The Sea-Wolf
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