I have been robbed, sir,” I amended.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been left to
dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook when I
mentioned the matter.

He smiled at my recital.  “Pickings,” he concluded; “Cooky’s pickings.
And don’t you think your miserable life worth the price?  Besides,
consider it a lesson.  You’ll learn in time how to take care of your
money for yourself.  I suppose, up to now, your lawyer has done it for
you, or your business agent.”

I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, “How can I
get it back again?”

“That’s your look-out.  You haven’t any lawyer or business agent now, so
you’ll have to depend on yourself.  When you get a dollar, hang on to it.
A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to
lose it.  Besides, you have sinned.  You have no right to put temptation
in the way of your fellow-creatures.  You tempted Cooky, and he fell.
You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy.  By the way, do you
believe in the immortal soul?”

His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the
deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul.  But it was
an illusion.  Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far
into Wolf Larsen’s soul, or seen it at all,—of this I am convinced.  It
was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at
rare moments it played at doing so.

“I read immortality in your eyes,” I answered, dropping the “sir,”—an
experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation warranted it.

He took no notice.  “By that, I take it, you see something that is alive,
but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.”

“I read more than that,” I continued boldly.

“Then you read consciousness.  You read the consciousness of life that it
is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.”

How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought!  From
regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the
leaden sea to windward.  A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of
his mouth grew severe and harsh.  He was evidently in a pessimistic mood.

“Then to what end?” he demanded abruptly, turning back to me.  “If I am
immortal—why?”

I halted.  How could I explain my idealism to this man?  How could I put
into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard
in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended utterance?

“What do you believe, then?” I countered.

“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly.  “It is like
yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour,
a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move.  The
big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the
weak that they may retain their strength.  The lucky eat the most and
move the longest, that is all.  What do you make of those things?”

He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors
who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.

“They move, so does the jelly-fish move.  They move in order to eat in
order that they may keep moving.  There you have it.  They live for their
belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake.  It’s a circle; you get
nowhere.  Neither do they.  In the end they come to a standstill.  They
move no more.  They are dead.”

“They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams—”

“Of grub,” he concluded sententiously.

“And of more—”

“Grub.  Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.”  His voice
sounded harsh.  There was no levity in it.  “For, look you, they dream of
making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of becoming the
mates of ships, of finding fortunes—in short, of being in a better
position for preying on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub
and somebody else to do the dirty work.  You and I are just like them.
There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better.  I am
eating them now, and you too.  But in the past you have eaten more than I
have.  You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good
meals.  Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals?  Not
you.  You never made anything in your own sweat.  You live on an income
which your father earned.  You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon
the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught.  You are one
with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are
masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and
would like to eat themselves.  You wear the warm clothes.  They made the
clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business
agent who handles your money, for a job.”

“But that is beside the matter,” I cried.

“Not at all.”  He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were flashing.
“It is piggishness, and it is life.  Of what use or sense is an
immortality of piggishness?  What is the end?  What is it all about?  You
have made no food.  Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have
saved the lives of a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat
it.  What immortal end did you serve? or did they?  Consider yourself and
me.  What does your boasted immortality amount to when your life runs
foul of mine?  You would like to go back to the land, which is a
favourable place for your kind of piggishness.  It is a whim of mine to
keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes.  And keep you
I will.  I may make or break you.  You may die to-day, this week, or next
month.  I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you are a
miserable weakling.  But if we are immortal, what is the reason for this?
To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be
just the thing for immortals to be doing.  Again, what’s it all about?
Why have I kept you here?—”

“Because you are stronger,” I managed to blurt out.

“But why stronger?” he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
“Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you?  Don’t you see?
Don’t you see?”

“But the hopelessness of it,” I protested.

“I agree with you,” he answered.  “Then why move at all, since moving is
living?  Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no
hopelessness.  But,—and there it is,—we want to live and move, though we
have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to
live and move, to want to live and move.  If it were not for this, life
would be dead.  It is because of this life that is in you that you dream
of your immortality.  The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on
being alive for ever.  Bah!  An eternity of piggishness!”

He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward.  He stopped at the
break of the poop and called me to him.

“By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?” he asked.

“One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir,” I answered.

He nodded his head.  A moment later, as I started down the companion
stairs to lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly cursing some men
amidships.




CHAPTER VI


By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and the
_Ghost_ was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind.
Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen patrolled the
poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the north-eastward,
from which direction the great trade-wind must blow.

The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for the
season’s hunting.  There are seven boats aboard, the captain’s dingey,
and the six which the hunters will use.  Three, a hunter, a boat-puller,
and a boat-steerer, compose a boat’s crew.  On board the schooner the
boat-pullers and steerers are the crew.  The hunters, too, are supposed
to be in command of the watches, subject, always, to the orders of Wolf
Larsen.

All this, and more, I have learned.  The _Ghost_ is considered the
fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets.  In fact,
she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed.  Her lines and
fittings—though I know nothing about such things—speak for themselves.
Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat I had with him during
yesterday’s second dog-watch.  He spoke enthusiastically, with the love
for a fine craft such as some men feel for horses.  He is greatly
disgusted with the outlook, and I am given to understand that Wolf Larsen
bears a very unsavoury reputation among the sealing captains.  It was the
_Ghost_ herself that lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is
already beginning to repent.

As he told me, the _Ghost_ is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably fine
model.  Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a little
over ninety feet.  A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight makes her
very stable, while she carries an immense spread of canvas.  From the
deck to the truck of the maintopmast is something over a hundred feet,
while the foremast with its topmast is eight or ten feet shorter.  I am
giving these details so that the size of this little floating world which
holds twenty-two men may be appreciated.  It is a very little world, a
mote, a speck, and I marvel that men should dare to venture the sea on a
contrivance so small and fragile.

Wolf Larsen has, also, a reputation for reckless carrying on of sail.  I
overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a Californian,
talking about it.  Two years ago he dismasted the _Ghost_ in a gale on
Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which are stronger
and heavier in every way.  He is said to have remarked, when he put them
in, that he preferred turning her over to losing the sticks.

Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather overcome
by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the
_Ghost_.  Half the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their excuse
is that they did not know anything about her or her captain.  And those
who do know, whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so
notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that they could
not sign on any decent schooner.

I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew,—Louis he is
called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very
sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener.  In the
afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the
everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley for a “yarn.”  His
excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed.  He assured
me again and again that it was the last thing in the world he would dream
of doing in a sober moment.  It seems that he has been seal-hunting
regularly each season for a dozen years, and is accounted one of the two
or three very best boat-steerers in both fleets.

“Ah, my boy,” he shook his head ominously at me, “’tis the worst schooner
ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was I.  ’Tis
sealin’ is the sailor’s paradise—on other ships than this.  The mate was
the first, but mark me words, there’ll be more dead men before the trip
is done with.  Hist, now, between you an’ meself and the stanchion there,
this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an’ the _Ghost’ll_ be a hell-ship
like she’s always ben since he had hold iv her.  Don’t I know?  Don’t I
know?  Don’t I remember him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row
an’ shot four iv his men?  Wasn’t I a-layin’ on the _Emma L._, not three
hundred yards away?  An’ there was a man the same year he killed with a
blow iv his fist.  Yes, sir, killed ’im dead-oh.  His head must iv
smashed like an eggshell.  An’ wasn’t there the Governor of Kura Island,
an’ the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an’ didn’t they come
aboard the _Ghost_ as his guests, a-bringin’ their wives along—wee an’
pretty little bits of things like you see ’em painted on fans.  An’ as he
was a-gettin’ under way, didn’t the fond husbands get left astern-like in
their sampan, as it might be by accident?  An’ wasn’t it a week later
that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other side of the
island, with nothin’ before ’em but to walk home acrost the mountains on
their weeny-teeny little straw sandals which wouldn’t hang together a
mile?  Don’t I know?  ’Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen—the great
big beast mentioned iv in Revelation; an’ no good end will he ever come
to.  But I’ve said nothin’ to ye, mind ye.  I’ve whispered never a word;
for old fat Louis’ll live the voyage out if the last mother’s son of yez
go to the fishes.”

“Wolf Larsen!” he snorted a moment later.  “Listen to the word, will ye!
Wolf—’tis what he is.  He’s not black-hearted like some men.  ’Tis no
heart he has at all.  Wolf, just wolf, ’tis what he is.  D’ye wonder he’s
well named?”

“But if he is so well-known for what he is,” I queried, “how is it that
he can get men to ship with him?”

“An’ how is it ye can get men to do anything on God’s earth an’ sea?”
Louis demanded with Celtic fire.  “How d’ye find me aboard if ’twasn’t
that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down?  There’s them that
can’t sail with better men, like the hunters, and them that don’t know,
like the poor devils of wind-jammers for’ard there.  But they’ll come to
it, they’ll come to it, an’ be sorry the day they was born.  I could weep
for the poor creatures, did I but forget poor old fat Louis and the
troubles before him.  But ’tis not a whisper I’ve dropped, mind ye, not a
whisper.”

“Them hunters is the wicked boys,” he broke forth again, for he suffered
from a constitutional plethora of speech.  “But wait till they get to
cutting up iv jinks and rowin’ ’round.  He’s the boy’ll fix ’em.  ’Tis
him that’ll put the fear of God in their rotten black hearts.  Look at
that hunter iv mine, Horner.  ‘Jock’ Horner they call him, so quiet-like
an’ easy-goin’, soft-spoken as a girl, till ye’d think butter wouldn’t
melt in the mouth iv him.  Didn’t he kill his boat-steerer last year?
’Twas called a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama an’
the straight iv it was given me.  An’ there’s Smoke, the black little
devil—didn’t the Roosians have him for three years in the salt mines of
Siberia, for poachin’ on Copper Island, which is a Roosian preserve?
Shackled he was, hand an’ foot, with his mate.  An’ didn’t they have
words or a ruction of some kind?—for ’twas the other fellow Smoke sent up
in the buckets to the top of the mine; an’ a piece at a time he went up,
a leg to-day, an’ to-morrow an arm, the next day the head, an’ so on.”

“But you can’t mean it!” I cried out, overcome with the horror of it.

“Mean what!” he demanded, quick as a flash.  “’Tis nothin’ I’ve said.
Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your mother; an’
never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things iv them an’ him,
God curse his soul, an’ may he rot in purgatory ten thousand years, and
then go down to the last an’ deepest hell iv all!”

Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard, seemed
the least equivocal of the men forward or aft.  In fact, there was
nothing equivocal about him.  One was struck at once by his
straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were tempered by a
modesty which might be mistaken for timidity.  But timid he was not.  He
seemed, rather, to have the courage of his convictions, the certainty of
his manhood.  It was this that made him protest, at the commencement of
our acquaintance, against being called Yonson.  And upon this, and him,
Louis passed judgment and prophecy.

“’Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we’ve for’ard with us,” he
said.  “The best sailorman in the fo’c’sle.  He’s my boat-puller.  But
it’s to trouble he’ll come with Wolf Larsen, as the sparks fly upward.
It’s meself that knows.  I can see it brewin’ an’ comin’ up like a storm
in the sky.  I’ve talked to him like a brother, but it’s little he sees
in takin’ in his lights or flyin’ false signals.  He grumbles out when
things don’t go to suit him, and there’ll be always some tell-tale
carryin’ word iv it aft to the Wolf.  The Wolf is strong, and it’s the
way of a wolf to hate strength, an’ strength it is he’ll see in
Johnson—no knucklin’ under, and a ‘Yes, sir, thank ye kindly, sir,’ for a
curse or a blow.  Oh, she’s a-comin’!  She’s a-comin’!  An’ God knows
where I’ll get another boat-puller!  What does the fool up an’ say, when
the old man calls him Yonson, but ‘Me name is Johnson, sir,’ an’ then
spells it out, letter for letter.  Ye should iv seen the old man’s face!
I thought he’d let drive at him on the spot.  He didn’t, but he will, an’
he’ll break that squarehead’s heart, or it’s little I know iv the ways iv
men on the ships iv the sea.”

Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable.  I am compelled to Mister him
and to Sir him with every speech.  One reason for this is that Wolf
Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him.  It is an unprecedented thing,
I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook; but this is
certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing.  Two or three times he put his head
into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly, and once, this
afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted with him for
fully fifteen minutes.  When it was over, and Mugridge was back in the
galley, he became greasily radiant, and went about his work, humming
coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.

“I always get along with the officers,” he remarked to me in a
confidential tone.  “I know the w’y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted.
There was my last skipper—w’y I thought nothin’ of droppin’ down in the
cabin for a little chat and a friendly glass.  ‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e to me,
‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e, ‘you’ve missed yer vokytion.’  ‘An’ ’ow’s that?’ sez
I.  ‘Yer should ’a been born a gentleman, an’ never ’ad to work for yer
livin’.’  God strike me dead, ’Ump, if that ayn’t wot ’e sez, an’ me
a-sittin’ there in ’is own cabin, jolly-like an’ comfortable, a-smokin’
’is cigars an’ drinkin’ ’is rum.”

This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction.  I never heard a voice I
hated so.  His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile and his
monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes I was all in a
tremble.  Positively, he was the most disgusting and loathsome person I
have ever met.  The filth of his cooking was indescribable; and, as he
cooked everything that was eaten aboard, I was compelled to select what I
ate with great circumspection, choosing from the least dirty of his
concoctions.

My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.  The
nails were discoloured and black, while the skin was already grained with
dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.  Then blisters came,
in a painful and never-ending procession, and I had a great burn on my
forearm, acquired by losing my balance in a roll of the ship and pitching
against the galley stove.  Nor was my knee any better.  The swelling had
not gone down, and the cap was still up on edge.  Hobbling about on it
from morning till night was not helping it any.  What I needed was rest,
if it were ever to get well.

Rest!  I never before knew the meaning of the word.  I had been resting
all my life and did not know it.  But now, could I sit still for one
half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most
pleasurable thing in the world.  But it is a revelation, on the other
hand.  I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working people
hereafter.  I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing.  From
half-past five in the morning till ten o’clock at night I am everybody’s
slave, with not one moment to myself, except such as I can steal near the
end of the second dog-watch.  Let me pause for a minute to look out over
the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the
gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the
hateful voice, “’Ere, you, ’Ump, no sodgerin’.  I’ve got my peepers on
yer.”

There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is
going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.  Henderson seems
the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse; but
roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discoloured eye,
and looked particularly vicious when he came into the cabin for supper.

A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness
and brutishness of these men.  There is one green hand in the crew,
Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered, I imagine, by
the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage.  In the light
baffling airs the schooner had been tacking about a great deal, at which
times the sails pass from one side to the other and a man is sent aloft
to shift over the fore-gaff-topsail.  In some way, when Harrison was
aloft, the sheet jammed in the block through which it runs at the end of
the gaff.  As I understood it, there were two ways of getting it
cleared,—first, by lowering the foresail, which was comparatively easy
and without danger; and second, by climbing out the peak-halyards to the
end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous performance.

Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards.  It was patent to
everybody that the boy was afraid.  And well he might be, eighty feet
above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking ropes.  Had
there been a steady breeze it would not have been so bad, but the _Ghost_
was rolling emptily in a long sea, and with each roll the canvas flapped
and boomed and the halyards slacked and jerked taut.  They were capable
of snapping a man off like a fly from a whip-lash.

Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him, but
hesitated.  It was probably the first time he had been aloft in his life.
Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen’s masterfulness,
burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.

“That’ll do, Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said brusquely.  “I’ll have you know
that I do the swearing on this ship.  If I need your assistance, I’ll
call you in.”

“Yes, sir,” the mate acknowledged submissively.

In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards.  I was looking
up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling, as if with ague,
in every limb.  He proceeded very slowly and cautiously, an inch at a
time.  Outlined against the clear blue of the sky, he had the appearance
of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery of its web.

It was a slight uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and the
halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and mast, gave him
separate holds for hands and feet.  But the trouble lay in that the wind
was not strong enough nor steady enough to keep the sail full.  When he
was half-way out, the _Ghost_ took a long roll to windward and back again
into the hollow between two seas.  Harrison ceased his progress and held
on tightly.  Eighty feet beneath, I could see the agonized strain of his
muscles as he gripped for very life.  The sail emptied and the gaff swung
amid-ships.  The halyards slackened, and, though it all happened very
quickly, I could see them sag beneath the weight of his body.  Then the
gaff swung to the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed
like a cannon, and the three rows of reef-points slatted against the
canvas like a volley of rifles.  Harrison, clinging on, made the giddy
rush through the air.  This rush ceased abruptly.  The halyards became
instantly taut.  It was the snap of the whip.  His clutch was broken.
One hand was torn loose from its hold.  The other lingered desperately
for a moment, and followed.  His body pitched out and down, but in some
way he managed to save himself with his legs.  He was hanging by them,
head downward.  A quick effort brought his hands up to the halyards
again; but he was a long time regaining his former position, where he
hung, a pitiable object.

“I’ll bet he has no appetite for supper,” I heard Wolf Larsen’s voice,
which came to me from around the corner of the galley.  “Stand from
under, you, Johansen!  Watch out!  Here she comes!”

In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for a long
time he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move.
Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on to the completion
of his task.

“It is a shame,” I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow and correct
English.  He was standing by the main rigging, a few feet away from me.
“The boy is willing enough.  He will learn if he has a chance.  But this
is—”  He paused awhile, for the word “murder” was his final judgment.

“Hist, will ye!” Louis whispered to him, “For the love iv your mother
hold your mouth!”

But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.

“Look here,” the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen, “that’s my
boat-puller, and I don’t want to lose him.”

“That’s all right, Standish,” was the reply.  “He’s your boat-puller when
you’ve got him in the boat; but he’s my sailor when I have him aboard,
and I’ll do what I damn well please with him.”

“But that’s no reason—” Standish began in a torrent of speech.

“That’ll do, easy as she goes,” Wolf Larsen counselled back.  “I’ve told
you what’s what, and let it stop at that.  The man’s mine, and I’ll make
soup of him and eat it if I want to.”

There was an angry gleam in the hunter’s eye, but he turned on his heel
and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained, looking
upward.  All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were aloft, where a
human life was at grapples with death.  The callousness of these men, to
whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other men, was
appalling.  I, who had lived out of the whirl of the world, had never
dreamed that its work was carried on in such fashion.  Life had always
seemed a peculiarly sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a
cipher in the arithmetic of commerce.  I must say, however, that the
sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but
the masters (the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly indifferent.
Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact that he did not wish
to lose his boat-puller.  Had it been some other hunter’s boat-puller,
he, like them, would have been no more than amused.

But to return to Harrison.  It took Johansen, insulting and reviling the
poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again.  A little later
he made the end of the gaff, where, astride the spar itself, he had a
better chance for holding on.  He cleared the sheet, and was free to
return, slightly downhill now, along the halyards to the mast.  But he
had lost his nerve.  Unsafe as was his present position, he was loath to
forsake it for the more unsafe position on the halyards.

He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the
deck.  His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling violently.  I
had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human face.  Johansen
called vainly for him to come down.  At any moment he was liable to be
snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with fright.  Wolf Larsen,
walking up and down with Smoke and in conversation, took no more notice
of him, though he cried sharply, once, to the man at the wheel:

“You’re off your course, my man!  Be careful, unless you’re looking for
trouble!”

“Ay, ay, sir,” the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes down.

He had been guilty of running the _Ghost_ several points off her course
in order that what little wind there was should fill the foresail and
hold it steady.  He had striven to help the unfortunate Harrison at the
risk of incurring Wolf Larsen’s anger.

The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible.  Thomas
Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was
continually bobbing his head out the galley door to make jocose remarks.
How I hated him!  And how my hatred for him grew and grew, during that
fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions.  For the first time in my life I
experienced the desire to murder—“saw red,” as some of our picturesque
writers phrase it.  Life in general might still be sacred, but life in
the particular case of Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed.  I
was frightened when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and the
thought flashed through my mind: was I, too, becoming tainted by the
brutality of my environment?—I, who even in the most flagrant crimes had
denied the justice and righteousness of capital punishment?

Fully half-an-hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in some sort
of altercation.  It ended with Johnson flinging off Louis’s detaining arm
and starting forward.  He crossed the deck, sprang into the fore rigging,
and began to climb.  But the quick eye of Wolf Larsen caught him.

“Here, you, what are you up to?” he cried.

Johnson’s ascent was arrested.  He looked his captain in the eyes and
replied slowly:

“I am going to get that boy down.”

“You’ll get down out of that rigging, and damn lively about it!  D’ye
hear?  Get down!”

Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters of
ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went on
forward.

At half after five I went below to set the cabin table, but I hardly knew
what I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with the vision of a
man, white-faced and trembling, comically like a bug, clinging to the
thrashing gaff.  At six o’clock, when I served supper, going on deck to
get the food from the galley, I saw Harrison, still in the same position.
The conversation at the table was of other things.  Nobody seemed
interested in the wantonly imperilled life.  But making an extra trip to
the galley a little later, I was gladdened by the sight of Harrison
staggering weakly from the rigging to the forecastle scuttle.  He had
finally summoned the courage to descend.

Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation I had
with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.

“You were looking squeamish this afternoon,” he began.  “What was the
matter?”

I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as Harrison,
that he was trying to draw me, and I answered, “It was because of the
brutal treatment of that boy.”

He gave a short laugh.  “Like sea-sickness, I suppose.  Some men are
subject to it, and others are not.”

“Not so,” I objected.

“Just so,” he went on.  “The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is
full of motion.  And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the
other.  That’s the only reason.”

“But you, who make a mock of human life, don’t you place any value upon
it whatever?” I demanded.

“Value?  What value?”  He looked at me, and though his eyes were steady
and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them.  “What kind of
value?  How do you measure it?  Who values it?”

“I do,” I made answer.

“Then what is it worth to you?  Another man’s life, I mean.  Come now,
what is it worth?”

The value of life?  How could I put a tangible value upon it?  Somehow,
I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf
Larsen.  I have since determined that a part of it was due to the man’s
personality, but that the greater part was due to his totally different
outlook.  Unlike other materialists I had met and with whom I had
something in common to start on, I had nothing in common with him.
Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind that baffled
me.  He drove so directly to the core of the matter, divesting a question
always of all superfluous details, and with such an air of finality, that
I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water, with no footing under
me.  Value of life?  How could I answer the question on the spur of the
moment?  The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic.  That it was
intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned.  But when he
challenged the truism I was speechless.

“We were talking about this yesterday,” he said.  “I held that life was a
ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and
that living was merely successful piggishness.  Why, if there is anything
in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world.  There is
only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is
demanding to be born is limitless.  Nature is a spendthrift.  Look at the
fish and their millions of eggs.  For that matter, look at you and me.
In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives.  Could we but
find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the
unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and
populate continents.  Life?  Bah!  It has no value.  Of cheap things it
is the cheapest.  Everywhere it goes begging.  Nature spills it out with
a lavish hand.  Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand
lives, and it’s life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life
is left.”

“You have read Darwin,” I said.  “But you read him misunderstandingly
when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton
destruction of life.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “You know you only mean that in relation to
human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you destroy as
much as I or any other man.  And human life is in no wise different,
though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is.  Why should I
be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value?  There
are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers
than there are factories or machines for them.  Why, you who live on the
land know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and
loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain more
poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which
is life destroyed), than you know what to do with.  Have you ever seen
the London dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?”

He started for the companion stairs, but turned his head for a final
word.  “Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon
itself?  And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity
prejudiced in its own favour.  Take that man I had aloft.  He held on as
if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies.  To
you?  No.  To me?  Not at all.  To himself?  Yes.  But I do not accept
his estimate.  He sadly overrates himself.  There is plenty more life
demanding to be born.  Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck
like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world.  He
was worth nothing to the world.  The supply is too large.  To himself
only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was,
being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself.  He alone rated
himself beyond diamonds and rubies.  Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread
out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does
not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone.  He does not lose
anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.
Don’t you see?  And what have you to say?”

“That you are at least consistent,” was all I could say, and I went on
washing the dishes.




CHAPTER VII


At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
north-east trades.  I came on deck, after a good night’s rest in spite of
my poor knee, to find the _Ghost_ foaming along, wing-and-wing, and every
sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern.  Oh, the wonder
of the great trade-wind!  All day we sailed, and all night, and the next
day, and the next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing
steadily and strong.  The schooner sailed herself.  There was no pulling
and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at
all for the sailors to do except to steer.  At night when the sun went
down, the sheets were slackened; in the morning, when they yielded up the
damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled tight again—and that was
all.

Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time, is the
speed we are making.  And ever out of the north-east the brave wind
blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty miles between the
dawns.  It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving
San Francisco behind and with which we are foaming down upon the tropics.
Each day grows perceptibly warmer.  In the second dog-watch the sailors
come on deck, stripped, and heave buckets of water upon one another from
overside.  Flying-fish are beginning to be seen, and during the night the
watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of those that fall aboard.
In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is
pleasantly areek with the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat is
served fore and aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing
beauties from the bowsprit end.

Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the
crosstrees, watching the _Ghost_ cleaving the water under press of sail.
There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort of
trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake, and
the heave and the run of her over the liquid mountains that are moving
with us in stately procession.

The days and nights are “all a wonder and a wild delight,” and though I
have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze and
gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed.
Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the
forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin.  All around the
horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never changing, never moving, like a
silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky.

I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying on
the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam thrust
aside by the _Ghost’s_ forefoot.  It sounded like the gurgling of a brook
over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured
me away and out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor
Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books.
But a voice behind me, the unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with
the invincible certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the
words he was quoting, aroused me.

   “‘O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light
      That holds the hot sky tame,
   And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors
      Where the scared whale flukes in flame.
   Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
      And her ropes are taut with the dew,
   For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
      We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always
   new.’”

“Eh, Hump?  How’s it strike you?” he asked, after the due pause which
words and setting demanded.

I looked into his face.  It was aglow with light, as the sea itself, and
the eyes were flashing in the starshine.

“It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should show
enthusiasm,” I answered coldly.

“Why, man, it’s living! it’s life!” he cried.

“Which is a cheap thing and without value.”  I flung his words at him.

He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in his
voice.

“Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head, what
a thing this life is.  Of course life is valueless, except to itself.
And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now—to myself.
It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating,
but which I cannot help, for it is the life that is in me that makes the
rating.”

He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought that
was in him, and finally went on.

“Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time
were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine.  I know truth,
divine good from evil, right from wrong.  My vision is clear and far.  I
could almost believe in God.  But,” and his voice changed and the light
went out of his face,—“what is this condition in which I find myself?
this joy of living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well
call it?  It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one’s
digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and
all goes well.  It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood,
the effervescence of the ferment—that makes some men think holy thoughts,
and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him.  That
is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast,
the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is
alive.  And—bah!  To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays.  And
I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of
myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon,
to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles
that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of
fishes.  Bah!  And bah! again.  The champagne is already flat.  The
sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.”

He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with the
weight and softness of a tiger.  The _Ghost_ ploughed on her way.  I
noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to
it the effect of Wolf Larsen’s swift rush from sublime exultation to
despair slowly left me.  Then some deep-water sailor, from the waist of
the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the “Song of the Trade Wind”:

   “Oh, I am the wind the seamen love—
      I am steady, and strong, and true;
   They follow my track by the clouds above,
      O’er the fathomless tropic blue.

                                  * * * * *

   Through daylight and dark I follow the bark
      I keep like a hound on her trail;
   I’m strongest at noon, yet under the moon,
      I stiffen the bunt of her sail.”




CHAPTER VIII


Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his
strange moods and vagaries.  At other times I take him for a great man, a
genius who has never arrived.  And, finally, I am convinced that he is
the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or
generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of
civilization.  He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced
type.  Not only that, but he is very lonely.  There is no congeniality
between him and the rest of the men aboard ship.  His tremendous virility
and mental strength wall him apart.  They are more like children to him,
even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies.  Or else
he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in
their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what
soul-stuff is made.

I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or
that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest,
pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost
laughable to me who stood onlooker and who understood.  Concerning his
own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes
experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or
attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men.  I know, with the
possible exception of the incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen
him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when
all the force of him is called into play.

While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon
which I have already touched once or twice.  The twelve o’clock dinner
was over, one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin in order,
when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended the companion stairs.
Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-room opening off from the
cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to linger or to be seen,
and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, a timid spectre.

“So you know how to play ‘Nap,’” Wolf Larsen was saying in a pleased sort
of voice.  “I might have guessed an Englishman would know.  I learned it
myself in English ships.”

Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased was
he at chumming thus with the captain.  The little airs he put on and the
painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified
place in life would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous.  He
quite ignored my presence, though I credited him with being simply unable
to see me.  His pale, wishy-washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer
seas, though what blissful visions they beheld were beyond my
imagination.

“Get the cards, Hump,” Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at the
table.  “And bring out the cigars and the whisky you’ll find in my
berth.”

I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting broadly
that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman’s son
gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was a remittance man and
was paid to keep away from England—“p’yed ’ansomely, sir,” was the way he
put it; “p’yed ’ansomely to sling my ’ook an’ keep slingin’ it.”

I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned,
shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the
tumblers.  These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky—“a
gentleman’s drink?” quoth Thomas Mugridge,—and they clinked their glasses
to the glorious game of “Nap,” lighted cigars, and fell to shuffling and
dealing the cards.

They played for money.  They increased the amounts of the bets.  They
drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more.  I do not know
whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,—a thing he was thoroughly capable of
doing,—but he won steadily.  The cook made repeated journeys to his bunk
for money.  Each time he performed the journey with greater swagger, but
he never brought more than a few dollars at a time.  He grew maudlin,
familiar, could hardly see the cards or sit upright.  As a preliminary to
another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen’s buttonhole with a
greasy forefinger and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, “I got money,
I got money, I tell yer, an’ I’m a gentleman’s son.”

Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass,
and if anything his glasses were fuller.  There was no change in him.  He
did not appear even amused at the other’s antics.

In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman,
the cook’s last money was staked on the game—and lost.  Whereupon he
leaned his head on his hands and wept.  Wolf Larsen looked curiously at
him, as though about to probe and vivisect him, then changed his mind, as
from the foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe.

“Hump,” he said to me, elaborately polite, “kindly take Mr. Mugridge’s
arm and help him up on deck.  He is not feeling very well.”

“And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,” he
added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.

I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors
who had been told off for the purpose.  Mr. Mugridge was sleepily
spluttering that he was a gentleman’s son.  But as I descended the
companion stairs to clear the table I heard him shriek as the first
bucket of water struck him.

Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.

“One hundred and eighty-five dollars even,” he said aloud.  “Just as I
thought.  The beggar came aboard without a cent.”

“And what you have won is mine, sir,” I said boldly.

He favoured me with a quizzical smile.  “Hump, I have studied some
grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.  ‘Was mine,’ you
should have said, not ’is mine.’”

“It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics,” I answered.

It was possibly a minute before he spoke.

“D’ye know, Hump,” he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it an
indefinable strain of sadness, “that this is the first time I have heard
the word ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man.  You and I are the only men on
this ship who know its meaning.”

“At one time in my life,” he continued, after another pause, “I dreamed
that I might some day talk with men who used such language, that I might
lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold
conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as
ethics.  And this is the first time I have ever heard the word
pronounced.  Which is all by the way, for you are wrong.  It is a
question neither of grammar nor ethics, but of fact.”

“I understand,” I said.  “The fact is that you have the money.”

His face brightened.  He seemed pleased at my perspicacity.  “But it is
avoiding the real question,” I continued, “which is one of right.”

“Ah,” he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, “I see you still
believe in such things as right and wrong.”

“But don’t you?—at all?” I demanded.

“Not the least bit.  Might is right, and that is all there is to it.
Weakness is wrong.  Which is a very poor way of saying that it is good
for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak—or better yet,
it is pleasurable to be strong, because of the profits; painful to be
weak, because of the penalties.  Just now the possession of this money is
a pleasurable thing.  It is good for one to possess it.  Being able to
possess it, I wrong myself and the life that is in me if I give it to you
and forego the pleasure of possessing it.”

“But you wrong me by withholding it,” I objected.

“Not at all.  One man cannot wrong another man.  He can only wrong
himself.  As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the interests of
others.  Don’t you see?  How can two particles of the yeast wrong each
other by striving to devour each other?  It is their inborn heritage to
strive to devour, and to strive not to be devoured.  When they depart
from this they sin.”

“Then you don’t believe in altruism?” I asked.

He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he pondered it
thoughtfully.  “Let me see, it means something about coöperation, doesn’t
it?”

“Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,” I answered
unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary, which, like his
knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated man, whom no
one had directed in his studies, and who had thought much and talked
little or not at all.  “An altruistic act is an act performed for the
welfare of others.  It is unselfish, as opposed to an act performed for
self, which is selfish.”

He nodded his head.  “Oh, yes, I remember it now.  I ran across it in
Spencer.”

“Spencer!” I cried.  “Have you read him?”

“Not very much,” was his confession.  “I understood quite a good deal of
_First Principles_, but his _Biology_ took the wind out of my sails, and
his _Psychology_ left me butting around in the doldrums for many a day.
I honestly could not understand what he was driving at.  I put it down to
mental deficiency on my part, but since then I have decided that it was
for want of preparation.  I had no proper basis.  Only Spencer and myself
know how hard I hammered.  But I did get something out of his _Data of
Ethics_.  There’s where I ran across ‘altruism,’ and I remember now how
it was used.”

I wondered what this man could have got from such a work.  Spencer I
remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his ideal of
highest conduct.  Wolf Larsen, evidently, had sifted the great
philosopher’s teachings, rejecting and selecting according to his needs
and desires.

“What else did you run across?” I asked.

His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably phrasing
thoughts which he had never before put into speech.  I felt an elation of
spirit.  I was groping into his soul-stuff as he made a practice of
groping in the soul-stuff of others.  I was exploring virgin territory.
A strange, a terribly strange, region was unrolling itself before my
eyes.

“In as few words as possible,” he began, “Spencer puts it something like
this: First, a man must act for his own benefit—to do this is to be moral
and good.  Next, he must act for the benefit of his children.  And third,
he must act for the benefit of his race.”

“And the highest, finest, right conduct,” I interjected, “is that act
which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his race.”

“I wouldn’t stand for that,” he replied.  “Couldn’t see the necessity for
it, nor the common sense.  I cut out the race and the children.  I would
sacrifice nothing for them.  It’s just so much slush and sentiment, and
you must see it yourself, at least for one who does not believe in
eternal life.  With immortality before me, altruism would be a paying
business proposition.  I might elevate my soul to all kinds of altitudes.
But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell
this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why, it would be
immoral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice.  Any sacrifice
that makes me lose one crawl or squirm is foolish,—and not only foolish,
for it is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing.  I must not lose one
crawl or squirm if I am to get the most out of the ferment.  Nor will the
eternal movelessness that is coming to me be made easier or harder by the
sacrifices or selfishnesses of the time when I was yeasty and acrawl.”

“Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically, a
hedonist.”

“Big words,” he smiled.  “But what is a hedonist?”

He nodded agreement when I had given the definition.  “And you are also,”
I continued, “a man one could not trust in the least thing where it was
possible for a selfish interest to intervene?”

“Now you’re beginning to understand,” he said, brightening.

“You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?”

“That’s it.”

“A man of whom to be always afraid—”

“That’s the way to put it.”

“As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?”

“Now you know me,” he said.  “And you know me as I am generally known.
Other men call me ‘Wolf.’”

“You are a sort of monster,” I added audaciously, “a Caliban who has
pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments, by whim and
fancy.”

His brow clouded at the allusion.  He did not understand, and I quickly
learned that he did not know the poem.

“I’m just reading Browning,” he confessed, “and it’s pretty tough.  I
haven’t got very far along, and as it is I’ve about lost my bearings.”

Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
state-room and read “Caliban” aloud.  He was delighted.  It was a
primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he understood
thoroughly.  He interrupted again and again with comment and criticism.
When I finished, he had me read it over a second time, and a third.  We
fell into discussion—philosophy, science, evolution, religion.  He
betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man, and, it must be granted,
the sureness and directness of the primitive mind.  The very simplicity
of his reasoning was its strength, and his materialism was far more
compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charley Furuseth.  Not
that I—a confirmed and, as Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental
idealist—was to be compelled; but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last
strongholds of my faith with a vigour that received respect, while not
accorded conviction.

Time passed.  Supper was at hand and the table not laid.  I became
restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the
companion-way, sick and angry of countenance, I prepared to go about my
duties.  But Wolf Larsen cried out to him:

“Cooky, you’ve got to hustle to-night.  I’m busy with Hump, and you’ll do
the best you can without him.”

And again the unprecedented was established.  That night I sat at table
with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited on us and
washed the dishes afterward—a whim, a Caliban-mood of Wolf Larsen’s, and
one I foresaw would bring me trouble.  In the meantime we talked and
talked, much to the disgust of the hunters, who could not understand a
word.




CHAPTER IX


Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with Wolf
Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss life,
literature, and the universe, the while Thomas Mugridge fumed and raged
and did my work as well as his own.

“Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,” was Louis’s warning,
given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen was engaged in
straightening out a row among the hunters.

“Ye can’t tell what’ll be happenin’,” Louis went on, in response to my
query for more definite information.  “The man’s as contrary as air
currents or water currents.  You can never guess the ways iv him.  ’Tis
just as you’re thinkin’ you know him and are makin’ a favourable slant
along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and comes howlin’ down upon
you and a-rippin’ all iv your fine-weather sails to rags.”

So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis smote
me.  We had been having a heated discussion,—upon life, of course,—and,
grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf Larsen and the
life of Wolf Larsen.  In fact, I was vivisecting him and turning over his
soul-stuff as keenly and thoroughly as it was his custom to do it to
others.  It may be a weakness of mine that I have an incisive way of
speech; but I threw all restraint to the winds and cut and slashed until
the whole man of him was snarling.  The dark sun-bronze of his face went
black with wrath, his eyes were ablaze.  There was no clearness or sanity
in them—nothing but the terrific rage of a madman.  It was the wolf in
him that I saw, and a mad wolf at that.

He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm.  I had steeled myself
to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the enormous
strength of the man was too much for my fortitude.  He had gripped me by
the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted
and shrieked aloud.  My feet went out from under me.  I simply could not
stand upright and endure the agony.  The muscles refused their duty.  The
pain was too great.  My biceps was being crushed to a pulp.

He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes, and
he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a growl.  I
fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down, lighted a
cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse.  As I writhed about I
could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often noted, that wonder
and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting query of his as to what
it was all about.

I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs.  Fair
weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley.
My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed before I could
use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness and pain went out
of it.  And he had done nothing but put his hand upon my arm and squeeze.
There had been no wrenching or jerking.  He had just closed his hand with
a steady pressure.  What he might have done I did not fully realize till
next day, when he put his head into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed
friendliness, asked me how my arm was getting on.

“It might have been worse,” he smiled.

I was peeling potatoes.  He picked one up from the pan.  It was
fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled.  He closed his hand upon it, squeezed,
and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy streams.  The
pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned away, and I had a
sharp vision of how it might have fared with me had the monster put his
real strength upon me.

But the three days’ rest was good in spite of it all, for it had given my
knee the very chance it needed.  It felt much better, the swelling had
materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending into its proper
place.  Also, the three days’ rest brought the trouble I had foreseen.
It was plainly Thomas Mugridge’s intention to make me pay for those three
days.  He treated me vilely, cursed me continually, and heaped his own
work upon me.  He even ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was
becoming animal-like myself, and I snarled in his face so terribly that
it must have frightened him back.  It is no pleasant picture I can
conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van Weyden, in that noisome ship’s galley,
crouched in a corner over my task, my face raised to the face of the
creature about to strike me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog’s, my
eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of
fear and helplessness.  I do not like the picture.  It reminds me too
strongly of a rat in a trap.  I do not care to think of it; but it was
effective, for the threatened blow did not descend.

Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I
glared.  A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and showing
our teeth.  He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I had not
quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to intimidate me.
There was only one galley knife that, as a knife, amounted to anything.
This, through many years of service and wear, had acquired a long, lean
blade.  It was unusually cruel-looking, and at first I had shuddered
every time I used it.  The cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and
proceeded to sharpen the knife.  He did it with great ostentation,
glancing significantly at me the while.  He whetted it up and down all
day long.  Every odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out
and was whetting away.  The steel acquired a razor edge.  He tried it
with the ball of his thumb or across the nail.  He shaved hairs from the
back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and
found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge
somewhere.  Then he would put it on the stone again and whet, whet, whet,
till I could have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.

It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it, that
under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like mine, that
would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against
doing and was afraid of doing.  “Cooky’s sharpening his knife for Hump,”
was being whispered about among the sailors, and some of them twitted him
about it.  This he took in good part, and was really pleased, nodding his
head with direful foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the
erstwhile cabin-boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.

Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse
Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain.  Leach had evidently
done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not forgiven, for
words followed and evil names involving smirched ancestries.  Mugridge
menaced with the knife he was sharpening for me.  Leach laughed and
hurled more of his Telegraph Hill Billingsgate, and before either he or I
knew what had happened, his right arm had been ripped open from elbow to
wrist by a quick slash of the knife.  The cook backed away, a fiendish
expression on his face, the knife held before him in a position of
defence.  But Leach took it quite calmly, though blood was spouting upon
the deck as generously as water from a fountain.

“I’m goin’ to get you, Cooky,” he said, “and I’ll get you hard.  And I
won’t be in no hurry about it.  You’ll be without that knife when I come
for you.”

So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward.  Mugridge’s face was
livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect sooner or
later from the man he had stabbed.  But his demeanour toward me was more
ferocious than ever.  In spite of his fear at the reckoning he must
expect to pay for what he had done, he could see that it had been an
object-lesson to me, and he became more domineering and exultant.  Also
there was a lust in him, akin to madness, which had come with sight of
the blood he had drawn.  He was beginning to see red in whatever
direction he looked.  The psychology of it is sadly tangled, and yet I
could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though it were a
printed book.

Several days went by, the _Ghost_ still foaming down the trades, and I
could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge’s eyes.  And I
confess that I became afraid, very much afraid.  Whet, whet, whet, it
went all day long.  The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge and
glared at me was positively carnivorous.  I was afraid to turn my
shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I went out backwards—to the
amusement of the sailors and hunters, who made a point of gathering in
groups to witness my exit.  The strain was too great.  I sometimes
thought my mind would give way under it—a meet thing on this ship of
madmen and brutes.  Every hour, every minute of my existence was in
jeopardy.  I was a human soul in distress, and yet no soul, fore or aft,
betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to my aid.  At times I thought of
throwing myself on the mercy of Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the
mocking devil in his eyes that questioned life and sneered at it would
come strong upon me and compel me to refrain.  At other times I seriously
contemplated suicide, and the whole force of my hopeful philosophy was
required to keep me from going over the side in the darkness of night.

Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but I
gave him short answers and eluded him.  Finally, he commanded me to
resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook do my work.
Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring from Thomas
Mugridge because of the three days of favouritism which had been shown
me.  Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.

“So you’re afraid, eh?” he sneered.

“Yes,” I said defiantly and honestly, “I am afraid.”

“That’s the way with you fellows,” he cried, half angrily,
“sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid to die.  At sight
of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging of life to life
overcomes all your fond foolishness.  Why, my dear fellow, you will live
for ever.  You are a god, and God cannot be killed.  Cooky cannot hurt
you.  You are sure of your resurrection.  What’s there to be afraid of?

“You have eternal life before you.  You are a millionaire in immortality,
and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose fortune is less
perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or time.  It is
impossible for you to diminish your principal.  Immortality is a thing
without beginning or end.  Eternity is eternity, and though you die here
and now you will go on living somewhere else and hereafter.  And it is
all very beautiful, this shaking off of the flesh and soaring of the
imprisoned spirit.  Cooky cannot hurt you.  He can only give you a boost
on the path you eternally must tread.

“Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost Cooky?
According to your ideas, he, too, must be an immortal millionaire.  You
cannot bankrupt him.  His paper will always circulate at par.  You cannot
diminish the length of his living by killing him, for he is without
beginning or end.  He’s bound to go on living, somewhere, somehow.  Then
boost him.  Stick a knife in him and let his spirit free.  As it is, it’s
in a nasty prison, and you’ll do him only a kindness by breaking down the
door.  And who knows?—it may be a very beautiful spirit that will go
soaring up into the blue from that ugly carcass.  Boost him along, and
I’ll promote you to his place, and he’s getting forty-five dollars a
month.”

It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf Larsen.
Whatever was to be done I must do for myself; and out of the courage of
fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with his own weapons.
I borrowed a whetstone from Johansen.  Louis, the boat-steerer, had
already begged me for condensed milk and sugar.  The lazarette, where
such delicacies were stored, was situated beneath the cabin floor.
Watching my chance, I stole five cans of the milk, and that night, when
it was Louis’s watch on deck, I traded them with him for a dirk as lean
and cruel-looking as Thomas Mugridge’s vegetable knife.  It was rusty and
dull, but I turned the grindstone while Louis gave it an edge.  I slept
more soundly than usual that night.

Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet,
whet.  I glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking the ashes
from the stove.  When I returned from throwing them overside, he was
talking to Harrison, whose honest yokel’s face was filled with
fascination and wonder.

“Yes,” Mugridge was saying, “an’ wot does ’is worship do but give me two
years in Reading.  But blimey if I cared.  The other mug was fixed
plenty.  Should ’a seen ’im.  Knife just like this.  I stuck it in, like
into soft butter, an’ the w’y ’e squealed was better’n a tu-penny gaff.”
He shot a glance in my direction to see if I was taking it in, and went
on.  “‘I didn’t mean it Tommy,’ ’e was snifflin’; ‘so ’elp me Gawd, I
didn’t mean it!’  ‘I’ll fix yer bloody well right,’ I sez, an’ kept right
after ’im.  I cut ’im in ribbons, that’s wot I did, an’ ’e a-squealin’
all the time.  Once ’e got ’is ’and on the knife an’ tried to ’old it.
‘Ad ’is fingers around it, but I pulled it through, cuttin’ to the bone.
O, ’e was a sight, I can tell yer.”

