CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.
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 or 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 messages and concoctions of the vilest order.
Conditions favored 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 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 hurling 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 aerial battle was over, and Thomas Mugridge, whining and
gibbering, was brought down to the 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 after each lift
the stern fell, and while the bow lazily climbed the next wave the
line slackened 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 a 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. The right foot was missing, amputated neatly at
the ankle!
I looked instantly at 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 that 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,' 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
must 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,
beyond several 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 TWENTY-TWO.
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 grim
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 ax, and kill this man?'
She 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, or 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 before 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 "Plowman."
'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 Ring." 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 TWENTY-THREE.
BRAVE WINDS, BLOWING FAIR, swiftly drove the Ghost northward into
the sealherd. 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 or 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 were lowered day after
day, were swallowed up in the gray 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 gray. 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 before 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 maneuvered 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 specter.
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 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, 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
lift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, 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 companionway. 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 gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and
golden, and all adance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or
welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a flowing radiance.
Perhaps it was to this that the golden color was due; but golden his
eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and
compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor 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 color and the
dancing lights were gone. Cold and gray 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 skeptical, my mind
flew back to a small note in a biographical directory, 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. These 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
esthetic 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 would have
been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the
companionway 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.
'Sleepwalking, sunstroke- what?' he barked.
'No; indigestion,' I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
untoward had occurred.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
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 court
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 companionway.
'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 centered 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 the 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 shotguns, and saw the sail go up again. The seals were thick,
the wind dying away; everything favored 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 and 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 out 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, naive 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 of
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 fear of betraying myself. A small
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
oldtime 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 payday brings them- the women and the drink, the gorging
and the beastliness which so truly express 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 has 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 yourselves. 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 knew only 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 give greater delight. And,
after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living
is a worthless act. To labor at living and be paid 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 most gratifying than are my
facts to me.'
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
'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 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 a 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 for the penalty which the materialist ever
pays for his materialism.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
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 companionway. '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 northwest.'
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 had 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
shotguns 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 behavior. 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
northeast, 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 cripped 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 meager body to splintered
wreckage, and yet the spark of light within burned as 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 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' d- 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
maneuver, for the free sea was 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 and 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
northeastern 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 aboard 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 main-sheet.
'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- two hundred and forty 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
companionway. 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
companionway, 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 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 defense
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 companionway, 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 percent 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 favored by a quick look. He was wondering if
I was 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, 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, 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 traveled 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 leveled 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 before 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 out 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. Have you 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 northeast.
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 marshaled forward into the forecastle by our
hunters, while our sailors hoisted in the boats, 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.
THERE WAS NEED FOR HASTE. The Macedonia, belching the blackest of
smoke from her funnel, was charging down upon us from out of the
northeast. 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 leapt 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 rumor 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 cannonball
striking not more than twenty feet astern and glancing twice from
sea to sea to windward before 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 gray mist drove by us like a rain.
Every woolen filament of our garments, every hair of our heads and
faces, was jeweled with a crystal globule. The shrouds were wet with
moisture; it dripped from our rigging overhead; and on the under
side 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
that one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push them back. It
was impossible that the rest could be beyond these walls of gray.
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 alee,' was passed forward to
me from man to man; and the Ghost heeled about on the port tack with
virtually 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 skyline. But the ocean was bare. No wrathful
Macedonia broke its surface or 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 reenter 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 mainsails 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
maneuver and failing for 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 tonight.
'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 newcomers 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
tomorrow, 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 today
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.'
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 foreshortening 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
those of a deer; 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 newcomers 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
groveled 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 with 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, Larsen
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 lookout 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 has 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 as clear
blue as the sky, his bronze skin 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 stronger 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 was the
stronger 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 color, but tonight 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 knew 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 quoting when Louis put
his head into the companionway and whispered down:
'Be easy, will ye? The fog's lifted, an' 't is 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
clamor 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 search-light,' 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 each other 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 analyzed 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 Luficer 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 figurehead. 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 clamor in the
steerage and marveled 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, straining and
struggling and crushed in the embrace of Wolf Larsen's arms. Her
face was forcibly upturned. I could see the vain beat and flutter of
her as she strove, by pressing her face against his breast, to
escape his lips. 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 that 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 for 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 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 d- 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 happened 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?'
'Wait 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. 'Nothing is 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. '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 stateroom.
The lazaret 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 reentered Wolf Larsen's
state-room to get his rifle and shotgun. I spoke to him, but he made
no answer, though his head was still rocking from side to side and
he was not asleep.
Next to obtain was a stock of ammunition- an easy matter, though I
had to enter the steerage companionway 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, with 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 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-by 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 leapt 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 sprit-sails
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 TWENTY-SEVEN.
DAY BROKE, GRAY AND CHILL. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh
breeze, and the compass indicated that it was making just the course
that would bring it 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 jeweled 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 southwest, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should
hold, we'll make it in five days.'
'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 no 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 were 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 hairpins!'
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 cover completely 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
stenciled brows, and its large brown eyes, clear-seeing and calm,
gloriously calm.
Just then a puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us. 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 forever. 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 dinnertime,' 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 gray cloud, now of gray 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 '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 said.
