The Sea-Wolf
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