A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, and Harrison went
aft.  Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley and went on
with his knife-sharpening.  I put the shovel away and calmly sat down on
the coal-box facing him.  He favoured me with a vicious stare.  Still
calmly, though my heart was going pitapat, I pulled out Louis’s dirk and
began to whet it on the stone.  I had looked for almost any sort of
explosion on the Cockney’s part, but to my surprise he did not appear
aware of what I was doing.  He went on whetting his knife.  So did I.
And for two hours we sat there, face to face, whet, whet, whet, till the
news of it spread abroad and half the ship’s company was crowding the
galley doors to see the sight.

Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner, the
quiet, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse,
advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen,
at the same time giving what he called the “Spanish twist” to the blade.
Leach, his bandaged arm prominently to the fore, begged me to leave a few
remnants of the cook for him; and Wolf Larsen paused once or twice at the
break of the poop to glance curiously at what must have been to him a
stirring and crawling of the yeasty thing he knew as life.

And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same
sordid values to me.  There was nothing pretty about it, nothing
divine—only two cowardly moving things that sat whetting steel upon
stone, and a group of other moving things, cowardly and otherwise, that
looked on.  Half of them, I am sure, were anxious to see us shedding each
other’s blood.  It would have been entertainment.  And I do not think
there was one who would have interfered had we closed in a
death-struggle.

On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish.  Whet,
whet, whet,—Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in a ship’s galley
and trying its edge with his thumb!  Of all situations this was the most
inconceivable.  I know that my own kind could not have believed it
possible.  I had not been called “Sissy” Van Weyden all my days without
reason, and that “Sissy” Van Weyden should be capable of doing this thing
was a revelation to Humphrey Van Weyden, who knew not whether to be
exultant or ashamed.

But nothing happened.  At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put away
knife and stone and held out his hand.

“Wot’s the good of mykin’ a ’oly show of ourselves for them mugs?” he
demanded.  “They don’t love us, an’ bloody well glad they’d be a-seein’
us cuttin’ our throats.  Yer not ’arf bad, ’Ump!  You’ve got spunk, as
you Yanks s’y, an’ I like yer in a w’y.  So come on an’ shyke.”

Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he.  It was a distinct
victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by shaking his
detestable hand.

“All right,” he said pridelessly, “tyke it or leave it, I’ll like yer
none the less for it.”  And to save his face he turned fiercely upon the
onlookers.  “Get outa my galley-doors, you bloomin’ swabs!”

This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at sight
of it the sailors scrambled out of the way.  This was a sort of victory
for Thomas Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more gracefully the defeat
I had given him, though, of course, he was too discreet to attempt to
drive the hunters away.

“I see Cooky’s finish,” I heard Smoke say to Horner.

“You bet,” was the reply.  “Hump runs the galley from now on, and Cooky
pulls in his horns.”

Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign that the
conversation had reached me.  I had not thought my victory was so
far-reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I had gained.
As the days went by, Smoke’s prophecy was verified.  The Cockney became
more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf Larsen.  I mistered him
and sirred him no longer, washed no more greasy pots, and peeled no more
potatoes.  I did my own work, and my own work only, and when and in what
fashion I saw fit.  Also I carried the dirk in a sheath at my hip,
sailor-fashion, and maintained toward Thomas Mugridge a constant attitude
which was composed of equal parts of domineering, insult, and contempt.




CHAPTER X


My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases—if by intimacy may be denoted
those relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet,
between king and jester.  I am to him no more than a toy, and he values
me no more than a child values a toy.  My function is to amuse, and so
long as I amuse all goes well; but let him become bored, or let him have
one of his black moods come upon him, and at once I am relegated from
cabin table to galley, while, at the same time, I am fortunate to escape
with my life and a whole body.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me.  There is not
a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not
despise.  He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him and
that seems never to have found adequate expression in works.  He is as
Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished to a society of
soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.

This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is
oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race.  Knowing him, I review
the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.  The
white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon
were of the same fibre as he.  The frivolity of the laughter-loving
Latins is no part of him.  When he laughs it is from a humour that is
nothing else than ferocious.  But he laughs rarely; he is too often sad.
And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race.  It is the
race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection,
has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.

In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
religion in its more agonizing forms.  But the compensations of such
religion are denied Wolf Larsen.  His brutal materialism will not permit
it.  So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him, but to be
devilish.  Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorry
for him, as instance three mornings ago, when I went into his stateroom
to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon him.  He did not see
me.  His head was buried in his hands, and his shoulders were heaving
convulsively as with sobs.  He seemed torn by some mighty grief.  As I
softly withdrew I could hear him groaning, “God!  God!  God!”  Not that
he was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
soul.

At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening,
strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin.

“I’ve never been sick in my life, Hump,” he said, as I guided him to his
room.  “Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head was
healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar.”

For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as wild
animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without plaint,
without sympathy, utterly alone.

This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed and put
things in order, I found him well and hard at work.  Table and bunk were
littered with designs and calculations.  On a large transparent sheet,
compass and square in hand, he was copying what appeared to be a scale of
some sort or other.

“Hello, Hump,” he greeted me genially.  “I’m just finishing the finishing
touches.  Want to see it work?”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to kindergarten
simplicity,” he answered gaily.  “From to-day a child will be able to
navigate a ship.  No more long-winded calculations.  All you need is one
star in the sky on a dirty night to know instantly where you are.  Look.
I place the transparent scale on this star-map, revolving the scale on
the North Pole.  On the scale I’ve worked out the circles of altitude and
the lines of bearing.  All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale
till it is opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto!
there you are, the ship’s precise location!”

There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue this
morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.

“You must be well up in mathematics,” I said.  “Where did you go to
school?”

“Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,” was the answer.  “I had to dig
it out for myself.”

“And why do you think I have made this thing?” he demanded, abruptly.
“Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?”  He laughed one of
his horrible mocking laughs.  “Not at all.  To get it patented, to make
money from it, to revel in piggishness with all night in while other men
do the work.  That’s my purpose.  Also, I have enjoyed working it out.”

“The creative joy,” I murmured.

“I guess that’s what it ought to be called.  Which is another way of
expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement
over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because
it is yeast and crawls.”

I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate
materialism and went about making the bed.  He continued copying lines
and figures upon the transparent scale.  It was a task requiring the
utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he
tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
fascinated sort of way.  He was certainly a handsome man—beautiful in the
masculine sense.  And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the
total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face.  It
was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong.  And by this I
do not wish to be misunderstood.  What I mean is that it was the face of
a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience,
or who had no conscience.  I am inclined to the latter way of accounting
for it.  He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he
was of the type that came into the world before the development of the
moral nature.  He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.
Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp
as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a
dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to his
savagery and his beauty.  The lips were full, yet possessed of the
firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips.  The
set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all
the fierceness and indomitableness of the male—the nose also.  It was the
nose of a being born to conquer and command.  It just hinted of the eagle
beak.  It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it was
a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for the other.  And
while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength, the
primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of
mouth and eye and brow, seemed to give a largeness and completeness which
otherwise the face would have lacked.

And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him.  I cannot say how
greatly the man had come to interest me.  Who was he?  What was he?  How
had he happened to be?  All powers seemed his, all potentialities—why,
then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner
with a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted
seals?

My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.

“Why is it that you have not done great things in this world?  With the
power that is yours you might have risen to any height.  Unpossessed of
conscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered the world, broken
it to your hand.  And yet here you are, at the top of your life, where
diminishing and dying begin, living an obscure and sordid existence,
hunting sea animals for the satisfaction of woman’s vanity and love of
decoration, revelling in a piggishness, to use your own words, which is
anything and everything except splendid.  Why, with all that wonderful
strength, have you not done something?  There was nothing to stop you,
nothing that could stop you.  What was wrong?  Did you lack ambition?
Did you fall under temptation?  What was the matter?  What was the
matter?”

He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst, and
followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathless
and dismayed.  He waited a moment, as though seeking where to begin, and
then said:

“Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow?  If
you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places, where there
was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no
deepness of earth.  And when the sun was up they were scorched, and
because they had no root they withered away.  And some fell among thorns,
and the thorns sprung up and choked them.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well?” he queried, half petulantly.  “It was not well.  I was one of
those seeds.”

He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying.  I finished my
work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to me.

“Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you will
see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord.  I was born within a hundred
miles of that stretch of water.  But I was not born Norwegian.  I am a
Dane.  My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to that
bleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know.  I never heard.
Outside of that there is nothing mysterious.  They were poor people and
unlettered.  They came of generations of poor unlettered people—peasants
of the sea who sowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom
since time began.  There is no more to tell.”

“But there is,” I objected.  “It is still obscure to me.”

“What can I tell you?” he demanded, with a recrudescence of fierceness.
“Of the meagreness of a child’s life? of fish diet and coarse living? of
going out with the boats from the time I could crawl? of my brothers, who
went away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back? of
myself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on
the coastwise, old-country ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage,
where kicks and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place of
speech, and fear and hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences?  I do
not care to remember.  A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think
of it.  But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and
killed when a man’s strength came to me, only the lines of my life were
cast at the time in other places.  I did return, not long ago, but
unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in the old
days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a cripple who would
never walk again.”

“But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside of a
school, how did you learn to read and write?” I queried.

“In the English merchant service.  Cabin-boy at twelve, ship’s boy at
fourteen, ordinary seaman at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen, and cock
of the fo’c’sle, infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receiving
neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself—navigation,
mathematics, science, literature, and what not.  And of what use has it
been?  Master and owner of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, when
I am beginning to diminish and die.  Paltry, isn’t it?  And when the sun
was up I was scorched, and because I had no root I withered away.”

“But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple,” I chided.

“And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose to
the purple,” he answered grimly.  “No man makes opportunity.  All the
great men ever did was to know it when it came to them.  The Corsican
knew.  I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican.  I should have known
the opportunity, but it never came.  The thorns sprung up and choked me.
And, Hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any living
man, except my own brother.”

“And what is he?  And where is he?”

“Master of the steamship _Macedonia_, seal-hunter,” was the answer.  “We
will meet him most probably on the Japan coast.  Men call him ‘Death’
Larsen.”

“Death Larsen!” I involuntarily cried.  “Is he like you?”

“Hardly.  He is a lump of an animal without any head.  He has all my—my—”

“Brutishness,” I suggested.

“Yes,—thank you for the word,—all my brutishness, but he can scarcely
read or write.”

“And he has never philosophized on life,” I added.

“No,” Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.  “And
he is all the happier for leaving life alone.  He is too busy living it
to think about it.  My mistake was in ever opening the books.”




CHAPTER XI


The _Ghost_ has attained the southernmost point of the arc she is
describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away to
the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured, where she
will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season’s hunt along
the coast of Japan.  The hunters have experimented and practised with
their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pullers
and steerers have made their spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in
leather and sennit so that they will make no noise when creeping on the
seals, and put their boats in apple-pie order—to use Leach’s homely
phrase.

His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain all
his life.  Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is afraid to
venture on deck after dark.  There are two or three standing quarrels in
the forecastle.  Louis tells me that the gossip of the sailors finds its
way aft, and that two of the telltales have been badly beaten by their
mates.  He shakes his head dubiously over the outlook for the man
Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same boat with him.  Johnson has been
guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and has collided two or three
times with Wolf Larsen over the pronunciation of his name.  Johansen he
thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which time the mate
has called him by his proper name.  But of course it is out of the
question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.

Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen, which
tallies with the captain’s brief description.  We may expect to meet
Death Larsen on the Japan coast.  “And look out for squalls,” is Louis’s
prophecy, “for they hate one another like the wolf whelps they are.”
Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing steamer in the fleet, the
_Macedonia_, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of the
schooners carry only six.  There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of
strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling
into the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open
piracy.  Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a
lie, while he has a cyclopædic knowledge of sealing and the men of the
sealing fleets.

As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft, on
this veritable hell-ship.  Men fight and struggle ferociously for one
another’s lives.  The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any
moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed,
while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill the survivor of the
affair, if such affair comes off.  He frankly states that the position he
takes is based on no moral grounds, that all the hunters could kill and
eat one another so far as he is concerned, were it not that he needs them
alive for the hunting.  If they will only hold their hands until the
season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when all grudges can
be settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard and
arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea.  I think even
the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness.  Wicked men though they
be, they are certainly very much afraid of him.

Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go about in
secret dread of him.  His is the courage of fear,—a strange thing I know
well of myself,—and at any moment it may master the fear and impel him to
the taking of my life.  My knee is much better, though it often aches for
long periods, and the stiffness is gradually leaving the arm which Wolf
Larsen squeezed.  Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in
splendid condition.  My muscles are growing harder and increasing in
size.  My hands, however, are a spectacle for grief.  They have a
parboiled appearance, are afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are
broken and discoloured, and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a
fungoid sort of growth.  Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the
diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in this manner before.

I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen reading
the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at the
beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate’s sea-chest.  I
wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he read aloud to me from
Ecclesiastes.  I could imagine he was speaking the thoughts of his own
mind as he read to me, and his voice, reverberating deeply and mournfully
in the confined cabin, charmed and held me.  He may be uneducated, but he
certainly knows how to express the significance of the written word.  I
can hear him now, as I shall always hear him, the primal melancholy
vibrant in his voice as he read:

    “I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of
    kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,
    and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that
    of all sorts.

    “So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
    Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.

    “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the
    labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and
    vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

    “All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
    and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
    to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the
    good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
    oath.

    “This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
    there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men
    is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
    after that they go to the dead.

    “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a
    living dog is better than a dead lion.

    “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
    anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
    is forgotten.

    “Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
    neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is
    done under the sun.”

“There you have it, Hump,” he said, closing the book upon his finger and
looking up at me.  “The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem
thought as I think.  You call me a pessimist.  Is not this pessimism of
the blackest?—‘All is vanity and vexation of spirit,’ ‘There is no profit
under the sun,’ ‘There is one event unto all,’ to the fool and the wise,
the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event is
death, and an evil thing, he says.  For the Preacher loved life, and did
not want to die, saying, ‘For a living dog is better than a dead lion.’
He preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness of
the grave.  And so I.  To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to be as
the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate.  It is loathsome to the
life that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the power of
movement, and the consciousness of the power of movement.  Life itself is
unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.”

“You are worse off than Omar,” I said.  “He, at least, after the
customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a
joyous thing.”

“Who was Omar?” Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day, nor
the next, nor the next.

In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubáiyát, and it was
to him like a great find of treasure.  Much I remembered, possibly
two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder
without difficulty.  We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found
him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the
life of me, I could not discover myself.  Possibly I recited with a
certain joyous lilt which was my own, for—his memory was good, and at a
second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own—he
recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate
revolt that was well-nigh convincing.

I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not
surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant’s irritability, and
quite at variance with the Persian’s complacent philosophy and genial
code of life:

   “What, without asking, hither hurried _Whence_?
   And, without asking, _Whither_ hurried hence!
      Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
   Must drown the memory of that insolence!”

“Great!” Wolf Larsen cried.  “Great!  That’s the keynote.  Insolence!  He
could not have used a better word.”

In vain I objected and denied.  He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
argument.

“It’s not the nature of life to be otherwise.  Life, when it knows that
it must cease living, will always rebel.  It cannot help itself.  The
Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and vexation, an
evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he
found an eviler thing.  Through chapter after chapter he is worried by
the one event that cometh to all alike.  So Omar, so I, so you, even you,
for you rebelled against dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you.  You
were afraid to die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is
greater than you, did not want to die.  You have talked of the instinct
of immortality.  I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and
which, when death looms near and large, masters the instinct, so called,
of immortality.  It mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a
crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.

“You are afraid of him now.  You are afraid of me.  You cannot deny it.
If I should catch you by the throat, thus,”—his hand was about my throat
and my breath was shut off,—“and began to press the life out of you thus,
and thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering, and your
instinct of life, which is longing for life, will flutter up, and you
will struggle to save yourself.  Eh?  I see the fear of death in your
eyes.  You beat the air with your arms.  You exert all your puny strength
to struggle to live.  Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as
a butterfly resting there.  Your chest is heaving, your tongue
protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming.  ‘To live!  To
live!  To live!’ you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now,
not hereafter.  You doubt your immortality, eh?  Ha! ha!  You are not
sure of it.  You won’t chance it.  This life only you are certain is
real.  Ah, it is growing dark and darker.  It is the darkness of death,
the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is
gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you.  Your eyes
are becoming set.  They are glazing.  My voice sounds faint and far.  You
cannot see my face.  And still you struggle in my grip.  You kick with
your legs.  Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake’s.  Your
chest heaves and strains.  To live!  To live!  To live—”

I heard no more.  Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so
graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor
and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old
familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.

“Well, have I convinced you?” he demanded.  “Here take a drink of this.
I want to ask you some questions.”

I rolled my head negatively on the floor.  “Your arguments are
too—er—forcible,” I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my
aching throat.

“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour,” he assured me.  “And I promise I
won’t use any more physical demonstrations.  Get up now.  You can sit on
a chair.”

And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
Preacher was resumed.  And half the night we sat up over it.




CHAPTER XII


The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality.  From
cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion.  I
scarcely know where to begin.  Wolf Larsen was really the cause of it.
The relations among the men, strained and made tense by feuds, quarrels
and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium, and evil passions
flared up in flame like prairie-grass.

Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer.  He has been attempting
to curry favour and reinstate himself in the good graces of the captain
by carrying tales of the men forward.  He it was, I know, that carried
some of Johnson’s hasty talk to Wolf Larsen.  Johnson, it seems, bought a
suit of oilskins from the slop-chest and found them to be of greatly
inferior quality.  Nor was he slow in advertising the fact.  The
slop-chest is a sort of miniature dry-goods store which is carried by all
sealing schooners and which is stocked with articles peculiar to the
needs of the sailors.  Whatever a sailor purchases is taken from his
subsequent earnings on the sealing grounds; for, as it is with the
hunters so it is with the boat-pullers and steerers—in the place of wages
they receive a “lay,” a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured
in their particular boat.

But of Johnson’s grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that what
I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise.  I had just finished
sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a
discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian character, when
Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by Johnson.  The
latter’s cap came off after the custom of the sea, and he stood
respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily and uneasily to
the roll of the schooner and facing the captain.

“Shut the doors and draw the slide,” Wolf Larsen said to me.

As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson’s eyes, but I
did not dream of its cause.  I did not dream of what was to occur until
it did occur, but he knew from the very first what was coming and awaited
it bravely.  And in his action I found complete refutation of all Wolf
Larsen’s materialism.  The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by
principle, and truth, and sincerity.  He was right, he knew he was right,
and he was unafraid.  He would die for the right if needs be, he would be
true to himself, sincere with his soul.  And in this was portrayed the
victory of the spirit over the flesh, the indomitability and moral
grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and rises above time and
space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else
than eternity and immortality.

But to return.  I noticed the anxious light in Johnson’s eyes, but
mistook it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the man.  The
mate, Johansen, stood away several feet to the side of him, and fully
three yards in front of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the pivotal cabin
chairs.  An appreciable pause fell after I had closed the doors and drawn
the slide, a pause that must have lasted fully a minute.  It was broken
by Wolf Larsen.

“Yonson,” he began.

“My name is Johnson, sir,” the sailor boldly corrected.

“Well, Johnson, then, damn you!  Can you guess why I have sent for you?”

“Yes, and no, sir,” was the slow reply.  “My work is done well.  The mate
knows that, and you know it, sir.  So there cannot be any complaint.”

“And is that all?” Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft, and low, and
purring.

“I know you have it in for me,” Johnson continued with his unalterable
and ponderous slowness.  “You do not like me.  You—you—”

“Go on,” Wolf Larsen prompted.  “Don’t be afraid of my feelings.”

“I am not afraid,” the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush rising
through his sunburn.  “If I speak not fast, it is because I have not been
from the old country as long as you.  You do not like me because I am too
much of a man; that is why, sir.”

“You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what you mean,
and if you know what I mean,” was Wolf Larsen’s retort.

“I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,” Johnson answered, his
flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English language.

“Johnson,” Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that had gone
before as introductory to the main business in hand, “I understand you’re
not quite satisfied with those oilskins?”

“No, I am not.  They are no good, sir.”

“And you’ve been shooting off your mouth about them.”

“I say what I think, sir,” the sailor answered courageously, not failing
at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that “sir” be appended
to each speech he made.

It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen.  His big
fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was positively
fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson.  I noticed a black
discoloration, still faintly visible, under Johansen’s eye, a mark of the
thrashing he had received a few nights before from the sailor.  For the
first time I began to divine that something terrible was about to be
enacted,—what, I could not imagine.

“Do you know what happens to men who say what you’ve said about my
slop-chest and me?” Wolf Larsen was demanding.

“I know, sir,” was the answer.

“What?” Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.

“What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.”

“Look at him, Hump,” Wolf Larsen said to me, “look at this bit of
animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and
defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something
good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such as righteousness
and honesty, and that will live up to them in spite of all personal
discomforts and menaces.  What do you think of him, Hump?  What do you
think of him?”

“I think that he is a better man than you are,” I answered, impelled,
somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the wrath I felt
was about to break upon his head.  “His human fictions, as you choose to
call them, make for nobility and manhood.  You have no fictions, no
dreams, no ideals.  You are a pauper.”

He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness.  “Quite true, Hump, quite
true.  I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood.  A living
dog is better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher.  My only
doctrine is the doctrine of expediency, and it makes for surviving.  This
bit of the ferment we call ‘Johnson,’ when he is no longer a bit of the
ferment, only dust and ashes, will have no more nobility than any dust
and ashes, while I shall still be alive and roaring.”

“Do you know what I am going to do?” he questioned.

I shook my head.

“Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how
fares nobility.  Watch me.”

Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down.  Nine feet!  And
yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a standing
position.  He left the chair, just as he sat in it, squarely, springing
from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a tiger, and like a tiger
covered the intervening space.  It was an avalanche of fury that Johnson
strove vainly to fend off.  He threw one arm down to protect the stomach,
the other arm up to protect the head; but Wolf Larsen’s fist drove midway
between, on the chest, with a crushing, resounding impact.  Johnson’s
breath, suddenly expelled, shot from his mouth and as suddenly checked,
with the forced, audible expiration of a man wielding an axe.  He almost
fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his
balance.

I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
followed.  It was too revolting.  It turns me sick even now when I think
of it.  Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was no match for Wolf
Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate.  It was frightful.  I had
not imagined a human being could endure so much and still live and
struggle on.  And struggle on Johnson did.  Of course there was no hope
for him, not the slightest, and he knew it as well as I, but by the
manhood that was in him he could not cease from fighting for that
manhood.

It was too much for me to witness.  I felt that I should lose my mind,
and I ran up the companion stairs to open the doors and escape on deck.
But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the moment, and with one of his
tremendous springs, gained my side and flung me into the far corner of
the cabin.

“The phenomena of life, Hump,” he girded at me.  “Stay and watch it.  You
may gather data on the immortality of the soul.  Besides, you know, we
can’t hurt Johnson’s soul.  It’s only the fleeting form we may demolish.”

It seemed centuries—possibly it was no more than ten minutes that the
beating continued.  Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the poor
fellow.  They struck him with their fists, kicked him with their heavy
shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his feet to knock him down
again.  His eyes were blinded so that he could not see, and the blood
running from ears and nose and mouth turned the cabin into a shambles.
And when he could no longer rise they still continued to beat and kick
him where he lay.

“Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,” Wolf Larsen finally said.

But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm, gentle
enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a cork, driving
his head against the wall with a crash.  He fell to the floor, half
stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and blinking his eyes in a
stupid sort of way.

“Jerk open the doors, Hump,” I was commanded.

I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack of
rubbish and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through the narrow
doorway, and out on deck.  The blood from his nose gushed in a scarlet
stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was none other than Louis, his
boat-mate.  But Louis took and gave a spoke and gazed imperturbably into
the binnacle.

Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy.  Fore
and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more than his
consequent behaviour.  He it was that came up on the poop without orders
and dragged Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his wounds as
well as he could and making him comfortable.  Johnson, as Johnson, was
unrecognizable; and not only that, for his features, as human features at
all, were unrecognizable, so discoloured and swollen had they become in
the few minutes which had elapsed between the beginning of the beating
and the dragging forward of the body.

But of Leach’s behaviour—By the time I had finished cleansing the cabin
he had taken care of Johnson.  I had come up on deck for a breath of
fresh air and to try to get some repose for my overwrought nerves.  Wolf
Larsen was smoking a cigar and examining the patent log which the _Ghost_
usually towed astern, but which had been hauled in for some purpose.
Suddenly Leach’s voice came to my ears.  It was tense and hoarse with an
overmastering rage.  I turned and saw him standing just beneath the break
of the poop on the port side of the galley.  His face was convulsed and
white, his eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.

“May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell’s too good for
you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!” was his opening salutation.

I was thunderstruck.  I looked for his instant annihilation.  But it was
not Wolf Larsen’s whim to annihilate him.  He sauntered slowly forward to
the break of the poop, and, leaning his elbow on the corner of the cabin,
gazed down thoughtfully and curiously at the excited boy.

And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before.
The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle
scuttle and watched and listened.  The hunters piled pell-mell out of the
steerage, but as Leach’s tirade continued I saw that there was no levity
in their faces.  Even they were frightened, not at the boy’s terrible
words, but at his terrible audacity.  It did not seem possible that any
living creature could thus beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth.  I know for
myself that I was shocked into admiration of the boy, and I saw in him
the splendid invincibleness of immortality rising above the flesh and the
fears of the flesh, as in the prophets of old, to condemn
unrighteousness.

And such condemnation!  He haled forth Wolf Larsen’s soul naked to the
scorn of men.  He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and
withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a mediæval
excommunication of the Catholic Church.  He ran the gamut of
denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost
Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest and most
indecent abuse.

His rage was a madness.  His lips were flecked with a soapy froth, and
sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate.  And through it
all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf
Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity.  This wild stirring of yeasty
life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed
and interested him.

Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon the boy
and destroy him.  But it was not his whim.  His cigar went out, and he
continued to gaze silently and curiously.

Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.

“Pig!  Pig!  Pig!” he was reiterating at the top of his lungs.  “Why
don’t you come down and kill me, you murderer?  You can do it!  I ain’t
afraid!  There’s no one to stop you!  Damn sight better dead and outa
your reach than alive and in your clutches!  Come on, you coward!  Kill
me!  Kill me!  Kill me!”

It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge’s erratic soul brought him into
the scene.  He had been listening at the galley door, but he now came
out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see
the killing he was certain would take place.  He smirked greasily up into
the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him.  But the Cockney was
unabashed, though mad, stark mad.  He turned to Leach, saying:

“Such langwidge!  Shockin’!”

Leach’s rage was no longer impotent.  Here at last was something ready to
hand.  And for the first time since the stabbing the Cockney had appeared
outside the galley without his knife.  The words had barely left his
mouth when he was knocked down by Leach.  Three times he struggled to his
feet, striving to gain the galley, and each time was knocked down.

“Oh, Lord!” he cried.  “’Elp!  ’Elp!  Tyke ’im aw’y, carn’t yer?  Tyke
’im aw’y!”

The hunters laughed from sheer relief.  Tragedy had dwindled, the farce
had begun.  The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and shuffling,
to watch the pummelling of the hated Cockney.  And even I felt a great
joy surge up within me.  I confess that I delighted in this beating Leach
was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was as terrible, almost, as the
one Mugridge had caused to be given to Johnson.  But the expression of
Wolf Larsen’s face never changed.  He did not change his position either,
but continued to gaze down with a great curiosity.  For all his pragmatic
certitude, it seemed as if he watched the play and movement of life in
the hope of discovering something more about it, of discerning in its
maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to
its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.

But the beating!  It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed in the
cabin.  The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated
boy.  And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin.  He rolled
toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down.
But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity.  He was knocked about
like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and
kicked as he lay helpless on the deck.  And no one interfered.  Leach
could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his
vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering and
wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.

But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day’s
programme.  In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each other,
and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed by a
stampede of the other four hunters for the deck.  A column of thick,
acrid smoke—the kind always made by black powder—was arising through the
open companion-way, and down through it leaped Wolf Larsen.  The sound of
blows and scuffling came to our ears.  Both men were wounded, and he was
thrashing them both for having disobeyed his orders and crippled
themselves in advance of the hunting season.  In fact, they were badly
wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded to operate upon them in
a rough surgical fashion and to dress their wounds.  I served as
assistant while he probed and cleansed the passages made by the bullets,
and I saw the two men endure his crude surgery without anæsthetics and
with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.

Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the forecastle.
It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing which had been
the cause of Johnson’s beating, and from the noise we heard, and from the
sight of the bruised men next day, it was patent that half the forecastle
had soundly drubbed the other half.

The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between
Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer.  It was caused by
remarks of Latimer’s concerning the noises made by the mate in his sleep,
and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage awake for the rest
of the night while he blissfully slumbered and fought the fight over and
over again.

As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare.  The day had been like
some horrible dream.  Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming
passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another’s
lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.  My nerves were
shocked.  My mind itself was shocked.  All my days had been passed in
comparative ignorance of the animality of man.  In fact, I had known life
only in its intellectual phases.  Brutality I had experienced, but it was
the brutality of the intellect—the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth,
the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
undergraduate days.

That was all.  But that men should wreak their anger on others by the
bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely
and fearfully new to me.  Not for nothing had I been called “Sissy” Van
Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one
nightmare and another.  And it seemed to me that my innocence of the
realities of life had been complete indeed.  I laughed bitterly to
myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen’s forbidding philosophy a more
adequate explanation of life than I found in my own.

And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought.
The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect.  It bid
fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life.  My
reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill
thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in
it.  And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it
was,—I chuckled with an insane delight.  I was no longer Humphrey Van
Weyden.  I was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner _Ghost_.  Wolf Larsen was
my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was
receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them all.




CHAPTER XIII


For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge’s too; and I flatter
myself that I did his work well.  I know that it won Wolf Larsen’s
approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during the brief
time my _régime_ lasted.

“The first clean bite since I come aboard,” Harrison said to me at the
galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the forecastle.
“Somehow Tommy’s grub always tastes of grease, stale grease, and I reckon
he ain’t changed his shirt since he left ’Frisco.”

“I know he hasn’t,” I answered.

“And I’ll bet he sleeps in it,” Harrison added.

“And you won’t lose,” I agreed.  “The same shirt, and he hasn’t had it
off once in all this time.”

But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover from
the effects of the beating.  On the fourth day, lame and sore, scarcely
able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his bunk by the
nape of the neck and set to his duty.  He sniffled and wept, but Wolf
Larsen was pitiless.

“And see that you serve no more slops,” was his parting injunction.  “No
more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or you’ll get
a tow over the side.  Understand?”

Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short lurch
of the _Ghost_ sent him staggering.  In attempting to recover himself, he
reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove and kept the pots
from sliding off; but he missed the railing, and his hand, with his
weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot surface.  There was a sizzle
and odour of burning flesh, and a sharp cry of pain.

“Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot ’ave I done?” he wailed; sitting down in the
coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.  “W’y ’as
all this come on me?  It mykes me fair sick, it does, an’ I try so ’ard
to go through life ’armless an’ ’urtin’ nobody.”

The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and his
face was drawn with pain.  A savage expression flitted across it.

“Oh, ’ow I ’ate ’im!  ’Ow I ’ate ’im!” he gritted out.

“Whom?” I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
misfortunes.  Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than whom he
did not hate.  For I had come to see a malignant devil in him which
impelled him to hate all the world.  I sometimes thought that he hated
even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him, and so monstrously.
At such moments a great sympathy welled up within me, and I felt shame
that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture or pain.  Life had been unfair
to him.  It had played him a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the
thing he was, and it had played him scurvy tricks ever since.  What
chance had he to be anything else than he was?  And as though answering
my unspoken thought, he wailed:

“I never ’ad no chance, not ’arf a chance!  ’Oo was there to send me to
school, or put tommy in my ’ungry belly, or wipe my bloody nose for me,
w’en I was a kiddy?  ’Oo ever did anything for me, heh?  ’Oo, I s’y?”

“Never mind, Tommy,” I said, placing a soothing hand on his shoulder.
“Cheer up.  It’ll all come right in the end.  You’ve long years before
you, and you can make anything you please of yourself.”

“It’s a lie! a bloody lie!” he shouted in my face, flinging off the hand.
“It’s a lie, and you know it.  I’m already myde, an’ myde out of leavin’s
an’ scraps.  It’s all right for you, ’Ump.  You was born a gentleman.
You never knew wot it was to go ’ungry, to cry yerself asleep with yer
little belly gnawin’ an’ gnawin’, like a rat inside yer.  It carn’t come
right.  If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, ’ow would it
fill my belly for one time w’en I was a kiddy and it went empty?

“’Ow could it, I s’y?  I was born to sufferin’ and sorrer.  I’ve had more
cruel sufferin’ than any ten men, I ’ave.  I’ve been in orspital arf my
bleedin’ life.  I’ve ’ad the fever in Aspinwall, in ’Avana, in New
Orleans.  I near died of the scurvy and was rotten with it six months in
Barbadoes.  Smallpox in ’Onolulu, two broken legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia
in Unalaska, three busted ribs an’ my insides all twisted in ’Frisco.
An’ ’ere I am now.  Look at me!  Look at me!  My ribs kicked loose from
my back again.  I’ll be coughin’ blood before eyght bells.  ’Ow can it be
myde up to me, I arsk?  ’Oo’s goin’ to do it?  Gawd?  ’Ow Gawd must ’ave
’ated me w’en ’e signed me on for a voyage in this bloomin’ world of
’is!”

This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then he
buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a great hatred
for all created things.  His diagnosis was correct, however, for he was
seized with occasional sicknesses, during which he vomited blood and
suffered great pain.  And as he said, it seemed God hated him too much to
let him die, for he ultimately grew better and waxed more malignant than
ever.

Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went about
his work in a half-hearted way.  He was still a sick man, and I more than
once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping
wearily as he stood at the wheel.  But, still worse, it seemed that his
spirit was broken.  He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled
to Johansen.  Not so was the conduct of Leach.  He went about the deck
like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.

“I’ll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede,” I heard him say to Johansen
one night on deck.

The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some missile
struck the galley a sharp rap.  There was more cursing, and a mocking
laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and found a heavy knife
imbedded over an inch in the solid wood.  A few minutes later the mate
came fumbling about in search of it, but I returned it privily to Leach
next day.  He grinned when I handed it over, yet it was a grin that
contained more sincere thanks than a multitude of the verbosities of
speech common to the members of my own class.

Unlike any one else in the ship’s company, I now found myself with no
quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all.  The hunters possibly
no more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked me; while Smoke
and Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and swinging day and
night in their hammocks, assured me that I was better than any hospital
nurse, and that they would not forget me at the end of the voyage when
they were paid off.  (As though I stood in need of their money!  I, who
could have bought them out, bag and baggage, and the schooner and its
equipment, a score of times over!)  But upon me had devolved the task of
tending their wounds, and pulling them through, and I did my best by
them.

Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache which lasted two
days.  He must have suffered severely, for he called me in and obeyed my
commands like a sick child.  But nothing I could do seemed to relieve
him.  At my suggestion, however, he gave up smoking and drinking; though
why such a magnificent animal as he should have headaches at all puzzles
me.

“’Tis the hand of God, I’m tellin’ you,” is the way Louis sees it.  “’Tis
a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, and there’s more behind and
comin’, or else—”

“Or else,” I prompted.

“God is noddin’ and not doin’ his duty, though it’s me as shouldn’t say
it.”

I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces of all.  Not
only does Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has discovered a
new reason for hating me.  It took me no little while to puzzle it out,
but I finally discovered that it was because I was more luckily born than
he—“gentleman born,” he put it.

“And still no more dead men,” I twitted Louis, when Smoke and Henderson,
side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first exercise on
deck.

Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head
portentously.  “She’s a-comin’, I tell you, and it’ll be sheets and
halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl.  I’ve had the feel
iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the
rigging iv a dark night.  She’s close, she’s close.”

“Who goes first?” I queried.

“Not fat old Louis, I promise you,” he laughed.  “For ’tis in the bones
iv me I know that come this time next year I’ll be gazin’ in the old
mother’s eyes, weary with watchin’ iv the sea for the five sons she gave
to it.”

“Wot’s ’e been s’yin’ to yer?” Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment later.

“That he’s going home some day to see his mother,” I answered
diplomatically.

“I never ’ad none,” was the Cockney’s comment, as he gazed with
lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.




CHAPTER XIV


It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation upon
womankind.  For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
degree so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere of
women until now.  My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was
always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction with
their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads on my den,
when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into
worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.
I never could find anything when they had departed.  But now, alas, how
welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and
swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested!  I am
sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them
again.  They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust
and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall
only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed
of a mother and some several sisters.

All of which has set me wondering.  Where are the mothers of these twenty
and odd men on the _Ghost_?  It strikes me as unnatural and unhealthful
that men should be totally separated from women and herd through the
world by themselves.  Coarseness and savagery are the inevitable results.
These men about me should have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then
would they be capable of softness, and tenderness, and sympathy.  As it
is, not one of them is married.  In years and years not one of them has
been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or
redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature.  There is
no balance in their lives.  Their masculinity, which in itself is of the
brute, has been over-developed.  The other and spiritual side of their
natures has been dwarfed—atrophied, in fact.

They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and
growing daily more calloused from the grinding.  It seems to me
impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers.  It would appear that
they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is
no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle
eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all
their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die
as unlovely as they have lived.

Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen
last night—the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me
since the voyage began.  He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now
thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once.  He
had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor
boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.

“She must be a pretty old woman now,” he said, staring meditatively into
the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was
steering a point off the course.

“When did you last write to her?”

He performed his mental arithmetic aloud.  “Eighty-one; no—eighty-two,
eh? no—eighty-three?  Yes, eighty-three.  Ten years ago.  From some
little port in Madagascar.  I was trading.

“You see,” he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across
half the girth of the earth, “each year I was going home.  So what was
the good to write?  It was only a year.  And each year something
happened, and I did not go.  But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at
’Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a
windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money;
and then I will pay my passage from there home.  Then she will not do any
more work.”

“But does she work? now?  How old is she?”

“About seventy,” he answered.  And then, boastingly, “We work from the
time we are born until we die, in my country.  That’s why we live so
long.  I will live to a hundred.”

I shall never forget this conversation.  The words were the last I ever
heard him utter.  Perhaps they were the last he did utter, too.  For,
going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it was too stuffy to
sleep below.  It was a calm night.  We were out of the Trades, and the
_Ghost_ was forging ahead barely a knot an hour.  So I tucked a blanket
and pillow under my arm and went up on deck.

As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into the
top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three points off.
Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape reprimand or
worse, I spoke to him.  But he was not asleep.  His eyes were wide and
staring.  He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to reply to me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.  “Are you sick?”

He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
breath.

“You’d better get on your course, then,” I chided.

He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing slowly to
N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.

I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on, when
some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail.  A sinewy
hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail.  A second hand took
form in the darkness beside it.  I watched, fascinated.  What visitant
from the gloom of the deep was I to behold?  Whatever it was, I knew that
it was climbing aboard by the log-line.  I saw a head, the hair wet and
straight, shape itself, and then the unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf
Larsen.  His right cheek was red with blood, which flowed from some wound
in the head.

He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet,
glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though to
assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to fear from
him.  The sea-water was streaming from him.  It made little audible
gurgles which distracted me.  As he stepped toward me I shrank back
instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which spelled death.

“All right, Hump,” he said in a low voice.  “Where’s the mate?”

I shook my head.

“Johansen!” he called softly.  “Johansen!”

“Where is he?” he demanded of Harrison.

The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he answered
steadily enough, “I don’t know, sir.  I saw him go for’ard a little while
ago.”

“So did I go for’ard.  But you will observe that I didn’t come back the
way I went.  Can you explain it?”

“You must have been overboard, sir.”

“Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?” I asked.

Wolf Larsen shook his head.  “You wouldn’t find him, Hump.  But you’ll
do.  Come on.  Never mind your bedding.  Leave it where it is.”

I followed at his heels.  There was nothing stirring amidships.

“Those cursed hunters,” was his comment.  “Too damned fat and lazy to
stand a four-hour watch.”

But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep.  He turned them
over and looked at their faces.  They composed the watch on deck, and it
was the ship’s custom, in good weather, to let the watch sleep with the
exception of the officer, the helmsman, and the look-out.

“Who’s look-out?” he demanded.

“Me, sir,” answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a slight
tremor in his voice.  “I winked off just this very minute, sir.  I’m
sorry, sir.  It won’t happen again.”

“Did you hear or see anything on deck?”

“No, sir, I—”

But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving the
sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let off so easily.

“Softly, now,” Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled his body
into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.

I followed with a quaking heart.  What was to happen I knew no more than
did I know what had happened.  But blood had been shed, and it was
through no whim of Wolf Larsen that he had gone over the side with his
scalp laid open.  Besides, Johansen was missing.

It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon forget
my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom of the
ladder.  Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it was of the shape
of a triangle, along the three sides of which stood the bunks, in
double-tier, twelve of them.  It was no larger than a hall bedroom in
Grub Street, and yet twelve men were herded into it to eat and sleep and
carry on all the functions of living.  My bedroom at home was not large,
yet it could have contained a dozen similar forecastles, and taking into
consideration the height of the ceiling, a score at least.

It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp
I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots,
oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts.  These swung
back and forth with every roll of the vessel, giving rise to a brushing
sound, as of trees against a roof or wall.  Somewhere a boot thumped
loudly and at irregular intervals against the wall; and, though it was a
mild night on the sea, there was a continual chorus of the creaking
timbers and bulkheads and of abysmal noises beneath the flooring.

The sleepers did not mind.  There were eight of them,—the two watches
below,—and the air was thick with the warmth and odour of their
breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their snoring and of
their sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the rest of the animal-man.
But were they sleeping? all of them?  Or had they been sleeping?  This
was evidently Wolf Larsen’s quest—to find the men who appeared to be
asleep and who were not asleep or who had not been asleep very recently.
And he went about it in a way that reminded me of a story out of
Boccaccio.

He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me.  He
began at the first bunks forward on the star-board side.  In the top one
lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named by his mates.  He
was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly as a woman.  One arm was
under his head, the other lay on top of the blankets.  Wolf Larsen put
thumb and forefinger to the wrist and counted the pulse.  In the midst of
it the Kanaka roused.  He awoke as gently as he slept.  There was no
movement of the body whatever.  The eyes, only, moved.  They flashed wide
open, big and black, and stared, unblinking, into our faces.  Wolf Larsen
put his finger to his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes closed
again.

In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep
unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously.  While Wolf Larsen held his wrist
he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it rested on
shoulders and heels.  His lips moved, and he gave voice to this enigmatic
utterance:

“A shilling’s worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for
thruppenny-bits, or the publicans ’ll shove ’em on you for sixpence.”

Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:

“A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony is I don’t
know.”

Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka’s sleep, Wolf Larsen
passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied top and
bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and Johnson.

As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson’s pulse, I,
standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach’s head rise stealthily as
he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was going on.  He must
have divined Wolf Larsen’s trick and the sureness of detection, for the
light was at once dashed from my hand and the forecastle was left in
darkness.  He must have leaped, also, at the same instant, straight down
on Wolf Larsen.

The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf.  I
heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach a
snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling.  Johnson must have joined
him immediately, so that his abject and grovelling conduct on deck for
the past few days had been no more than planned deception.

I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned against
the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend.  And upon me was that old
sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by the spectacle of
physical violence.  In this instance I could not see, but I could hear
the impact of the blows—the soft crushing sound made by flesh striking
forcibly against flesh.  Then there was the crashing about of the
entwined bodies, the laboured breathing, the short quick gasps of sudden
pain.

There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the captain and
mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly
reinforced by some of their mates.

“Get a knife somebody!” Leach was shouting.

“Pound him on the head!  Mash his brains out!” was Johnson’s cry.

But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise.  He was fighting
grimly and silently for life.  He was sore beset.  Down at the very
first, he had been unable to gain his feet, and for all of his tremendous
strength I felt that there was no hope for him.

The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me; for I
was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised.  But in the
confusion I managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk out of the way.

“All hands!  We’ve got him!  We’ve got him!” I could hear Leach crying.

“Who?” demanded those who had been really asleep, and who had wakened to
they knew not what.

“It’s the bloody mate!” was Leach’s crafty answer, strained from him in a
smothered sort of way.

This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen had
seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part in it.
The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused by some marauder.

“What ho! below there!” I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle, too
cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could hear raging
beneath him in the darkness.

“Won’t somebody get a knife?  Oh, won’t somebody get a knife?” Leach
pleaded in the first interval of comparative silence.

The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion.  They blocked
their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single purpose, achieved
his.  This was to fight his way across the floor to the ladder.  Though
in total darkness, I followed his progress by its sound.  No man less
than a giant could have done what he did, once he had gained the foot of
the ladder.  Step by step, by the might of his arms, the whole pack of
men striving to drag him back and down, he drew his body up from the
floor till he stood erect.  And then, step by step, hand and foot, he
slowly struggled up the ladder.

The very last of all, I saw.  For Latimer, having finally gone for a
lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle.  Wolf Larsen
was nearly to the top, though I could not see him.  All that was visible
was the mass of men fastened upon him.  It squirmed about, like some huge
many-legged spider, and swayed back and forth to the regular roll of the
vessel.  And still, step by step with long intervals between, the mass
ascended.  Once it tottered, about to fall back, but the broken hold was
regained and it still went up.

“Who is it?” Latimer cried.

In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering down.

“Larsen,” I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.

Latimer reached down with his free hand.  I saw a hand shoot up to clasp
his.  Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made with a rush.
Then Wolf Larsen’s other hand reached up and clutched the edge of the
scuttle.  The mass swung clear of the ladder, the men still clinging to
their escaping foe.  They began to drop off, to be brushed off against
the sharp edge of the scuttle, to be knocked off by the legs which were
now kicking powerfully.  Leach was the last to go, falling sheer back
from the top of the scuttle and striking on head and shoulders upon his
sprawling mates beneath.  Wolf Larsen and the lantern disappeared, and we
were left in darkness.




CHAPTER XV


There was a deal of cursing and groaning as the men at the bottom of the
ladder crawled to their feet.

“Somebody strike a light, my thumb’s out of joint,” said one of the men,
Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer in Standish’s boat, in
which Harrison was puller.

