The Sea-Wolf
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.