The Sea-Wolf
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