“You’ll find it knockin’ about by the bitts,” Leach said, sitting down on
the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.

There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp flared
up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about
nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts.  Oofty-Oofty laid hold
of Parsons’s thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it back into
place.  I noticed at the same time that the Kanaka’s knuckles were laid
open clear across and to the bone.  He exhibited them, exposing beautiful
white teeth in a grin as he did so, and explaining that the wounds had
come from striking Wolf Larsen in the mouth.

“So it was you, was it, you black beggar?” belligerently demanded one
Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his first trip to
sea, and boat-puller for Kerfoot.

As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and
shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.  The Kanaka leaped
backward to his bunk, to return with a second leap, flourishing a long
knife.

“Aw, go lay down, you make me tired,” Leach interfered.  He was
evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the forecastle.
“G’wan, you Kelly.  You leave Oofty alone.  How in hell did he know it
was you in the dark?”

Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his white
teeth in a grateful smile.  He was a beautiful creature, almost feminine
in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was a softness and
dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to contradict his well-earned
reputation for strife and action.

“How did he get away?” Johnson asked.

He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his figure
indicating utter dejection and hopelessness.  He was still breathing
heavily from the exertion he had made.  His shirt had been ripped
entirely from him in the struggle, and blood from a gash in the cheek was
flowing down his naked chest, marking a red path across his white thigh
and dripping to the floor.

“Because he is the devil, as I told you before,” was Leach’s answer; and
thereat he was on his feet and raging his disappointment with tears in
his eyes.

“And not one of you to get a knife!” was his unceasing lament.

But the rest of the hands had a lively fear of consequences to come and
gave no heed to him.

“How’ll he know which was which?” Kelly asked, and as he went on he
looked murderously about him—“unless one of us peaches.”

“He’ll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us,” Parsons replied.  “One
look at you’d be enough.”

“Tell him the deck flopped up and gouged yer teeth out iv yer jaw,” Louis
grinned.  He was the only man who was not out of his bunk, and he was
jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to advertise that he had had a
hand in the night’s work.  “Just wait till he gets a glimpse iv yer mugs
to-morrow, the gang iv ye,” he chuckled.

“We’ll say we thought it was the mate,” said one.  And another, “I know
what I’ll say—that I heered a row, jumped out of my bunk, got a jolly
good crack on the jaw for my pains, and sailed in myself.  Couldn’t tell
who or what it was in the dark and just hit out.”

“An’ ’twas me you hit, of course,” Kelly seconded, his face brightening
for the moment.

Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain to see
that their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was
inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead.  Leach stood their
fears and reproaches for some time.  Then he broke out:

“You make me tired!  A nice lot of gazabas you are!  If you talked less
with yer mouth and did something with yer hands, he’d a-ben done with by
now.  Why couldn’t one of you, just one of you, get me a knife when I
sung out?  You make me sick!  A-beefin’ and bellerin’ ’round, as though
he’d kill you when he gets you!  You know damn well he wont.  Can’t
afford to.  No shipping masters or beach-combers over here, and he wants
yer in his business, and he wants yer bad.  Who’s to pull or steer or
sail ship if he loses yer?  It’s me and Johnson have to face the music.
Get into yer bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want to get some sleep.”

“That’s all right all right,” Parsons spoke up.  “Mebbe he won’t do for
us, but mark my words, hell ’ll be an ice-box to this ship from now on.”

All the while I had been apprehensive concerning my own predicament.
What would happen to me when these men discovered my presence?  I could
never fight my way out as Wolf Larsen had done.  And at this moment
Latimer called down the scuttles:

“Hump!  The old man wants you!”

“He ain’t down here!” Parsons called back.

“Yes, he is,” I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my hardest to
keep my voice steady and bold.

The sailors looked at me in consternation.  Fear was strong in their
faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.

“I’m coming!” I shouted up to Latimer.

“No you don’t!” Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder, his
right hand shaped into a veritable strangler’s clutch.  “You damn little
sneak!  I’ll shut yer mouth!”

“Let him go,” Leach commanded.

“Not on yer life,” was the angry retort.

Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk.  “Let him go, I
say,” he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and metallic.

The Irishman wavered.  I made to step by him, and he stood aside.  When I
had gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant
faces peering at me through the semi-darkness.  A sudden and deep
sympathy welled up in me.  I remembered the Cockney’s way of putting it.
How God must have hated them that they should be tortured so!

“I have seen and heard nothing, believe me,” I said quietly.

“I tell yer, he’s all right,” I could hear Leach saying as I went up the
ladder.  “He don’t like the old man no more nor you or me.”

I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for me.
He greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.

“Come, get to work, Doctor.  The signs are favourable for an extensive
practice this voyage.  I don’t know what the _Ghost_ would have been
without you, and if I could only cherish such noble sentiments I would
tell you her master is deeply grateful.”

I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the _Ghost_ carried, and
while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things ready
for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and chatting, and
examining his hurts with a calculating eye.  I had never before seen him
stripped, and the sight of his body quite took my breath away.  It has
never been my weakness to exalt the flesh—far from it; but there is
enough of the artist in me to appreciate its wonder.

I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen’s
figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.  I had noted
the men in the forecastle.  Powerfully muscled though some of them were,
there had been something wrong with all of them, an insufficient
development here, an undue development there, a twist or a crook that
destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too long, or too much sinew or bone
exposed, or too little.  Oofty-Oofty had been the only one whose lines
were at all pleasing, while, in so far as they pleased, that far had they
been what I should call feminine.

But Wolf Larsen was the man-type, the masculine, and almost a god in his
perfectness.  As he moved about or raised his arms the great muscles
leapt and moved under the satiny skin.  I have forgotten to say that the
bronze ended with his face.  His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock,
was fair as the fairest woman’s.  I remember his putting his hand up to
feel of the wound on his head, and my watching the biceps move like a
living thing under its white sheath.  It was the biceps that had nearly
crushed out my life once, that I had seen strike so many killing blows.
I could not take my eyes from him.  I stood motionless, a roll of
antiseptic cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling itself down to the
floor.

He noticed me, and I became conscious that I was staring at him.

“God made you well,” I said.

“Did he?” he answered.  “I have often thought so myself, and wondered
why.”

“Purpose—” I began.

“Utility,” he interrupted.  “This body was made for use.  These muscles
were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between
me and life.  But have you thought of the other living things?  They,
too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and
destroy; and when they come between me and life, I out-grip them,
out-tear them, out-destroy them.  Purpose does not explain that.  Utility
does.”

“It is not beautiful,” I protested.

“Life isn’t, you mean,” he smiled.  “Yet you say I was made well.  Do you
see this?”

He braced his legs and feet, pressing the cabin floor with his toes in a
clutching sort of way.  Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles writhed
and bunched under the skin.

“Feel them,” he commanded.

They were hard as iron.  And I observed, also, that his whole body had
unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles were
softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back, and across
the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted, their muscles
contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were like talons; and
that even the eyes had changed expression and into them were coming
watchfulness and measurement and a light none other than of battle.

“Stability, equilibrium,” he said, relaxing on the instant and sinking
his body back into repose.  “Feet with which to clutch the ground, legs
to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and hands, teeth and
nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed.  Purpose?  Utility is the
better word.”

I did not argue.  I had seen the mechanism of the primitive fighting
beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the engines of a
great battleship or Atlantic liner.

I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the forecastle, at
the superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself that I dressed them
dexterously.  With the exception of several bad wounds, the rest were
merely severe bruises and lacerations.  The blow which he had received
before going overboard had laid his scalp open several inches.  This,
under his direction, I cleansed and sewed together, having first shaved
the edges of the wound.  Then the calf of his leg was badly lacerated and
looked as though it had been mangled by a bulldog.  Some sailor, he told
me, had laid hold of it by his teeth, at the beginning of the fight, and
hung on and been dragged to the top of the forecastle ladder, when he was
kicked loose.

“By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man,” Wolf Larsen
began, when my work was done.  “As you know, we’re short a mate.
Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive seventy-five dollars per
month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van Weyden.”

“I—I don’t understand navigation, you know,” I gasped.

“Not necessary at all.”

“I really do not care to sit in the high places,” I objected.  “I find
life precarious enough in my present humble situation.  I have no
experience.  Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.”

He smiled as though it were all settled.

“I won’t be mate on this hell-ship!” I cried defiantly.

I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his eyes.
He walked to the door of his room, saying:

“And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night.”

“Good-night, Mr. Larsen,” I answered weakly.




CHAPTER XVI


I cannot say that the position of mate carried with it anything more
joyful than that there were no more dishes to wash.  I was ignorant of
the simplest duties of mate, and would have fared badly indeed, had the
sailors not sympathized with me.  I knew nothing of the minutiæ of ropes
and rigging, of the trimming and setting of sails; but the sailors took
pains to put me to rights,—Louis proving an especially good teacher,—and
I had little trouble with those under me.

With the hunters it was otherwise.  Familiar in varying degree with the
sea, they took me as a sort of joke.  In truth, it was a joke to me, that
I, the veriest landsman, should be filling the office of mate; but to be
taken as a joke by others was a different matter.  I made no complaint,
but Wolf Larsen demanded the most punctilious sea etiquette in my
case,—far more than poor Johansen had ever received; and at the expense
of several rows, threats, and much grumbling, he brought the hunters to
time.  I was “Mr. Van Weyden” fore and aft, and it was only unofficially
that Wolf Larsen himself ever addressed me as “Hump.”

It was amusing.  Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while we were
at dinner, and as I left the table he would say, “Mr. Van Weyden, will
you kindly put about on the port tack.”  And I would go on deck, beckon
Louis to me, and learn from him what was to be done.  Then, a few minutes
later, having digested his instructions and thoroughly mastered the
manœuvre, I would proceed to issue my orders.  I remember an early
instance of this kind, when Wolf Larsen appeared on the scene just as I
had begun to give orders.  He smoked his cigar and looked on quietly till
the thing was accomplished, and then paced aft by my side along the
weather poop.

“Hump,” he said, “I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden, I congratulate you.  I
think you can now fire your father’s legs back into the grave to him.
You’ve discovered your own and learned to stand on them.  A little
rope-work, sail-making, and experience with storms and such things, and
by the end of the voyage you could ship on any coasting schooner.”

It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the arrival
on the sealing grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours on the
_Ghost_.  Wolf Larsen was quite considerate, the sailors helped me, and I
was no longer in irritating contact with Thomas Mugridge.  And I make
free to say, as the days went by, that I found I was taking a certain
secret pride in myself.  Fantastic as the situation was,—a land-lubber
second in command,—I was, nevertheless, carrying it off well; and during
that brief time I was proud of myself, and I grew to love the heave and
roll of the _Ghost_ under my feet as she wallowed north and west through
the tropic sea to the islet where we filled our water-casks.

But my happiness was not unalloyed.  It was comparative, a period of less
misery slipped in between a past of great miseries and a future of great
miseries.  For the _Ghost_, so far as the seamen were concerned, was a
hell-ship of the worst description.  They never had a moment’s rest or
peace.  Wolf Larsen treasured against them the attempt on his life and
the drubbing he had received in the forecastle; and morning, noon, and
night, and all night as well, he devoted himself to making life unlivable
for them.

He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the little
things by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of madness.  I
have seen Harrison called from his bunk to put properly away a misplaced
paintbrush, and the two watches below haled from their tired sleep to
accompany him and see him do it.  A little thing, truly, but when
multiplied by the thousand ingenious devices of such a mind, the mental
state of the men in the forecastle may be slightly comprehended.

Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were continually
occurring.  Blows were struck, and there were always two or three men
nursing injuries at the hands of the human beast who was their master.
Concerted action was impossible in face of the heavy arsenal of weapons
carried in the steerage and cabin.  Leach and Johnson were the two
particular victims of Wolf Larsen’s diabolic temper, and the look of
profound melancholy which had settled on Johnson’s face and in his eyes
made my heart bleed.

With Leach it was different.  There was too much of the fighting beast in
him.  He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which gave no time for
grief.  His lips had become distorted into a permanent snarl, which at
mere sight of Wolf Larsen broke out in sound, horrible and menacing and,
I do believe, unconsciously.  I have seen him follow Wolf Larsen about
with his eyes, like an animal its keeper, the while the animal-like snarl
sounded deep in his throat and vibrated forth between his teeth.

I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the shoulder as
preliminary to giving an order.  His back was toward me, and at the first
feel of my hand he leaped upright in the air and away from me, snarling
and turning his head as he leaped.  He had for the moment mistaken me for
the man he hated.

Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest
opportunity, but the opportunity never came.  Wolf Larsen was too wise
for that, and, besides, they had no adequate weapons.  With their fists
alone they had no chance whatever.  Time and again he fought it out with
Leach who fought back always, like a wildcat, tooth and nail and fist,
until stretched, exhausted or unconscious, on the deck.  And he was never
averse to another encounter.  All the devil that was in him challenged
the devil in Wolf Larsen.  They had but to appear on deck at the same
time, when they would be at it, cursing, snarling, striking; and I have
seen Leach fling himself upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation.
Once he threw his heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen’s throat by an
inch.  Another time he dropped a steel marlinspike from the mizzen
crosstree.  It was a difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but the
sharp point of the spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air,
barely missed Wolf Larsen’s head as he emerged from the cabin
companion-way and drove its length two inches and over into the solid
deck-planking.  Still another time, he stole into the steerage, possessed
himself of a loaded shot-gun, and was making a rush for the deck with it
when caught by Kerfoot and disarmed.

I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end of it.
But he only laughed and seemed to enjoy it.  There seemed a certain spice
about it, such as men must feel who take delight in making pets of
ferocious animals.

“It gives a thrill to life,” he explained to me, “when life is carried in
one’s hand.  Man is a natural gambler, and life is the biggest stake he
can lay.  The greater the odds, the greater the thrill.  Why should I
deny myself the joy of exciting Leach’s soul to fever-pitch?  For that
matter, I do him a kindness.  The greatness of sensation is mutual.  He
is living more royally than any man for’ard, though he does not know it.
For he has what they have not—purpose, something to do and be done, an
all-absorbing end to strive to attain, the desire to kill me, the hope
that he may kill me.  Really, Hump, he is living deep and high.  I doubt
that he has ever lived so swiftly and keenly before, and I honestly envy
him, sometimes, when I see him raging at the summit of passion and
sensibility.”

“Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly!” I cried.  “You have all the
advantage.”

“Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?” he asked
seriously.  “If the situation is unpleasing, you compromise with your
conscience when you make yourself a party to it.  If you were really
great, really true to yourself, you would join forces with Leach and
Johnson.  But you are afraid, you are afraid.  You want to live.  The
life that is in you cries out that it must live, no matter what the cost;
so you live ignominiously, untrue to the best you dream of, sinning
against your whole pitiful little code, and, if there were a hell,
heading your soul straight for it.  Bah!  I play the braver part.  I do
no sin, for I am true to the promptings of the life that is in me.  I am
sincere with my soul at least, and that is what you are not.”

There was a sting in what he said.  Perhaps, after all, I was playing a
cowardly part.  And the more I thought about it the more it appeared that
my duty to myself lay in doing what he had advised, lay in joining forces
with Johnson and Leach and working for his death.  Right here, I think,
entered the austere conscience of my Puritan ancestry, impelling me
toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even murder as right conduct.  I dwelt
upon the idea.  It would be a most moral act to rid the world of such a
monster.  Humanity would be better and happier for it, life fairer and
sweeter.

I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in endless
procession the facts of the situation.  I talked with Johnson and Leach,
during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below.  Both men had lost
hope—Johnson, because of temperamental despondency; Leach, because he had
beaten himself out in the vain struggle and was exhausted.  But he caught
my hand in a passionate grip one night, saying:

“I think yer square, Mr. Van Weyden.  But stay where you are and keep yer
mouth shut.  Say nothin’ but saw wood.  We’re dead men, I know it; but
all the same you might be able to do us a favour some time when we need
it damn bad.”

It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward, close
abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy.  He had attacked
Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished whipping the pair
of them.

“Leach,” he said, “you know I’m going to kill you some time or other,
don’t you?”

A snarl was the answer.

“And as for you, Johnson, you’ll get so tired of life before I’m through
with you that you’ll fling yourself over the side.  See if you don’t.”

“That’s a suggestion,” he added, in an aside to me.  “I’ll bet you a
month’s pay he acts upon it.”

I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity to
escape while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had selected his
spot well.  The _Ghost_ lay half-a-mile beyond the surf-line of a lonely
beach.  Here debouched a deep gorge, with precipitous, volcanic walls
which no man could scale.  And here, under his direct supervision—for he
went ashore himself—Leach and Johnson filled the small casks and rolled
them down to the beach.  They had no chance to make a break for liberty
in one of the boats.

Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt.  They composed one of
the boats’ crews, and their task was to ply between the schooner and the
shore, carrying a single cask each trip.  Just before dinner, starting
for the beach with an empty barrel, they altered their course and bore
away to the left to round the promontory which jutted into the sea
between them and liberty.  Beyond its foaming base lay the pretty
villages of the Japanese colonists and smiling valleys which penetrated
deep into the interior.  Once in the fastnesses they promised, and the
two men could defy Wolf Larsen.

I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all morning,
and I now learned why they were there.  Procuring their rifles, they
opened fire in a leisurely manner, upon the deserters.  It was a
cold-blooded exhibition of marksmanship.  At first their bullets zipped
harmlessly along the surface of the water on either side the boat; but,
as the men continued to pull lustily, they struck closer and closer.

“Now, watch me take Kelly’s right oar,” Smoke said, drawing a more
careful aim.

I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shatter as he
shot.  Henderson duplicated it, selecting Harrison’s right oar.  The boat
slewed around.  The two remaining oars were quickly broken.  The men
tried to row with the splinters, and had them shot out of their hands.
Kelly ripped up a bottom board and began paddling, but dropped it with a
cry of pain as its splinters drove into his hands.  Then they gave up,
letting the boat drift till a second boat, sent from the shore by Wolf
Larsen, took them in tow and brought them aboard.

Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away.  Nothing was before
us but the three or four months’ hunting on the sealing grounds.  The
outlook was black indeed, and I went about my work with a heavy heart.
An almost funereal gloom seemed to have descended upon the _Ghost_.  Wolf
Larsen had taken to his bunk with one of his strange, splitting
headaches.  Harrison stood listlessly at the wheel, half supporting
himself by it, as though wearied by the weight of his flesh.  The rest of
the men were morose and silent.  I came upon Kelly crouching to the lee
of the forecastle scuttle, his head on his knees, his arms about his
head, in an attitude of unutterable despondency.

Johnson I found lying full length on the forecastle head, staring at the
troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror the
suggestion Wolf Larsen had made.  It seemed likely to bear fruit.  I
tried to break in on the man’s morbid thoughts by calling him away, but
he smiled sadly at me and refused to obey.

Leach approached me as I returned aft.

“I want to ask a favour, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said.  “If it’s yer luck to
ever make ’Frisco once more, will you hunt up Matt McCarthy?  He’s my old
man.  He lives on the Hill, back of the Mayfair bakery, runnin’ a
cobbler’s shop that everybody knows, and you’ll have no trouble.  Tell
him I lived to be sorry for the trouble I brought him and the things I
done, and—and just tell him ‘God bless him,’ for me.”

I nodded my head, but said, “We’ll all win back to San Francisco, Leach,
and you’ll be with me when I go to see Matt McCarthy.”

“I’d like to believe you,” he answered, shaking my hand, “but I can’t.
Wolf Larsen ’ll do for me, I know it; and all I can hope is, he’ll do it
quick.”

And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart.  Since it
was to be done, let it be done with despatch.  The general gloom had
gathered me into its folds.  The worst appeared inevitable; and as I
paced the deck, hour after hour, I found myself afflicted with Wolf
Larsen’s repulsive ideas.  What was it all about?  Where was the grandeur
of life that it should permit such wanton destruction of human souls?  It
was a cheap and sordid thing after all, this life, and the sooner over
the better.  Over and done with!  I, too, leaned upon the rail and gazed
longingly into the sea, with the certainty that sooner or later I should
be sinking down, down, through the cool green depths of its oblivion.




CHAPTER XVII


Strange to say, in spite of the general foreboding, nothing of especial
moment happened on the _Ghost_.  We ran on to the north and west till we
raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great seal herd.  Coming
from no man knew where in the illimitable Pacific, it was travelling
north on its annual migration to the rookeries of Bering Sea.  And north
we travelled with it, ravaging and destroying, flinging the naked
carcasses to the shark and salting down the skins so that they might
later adorn the fair shoulders of the women of the cities.

It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman’s sake.  No man ate of the
seal meat or the oil.  After a good day’s killing I have seen our decks
covered with hides and bodies, slippery with fat and blood, the scuppers
running red; masts, ropes, and rails spattered with the sanguinary
colour; and the men, like butchers plying their trade, naked and red of
arm and hand, hard at work with ripping and flensing-knives, removing the
skins from the pretty sea-creatures they had killed.

It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the boats, to
oversee the skinning and afterward the cleansing of the decks and
bringing things ship-shape again.  It was not pleasant work.  My soul and
my stomach revolted at it; and yet, in a way, this handling and directing
of many men was good for me.  It developed what little executive ability
I possessed, and I was aware of a toughening or hardening which I was
undergoing and which could not be anything but wholesome for “Sissy” Van
Weyden.

One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never again
be quite the same man I had been.  While my hope and faith in human life
still survived Wolf Larsen’s destructive criticism, he had nevertheless
been a cause of change in minor matters.  He had opened up for me the
world of the real, of which I had known practically nothing and from
which I had always shrunk.  I had learned to look more closely at life as
it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the
world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain
values on the concrete and objective phases of existence.

I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the grounds.  For
when the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the herd, all hands
were away in the boats, and left on board were only he and I, and Thomas
Mugridge, who did not count.  But there was no play about it.  The six
boats, spreading out fan-wise from the schooner until the first weather
boat and the last lee boat were anywhere from ten to twenty miles apart,
cruised along a straight course over the sea till nightfall or bad
weather drove them in.  It was our duty to sail the _Ghost_ well to
leeward of the last lee boat, so that all the boats should have fair wind
to run for us in case of squalls or threatening weather.

It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind has
sprung up, to handle a vessel like the _Ghost_, steering, keeping
look-out for the boats, and setting or taking in sail; so it devolved
upon me to learn, and learn quickly.  Steering I picked up easily, but
running aloft to the crosstrees and swinging my whole weight by my arms
when I left the ratlines and climbed still higher, was more difficult.
This, too, I learned, and quickly, for I felt somehow a wild desire to
vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen’s eyes, to prove my right to live in ways
other than of the mind.  Nay, the time came when I took joy in the run of
the masthead and in the clinging on by my legs at that precarious height
while I swept the sea with glasses in search of the boats.

I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the reports
of the hunters’ guns grew dim and distant and died away as they scattered
far and wide over the sea.  There was just the faintest wind from the
westward; but it breathed its last by the time we managed to get to
leeward of the last lee boat.  One by one—I was at the masthead and
saw—the six boats disappeared over the bulge of the earth as they
followed the seal into the west.  We lay, scarcely rolling on the placid
sea, unable to follow.  Wolf Larsen was apprehensive.  The barometer was
down, and the sky to the east did not please him.  He studied it with
unceasing vigilance.

“If she comes out of there,” he said, “hard and snappy, putting us to
windward of the boats, it’s likely there’ll be empty bunks in steerage
and fo’c’sle.”

By eleven o’clock the sea had become glass.  By midday, though we were
well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening.  There was no
freshness in the air.  It was sultry and oppressive, reminding me of what
the old Californians term “earthquake weather.”  There was something
ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was made to feel that the
worst was about to come.  Slowly the whole eastern sky filled with clouds
that over-towered us like some black sierra of the infernal regions.  So
clearly could one see cañon, gorge, and precipice, and the shadows that
lie therein, that one looked unconsciously for the white surf-line and
bellowing caverns where the sea charges on the land.  And still we rocked
gently, and there was no wind.

“It’s no squall,” Wolf Larsen said.  “Old Mother Nature’s going to get
up on her hind legs and howl for all that’s in her, and it’ll keep us
jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our boats.  You’d better run up
and loosen the topsails.”

“But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?” I asked, a
note of protest in my voice.

“Why we’ve got to make the best of the first of it and run down to our
boats before our canvas is ripped out of us.  After that I don’t give a
rap what happens.  The sticks ’ll stand it, and you and I will have to,
though we’ve plenty cut out for us.”

Still the calm continued.  We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious meal for
me with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the bulge of the earth,
and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of clouds moving slowly down
upon us.  Wolf Larsen did not seem affected, however; though I noticed,
when we returned to the deck, a slight twitching of the nostrils, a
perceptible quickness of movement.  His face was stern, the lines of it
had grown hard, and yet in his eyes—blue, clear blue this day—there was a
strange brilliancy, a bright scintillating light.  It struck me that he
was joyous, in a ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an
impending struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge that
one of the great moments of living, when the tide of life surges up in
flood, was upon him.

Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud,
mockingly and defiantly, at the advancing storm.  I see him yet standing
there like a pigmy out of the _Arabian Nights_ before the huge front of
some malignant genie.  He was daring destiny, and he was unafraid.

He walked to the galley.  “Cooky, by the time you’ve finished pots and
pans you’ll be wanted on deck.  Stand ready for a call.”

“Hump,” he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent upon
him, “this beats whisky and is where your Omar misses.  I think he only
half lived after all.”

The western half of the sky had by now grown murky.  The sun had dimmed
and faded out of sight.  It was two in the afternoon, and a ghostly
twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon
us.  In this purplish light Wolf Larsen’s face glowed and glowed, and to
my excited fancy he appeared encircled by a halo.  We lay in the midst of
an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens of oncoming
sound and movement.  The sultry heat had become unendurable.  The sweat
was standing on my forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose.
I felt as though I should faint, and reached out to the rail for support.

And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed by.  It
was from the east, and like a whisper it came and went.  The drooping
canvas was not stirred, and yet my face had felt the air and been cooled.

“Cooky,” Wolf Larsen called in a low voice.  Thomas Mugridge turned a
pitiable scared face.  “Let go that foreboom tackle and pass it across,
and when she’s willing let go the sheet and come in snug with the tackle.
And if you make a mess of it, it will be the last you ever make.
Understand?”

“Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over.  Then jump for the
topsails and spread them quick as God’ll let you—the quicker you do it
the easier you’ll find it.  As for Cooky, if he isn’t lively bat him
between the eyes.”

I was aware of the compliment and pleased, in that no threat had
accompanied my instructions.  We were lying head to north-west, and it
was his intention to jibe over all with the first puff.

“We’ll have the breeze on our quarter,” he explained to me.  “By the last
guns the boats were bearing away slightly to the south’ard.”

He turned and walked aft to the wheel.  I went forward and took my
station at the jibs.  Another whisper of wind, and another, passed by.
The canvas flapped lazily.

“Thank Gawd she’s not comin’ all of a bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,” was the
Cockney’s fervent ejaculation.

And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough to know,
with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event awaited us.  The
whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the _Ghost_ moved.  Wolf
Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and we began to pay off.  The wind
was now dead astern, muttering and puffing stronger and stronger, and my
head-sails were pounding lustily.  I did not see what went on elsewhere,
though I felt the sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the
wind-pressures changed to the jibing of the fore- and main-sails.  My
hands were full with the flying-jib, jib, and staysail; and by the time
this part of my task was accomplished the _Ghost_ was leaping into the
south-west, the wind on her quarter and all her sheets to starboard.
Without pausing for breath, though my heart was beating like a
trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and before the
wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down.
Then I went aft for orders.

Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me.  The wind
was strengthening steadily and the sea rising.  For an hour I steered,
each moment becoming more difficult.  I had not the experience to steer
at the gait we were going on a quartering course.

“Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.  We’ve
made at least ten knots, and we’re going twelve or thirteen now.  The old
girl knows how to walk.”

I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above the
deck.  As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I
comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any of
our men.  Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which we were
running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat.  It did not seem
possible that such frail craft could survive such stress of wind and
water.

I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running with it;
but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the _Ghost_ and
apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply against the
foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life.  Sometimes she would
lift and send across some great wave, burying her starboard-rail from
view, and covering her deck to the hatches with the boiling ocean.  At
such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through
the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge,
inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have
been seventy feet or more.  Once, the terror of this giddy sweep
overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and
trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to behold
aught of the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to overwhelm
the _Ghost_.

But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my
quest for them I forgot myself.  For an hour I saw nothing but the naked,
desolate sea.  And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the
ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black
speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up.  I waited
patiently.  Again the tiny point of black projected itself through the
wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow.  I did not attempt to
shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen by waving my arm.  He
changed the course, and I signalled affirmation when the speck showed
dead ahead.

It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully
appreciated the speed of our flight.  Wolf Larsen motioned for me to come
down, and when I stood beside him at the wheel gave me instructions for
heaving to.

“Expect all hell to break loose,” he cautioned me, “but don’t mind it.
Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the fore-sheet.”

I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of sides,
for the weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee.  Having
instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered into the
fore-rigging a few feet.  The boat was now very close, and I could make
out plainly that it was lying head to wind and sea and dragging on its
mast and sail, which had been thrown overboard and made to serve as a
sea-anchor.  The three men were bailing.  Each rolling mountain whelmed
them from view, and I would wait with sickening anxiety, fearing that
they would never appear again.  Then, and with black suddenness, the boat
would shoot clear through the foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky, and
the whole length of her bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on
end.  There would be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water
in frantic haste, when she would topple over and fall into the yawning
valley, bow down and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared
almost directly above the bow.  Each time that she reappeared was a
miracle.

The _Ghost_ suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came to me
with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as impossible.
Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to, and dropped to the
deck to be in readiness.  We were now dead before the wind, the boat far
away and abreast of us.  I felt an abrupt easing of the schooner, a loss
for the moment of all strain and pressure, coupled with a swift
acceleration of speed.  She was rushing around on her heel into the wind.

As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the wind
(from which we had hitherto run away) caught us.  I was unfortunately and
ignorantly facing it.  It stood up against me like a wall, filling my
lungs with air which I could not expel.  And as I choked and strangled,
and as the _Ghost_ wallowed for an instant, broadside on and rolling
straight over and far into the wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above
my head.  I turned aside, caught my breath, and looked again.  The wave
over-topped the _Ghost_, and I gazed sheer up and into it.  A shaft of
sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent,
rushing green, backed by a milky smother of foam.

Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at once.
I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular and yet
everywhere.  My hold had been broken loose, I was under water, and the
thought passed through my mind that this was the terrible thing of which
I had heard, the being swept in the trough of the sea.  My body struck
and pounded as it was dashed helplessly along and turned over and over,
and when I could hold my breath no longer, I breathed the stinging salt
water into my lungs.  But through it all I clung to the one idea—_I must
get the jib backed over to windward_.  I had no fear of death.  I had no
doubt but that I should come through somehow.  And as this idea of
fulfilling Wolf Larsen’s order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I
seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter,
pitting his will against the will of the storm and defying it.

I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed, and
breathed the sweet air again.  I tried to rise, but struck my head and
was knocked back on hands and knees.  By some freak of the waters I had
been swept clear under the forecastle-head and into the eyes.  As I
scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge,
who lay in a groaning heap.  There was no time to investigate.  I must
get the jib backed over.

When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had come.  On
all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and steel and canvas.
The _Ghost_ was being wrenched and torn to fragments.  The foresail and
fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by the manœuvre, and with no one to
bring in the sheet in time, were thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom
threshing and splintering from rail to rail.  The air was thick with
flying wreckage, detached ropes and stays were hissing and coiling like
snakes, and down through it all crashed the gaff of the foresail.

The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred me to
action.  Perhaps the situation was not hopeless.  I remembered Wolf
Larsen’s caution.  He had expected all hell to break loose, and here it
was.  And where was he?  I caught sight of him toiling at the main-sheet,
heaving it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the stern of the
schooner lifted high in the air and his body outlined against a white
surge of sea sweeping past.  All this, and more,—a whole world of chaos
and wreck,—in possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.

I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang to
the jib-sheet.  The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially filling
and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet and the
application of my whole strength each time it slapped, I slowly backed
it.  This I know: I did my best.  I pulled till I burst open the ends of
all my fingers; and while I pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split
their cloths apart and thundered into nothingness.

Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn until
the next slap gave me more.  Then the sheet gave with greater ease, and
Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was busied taking up
the slack.

“Make fast!” he shouted.  “And come on!”

As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough order
obtained.  The _Ghost_ was hove to.  She was still in working order, and
she was still working.  Though the rest of her sails were gone, the jib,
backed to windward, and the mainsail hauled down flat, were themselves
holding, and holding her bow to the furious sea as well.

I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-tackles,
saw it lift to leeward on a big sea and not a score of feet away.  And, so
nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted fairly down upon it, so
that nothing remained to do but hook the tackles to either end and hoist
it aboard.  But this was not done so easily as it is written.

In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly amidships.
As we drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave while we sank in the
trough, till almost straight above me I could see the heads of the three
men craned overside and looking down.  Then, the next moment, we would
lift and soar upward while they sank far down beneath us.  It seemed
incredible that the next surge should not crush the _Ghost_ down upon the
tiny eggshell.

But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while Wolf
Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot.  Both tackles were hooked
in a trice, and the three men, deftly timing the roll, made a
simultaneous leap aboard the schooner.  As the _Ghost_ rolled her side
out of water, the boat was lifted snugly against her, and before the
return roll came, we had heaved it in over the side and turned it bottom
up on the deck.  I noticed blood spouting from Kerfoot’s left hand.  In
some way the third finger had been crushed to a pulp.  But he gave no
sign of pain, and with his single right hand helped us lash the boat in
its place.

“Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty!” Wolf Larsen commanded, the
very second we had finished with the boat.  “Kelly, come aft and slack
off the main-sheet!  You, Kerfoot, go for’ard and see what’s become of
Cooky!  Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft again, and cut away any stray stuff on
your way!”

And having commanded, he went aft with his peculiar tigerish leaps to the
wheel.  While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the _Ghost_ slowly paid off.
This time, as we went into the trough of the sea and were swept, there
were no sails to carry away.  And, halfway to the crosstrees and
flattened against the rigging by the full force of the wind so that it
would have been impossible for me to have fallen, the _Ghost_ almost on
her beam-ends and the masts parallel with the water, I looked, not down,
but at almost right angles from the perpendicular, to the deck of the
_Ghost_.  But I saw, not the deck, but where the deck should have been,
for it was buried beneath a wild tumbling of water.  Out of this water I
could see the two masts rising, and that was all.  The _Ghost_, for the
moment, was buried beneath the sea.  As she squared off more and more,
escaping from the side pressure, she righted herself and broke her deck,
like a whale’s back, through the ocean surface.

Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung like a
fly in the crosstrees and searched for the other boats.  In half-an-hour
I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to which were
desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson.  This time I
remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen succeeded in heaving to without being
swept.  As before, we drifted down upon it.  Tackles were made fast and
lines flung to the men, who scrambled aboard like monkeys.  The boat
itself was crushed and splintered against the schooner’s side as it came
inboard; but the wreck was securely lashed, for it could be patched and
made whole again.

Once more the _Ghost_ bore away before the storm, this time so submerging
herself that for some seconds I thought she would never reappear.  Even
the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was covered and swept
again and again.  At such moments I felt strangely alone with God, alone
with him and watching the chaos of his wrath.  And then the wheel would
reappear, and Wolf Larsen’s broad shoulders, his hands gripping the
spokes and holding the schooner to the course of his will, himself an
earth-god, dominating the storm, flinging its descending waters from him
and riding it to his own ends.  And oh, the marvel of it! the marvel of
it!  That tiny men should live and breathe and work, and drive so frail a
contrivance of wood and cloth through so tremendous an elemental strife.

As before, the _Ghost_ swung out of the trough, lifting her deck again
out of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast.  It was now
half-past five, and half-an-hour later, when the last of the day lost
itself in a dim and furious twilight, I sighted a third boat.  It was
bottom up, and there was no sign of its crew.  Wolf Larsen repeated his
manœuvre, holding off and then rounding up to windward and drifting down
upon it.  But this time he missed by forty feet, the boat passing astern.

“Number four boat!” Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes reading its number
in the one second when it lifted clear of the foam, and upside down.

It was Henderson’s boat and with him had been lost Holyoak and Williams,
another of the deep-water crowd.  Lost they indubitably were; but the
boat remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless effort to recover
it.  I had come down to the deck, and I saw Horner and Kerfoot vainly
protest against the attempt.

“By God, I’ll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that ever blew out of
hell!” he shouted, and though we four stood with our heads together that
we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far, as though removed from us
an immense distance.

“Mr. Van Weyden!” he cried, and I heard through the tumult as one might
hear a whisper.  “Stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty!  The rest of
you tail aft to the mainsheet!  Lively now! or I’ll sail you all into
Kingdom Come!  Understand?”

And when he put the wheel hard over and the _Ghost’s_ bow swung off,
there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and make the best of a
risky chance.  How great the risk I realized when I was once more buried
beneath the pounding seas and clinging for life to the pinrail at the
foot of the foremast.  My fingers were torn loose, and I swept across to
the side and over the side into the sea.  I could not swim, but before I
could sink I was swept back again.  A strong hand gripped me, and when
the _Ghost_ finally emerged, I found that I owed my life to Johnson.  I
saw him looking anxiously about him, and noted that Kelly, who had come
forward at the last moment, was missing.

This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same position as
in the previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to resort to a
different manœuvre.  Running off before the wind with everything to
starboard, he came about, and returned close-hauled on the port tack.

“Grand!” Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully came through the
attendant deluge, and I knew he referred, not to Wolf Larsen’s
seamanship, but to the performance of the _Ghost_ herself.

It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf Larsen
held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by unerring
instinct.  This time, though we were continually half-buried, there was
no trough in which to be swept, and we drifted squarely down upon the
upturned boat, badly smashing it as it was heaved inboard.

Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us—two
hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen and I—reefed, first one and then the
other, the jib and mainsail.  Hove to under this short canvas, our decks
were comparatively free of water, while the _Ghost_ bobbed and ducked
amongst the combers like a cork.

I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and during the
reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my cheeks.  And when
all was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled upon the deck in the
agony of exhaustion.

In the meantime Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being dragged
out from under the forecastle head where he had cravenly ensconced
himself.  I saw him pulled aft to the cabin, and noted with a shock of
surprise that the galley had disappeared.  A clean space of deck showed
where it had stood.

In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and while
coffee was being cooked over the small stove we drank whisky and crunched
hard-tack.  Never in my life had food been so welcome.  And never had hot
coffee tasted so good.  So violently did the _Ghost_ pitch and toss and
tumble that it was impossible for even the sailors to move about without
holding on, and several times, after a cry of “Now she takes it!” we were
heaped upon the wall of the port cabins as though it had been the deck.

“To hell with a look-out,” I heard Wolf Larsen say when we had eaten and
drunk our fill.  “There’s nothing can be done on deck.  If anything’s
going to run us down we couldn’t get out of its way.  Turn in, all hands,
and get some sleep.”

The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went, while
the two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being deemed
advisable to open the slide to the steerage companion-way.  Wolf Larsen
and I, between us, cut off Kerfoot’s crushed finger and sewed up the
stump.  Mugridge, who, during all the time he had been compelled to cook
and serve coffee and keep the fire going, had complained of internal
pains, now swore that he had a broken rib or two.  On examination we
found that he had three.  But his case was deferred to next day,
principally for the reason that I did not know anything about broken ribs
and would first have to read it up.

“I don’t think it was worth it,” I said to Wolf Larsen, “a broken boat
for Kelly’s life.”

“But Kelly didn’t amount to much,” was the reply.  “Good-night.”

After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my
finger-ends, and with three boats missing, to say nothing of the wild
capers the _Ghost_ was cutting, I should have thought it impossible to
sleep.  But my eyes must have closed the instant my head touched the
pillow, and in utter exhaustion I slept throughout the night, the while
the _Ghost_, lonely and undirected, fought her way through the storm.




CHAPTER XVIII


The next day, while the storm was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen and I
crammed anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge’s ribs.  Then, when the
storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that portion of the
ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat more to the westward,
while the boats were being repaired and new sails made and bent.  Sealing
schooner after sealing schooner we sighted and boarded, most of which
were in search of lost boats, and most of which were carrying boats and
crews they had picked up and which did not belong to them.  For the thick
of the fleet had been to the westward of us, and the boats, scattered far
and wide, had headed in mad flight for the nearest refuge.

Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the _Cisco_, and, to
Wolf Larsen’s huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with Nilson
and Leach, from the _San Diego_.  So that, at the end of five days, we
found ourselves short but four men—Henderson, Holyoak, Williams, and
Kelly,—and were once more hunting on the flanks of the herd.

As we followed it north we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.  Day
after day the boats lowered and were swallowed up almost ere they touched
the water, while we on board pumped the horn at regular intervals and
every fifteen minutes fired the bomb gun.  Boats were continually being
lost and found, it being the custom for a boat to hunt, on lay, with
whatever schooner picked it up, until such time it was recovered by its
own schooner.  But Wolf Larsen, as was to be expected, being a boat
short, took possession of the first stray one and compelled its men to
hunt with the _Ghost_, not permitting them to return to their own
schooner when we sighted it.  I remember how he forced the hunter and his
two men below, a rifle at their breasts, when their captain passed by at
biscuit-toss and hailed us for information.

Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life, was
soon limping about again and performing his double duties of cook and
cabin-boy.  Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as much as ever,
and they looked for their lives to end with the end of the hunting
season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives of dogs and were
worked like dogs by their pitiless master.  As for Wolf Larsen and
myself, we got along fairly well; though I could not quite rid myself of
the idea that right conduct, for me, lay in killing him.  He fascinated
me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably.  And yet, I could not
imagine him lying prone in death.  There was an endurance, as of
perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade the picture.  I
could see him only as living always, and dominating always, fighting and
destroying, himself surviving.

One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and the sea
was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two boat-pullers and
a steerer and go out himself.  He was a good shot, too, and brought many
a skin aboard under what the hunters termed impossible hunting
conditions.  It seemed the breath of his nostrils, this carrying his life
in his hands and struggling for it against tremendous odds.

I was learning more and more seamanship; and one clear day—a thing we
rarely encountered now—I had the satisfaction of running and handling the
_Ghost_ and picking up the boats myself.  Wolf Larsen had been smitten
with one of his headaches, and I stood at the wheel from morning until
evening, sailing across the ocean after the last lee boat, and heaving to
and picking it and the other five up without command or suggestion from
him.

Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy region,
and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me and most
important because of the changes wrought through it upon my future.  We
must have been caught nearly at the centre of this circular storm, and
Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward, first under a
double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles.  Never had I imagined so
great a sea.  The seas previously encountered were as ripples compared
with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest and which upreared,
I am confident, above our masthead.  So great was it that Wolf Larsen
himself did not dare heave to, though he was being driven far to the
southward and out of the seal herd.

We must have been well in the path of the trans-Pacific steamships when
the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the hunters, we found
ourselves in the midst of seals—a second herd, or sort of rear-guard,
they declared, and a most unusual thing.  But it was “Boats over!” the
boom-boom of guns, and the pitiful slaughter through the long day.

It was at this time that I was approached by Leach.  I had just finished
tallying the skins of the last boat aboard, when he came to my side, in
the darkness, and said in a low tone:

“Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast, and what
the bearings of Yokohama are?”

My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and I gave
him the bearings—west-north-west, and five hundred miles away.

“Thank you, sir,” was all he said as he slipped back into the darkness.

Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing.  The
water-breakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise
missing, as were the beds and sea bags of the two men.  Wolf Larsen was
furious.  He set sail and bore away into the west-north-west, two hunters
constantly at the mastheads and sweeping the sea with glasses, himself
pacing the deck like an angry lion.  He knew too well my sympathy for the
runaways to send me aloft as look-out.

The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a
haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.  But he put
the _Ghost_ through her best paces so as to get between the deserters and
the land.  This accomplished, he cruised back and forth across what he
knew must be their course.

On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry that
the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead.  All hands
lined the rail.  A snappy breeze was blowing from the west with the
promise of more wind behind it; and there, to leeward, in the troubled
silver of the rising sun, appeared and disappeared a black speck.

We squared away and ran for it.  My heart was as lead.  I felt myself
turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam of triumph in
Wolf Larsen’s eyes, his form swam before me, and I felt almost
irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him.  So unnerved was I by the
thought of impending violence to Leach and Johnson that my reason must
have left me.  I know that I slipped down into the steerage in a daze,
and that I was just beginning the ascent to the deck, a loaded shot-gun
in my hands, when I heard the startled cry:

“There’s five men in that boat!”

I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while the
observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of the men.
Then my knees gave from under me and I sank down, myself again, but
overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly done.  Also, I was
very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped back on deck.

No one had remarked my absence.  The boat was near enough for us to make
out that it was larger than any sealing boat and built on different
lines.  As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and the mast unstepped.
Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited for us to heave to and take
them aboard.

Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my side,
began to chuckle in a significant way.  I looked at him inquiringly.

“Talk of a mess!” he giggled.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded.

Again he chuckled.  “Don’t you see there, in the stern-sheets, on the
bottom?  May I never shoot a seal again if that ain’t a woman!”

I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamations broke out on all
sides.  The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was certainly
a woman.  We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf Larsen, who was
too evidently disappointed in that it was not his own boat with the two
victims of his malice.

We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and the
main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind.  The oars struck the water,
and with a few strokes the boat was alongside.  I now caught my first
fair glimpse of the woman.  She was wrapped in a long ulster, for the
morning was raw; and I could see nothing but her face and a mass of light
brown hair escaping from under the seaman’s cap on her head.  The eyes
were large and brown and lustrous, the mouth sweet and sensitive, and the
face itself a delicate oval, though sun and exposure to briny wind had
burnt the face scarlet.

She seemed to me like a being from another world.  I was aware of a
hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread.  But then, I
had not seen a woman for a very long time.  I know that I was lost in a
great wonder, almost a stupor,—this, then, was a woman?—so that I forgot
myself and my mate’s duties, and took no part in helping the new-comers
aboard.  For when one of the sailors lifted her into Wolf Larsen’s
downstretched arms, she looked up into our curious faces and smiled
amusedly and sweetly, as only a woman can smile, and as I had seen no one
smile for so long that I had forgotten such smiles existed.