Then 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 southwest and thought of the six hundred miles of
hardship before us- aye, 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 traveling toward Japan,' I answered.
'Our drift is to the southeast, or south-southeast, 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 shall not know where we are by five
hundred miles.'
Then I begged her pardon and promised I would 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 catnaps. 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 forgot my own life in the love of
another life; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much
to live as right then when I placed 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
instant's notice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.
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 northwest for twenty-four hours, when it fell calm,
and in the night sprang up from the southwest. This was dead in our
teeth, but I took in the sea-anchor and set sail, hauling a course
on the wind that took us in a south-southeasterly direction. It was an
even choice between this and the west-northwesterly course that 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
southwest, 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 baled without cessation. The blankets were
soaking. Everything was wet except Maud, and she, in oilskins,
rubber boots, and souwester, was dry, all but her face and hands and a
stray wisp of hair. She relieved me at the baling-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 northeast, 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 baled 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 that 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 gray 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 insects 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 away 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
northeast. 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 northwest breeze had sprung up
freshly once more; but the strange schooner lost itself on the
skyline, 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
marveling 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 that 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, as 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 northeast. 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
coastline running toward the southeast 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.
'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, very 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 among 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 that I knew
deceived neither of us. Five minutes later I cried: 'By God! We
shall go clear!'
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 for the first time 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
traveling 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 that 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 southwest wind; but once around the second,- and we
went perilously close,- 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 landlocked harbor, the water as 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 stem 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 if 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 Endeavor Island, as we called it, land-sick from long custom
of the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.
'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, nor 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 that 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 with 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
Maud 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 soft but
unfaltering.
'Please, please!' she said very 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
each side of the cove rose from the deep water.
Morning broke dull and gray, 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 notebook I tore out a page, and from the ammunition-box took a
shotgun 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 far too busy 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 baling 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 crumpled
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 would 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 that had landed on Endeavor 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 shotgun 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 northeastern
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
southwestern point, the headlands and backbone diminishing regularly
until the northeastern 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 Endeavor 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 THIRTY.
NO WONDER WE CALLED IT Endeavor 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 that 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 labors of cooking and of
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 that 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 or 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 that turned tail 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 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.
'Look 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, nor any more than I like the idea of killing
such pretty, inoffensive creatures.'
'Pretty!' I sniffed. 'I failed to mark anything preeminently
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
paths 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 inland, 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 each side, there were no signs of hostility. It was a rookery
that 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 would have met him
unflinchingly and cooly, and I know that I would have killed him.
'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
bulls, living out the loneliness of their bacherlorhood 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 him 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 him 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 him 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 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 you are 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 the
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 THIRTY-ONE.
'IT WILL SMELL,' I SAID, 'but it will keep in the heat and keep
out the rain and snow.'
We were surveying the completed sealskin 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,' 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
boat-load 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 she declared that
she had never felt better nor 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 as hard as ever. Where she obtained this strength was a 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 that had swung around the
compass from the southeast to the northwest, and that was then blowing
directly in upon us. The beaches of the outer cove were thundering
with the surf, and even in our landlocked 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 even
on Endeavor 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 toward 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?' I said.
'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 that had not existed before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.
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 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), analyzing, 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 Endeavor 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 around 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. 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 shotgun, 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 lazaret 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 companionway 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 companionway, 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 my new fear was increased an hundredfold. 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 leveled the shotgun at him. Had he
moved, attempted to drop down the companionway, I know I should have
shot him. But he stood motionless and staring as before. And as I
faced him, with leveled 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 companionway 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 Endeavor 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, but did not answer.
'Well, where are all hands?' I asked him. '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 reexamine 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
underarm, 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
lazaret 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 companionway and peeped at him. He was lying as I had left him.
Again I went below; but before I dropped into the lazaret 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 stateroom and possessed myself
of his revolvers. There were no other weapons, though I thoroughly
ransacked the three remaining staterooms. 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 coffeepot 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 simple
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 that 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 THIRTY-THREE.
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.
The next day we waited, and the next, and still he made no sign.
'These headaches of his, these attacks-' Maude 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 by 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? Besides, I myself was 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 that 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 companionway. Cautiously descending, I found the cabin
deserted. The door to his stateroom 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 trapdoor in the
floor and set it to one side. The slopchest, as well as the
provisions, was stored in the lazaret, and I took advantage of the
opportunity to lay in a stock of underclothing.
As I emerged from the lazaret I heard sounds in Wolf Larsen's
stateroom. I crouched and listened. The doorknob 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 companionway, 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 lazaret. 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 stateroom. I saw his hand miss the doorknob
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 companionway, I
retreated, silently rolling over on top of the cabin.
He shoved the slide part away back and rested his arms on it, his
body still in the companionway. 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, in 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- and who could 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 out 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 THIRTY-FOUR.
'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 possibly 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 lazaret.'
'And you know also how I crept about and avoided him,' I contended
gaily.
'And lost your shoes.'
'You'd hardly expect him 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 schooldays, 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 bootstraps. 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 Endeavor
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
tackle I could, if necessary, attach a second 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 humor and the power
of expression, must inevitably command the world's ear. And so it
was that she had commanded. Her sense of humor 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 leaped 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 labor.