“Mr. Van Weyden!”

Wolf Larsen’s voice brought me sharply back to myself.

“Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort?  Make up that spare
port cabin.  Put Cooky to work on it.  And see what you can do for that
face.  It’s burned badly.”

He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men.  The
boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a “bloody shame” with
Yokohama so near.

I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.  Also
I was awkward.  It seemed to me that I was realizing for the first time
what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I caught her arm to
help her down the companion stairs, I was startled by its smallness and
softness.  Indeed, she was a slender, delicate woman as women go, but to
me she was so ethereally slender and delicate that I was quite prepared
for her arm to crumble in my grasp.  All this, in frankness, to show my
first impression, after long denial of women in general and of Maud
Brewster in particular.

“No need to go to any great trouble for me,” she protested, when I had
seated her in Wolf Larsen’s arm-chair, which I had dragged hastily from
his cabin.  “The men were looking for land at any moment this morning,
and the vessel should be in by night; don’t you think so?”

Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback.  How could I
explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea like
Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn?  But I answered
honestly:

“If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would be
ashore in Yokohama to-morrow.  But our captain is a strange man, and I
beg of you to be prepared for anything—understand?—for anything.”

“I—I confess I hardly do understand,” she hesitated, a perturbed but not
frightened expression in her eyes.  “Or is it a misconception of mine
that shipwrecked people are always shown every consideration?  This is
such a little thing, you know.  We are so close to land.”

“Candidly, I do not know,” I strove to reassure her.  “I wished merely to
prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come.  This man, this
captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what will be his
next fantastic act.”

I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an “Oh, I see,” and
her voice sounded weary.  To think was patently an effort.  She was
clearly on the verge of physical collapse.

She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remark, devoting
myself to Wolf Larsen’s command, which was to make her comfortable.  I
bustled about in quite housewifely fashion, procuring soothing lotions
for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen’s private stores for a bottle of
port I knew to be there, and directing Thomas Mugridge in the preparation
of the spare state-room.

The wind was freshening rapidly, the _Ghost_ heeling over more and more,
and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing through the
water at a lively clip.  I had quite forgotten the existence of Leach and
Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunderclap, “Boat ho!” came down the open
companion-way.  It was Smoke’s unmistakable voice, crying from the
masthead.  I shot a glance at the woman, but she was leaning back in the
arm-chair, her eyes closed, unutterably tired.  I doubted that she had
heard, and I resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would
follow the capture of the deserters.  She was tired.  Very good.  She
should sleep.

There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a slapping of
reef-points as the _Ghost_ shot into the wind and about on the other
tack.  As she filled away and heeled, the arm-chair began to slide across
the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in time to prevent the rescued
woman from being spilled out.

Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half
stumbled, half tottered, as I led her to her cabin.  Mugridge grinned
insinuatingly in my face as I shoved him out and ordered him back to his
galley work; and he won his revenge by spreading glowing reports among
the hunters as to what an excellent “lydy’s-myde” I was proving myself to
be.

She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had fallen
asleep again between the arm-chair and the state-room.  This I discovered
when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch of the schooner.
She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep again; and asleep I
left her, under a heavy pair of sailor’s blankets, her head resting on a
pillow I had appropriated from Wolf Larsen’s bunk.




CHAPTER XIX


I came on deck to find the _Ghost_ heading up close on the port tack and
cutting in to windward of a familiar spritsail close-hauled on the same
tack ahead of us.  All hands were on deck, for they knew that something
was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged aboard.

It was four bells.  Louis came aft to relieve the wheel.  There was a
dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.

“What are we going to have?” I asked him.

“A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath iv it, sir,” he answered,
“with a splatter iv rain just to wet our gills an’ no more.”

“Too bad we sighted them,” I said, as the _Ghost’s_ bow was flung off a
point by a large sea and the boat leaped for a moment past the jibs and
into our line of vision.

Louis gave a spoke and temporized.  “They’d never iv made the land, sir,
I’m thinkin’.”

“Think not?” I queried.

“No, sir.  Did you feel that?”  (A puff had caught the schooner, and he
was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of the wind.)
“’Tis no egg-shell’ll float on this sea an hour come, an’ it’s a stroke
iv luck for them we’re here to pick ’em up.”

Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking with the
rescued men.  The cat-like springiness in his tread was a little more
pronounced than usual, and his eyes were bright and snappy.

“Three oilers and a fourth engineer,” was his greeting.  “But we’ll make
sailors out of them, or boat-pullers at any rate.  Now, what of the
lady?”

I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of a
knife when he mentioned her.  I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness
on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely shrugged my
shoulders in answer.

Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long, quizzical whistle.

“What’s her name, then?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “She is asleep.  She was very tired.  In
fact, I am waiting to hear the news from you.  What vessel was it?”

“Mail steamer,” he answered shortly.  “_The City of Tokio_, from ’Frisco,
bound for Yokohama.  Disabled in that typhoon.  Old tub.  Opened up top
and bottom like a sieve.  They were adrift four days.  And you don’t know
who or what she is, eh?—maid, wife, or widow?  Well, well.”

He shook his head in a bantering way, and regarded me with laughing eyes.

“Are you—” I began.  It was on the verge of my tongue to ask if he were
going to take the castaways into Yokohama.

“Am I what?” he asked.

“What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?”

He shook his head.  “Really, Hump, I don’t know.  You see, with these
additions I’ve about all the crew I want.”

“And they’ve about all the escaping they want,” I said.  “Why not give
them a change of treatment?  Take them aboard, and deal gently with them.
Whatever they have done they have been hounded into doing.”

“By me?”

“By you,” I answered steadily.  “And I give you warning, Wolf Larsen,
that I may forget love of my own life in the desire to kill you if you go
too far in maltreating those poor wretches.”

“Bravo!” he cried.  “You do me proud, Hump!  You’ve found your legs with
a vengeance.  You’re quite an individual.  You were unfortunate in having
your life cast in easy places, but you’re developing, and I like you the
better for it.”

His voice and expression changed.  His face was serious.  “Do you believe
in promises?” he asked.  “Are they sacred things?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“Then here’s a compact,” he went on, consummate actor.  “If I promise not
to lay my hands upon Leach will you promise, in turn, not to attempt to
kill me?”

“Oh, not that I’m afraid of you, not that I’m afraid of you,” he hastened
to add.

I could hardly believe my ears.  What was coming over the man?

“Is it a go?” he asked impatiently.

“A go,” I answered.

His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have sworn
I saw the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.

We strolled across the poop to the lee side.  The boat was close at hand
now, and in desperate plight.  Johnson was steering, Leach bailing.  We
overhauled them about two feet to their one.  Wolf Larsen motioned Louis
to keep off slightly, and we dashed abreast of the boat, not a score of
feet to windward.  The _Ghost_ blanketed it.  The spritsail flapped
emptily and the boat righted to an even keel, causing the two men swiftly
to change position.  The boat lost headway, and, as we lifted on a huge
surge, toppled and fell into the trough.

It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the faces of
their shipmates, who lined the rail amidships.  There was no greeting.
They were as dead men in their comrades’ eyes, and between them was the
gulf that parts the living and the dead.

The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf Larsen and
I.  We were falling in the trough, they were rising on the surge.
Johnson looked at me, and I could see that his face was worn and haggard.
I waved my hand to him, and he answered the greeting, but with a wave
that was hopeless and despairing.  It was as if he were saying farewell.
I did not see into the eyes of Leach, for he was looking at Wolf Larsen,
the old and implacable snarl of hatred strong as ever on his face.

Then they were gone astern.  The spritsail filled with the wind,
suddenly, careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would surely
capsize.  A whitecap foamed above it and broke across in a snow-white
smother.  Then the boat emerged, half swamped, Leach flinging the water
out and Johnson clinging to the steering-oar, his face white and anxious.

Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the weather
side of the poop.  I expected him to give orders for the _Ghost_ to heave
to, but she kept on her course and he made no sign.  Louis stood
imperturbably at the wheel, but I noticed the grouped sailors forward
turning troubled faces in our direction.  Still the _Ghost_ tore along,
till the boat dwindled to a speck, when Wolf Larsen’s voice rang out in
command and he went about on the starboard tack.

Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling
cockle-shell, when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove to.
The sealing boats are not made for windward work.  Their hope lies in
keeping a weather position so that they may run before the wind for the
schooner when it breezes up.  But in all that wild waste there was no
refuge for Leach and Johnson save on the _Ghost_, and they resolutely
began the windward beat.  It was slow work in the heavy sea that was
running.  At any moment they were liable to be overwhelmed by the hissing
combers.  Time and again and countless times we watched the boat luff
into the big whitecaps, lose headway, and be flung back like a cork.

Johnson was a splendid seaman, and he knew as much about small boats as
he did about ships.  At the end of an hour and a half he was nearly
alongside, standing past our stern on the last leg out, aiming to fetch
us on the next leg back.

“So you’ve changed your mind?” I heard Wolf Larsen mutter, half to
himself, half to them as though they could hear.  “You want to come
aboard, eh?  Well, then, just keep a-coming.”

“Hard up with that helm!” he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the Kanaka, who had
in the meantime relieved Louis at the wheel.

Command followed command.  As the schooner paid off, the fore- and
main-sheets were slacked away for fair wind.  And before the wind we
were, and leaping, when Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent peril, cut
across our wake a hundred feet away.  Again Wolf Larsen laughed, at the
same time beckoning them with his arm to follow.  It was evidently his
intention to play with them,—a lesson, I took it, in lieu of a beating,
though a dangerous lesson, for the frail craft stood in momentary danger
of being overwhelmed.

Johnson squared away promptly and ran after us.  There was nothing else
for him to do.  Death stalked everywhere, and it was only a matter of
time when some one of those many huge seas would fall upon the boat, roll
over it, and pass on.

“’Tis the fear iv death at the hearts iv them,” Louis muttered in my ear,
as I passed forward to see to taking in the flying jib and staysail.

“Oh, he’ll heave to in a little while and pick them up,” I answered
cheerfully.  “He’s bent upon giving them a lesson, that’s all.”

Louis looked at me shrewdly.  “Think so?” he asked.

“Surely,” I answered.  “Don’t you?”

“I think nothing but iv my own skin, these days,” was his answer.  “An’
’tis with wonder I’m filled as to the workin’ out iv things.  A pretty
mess that ’Frisco whisky got me into, an’ a prettier mess that woman’s
got you into aft there.  Ah, it’s myself that knows ye for a blitherin’
fool.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was
turning away.

“What do I mean?” he cried.  “And it’s you that asks me!  ’Tis not what I
mean, but what the Wolf ’ll mean.  The Wolf, I said, the Wolf!”

“If trouble comes, will you stand by?” I asked impulsively, for he had
voiced my own fear.

“Stand by?  ’Tis old fat Louis I stand by, an’ trouble enough it’ll be.
We’re at the beginnin’ iv things, I’m tellin’ ye, the bare beginnin’ iv
things.”

“I had not thought you so great a coward,” I sneered.

He favoured me with a contemptuous stare.  “If I raised never a hand for
that poor fool,”—pointing astern to the tiny sail,—“d’ye think I’m
hungerin’ for a broken head for a woman I never laid me eyes upon before
this day?”

I turned scornfully away and went aft.

“Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, as I
came on the poop.

I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned.  It was
clear he did not wish to run too far away from them.  I picked up hope at
the thought and put the order swiftly into execution.  I had scarcely
opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when eager men were
springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were racing aloft.  This
eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf Larsen with a grim smile.

Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern several
miles we hove to and waited.  All eyes watched it coming, even Wolf
Larsen’s; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard.  Louis, gazing
fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not quite able to hide.

The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the seething green
like a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing across the
huge-backed breakers, or disappearing behind them only to rush into sight
again and shoot skyward.  It seemed impossible that it could continue to
live, yet with each dizzying sweep it did achieve the impossible.  A
rain-squall drove past, and out of the flying wet the boat emerged,
almost upon us.

“Hard up, there!” Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing to the wheel and
whirling it over.

Again the _Ghost_ sprang away and raced before the wind, and for two
hours Johnson and Leach pursued us.  We hove to and ran away, hove to and
ran away, and ever astern the struggling patch of sail tossed skyward and
fell into the rushing valleys.  It was a quarter of a mile away when a
thick squall of rain veiled it from view.  It never emerged.  The wind
blew the air clear again, but no patch of sail broke the troubled
surface.  I thought I saw, for an instant, the boat’s bottom show black
in a breaking crest.  At the best, that was all.  For Johnson and Leach
the travail of existence had ceased.

The men remained grouped amidships.  No one had gone below, and no one
was speaking.  Nor were any looks being exchanged.  Each man seemed
stunned—deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite sure, trying to
realize just what had taken place.  Wolf Larsen gave them little time for
thought.  He at once put the _Ghost_ upon her course—a course which meant
the seal herd and not Yokohama harbour.  But the men were no longer eager
as they pulled and hauled, and I heard curses amongst them, which left
their lips smothered and as heavy and lifeless as were they.  Not so was
it with the hunters.  Smoke the irrepressible related a story, and they
descended into the steerage, bellowing with laughter.

As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft I was approached by
the engineer we had rescued.  His face was white, his lips were
trembling.

“Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?” he cried.

“You have eyes, you have seen,” I answered, almost brutally, what of the
pain and fear at my own heart.

“Your promise?” I said to Wolf Larsen.

“I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that promise,” he
answered.  “And anyway, you’ll agree I’ve not laid my hands upon them.”

“Far from it, far from it,” he laughed a moment later.

I made no reply.  I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too confused.
I must have time to think, I knew.  This woman, sleeping even now in the
spare cabin, was a responsibility, which I must consider, and the only
rational thought that flickered through my mind was that I must do
nothing hastily if I were to be any help to her at all.




CHAPTER XX


The remainder of the day passed uneventfully.  The young slip of a gale,
having wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate.  The fourth engineer and
the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf Larsen, were furnished
with outfits from the slop-chests, assigned places under the hunters in
the various boats and watches on the vessel, and bundled forward into the
forecastle.  They went protestingly, but their voices were not loud.
They were awed by what they had already seen of Wolf Larsen’s character,
while the tale of woe they speedily heard in the forecastle took the last
bit of rebellion out of them.

Miss Brewster—we had learned her name from the engineer—slept on and on.
At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices, so she was not
disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she made her appearance.
It had been my intention to have her meals served apart, but Wolf Larsen
put down his foot.  Who was she that she should be too good for cabin
table and cabin society? had been his demand.

But her coming to the table had something amusing in it.  The hunters
fell silent as clams.  Jock Horner and Smoke alone were unabashed,
stealing stealthy glances at her now and again, and even taking part in
the conversation.  The other four men glued their eyes on their plates
and chewed steadily and with thoughtful precision, their ears moving and
wobbling, in time with their jaws, like the ears of so many animals.

Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply when he
was addressed.  Not that he was abashed.  Far from it.  This woman was a
new type to him, a different breed from any he had ever known, and he was
curious.  He studied her, his eyes rarely leaving her face unless to
follow the movements of her hands or shoulders.  I studied her myself,
and though it was I who maintained the conversation, I know that I was a
bit shy, not quite self-possessed.  His was the perfect poise, the
supreme confidence in self, which nothing could shake; and he was no more
timid of a woman than he was of storm and battle.

“And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?” she asked, turning to him and
looking him squarely in the eyes.

There it was, the question flat.  The jaws stopped working, the ears
ceased wobbling, and though eyes remained glued on plates, each man
listened greedily for the answer.

“In four months, possibly three if the season closes early,” Wolf Larsen
said.

She caught her breath and stammered, “I—I thought—I was given to
understand that Yokohama was only a day’s sail away.  It—”  Here she
paused and looked about the table at the circle of unsympathetic faces
staring hard at the plates.  “It is not right,” she concluded.

“That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there,” he
replied, nodding to me with a mischievous twinkle.  “Mr. Van Weyden is
what you may call an authority on such things as rights.  Now I, who am
only a sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat differently.  It
may possibly be your misfortune that you have to remain with us, but it
is certainly our good fortune.”

He regarded her smilingly.  Her eyes fell before his gaze, but she lifted
them again, and defiantly, to mine.  I read the unspoken question there:
was it right?  But I had decided that the part I was to play must be a
neutral one, so I did not answer.

“What do you think?” she demanded.

“That it is unfortunate, especially if you have any engagements falling
due in the course of the next several months.  But, since you say that
you were voyaging to Japan for your health, I can assure you that it will
improve no better anywhere than aboard the _Ghost_.”

I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who dropped
mine, while I felt my face flushing under her gaze.  It was cowardly, but
what else could I do?

“Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority,” Wolf Larsen laughed.

I nodded my head, and she, having recovered herself, waited expectantly.

“Not that he is much to speak of now,” Wolf Larsen went on, “but he has
improved wonderfully.  You should have seen him when he came on board.  A
more scrawny, pitiful specimen of humanity one could hardly conceive.
Isn’t that so, Kerfoot?”

Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his knife on
the floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.

“Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes.  Eh, Kerfoot?”

Again that worthy grunted.

“Look at him now.  True, he is not what you would term muscular, but
still he has muscles, which is more than he had when he came aboard.
Also, he has legs to stand on.  You would not think so to look at him,
but he was quite unable to stand alone at first.”

The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy in her
eyes which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen’s nastiness.  In truth,
it had been so long since I had received sympathy that I was softened,
and I became then, and gladly, her willing slave.  But I was angry with
Wolf Larsen.  He was challenging my manhood with his slurs, challenging
the very legs he claimed to be instrumental in getting for me.

“I may have learned to stand on my own legs,” I retorted.  “But I have
yet to stamp upon others with them.”

He looked at me insolently.  “Your education is only half completed,
then,” he said dryly, and turned to her.

“We are very hospitable upon the _Ghost_.  Mr. Van Weyden has discovered
that.  We do everything to make our guests feel at home, eh, Mr. Van
Weyden?”

“Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes,” I answered,
“to say nothing to wringing their necks out of very fellowship.”

“I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr. Van
Weyden,” he interposed with mock anxiety.  “You will observe, Miss
Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a—ahem—a most unusual thing
for a ship’s officer to do.  While really very estimable, Mr. Van Weyden
is sometimes—how shall I say?—er—quarrelsome, and harsh measures are
necessary.  He is quite reasonable and fair in his calm moments, and as
he is calm now he will not deny that only yesterday he threatened my
life.”

I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery.  He drew
attention to me.

“Look at him now.  He can scarcely control himself in your presence.  He
is not accustomed to the presence of ladies anyway.  I shall have to arm
myself before I dare go on deck with him.”

He shook his head sadly, murmuring, “Too bad, too bad,” while the hunters
burst into guffaws of laughter.

The deep-sea voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the confined
space, produced a wild effect.  The whole setting was wild, and for the
first time, regarding this strange woman and realizing how incongruous
she was in it, I was aware of how much a part of it I was myself.  I knew
these men and their mental processes, was one of them myself, living the
seal-hunting life, eating the seal-hunting fare, thinking, largely, the
seal-hunting thoughts.  There was for me no strangeness to it, to the
rough clothes, the coarse faces, the wild laughter, and the lurching
cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.

As I buttered a piece of bread my eyes chanced to rest upon my hand.  The
knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the fingers swollen, the
nails rimmed with black.  I felt the mattress-like growth of beard on my
neck, knew that the sleeve of my coat was ripped, that a button was
missing from the throat of the blue shirt I wore.  The dirk mentioned by
Wolf Larsen rested in its sheath on my hip.  It was very natural that it
should be there,—how natural I had not imagined until now, when I looked
upon it with her eyes and knew how strange it and all that went with it
must appear to her.

But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen’s words, and again favoured me
with a sympathetic glance.  But there was a look of bewilderment also in
her eyes.  That it was mockery made the situation more puzzling to her.

“I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps,” she suggested.

“There will be no passing vessels, except other sealing-schooners,” Wolf
Larsen made answer.

“I have no clothes, nothing,” she objected.  “You hardly realize, sir,
that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant, careless
life which you and your men seem to lead.”

“The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better,” he said.

“I’ll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,” he added.  “I hope it
will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make yourself a dress or
two.”

She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her
ignorance of dressmaking.  That she was frightened and bewildered, and
that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.

“I suppose you’re like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having things
done for you.  Well, I think doing a few things for yourself will hardly
dislocate any joints.  By the way, what do you do for a living?”

She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.

“I mean no offence, believe me.  People eat, therefore they must procure
the wherewithal.  These men here shoot seals in order to live; for the
same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden, for the present at
any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me.  Now what do you do?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Do you feed yourself?  Or does some one else feed you?”

“I’m afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,” she laughed,
trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing, though I could
see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched Wolf Larsen.

“And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?”

“I _have_ made beds,” she replied.

“Very often?”

She shook her head with mock ruefulness.

“Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like you, do
not work for their living?”

“I am very ignorant,” she pleaded.  “What do they do to the poor men who
are like me?”

“They send them to jail.  The crime of not earning a living, in their
case, is called vagrancy.  If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who harps eternally
on questions of right and wrong, I’d ask, by what right do you live when
you do nothing to deserve living?”

“But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don’t have to answer, do I?”

She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos of it
cut me to the heart.  I must in some way break in and lead the
conversation into other channels.

“Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?” he demanded, certain
of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.

“Yes, I have,” she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud at his
crestfallen visage.  “I remember my father giving me a dollar once, when
I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely quiet for five minutes.”

He smiled indulgently.

“But that was long ago,” she continued.  “And you would scarcely demand a
little girl of nine to earn her own living.”

“At present, however,” she said, after another slight pause, “I earn
about eighteen hundred dollars a year.”

With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her.  A woman
who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking at.  Wolf
Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.

“Salary, or piece-work?” he asked.

“Piece-work,” she answered promptly.

“Eighteen hundred,” he calculated.  “That’s a hundred and fifty dollars a
month.  Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about the _Ghost_.
Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain with us.”

She made no acknowledgment.  She was too unused as yet to the whims of
the man to accept them with equanimity.

“I forgot to inquire,” he went on suavely, “as to the nature of your
occupation.  What commodities do you turn out?  What tools and materials
do you require?”

“Paper and ink,” she laughed.  “And, oh! also a typewriter.”

“You are Maud Brewster,” I said slowly and with certainty, almost as
though I were charging her with a crime.

Her eyes lifted curiously to mine.  “How do you know?”

“Aren’t you?” I demanded.

She acknowledged her identity with a nod.  It was Wolf Larsen’s turn to
be puzzled.  The name and its magic signified nothing to him.  I was
proud that it did mean something to me, and for the first time in a weary
while I was convincingly conscious of a superiority over him.

“I remember writing a review of a thin little volume—” I had begun
carelessly, when she interrupted me.

“You!” she cried.  “You are—”

She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.

I nodded my identity, in turn.

“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she concluded; then added with a sigh of relief,
and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf Larsen, “I am so
glad.”

“I remember the review,” she went on hastily, becoming aware of the
awkwardness of her remark; “that too, too flattering review.”

“Not at all,” I denied valiantly.  “You impeach my sober judgment and
make my canons of little worth.  Besides, all my brother critics were
with me.  Didn’t Lang include your ‘Kiss Endured’ among the four supreme
sonnets by women in the English language?”

“But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!”

“Was it not true?” I demanded.

“No, not that,” she answered.  “I was hurt.”

“We can measure the unknown only by the known,” I replied, in my finest
academic manner.  “As a critic I was compelled to place you.  You have
now become a yardstick yourself.  Seven of your thin little volumes are
on my shelves; and there are two thicker volumes, the essays, which, you
will pardon my saying, and I know not which is flattered more, fully
equal your verse.  The time is not far distant when some unknown will
arise in England and the critics will name her the English Maud
Brewster.”

“You are very kind, I am sure,” she murmured; and the very
conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it
aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick
thrill—rich with remembrance but stinging sharp with home-sickness.

“And you are Maud Brewster,” I said solemnly, gazing across at her.

“And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, gazing back at me with equal
solemnity and awe.  “How unusual!  I don’t understand.  We surely are not
to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your sober pen.”

“No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,” was my answer.  “I have
neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction.”

“Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?” she next
asked.  “It has not been kind of you.  We of the East have seen so very
little of you—too little, indeed, of the Dean of American Letters, the
Second.”

I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment.  “I nearly met you, once, in
Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other—you were to lecture, you
know.  My train was four hours late.”

And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded and
silent in the midst of our flood of gossip.  The hunters left the table
and went on deck, and still we talked.  Wolf Larsen alone remained.
Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning back from the table and listening
curiously to our alien speech of a world he did not know.

I broke short off in the middle of a sentence.  The present, with all its
perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force.  It smote Miss
Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing into her eyes as
she regarded Wolf Larsen.

He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly.  The sound of it was metallic.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, with a self-depreciatory wave of his hand.
“I don’t count.  Go on, go on, I pray you.”

But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the table and
laughed awkwardly.




CHAPTER XXI


The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster and me
in the conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion, and
it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim.  He had not mended his ways
nor his shirt, though the latter he contended he had changed.  The
garment itself did not bear out the assertion, nor did the accumulations
of grease on stove and pot and pan attest a general cleanliness.

“I’ve given you warning, Cooky,” Wolf Larsen said, “and now you’ve got to
take your medicine.”

Mugridge’s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen
called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly
out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning
crew in pursuit.  Few things could have been more to their liking than to
give him a tow over the side, for to the forecastle he had sent messes
and concoctions of the vilest order.  Conditions favoured the
undertaking.  The _Ghost_ was slipping through the water at no more than
three miles an hour, and the sea was fairly calm.  But Mugridge had
little stomach for a dip in it.  Possibly he had seen men towed before.
Besides, the water was frightfully cold, and his was anything but a
rugged constitution.

As usual, the watches below and the hunters turned out for what promised
sport.  Mugridge seemed to be in rabid fear of the water, and he
exhibited a nimbleness and speed we did not dream he possessed.  Cornered
in the right-angle of the poop and galley, he sprang like a cat to the
top of the cabin and ran aft.  But his pursuers forestalling him, he
doubled back across the cabin, passed over the galley, and gained the
deck by means of the steerage-scuttle.  Straight forward he raced, the
boat-puller Harrison at his heels and gaining on him.  But Mugridge,
leaping suddenly, caught the jib-boom-lift.  It happened in an instant.
Holding his weight by his arms, and in mid-air doubling his body at the
hips, he let fly with both feet.  The oncoming Harrison caught the kick
squarely in the pit of the stomach, groaned involuntarily, and doubled up
and sank backward to the deck.

Hand-clapping and roars of laughter from the hunters greeted the exploit,
while Mugridge, eluding half of his pursuers at the foremast, ran aft and
through the remainder like a runner on the football field.  Straight aft
he held, to the poop and along the poop to the stern.  So great was his
speed that as he curved past the corner of the cabin he slipped and fell.
Nilson was standing at the wheel, and the Cockney’s hurtling body struck
his legs.  Both went down together, but Mugridge alone arose.  By some
freak of pressures, his frail body had snapped the strong man’s leg like
a pipe-stem.

Parsons took the wheel, and the pursuit continued.  Round and round the
decks they went, Mugridge sick with fear, the sailors hallooing and
shouting directions to one another, and the hunters bellowing
encouragement and laughter.  Mugridge went down on the fore-hatch under
three men; but he emerged from the mass like an eel, bleeding at the
mouth, the offending shirt ripped into tatters, and sprang for the
main-rigging.  Up he went, clear up, beyond the ratlines, to the very
masthead.

Half-a-dozen sailors swarmed to the crosstrees after him, where they
clustered and waited while two of their number, Oofty-Oofty and Black
(who was Latimer’s boat-steerer), continued up the thin steel stays,
lifting their bodies higher and higher by means of their arms.

It was a perilous undertaking, for, at a height of over a hundred feet
from the deck, holding on by their hands, they were not in the best of
positions to protect themselves from Mugridge’s feet.  And Mugridge
kicked savagely, till the Kanaka, hanging on with one hand, seized the
Cockney’s foot with the other.  Black duplicated the performance a moment
later with the other foot.  Then the three writhed together in a swaying
tangle, struggling, sliding, and falling into the arms of their mates on
the crosstrees.

The aërial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and gibbering,
his mouth flecked with bloody foam, was brought down to deck.  Wolf
Larsen rove a bowline in a piece of rope and slipped it under his
shoulders.  Then he was carried aft and flung into the sea.
Forty,—fifty,—sixty feet of line ran out, when Wolf Larsen cried “Belay!”
Oofty-Oofty took a turn on a bitt, the rope tautened, and the _Ghost_,
lunging onward, jerked the cook to the surface.

It was a pitiful spectacle.  Though he could not drown, and was
nine-lived in addition, he was suffering all the agonies of
half-drowning.  The _Ghost_ was going very slowly, and when her stern
lifted on a wave and she slipped forward she pulled the wretch to the
surface and gave him a moment in which to breathe; but between each lift
the stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed the next wave the line
slacked and he sank beneath.

I had forgotten the existence of Maud Brewster, and I remembered her with
a start as she stepped lightly beside me.  It was her first time on deck
since she had come aboard.  A dead silence greeted her appearance.

“What is the cause of the merriment?” she asked.

“Ask Captain Larsen,” I answered composedly and coldly, though inwardly
my blood was boiling at the thought that she should be witness to such
brutality.

She took my advice and was turning to put it into execution, when her
eyes lighted on Oofty-Oofty, immediately before her, his body instinct
with alertness and grace as he held the turn of the rope.

“Are you fishing?” she asked him.

He made no reply.  His eyes, fixed intently on the sea astern, suddenly
flashed.

“Shark ho, sir!” he cried.

“Heave in!  Lively!  All hands tail on!” Wolf Larsen shouted, springing
himself to the rope in advance of the quickest.

Mugridge had heard the Kanaka’s warning cry and was screaming madly.  I
could see a black fin cutting the water and making for him with greater
swiftness than he was being pulled aboard.  It was an even toss whether
the shark or we would get him, and it was a matter of moments.  When
Mugridge was directly beneath us, the stern descended the slope of a
passing wave, thus giving the advantage to the shark.  The fin
disappeared.  The belly flashed white in swift upward rush.  Almost
equally swift, but not quite, was Wolf Larsen.  He threw his strength
into one tremendous jerk.  The Cockney’s body left the water; so did part
of the shark’s.  He drew up his legs, and the man-eater seemed no more
than barely to touch one foot, sinking back into the water with a splash.
But at the moment of contact Thomas Mugridge cried out.  Then he came in
like a fresh-caught fish on a line, clearing the rail generously and
striking the deck in a heap, on hands and knees, and rolling over.

But a fountain of blood was gushing forth.  The right foot was missing,
amputated neatly at the ankle.  I looked instantly to Maud Brewster.  Her
face was white, her eyes dilated with horror.  She was gazing, not at
Thomas Mugridge, but at Wolf Larsen.  And he was aware of it, for he
said, with one of his short laughs:

“Man-play, Miss Brewster.  Somewhat rougher, I warrant, than what you
have been used to, but still-man-play.  The shark was not in the
reckoning.  It—”

But at this juncture, Mugridge, who had lifted his head and ascertained
the extent of his loss, floundered over on the deck and buried his teeth
in Wolf Larsen’s leg.  Wolf Larsen stooped, coolly, to the Cockney, and
pressed with thumb and finger at the rear of the jaws and below the ears.
The jaws opened with reluctance, and Wolf Larsen stepped free.

“As I was saying,” he went on, as though nothing unwonted had happened,
“the shark was not in the reckoning.  It was—ahem—shall we say
Providence?”

She gave no sign that she had heard, though the expression of her eyes
changed to one of inexpressible loathing as she started to turn away.
She no more than started, for she swayed and tottered, and reached her
hand weakly out to mine.  I caught her in time to save her from falling,
and helped her to a seat on the cabin.  I thought she might faint
outright, but she controlled herself.

“Will you get a tourniquet, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen called to me.

I hesitated.  Her lips moved, and though they formed no words, she
commanded me with her eyes, plainly as speech, to go to the help of the
unfortunate man.  “Please,” she managed to whisper, and I could but obey.

By now I had developed such skill at surgery that Wolf Larsen, with a few
words of advice, left me to my task with a couple of sailors for
assistants.  For his task he elected a vengeance on the shark.  A heavy
swivel-hook, baited with fat salt-pork, was dropped overside; and by the
time I had compressed the severed veins and arteries, the sailors were
singing and heaving in the offending monster.  I did not see it myself,
but my assistants, first one and then the other, deserted me for a few
moments to run amidships and look at what was going on.  The shark, a
sixteen-footer, was hoisted up against the main-rigging.  Its jaws were
pried apart to their greatest extension, and a stout stake, sharpened at
both ends, was so inserted that when the pries were removed the spread
jaws were fixed upon it.  This accomplished, the hook was cut out.  The
shark dropped back into the sea, helpless, yet with its full strength,
doomed—to lingering starvation—a living death less meet for it than for
the man who devised the punishment.




CHAPTER XXII


I knew what it was as she came toward me.  For ten minutes I had watched
her talking earnestly with the engineer, and now, with a sign for
silence, I drew her out of earshot of the helmsman.  Her face was white
and set; her large eyes, larger than usual what of the purpose in them,
looked penetratingly into mine.  I felt rather timid and apprehensive,
for she had come to search Humphrey Van Weyden’s soul, and Humphrey Van
Weyden had nothing of which to be particularly proud since his advent on
the _Ghost_.

We walked to the break of the poop, where she turned and faced me.  I
glanced around to see that no one was within hearing distance.

“What is it?” I asked gently; but the expression of determination on her
face did not relax.

“I can readily understand,” she began, “that this morning’s affair was
largely an accident; but I have been talking with Mr. Haskins.  He tells
me that the day we were rescued, even while I was in the cabin, two men
were drowned, deliberately drowned—murdered.”

There was a query in her voice, and she faced me accusingly, as though I
were guilty of the deed, or at least a party to it.

“The information is quite correct,” I answered.  “The two men were
murdered.”

“And you permitted it!” she cried.

“I was unable to prevent it, is a better way of phrasing it,” I replied,
still gently.

“But you tried to prevent it?”  There was an emphasis on the “tried,” and
a pleading little note in her voice.

“Oh, but you didn’t,” she hurried on, divining my answer.  “But why
didn’t you?”

I shrugged my shoulders.  “You must remember, Miss Brewster, that you are
a new inhabitant of this little world, and that you do not yet understand
the laws which operate within it.  You bring with you certain fine
conceptions of humanity, manhood, conduct, and such things; but here you
will find them misconceptions.  I have found it so,” I added, with an
involuntary sigh.

She shook her head incredulously.

“What would you advise, then?” I asked.  “That I should take a knife, or
a gun, or an axe, and kill this man?”

She half started back.

“No, not that!”

“Then what should I do?  Kill myself?”

“You speak in purely materialistic terms,” she objected.  “There is such
a thing as moral courage, and moral courage is never without effect.”

“Ah,” I smiled, “you advise me to kill neither him nor myself, but to let
him kill me.”  I held up my hand as she was about to speak.  “For moral
courage is a worthless asset on this little floating world.  Leach, one
of the men who were murdered, had moral courage to an unusual degree.  So
had the other man, Johnson.  Not only did it not stand them in good
stead, but it destroyed them.  And so with me if I should exercise what
little moral courage I may possess.

“You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that this
man is a monster.  He is without conscience.  Nothing is sacred to him,
nothing is too terrible for him to do.  It was due to his whim that I was
detained aboard in the first place.  It is due to his whim that I am
still alive.  I do nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this
monster, as you are now a slave to him; because I desire to live, as you
will desire to live; because I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you
will not be able to fight and overcome him.”

She waited for me to go on.

“What remains?  Mine is the role of the weak.  I remain silent and suffer
ignominy, as you will remain silent and suffer ignominy.  And it is well.
It is the best we can do if we wish to live.  The battle is not always to
the strong.  We have not the strength with which to fight this man; we
must dissimulate, and win, if win we can, by craft.  If you will be
advised by me, this is what you will do.  I know my position is perilous,
and I may say frankly that yours is even more perilous.  We must stand
together, without appearing to do so, in secret alliance.  I shall not be
able to side with you openly, and, no matter what indignities may be put
upon me, you are to remain likewise silent.  We must provoke no scenes
with this man, nor cross his will.  And we must keep smiling faces and be
friendly with him no matter how repulsive it may be.”

She brushed her hand across her forehead in a puzzled way, saying, “Still
I do not understand.”

“You must do as I say,” I interrupted authoritatively, for I saw Wolf
Larsen’s gaze wandering toward us from where he paced up and down with
Latimer amidships.  “Do as I say, and ere long you will find I am right.”

“What shall I do, then?” she asked, detecting the anxious glance I had
shot at the object of our conversation, and impressed, I flatter myself,
with the earnestness of my manner.

“Dispense with all the moral courage you can,” I said briskly.  “Don’t
arouse this man’s animosity.  Be quite friendly with him, talk with him,
discuss literature and art with him—he is fond of such things.  You will
find him an interested listener and no fool.  And for your own sake try
to avoid witnessing, as much as you can, the brutalities of the ship.  It
will make it easier for you to act your part.”

“I am to lie,” she said in steady, rebellious tones, “by speech and
action to lie.”

Wolf Larsen had separated from Latimer and was coming toward us.  I was
desperate.

“Please, please understand me,” I said hurriedly, lowering my voice.
“All your experience of men and things is worthless here.  You must begin
over again.  I know,—I can see it—you have, among other ways, been used
to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out
through them, as it were.  You have already managed me with your eyes,
commanded me with them.  But don’t try it on Wolf Larsen.  You could as
easily control a lion, while he would make a mock of you.  He would—I
have always been proud of the fact that I discovered him,” I said,
turning the conversation as Wolf Larsen stepped on the poop and joined
us.  “The editors were afraid of him and the publishers would have none
of him.  But I knew, and his genius and my judgment were vindicated when
he made that magnificent hit with his ‘Forge.’”

“And it was a newspaper poem,” she said glibly.

“It did happen to see the light in a newspaper,” I replied, “but not
because the magazine editors had been denied a glimpse at it.”

“We were talking of Harris,” I said to Wolf Larsen.

“Oh, yes,” he acknowledged.  “I remember the ‘Forge.’  Filled with pretty
sentiments and an almighty faith in human illusions.  By the way, Mr. Van
Weyden, you’d better look in on Cooky.  He’s complaining and restless.”

Thus was I bluntly dismissed from the poop, only to find Mugridge
sleeping soundly from the morphine I had given him.  I made no haste to
return on deck, and when I did I was gratified to see Miss Brewster in
animated conversation with Wolf Larsen.  As I say, the sight gratified
me.  She was following my advice.  And yet I was conscious of a slight
shock or hurt in that she was able to do the thing I had begged her to do
and which she had notably disliked.




CHAPTER XXIII


Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the _Ghost_ northward into the
seal herd.  We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth parallel, in a
raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the fog-banks in eternal
flight.  For days at a time we could never see the sun nor take an
observation; then the wind would sweep the face of the ocean clean, the
waves would ripple and flash, and we would learn where we were.  A day of
clear weather might follow, or three days or four, and then the fog would
settle down upon us, seemingly thicker than ever.

The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, were
swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till nightfall,
and often not till long after, when they would creep in like sea-wraiths,
one by one, out of the grey.  Wainwright—the hunter whom Wolf Larsen had
stolen with boat and men—took advantage of the veiled sea and escaped.
He disappeared one morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we
never saw them again, though it was not many days when we learned that
they had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regained
their own.

This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunity
never offered.  It was not in the mate’s province to go out in the boats,
and though I manœuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen never granted me the
privilege.  Had he done so, I should have managed somehow to carry Miss
Brewster away with me.  As it was, the situation was approaching a stage
which I was afraid to consider.  I involuntarily shunned the thought of
it, and yet the thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting
spectre.

I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of
course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I learned,
now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance of such a
situation—the thing the writers harped upon and exploited so thoroughly.
And here it was, now, and I was face to face with it.  That it should be
as vital as possible, it required no more than that the woman should be
Maud Brewster, who now charmed me in person as she had long charmed me
through her work.

No one more out of environment could be imagined.  She was a delicate,
ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful of movement.
It never seemed to me that she walked, or, at least, walked after the
ordinary manner of mortals.  Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and she
moved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching one as down might
float or as a bird on noiseless wings.

She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed with
what I may call her fragility.  As at the time I caught her arm when
helping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress or
rough handling befall her, to see her crumble away.  I have never seen
body and spirit in such perfect accord.  Describe her verse, as the
critics have described it, as sublimated and spiritual, and you have
described her body.  It seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogous
attributes, and to link it to life with the slenderest of chains.
Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her constitution there was
little of the robust clay.

She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen.  Each was nothing that the
other was, everything that the other was not.  I noted them walking the
deck together one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of the
human ladder of evolution—the one the culmination of all savagery, the
other the finished product of the finest civilization.  True, Wolf Larsen
possessed intellect to an unusual degree, but it was directed solely to
the exercise of his savage instincts and made him but the more formidable
a savage.  He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode
with the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing
heavy about his stride.  The jungle and the wilderness lurked in the
uplift and downput of his feet.  He was cat-footed, and lithe, and
strong, always strong.  I likened him to some great tiger, a beast of
prowess and prey.  He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose at
times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in the
eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.

But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was she
who terminated the walk.  They came up to where I was standing by the
entrance to the companion-way.  Though she betrayed it by no outward
sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed.  She made some
idle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough; but I saw her
eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though fascinated; then they fell,
but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of terror that filled them.

It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.  Ordinarily
grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all
a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the
full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.  Perhaps it was to this
that the golden colour was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and
masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand
and clamour of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, could
misunderstand.

Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear—the most
terrible fear a man can experience—I knew that in inexpressible ways she
was dear to me.  The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with the
terror, and with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my blood
at the same time to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by a
power without me and beyond me, and found my eyes returning against my
will to gaze into the eyes of Wolf Larsen.  But he had recovered himself.
The golden colour and the dancing lights were gone.  Cold and grey and
glittering they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.

“I am afraid,” she whispered, with a shiver.  “I am so afraid.”

I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to me
my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly:

“All will come right, Miss Brewster.  Trust me, it will come right.”

She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding,
and started to descend the companion-stairs.

For a long while I remained standing where she had left me.  There was
imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of the
changed aspect of things.  It had come, at last, love had come, when I
least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions.  Of course,
my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-call
sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had made me
inattentive and unprepared.

And now it had come!  Maud Brewster!  My memory flashed back to that
first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in
the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library shelf.  How I
had welcomed each of them!  Each year one had come from the press, and to
me each was the advent of the year.  They had voiced a kindred intellect
and spirit, and as such I had received them into a camaraderie of the
mind; but now their place was in my heart.

My heart?  A revulsion of feeling came over me.  I seemed to stand
outside myself and to look at myself incredulously.  Maud Brewster!
Humphrey Van Weyden, “the cold-blooded fish,” the “emotionless monster,”
the “analytical demon,” of Charley Furuseth’s christening, in love!  And
then, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a
small biographical note in the red-bound _Who’s Who_, and I said to
myself, “She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old.”
And then I said, “Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?”
But how did I know she was fancy free?  And the pang of new-born jealousy
put all incredulity to flight.  There was no doubt about it.  I was
jealous; therefore I loved.  And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.

I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love!  And again the doubt assailed me.
Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it.  On the
contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, my
philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thing
in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most exquisite pitch
of joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the thing of all things
to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart.  But now that it had
come I could not believe.  I could not be so fortunate.  It was too good,
too good to be true.  Symons’s lines came into my head:

   “I wandered all these years among
   A world of women, seeking you.”

And then I had ceased seeking.  It was not for me, this greatest thing in
the world, I had decided.  Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an
“emotionless monster,” a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring
in sensations only of the mind.  And though I had been surrounded by
women all my days, my appreciation of them had been æsthetic and nothing
more.  I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a
monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and
understood so well in others.  And now it had come!  Undreamed of and
unheralded, it had come.  In what could have been no less than an
ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and started
along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs.
Browning:

   “I lived with visions for my company
   Instead of men and women years ago,
   And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
   A sweeter music than they played to me.”

But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and
oblivious to all about me.  The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.

“What the hell are you up to?” he was demanding.

I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to
myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.

“Sleep-walking, sunstroke,—what?” he barked.

“No; indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
untoward had occurred.




CHAPTER XXIV


Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the
_Ghost_ which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of
my love for Maud Brewster.  I, who had lived my life in quiet places,
only to enter at the age of thirty-five upon a course of the most
irrational adventure I could have imagined, never had more incident and
excitement crammed into any forty hours of my experience.  Nor can I
quite close my ears to a small voice of pride which tells me I did not do
so badly, all things considered.

To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the hunters
that they were to eat thenceforth in the steerage.  It was an
unprecedented thing on sealing-schooners, where it is the custom for the
hunters to rank, unofficially as officers.  He gave no reason, but his
motive was obvious enough.  Horner and Smoke had been displaying a
gallantry toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in itself and inoffensive to
her, but to him evidently distasteful.

The announcement was received with black silence, though the other four
hunters glanced significantly at the two who had been the cause of their
banishment.  Jock Horner, quiet as was his way, gave no sign; but the
blood surged darkly across Smoke’s forehead, and he half opened his mouth
to speak.  Wolf Larsen was watching him, waiting for him, the steely
glitter in his eyes; but Smoke closed his mouth again without having said
anything.

“Anything to say?” the other demanded aggressively.

It was a challenge, but Smoke refused to accept it.

“About what?” he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen was disconcerted,
while the others smiled.

“Oh, nothing,” Wolf Larsen said lamely.  “I just thought you might want
to register a kick.”

“About what?” asked the imperturbable Smoke.

Smoke’s mates were now smiling broadly.  His captain could have killed
him, and I doubt not that blood would have flowed had not Maud Brewster
been present.  For that matter, it was her presence which enabled Smoke
to act as he did.  He was too discreet and cautious a man to incur Wolf
Larsen’s anger at a time when that anger could be expressed in terms
stronger than words.  I was in fear that a struggle might take place, but
a cry from the helmsman made it easy for the situation to save itself.

“Smoke ho!” the cry came down the open companion-way.

“How’s it bear?” Wolf Larsen called up.

“Dead astern, sir.”

“Maybe it’s a Russian,” suggested Latimer.

His words brought anxiety into the faces of the other hunters.  A Russian
could mean but one thing—a cruiser.  The hunters, never more than roughly
aware of the position of the ship, nevertheless knew that we were close
to the boundaries of the forbidden sea, while Wolf Larsen’s record as a
poacher was notorious.  All eyes centred upon him.

“We’re dead safe,” he assured them with a laugh.  “No salt mines this
time, Smoke.  But I’ll tell you what—I’ll lay odds of five to one it’s
the _Macedonia_.”

No one accepted his offer, and he went on: “In which event, I’ll lay ten
to one there’s trouble breezing up.”

“No, thank you,” Latimer spoke up.  “I don’t object to losing my money,
but I like to get a run for it anyway.  There never was a time when there
wasn’t trouble when you and that brother of yours got together, and I’ll
lay twenty to one on that.”

A general smile followed, in which Wolf Larsen joined, and the dinner
went on smoothly, thanks to me, for he treated me abominably the rest of
the meal, sneering at me and patronizing me till I was all a-tremble with
suppressed rage.  Yet I knew I must control myself for Maud Brewster’s
sake, and I received my reward when her eyes caught mine for a fleeting
second, and they said, as distinctly as if she spoke, “Be brave, be
brave.”

We left the table to go on deck, for a steamer was a welcome break in the
monotony of the sea on which we floated, while the conviction that it was
Death Larsen and the _Macedonia_ added to the excitement.  The stiff
breeze and heavy sea which had sprung up the previous afternoon had been
moderating all morning, so that it was now possible to lower the boats
for an afternoon’s hunt.  The hunting promised to be profitable.  We had
sailed since daylight across a sea barren of seals, and were now running
into the herd.

The smoke was still miles astern, but overhauling us rapidly, when we
lowered our boats.  They spread out and struck a northerly course across
the ocean.  Now and again we saw a sail lower, heard the reports of the
shot-guns, and saw the sail go up again.  The seals were thick, the wind
was dying away; everything favoured a big catch.  As we ran off to get
our leeward position of the last lee boat, we found the ocean fairly
carpeted with sleeping seals.  They were all about us, thicker than I had
ever seen them before, in twos and threes and bunches, stretched full
length on the surface and sleeping for all the world like so many lazy
young dogs.

Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer were
growing larger.  It was the _Macedonia_.  I read her name through the
glasses as she passed by scarcely a mile to starboard.  Wolf Larsen
looked savagely at the vessel, while Maud Brewster was curious.

“Where is the trouble you were so sure was breezing up, Captain Larsen?”
she asked gaily.

He glanced at her, a moment’s amusement softening his features.

“What did you expect?  That they’d come aboard and cut our throats?”

“Something like that,” she confessed.  “You understand, seal-hunters are
so new and strange to me that I am quite ready to expect anything.”

He nodded his head.  “Quite right, quite right.  Your error is that you
failed to expect the worst.”

“Why, what can be worse than cutting our throats?” she asked, with pretty
naïve surprise.

“Cutting our purses,” he answered.  “Man is so made these days that his
capacity for living is determined by the money he possesses.”

“’Who steals my purse steals trash,’” she quoted.

“Who steals my purse steals my right to live,” was the reply, “old saws
to the contrary.  For he steals my bread and meat and bed, and in so
doing imperils my life.  There are not enough soup-kitchens and
bread-lines to go around, you know, and when men have nothing in their
purses they usually die, and die miserably—unless they are able to fill
their purses pretty speedily.”

“But I fail to see that this steamer has any designs on your purse.”

“Wait and you will see,” he answered grimly.

We did not have long to wait.  Having passed several miles beyond our
line of boats, the _Macedonia_ proceeded to lower her own.  We knew she
carried fourteen boats to our five (we were one short through the
desertion of Wainwright), and she began dropping them far to leeward of
our last boat, continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished
dropping them far to windward of our first weather boat.  The hunting,
for us, was spoiled.  There were no seals behind us, and ahead of us the
line of fourteen boats, like a huge broom, swept the herd before it.

Our boats hunted across the two or three miles of water between them and
the point where the _Macedonia’s_ had been dropped, and then headed for
home.  The wind had fallen to a whisper, the ocean was growing calmer and
calmer, and this, coupled with the presence of the great herd, made a
perfect hunting day—one of the two or three days to be encountered in the
whole of a lucky season.  An angry lot of men, boat-pullers and steerers
as well as hunters, swarmed over our side.  Each man felt that he had
been robbed; and the boats were hoisted in amid curses, which, if curses
had power, would have settled Death Larsen for all eternity—“Dead and
damned for a dozen iv eternities,” commented Louis, his eyes twinkling up
at me as he rested from hauling taut the lashings of his boat.

“Listen to them, and find if it is hard to discover the most vital thing
in their souls,” said Wolf Larsen.  “Faith? and love? and high ideals?
The good? the beautiful? the true?”

“Their innate sense of right has been violated,” Maud Brewster said,
joining the conversation.

She was standing a dozen feet away, one hand resting on the main-shrouds
and her body swaying gently to the slight roll of the ship.  She had not
raised her voice, and yet I was struck by its clear and bell-like tone.
Ah, it was sweet in my ears!  I scarcely dared look at her just then, for
the fear of betraying myself.  A boy’s cap was perched on her head, and
her hair, light brown and arranged in a loose and fluffy order that
caught the sun, seemed an aureole about the delicate oval of her face.
She was positively bewitching, and, withal, sweetly spirituelle, if not
saintly.  All my old-time marvel at life returned to me at sight of this
splendid incarnation of it, and Wolf Larsen’s cold explanation of life
and its meaning was truly ridiculous and laughable.

“A sentimentalist,” he sneered, “like Mr. Van Weyden.  Those men are
cursing because their desires have been outraged.  That is all.  What
desires?  The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore which a
handsome pay-day brings them—the women and the drink, the gorging and the
beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best that is in them,
their highest aspirations, their ideals, if you please.  The exhibition
they make of their feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how
deeply they have been touched, how deeply their purses have been touched,
for to lay hands on their purses is to lay hands on their souls.”

“’You hardly behave as if your purse had been touched,” she said,
smilingly.

“Then it so happens that I am behaving differently, for my purse and my
soul have both been touched.  At the current price of skins in the London
market, and based on a fair estimate of what the afternoon’s catch would
have been had not the _Macedonia_ hogged it, the _Ghost_ has lost about
fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of skins.”

“You speak so calmly—” she began.

“But I do not feel calm; I could kill the man who robbed me,” he
interrupted.  “Yes, yes, I know, and that man my brother—more sentiment!
Bah!”

His face underwent a sudden change.  His voice was less harsh and wholly
sincere as he said:

“You must be happy, you sentimentalists, really and truly happy at
dreaming and finding things good, and, because you find some of them
good, feeling good yourself.  Now, tell me, you two, do you find me
good?”

“You are good to look upon—in a way,” I qualified.

“There are in you all powers for good,” was Maud Brewster’s answer.

“There you are!” he cried at her, half angrily.  “Your words are empty to
me.  There is nothing clear and sharp and definite about the thought you
have expressed.  You cannot pick it up in your two hands and look at it.
In point of fact, it is not a thought.  It is a feeling, a sentiment, a
something based upon illusion and not a product of the intellect at all.”

As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into
it.  “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were
blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions.
They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the
face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and
live illusions gives greater delight.  And after all, delight is the wage
for living.  Without delight, living is a worthless act.  To labour at
living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead.  He who delights the most
lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to
you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”

He shook his head slowly, pondering.

“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason.  Dreams must
be more substantial and satisfying.  Emotional delight is more filling
and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your
moments of intellectual delight by having the blues.  Emotional delight
is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate.  I
envy you, I envy you.”

He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange
quizzical smiles, as he added:

“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart.  My
reason dictates it.  The envy is an intellectual product.  I am like a
sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too,
were drunk.”

“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,”
I laughed.

“Quite so,” he said.  “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.  You
have no facts in your pocketbook.”

“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.

“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”

“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.

“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing.  You spend what you
haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you
haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have
sweated to get.”

“Why don’t you change the basis of your coinage, then?” she queried
teasingly.

He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully:
“Too late.  I’d like to, perhaps, but I can’t.  My pocketbook is stuffed
with the old coinage, and it’s a stubborn thing.  I can never bring
myself to recognize anything else as valid.”

He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became
lost in the placid sea.  The old primal melancholy was strong upon him.
He was quivering to it.  He had reasoned himself into a spell of the
blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be
up and stirring.  I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man’s
sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his
materialism.




CHAPTER XXV


“You’ve been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, the following
morning at the breakfast-table, “How do things look?”

“Clear enough,” I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed down
the open companion-way.  “Fair westerly breeze, with a promise of
stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly.”

He nodded his head in a pleased way.  “Any signs of fog?”

“Thick banks in the north and north-west.”

He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.

“What of the _Macedonia_?”

“Not sighted,” I answered.

I could have sworn his face fell at the intelligence, but why he should
be disappointed I could not conceive.

I was soon to learn.  “Smoke ho!” came the hail from on deck, and his
face brightened.

“Good!” he exclaimed, and left the table at once to go on deck and into
the steerage, where the hunters were taking the first breakfast of their
exile.

Maud Brewster and I scarcely touched the food before us, gazing, instead,
in silent anxiety at each other, and listening to Wolf Larsen’s voice,
which easily penetrated the cabin through the intervening bulkhead.  He
spoke at length, and his conclusion was greeted with a wild roar of
cheers.  The bulkhead was too thick for us to hear what he said; but
whatever it was it affected the hunters strongly, for the cheering was
followed by loud exclamations and shouts of joy.

From the sounds on deck I knew that the sailors had been routed out and
were preparing to lower the boats.  Maud Brewster accompanied me on deck,
but I left her at the break of the poop, where she might watch the scene
and not be in it.  The sailors must have learned whatever project was on
hand, and the vim and snap they put into their work attested their
enthusiasm.  The hunters came trooping on deck with shot-guns and
ammunition-boxes, and, most unusual, their rifles.  The latter were
rarely taken in the boats, for a seal shot at long range with a rifle
invariably sank before a boat could reach it.  But each hunter this day
had his rifle and a large supply of cartridges.  I noticed they grinned
with satisfaction whenever they looked at the _Macedonia’s_ smoke, which
was rising higher and higher as she approached from the west.

The five boats went over the side with a rush, spread out like the ribs
of a fan, and set a northerly course, as on the preceding afternoon, for
us to follow.  I watched for some time, curiously, but there seemed
nothing extraordinary about their behaviour.  They lowered sails, shot
seals, and hoisted sails again, and continued on their way as I had
always seen them do.  The _Macedonia_ repeated her performance of
yesterday, “hogging” the sea by dropping her line of boats in advance of
ours and across our course.  Fourteen boats require a considerable spread
of ocean for comfortable hunting, and when she had completely lapped our
line she continued steaming into the north-east, dropping more boats as
she went.

“What’s up?” I asked Wolf Larsen, unable longer to keep my curiosity in
check.

“Never mind what’s up,” he answered gruffly.  “You won’t be a thousand
years in finding out, and in the meantime just pray for plenty of wind.”

“Oh, well, I don’t mind telling you,” he said the next moment.  “I’m
going to give that brother of mine a taste of his own medicine.  In
short, I’m going to play the hog myself, and not for one day, but for the
rest of the season,—if we’re in luck.”

“And if we’re not?” I queried.

“Not to be considered,” he laughed.  “We simply must be in luck, or it’s
all up with us.”

He had the wheel at the time, and I went forward to my hospital in the
forecastle, where lay the two crippled men, Nilson and Thomas Mugridge.
Nilson was as cheerful as could be expected, for his broken leg was
knitting nicely; but the Cockney was desperately melancholy, and I was
aware of a great sympathy for the unfortunate creature.  And the marvel
of it was that still he lived and clung to life.  The brutal years had
reduced his meagre body to splintered wreckage, and yet the spark of life
within burned brightly as ever.

“With an artificial foot—and they make excellent ones—you will be
stumping ships’ galleys to the end of time,” I assured him jovially.

But his answer was serious, nay, solemn.  “I don’t know about wot you
s’y, Mr. Van W’yden, but I do know I’ll never rest ’appy till I see that
’ell-’ound bloody well dead.  ’E cawn’t live as long as me.  ’E’s got no
right to live, an’ as the Good Word puts it, ‘’E shall shorely die,’ an’
I s’y, ‘Amen, an’ damn soon at that.’”

When I returned on deck I found Wolf Larsen steering mainly with one
hand, while with the other hand he held the marine glasses and studied
the situation of the boats, paying particular attention to the position
of the _Macedonia_.  The only change noticeable in our boats was that
they had hauled close on the wind and were heading several points west of
north.  Still, I could not see the expediency of the manœuvre, for the
free sea was still intercepted by the _Macedonia’s_ five weather boats,
which, in turn, had hauled close on the wind.  Thus they slowly diverged
toward the west, drawing farther away from the remainder of the boats in
their line.  Our boats were rowing as well as sailing.  Even the hunters
were pulling, and with three pairs of oars in the water they rapidly
overhauled what I may appropriately term the enemy.

The smoke of the _Macedonia_ had dwindled to a dim blot on the
north-eastern horizon.  Of the steamer herself nothing was to be seen.
We had been loafing along, till now, our sails shaking half the time and
spilling the wind; and twice, for short periods, we had been hove to.
But there was no more loafing.  Sheets were trimmed, and Wolf Larsen
proceeded to put the _Ghost_ through her paces.  We ran past our line of
boats and bore down upon the first weather boat of the other line.

“Down that flying jib, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen commanded.  “And
stand by to back over the jibs.”

I ran forward and had the downhaul of the flying jib all in and fast as
we slipped by the boat a hundred feet to leeward.  The three men in it
gazed at us suspiciously.  They had been hogging the sea, and they knew
Wolf Larsen, by reputation at any rate.  I noted that the hunter, a huge
Scandinavian sitting in the bow, held his rifle, ready to hand, across
his knees.  It should have been in its proper place in the rack.  When
they came opposite our stern, Wolf Larsen greeted them with a wave of the
hand, and cried:

“Come on board and have a ’gam’!”

“To gam,” among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute for the verbs “to
visit,” “to gossip.”  It expresses the garrulity of the sea, and is a
pleasant break in the monotony of the life.

The _Ghost_ swung around into the wind, and I finished my work forward in
time to run aft and lend a hand with the mainsheet.

“You will please stay on deck, Miss Brewster,” Wolf Larsen said, as he
started forward to meet his guest.  “And you too, Mr. Van Weyden.”

The boat had lowered its sail and run alongside.  The hunter, golden
bearded like a sea-king, came over the rail and dropped on deck.  But his
hugeness could not quite overcome his apprehensiveness.  Doubt and
distrust showed strongly in his face.  It was a transparent face, for all
of its hairy shield, and advertised instant relief when he glanced from
Wolf Larsen to me, noted that there was only the pair of us, and then
glanced over his own two men who had joined him.  Surely he had little
reason to be afraid.  He towered like a Goliath above Wolf Larsen.  He
must have measured six feet eight or nine inches in stature, and I
subsequently learned his weight—240 pounds.  And there was no fat about
him.  It was all bone and muscle.

A return of apprehension was apparent when, at the top of the
companion-way, Wolf Larsen invited him below.  But he reassured himself
with a glance down at his host—a big man himself but dwarfed by the
propinquity of the giant.  So all hesitancy vanished, and the pair
descended into the cabin.  In the meantime, his two men, as was the wont
of visiting sailors, had gone forward into the forecastle to do some
visiting themselves.

Suddenly, from the cabin came a great, choking bellow, followed by all
the sounds of a furious struggle.  It was the leopard and the lion, and
the lion made all the noise.  Wolf Larsen was the leopard.

“You see the sacredness of our hospitality,” I said bitterly to Maud
Brewster.

She nodded her head that she heard, and I noted in her face the signs of
the same sickness at sight or sound of violent struggle from which I had
suffered so severely during my first weeks on the _Ghost_.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you went forward, say by the steerage
companion-way, until it is over?” I suggested.

She shook her head and gazed at me pitifully.  She was not frightened,
but appalled, rather, at the human animality of it.

“You will understand,” I took advantage of the opportunity to say,
“whatever part I take in what is going on and what is to come, that I am
compelled to take it—if you and I are ever to get out of this scrape with
our lives.”

“It is not nice—for me,” I added.

“I understand,” she said, in a weak, far-away voice, and her eyes showed
me that she did understand.

The sounds from below soon died away.  Then Wolf Larsen came alone on
deck.  There was a slight flush under his bronze, but otherwise he bore
no signs of the battle.

“Send those two men aft, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said.

I obeyed, and a minute or two later they stood before him.  “Hoist in
your boat,” he said to them.  “Your hunter’s decided to stay aboard
awhile and doesn’t want it pounding alongside.”

“Hoist in your boat, I said,” he repeated, this time in sharper tones as
they hesitated to do his bidding.

“Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time,” he said, quite
softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness, as they moved
slowly to comply, “and we might as well start with a friendly
understanding.  Lively now!  Death Larsen makes you jump better than
that, and you know it!”

Their movements perceptibly quickened under his coaching, and as the boat
swung inboard I was sent forward to let go the jibs.  Wolf Larsen, at the
wheel, directed the _Ghost_ after the _Macedonia’s_ second weather boat.

Under way, and with nothing for the time being to do, I turned my
attention to the situation of the boats.  The _Macedonia’s_ third weather
boat was being attacked by two of ours, the fourth by our remaining
three; and the fifth, turn about, was taking a hand in the defence of its
nearest mate.  The fight had opened at long distance, and the rifles were
cracking steadily.  A quick, snappy sea was being kicked up by the wind,
a condition which prevented fine shooting; and now and again, as we drew
closer, we could see the bullets zip-zipping from wave to wave.

The boat we were pursuing had squared away and was running before the
wind to escape us, and, in the course of its flight, to take part in
repulsing our general boat attack.

Attending to sheets and tacks now left me little time to see what was
taking place, but I happened to be on the poop when Wolf Larsen ordered
the two strange sailors forward and into the forecastle.  They went
sullenly, but they went.  He next ordered Miss Brewster below, and smiled
at the instant horror that leapt into her eyes.

“You’ll find nothing gruesome down there,” he said, “only an unhurt man
securely made fast to the ring-bolts.  Bullets are liable to come aboard,
and I don’t want you killed, you know.”

Even as he spoke, a bullet was deflected by a brass-capped spoke of the
wheel between his hands and screeched off through the air to windward.

“You see,” he said to her; and then to me, “Mr. Van Weyden, will you take
the wheel?”

Maud Brewster had stepped inside the companion-way so that only her head
was exposed.  Wolf Larsen had procured a rifle and was throwing a
cartridge into the barrel.  I begged her with my eyes to go below, but
she smiled and said:

“We may be feeble land-creatures without legs, but we can show Captain
Larsen that we are at least as brave as he.”

He gave her a quick look of admiration.

“I like you a hundred per cent. better for that,” he said.  “Books, and
brains, and bravery.  You are well-rounded, a blue-stocking fit to be the
wife of a pirate chief.  Ahem, we’ll discuss that later,” he smiled, as a
bullet struck solidly into the cabin wall.

I saw his eyes flash golden as he spoke, and I saw the terror mount in
her own.

“We are braver,” I hastened to say.  “At least, speaking for myself, I
know I am braver than Captain Larsen.”

It was I who was now favoured by a quick look.  He was wondering if I
were making fun of him.  I put three or four spokes over to counteract a
sheer toward the wind on the part of the _Ghost_, and then steadied her.
Wolf Larsen was still waiting an explanation, and I pointed down to my
knees.

“You will observe there,” I said, “a slight trembling.  It is because I
am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my mind because I do
not wish to die.  But my spirit masters the trembling flesh and the
qualms of the mind.  I am more than brave.  I am courageous.  Your flesh
is not afraid.  You are not afraid.  On the one hand, it costs you
nothing to encounter danger; on the other hand, it even gives you
delight.  You enjoy it.  You may be unafraid, Mr. Larsen, but you must
grant that the bravery is mine.”

“You’re right,” he acknowledged at once.  “I never thought of it in that
way before.  But is the opposite true?  If you are braver than I, am I
more cowardly than you?”

We both laughed at the absurdity, and he dropped down to the deck and
rested his rifle across the rail.  The bullets we had received had
travelled nearly a mile, but by now we had cut that distance in half.  He
fired three careful shots.  The first struck fifty feet to windward of
the boat, the second alongside; and at the third the boat-steerer let
loose his steering-oar and crumpled up in the bottom of the boat.

“I guess that’ll fix them,” Wolf Larsen said, rising to his feet.  “I
couldn’t afford to let the hunter have it, and there is a chance the
boat-puller doesn’t know how to steer.  In which case, the hunter cannot
steer and shoot at the same time.”

His reasoning was justified, for the boat rushed at once into the wind
and the hunter sprang aft to take the boat-steerer’s place.  There was no
more shooting, though the rifles were still cracking merrily from the
other boats.

The hunter had managed to get the boat before the wind again, but we ran
down upon it, going at least two feet to its one.  A hundred yards away,
I saw the boat-puller pass a rifle to the hunter.  Wolf Larsen went
amidships and took the coil of the throat-halyards from its pin.  Then he
peered over the rail with levelled rifle.  Twice I saw the hunter let go
the steering-oar with one hand, reach for his rifle, and hesitate.  We
were now alongside and foaming past.

“Here, you!” Wolf Larsen cried suddenly to the boat-puller.  “Take a
turn!”

At the same time he flung the coil of rope.  It struck fairly, nearly
knocking the man over, but he did not obey.  Instead, he looked to his
hunter for orders.  The hunter, in turn, was in a quandary.  His rifle
was between his knees, but if he let go the steering-oar in order to
shoot, the boat would sweep around and collide with the schooner.  Also
he saw Wolf Larsen’s rifle bearing upon him and knew he would be shot ere
he could get his rifle into play.

“Take a turn,” he said quietly to the man.

The boat-puller obeyed, taking a turn around the little forward thwart
and paying the line as it jerked taut.  The boat sheered out with a rush,
and the hunter steadied it to a parallel course some twenty feet from the
side of the _Ghost_.

“Now, get that sail down and come alongside!” Wolf Larsen ordered.

He never let go his rifle, even passing down the tackles with one hand.
When they were fast, bow and stern, and the two uninjured men prepared to
come aboard, the hunter picked up his rifle as if to place it in a secure
position.

“Drop it!” Wolf Larsen cried, and the hunter dropped it as though it were
hot and had burned him.

Once aboard, the two prisoners hoisted in the boat and under Wolf
Larsen’s direction carried the wounded boat-steerer down into the
forecastle.

“If our five boats do as well as you and I have done, we’ll have a pretty
full crew,” Wolf Larsen said to me.

“The man you shot—he is—I hope?” Maud Brewster quavered.

“In the shoulder,” he answered.  “Nothing serious, Mr. Van Weyden will
pull him around as good as ever in three or four weeks.”

“But he won’t pull those chaps around, from the look of it,” he added,
pointing at the _Macedonia’s_ third boat, for which I had been steering
and which was now nearly abreast of us.  “That’s Horner’s and Smoke’s
work.  I told them we wanted live men, not carcasses.  But the joy of
shooting to hit is a most compelling thing, when once you’ve learned how
to shoot.  Ever experienced it, Mr. Van Weyden?”

I shook my head and regarded their work.  It had indeed been bloody, for
they had drawn off and joined our other three boats in the attack on the
remaining two of the enemy.  The deserted boat was in the trough of the
sea, rolling drunkenly across each comber, its loose spritsail out at
right angles to it and fluttering and flapping in the wind.  The hunter
and boat-puller were both lying awkwardly in the bottom, but the
boat-steerer lay across the gunwale, half in and half out, his arms
trailing in the water and his head rolling from side to side.

“Don’t look, Miss Brewster, please don’t look,” I had begged of her, and
I was glad that she had minded me and been spared the sight.

“Head right into the bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,” was Wolf Larsen’s command.

As we drew nearer, the firing ceased, and we saw that the fight was over.
The remaining two boats had been captured by our five, and the seven were
grouped together, waiting to be picked up.

“Look at that!” I cried involuntarily, pointing to the north-east.

The blot of smoke which indicated the _Macedonia’s_ position had
reappeared.

“Yes, I’ve been watching it,” was Wolf Larsen’s calm reply.  He measured
the distance away to the fog-bank, and for an instant paused to feel the
weight of the wind on his cheek.  “We’ll make it, I think; but you can
depend upon it that blessed brother of mine has twigged our little game
and is just a-humping for us.  Ah, look at that!”

The blot of smoke had suddenly grown larger, and it was very black.

“I’ll beat you out, though, brother mine,” he chuckled.  “I’ll beat you
out, and I hope you no worse than that you rack your old engines into
scrap.”

When we hove to, a hasty though orderly confusion reigned.  The boats
came aboard from every side at once.  As fast as the prisoners came over
the rail they were marshalled forward to the forecastle by our hunters,
while our sailors hoisted in the boats, pell-mell, dropping them anywhere
upon the deck and not stopping to lash them.  We were already under way,
all sails set and drawing, and the sheets being slacked off for a wind
abeam, as the last boat lifted clear of the water and swung in the
tackles.

There was need for haste.  The _Macedonia_, belching the blackest of
smoke from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out of the
north-east.  Neglecting the boats that remained to her, she had altered
her course so as to anticipate ours.  She was not running straight for
us, but ahead of us.  Our courses were converging like the sides of an
angle, the vertex of which was at the edge of the fog-bank.  It was
there, or not at all, that the _Macedonia_ could hope to catch us.  The
hope for the _Ghost_ lay in that she should pass that point before the
_Macedonia_ arrived at it.

Wolf Larsen was steering, his eyes glistening and snapping as they dwelt
upon and leaped from detail to detail of the chase.  Now he studied the
sea to windward for signs of the wind slackening or freshening, now the
_Macedonia_; and again, his eyes roved over every sail, and he gave
commands to slack a sheet here a trifle, to come in on one there a
trifle, till he was drawing out of the _Ghost_ the last bit of speed she
possessed.  All feuds and grudges were forgotten, and I was surprised at
the alacrity with which the men who had so long endured his brutality
sprang to execute his orders.  Strange to say, the unfortunate Johnson
came into my mind as we lifted and surged and heeled along, and I was
aware of a regret that he was not alive and present; he had so loved the
_Ghost_ and delighted in her sailing powers.

“Better get your rifles, you fellows,” Wolf Larsen called to our hunters;
and the five men lined the lee rail, guns in hand, and waited.

The _Macedonia_ was now but a mile away, the black smoke pouring from her
funnel at a right angle, so madly she raced, pounding through the sea at
a seventeen-knot gait—“’Sky-hooting through the brine,” as Wolf Larsen
quoted while gazing at her.  We were not making more than nine knots, but
the fog-bank was very near.

A puff of smoke broke from the _Macedonia’s_ deck, we heard a heavy
report, and a round hole took form in the stretched canvas of our
mainsail.  They were shooting at us with one of the small cannon which
rumour had said they carried on board.  Our men, clustering amidships,
waved their hats and raised a derisive cheer.  Again there was a puff of
smoke and a loud report, this time the cannon-ball striking not more than
twenty feet astern and glancing twice from sea to sea to windward ere it
sank.

But there was no rifle-firing for the reason that all their hunters were
out in the boats or our prisoners.  When the two vessels were half-a-mile
apart, a third shot made another hole in our mainsail.  Then we entered
the fog.  It was about us, veiling and hiding us in its dense wet gauze.

The sudden transition was startling.  The moment before we had been
leaping through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea breaking
and rolling wide to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting smoke and fire and
iron missiles, rushing madly upon us.  And at once, as in an instant’s
leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were
lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see.  The
grey mist drove by us like a rain.  Every woollen filament of our
garments, every hair of our heads and faces, was jewelled with a crystal
globule.  The shrouds were wet with moisture; it dripped from our rigging
overhead; and on the underside of our booms drops of water took shape in
long swaying lines, which were detached and flung to the deck in mimic
showers at each surge of the schooner.  I was aware of a pent, stifled
feeling.  As the sounds of the ship thrusting herself through the waves
were hurled back upon us by the fog, so were one’s thoughts.  The mind
recoiled from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which wrapped
us around.  This was the world, the universe itself, its bounds so near
one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push them back.  It was
impossible, that the rest could be beyond these walls of grey.  The rest
was a dream, no more than the memory of a dream.

It was weird, strangely weird.  I looked at Maud Brewster and knew that
she was similarly affected.  Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was
nothing subjective about his state of consciousness.  His whole concern
was with the immediate, objective present.  He still held the wheel, and
I felt that he was timing Time, reckoning the passage of the minutes with
each forward lunge and leeward roll of the _Ghost_.

“Go for’ard and hard alee without any noise,” he said to me in a low
voice.  “Clew up the topsails first.  Set men at all the sheets.  Let
there be no rattling of blocks, no sound of voices.  No noise,
understand, no noise.”

When all was ready, the word “hard-a-lee” was passed forward to me from
man to man; and the _Ghost_ heeled about on the port tack with
practically no noise at all.  And what little there was,—the slapping of
a few reef-points and the creaking of a sheave in a block or two,—was
ghostly under the hollow echoing pall in which we were swathed.

We had scarcely filled away, it seemed, when the fog thinned abruptly and
we were again in the sunshine, the wide-stretching sea breaking before us
to the sky-line.  But the ocean was bare.  No wrathful _Macedonia_ broke
its surface nor blackened the sky with her smoke.

Wolf Larsen at once squared away and ran down along the rim of the
fog-bank.  His trick was obvious.  He had entered the fog to windward of
the steamer, and while the steamer had blindly driven on into the fog in
the chance of catching him, he had come about and out of his shelter and
was now running down to re-enter to leeward.  Successful in this, the old
simile of the needle in the haystack would be mild indeed compared with
his brother’s chance of finding him.  He did not run long.  Jibing the
fore- and main-sails and setting the topsails again, we headed back into
the bank.  As we entered I could have sworn I saw a vague bulk emerging
to windward.  I looked quickly at Wolf Larsen.  Already we were ourselves
buried in the fog, but he nodded his head.  He, too, had seen it—the
_Macedonia_, guessing his manœuvre and failing by a moment in
anticipating it.  There was no doubt that we had escaped unseen.

“He can’t keep this up,” Wolf Larsen said.  “He’ll have to go back for
the rest of his boats.  Send a man to the wheel, Mr. Van Weyden, keep
this course for the present, and you might as well set the watches, for
we won’t do any lingering to-night.”

“I’d give five hundred dollars, though,” he added, “just to be aboard the
_Macedonia_ for five minutes, listening to my brother curse.”

“And now, Mr. Van Weyden,” he said to me when he had been relieved from
the wheel, “we must make these new-comers welcome.  Serve out plenty of
whisky to the hunters and see that a few bottles slip for’ard.  I’ll
wager every man Jack of them is over the side to-morrow, hunting for Wolf
Larsen as contentedly as ever they hunted for Death Larsen.”

“But won’t they escape as Wainwright did?” I asked.

He laughed shrewdly.  “Not as long as our old hunters have anything to
say about it.  I’m dividing amongst them a dollar a skin for all the
skins shot by our new hunters.  At least half of their enthusiasm to-day
was due to that.  Oh, no, there won’t be any escaping if they have
anything to say about it.  And now you’d better get for’ard to your
hospital duties.  There must be a full ward waiting for you.”




CHAPTER XXVI


Wolf Larsen took the distribution of the whisky off my hands, and the
bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh
batch of wounded men in the forecastle.  I had seen whisky drunk, such as
whisky-and-soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it,
from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles—great brimming drinks, each
one of which was in itself a debauch.  But they did not stop at one or
two.  They drank and drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and they
drank more.

Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank.
Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with the
liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of
most of them.  It was a saturnalia.  In loud voices they shouted over the
day’s fighting, wrangled about details, or waxed affectionate and made
friends with the men whom they had fought.  Prisoners and captors
hiccoughed on one another’s shoulders, and swore mighty oaths of respect
and esteem.  They wept over the miseries of the past and over the
miseries yet to come under the iron rule of Wolf Larsen.  And all cursed
him and told terrible tales of his brutality.

It was a strange and frightful spectacle—the small, bunk-lined space, the
floor and walls leaping and lurching, the dim light, the swaying shadows
lengthening and fore-shortening monstrously, the thick air heavy with
smoke and the smell of bodies and iodoform, and the inflamed faces of the
men—half-men, I should call them.  I noted Oofty-Oofty, holding the end
of a bandage and looking upon the scene, his velvety and luminous eyes
glistening in the light like a deer’s eyes, and yet I knew the barbaric
devil that lurked in his breast and belied all the softness and
tenderness, almost womanly, of his face and form.  And I noticed the
boyish face of Harrison,—a good face once, but now a demon’s,—convulsed
with passion as he told the new-comers of the hell-ship they were in and
shrieked curses upon the head of Wolf Larsen.

Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a
male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that grovelled before
him and revolted only in drunkenness and in secrecy.  And was I, too, one
of his swine? I thought.  And Maud Brewster?  No!  I ground my teeth in
my anger and determination till the man I was attending winced under my
hand and Oofty-Oofty looked at me with curiosity.  I felt endowed with a
sudden strength.  What of my new-found love, I was a giant.  I feared
nothing.  I would work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen
and of my own thirty-five bookish years.  All would be well.  I would
make it well.  And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of power, I turned my
back on the howling inferno and climbed to the deck, where the fog
drifted ghostly through the night and the air was sweet and pure and
quiet.

The steerage, where were two wounded hunters, was a repetition of the
forecastle, except that Wolf Larsen was not being cursed; and it was with
a great relief that I again emerged on deck and went aft to the cabin.
Supper was ready, and Wolf Larsen and Maud were waiting for me.

While all his ship was getting drunk as fast as it could, he remained
sober.  Not a drop of liquor passed his lips.  He did not dare it under
the circumstances, for he had only Louis and me to depend upon, and Louis
was even now at the wheel.  We were sailing on through the fog without a
look-out and without lights.  That Wolf Larsen had turned the liquor
loose among his men surprised me, but he evidently knew their psychology
and the best method of cementing in cordiality, what had begun in
bloodshed.

His victory over Death Larsen seemed to have had a remarkable effect upon
him.  The previous evening he had reasoned himself into the blues, and I
had been waiting momentarily for one of his characteristic outbursts.
Yet nothing had occurred, and he was now in splendid trim.  Possibly his
success in capturing so many hunters and boats had counteracted the
customary reaction.  At any rate, the blues were gone, and the blue
devils had not put in an appearance.  So I thought at the time; but, ah
me, little I knew him or knew that even then, perhaps, he was meditating
an outbreak more terrible than any I had seen.

As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the
cabin.  He had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear blue as
the sky, his bronze was beautiful with perfect health; life swelled
through his veins in full and magnificent flood.  While waiting for me he
had engaged Maud in animated discussion.  Temptation was the topic they
had hit upon, and from the few words I heard I made out that he was
contending that temptation was temptation only when a man was seduced by
it and fell.

“For look you,” he was saying, “as I see it, a man does things because of
desire.  He has many desires.  He may desire to escape pain, or to enjoy
pleasure.  But whatever he does, he does because he desires to do it.”

“But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither of which will
permit him to do the other?” Maud interrupted.

“The very thing I was coming to,” he said.

“And between these two desires is just where the soul of the man is
manifest,” she went on.  “If it is a good soul, it will desire and do the
good action, and the contrary if it is a bad soul.  It is the soul that
decides.”

“Bosh and nonsense!” he exclaimed impatiently.  “It is the desire that
decides.  Here is a man who wants to, say, get drunk.  Also, he doesn’t
want to get drunk.  What does he do?  How does he do it?  He is a puppet.
He is the creature of his desires, and of the two desires he obeys the
strongest one, that is all.  His soul hasn’t anything to do with it.  How
can he be tempted to get drunk and refuse to get drunk?  If the desire to
remain sober prevails, it is because it is the strongest desire.
Temptation plays no part, unless—” he paused while grasping the new
thought which had come into his mind—“unless he is tempted to remain
sober.

“Ha! ha!” he laughed.  “What do you think of that, Mr. Van Weyden?”

“That both of you are hair-splitting,” I said.  “The man’s soul is his
desires.  Or, if you will, the sum of his desires is his soul.  Therein
you are both wrong.  You lay the stress upon the desire apart from the
soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire,
and in point of fact soul and desire are the same thing.

“However,” I continued, “Miss Brewster is right in contending that
temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome.  Fire is
fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely.  So is desire like fire.
It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of the thing desired, or by a new
and luring description or comprehension of the thing desired.  There lies
the temptation.  It is the wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to
mastery.  That’s temptation.  It may not fan sufficiently to make the
desire overmastering, but in so far as it fans at all, that far is it
temptation.  And, as you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil.”

I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table.  My words had been
decisive.  At least they had put an end to the discussion.

But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen him
before.  It was as though he were bursting with pent energy which must
find an outlet somehow.  Almost immediately he launched into a discussion
on love.  As usual, his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud’s was
the idealistic.  For myself, beyond a word or so of suggestion or
correction now and again, I took no part.

He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread of
the conversation through studying her face as she talked.  It was a face
that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed and vivacious.
Her wit was playing keenly, and she was enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf
Larsen, and he was enjoying it hugely.  For some reason, though I know
not why in the argument, so utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of
one stray brown lock of Maud’s hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel,
where she says:

   “Blessed am I beyond women even herein,
   That beyond all born women is my sin,
   And perfect my transgression.”

As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging
triumph and exultation, into Swinburne’s lines.  And he read rightly, and
he read well.  He had hardly ceased reading when Louis put his head into
the companion-way and whispered down:

“Be easy, will ye?  The fog’s lifted, an’ ’tis the port light iv a
steamer that’s crossin’ our bow this blessed minute.”

Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we followed
him he had pulled the steerage-slide over the drunken clamour and was on
his way forward to close the forecastle-scuttle.  The fog, though it
remained, had lifted high, where it obscured the stars and made the night
quite black.  Directly ahead of us I could see a bright red light and a
white light, and I could hear the pulsing of a steamer’s engines.  Beyond
a doubt it was the _Macedonia_.

Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent group,
watching the lights rapidly cross our bow.

“Lucky for me he doesn’t carry a searchlight,” Wolf Larsen said.

“What if I should cry out loudly?” I queried in a whisper.

“It would be all up,” he answered.  “But have you thought upon what would
immediately happen?”

Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the throat
with his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles—a hint, as it
were—he suggested to me the twist that would surely have broken my neck.
The next moment he had released me and we were gazing at the
_Macedonia’s_ lights.

“What if I should cry out?” Maud asked.

“I like you too well to hurt you,” he said softly—nay, there was a
tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.

“But don’t do it, just the same, for I’d promptly break Mr. Van Weyden’s
neck.”

“Then she has my permission to cry out,” I said defiantly.

“I hardly think you’ll care to sacrifice the Dean of American Letters the
Second,” he sneered.

We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for the
silence to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had
disappeared we returned to the cabin to finish the interrupted supper.

Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson’s “Impenitentia Ultima.”
She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not her, but Wolf Larsen.  I
was fascinated by the fascinated look he bent upon Maud.  He was quite
out of himself, and I noticed the unconscious movement of his lips as he
shaped word for word as fast as she uttered them.  He interrupted her
when she gave the lines:

   “And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind me,
   And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear.”

“There are viols in your voice,” he said bluntly, and his eyes flashed
their golden light.

I could have shouted with joy at her control.  She finished the
concluding stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the
conversation into less perilous channels.  And all the while I sat in a
half-daze, the drunken riot of the steerage breaking through the
bulkhead, the man I feared and the woman I loved talking on and on.  The
table was not cleared.  The man who had taken Mugridge’s place had
evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.

If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it then.
From time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him, and I followed
in amaze, mastered for the moment by his remarkable intellect, under the
spell of his passion, for he was preaching the passion of revolt.  It was
inevitable that Milton’s Lucifer should be instanced, and the keenness
with which Wolf Larsen analysed and depicted the character was a
revelation of his stifled genius.  It reminded me of Taine, yet I knew
the man had never heard of that brilliant though dangerous thinker.

“He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God’s thunderbolts,” Wolf
Larsen was saying.  “Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten.  A third of God’s
angels he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel
against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the
generations of man.  Why was he beaten out of heaven?  Because he was
less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring?  No!  A thousand times
no!  God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater.
But Lucifer was a free spirit.  To serve was to suffocate.  He preferred
suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility.  He
did not care to serve God.  He cared to serve nothing.  He was no
figure-head.  He stood on his own legs.  He was an individual.”

“The first Anarchist,” Maud laughed, rising and preparing to withdraw to
her state-room.

“Then it is good to be an anarchist!” he cried.  He, too, had risen, and
he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of her room, as he
went on:

               “‘Here at least
   We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
   Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
   Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
   To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
   Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit.  The cabin still rang with his
voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up
and dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely masculine and
insistently soft, flashing upon Maud at the door.

Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and she
said, almost in a whisper, “You are Lucifer.”

The door closed and she was gone.  He stood staring after her for a
minute, then returned to himself and to me.

“I’ll relieve Louis at the wheel,” he said shortly, “and call upon you to
relieve at midnight.  Better turn in now and get some sleep.”

He pulled on a pair of mittens, put on his cap, and ascended the
companion-stairs, while I followed his suggestion by going to bed.  For
some unknown reason, prompted mysteriously, I did not undress, but lay
down fully clothed.  For a time I listened to the clamour in the steerage
and marvelled upon the love which had come to me; but my sleep on the
_Ghost_ had become most healthful and natural, and soon the songs and
cries died away, my eyes closed, and my consciousness sank down into the
half-death of slumber.

                                * * * * *

I knew not what had aroused me, but I found myself out of my bunk, on my
feet, wide awake, my soul vibrating to the warning of danger as it might
have thrilled to a trumpet call.  I threw open the door.  The cabin light
was burning low.  I saw Maud, my Maud, straining and struggling and
crushed in the embrace of Wolf Larsen’s arms.  I could see the vain beat
and flutter of her as she strove, pressing her face against his breast,
to escape from him.  All this I saw on the very instant of seeing and as
I sprang forward.

I struck him with my fist, on the face, as he raised his head, but it was
a puny blow.  He roared in a ferocious, animal-like way, and gave me a
shove with his hand.  It was only a shove, a flirt of the wrist, yet so
tremendous was his strength that I was hurled backward as from a
catapult.  I struck the door of the state-room which had formerly been
Mugridge’s, splintering and smashing the panels with the impact of my
body.  I struggled to my feet, with difficulty dragging myself clear of
the wrecked door, unaware of any hurt whatever.  I was conscious only of
an overmastering rage.  I think I, too, cried aloud, as I drew the knife
at my hip and sprang forward a second time.

But something had happened.  They were reeling apart.  I was close upon
him, my knife uplifted, but I withheld the blow.  I was puzzled by the
strangeness of it.  Maud was leaning against the wall, one hand out for
support; but he was staggering, his left hand pressed against his
forehead and covering his eyes, and with the right he was groping about
him in a dazed sort of way.  It struck against the wall, and his body
seemed to express a muscular and physical relief at the contact, as
though he had found his bearings, his location in space as well as
something against which to lean.

Then I saw red again.  All my wrongs and humiliations flashed upon me
with a dazzling brightness, all that I had suffered and others had
suffered at his hands, all the enormity of the man’s very existence.  I
sprang upon him, blindly, insanely, and drove the knife into his
shoulder.  I knew, then, that it was no more than a flesh wound,—I had
felt the steel grate on his shoulder-blade,—and I raised the knife to
strike at a more vital part.

But Maud had seen my first blow, and she cried, “Don’t!  Please don’t!”

I dropped my arm for a moment, and a moment only.  Again the knife was
raised, and Wolf Larsen would have surely died had she not stepped
between.  Her arms were around me, her hair was brushing my face.  My
pulse rushed up in an unwonted manner, yet my rage mounted with it.  She
looked me bravely in the eyes.

“For my sake,” she begged.

“I would kill him for your sake!” I cried, trying to free my arm without
hurting her.

“Hush!” she said, and laid her fingers lightly on my lips.  I could have
kissed them, had I dared, even then, in my rage, the touch of them was so
sweet, so very sweet.  “Please, please,” she pleaded, and she disarmed me
by the words, as I was to discover they would ever disarm me.

I stepped back, separating from her, and replaced the knife in its
sheath.  I looked at Wolf Larsen.  He still pressed his left hand against
his forehead.  It covered his eyes.  His head was bowed.  He seemed to
have grown limp.  His body was sagging at the hips, his great shoulders
were drooping and shrinking forward.

“Van Weyden!” he called hoarsely, and with a note of fright in his
voice.  “Oh, Van Weyden! where are you?”

I looked at Maud.  She did not speak, but nodded her head.

“Here I am,” I answered, stepping to his side.  “What is the matter?”

“Help me to a seat,” he said, in the same hoarse, frightened voice.

“I am a sick man; a very sick man, Hump,” he said, as he left my
sustaining grip and sank into a chair.

His head dropped forward on the table and was buried in his hands.  From
time to time it rocked back and forward as with pain.  Once, when he half
raised it, I saw the sweat standing in heavy drops on his forehead about
the roots of his hair.

“I am a sick man, a very sick man,” he repeated again, and yet once
again.

“What is the matter?” I asked, resting my hand on his shoulder.  “What
can I do for you?”

But he shook my hand off with an irritated movement, and for a long time
I stood by his side in silence.  Maud was looking on, her face awed and
frightened.  What had happened to him we could not imagine.

“Hump,” he said at last, “I must get into my bunk.  Lend me a hand.  I’ll
be all right in a little while.  It’s those damn headaches, I believe.  I
was afraid of them.  I had a feeling—no, I don’t know what I’m talking
about.  Help me into my bunk.”

But when I got him into his bunk he again buried his face in his hands,
covering his eyes, and as I turned to go I could hear him murmuring, “I
am a sick man, a very sick man.”

Maud looked at me inquiringly as I emerged.  I shook my head, saying:

“Something has happened to him.  What, I don’t know.  He is helpless, and
frightened, I imagine, for the first time in his life.  It must have
occurred before he received the knife-thrust, which made only a
superficial wound.  You must have seen what happened.”