Her task was to hold the boat in position while I worked at the
tangle. And such a tangle- halyards, sheets, guys, downhauls, shrouds,
stays, all washed about and back and forth and through and twined
and knitted 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 restepping 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 on my
philosophy back on me for all it is worth. But don't make the
mistake of underestimating me. For your own good I warn you.'
'Since when have you become an altruist?' I queried. 'Confess,
now, in warning me for my own good, that you are very inconsistent.'
He ignored my sarcasm, saying, 'Suppose I clap the hatch on now? You
won't fool me as you did in the lazaret.'
'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 THIRTY-FIVE.
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 partway 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 mainthroat-halyards. This, with the
single block and 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 guyropes. This necessitated my
climbing the shears, which I did twice before I finished guying it
fore and aft and to each 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,
tomorrow 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 knew 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, puzzled
over what I had seen in her eyes and 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 campfire, 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 curtsy, 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 clamor 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, 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 tomorrow,
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, virtually 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 line which held them and cast it 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 setback, 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 for'ard.
'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 THIRTY-SIX.
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 southwestern 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, virtually every inch of the
way.
Another day of heartbreaking 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 favorable,
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 sternsheets. 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 leapt 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 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 tonight or tomorrow 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.
And so it ended, with the phrase she knew had all power over me.
We shivered miserably throughout the night. Now and I again I slept
fitfully, 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
southwest 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 laboring
through a heavy sea toward the island. At half-past three in the
afternoon we passed the southwestern 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 but.
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 traveling 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 woman 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 I instanced his statement that
he intended to stay and die on Endeavor Island. There had been his
terrific headaches, and we were agreed that it was some sort of
brain breakdown, and that in his attacks he endured path 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 sometime 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 forehold, 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 stern, 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 shorelines, 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 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. Maud even contrived, at
times when all my effort 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 his arms
out for support. He regained his balance by the steerage companionway,
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 heavily
and spasmodically. Maud took charge of him, lifting his head to keep
the blood out of it, and dispatching 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, 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 leapt from my hand, and the hand clasped like
a steel trap about my own 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 bitter 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 the woman's scream of fear and heartbreaking 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 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 consciousness
of his growing impotence, I know not, but his throat vibrated with a
deep groan. The hand at my throat relaxed. I breathed. His hand
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 if 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 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 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 is 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
companionway. 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
stateroom, 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 from 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 THIRTY-SEVEN.
AT ONCE WE MOVED ABOARD the Ghost, occupying our old staterooms
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 businesslike 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, I was 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 a strange, 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 stroke of the Wolf,' he said. 'I am paralyzed;
I shall never walk again. Oh, only on the right 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 like 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 mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:
'Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest big
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
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 or tumor or
something of that nature- a thing that devours and destroys. It's
attacking my nerve centers, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by
cell- from the pain.'
'The motor centers, 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 centers are untouched. I can remember,
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 bedsores.'
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 his spirit 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 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 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 complete 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
chiseled 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.
Wolf Larsen had received another stroke. He had lost his voice, or
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 reestablished. 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 virtually 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
climbed them to attach the guys. To the top of the foremast, which was
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, had to be made over.
While I toiled at rigging the foremast, Maud sewed on the 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 the three-cornered
sail-needle. Her hands were soon sadly blistered, but she struggled
bravely on, and, in addition, did the cooking and took care of the
sick man.
'A fig for superstition,' I said on Friday morning. 'That mast
goes in today.'
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 said. '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 center 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. Once more Maud rectified the twist with the watch-tackle, and
once more 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 companionway.
'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
stranglehold. 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 in my hand and felt for him. 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 partly 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
companionway. 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, half carrying her, I took her up the companionway. 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
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 smoldering 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 bulk, 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 a sepulcher,
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 THIRTY-EIGHT.
'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 seances of
spiritualists for a dollar admission.
'But I am still here, all here,' 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 Hindu
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,'- skeptical 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, 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 shall know with 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, '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 sailmaker. 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 textbooks 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 faint 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 the 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 THIRTY-NINE.
THE DAY CAME FOR OUR DEPARTURE. There was no longer anything to
detain us on Endeavor 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 also a phrase of your father's.'
She shook her head and laughed, 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 honor,' 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. Willfully had it disobeyed
and won my eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue- aye,
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,' 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 maneuver 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 cover, 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 cover. Once again about, and the Ghost headed out to open
sea. She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the ocean, and was
herself abreath 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 Endeavor Island
brightened under the sun. Even the grim southwestern 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 sad, 'Dear, dear
Endeavor 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 which 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 main-sheets,
took in on the boom-tackles, and trimmed everything for the quartering
breeze which was ours. 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 heartbroken 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. 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, 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
sorry, 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
further 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.
I was famished, but Maud tried vainly to get me to eat. 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. In fact,
I was aware of nothing till I awoke in my bunk, with my boots off.
It was dark. I was stiff and lame, and cried out with pain when the
bedclothes 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 awoke, 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 behavior 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-by, 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 provisions 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 rested 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
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