She shook her head.  “I saw nothing.  It is just as mysterious to me.  He
suddenly released me and staggered away.  But what shall we do?  What
shall I do?”

“If you will wait, please, until I come back,” I answered.

I went on deck.  Louis was at the wheel.

“You may go for’ard and turn in,” I said, taking it from him.

He was quick to obey, and I found myself alone on the deck of the
_Ghost_.  As quietly as was possible, I clewed up the topsails, lowered
the flying jib and staysail, backed the jib over, and flattened the
mainsail.  Then I went below to Maud.  I placed my finger on my lips for
silence, and entered Wolf Larsen’s room.  He was in the same position in
which I had left him, and his head was rocking—almost writhing—from side
to side.

“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He made no reply at first, but on my repeating the question he answered,
“No, no; I’m all right.  Leave me alone till morning.”

But as I turned to go I noted that his head had resumed its rocking
motion.  Maud was waiting patiently for me, and I took notice, with a
thrill of joy, of the queenly poise of her head and her glorious, calm
eyes.  Calm and sure they were as her spirit itself.

“Will you trust yourself to me for a journey of six hundred miles or so?”
I asked.

“You mean—?” she asked, and I knew she had guessed aright.

“Yes, I mean just that,” I replied.  “There is nothing left for us but
the open boat.”

“For me, you mean,” she said.  “You are certainly as safe here as you
have been.”

“No, there is nothing left for us but the open boat,” I iterated stoutly.
“Will you please dress as warmly as you can, at once, and make into a
bundle whatever you wish to bring with you.”

“And make all haste,” I added, as she turned toward her state-room.

The lazarette was directly beneath the cabin, and, opening the trap-door
in the floor and carrying a candle with me, I dropped down and began
overhauling the ship’s stores.  I selected mainly from the canned goods,
and by the time I was ready, willing hands were extended from above to
receive what I passed up.

We worked in silence.  I helped myself also to blankets, mittens,
oilskins, caps, and such things, from the slop-chest.  It was no light
adventure, this trusting ourselves in a small boat to so raw and stormy a
sea, and it was imperative that we should guard ourselves against the
cold and wet.

We worked feverishly at carrying our plunder on deck and depositing it
amidships, so feverishly that Maud, whose strength was hardly a positive
quantity, had to give over, exhausted, and sit on the steps at the break
of the poop.  This did not serve to recover her, and she lay on her back,
on the hard deck, arms stretched out, and whole body relaxed.  It was a
trick I remembered of my sister, and I knew she would soon be herself
again.  I knew, also, that weapons would not come in amiss, and I
re-entered Wolf Larsen’s state-room to get his rifle and shot-gun.  I
spoke to him, but he made no answer, though his head was still rocking
from side to side and he was not asleep.

“Good-bye, Lucifer,” I whispered to myself as I softly closed the door.

Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition,—an easy matter, though I had to
enter the steerage companion-way to do it.  Here the hunters stored the
ammunition-boxes they carried in the boats, and here, but a few feet from
their noisy revels, I took possession of two boxes.

Next, to lower a boat.  Not so simple a task for one man.  Having cast
off the lashings, I hoisted first on the forward tackle, then on the aft,
till the boat cleared the rail, when I lowered away, one tackle and then
the other, for a couple of feet, till it hung snugly, above the water,
against the schooner’s side.  I made certain that it contained the proper
equipment of oars, rowlocks, and sail.  Water was a consideration, and I
robbed every boat aboard of its breaker.  As there were nine boats all
told, it meant that we should have plenty of water, and ballast as well,
though there was the chance that the boat would be overloaded, what of
the generous supply of other things I was taking.

While Maud was passing me the provisions and I was storing them in the
boat, a sailor came on deck from the forecastle.  He stood by the weather
rail for a time (we were lowering over the lee rail), and then sauntered
slowly amidships, where he again paused and stood facing the wind, with
his back toward us.  I could hear my heart beating as I crouched low in
the boat.  Maud had sunk down upon the deck and was, I knew, lying
motionless, her body in the shadow of the bulwark.  But the man never
turned, and, after stretching his arms above his head and yawning
audibly, he retraced his steps to the forecastle scuttle and disappeared.

A few minutes sufficed to finish the loading, and I lowered the boat into
the water.  As I helped Maud over the rail and felt her form close to
mine, it was all I could do to keep from crying out, “I love you!  I love
you!”  Truly Humphrey Van Weyden was at last in love, I thought, as her
fingers clung to mine while I lowered her down to the boat.  I held on to
the rail with one hand and supported her weight with the other, and I was
proud at the moment of the feat.  It was a strength I had not possessed a
few months before, on the day I said good-bye to Charley Furuseth and
started for San Francisco on the ill-fated _Martinez_.

As the boat ascended on a sea, her feet touched and I released her hands.
I cast off the tackles and leaped after her.  I had never rowed in my
life, but I put out the oars and at the expense of much effort got the
boat clear of the _Ghost_.  Then I experimented with the sail.  I had
seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their spritsails many times, yet
this was my first attempt.  What took them possibly two minutes took me
twenty, but in the end I succeeded in setting and trimming it, and with
the steering-oar in my hands hauled on the wind.

“There lies Japan,” I remarked, “straight before us.”

“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, “you are a brave man.”

“Nay,” I answered, “it is you who are a brave woman.”

We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of the
_Ghost_.  Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea; her canvas
loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as the rudder
kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we were alone on the
dark sea.




CHAPTER XXVII


Day broke, grey and chill.  The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breeze
and the compass indicated that we were just making the course which would
bring us to Japan.  Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, and
they pained from the grip on the steering-oar.  My feet were stinging
from the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently that the sun would
shine.

Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud.  She, at least, was warm,
for under her and over her were thick blankets.  The top one I had drawn
over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but
the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from the
covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.

Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only a
man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world.  So
insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, the
top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavy
with sleep.

“Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,” she said.  “Have you sighted land yet?”

“No,” I answered, “but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles an
hour.”

She made a _moue_ of disappointment.

“But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in
twenty-four hours,” I added reassuringly.

Her face brightened.  “And how far have we to go?”

“Siberia lies off there,” I said, pointing to the west.  “But to the
south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan.  If this wind should hold,
we’ll make it in five days.”

“And if it storms?  The boat could not live?”

She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, and
thus she looked at me as she asked the question.

“It would have to storm very hard,” I temporized.

“And if it storms very hard?”

I nodded my head.  “But we may be picked up any moment by a
sealing-schooner.  They are plentifully distributed over this part of the
ocean.”

“Why, you are chilled through!” she cried.  “Look!  You are shivering.
Don’t deny it; you are.  And here I have been lying warm as toast.”

“I don’t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and were
chilled,” I laughed.

“It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.”

She sat up and began making her simple toilet.  She shook down her hair,
and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders.
Dear, damp brown hair!  I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my
fingers, to bury my face in it.  I gazed entranced, till the boat ran
into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to my
duties.  Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite
of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of
the physical characteristics of love.  The love of man and woman, I had
always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual
bond that linked and drew their souls together.  The bonds of the flesh
had little part in my cosmos of love.  But I was learning the sweet
lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself,
through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’s
hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light
that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips.  After
all, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only;
nor could it express itself in terms of itself.  Jehovah was
anthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only in
terms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image,
as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the
mind of the Israelites could grasp.

And so I gazed upon Maud’s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned
more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their
songs and sonnets.  She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and
her face emerged, smiling.

“Why don’t women wear their hair down always?” I asked.  “It is so much
more beautiful.”

“If it didn’t tangle so dreadfully,” she laughed.  “There!  I’ve lost one
of my precious hair-pins!”

I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again,
such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched
through the blankets for the pin.  I was surprised, and joyfully, that
she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism
that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy.  For I had been
elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far from
the plane of the human, and too far from me.  I had been making of her a
creature goddess-like and unapproachable.  So I hailed with delight the
little traits that proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the toss
of the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for the
pin.  She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy of
kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and awe in
which I knew I should always hold her.

She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention
more fully to my steering.  I proceeded to experiment, lashing and
wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the wind
without my assistance.  Occasionally it came up too close, or fell off
too freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main behaved
satisfactorily.

“And now we shall have breakfast,” I said.  “But first you must be more
warmly clad.”

I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket
goods.  I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it could
resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting.  When
she had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy’s cap she wore
for a man’s cap, large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap was
turned down, to completely cover her neck and ears.  The effect was
charming.  Her face was of the sort that cannot but look well under all
circumstances.  Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh
classic lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes,
clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.

A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then.  The boat was
caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave.  It went over
suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketful
or so of water.  I was opening a can of tongue at the moment, and I
sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time.  The sail flapped and
fluttered, and the boat paid off.  A few minutes of regulating sufficed
to put it on its course again, when I returned to the preparation of
breakfast.

“It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things nautical,”
she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steering
contrivance.

“But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,” I explained.
“When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on the quarter,
it will be necessary for me to steer.”

“I must say I don’t understand your technicalities,” she said, “but I do
your conclusion, and I don’t like it.  You cannot steer night and day and
for ever.  So I shall expect, after breakfast, to receive my first
lesson.  And then you shall lie down and sleep.  We’ll stand watches just
as they do on ships.”

“I don’t see how I am to teach you,” I made protest.  “I am just learning
for myself.  You little thought when you trusted yourself to me that I
had had no experience whatever with small boats.  This is the first time
I have ever been in one.”

“Then we’ll learn together, sir.  And since you’ve had a night’s start
you shall teach me what you have learned.  And now, breakfast.  My! this
air does give one an appetite!”

“No coffee,” I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits and a
slice of canned tongue.  “And there will be no tea, no soups, nothing
hot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow.”

After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud took
her lesson in steering.  In teaching her I learned quite a deal myself,
though I was applying the knowledge already acquired by sailing the
_Ghost_ and by watching the boat-steerers sail the small boats.  She was
an apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the course, to luff in the puffs
and to cast off the sheet in an emergency.

Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the oar to
me.  I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to spread them
out on the bottom.  When all was arranged snugly, she said:

“Now, sir, to bed.  And you shall sleep until luncheon.  Till
dinner-time,” she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the _Ghost_.

What could I do?  She insisted, and said, “Please, please,” whereupon I
turned the oar over to her and obeyed.  I experienced a positive sensuous
delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands.  The calm
and control which were so much a part of her seemed to have been
communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft dreaminess
and content, and of an oval face and brown eyes framed in a fisherman’s
cap and tossing against a background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea,
and then I was aware that I had been asleep.

I looked at my watch.  It was one o’clock.  I had slept seven hours!  And
she had been steering seven hours!  When I took the steering-oar I had
first to unbend her cramped fingers.  Her modicum of strength had been
exhausted, and she was unable even to move from her position.  I was
compelled to let go the sheet while I helped her to the nest of blankets
and chafed her hands and arms.

“I am so tired,” she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a sigh,
drooping her head wearily.

But she straightened it the next moment.  “Now don’t scold, don’t you
dare scold,” she cried with mock defiance.

“I hope my face does not appear angry,” I answered seriously; “for I
assure you I am not in the least angry.”

“N-no,” she considered.  “It looks only reproachful.”

“Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel.  You were not fair
to yourself, nor to me.  How can I ever trust you again?”

She looked penitent.  “I’ll be good,” she said, as a naughty child might
say it.  “I promise—”

“To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?”

“Yes,” she answered.  “It was stupid of me, I know.”

“Then you must promise something else,” I ventured.

“Readily.”

“That you will not say, ‘Please, please,’ too often; for when you do you
are sure to override my authority.”

She laughed with amused appreciation.  She, too, had noticed the power of
the repeated “please.”

“It is a good word—” I began.

“But I must not overwork it,” she broke in.

But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again.  I left the oar long
enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single fold
across her face.  Alas! she was not strong.  I looked with misgiving
toward the south-west and thought of the six hundred miles of hardship
before us—ay, if it were no worse than hardship.  On this sea a storm
might blow up at any moment and destroy us.  And yet I was unafraid.  I
was without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt
no underlying fear.  It must come right, it must come right, I repeated
to myself, over and over again.

The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying the
boat and me severely.  But the supply of food and the nine breakers of
water enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and wind, and I held on as
long as I dared.  Then I removed the sprit, tightly hauling down the peak
of the sail, and we raced along under what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.

Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer’s smoke on the horizon to
leeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely, the
_Macedonia_ still seeking the _Ghost_.  The sun had not shone all day,
and it had been bitter cold.  As night drew on, the clouds darkened and
the wind freshened, so that when Maud and I ate supper it was with our
mittens on and with me still steering and eating morsels between puffs.

By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat,
and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag or
sea-anchor.  I had learned of the device from the talk of the hunters,
and it was a simple thing to manufacture.  Furling the sail and lashing
it securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, I
threw it overboard.  A line connected it with the bow, and as it floated
low in the water, practically unexposed to the wind, it drifted less
rapidly than the boat.  In consequence it held the boat bow on to the sea
and wind—the safest position in which to escape being swamped when the
sea is breaking into whitecaps.

“And now?” Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished and I
pulled on my mittens.

“And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,” I answered.  “Our
drift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at least
two miles an hour.”

“That will be only twenty-four miles,” she urged, “if the wind remains
high all night.”

“Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three days
and nights.”

“But it won’t continue,” she said with easy confidence.  “It will turn
around and blow fair.”

“The sea is the great faithless one.”

“But the wind!” she retorted.  “I have heard you grow eloquent over the
brave trade-wind.”

“I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen’s chronometer and sextant,” I
said, still gloomily.  “Sailing one direction, drifting another
direction, to say nothing of the set of the current in some third
direction, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate.
Before long we won’t know where we are by five hundred miles.”

Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened any
more.  At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,—it was
then nine o’clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin about
her before I lay down.  I slept only cat-naps.  The boat was leaping and
pounding as it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas rushing past,
and spray was continually being thrown aboard.  And still, it was not a
bad night, I mused—nothing to the nights I had been through on the
_Ghost_; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in this
cockle-shell.  Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick.  Between
us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.

And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.  The death which
Wolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longer
feared.  The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to have
transformed me.  After all, I thought, it is better and finer to love
than to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth while that one
is not loath to die for it.  I forget my own life in the love of another
life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live as
right now when I place the least value upon my own life.  I never had so
much reason for living, was my concluding thought; and after that, until
I dozed, I contented myself with trying to pierce the darkness to where I
knew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the foaming sea
and ready to call me on an instant’s notice.




CHAPTER XXVIII


There is no need of going into an extended recital of our suffering in
the small boat during the many days we were driven and drifted, here and
there, willy-nilly, across the ocean.  The high wind blew from the
north-west for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm, and in the night
sprang up from the south-west.  This was dead in our teeth, but I took in
the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course on the wind which took us
in a south-south-easterly direction.  It was an even choice between this
and the west-north-westerly course which the wind permitted; but the warm
airs of the south fanned my desire for a warmer sea and swayed my
decision.

In three hours—it was midnight, I well remember, and as dark as I had
ever seen it on the sea—the wind, still blowing out of the south-west,
rose furiously, and once again I was compelled to set the sea-anchor.

Day broke and found me wan-eyed and the ocean lashed white, the boat
pitching, almost on end, to its drag.  We were in imminent danger of
being swamped by the whitecaps.  As it was, spray and spume came aboard
in such quantities that I bailed without cessation.  The blankets were
soaking.  Everything was wet except Maud, and she, in oilskins, rubber
boots, and sou’wester, was dry, all but her face and hands and a stray
wisp of hair.  She relieved me at the bailing-hole from time to time, and
bravely she threw out the water and faced the storm.  All things are
relative.  It was no more than a stiff blow, but to us, fighting for life
in our frail craft, it was indeed a storm.

Cold and cheerless, the wind beating on our faces, the white seas roaring
by, we struggled through the day.  Night came, but neither of us slept.
Day came, and still the wind beat on our faces and the white seas roared
past.  By the second night Maud was falling asleep from exhaustion.  I
covered her with oilskins and a tarpaulin.  She was comparatively dry,
but she was numb with the cold.  I feared greatly that she might die in
the night; but day broke, cold and cheerless, with the same clouded sky
and beating wind and roaring seas.

I had had no sleep for forty-eight hours.  I was wet and chilled to the
marrow, till I felt more dead than alive.  My body was stiff from
exertion as well as from cold, and my aching muscles gave me the severest
torture whenever I used them, and I used them continually.  And all the
time we were being driven off into the north-east, directly away from
Japan and toward bleak Bering Sea.

And still we lived, and the boat lived, and the wind blew unabated.  In
fact, toward nightfall of the third day it increased a trifle and
something more.  The boat’s bow plunged under a crest, and we came
through quarter-full of water.  I bailed like a madman.  The liability of
shipping another such sea was enormously increased by the water that
weighed the boat down and robbed it of its buoyancy.  And another such
sea meant the end.  When I had the boat empty again I was forced to take
away the tarpaulin which covered Maud, in order that I might lash it down
across the bow.  It was well I did, for it covered the boat fully a third
of the way aft, and three times, in the next several hours, it flung off
the bulk of the down-rushing water when the bow shoved under the seas.

Maud’s condition was pitiable.  She sat crouched in the bottom of the
boat, her lips blue, her face grey and plainly showing the pain she
suffered.  But ever her eyes looked bravely at me, and ever her lips
uttered brave words.

The worst of the storm must have blown that night, though little I
noticed it.  I had succumbed and slept where I sat in the stern-sheets.
The morning of the fourth day found the wind diminished to a gentle
whisper, the sea dying down and the sun shining upon us.  Oh, the blessed
sun!  How we bathed our poor bodies in its delicious warmth, reviving
like bugs and crawling things after a storm.  We smiled again, said
amusing things, and waxed optimistic over our situation.  Yet it was, if
anything, worse than ever.  We were farther from Japan than the night we
left the _Ghost_.  Nor could I more than roughly guess our latitude and
longitude.  At a calculation of a two-mile drift per hour, during the
seventy and odd hours of the storm, we had been driven at least one
hundred and fifty miles to the north-east.  But was such calculated drift
correct?  For all I knew, it might have been four miles per hour instead
of two.  In which case we were another hundred and fifty miles to the
bad.

Where we were I did not know, though there was quite a likelihood that we
were in the vicinity of the _Ghost_.  There were seals about us, and I
was prepared to sight a sealing-schooner at any time.  We did sight one,
in the afternoon, when the north-west breeze had sprung up freshly once
more.  But the strange schooner lost itself on the sky-line and we alone
occupied the circle of the sea.

Came days of fog, when even Maud’s spirit drooped and there were no merry
words upon her lips; days of calm, when we floated on the lonely
immensity of sea, oppressed by its greatness and yet marvelling at the
miracle of tiny life, for we still lived and struggled to live; days of
sleet and wind and snow-squalls, when nothing could keep us warm; or days
of drizzling rain, when we filled our water-breakers from the drip of the
wet sail.

And ever I loved Maud with an increasing love.  She was so many-sided, so
many-mooded—“protean-mooded” I called her.  But I called her this, and
other and dearer things, in my thoughts only.  Though the declaration of
my love urged and trembled on my tongue a thousand times, I knew that it
was no time for such a declaration.  If for no other reason, it was no
time, when one was protecting and trying to save a woman, to ask that
woman for her love.  Delicate as was the situation, not alone in this but
in other ways, I flattered myself that I was able to deal delicately with
it; and also I flattered myself that by look or sign I gave no
advertisement of the love I felt for her.  We were like good comrades,
and we grew better comrades as the days went by.

One thing about her which surprised me was her lack of timidity and fear.
The terrible sea, the frail boat, the storms, the suffering, the
strangeness and isolation of the situation,—all that should have
frightened a robust woman,—seemed to make no impression upon her who had
known life only in its most sheltered and consummately artificial
aspects, and who was herself all fire and dew and mist, sublimated
spirit, all that was soft and tender and clinging in woman.  And yet I am
wrong.  She _was_ timid and afraid, but she possessed courage.  The flesh
and the qualms of the flesh she was heir to, but the flesh bore heavily
only on the flesh.  And she was spirit, first and always spirit,
etherealized essence of life, calm as her calm eyes, and sure of
permanence in the changing order of the universe.

Came days of storm, days and nights of storm, when the ocean menaced us
with its roaring whiteness, and the wind smote our struggling boat with a
Titan’s buffets.  And ever we were flung off, farther and farther, to the
north-east.  It was in such a storm, and the worst that we had
experienced, that I cast a weary glance to leeward, not in quest of
anything, but more from the weariness of facing the elemental strife, and
in mute appeal, almost, to the wrathful powers to cease and let us be.
What I saw I could not at first believe.  Days and nights of
sleeplessness and anxiety had doubtless turned my head.  I looked back at
Maud, to identify myself, as it were, in time and space.  The sight of
her dear wet cheeks, her flying hair, and her brave brown eyes convinced
me that my vision was still healthy.  Again I turned my face to leeward,
and again I saw the jutting promontory, black and high and naked, the
raging surf that broke about its base and beat its front high up with
spouting fountains, the black and forbidding coast-line running toward the
south-east and fringed with a tremendous scarf of white.

“Maud,” I said.  “Maud.”

She turned her head and beheld the sight.

“It cannot be Alaska!” she cried.

“Alas, no,” I answered, and asked, “Can you swim?”

She shook her head.

“Neither can I,” I said.  “So we must get ashore without swimming, in
some opening between the rocks through which we can drive the boat and
clamber out.  But we must be quick, most quick—and sure.”

I spoke with a confidence she knew I did not feel, for she looked at me
with that unfaltering gaze of hers and said:

“I have not thanked you yet for all you have done for me but—”

She hesitated, as if in doubt how best to word her gratitude.

“Well?” I said, brutally, for I was not quite pleased with her thanking
me.

“You might help me,” she smiled.

“To acknowledge your obligations before you die?  Not at all.  We are not
going to die.  We shall land on that island, and we shall be snug and
sheltered before the day is done.”

I spoke stoutly, but I did not believe a word.  Nor was I prompted to lie
through fear.  I felt no fear, though I was sure of death in that boiling
surge amongst the rocks which was rapidly growing nearer.  It was
impossible to hoist sail and claw off that shore.  The wind would
instantly capsize the boat; the seas would swamp it the moment it fell
into the trough; and, besides, the sail, lashed to the spare oars,
dragged in the sea ahead of us.

As I say, I was not afraid to meet my own death, there, a few hundred
yards to leeward; but I was appalled at the thought that Maud must die.
My cursed imagination saw her beaten and mangled against the rocks, and
it was too terrible.  I strove to compel myself to think we would make
the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I
preferred to believe.

I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment
I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping
overboard.  Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we
entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my
love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and
die.

Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.  I felt
her mittened hand come out to mine.  And thus, without speech, we waited
the end.  We were not far off the line the wind made with the western
edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the
current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the
surf.

“We shall go clear,” I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived
neither of us.

“By God, we _will_ go clear!” I cried, five minutes later.

The oath left my lips in my excitement—the first, I do believe, in my
life, unless “trouble it,” an expletive of my youth, be accounted an
oath.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“You have convinced me of your sincerity,” she said, with a faint smile.
“I do know, now, that we shall go clear.”

I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory,
and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was
evidently a deep cove.  At the same time there broke upon our ears a
continuous and mighty bellowing.  It partook of the magnitude and volume
of distant thunder, and it came to us directly from leeward, rising above
the crash of the surf and travelling directly in the teeth of the storm.
As we passed the point the whole cove burst upon our view, a half-moon of
white sandy beach upon which broke a huge surf, and which was covered
with myriads of seals.  It was from them that the great bellowing went
up.

“A rookery!” I cried.  “Now are we indeed saved.  There must be men and
cruisers to protect them from the seal-hunters.  Possibly there is a
station ashore.”

But as I studied the surf which beat upon the beach, I said, “Still bad,
but not so bad.  And now, if the gods be truly kind, we shall drift by
that next headland and come upon a perfectly sheltered beach, where we
may land without wetting our feet.”

And the gods were kind.  The first and second headlands were directly in
line with the south-west wind; but once around the second,—and we went
perilously near,—we picked up the third headland, still in line with the
wind and with the other two.  But the cove that intervened!  It
penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under
the shelter of the point.  Here the sea was calm, save for a heavy but
smooth ground-swell, and I took in the sea-anchor and began to row.  From
the point the shore curved away, more and more to the south and west,
until at last it disclosed a cove within the cove, a little land-locked
harbour, the water level as a pond, broken only by tiny ripples where
vagrant breaths and wisps of the storm hurtled down from over the
frowning wall of rock that backed the beach a hundred feet inshore.

Here were no seals whatever.  The boat’s stern touched the hard shingle.
I sprang out, extending my hand to Maud.  The next moment she was beside
me.  As my fingers released hers, she clutched for my arm hastily.  At
the same moment I swayed, as about to fall to the sand.  This was the
startling effect of the cessation of motion.  We had been so long upon
the moving, rocking sea that the stable land was a shock to us.  We
expected the beach to lift up this way and that, and the rocky walls to
swing back and forth like the sides of a ship; and when we braced
ourselves, automatically, for these various expected movements, their
non-occurrence quite overcame our equilibrium.

“I really must sit down,” Maud said, with a nervous laugh and a dizzy
gesture, and forthwith she sat down on the sand.

I attended to making the boat secure and joined her.  Thus we landed on
Endeavour Island, as we came to it, land-sick from long custom of the
sea.




CHAPTER XXIX


“Fool!” I cried aloud in my vexation.

I had unloaded the boat and carried its contents high up on the beach,
where I had set about making a camp.  There was driftwood, though not
much, on the beach, and the sight of a coffee tin I had taken from the
_Ghost’s_ larder had given me the idea of a fire.

“Blithering idiot!” I was continuing.

But Maud said, “Tut, tut,” in gentle reproval, and then asked why I was a
blithering idiot.

“No matches,” I groaned.  “Not a match did I bring.  And now we shall
have no hot coffee, soup, tea, or anything!”

“Wasn’t it—er—Crusoe who rubbed sticks together?” she drawled.

“But I have read the personal narratives of a score of shipwrecked men
who tried, and tried in vain,” I answered.  “I remember Winters, a
newspaper fellow with an Alaskan and Siberian reputation.  Met him at the
Bibelot once, and he was telling us how he attempted to make a fire with
a couple of sticks.  It was most amusing.  He told it inimitably, but it
was the story of a failure.  I remember his conclusion, his black eyes
flashing as he said, ‘Gentlemen, the South Sea Islander may do it, the
Malay may do it, but take my word it’s beyond the white man.’”

“Oh, well, we’ve managed so far without it,” she said cheerfully.  “And
there’s no reason why we cannot still manage without it.”

“But think of the coffee!” I cried.  “It’s good coffee, too, I know.  I
took it from Larsen’s private stores.  And look at that good wood.”

I confess, I wanted the coffee badly; and I learned, not long afterward,
that the berry was likewise a little weakness of Maud’s.  Besides, we had
been so long on a cold diet that we were numb inside as well as out.
Anything warm would have been most gratifying.  But I complained no more
and set about making a tent of the sail for Maud.

I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom, and
sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines.  But as I was without
experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every successful
detail an invention, the day was well gone before her shelter was an
accomplished fact.  And then, that night, it rained, and she was flooded
out and driven back into the boat.

The next morning I dug a shallow ditch around the tent, and, an hour
later, a sudden gust of wind, whipping over the rocky wall behind us,
picked up the tent and smashed it down on the sand thirty yards away.

Maud laughed at my crestfallen expression, and I said, “As soon as the
wind abates I intend going in the boat to explore the island.  There must
be a station somewhere, and men.  And ships must visit the station.  Some
Government must protect all these seals.  But I wish to have you
comfortable before I start.”

“I should like to go with you,” was all she said.

“It would be better if you remained.  You have had enough of hardship.
It is a miracle that you have survived.  And it won’t be comfortable in
the boat rowing and sailing in this rainy weather.  What you need is
rest, and I should like you to remain and get it.”

Something suspiciously akin to moistness dimmed her beautiful eyes before
she dropped them and partly turned away her head.

“I should prefer going with you,” she said in a low voice, in which there
was just a hint of appeal.

“I might be able to help you a—” her voice broke,—“a little.  And if
anything should happen to you, think of me left here alone.”

“Oh, I intend being very careful,” I answered.  “And I shall not go so
far but what I can get back before night.  Yes, all said and done, I
think it vastly better for you to remain, and sleep, and rest and do
nothing.”

She turned and looked me in the eyes.  Her gaze was unfaltering, but
soft.

“Please, please,” she said, oh, so softly.

I stiffened myself to refuse, and shook my head.  Still she waited and
looked at me.  I tried to word my refusal, but wavered.  I saw the glad
light spring into her eyes and knew that I had lost.  It was impossible
to say no after that.

The wind died down in the afternoon, and we were prepared to start the
following morning.  There was no way of penetrating the island from our
cove, for the walls rose perpendicularly from the beach, and, on either
side of the cove, rose from the deep water.

Morning broke dull and grey, but calm, and I was awake early and had the
boat in readiness.

“Fool!  Imbecile!  Yahoo!” I shouted, when I thought it was meet to
arouse Maud; but this time I shouted in merriment as I danced about the
beach, bareheaded, in mock despair.

Her head appeared under the flap of the sail.

“What now?” she asked sleepily, and, withal, curiously.

“Coffee!” I cried.  “What do you say to a cup of coffee? hot coffee?
piping hot?”

“My!” she murmured, “you startled me, and you are cruel.  Here I have
been composing my soul to do without it, and here you are vexing me with
your vain suggestions.”

“Watch me,” I said.

From under clefts among the rocks I gathered a few dry sticks and chips.
These I whittled into shavings or split into kindling.  From my note-book
I tore out a page, and from the ammunition box took a shot-gun shell.
Removing the wads from the latter with my knife, I emptied the powder on
a flat rock.  Next I pried the primer, or cap, from the shell, and laid
it on the rock, in the midst of the scattered powder.  All was ready.
Maud still watched from the tent.  Holding the paper in my left hand, I
smashed down upon the cap with a rock held in my right.  There was a puff
of white smoke, a burst of flame, and the rough edge of the paper was
alight.

Maud clapped her hands gleefully.  “Prometheus!” she cried.

But I was too occupied to acknowledge her delight.  The feeble flame must
be cherished tenderly if it were to gather strength and live.  I fed it,
shaving by shaving, and sliver by sliver, till at last it was snapping
and crackling as it laid hold of the smaller chips and sticks.  To be
cast away on an island had not entered into my calculations, so we were
without a kettle or cooking utensils of any sort; but I made shift with
the tin used for bailing the boat, and later, as we consumed our supply
of canned goods, we accumulated quite an imposing array of cooking
vessels.

I boiled the water, but it was Maud who made the coffee.  And how good it
was!  My contribution was canned beef fried with crumbled sea-biscuit and
water.  The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much
longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot
black coffee and talking over our situation.

I was confident that we should find a station in some one of the coves,
for I knew that the rookeries of Bering Sea were thus guarded; but Maud
advanced the theory—to prepare me for disappointment, I do believe, if
disappointment were to come—that we had discovered an unknown rookery.
She was in very good spirits, however, and made quite merry in accepting
our plight as a grave one.

“If you are right,” I said, “then we must prepare to winter here.  Our
food will not last, but there are the seals.  They go away in the fall,
so I must soon begin to lay in a supply of meat.  Then there will be huts
to build and driftwood to gather.  Also we shall try out seal fat for
lighting purposes.  Altogether, we’ll have our hands full if we find the
island uninhabited.  Which we shall not, I know.”

But she was right.  We sailed with a beam wind along the shore, searching
the coves with our glasses and landing occasionally, without finding a
sign of human life.  Yet we learned that we were not the first who had
landed on Endeavour Island.  High up on the beach of the second cove from
ours, we discovered the splintered wreck of a boat—a sealer’s boat, for
the rowlocks were bound in sennit, a gun-rack was on the starboard side
of the bow, and in white letters was faintly visible _Gazelle_ No. 2.
The boat had lain there for a long time, for it was half filled with
sand, and the splintered wood had that weather-worn appearance due to
long exposure to the elements.  In the stern-sheets I found a rusty
ten-gauge shot-gun and a sailor’s sheath-knife broken short across and so
rusted as to be almost unrecognizable.

“They got away,” I said cheerfully; but I felt a sinking at the heart and
seemed to divine the presence of bleached bones somewhere on that beach.

I did not wish Maud’s spirits to be dampened by such a find, so I turned
seaward again with our boat and skirted the north-eastern point of the
island.  There were no beaches on the southern shore, and by early
afternoon we rounded the black promontory and completed the
circumnavigation of the island.  I estimated its circumference at
twenty-five miles, its width as varying from two to five miles; while my
most conservative calculation placed on its beaches two hundred thousand
seals.  The island was highest at its extreme south-western point, the
headlands and backbone diminishing regularly until the north-eastern
portion was only a few feet above the sea.  With the exception of our
little cove, the other beaches sloped gently back for a distance of
half-a-mile or so, into what I might call rocky meadows, with here and
there patches of moss and tundra grass.  Here the seals hauled out, and
the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by
themselves.

This brief description is all that Endeavour Island merits.  Damp and
soggy where it was not sharp and rocky, buffeted by storm winds and
lashed by the sea, with the air continually a-tremble with the bellowing
of two hundred thousand amphibians, it was a melancholy and miserable
sojourning-place.  Maud, who had prepared me for disappointment, and who
had been sprightly and vivacious all day, broke down as we landed in our
own little cove.  She strove bravely to hide it from me, but while I was
kindling another fire I knew she was stifling her sobs in the blankets
under the sail-tent.

It was my turn to be cheerful, and I played the part to the best of my
ability, and with such success that I brought the laughter back into her
dear eyes and song on her lips; for she sang to me before she went to an
early bed.  It was the first time I had heard her sing, and I lay by the
fire, listening and transported, for she was nothing if not an artist in
everything she did, and her voice, though not strong, was wonderfully
sweet and expressive.

I still slept in the boat, and I lay awake long that night, gazing up at
the first stars I had seen in many nights and pondering the situation.
Responsibility of this sort was a new thing to me.  Wolf Larsen had been
quite right.  I had stood on my father’s legs.  My lawyers and agents had
taken care of my money for me.  I had had no responsibilities at all.
Then, on the _Ghost_ I had learned to be responsible for myself.  And
now, for the first time in my life, I found myself responsible for some
one else.  And it was required of me that this should be the gravest of
responsibilities, for she was the one woman in the world—the one small
woman, as I loved to think of her.




CHAPTER XXX


No wonder we called it Endeavour Island.  For two weeks we toiled at
building a hut.  Maud insisted on helping, and I could have wept over her
bruised and bleeding hands.  And still, I was proud of her because of it.
There was something heroic about this gently-bred woman enduring our
terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks
of a peasant woman.  She gathered many of the stones which I built into
the walls of the hut; also, she turned a deaf ear to my entreaties when I
begged her to desist.  She compromised, however, by taking upon herself
the lighter labours of cooking and gathering driftwood and moss for our
winter’s supply.

The hut’s walls rose without difficulty, and everything went smoothly
until the problem of the roof confronted me.  Of what use the four walls
without a roof?  And of what could a roof be made?  There were the spare
oars, very true.  They would serve as roof-beams; but with what was I to
cover them?  Moss would never do.  Tundra grass was impracticable.  We
needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.

“Winters used walrus skins on his hut,” I said.

“There are the seals,” she suggested.

So next day the hunting began.  I did not know how to shoot, but I
proceeded to learn.  And when I had expended some thirty shells for three
seals, I decided that the ammunition would be exhausted before I acquired
the necessary knowledge.  I had used eight shells for lighting fires
before I hit upon the device of banking the embers with wet moss, and
there remained not over a hundred shells in the box.

“We must club the seals,” I announced, when convinced of my poor
marksmanship.  “I have heard the sealers talk about clubbing them.”

“They are so pretty,” she objected.  “I cannot bear to think of it being
done.  It is so directly brutal, you know; so different from shooting
them.”

“That roof must go on,” I answered grimly.  “Winter is almost here.  It
is our lives against theirs.  It is unfortunate we haven’t plenty of
ammunition, but I think, anyway, that they suffer less from being clubbed
than from being all shot up.  Besides, I shall do the clubbing.”

“That’s just it,” she began eagerly, and broke off in sudden confusion.

“Of course,” I began, “if you prefer—”

“But what shall I be doing?” she interrupted, with that softness I knew
full well to be insistence.

“Gathering firewood and cooking dinner,” I answered lightly.

She shook her head.  “It is too dangerous for you to attempt alone.”

“I know, I know,” she waived my protest.  “I am only a weak woman, but
just my small assistance may enable you to escape disaster.”

“But the clubbing?” I suggested.

“Of course, you will do that.  I shall probably scream.  I’ll look away
when—”

“The danger is most serious,” I laughed.

“I shall use my judgment when to look and when not to look,” she replied
with a grand air.

The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning.  I
rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach.  There
were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the
beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard.

“I know men club them,” I said, trying to reassure myself, and gazing
doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his
fore-flippers and regarding me intently.  “But the question is, How do
they club them?”

“Let us gather tundra grass and thatch the roof,” Maud said.

She was as frightened as I at the prospect, and we had reason to be
gazing at close range at the gleaming teeth and dog-like mouths.

“I always thought they were afraid of men,” I said.

“How do I know they are not afraid?” I queried a moment later, after
having rowed a few more strokes along the beach.  “Perhaps, if I were to
step boldly ashore, they would cut for it, and I could not catch up with
one.”  And still I hesitated.

“I heard of a man, once, who invaded the nesting grounds of wild geese,”
Maud said.  “They killed him.”

“The geese?”

“Yes, the geese.  My brother told me about it when I was a little girl.”

“But I know men club them,” I persisted.

“I think the tundra grass will make just as good a roof,” she said.

Far from her intention, her words were maddening me, driving me on.  I
could not play the coward before her eyes.  “Here goes,” I said, backing
water with one oar and running the bow ashore.

I stepped out and advanced valiantly upon a long-maned bull in the midst
of his wives.  I was armed with the regular club with which the
boat-pullers killed the wounded seals gaffed aboard by the hunters.  It
was only a foot and a half long, and in my superb ignorance I never
dreamed that the club used ashore when raiding the rookeries measured
four to five feet.  The cows lumbered out of my way, and the distance
between me and the bull decreased.  He raised himself on his flippers
with an angry movement.  We were a dozen feet apart.  Still I advanced
steadily, looking for him to turn tail at any moment and run.

At six feet the panicky thought rushed into my mind, What if he will not
run?  Why, then I shall club him, came the answer.  In my fear I had
forgotten that I was there to get the bull instead of to make him run.
And just then he gave a snort and a snarl and rushed at me.  His eyes
were blazing, his mouth was wide open; the teeth gleamed cruelly white.
Without shame, I confess that it was I who turned and footed it.  He ran
awkwardly, but he ran well.  He was but two paces behind when I tumbled
into the boat, and as I shoved off with an oar his teeth crunched down
upon the blade.  The stout wood was crushed like an egg-shell.  Maud and
I were astounded.  A moment later he had dived under the boat, seized the
keel in his mouth, and was shaking the boat violently.

“My!” said Maud.  “Let’s go back.”

I shook my head.  “I can do what other men have done, and I know that
other men have clubbed seals.  But I think I’ll leave the bulls alone
next time.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Now don’t say, ‘Please, please,’” I cried, half angrily, I do believe.

She made no reply, and I knew my tone must have hurt her.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, or shouted, rather, in order to make myself
heard above the roar of the rookery.  “If you say so, I’ll turn and go
back; but honestly, I’d rather stay.”

“Now don’t say that this is what you get for bringing a woman along,” she
said.  She smiled at me whimsically, gloriously, and I knew there was no
need for forgiveness.

I rowed a couple of hundred feet along the beach so as to recover my
nerves, and then stepped ashore again.

“Do be cautious,” she called after me.

I nodded my head and proceeded to make a flank attack on the nearest
harem.  All went well until I aimed a blow at an outlying cow's head and
fell short.  She snorted and tried to scramble away.  I ran in close and
struck another blow, hitting the shoulder instead of the head.

“Watch out!” I heard Maud scream.

In my excitement I had not been taking notice of other things, and I
looked up to see the lord of the harem charging down upon me.  Again I
fled to the boat, hotly pursued; but this time Maud made no suggestion of
turning back.

“It would be better, I imagine, if you let harems alone and devoted your
attention to lonely and inoffensive-looking seals,” was what she said.
“I think I have read something about them.  Dr. Jordan’s book, I believe.
They are the young bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own.  He
called them the holluschickie, or something like that.  It seems to me if
we find where they haul out—”

“It seems to me that your fighting instinct is aroused,” I laughed.

She flushed quickly and prettily.  “I’ll admit I don’t like defeat any
more than you do, or any more than I like the idea of killing such
pretty, inoffensive creatures.”

“Pretty!” I sniffed.  “I failed to mark anything pre-eminently pretty
about those foamy-mouthed beasts that raced me.”

“Your point of view,” she laughed.  “You lacked perspective.  Now if you
did not have to get so close to the subject—”

“The very thing!” I cried.  “What I need is a longer club.  And there’s
that broken oar ready to hand.”

“It just comes to me,” she said, “that Captain Larsen was telling me how
the men raided the rookeries.  They drive the seals, in small herds, a
short distance inland before they kill them.”

“I don’t care to undertake the herding of one of those harems,” I
objected.

“But there are the holluschickie,” she said.  “The holluschickie haul out
by themselves, and Dr. Jordan says that paths are left between the
harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the path
they are unmolested by the masters of the harem.”

“There’s one now,” I said, pointing to a young bull in the water.  “Let’s
watch him, and follow him if he hauls out.”

He swam directly to the beach and clambered out into a small opening
between two harems, the masters of which made warning noises but did not
attack him.  We watched him travel slowly inward, threading about among
the harems along what must have been the path.

“Here goes,” I said, stepping out; but I confess my heart was in my mouth
as I thought of going through the heart of that monstrous herd.

“It would be wise to make the boat fast,” Maud said.

She had stepped out beside me, and I regarded her with wonderment.

She nodded her head determinedly.  “Yes, I’m going with you, so you may
as well secure the boat and arm me with a club.”

“Let’s go back,” I said dejectedly.  “I think tundra grass, will do,
after all.”

“You know it won’t,” was her reply.  “Shall I lead?”

With a shrug of the shoulders, but with the warmest admiration and pride
at heart for this woman, I equipped her with the broken oar and took
another for myself.  It was with nervous trepidation that we made the
first few rods of the journey.  Once Maud screamed in terror as a cow
thrust an inquisitive nose toward her foot, and several times I quickened
my pace for the same reason.  But, beyond warning coughs from either
side, there were no signs of hostility.  It was a rookery which had never
been raided by the hunters, and in consequence the seals were
mild-tempered and at the same time unafraid.

In the very heart of the herd the din was terrific.  It was almost
dizzying in its effect.  I paused and smiled reassuringly at Maud, for I
had recovered my equanimity sooner than she.  I could see that she was
still badly frightened.  She came close to me and shouted:

“I’m dreadfully afraid!”

And I was not.  Though the novelty had not yet worn off, the peaceful
comportment of the seals had quieted my alarm.  Maud was trembling.

“I’m afraid, and I’m not afraid,” she chattered with shaking jaws.  “It’s
my miserable body, not I.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I reassured her, my arm passing
instinctively and protectingly around her.

I shall never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became of
my manhood.  The primitive deeps of my nature stirred.  I felt myself
masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting male.  And, best of
all, I felt myself the protector of my loved one.  She leaned against me,
so light and lily-frail, and as her trembling eased away it seemed as
though I became aware of prodigious strength.  I felt myself a match for
the most ferocious bull in the herd, and I know, had such a bull charged
upon me, that I should have met it unflinchingly and quite coolly, and I
know that I should have killed it.

“I am all right now,” she said, looking up at me gratefully.  “Let us go
on.”

And that the strength in me had quieted her and given her confidence,
filled me with an exultant joy.  The youth of the race seemed burgeoning
in me, over-civilized man that I was, and I lived for myself the old
hunting days and forest nights of my remote and forgotten ancestry.  I
had much for which to thank Wolf Larsen, was my thought as we went along
the path between the jostling harems.

A quarter of a mile inland we came upon the holluschickie—sleek young
bulls, living out the loneliness of their bachelorhood and gathering
strength against the day when they would fight their way into the ranks
of the Benedicts.

Everything now went smoothly.  I seemed to know just what to do and how
to do it.  Shouting, making threatening gestures with my club, and even
prodding the lazy ones, I quickly cut out a score of the young bachelors
from their companions.  Whenever one made an attempt to break back toward
the water, I headed it off.  Maud took an active part in the drive, and
with her cries and flourishings of the broken oar was of considerable
assistance.  I noticed, though, that whenever one looked tired and
lagged, she let it slip past.  But I noticed, also, whenever one, with a
show of fight, tried to break past, that her eyes glinted and showed
bright, and she rapped it smartly with her club.

“My, it’s exciting!” she cried, pausing from sheer weakness.  “I think
I’ll sit down.”

I drove the little herd (a dozen strong, now, what of the escapes she had
permitted) a hundred yards farther on; and by the time she joined me I
had finished the slaughter and was beginning to skin.  An hour later we
went proudly back along the path between the harems.  And twice again we
came down the path burdened with skins, till I thought we had enough to
roof the hut.  I set the sail, laid one tack out of the cove, and on the
other tack made our own little inner cove.

“It’s just like home-coming,” Maud said, as I ran the boat ashore.

I heard her words with a responsive thrill, it was all so dearly intimate
and natural, and I said:

“It seems as though I have lived this life always.  The world of books
and bookish folk is very vague, more like a dream memory than an
actuality.  I surely have hunted and forayed and fought all the days of
my life.  And you, too, seem a part of it.  You are—”  I was on the verge
of saying, “my woman, my mate,” but glibly changed it to—“standing the
hardship well.”

But her ear had caught the flaw.  She recognized a flight that midmost
broke.  She gave me a quick look.

“Not that.  You were saying—?”

“That the American Mrs. Meynell was living the life of a savage and
living it quite successfully,” I said easily.

“Oh,” was all she replied; but I could have sworn there was a note of
disappointment in her voice.

But “my woman, my mate” kept ringing in my head for the rest of the day
and for many days.  Yet never did it ring more loudly than that night, as
I watched her draw back the blanket of moss from the coals, blow up the
fire, and cook the evening meal.  It must have been latent savagery
stirring in me, for the old words, so bound up with the roots of the
race, to grip me and thrill me.  And grip and thrill they did, till I
fell asleep, murmuring them to myself over and over again.




CHAPTER XXXI


“It will smell,” I said, “but it will keep in the heat and keep out the
rain and snow.”

We were surveying the completed seal-skin roof.

“It is clumsy, but it will serve the purpose, and that is the main
thing,” I went on, yearning for her praise.

And she clapped her hands and declared that she was hugely pleased.

“But it is dark in here,” she said the next moment, her shoulders
shrinking with a little involuntary shiver.

“You might have suggested a window when the walls were going up,” I said.
“It was for you, and you should have seen the need of a window.”

“But I never do see the obvious, you know,” she laughed back.  “And
besides, you can knock a hole in the wall at any time.”

“Quite true; I had not thought of it,” I replied, wagging my head sagely.
“But have you thought of ordering the window-glass?  Just call up the
firm,—Red, 4451, I think it is,—and tell them what size and kind of glass
you wish.”

“That means—” she began.

“No window.”

It was a dark and evil-appearing thing, that hut, not fit for aught
better than swine in a civilized land; but for us, who had known the
misery of the open boat, it was a snug little habitation.  Following the
housewarming, which was accomplished by means of seal-oil and a wick made
from cotton calking, came the hunting for our winter’s meat and the
building of the second hut.  It was a simple affair, now, to go forth in
the morning and return by noon with a boatload of seals.  And then, while
I worked at building the hut, Maud tried out the oil from the blubber and
kept a slow fire under the frames of meat.  I had heard of jerking beef
on the plains, and our seal-meat, cut in thin strips and hung in the
smoke, cured excellently.

The second hut was easier to erect, for I built it against the first, and
only three walls were required.  But it was work, hard work, all of it.
Maud and I worked from dawn till dark, to the limit of our strength, so
that when night came we crawled stiffly to bed and slept the animal-like
sleep of exhaustion.  And yet Maud declared that she had never felt better
or stronger in her life.  I knew this was true of myself, but hers was
such a lily strength that I feared she would break down.  Often and
often, her last-reserve force gone, I have seen her stretched flat on her
back on the sand in the way she had of resting and recuperating.  And
then she would be up on her feet and toiling hard as ever.  Where she
obtained this strength was the marvel to me.

“Think of the long rest this winter,” was her reply to my remonstrances.
“Why, we’ll be clamorous for something to do.”

We held a housewarming in my hut the night it was roofed.  It was the end
of the third day of a fierce storm which had swung around the compass
from the south-east to the north-west, and which was then blowing
directly in upon us.  The beaches of the outer cove were thundering with
the surf, and even in our land-locked inner cove a respectable sea was
breaking.  No high backbone of island sheltered us from the wind, and it
whistled and bellowed about the hut till at times I feared for the
strength of the walls.  The skin roof, stretched tightly as a drumhead, I
had thought, sagged and bellied with every gust; and innumerable
interstices in the walls, not so tightly stuffed with moss as Maud had
supposed, disclosed themselves.  Yet the seal-oil burned brightly and we
were warm and comfortable.

It was a pleasant evening indeed, and we voted that as a social function
on Endeavour Island it had not yet been eclipsed.  Our minds were at
ease.  Not only had we resigned ourselves to the bitter winter, but we
were prepared for it.  The seals could depart on their mysterious journey
into the south at any time, now, for all we cared; and the storms held no
terror for us.  Not only were we sure of being dry and warm and sheltered
from the wind, but we had the softest and most luxurious mattresses that
could be made from moss.  This had been Maud’s idea, and she had herself
jealously gathered all the moss.  This was to be my first night on the
mattress, and I knew I should sleep the sweeter because she had made it.

As she rose to go she turned to me with the whimsical way she had, and
said:

“Something is going to happen—is happening, for that matter.  I feel it.
Something is coming here, to us.  It is coming now.  I don’t know what,
but it is coming.”

“Good or bad?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “I don’t know, but it is there, somewhere.”

She pointed in the direction of the sea and wind.

“It’s a lee shore,” I laughed, “and I am sure I’d rather be here than
arriving, a night like this.”

“You are not frightened?” I asked, as I stepped to open the door for her.

Her eyes looked bravely into mine.

“And you feel well? perfectly well?”

“Never better,” was her answer.

We talked a little longer before she went.

“Good-night, Maud,” I said.

“Good-night, Humphrey,” she said.

This use of our given names had come about quite as a matter of course,
and was as unpremeditated as it was natural.  In that moment I could have
put my arms around her and drawn her to me.  I should certainly have done
so out in that world to which we belonged.  As it was, the situation
stopped there in the only way it could; but I was left alone in my little
hut, glowing warmly through and through with a pleasant satisfaction; and
I knew that a tie, or a tacit something, existed between us which had not
existed before.




CHAPTER XXXII


I awoke, oppressed by a mysterious sensation.  There seemed something
missing in my environment.  But the mystery and oppressiveness vanished
after the first few seconds of waking, when I identified the missing
something as the wind.  I had fallen asleep in that state of nerve
tension with which one meets the continuous shock of sound or movement,
and I had awakened, still tense, bracing myself to meet the pressure of
something which no longer bore upon me.

It was the first night I had spent under cover in several months, and I
lay luxuriously for some minutes under my blankets (for once not wet with
fog or spray), analysing, first, the effect produced upon me by the
cessation of the wind, and next, the joy which was mine from resting on
the mattress made by Maud’s hands.  When I had dressed and opened the
door, I heard the waves still lapping on the beach, garrulously attesting
the fury of the night.  It was a clear day, and the sun was shining.  I
had slept late, and I stepped outside with sudden energy, bent upon
making up lost time as befitted a dweller on Endeavour Island.

And when outside, I stopped short.  I believed my eyes without question,
and yet I was for the moment stunned by what they disclosed to me.
There, on the beach, not fifty feet away, bow on, dismasted, was a
black-hulled vessel.  Masts and booms, tangled with shrouds, sheets, and
rent canvas, were rubbing gently alongside.  I could have rubbed my eyes
as I looked.  There was the home-made galley we had built, the familiar
break of the poop, the low yacht-cabin scarcely rising above the rail.
It was the _Ghost_.

What freak of fortune had brought it here—here of all spots? what chance
of chances?  I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and knew
the profundity of despair.  Escape was hopeless, out of the question.  I
thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her
“Good-night, Humphrey”; “my woman, my mate,” went ringing through my
brain, but now, alas, it was a knell that sounded.  Then everything went
black before my eyes.

Possibly it was the fraction of a second, but I had no knowledge of how
long an interval had lapsed before I was myself again.  There lay the
_Ghost_, bow on to the beach, her splintered bowsprit projecting over the
sand, her tangled spars rubbing against her side to the lift of the
crooning waves.  Something must be done, must be done.

It came upon me suddenly, as strange, that nothing moved aboard.  Wearied
from the night of struggle and wreck, all hands were yet asleep, I
thought.  My next thought was that Maud and I might yet escape.  If we
could take to the boat and make round the point before any one awoke?  I
would call her and start.  My hand was lifted at her door to knock, when
I recollected the smallness of the island.  We could never hide ourselves
upon it.  There was nothing for us but the wide raw ocean.  I thought of
our snug little huts, our supplies of meat and oil and moss and firewood,
and I knew that we could never survive the wintry sea and the great
storms which were to come.

So I stood, with hesitant knuckle, without her door.  It was impossible,
impossible.  A wild thought of rushing in and killing her as she slept
rose in my mind.  And then, in a flash, the better solution came to me.
All hands were asleep.  Why not creep aboard the _Ghost_,—well I knew the
way to Wolf Larsen’s bunk,—and kill him in his sleep?  After that—well,
we would see.  But with him dead there was time and space in which to
prepare to do other things; and besides, whatever new situation arose, it
could not possibly be worse than the present one.

My knife was at my hip.  I returned to my hut for the shot-gun, made sure
it was loaded, and went down to the _Ghost_.  With some difficulty, and
at the expense of a wetting to the waist, I climbed aboard.  The
forecastle scuttle was open.  I paused to listen for the breathing of the
men, but there was no breathing.  I almost gasped as the thought came to
me: What if the _Ghost_ is deserted?  I listened more closely.  There was
no sound.  I cautiously descended the ladder.  The place had the empty
and musty feel and smell usual to a dwelling no longer inhabited.
Everywhere was a thick litter of discarded and ragged garments, old
sea-boots, leaky oilskins—all the worthless forecastle dunnage of a long
voyage.

Abandoned hastily, was my conclusion, as I ascended to the deck.  Hope
was alive again in my breast, and I looked about me with greater
coolness.  I noted that the boats were missing.  The steerage told the
same tale as the forecastle.  The hunters had packed their belongings
with similar haste.  The _Ghost_ was deserted.  It was Maud’s and mine.
I thought of the ship’s stores and the lazarette beneath the cabin, and
the idea came to me of surprising Maud with something nice for breakfast.

The reaction from my fear, and the knowledge that the terrible deed I had
come to do was no longer necessary, made me boyish and eager.  I went up
the steerage companion-way two steps at a time, with nothing distinct in
my mind except joy and the hope that Maud would sleep on until the
surprise breakfast was quite ready for her.  As I rounded the galley, a
new satisfaction was mine at thought of all the splendid cooking utensils
inside.  I sprang up the break of the poop, and saw—Wolf Larsen.  What of
my impetus and the stunning surprise, I clattered three or four steps
along the deck before I could stop myself.  He was standing in the
companion-way, only his head and shoulders visible, staring straight at
me.  His arms were resting on the half-open slide.  He made no movement
whatever—simply stood there, staring at me.

I began to tremble.  The old stomach sickness clutched me.  I put one
hand on the edge of the house to steady myself.  My lips seemed suddenly
dry and I moistened them against the need of speech.  Nor did I for an
instant take my eyes off him.  Neither of us spoke.  There was something
ominous in his silence, his immobility.  All my old fear of him returned
and by my new fear was increased an hundred-fold.  And still we stood, the
pair of us, staring at each other.

I was aware of the demand for action, and, my old helplessness strong
upon me, I was waiting for him to take the initiative.  Then, as the
moments went by, it came to me that the situation was analogous to the
one in which I had approached the long-maned bull, my intention of
clubbing obscured by fear until it became a desire to make him run.  So
it was at last impressed upon me that I was there, not to have Wolf
Larsen take the initiative, but to take it myself.

I cocked both barrels and levelled the shot-gun at him.  Had he moved,
attempted to drop down the companion-way, I know I would have shot him.
But he stood motionless and staring as before.  And as I faced him, with
levelled gun shaking in my hands, I had time to note the worn and haggard
appearance of his face.  It was as if some strong anxiety had wasted it.
The cheeks were sunken, and there was a wearied, puckered expression on
the brow.  And it seemed to me that his eyes were strange, not only the
expression, but the physical seeming, as though the optic nerves and
supporting muscles had suffered strain and slightly twisted the eyeballs.

All this I saw, and my brain now working rapidly, I thought a thousand
thoughts; and yet I could not pull the triggers.  I lowered the gun and
stepped to the corner of the cabin, primarily to relieve the tension on
my nerves and to make a new start, and incidentally to be closer.  Again
I raised the gun.  He was almost at arm’s length.  There was no hope for
him.  I was resolved.  There was no possible chance of missing him, no
matter how poor my marksmanship.  And yet I wrestled with myself and
could not pull the triggers.

“Well?” he demanded impatiently.

I strove vainly to force my fingers down on the triggers, and vainly I
strove to say something.

“Why don’t you shoot?” he asked.

I cleared my throat of a huskiness which prevented speech.  “Hump,” he
said slowly, “you can’t do it.  You are not exactly afraid.  You are
impotent.  Your conventional morality is stronger than you.  You are the
slave to the opinions which have credence among the people you have known
and have read about.  Their code has been drummed into your head from the
time you lisped, and in spite of your philosophy, and of what I have
taught you, it won’t let you kill an unarmed, unresisting man.”

“I know it,” I said hoarsely.

“And you know that I would kill an unarmed man as readily as I would
smoke a cigar,” he went on.  “You know me for what I am,—my worth in the
world by your standard.  You have called me snake, tiger, shark, monster,
and Caliban.  And yet, you little rag puppet, you little echoing
mechanism, you are unable to kill me as you would a snake or a shark,
because I have hands, feet, and a body shaped somewhat like yours.  Bah!
I had hoped better things of you, Hump.”

He stepped out of the companion-way and came up to me.

“Put down that gun.  I want to ask you some questions.  I haven’t had a
chance to look around yet.  What place is this?  How is the _Ghost_
lying?  How did you get wet?  Where’s Maud?—I beg your pardon, Miss
Brewster—or should I say, ‘Mrs. Van Weyden’?”

I had backed away from him, almost weeping at my inability to shoot him,
but not fool enough to put down the gun.  I hoped, desperately, that he
might commit some hostile act, attempt to strike me or choke me; for in
such way only I knew I could be stirred to shoot.

“This is Endeavour Island,” I said.

“Never heard of it,” he broke in.

“At least, that’s our name for it,” I amended.

“Our?” he queried.  “Who’s our?”

“Miss Brewster and myself.  And the _Ghost_ is lying, as you can see for
yourself, bow on to the beach.”

“There are seals here,” he said.  “They woke me up with their barking, or
I’d be sleeping yet.  I heard them when I drove in last night.  They were
the first warning that I was on a lee shore.  It’s a rookery, the kind of
a thing I’ve hunted for years.  Thanks to my brother Death, I’ve lighted
on a fortune.  It’s a mint.  What’s its bearings?”

“Haven’t the least idea,” I said.  “But you ought to know quite closely.
What were your last observations?”

He smiled inscrutably, but did not answer.

“Well, where’s all hands?” I asked.  “How does it come that you are
alone?”

I was prepared for him again to set aside my question, and was surprised
at the readiness of his reply.

“My brother got me inside forty-eight hours, and through no fault of
mine.  Boarded me in the night with only the watch on deck.  Hunters went
back on me.  He gave them a bigger lay.  Heard him offering it.  Did it
right before me.  Of course the crew gave me the go-by.  That was to be
expected.  All hands went over the side, and there I was, marooned on my
own vessel.  It was Death’s turn, and it’s all in the family anyway.”

“But how did you lose the masts?” I asked.

“Walk over and examine those lanyards,” he said, pointing to where the
mizzen-rigging should have been.

“They have been cut with a knife!” I exclaimed.

“Not quite,” he laughed.  “It was a neater job.  Look again.”

I looked.  The lanyards had been almost severed, with just enough left to
hold the shrouds till some severe strain should be put upon them.

“Cooky did that,” he laughed again.  “I know, though I didn’t spot him at
it.  Kind of evened up the score a bit.”

“Good for Mugridge!” I cried.

“Yes, that’s what I thought when everything went over the side.  Only I
said it on the other side of my mouth.”

“But what were you doing while all this was going on?” I asked.

“My best, you may be sure, which wasn’t much under the circumstances.”

I turned to re-examine Thomas Mugridge’s work.

“I guess I’ll sit down and take the sunshine,” I heard Wolf Larsen
saying.

There was a hint, just a slight hint, of physical feebleness in his
voice, and it was so strange that I looked quickly at him.  His hand was
sweeping nervously across his face, as though he were brushing away
cobwebs.  I was puzzled.  The whole thing was so unlike the Wolf Larsen I
had known.

“How are your headaches?” I asked.

“They still trouble me,” was his answer.  “I think I have one coming on
now.”

He slipped down from his sitting posture till he lay on the deck.  Then
he rolled over on his side, his head resting on the biceps of the under
arm, the forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.  I stood regarding him
wonderingly.

“Now’s your chance, Hump,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I lied, for I thoroughly understood.

“Oh, nothing,” he added softly, as if he were drowsing; “only you’ve got
me where you want me.”

“No, I haven’t,” I retorted; “for I want you a few thousand miles away
from here.”

He chuckled, and thereafter spoke no more.  He did not stir as I passed
by him and went down into the cabin.  I lifted the trap in the floor, but
for some moments gazed dubiously into the darkness of the lazarette
beneath.  I hesitated to descend.  What if his lying down were a ruse?
Pretty, indeed, to be caught there like a rat.  I crept softly up the
companion-way and peeped at him.  He was lying as I had left him.  Again
I went below; but before I dropped into the lazarette I took the
precaution of casting down the door in advance.  At least there would be
no lid to the trap.  But it was all needless.  I regained the cabin with
a store of jams, sea-biscuits, canned meats, and such things,—all I could
carry,—and replaced the trap-door.

A peep at Wolf Larsen showed me that he had not moved.  A bright thought
struck me.  I stole into his state-room and possessed myself of his
revolvers.  There were no other weapons, though I thoroughly ransacked
the three remaining state-rooms.  To make sure, I returned and went
through the steerage and forecastle, and in the galley gathered up all
the sharp meat and vegetable knives.  Then I bethought me of the great
yachtsman’s knife he always carried, and I came to him and spoke to him,
first softly, then loudly.  He did not move.  I bent over and took it
from his pocket.  I breathed more freely.  He had no arms with which to
attack me from a distance; while I, armed, could always forestall him
should he attempt to grapple me with his terrible gorilla arms.

Filling a coffee-pot and frying-pan with part of my plunder, and taking
some chinaware from the cabin pantry, I left Wolf Larsen lying in the sun
and went ashore.

Maud was still asleep.  I blew up the embers (we had not yet arranged a
winter kitchen), and quite feverishly cooked the breakfast.  Toward the
end, I heard her moving about within the hut, making her toilet.  Just as
all was ready and the coffee poured, the door opened and she came forth.

“It’s not fair of you,” was her greeting.  “You are usurping one of my
prerogatives.  You know you agreed that the cooking should be mine,
and—”

“But just this once,” I pleaded.

“If you promise not to do it again,” she smiled.  “Unless, of course, you
have grown tired of my poor efforts.”

To my delight she never once looked toward the beach, and I maintained
the banter with such success all unconsciously she sipped coffee from the
china cup, ate fried evaporated potatoes, and spread marmalade on her
biscuit.  But it could not last.  I saw the surprise that came over her.
She had discovered the china plate from which she was eating.  She looked
over the breakfast, noting detail after detail.  Then she looked at me,
and her face turned slowly toward the beach.

“Humphrey!” she said.

The old unnamable terror mounted into her eyes.

“Is—he?” she quavered.

I nodded my head.




CHAPTER XXXIII


We waited all day for Wolf Larsen to come ashore.  It was an intolerable
period of anxiety.  Each moment one or the other of us cast expectant
glances toward the _Ghost_.  But he did not come.  He did not even appear
on deck.

“Perhaps it is his headache,” I said.  “I left him lying on the poop.  He
may lie there all night.  I think I’ll go and see.”

Maud looked entreaty at me.

“It is all right,” I assured her.  “I shall take the revolvers.  You know
I collected every weapon on board.”

“But there are his arms, his hands, his terrible, terrible hands!” she
objected.  And then she cried, “Oh, Humphrey, I am afraid of him!  Don’t
go—please don’t go!”

She rested her hand appealingly on mine, and sent my pulse fluttering.
My heart was surely in my eyes for a moment.  The dear and lovely woman!
And she was so much the woman, clinging and appealing, sunshine and dew
to my manhood, rooting it deeper and sending through it the sap of a new
strength.  I was for putting my arm around her, as when in the midst of
the seal herd; but I considered, and refrained.

“I shall not take any risks,” I said.  “I’ll merely peep over the bow and
see.”

She pressed my hand earnestly and let me go.  But the space on deck where
I had left him lying was vacant.  He had evidently gone below.  That
night we stood alternate watches, one of us sleeping at a time; for there
was no telling what Wolf Larsen might do.  He was certainly capable of
anything.

The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.

“These headaches of his, these attacks,” Maud said, on the afternoon of
the fourth day; “Perhaps he is ill, very ill.  He may be dead.”

“Or dying,” was her afterthought when she had waited some time for me to
speak.

“Better so,” I answered.

“But think, Humphrey, a fellow-creature in his last lonely hour.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested.

“Yes, even perhaps,” she acknowledged.  “But we do not know.  It would be
terrible if he were.  I could never forgive myself.  We must do
something.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested again.

I waited, smiling inwardly at the woman of her which compelled a
solicitude for Wolf Larsen, of all creatures.  Where was her solicitude
for me, I thought,—for me whom she had been afraid to have merely peep
aboard?

She was too subtle not to follow the trend of my silence.  And she was as
direct as she was subtle.

“You must go aboard, Humphrey, and find out,” she said.  “And if you want
to laugh at me, you have my consent and forgiveness.”

I arose obediently and went down the beach.

“Do be careful,” she called after me.

I waved my arm from the forecastle head and dropped down to the deck.
Aft I walked to the cabin companion, where I contented myself with
hailing below.  Wolf Larsen answered, and as he started to ascend the
stairs I cocked my revolver.  I displayed it openly during our
conversation, but he took no notice of it.  He appeared the same,
physically, as when last I saw him, but he was gloomy and silent.  In
fact, the few words we spoke could hardly be called a conversation.  I
did not inquire why he had not been ashore, nor did he ask why I had not
come aboard.  His head was all right again, he said, and so, without
further parley, I left him.

Maud received my report with obvious relief, and the sight of smoke which
later rose in the galley put her in a more cheerful mood.  The next day,
and the next, we saw the galley smoke rising, and sometimes we caught
glimpses of him on the poop.  But that was all.  He made no attempt to
come ashore.  This we knew, for we still maintained our night-watches.
We were waiting for him to do something, to show his hand, so to say, and
his inaction puzzled and worried us.

A week of this passed by.  We had no other interest than Wolf Larsen, and
his presence weighed us down with an apprehension which prevented us from
doing any of the little things we had planned.

But at the end of the week the smoke ceased rising from the galley, and
he no longer showed himself on the poop.  I could see Maud’s solicitude
again growing, though she timidly—and even proudly, I think—forbore a
repetition of her request.  After all, what censure could be put upon
her?  She was divinely altruistic, and she was a woman.  Besides, I was
myself aware of hurt at thought of this man whom I had tried to kill,
dying alone with his fellow-creatures so near.  He was right.  The code
of my group was stronger than I.  The fact that he had hands, feet, and a
body shaped somewhat like mine, constituted a claim which I could not
ignore.

So I did not wait a second time for Maud to send me.  I discovered that
we stood in need of condensed milk and marmalade, and announced that I
was going aboard.  I could see that she wavered.  She even went so far as
to murmur that they were non-essentials and that my trip after them might
be inexpedient.  And as she had followed the trend of my silence, she now
followed the trend of my speech, and she knew that I was going aboard,
not because of condensed milk and marmalade, but because of her and of
her anxiety, which she knew she had failed to hide.

I took off my shoes when I gained the forecastle head, and went
noiselessly aft in my stocking feet.  Nor did I call this time from the
top of the companion-way.  Cautiously descending, I found the cabin
deserted.  The door to his state-room was closed.  At first I thought of
knocking, then I remembered my ostensible errand and resolved to carry it
out.  Carefully avoiding noise, I lifted the trap-door in the floor and
set it to one side.  The slop-chest, as well as the provisions, was
stored in the lazarette, and I took advantage of the opportunity to lay
in a stock of underclothing.

As I emerged from the lazarette I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen’s
state-room.  I crouched and listened.  The door-knob rattled.  Furtively,
instinctively, I slunk back behind the table and drew and cocked my
revolver.  The door swung open and he came forth.  Never had I seen so
profound a despair as that which I saw on his face,—the face of Wolf
Larsen the fighter, the strong man, the indomitable one.  For all the
world like a woman wringing her hands, he raised his clenched fists and
groaned.  One fist unclosed, and the open palm swept across his eyes as
though brushing away cobwebs.

“God!  God!” he groaned, and the clenched fists were raised again to the
infinite despair with which his throat vibrated.

It was horrible.  I was trembling all over, and I could feel the shivers
running up and down my spine and the sweat standing out on my forehead.
Surely there can be little in this world more awful than the spectacle of
a strong man in the moment when he is utterly weak and broken.

But Wolf Larsen regained control of himself by an exertion of his
remarkable will.  And it was exertion.  His whole frame shook with the
struggle.  He resembled a man on the verge of a fit.  His face strove to
compose itself, writhing and twisting in the effort till he broke down
again.  Once more the clenched fists went upward and he groaned.  He
caught his breath once or twice and sobbed.  Then he was successful.  I
could have thought him the old Wolf Larsen, and yet there was in his
movements a vague suggestion of weakness and indecision.  He started for
the companion-way, and stepped forward quite as I had been accustomed to
see him do; and yet again, in his very walk, there seemed that suggestion
of weakness and indecision.

I was now concerned with fear for myself.  The open trap lay directly in
his path, and his discovery of it would lead instantly to his discovery
of me.  I was angry with myself for being caught in so cowardly a
position, crouching on the floor.  There was yet time.  I rose swiftly to
my feet, and, I know, quite unconsciously assumed a defiant attitude.  He
took no notice of me.  Nor did he notice the open trap.  Before I could
grasp the situation, or act, he had walked right into the trap.  One foot
was descending into the opening, while the other foot was just on the
verge of beginning the uplift.  But when the descending foot missed the
solid flooring and felt vacancy beneath, it was the old Wolf Larsen and
the tiger muscles that made the falling body spring across the opening,
even as it fell, so that he struck on his chest and stomach, with arms
outstretched, on the floor of the opposite side.  The next instant he had
drawn up his legs and rolled clear.  But he rolled into my marmalade and
underclothes and against the trap-door.

The expression on his face was one of complete comprehension.  But before
I could guess what he had comprehended, he had dropped the trap-door into
place, closing the lazarette.  Then I understood.  He thought he had me
inside.  Also, he was blind, blind as a bat.  I watched him, breathing
carefully so that he should not hear me.  He stepped quickly to his
state-room.  I saw his hand miss the door-knob by an inch, quickly fumble
for it, and find it.  This was my chance.  I tiptoed across the cabin and
to the top of the stairs.  He came back, dragging a heavy sea-chest,
which he deposited on top of the trap.  Not content with this he fetched
a second chest and placed it on top of the first.  Then he gathered up
the marmalade and underclothes and put them on the table.  When he
started up the companion-way, I retreated, silently rolling over on top
of the cabin.

He shoved the slide part way back and rested his arms on it, his body
still in the companion-way.  His attitude was of one looking forward the
length of the schooner, or staring, rather, for his eyes were fixed and
unblinking.  I was only five feet away and directly in what should have
been his line of vision.  It was uncanny.  I felt myself a ghost, what of
my invisibility.  I waved my hand back and forth, of course without
effect; but when the moving shadow fell across his face I saw at once
that he was susceptible to the impression.  His face became more
expectant and tense as he tried to analyze and identify the impression.
He knew that he had responded to something from without, that his
sensibility had been touched by a changing something in his environment;
but what it was he could not discover.  I ceased waving my hand, so that
the shadow remained stationary.  He slowly moved his head back and forth
under it and turned from side to side, now in the sunshine, now in the
shade, feeling the shadow, as it were, testing it by sensation.

I, too, was busy, trying to reason out how he was aware of the existence
of so intangible a thing as a shadow.  If it were his eyeballs only that
were affected, or if his optic nerve were not wholly destroyed, the
explanation was simple.  If otherwise, then the only conclusion I could
reach was that the sensitive skin recognized the difference of
temperature between shade and sunshine.  Or, perhaps,—who can tell?—it
was that fabled sixth sense which conveyed to him the loom and feel of an
object close at hand.

Giving over his attempt to determine the shadow, he stepped on deck and
started forward, walking with a swiftness and confidence which surprised
me.  And still there was that hint of the feebleness of the blind in his
walk.  I knew it now for what it was.

To my amused chagrin, he discovered my shoes on the forecastle head and
brought them back with him into the galley.  I watched him build the fire
and set about cooking food for himself; then I stole into the cabin for
my marmalade and underclothes, slipped back past the galley, and climbed
down to the beach to deliver my barefoot report.




CHAPTER XXXIV


“It’s too bad the _Ghost_ has lost her masts.  Why we could sail away in
her.  Don’t you think we could, Humphrey?”

I sprang excitedly to my feet.

“I wonder, I wonder,” I repeated, pacing up and down.

Maud’s eyes were shining with anticipation as they followed me.  She had
such faith in me!  And the thought of it was so much added power.  I
remembered Michelet’s “To man, woman is as the earth was to her legendary
son; he has but to fall down and kiss her breast and he is strong again.”
For the first time I knew the wonderful truth of his words.  Why, I was
living them.  Maud was all this to me, an unfailing source of strength
and courage.  I had but to look at her, or think of her, and be strong
again.

“It can be done, it can be done,” I was thinking and asserting aloud.
“What men have done, I can do; and if they have never done this before,
still I can do it.”

“What? for goodness’ sake,” Maud demanded.  “Do be merciful.  What is it
you can do?”

“We can do it,” I amended.  “Why, nothing else than put the masts back
into the _Ghost_ and sail away.”

“Humphrey!” she exclaimed.

And I felt as proud of my conception as if it were already a fact
accomplished.

“But how is it possible to be done?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” was my answer.  “I know only that I am capable of doing
anything these days.”

I smiled proudly at her—too proudly, for she dropped her eyes and was for
the moment silent.

“But there is Captain Larsen,” she objected.

“Blind and helpless,” I answered promptly, waving him aside as a straw.

“But those terrible hands of his!  You know how he leaped across the
opening of the lazarette.”

“And you know also how I crept about and avoided him,” I contended gaily.

“And lost your shoes.”

“You’d hardly expect them to avoid Wolf Larsen without my feet inside of
them.”

We both laughed, and then went seriously to work constructing the plan
whereby we were to step the masts of the _Ghost_ and return to the world.
I remembered hazily the physics of my school days, while the last few
months had given me practical experience with mechanical purchases.  I
must say, though, when we walked down to the _Ghost_ to inspect more
closely the task before us, that the sight of the great masts lying in
the water almost disheartened me.  Where were we to begin?  If there had
been one mast standing, something high up to which to fasten blocks and
tackles!  But there was nothing.  It reminded me of the problem of
lifting oneself by one’s boot-straps.  I understood the mechanics of
levers; but where was I to get a fulcrum?

There was the mainmast, fifteen inches in diameter at what was now the
butt, still sixty-five feet in length, and weighing, I roughly
calculated, at least three thousand pounds.  And then came the foremast,
larger in diameter, and weighing surely thirty-five hundred pounds.
Where was I to begin?  Maud stood silently by my side, while I evolved in
my mind the contrivance known among sailors as “shears.”  But, though
known to sailors, I invented it there on Endeavour Island.  By crossing
and lashing the ends of two spars, and then elevating them in the air
like an inverted “V,” I could get a point above the deck to which to make
fast my hoisting tackle.  To this hoisting tackle I could, if necessary,
attach a second hoisting tackle.  And then there was the windlass!

Maud saw that I had achieved a solution, and her eyes warmed
sympathetically.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Clear that raffle,” I answered, pointing to the tangled wreckage
overside.

Ah, the decisiveness, the very sound of the words, was good in my ears.
“Clear that raffle!”  Imagine so salty a phrase on the lips of the
Humphrey Van Weyden of a few months gone!

There must have been a touch of the melodramatic in my pose and voice,
for Maud smiled.  Her appreciation of the ridiculous was keen, and in all
things she unerringly saw and felt, where it existed, the touch of sham,
the overshading, the overtone.  It was this which had given poise and
penetration to her own work and made her of worth to the world.  The
serious critic, with the sense of humour and the power of expression,
must inevitably command the world’s ear.  And so it was that she had
commanded.  Her sense of humour was really the artist’s instinct for
proportion.

“I’m sure I’ve heard it before, somewhere, in books,” she murmured
gleefully.

I had an instinct for proportion myself, and I collapsed forthwith,
descending from the dominant pose of a master of matter to a state of
humble confusion which was, to say the least, very miserable.

Her hand leapt out at once to mine.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“No need to be,” I gulped.  “It does me good.  There’s too much of the
schoolboy in me.  All of which is neither here nor there.  What we’ve got
to do is actually and literally to clear that raffle.  If you’ll come
with me in the boat, we’ll get to work and straighten things out.”

“‘When the topmen clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their
teeth,’” she quoted at me; and for the rest of the afternoon we made
merry over our labour.

Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the tangle.
And such a tangle—halyards, sheets, guys, down-hauls, shrouds, stays, all
washed about and back and forth and through, and twined and knotted by
the sea.  I cut no more than was necessary, and what with passing the
long ropes under and around the booms and masts, of unreeving the
halyards and sheets, of coiling down in the boat and uncoiling in order
to pass through another knot in the bight, I was soon wet to the skin.

The sails did require some cutting, and the canvas, heavy with water,
tried my strength severely; but I succeeded before nightfall in getting
it all spread out on the beach to dry.  We were both very tired when we
knocked off for supper, and we had done good work, too, though to the eye
it appeared insignificant.

Next morning, with Maud as able assistant, I went into the hold of the
_Ghost_ to clear the steps of the mast-butts.  We had no more than begun
work when the sound of my knocking and hammering brought Wolf Larsen.

“Hello below!” he cried down the open hatch.

The sound of his voice made Maud quickly draw close to me, as for
protection, and she rested one hand on my arm while we parleyed.

“Hello on deck,” I replied.  “Good-morning to you.”

“What are you doing down there?” he demanded.  “Trying to scuttle my ship
for me?”

“Quite the opposite; I’m repairing her,” was my answer.

“But what in thunder are you repairing?”  There was puzzlement in his
voice.

“Why, I’m getting everything ready for re-stepping the masts,” I replied
easily, as though it were the simplest project imaginable.

“It seems as though you’re standing on your own legs at last, Hump,” we
heard him say; and then for some time he was silent.

“But I say, Hump,” he called down.  “You can’t do it.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” I retorted.  “I’m doing it now.”

“But this is my vessel, my particular property.  What if I forbid you?”

“You forget,” I replied.  “You are no longer the biggest bit of the
ferment.  You were, once, and able to eat me, as you were pleased to
phrase it; but there has been a diminishing, and I am now able to eat
you.  The yeast has grown stale.”

He gave a short, disagreeable laugh.  “I see you’re working my philosophy
back on me for all it is worth.  But don’t make the mistake of
under-estimating me.  For your own good I warn you.”

“Since when have you become a philanthropist?” I queried.  “Confess, now,
in warning me for my own good, that you are very consistent.”

He ignored my sarcasm, saying, “Suppose I clap the hatch on, now?  You
won’t fool me as you did in the lazarette.”

“Wolf Larsen,” I said sternly, for the first time addressing him by this
his most familiar name, “I am unable to shoot a helpless, unresisting
man.  You have proved that to my satisfaction as well as yours.  But I
warn you now, and not so much for your own good as for mine, that I shall
shoot you the moment you attempt a hostile act.  I can shoot you now, as
I stand here; and if you are so minded, just go ahead and try to clap on
the hatch.”

“Nevertheless, I forbid you, I distinctly forbid your tampering with my
ship.”

“But, man!” I expostulated, “you advance the fact that it is your ship as
though it were a moral right.  You have never considered moral rights in
your dealings with others.  You surely do not dream that I’ll consider
them in dealing with you?”

I had stepped underneath the open hatchway so that I could see him.  The
lack of expression on his face, so different from when I had watched him
unseen, was enhanced by the unblinking, staring eyes.  It was not a
pleasant face to look upon.

“And none so poor, not even Hump, to do him reverence,” he sneered.

The sneer was wholly in his voice.  His face remained expressionless as
ever.

“How do you do, Miss Brewster,” he said suddenly, after a pause.

I started.  She had made no noise whatever, had not even moved.  Could it
be that some glimmer of vision remained to him? or that his vision was
coming back?

“How do you do, Captain Larsen,” she answered.  “Pray, how did you know I
was here?”

“Heard you breathing, of course.  I say, Hump’s improving, don’t you
think so?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, smiling at me.  “I have never seen him
otherwise.”

“You should have seen him before, then.”

“Wolf Larsen, in large doses,” I murmured, “before and after taking.”

“I want to tell you again, Hump,” he said threateningly, “that you’d
better leave things alone.”

“But don’t you care to escape as well as we?” I asked incredulously.

“No,” was his answer.  “I intend dying here.”

“Well, we don’t,” I concluded defiantly, beginning again my knocking and
hammering.




CHAPTER XXXV


Next day, the mast-steps clear and everything in readiness, we started to
get the two topmasts aboard.  The maintopmast was over thirty feet in
length, the foretopmast nearly thirty, and it was of these that I
intended making the shears.  It was puzzling work.  Fastening one end of
a heavy tackle to the windlass, and with the other end fast to the butt
of the foretopmast, I began to heave.  Maud held the turn on the windlass
and coiled down the slack.

We were astonished at the ease with which the spar was lifted.  It was an
improved crank windlass, and the purchase it gave was enormous.  Of
course, what it gave us in power we paid for in distance; as many times
as it doubled my strength, that many times was doubled the length of rope
I heaved in.  The tackle dragged heavily across the rail, increasing its
drag as the spar arose more and more out of the water, and the exertion
on the windlass grew severe.

But when the butt of the topmast was level with the rail, everything came
to a standstill.

“I might have known it,” I said impatiently.  “Now we have to do it all
over again.”

“Why not fasten the tackle part way down the mast?” Maud suggested.

“It’s what I should have done at first,” I answered, hugely disgusted
with myself.

Slipping off a turn, I lowered the mast back into the water and fastened
the tackle a third of the way down from the butt.  In an hour, what of
this and of rests between the heaving, I had hoisted it to the point
where I could hoist no more.  Eight feet of the butt was above the rail,
and I was as far away as ever from getting the spar on board.  I sat down
and pondered the problem.  It did not take long.  I sprang jubilantly to
my feet.

“Now I have it!” I cried.  “I ought to make the tackle fast at the point
of balance.  And what we learn of this will serve us with everything else
we have to hoist aboard.”

Once again I undid all my work by lowering the mast into the water.  But
I miscalculated the point of balance, so that when I heaved the top of
the mast came up instead of the butt.  Maud looked despair, but I laughed
and said it would do just as well.

Instructing her how to hold the turn and be ready to slack away at
command, I laid hold of the mast with my hands and tried to balance it
inboard across the rail.  When I thought I had it I cried to her to slack
away; but the spar righted, despite my efforts, and dropped back toward
the water.  Again I heaved it up to its old position, for I had now
another idea.  I remembered the watch-tackle—a small double and single
block affair—and fetched it.

While I was rigging it between the top of the spar and the opposite rail,
Wolf Larsen came on the scene.  We exchanged nothing more than
good-mornings, and, though he could not see, he sat on the rail out of
the way and followed by the sound all that I did.

Again instructing Maud to slack away at the windlass when I gave the
word, I proceeded to heave on the watch-tackle.  Slowly the mast swung in
until it balanced at right angles across the rail; and then I discovered
to my amazement that there was no need for Maud to slack away.  In fact,
the very opposite was necessary.  Making the watch-tackle fast, I hove on
the windlass and brought in the mast, inch by inch, till its top tilted
down to the deck and finally its whole length lay on the deck.

I looked at my watch.  It was twelve o’clock.  My back was aching sorely,
and I felt extremely tired and hungry.  And there on the deck was a
single stick of timber to show for a whole morning’s work.  For the first
time I thoroughly realized the extent of the task before us.  But I was
learning, I was learning.  The afternoon would show far more
accomplished.  And it did; for we returned at one o’clock, rested and
strengthened by a hearty dinner.

In less than an hour I had the maintopmast on deck and was constructing
the shears.  Lashing the two topmasts together, and making allowance for
their unequal length, at the point of intersection I attached the double
block of the main throat-halyards.  This, with the single block and the
throat-halyards themselves, gave me a hoisting tackle.  To prevent the
butts of the masts from slipping on the deck, I nailed down thick cleats.
Everything in readiness, I made a line fast to the apex of the shears and
carried it directly to the windlass.  I was growing to have faith in that
windlass, for it gave me power beyond all expectation.  As usual, Maud
held the turn while I heaved.  The shears rose in the air.

Then I discovered I had forgotten guy-ropes.  This necessitated my
climbing the shears, which I did twice, before I finished guying it fore
and aft and to either side.  Twilight had set in by the time this was
accomplished.  Wolf Larsen, who had sat about and listened all afternoon
and never opened his mouth, had taken himself off to the galley and
started his supper.  I felt quite stiff across the small of the back, so
much so that I straightened up with an effort and with pain.  I looked
proudly at my work.  It was beginning to show.  I was wild with desire,
like a child with a new toy, to hoist something with my shears.

“I wish it weren’t so late,” I said.  “I’d like to see how it works.”

“Don’t be a glutton, Humphrey,” Maud chided me.  “Remember, to-morrow is
coming, and you’re so tired now that you can hardly stand.”

“And you?” I said, with sudden solicitude.  “You must be very tired.  You
have worked hard and nobly.  I am proud of you, Maud.”

“Not half so proud as I am of you, nor with half the reason,” she
answered, looking me straight in the eyes for a moment with an expression
in her own and a dancing, tremulous light which I had not seen before and
which gave me a pang of quick delight, I know not why, for I did not
understand it.  Then she dropped her eyes, to lift them again, laughing.

“If our friends could see us now,” she said.  “Look at us.  Have you ever
paused for a moment to consider our appearance?”

“Yes, I have considered yours, frequently,” I answered, puzzling over
what I had seen in her eyes and puzzled by her sudden change of subject.

“Mercy!” she cried.  “And what do I look like, pray?”

“A scarecrow, I’m afraid,” I replied.  “Just glance at your draggled
skirts, for instance.  Look at those three-cornered tears.  And such a
waist!  It would not require a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that you have
been cooking over a camp-fire, to say nothing of trying out seal-blubber.
And to cap it all, that cap!  And all that is the woman who wrote ‘A Kiss
Endured.’”

She made me an elaborate and stately courtesy, and said, “As for you,
sir—”

And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a
serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the
strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes.  What was it?
Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech?
My eyes had spoken, I knew, until I had found the culprits out and
silenced them.  This had occurred several times.  But had she seen the
clamour in them and understood?  And had her eyes so spoken to me?  What
else could that expression have meant—that dancing, tremulous light, and
a something more which words could not describe.  And yet it could not
be.  It was impossible.  Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of
eyes.  I was only Humphrey Van Weyden, a bookish fellow who loved.  And
to love, and to wait and win love, that surely was glorious enough for
me.  And thus I thought, even as we chaffed each other’s appearance,
until we arrived ashore and there were other things to think about.

“It’s a shame, after working hard all day, that we cannot have an
uninterrupted night’s sleep,” I complained, after supper.

“But there can be no danger now? from a blind man?” she queried.

“I shall never be able to trust him,” I averred, “and far less now that
he is blind.  The liability is that his part helplessness will make him
more malignant than ever.  I know what I shall do to-morrow, the first
thing—run out a light anchor and kedge the schooner off the beach.  And
each night when we come ashore in the boat, Mr. Wolf Larsen will be left
a prisoner on board.  So this will be the last night we have to stand
watch, and because of that it will go the easier.”

We were awake early and just finishing breakfast as daylight came.

“Oh, Humphrey!” I heard Maud cry in dismay and suddenly stop.

I looked at her.  She was gazing at the _Ghost_.  I followed her gaze,
but could see nothing unusual.  She looked at me, and I looked inquiry
back.

“The shears,” she said, and her voice trembled.

I had forgotten their existence.  I looked again, but could not see them.

“If he has—” I muttered savagely.

She put her hand sympathetically on mine, and said, “You will have to
begin over again.”

“Oh, believe me, my anger means nothing; I could not hurt a fly,” I
smiled back bitterly.  “And the worst of it is, he knows it.  You are
right.  If he has destroyed the shears, I shall do nothing except begin
over again.”

“But I’ll stand my watch on board hereafter,” I blurted out a moment
later.  “And if he interferes—”

“But I dare not stay ashore all night alone,” Maud was saying when I came
back to myself.  “It would be so much nicer if he would be friendly with
us and help us.  We could all live comfortably aboard.”

“We will,” I asserted, still savagely, for the destruction of my beloved
shears had hit me hard.  “That is, you and I will live aboard, friendly
or not with Wolf Larsen.”

“It’s childish,” I laughed later, “for him to do such things, and for me
to grow angry over them, for that matter.”

But my heart smote me when we climbed aboard and looked at the havoc he
had done.  The shears were gone altogether.  The guys had been slashed
right and left.  The throat-halyards which I had rigged were cut across
through every part.  And he knew I could not splice.  A thought struck
me.  I ran to the windlass.  It would not work.  He had broken it.  We
looked at each other in consternation.  Then I ran to the side.  The
masts, booms, and gaffs I had cleared were gone.  He had found the lines
which held them, and cast them adrift.

Tears were in Maud’s eyes, and I do believe they were for me.  I could
have wept myself.  Where now was our project of remasting the _Ghost_?
He had done his work well.  I sat down on the hatch-combing and rested my
chin on my hands in black despair.

“He deserves to die,” I cried out; “and God forgive me, I am not man
enough to be his executioner.”

But Maud was by my side, passing her hand soothingly through my hair as
though I were a child, and saying, “There, there; it will all come right.
We are in the right, and it must come right.”

I remembered Michelet and leaned my head against her; and truly I became
strong again.  The blessed woman was an unfailing fount of power to me.
What did it matter?  Only a set-back, a delay.  The tide could not have
carried the masts far to seaward, and there had been no wind.  It meant
merely more work to find them and tow them back.  And besides, it was a
lesson.  I knew what to expect.  He might have waited and destroyed our
work more effectually when we had more accomplished.

“Here he comes now,” she whispered.

I glanced up.  He was strolling leisurely along the poop on the port
side.

“Take no notice of him,” I whispered.  “He’s coming to see how we take
it.  Don’t let him know that we know.  We can deny him that satisfaction.
Take off your shoes—that’s right—and carry them in your hand.”

And then we played hide-and-seek with the blind man.  As he came up the
port side we slipped past on the starboard; and from the poop we watched
him turn and start aft on our track.

He must have known, somehow, that we were on board, for he said
“Good-morning” very confidently, and waited for the greeting to be
returned.  Then he strolled aft, and we slipped forward.

“Oh, I know you’re aboard,” he called out, and I could see him listen
intently after he had spoken.

It reminded me of the great hoot-owl, listening, after its booming cry,
for the stir of its frightened prey.  But we did not stir, and we moved
only when he moved.  And so we dodged about the deck, hand in hand, like
a couple of children chased by a wicked ogre, till Wolf Larsen, evidently
in disgust, left the deck for the cabin.  There was glee in our eyes, and
suppressed titters in our mouths, as we put on our shoes and clambered
over the side into the boat.  And as I looked into Maud’s clear brown
eyes I forgot the evil he had done, and I knew only that I loved her, and
that because of her the strength was mine to win our way back to the
world.




CHAPTER XXXVI


For two days Maud and I ranged the sea and explored the beaches in search
of the missing masts.  But it was not till the third day that we found
them, all of them, the shears included, and, of all perilous places, in
the pounding surf of the grim south-western promontory.  And how we
worked!  At the dark end of the first day we returned, exhausted, to our
little cove, towing the mainmast behind us.  And we had been compelled to
row, in a dead calm, practically every inch of the way.

Another day of heart-breaking and dangerous toil saw us in camp with the
two topmasts to the good.  The day following I was desperate, and I
rafted together the foremast, the fore and main booms, and the fore and
main gaffs.  The wind was favourable, and I had thought to tow them back
under sail, but the wind baffled, then died away, and our progress with
the oars was a snail’s pace.  And it was such dispiriting effort.  To
throw one’s whole strength and weight on the oars and to feel the boat
checked in its forward lunge by the heavy drag behind, was not exactly
exhilarating.

Night began to fall, and to make matters worse, the wind sprang up ahead.
Not only did all forward motion cease, but we began to drift back and out
to sea.  I struggled at the oars till I was played out.  Poor Maud, whom
I could never prevent from working to the limit of her strength, lay
weakly back in the stern-sheets.  I could row no more.  My bruised and
swollen hands could no longer close on the oar handles.  My wrists and
arms ached intolerably, and though I had eaten heartily of a
twelve-o’clock lunch, I had worked so hard that I was faint from hunger.

I pulled in the oars and bent forward to the line which held the tow.
But Maud’s hand leaped out restrainingly to mine.

“What are you going to do?” she asked in a strained, tense voice.

“Cast it off,” I answered, slipping a turn of the rope.

But her fingers closed on mine.

“Please don’t,” she begged.

“It is useless,” I answered.  “Here is night and the wind blowing us off
the land.”

“But think, Humphrey.  If we cannot sail away on the _Ghost_, we may
remain for years on the island—for life even.  If it has never been
discovered all these years, it may never be discovered.”

“You forget the boat we found on the beach,” I reminded her.

“It was a seal-hunting boat,” she replied, “and you know perfectly well
that if the men had escaped they would have been back to make their
fortunes from the rookery.  You know they never escaped.”

I remained silent, undecided.

“Besides,” she added haltingly, “it’s your idea, and I want to see you
succeed.”

Now I could harden my heart.  As soon as she put it on a flattering
personal basis, generosity compelled me to deny her.

“Better years on the island than to die to-night, or to-morrow, or the
next day, in the open boat.  We are not prepared to brave the sea.  We
have no food, no water, no blankets, nothing.  Why, you’d not survive the
night without blankets: I know how strong you are.  You are shivering
now.”

“It is only nervousness,” she answered.  “I am afraid you will cast off
the masts in spite of me.”

“Oh, please, please, Humphrey, don’t!” she burst out, a moment later.

And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me.  We
shivered miserably throughout the night.  Now and again I fitfully slept,
but the pain of the cold always aroused me.  How Maud could stand it was
beyond me.  I was too tired to thrash my arms about and warm myself, but
I found strength time and again to chafe her hands and feet to restore
the circulation.  And still she pleaded with me not to cast off the
masts.  About three in the morning she was caught by a cold cramp, and
after I had rubbed her out of that she became quite numb.  I was
frightened.  I got out the oars and made her row, though she was so weak
I thought she would faint at every stroke.

Morning broke, and we looked long in the growing light for our island.
At last it showed, small and black, on the horizon, fully fifteen miles
away.  I scanned the sea with my glasses.  Far away in the south-west I
could see a dark line on the water, which grew even as I looked at it.

“Fair wind!” I cried in a husky voice I did not recognize as my own.

Maud tried to reply, but could not speak.  Her lips were blue with cold,
and she was hollow-eyed—but oh, how bravely her brown eyes looked at me!
How piteously brave!

Again I fell to chafing her hands and to moving her arms up and down and
about until she could thrash them herself.  Then I compelled her to stand
up, and though she would have fallen had I not supported her, I forced
her to walk back and forth the several steps between the thwart and the
stern-sheets, and finally to spring up and down.

“Oh, you brave, brave woman,” I said, when I saw the life coming back
into her face.  “Did you know that you were brave?”

“I never used to be,” she answered.  “I was never brave till I knew you.
It is you who have made me brave.”

“Nor I, until I knew you,” I answered.

She gave me a quick look, and again I caught that dancing, tremulous
light and something more in her eyes.  But it was only for the moment.
Then she smiled.

“It must have been the conditions,” she said; but I knew she was wrong,
and I wondered if she likewise knew.  Then the wind came, fair and fresh,
and the boat was soon labouring through a heavy sea toward the island.
At half-past three in the afternoon we passed the south-western
promontory.  Not only were we hungry, but we were now suffering from
thirst.  Our lips were dry and cracked, nor could we longer moisten them
with our tongues.  Then the wind slowly died down.  By night it was dead
calm and I was toiling once more at the oars—but weakly, most weakly.  At
two in the morning the boat’s bow touched the beach of our own inner cove
and I staggered out to make the painter fast.  Maud could not stand, nor
had I strength to carry her.  I fell in the sand with her, and, when I
had recovered, contented myself with putting my hands under her shoulders
and dragging her up the beach to the hut.

The next day we did no work.  In fact, we slept till three in the
afternoon, or at least I did, for I awoke to find Maud cooking dinner.
Her power of recuperation was wonderful.  There was something tenacious
about that lily-frail body of hers, a clutch on existence which one could
not reconcile with its patent weakness.

“You know I was travelling to Japan for my health,” she said, as we
lingered at the fire after dinner and delighted in the movelessness of
loafing.  “I was not very strong.  I never was.  The doctors recommended
a sea voyage, and I chose the longest.”

“You little knew what you were choosing,” I laughed.

“But I shall be a different women for the experience, as well as a
stronger woman,” she answered; “and, I hope a better woman.  At least I
shall understand a great deal more of life.”

Then, as the short day waned, we fell to discussing Wolf Larsen’s
blindness.  It was inexplicable.  And that it was grave, I instanced his
statement that he intended to stay and die on Endeavour Island.  When he,
strong man that he was, loving life as he did, accepted his death, it was
plain that he was troubled by something more than mere blindness.  There
had been his terrific headaches, and we were agreed that it was some sort
of brain break-down, and that in his attacks he endured pain beyond our
comprehension.

I noticed as we talked over his condition, that Maud’s sympathy went out
to him more and more; yet I could not but love her for it, so sweetly
womanly was it.  Besides, there was no false sentiment about her feeling.
She was agreed that the most rigorous treatment was necessary if we were
to escape, though she recoiled at the suggestion that I might some time
be compelled to take his life to save my own—“our own,” she put it.

In the morning we had breakfast and were at work by daylight.  I found a
light kedge anchor in the fore-hold, where such things were kept; and
with a deal of exertion got it on deck and into the boat.  With a long
running-line coiled down in the stem, I rowed well out into our little
cove and dropped the anchor into the water.  There was no wind, the tide
was high, and the schooner floated.  Casting off the shore-lines, I
kedged her out by main strength (the windlass being broken), till she
rode nearly up and down to the small anchor—too small to hold her in any
breeze.  So I lowered the big starboard anchor, giving plenty of slack;
and by afternoon I was at work on the windlass.

Three days I worked on that windlass.  Least of all things was I a
mechanic, and in that time I accomplished what an ordinary machinist
would have done in as many hours.  I had to learn my tools to begin with,
and every simple mechanical principle which such a man would have at his
finger ends I had likewise to learn.  And at the end of three days I had
a windlass which worked clumsily.  It never gave the satisfaction the old
windlass had given, but it worked and made my work possible.

In half a day I got the two topmasts aboard and the shears rigged and
guyed as before.  And that night I slept on board and on deck beside my
work.  Maud, who refused to stay alone ashore, slept in the forecastle.
Wolf Larsen had sat about, listening to my repairing the windlass and
talking with Maud and me upon indifferent subjects.  No reference was
made on either side to the destruction of the shears; nor did he say
anything further about my leaving his ship alone.  But still I had feared
him, blind and helpless and listening, always listening, and I never let
his strong arms get within reach of me while I worked.

On this night, sleeping under my beloved shears, I was aroused by his
footsteps on the deck.  It was a starlight night, and I could see the
bulk of him dimly as he moved about.  I rolled out of my blankets and
crept noiselessly after him in my stocking feet.  He had armed himself
with a draw-knife from the tool-locker, and with this he prepared to cut
across the throat-halyards I had again rigged to the shears.  He felt the
halyards with his hands and discovered that I had not made them fast.
This would not do for a draw-knife, so he laid hold of the running part,
hove taut, and made fast.  Then he prepared to saw across with the
draw-knife.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” I said quietly.

He heard the click of my pistol and laughed.

“Hello, Hump,” he said.  “I knew you were here all the time.  You can’t
fool my ears.”

“That’s a lie, Wolf Larsen,” I said, just as quietly as before.
“However, I am aching for a chance to kill you, so go ahead and cut.”

“You have the chance always,” he sneered.

“Go ahead and cut,” I threatened ominously.

“I’d rather disappoint you,” he laughed, and turned on his heel and went
aft.

“Something must be done, Humphrey,” Maud said, next morning, when I had
told her of the night’s occurrence.  “If he has liberty, he may do
anything.  He may sink the vessel, or set fire to it.  There is no
telling what he may do.  We must make him a prisoner.”

“But how?” I asked, with a helpless shrug.  “I dare not come within reach
of his arms, and he knows that so long as his resistance is passive I
cannot shoot him.”

“There must be some way,” she contended.  “Let me think.”

“There is one way,” I said grimly.

She waited.

I picked up a seal-club.

“It won’t kill him,” I said.  “And before he could recover I’d have him
bound hard and fast.”

She shook her head with a shudder.  “No, not that.  There must be some
less brutal way.  Let us wait.”

But we did not have to wait long, and the problem solved itself.  In the
morning, after several trials, I found the point of balance in the
foremast and attached my hoisting tackle a few feet above it.  Maud held
the turn on the windlass and coiled down while I heaved.  Had the
windlass been in order it would not have been so difficult; as it was, I
was compelled to apply all my weight and strength to every inch of the
heaving.  I had to rest frequently.  In truth, my spells of resting were
longer than those of working.  Maud even contrived, at times when all my
efforts could not budge the windlass, to hold the turn with one hand and
with the other to throw the weight of her slim body to my assistance.

At the end of an hour the single and double blocks came together at the
top of the shears.  I could hoist no more.  And yet the mast was not
swung entirely inboard.  The butt rested against the outside of the port
rail, while the top of the mast overhung the water far beyond the
starboard rail.  My shears were too short.  All my work had been for
nothing.  But I no longer despaired in the old way.  I was acquiring more
confidence in myself and more confidence in the possibilities of
windlasses, shears, and hoisting tackles.  There was a way in which it
could be done, and it remained for me to find that way.

While I was considering the problem, Wolf Larsen came on deck.  We
noticed something strange about him at once.  The indecisiveness, or
feebleness, of his movements was more pronounced.  His walk was actually
tottery as he came down the port side of the cabin.  At the break of the
poop he reeled, raised one hand to his eyes with the familiar brushing
gesture, and fell down the steps—still on his feet—to the main deck,
across which he staggered, falling and flinging out his arms for support.
He regained his balance by the steerage companion-way and stood there
dizzily for a space, when he suddenly crumpled up and collapsed, his legs
bending under him as he sank to the deck.

“One of his attacks,” I whispered to Maud.

She nodded her head; and I could see sympathy warm in her eyes.

We went up to him, but he seemed unconscious, breathing spasmodically.
She took charge of him, lifting his head to keep the blood out of it and
despatching me to the cabin for a pillow.  I also brought blankets, and
we made him comfortable.  I took his pulse.  It beat steadily and strong,
and was quite normal.  This puzzled me.  I became suspicious.

“What if he should be feigning this?” I asked, still holding his wrist.

Maud shook her head, and there was reproof in her eyes.  But just then
the wrist I held leaped from my hand, and the hand clasped like a steel
trap about my wrist.  I cried aloud in awful fear, a wild inarticulate
cry; and I caught one glimpse of his face, malignant and triumphant, as
his other hand compassed my body and I was drawn down to him in a
terrible grip.

My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back, held
both my arms so that I could not move.  His free hand went to my throat,
and in that moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of death earned by
one’s own idiocy.  Why had I trusted myself within reach of those
terrible arms?  I could feel other hands at my throat.  They were Maud’s
hands, striving vainly to tear loose the hand that was throttling me.
She gave it up, and I heard her scream in a way that cut me to the soul,
for it was a woman’s scream of fear and heart-breaking despair.  I had
heard it before, during the sinking of the _Martinez_.

My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud turn
and run swiftly away along the deck.  Everything was happening quickly.
I had not yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and it seemed that an
interminable period of time was lapsing before I heard her feet flying
back.  And just then I felt the whole man sink under me.  The breath was
leaving his lungs and his chest was collapsing under my weight.  Whether
it was merely the expelled breath, or his consciousness of his growing
impotence, I know not, but his throat vibrated with a deep groan.  The
hand at my throat relaxed.  I breathed.  It fluttered and tightened
again.  But even his tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution
that assailed it.  That will of his was breaking down.  He was fainting.

Maud’s footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the last time
and my throat was released.  I rolled off and over to the deck on my
back, gasping and blinking in the sunshine.  Maud was pale but
composed,—my eyes had gone instantly to her face,—and she was looking at
me with mingled alarm and relief.  A heavy seal-club in her hand caught
my eyes, and at that moment she followed my gaze down to it.  The club
dropped from her hand as though it had suddenly stung her, and at the
same moment my heart surged with a great joy.  Truly she was my woman, my
mate-woman, fighting with me and for me as the mate of a caveman would
have fought, all the primitive in her aroused, forgetful of her culture,
hard under the softening civilization of the only life she had ever
known.

“Dear woman!” I cried, scrambling to my feet.

The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my shoulder
while I clasped her close.  I looked down at the brown glory of her hair,
glinting gems in the sunshine far more precious to me than those in the
treasure-chests of kings.  And I bent my head and kissed her hair softly,
so softly that she did not know.

Then sober thought came to me.  After all, she was only a woman, crying
her relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her protector or
of the one who had been endangered.  Had I been father or brother, the
situation would have been in nowise different.  Besides, time and place
were not meet, and I wished to earn a better right to declare my love.
So once again I softly kissed her hair as I felt her receding from my
clasp.

“It was a real attack this time,” I said: “another shock like the one
that made him blind.  He feigned at first, and in doing so brought it
on.”

Maud was already rearranging his pillow.

“No,” I said, “not yet.  Now that I have him helpless, helpless he shall
remain.  From this day we live in the cabin.  Wolf Larsen shall live in
the steerage.”

I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-way.
At my direction Maud fetched a rope.  Placing this under his shoulders, I
balanced him across the threshold and lowered him down the steps to the
floor.  I could not lift him directly into a bunk, but with Maud’s help I
lifted first his shoulders and head, then his body, balanced him across
the edge, and rolled him into a lower bunk.

But this was not to be all.  I recollected the handcuffs in his
state-room, which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the ancient
and clumsy ship irons.  So, when we left him, he lay handcuffed hand and
foot.  For the first time in many days I breathed freely.  I felt
strangely light as I came on deck, as though a weight had been lifted off
my shoulders.  I felt, also, that Maud and I had drawn more closely
together.  And I wondered if she, too, felt it, as we walked along the
deck side by side to where the stalled foremast hung in the shears.




CHAPTER XXXVII


At once we moved aboard the _Ghost_, occupying our old state-rooms and
cooking in the galley.  The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had happened most
opportunely, for what must have been the Indian summer of this high
latitude was gone and drizzling stormy weather had set in.  We were very
comfortable, and the inadequate shears, with the foremast suspended from
them, gave a business-like air to the schooner and a promise of
departure.

And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need it!
Like his first attack, his second had been accompanied by serious
disablement.  Maud made the discovery in the afternoon while trying to
give him nourishment.  He had shown signs of consciousness, and she had
spoken to him, eliciting no response.  He was lying on his left side at
the time, and in evident pain.  With a restless movement he rolled his
head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow against which it had
been pressed.  At once he heard and answered her, and at once she came to
me.

Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard me, but
he gave no sign.  Removing the pillow and, repeating the question he
answered promptly that he did.

“Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered in a low, strong voice, “and worse than that.  My
whole right side is affected.  It seems asleep.  I cannot move arm or
leg.”

“Feigning again?” I demanded angrily.

He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted smile.
It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side only, the
facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.

“That was the last play of the Wolf,” he said.  “I am paralysed.  I shall
never walk again.  Oh, only on the other side,” he added, as though
divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the knee of which
had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.

“It’s unfortunate,” he continued.  “I’d liked to have done for you first,
Hump.  And I thought I had that much left in me.”

“But why?” I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.

Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:

“Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of
the ferment to the end, to eat you.  But to die this way.”

He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the
left shoulder alone moved.  Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.

“But how can you account for it?” I asked.  “Where is the seat of your
trouble?”

“The brain,” he said at once.  “It was those cursed headaches brought it
on.”

“Symptoms,” I said.

He nodded his head.  “There is no accounting for it.  I was never sick in
my life.  Something’s gone wrong with my brain.  A cancer, a tumour, or
something of that nature,—a thing that devours and destroys.  It’s
attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell—from
the pain.”

“The motor-centres, too,” I suggested.

“So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here,
conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down,
breaking bit by bit communication with the world.  I cannot see, hearing
and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet
all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless.”

“When you say _you_ are here, I’d suggest the likelihood of the soul,” I
said.

“Bosh!” was his retort.  “It simply means that in the attack on my brain
the higher psychical centres are untouched.  I can remember, I can think
and reason.  When that goes, I go.  I am not.  The soul?”

He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the pillow
as a sign that he wished no further conversation.

Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which had
overtaken him,—how fearful we were yet fully to realize.  There was the
awfulness of retribution about it.  Our thoughts were deep and solemn,
and we spoke to each other scarcely above whispers.

“You might remove the handcuffs,” he said that night, as we stood in
consultation over him.  “It’s dead safe.  I’m a paralytic now.  The next
thing to watch out for is bed sores.”

He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror, was
compelled to turn away her head.

“Do you know that your smile is crooked?” I asked him; for I knew that
she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much as possible.

“Then I shall smile no more,” he said calmly.  “I thought something was
wrong.  My right cheek has been numb all day.  Yes, and I’ve had warnings
of this for the last three days; by spells, my right side seemed going to
sleep, sometimes arm or hand, sometimes leg or foot.”

“So my smile is crooked?” he queried a short while after.  “Well,
consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul, if you please,
my soul.  Consider that I am smiling now.”

And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging his
grotesque fancy.

The man of him was not changed.  It was the old, indomitable, terrible
Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had once been
so invincible and splendid.  Now it bound him with insentient fetters,
walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world
which to him had been a riot of action.  No more would he conjugate the
verb “to do in every mood and tense.”  “To be” was all that remained to
him—to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to
execute; to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as
ever, but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.

And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust
ourselves to his condition.  Our minds revolted.  To us he was full of
potentiality.  We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful
thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do.  Our experience
warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety
always upon us.

I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of the
shears.  By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one), I heaved
the butt of the foremast across the rail and then lowered it to the deck.
Next, by means of the shears, I hoisted the main boom on board.  Its
forty feet of length would supply the height necessary properly to swing
the mast.  By means of a secondary tackle I had attached to the shears, I
swung the boom to a nearly perpendicular position, then lowered the butt
to the deck, where, to prevent slipping, I spiked great cleats around it.
The single block of my original shears-tackle I had attached to the end
of the boom.  Thus, by carrying this tackle to the windlass, I could
raise and lower the end of the boom at will, the butt always remaining
stationary, and, by means of guys, I could swing the boom from side to
side.  To the end of the boom I had likewise rigged a hoisting tackle;
and when the whole arrangement was completed I could not but be startled
by the power and latitude it gave me.

Of course, two days’ work was required for the accomplishment of this
part of my task, and it was not till the morning of the third day that I
swung the foremast from the deck and proceeded to square its butt to fit
the step.  Here I was especially awkward.  I sawed and chopped and
chiselled the weathered wood till it had the appearance of having been
gnawed by some gigantic mouse.  But it fitted.

“It will work, I know it will work,” I cried.

“Do you know Dr. Jordan’s final test of truth?” Maud asked.

I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings which
had drifted down my neck.

“Can we make it work?  Can we trust our lives to it? is the test.”

“He is a favourite of yours,” I said.

“When I dismantled my old Pantheon and cast out Napoleon and Cæsar and
their fellows, I straightway erected a new Pantheon,” she answered
gravely, “and the first I installed was Dr. Jordan.”

“A modern hero.”

“And a greater because modern,” she added.  “How can the Old World heroes
compare with ours?”

I shook my head.  We were too much alike in many things for argument.
Our points of view and outlook on life at least were very alike.

“For a pair of critics we agree famously,” I laughed.

“And as shipwright and able assistant,” she laughed back.

But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our heavy
work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen’s living death.

He had received another stroke.  He had lost his voice, or he was losing
it.  He had only intermittent use of it.  As he phrased it, the wires
were like the stock market, now up, now down.  Occasionally the wires
were up and he spoke as well as ever, though slowly and heavily.  Then
speech would suddenly desert him, in the middle of a sentence perhaps,
and for hours, sometimes, we would wait for the connection to be
re-established.  He complained of great pain in his head, and it was
during this period that he arranged a system of communication against the
time when speech should leave him altogether—one pressure of the hand for
“yes,” two for “no.”  It was well that it was arranged, for by evening
his voice had gone from him.  By hand pressures, after that, he answered
our questions, and when he wished to speak he scrawled his thoughts with
his left hand, quite legibly, on a sheet of paper.

The fierce winter had now descended upon us.  Gale followed gale, with
snow and sleet and rain.  The seals had started on their great southern
migration, and the rookery was practically deserted.  I worked
feverishly.  In spite of the bad weather, and of the wind which
especially hindered me, I was on deck from daylight till dark and making
substantial progress.

I profited by my lesson learned through raising the shears and then
climbing them to attach the guys.  To the top of the foremast, which was
just lifted conveniently from the deck, I attached the rigging, stays and
throat and peak halyards.  As usual, I had underrated the amount of work
involved in this portion of the task, and two long days were necessary to
complete it.  And there was so much yet to be done—the sails, for
instance, which practically had to be made over.

While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on canvas, ready
always to drop everything and come to my assistance when more hands than
two were required.  The canvas was heavy and hard, and she sewed with the
regular sailor’s palm and three-cornered sail-needle.  Her hands were
soon sadly blistered, but she struggled bravely on, and in addition doing
the cooking and taking care of the sick man.

“A fig for superstition,” I said on Friday morning.  “That mast goes in
to-day.”

Everything was ready for the attempt.  Carrying the boom-tackle to the
windlass, I hoisted the mast nearly clear of the deck.  Making this
tackle fast, I took to the windlass the shears-tackle (which was
connected with the end of the boom), and with a few turns had the mast
perpendicular and clear.

Maud clapped her hands the instant she was relieved from holding the
turn, crying:

“It works!  It works!  We’ll trust our lives to it!”

Then she assumed a rueful expression.

“It’s not over the hole,” she add.  “Will you have to begin all over?”

I smiled in superior fashion, and, slacking off on one of the boom-guys
and taking in on the other, swung the mast perfectly in the centre of the
deck.  Still it was not over the hole.  Again the rueful expression came
on her face, and again I smiled in a superior way.  Slacking away on the
boom-tackle and hoisting an equivalent amount on the shears-tackle, I
brought the butt of the mast into position directly over the hole in the
deck.  Then I gave Maud careful instructions for lowering away and went
into the hold to the step on the schooner’s bottom.

I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately.  Straight
toward the square hole of the step the square butt descended; but as it
descended it slowly twisted so that square would not fit into square.
But I had not even a moment’s indecision.  Calling to Maud to cease
lowering, I went on deck and made the watch-tackle fast to the mast with
a rolling hitch.  I left Maud to pull on it while I went below.  By the
light of the lantern I saw the butt twist slowly around till its sides
coincided with the sides of the step.  Maud made fast and returned to the
windlass.  Slowly the butt descended the several intervening inches, at
the same time slightly twisting again.  Again Maud rectified the twist
with the watch-tackle, and again she lowered away from the windlass.
Square fitted into square.  The mast was stepped.

I raised a shout, and she ran down to see.  In the yellow lantern light
we peered at what we had accomplished.  We looked at each other, and our
hands felt their way and clasped.  The eyes of both of us, I think, were
moist with the joy of success.

“It was done so easily after all,” I remarked.  “All the work was in the
preparation.”

“And all the wonder in the completion,” Maud added.  “I can scarcely
bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up and in; that
you have lifted it from the water, swung it through the air, and
deposited it here where it belongs.  It is a Titan’s task.”

“And they made themselves many inventions,” I began merrily, then paused
to sniff the air.

I looked hastily at the lantern.  It was not smoking.  Again I sniffed.

“Something is burning,” Maud said, with sudden conviction.

We sprang together for the ladder, but I raced past her to the deck.  A
dense volume of smoke was pouring out of the steerage companion-way.

“The Wolf is not yet dead,” I muttered to myself as I sprang down through
the smoke.

It was so thick in the confined space that I was compelled to feel my
way; and so potent was the spell of Wolf Larsen on my imagination, I was
quite prepared for the helpless giant to grip my neck in a strangle hold.
I hesitated, the desire to race back and up the steps to the deck almost
overpowering me.  Then I recollected Maud.  The vision of her, as I had
last seen her, in the lantern light of the schooner’s hold, her brown
eyes warm and moist with joy, flashed before me, and I knew that I could
not go back.

I was choking and suffocating by the time I reached Wolf Larsen’s bunk.
I reached my hand and felt for his.  He was lying motionless, but moved
slightly at the touch of my hand.  I felt over and under his blankets.
There was no warmth, no sign of fire.  Yet that smoke which blinded me
and made me cough and gasp must have a source.  I lost my head
temporarily and dashed frantically about the steerage.  A collision with
the table partially knocked the wind from my body and brought me to
myself.  I reasoned that a helpless man could start a fire only near to
where he lay.

I returned to Wolf Larsen’s bunk.  There I encountered Maud.  How long
she had been there in that suffocating atmosphere I could not guess.

“Go up on deck!” I commanded peremptorily.

“But, Humphrey—” she began to protest in a queer, husky voice.

“Please! please!” I shouted at her harshly.

She drew away obediently, and then I thought, What if she cannot find the
steps?  I started after her, to stop at the foot of the companion-way.
Perhaps she had gone up.  As I stood there, hesitant, I heard her cry
softly:

“Oh, Humphrey, I am lost.”

I found her fumbling at the wall of the after bulkhead, and, half leading
her, half carrying her, I took her up the companion-way.  The pure air
was like nectar.  Maud was only faint and dizzy, and I left her lying on
the deck when I took my second plunge below.

The source of the smoke must be very close to Wolf Larsen—my mind was
made up to this, and I went straight to his bunk.  As I felt about among
his blankets, something hot fell on the back of my hand.  It burned me,
and I jerked my hand away.  Then I understood.  Through the cracks in the
bottom of the upper bunk he had set fire to the mattress.  He still
retained sufficient use of his left arm to do this.  The damp straw of
the mattress, fired from beneath and denied air, had been smouldering all
the while.

As I dragged the mattress out of the bunk it seemed to disintegrate in
mid-air, at the same time bursting into flames.  I beat out the burning
remnants of straw in the bunk, then made a dash for the deck for fresh
air.

Several buckets of water sufficed to put out the burning mattress in the
middle of the steerage floor; and ten minutes later, when the smoke had
fairly cleared, I allowed Maud to come below.  Wolf Larsen was
unconscious, but it was a matter of minutes for the fresh air to restore
him.  We were working over him, however, when he signed for paper and
pencil.

“Pray do not interrupt me,” he wrote.  “I am smiling.”

“I am still a bit of the ferment, you see,” he wrote a little later.

“I am glad you are as small a bit as you are,” I said.

“Thank you,” he wrote.  “But just think of how much smaller I shall be
before I die.”

“And yet I am all here, Hump,” he wrote with a final flourish.  “I can
think more clearly than ever in my life before.  Nothing to disturb me.
Concentration is perfect.  I am all here and more than here.”

It was like a message from the night of the grave; for this man’s body
had become his mausoleum.  And there, in so strange sepulchre, his spirit
fluttered and lived.  It would flutter and live till the last line of
communication was broken, and after that who was to say how much longer
it might continue to flutter and live?




CHAPTER XXXVIII


“I think my left side is going,” Wolf Larsen wrote, the morning after his
attempt to fire the ship.  “The numbness is growing.  I can hardly move
my hand.  You will have to speak louder.  The last lines are going down.”

“Are you in pain?” I asked.

I was compelled to repeat my question loudly before he answered:

“Not all the time.”

The left hand stumbled slowly and painfully across the paper, and it was
with extreme difficulty that we deciphered the scrawl.  It was like a
“spirit message,” such as are delivered at séances of spiritualists for a
dollar admission.

“But I am still here, all here,” the hand scrawled more slowly and
painfully than ever.

The pencil dropped, and we had to replace it in the hand.

“When there is no pain I have perfect peace and quiet.  I have never
thought so clearly.  I can ponder life and death like a Hindoo sage.”

“And immortality?” Maud queried loudly in the ear.

Three times the hand essayed to write but fumbled hopelessly.  The pencil
fell.  In vain we tried to replace it.  The fingers could not close on
it.  Then Maud pressed and held the fingers about the pencil with her own
hand and the hand wrote, in large letters, and so slowly that the minutes
ticked off to each letter:

“B-O-S-H.”

It was Wolf Larsen’s last word, “bosh,” sceptical and invincible to the
end.  The arm and hand relaxed.  The trunk of the body moved slightly.
Then there was no movement.  Maud released the hand.  The fingers spread
slightly, falling apart of their own weight, and the pencil rolled away.

“Do you still hear?” I shouted, holding the fingers and waiting for the
single pressure which would signify “Yes.”  There was no response.  The
hand was dead.

“I noticed the lips slightly move,” Maud said.

I repeated the question.  The lips moved.  She placed the tips of her
fingers on them.  Again I repeated the question.  “Yes,” Maud announced.
We looked at each other expectantly.

“What good is it?” I asked.  “What can we say now?”

“Oh, ask him—”

She hesitated.

“Ask him something that requires no for an answer,” I suggested.  “Then
we will know for certainty.”

“Are you hungry?” she cried.

The lips moved under her fingers, and she answered, “Yes.”

“Will you have some beef?” was her next query.

“No,” she announced.

“Beef-tea?”

“Yes, he will have some beef-tea,” she said, quietly, looking up at me.
“Until his hearing goes we shall be able to communicate with him.  And
after that—”

She looked at me queerly.  I saw her lips trembling and the tears
swimming up in her eyes.  She swayed toward me and I caught her in my
arms.

“Oh, Humphrey,” she sobbed, “when will it all end?  I am so tired, so
tired.”

She buried her head on my shoulder, her frail form shaken with a storm of
weeping.  She was like a feather in my arms, so slender, so ethereal.
“She has broken down at last,” I thought.  “What can I do without her
help?”

But I soothed and comforted her, till she pulled herself bravely together
and recuperated mentally as quickly as she was wont to do physically.

“I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she said.  Then added, with the
whimsical smile I adored, “but I am only one, small woman.”

That phrase, the “one small woman,” startled me like an electric shock.
It was my own phrase, my pet, secret phrase, my love phrase for her.

“Where did you get that phrase?” I demanded, with an abruptness that in
turn startled her.

“What phrase?” she asked.

“One small woman.”

“Is it yours?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered.  “Mine.  I made it.”

“Then you must have talked in your sleep,” she smiled.

The dancing, tremulous light was in her eyes.  Mine, I knew, were
speaking beyond the will of my speech.  I leaned toward her.  Without
volition I leaned toward her, as a tree is swayed by the wind.  Ah, we
were very close together in that moment.  But she shook her head, as one
might shake off sleep or a dream, saying:

“I have known it all my life.  It was my father’s name for my mother.”

“It is my phrase too,” I said stubbornly.

“For your mother?”

“No,” I answered, and she questioned no further, though I could have
sworn her eyes retained for some time a mocking, teasing expression.

With the foremast in, the work now went on apace.  Almost before I knew
it, and without one serious hitch, I had the mainmast stepped.  A
derrick-boom, rigged to the foremast, had accomplished this; and several
days more found all stays and shrouds in place, and everything set up
taut.  Topsails would be a nuisance and a danger for a crew of two, so I
heaved the topmasts on deck and lashed them fast.

Several more days were consumed in finishing the sails and putting them
on.  There were only three—the jib, foresail, and mainsail; and, patched,
shortened, and distorted, they were a ridiculously ill-fitting suit for
so trim a craft as the _Ghost_.

“But they’ll work!” Maud cried jubilantly.  “We’ll make them work, and
trust our lives to them!”

Certainly, among my many new trades, I shone least as a sail-maker.  I
could sail them better than make them, and I had no doubt of my power to
bring the schooner to some northern port of Japan.  In fact, I had
crammed navigation from text-books aboard; and besides, there was Wolf
Larsen’s star-scale, so simple a device that a child could work it.

As for its inventor, beyond an increasing deafness and the movement of
the lips growing fainter and fainter, there had been little change in his
condition for a week.  But on the day we finished bending the schooner’s
sails, he heard his last, and the last movement of his lips died away—but
not before I had asked him, “Are you all there?” and the lips had
answered, “Yes.”

The last line was down.  Somewhere within that tomb of the flesh still
dwelt the soul of the man.  Walled by the living clay, that fierce
intelligence we had known burned on; but it burned on in silence and
darkness.  And it was disembodied.  To that intelligence there could be
no objective knowledge of a body.  It knew no body.  The very world was
not.  It knew only itself and the vastness and profundity of the quiet
and the dark.




CHAPTER XXXIX


The day came for our departure.  There was no longer anything to detain
us on Endeavour Island.  The _Ghost’s_ stumpy masts were in place, her
crazy sails bent.  All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but
I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I looked
at it.

“I did it!  I did it!  With my own hands I did it!” I wanted to cry
aloud.

But Maud and I had a way of voicing each other’s thoughts, and she said,
as we prepared to hoist the mainsail:

“To think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands?”

“But there were two other hands,” I answered.  “Two small hands, and
don’t say that was a phrase, also, of your father.”

She laughed and shook her head, and held her hands up for inspection.

“I can never get them clean again,” she wailed, “nor soften the
weather-beat.”

“Then dirt and weather-beat shall be your guerdon of honour,” I said,
holding them in mine; and, spite of my resolutions, I would have kissed
the two dear hands had she not swiftly withdrawn them.

Our comradeship was becoming tremulous, I had mastered my love long and
well, but now it was mastering me.  Wilfully had it disobeyed and won my
eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue—ay, and my lips, for
they were mad this moment to kiss the two small hands which had toiled so
faithfully and hard.  And I, too, was mad.  There was a cry in my being
like bugles calling me to her.  And there was a wind blowing upon me
which I could not resist, swaying the very body of me till I leaned
toward her, all unconscious that I leaned.  And she knew it.  She could
not but know it as she swiftly drew away her hands, and yet, could not
forbear one quick searching look before she turned away her eyes.

By means of deck-tackles I had arranged to carry the halyards forward to
the windlass; and now I hoisted the mainsail, peak and throat, at the
same time.  It was a clumsy way, but it did not take long, and soon the
foresail as well was up and fluttering.

“We can never get that anchor up in this narrow place, once it has left
the bottom,” I said.  “We should be on the rocks first.”

“What can you do?” she asked.

“Slip it,” was my answer.  “And when I do, you must do your first work on
the windlass.  I shall have to run at once to the wheel, and at the same
time you must be hoisting the jib.”

This manœuvre of getting under way I had studied and worked out a score
of times; and, with the jib-halyard to the windlass, I knew Maud was
capable of hoisting that most necessary sail.  A brisk wind was blowing
into the cove, and though the water was calm, rapid work was required to
get us safely out.

When I knocked the shackle-bolt loose, the chain roared out through the
hawse-hole and into the sea.  I raced aft, putting the wheel up.  The
_Ghost_ seemed to start into life as she heeled to the first fill of her
sails.  The jib was rising.  As it filled, the _Ghost’s_ bow swung off
and I had to put the wheel down a few spokes and steady her.

I had devised an automatic jib-sheet which passed the jib across of
itself, so there was no need for Maud to attend to that; but she was
still hoisting the jib when I put the wheel hard down.  It was a moment
of anxiety, for the _Ghost_ was rushing directly upon the beach, a
stone’s throw distant.  But she swung obediently on her heel into the
wind.  There was a great fluttering and flapping of canvas and
reef-points, most welcome to my ears, then she filled away on the other
tack.

Maud had finished her task and come aft, where she stood beside me, a
small cap perched on her wind-blown hair, her cheeks flushed from
exertion, her eyes wide and bright with the excitement, her nostrils
quivering to the rush and bite of the fresh salt air.  Her brown eyes
were like a startled deer’s.  There was a wild, keen look in them I had
never seen before, and her lips parted and her breath suspended as the
_Ghost_, charging upon the wall of rock at the entrance to the inner
cove, swept into the wind and filled away into safe water.

My first mate’s berth on the sealing grounds stood me in good stead, and
I cleared the inner cove and laid a long tack along the shore of the
outer cove.  Once again about, and the _Ghost_ headed out to open sea.
She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the ocean, and was herself
a-breath with the rhythm of it as she smoothly mounted and slipped down
each broad-backed wave.  The day had been dull and overcast, but the sun
now burst through the clouds, a welcome omen, and shone upon the curving
beach where together we had dared the lords of the harem and slain the
holluschickie.  All Endeavour Island brightened under the sun.  Even the
grim south-western promontory showed less grim, and here and there, where
the sea-spray wet its surface, high lights flashed and dazzled in the
sun.

“I shall always think of it with pride,” I said to Maud.

She threw her head back in a queenly way but said, “Dear, dear Endeavour
Island!  I shall always love it.”

“And I,” I said quickly.

It seemed our eyes must meet in a great understanding, and yet, loath,
they struggled away and did not meet.

There was a silence I might almost call awkward, till I broke it, saying:

“See those black clouds to windward.  You remember, I told you last night
the barometer was falling.”

“And the sun is gone,” she said, her eyes still fixed upon our island,
where we had proved our mastery over matter and attained to the truest
comradeship that may fall to man and woman.

“And it’s slack off the sheets for Japan!” I cried gaily.  “A fair wind
and a flowing sheet, you know, or however it goes.”

Lashing the wheel I ran forward, eased the fore and mainsheets, took in
on the boom-tackles and trimmed everything for the quartering breeze
which was ours.  It was a fresh breeze, very fresh, but I resolved to run
as long as I dared.  Unfortunately, when running free, it is impossible
to lash the wheel, so I faced an all-night watch.  Maud insisted on
relieving me, but proved that she had not the strength to steer in a
heavy sea, even if she could have gained the wisdom on such short notice.
She appeared quite heart-broken over the discovery, but recovered her
spirits by coiling down tackles and halyards and all stray ropes.  Then
there were meals to be cooked in the galley, beds to make, Wolf Larsen to
be attended upon, and she finished the day with a grand house-cleaning
attack upon the cabin and steerage.

All night I steered, without relief, the wind slowly and steadily
increasing and the sea rising.  At five in the morning Maud brought me
hot coffee and biscuits she had baked, and at seven a substantial and
piping hot breakfast put new life into me.

Throughout the day, and as slowly and steadily as ever, the wind
increased.  It impressed one with its sullen determination to blow, and
blow harder, and keep on blowing.  And still the _Ghost_ foamed along,
racing off the miles till I was certain she was making at least eleven
knots.  It was too good to lose, but by nightfall I was exhausted.
Though in splendid physical trim, a thirty-six-hour trick at the wheel
was the limit of my endurance.  Besides, Maud begged me to heave to, and
I knew, if the wind and sea increased at the same rate during the night,
that it would soon be impossible to heave to.  So, as twilight deepened,
gladly and at the same time reluctantly, I brought the _Ghost_ up on the
wind.

But I had not reckoned upon the colossal task the reefing of three sails
meant for one man.  While running away from the wind I had not
appreciated its force, but when we ceased to run I learned to my sorrow,
and well-nigh to my despair, how fiercely it was really blowing.  The
wind balked my every effort, ripping the canvas out of my hands and in an
instant undoing what I had gained by ten minutes of severest struggle.
At eight o’clock I had succeeded only in putting the second reef into the
foresail.  At eleven o’clock I was no farther along.  Blood dripped from
every finger-end, while the nails were broken to the quick.  From pain
and sheer exhaustion I wept in the darkness, secretly, so that Maud
should not know.

Then, in desperation, I abandoned the attempt to reef the mainsail and
resolved to try the experiment of heaving to under the close-reefed
foresail.  Three hours more were required to gasket the mainsail and jib,
and at two in the morning, nearly dead, the life almost buffeted and
worked out of me, I had barely sufficient consciousness to know the
experiment was a success.  The close-reefed foresail worked.  The _Ghost_
clung on close to the wind and betrayed no inclination to fall off
broadside to the trough.

I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat.  I dozed with my
mouth full of food.  I would fall asleep in the act of carrying food to
my mouth and waken in torment to find the act yet uncompleted.  So
sleepily helpless was I that she was compelled to hold me in my chair to
prevent my being flung to the floor by the violent pitching of the
schooner.

Of the passage from the galley to the cabin I knew nothing.  It was a
sleep-walker Maud guided and supported.  In fact, I was aware of nothing
till I awoke, how long after I could not imagine, in my bunk with my
boots off.  It was dark.  I was stiff and lame, and cried out with pain
when the bed-clothes touched my poor finger-ends.

Morning had evidently not come, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep
again.  I did not know it, but I had slept the clock around and it was
night again.

Once more I woke, troubled because I could sleep no better.  I struck a
match and looked at my watch.  It marked midnight.  And I had not left
the deck until three!  I should have been puzzled had I not guessed the
solution.  No wonder I was sleeping brokenly.  I had slept twenty-one
hours.  I listened for a while to the behaviour of the _Ghost_, to the
pounding of the seas and the muffled roar of the wind on deck, and then
turned over on my side and slept peacefully until morning.

When I arose at seven I saw no sign of Maud and concluded she was in the
galley preparing breakfast.  On deck I found the _Ghost_ doing splendidly
under her patch of canvas.  But in the galley, though a fire was burning
and water boiling, I found no Maud.

I discovered her in the steerage, by Wolf Larsen’s bunk.  I looked at
him, the man who had been hurled down from the topmost pitch of life to
be buried alive and be worse than dead.  There seemed a relaxation of his
expressionless face which was new.  Maud looked at me and I understood.

“His life flickered out in the storm,” I said.

“But he still lives,” she answered, infinite faith in her voice.

“He had too great strength.”

“Yes,” she said, “but now it no longer shackles him.  He is a free
spirit.”

“He is a free spirit surely,” I answered; and, taking her hand, I led her
on deck.

The storm broke that night, which is to say that it diminished as slowly
as it had arisen.  After breakfast next morning, when I had hoisted Wolf
Larsen’s body on deck ready for burial, it was still blowing heavily and
a large sea was running.  The deck was continually awash with the sea
which came inboard over the rail and through the scuppers.  The wind
smote the schooner with a sudden gust, and she heeled over till her lee
rail was buried, the roar in her rigging rising in pitch to a shriek.  We
stood in the water to our knees as I bared my head.

“I remember only one part of the service,” I said, “and that is, ‘And the
body shall be cast into the sea.’”

Maud looked at me, surprised and shocked; but the spirit of something I
had seen before was strong upon me, impelling me to give service to Wolf
Larsen as Wolf Larsen had once given service to another man.  I lifted
the end of the hatch cover and the canvas-shrouded body slipped feet
first into the sea.  The weight of iron dragged it down.  It was gone.

“Good-bye, Lucifer, proud spirit,” Maud whispered, so low that it was
drowned by the shouting of the wind; but I saw the movement of her lips
and knew.

As we clung to the lee rail and worked our way aft, I happened to glance
to leeward.  The _Ghost_, at the moment, was uptossed on a sea, and I
caught a clear view of a small steamship two or three miles away, rolling
and pitching, head on to the sea, as it steamed toward us.  It was
painted black, and from the talk of the hunters of their poaching
exploits I recognized it as a United States revenue cutter.  I pointed it
out to Maud and hurriedly led her aft to the safety of the poop.

I started to rush below to the flag-locker, then remembered that in
rigging the _Ghost_ I had forgotten to make provision for a
flag-halyard.

“We need no distress signal,” Maud said.  “They have only to see us.”

“We are saved,” I said, soberly and solemnly.  And then, in an exuberance
of joy, “I hardly know whether to be glad or not.”

I looked at her.  Our eyes were not loath to meet.  We leaned toward each
other, and before I knew it my arms were about her.

“Need I?” I asked.

And she answered, “There is no need, though the telling of it would be
sweet, so sweet.”

Her lips met the press of mine, and, by what strange trick of the
imagination I know not, the scene in the cabin of the _Ghost_ flashed
upon me, when she had pressed her fingers lightly on my lips and said,
“Hush, hush.”

“My woman, my one small woman,” I said, my free hand petting her shoulder
in the way all lovers know though never learn in school.

“My man,” she said, looking at me for an instant with tremulous lids
which fluttered down and veiled her eyes as she snuggled her head against
my breast with a happy little sigh.

I looked toward the cutter.  It was very close.  A boat was being
lowered.

“One kiss, dear love,” I whispered.  “One kiss more before they come.”

“And rescue us from ourselves,” she completed, with a most adorable
smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical with love.

                                * * * * *

                                 THE END

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

        PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
         BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK




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