_ My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases - if by intimacy may be
denoted those relations which exist between master and man, or,
better yet, between king and jester. I am to him no more than a
toy, and he values me no more than a child values a toy. My
function is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes well; but let
him become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon
him, and at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while,
at the same time, I am fortunate to escape with my life and a whole
body.
The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There
is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom
he does not despise. He seems consuming with the tremendous power
that is in him and that seems never to have found adequate
expression in works. He is as Lucifer would be, were that proud
spirit banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he
is oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I
review the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. The
white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible
pantheon were of the same fibre as he. The frivolity of the
laughter-loving Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it is
from a humour that is nothing else than ferocious. But he laughs
rarely; he is too often sad. And it is a sadness as deep-reaching
as the roots of the race. It is the race heritage, the sadness
which has made the race sober-minded, clean-lived and fanatically
moral, and which, in this latter connection, has culminated among
the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.
In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
religion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensations of
such religion are denied Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism will
not permit it. So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains
for him, but to be devilish. Were he not so terrible a man, I
could sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago,
when I went into his stateroom to fill his water-bottle and came
unexpectedly upon him. He did not see me. His head was buried in
his hands, and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as with
sobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As I softly withdrew I
could hear him groaning, "God! God! God!" Not that he was
calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
soul.
At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by
evening, strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling
about the cabin.
"I've never been sick in my life, Hump," he said, as I guided him
to his room. "Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my
head was healing after having been laid open for six inches by a
capstan-bar."
For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as
wild animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer,
without plaint, without sympathy, utterly alone.
This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed
and put things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table
and bunk were littered with designs and calculations. On a large
transparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying what
appeared to be a scale of some sort or other.
"Hello, Hump," he greeted me genially. "I'm just finishing the
finishing touches. Want to see it work?"
"But what is it?" I asked.
"A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to
kindergarten simplicity," he answered gaily. "From to-day a child
will be able to navigate a ship. No more long-winded calculations.
All you need is one star in the sky on a dirty night to know
instantly where you are. Look. I place the transparent scale on
this star-map, revolving the scale on the North Pole. On the scale
I've worked out the circles of altitude and the lines of bearing.
All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scale till it is
opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto! there you
are, the ship's precise location!"
There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue
this morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.
"You must be well up in mathematics," I said. "Where did you go to
school?"
"Never saw the inside of one, worse luck," was the answer. "I had
to dig it out for myself."
"And why do you think I have made this thing?" he demanded,
abruptly. "Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?" He
laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. "Not at all. To get
it patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness with
all night in while other men do the work. That's my purpose.
Also, I have enjoyed working it out."
"The creative joy," I murmured.
"I guess that's what it ought to be called. Which is another way
of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of
movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the
yeast because it is yeast and crawls."
I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate
materialism and went about making the bed. He continued copying
lines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task
requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but
admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and
delicacy of the need.
When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man -
beautiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing
wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or
sinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man
who did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood.
What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing
contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no
conscience. I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it.
He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was
of the type that came into the world before the development of the
moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.
As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.
Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and
sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair
skin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added
both to his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet
possessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which is
characteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his
jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness and
indomitableness of the male - the nose also. It was the nose of a
being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eagle
beak. It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only
it was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for
the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of
fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which he
suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,
seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the
face would have lacked.
And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot
say how greatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What
was he? How had he happened to be? All powers seemed his, all
potentialities - why, then, was he no more than the obscure master
of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful
brutality amongst the men who hunted seals?
My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.
"Why is it that you have not done great things in this world? With
the power that is yours you might have risen to any height.
Unpossessed of conscience or moral instinct, you might have
mastered the world, broken it to your hand. And yet here you are,
at the top of your life, where diminishing and dying begin, living
an obscure and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for the
satisfaction of woman's vanity and love of decoration, revelling in
a piggishness, to use your own words, which is anything and
everything except splendid. Why, with all that wonderful strength,
have you not done something? There was nothing to stop you,
nothing that could stop you. What was wrong? Did you lack
ambition? Did you fall under temptation? What was the matter?
What was the matter?"
He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst,
and followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him
breathless and dismayed. He waited a moment, as though seeking
where to begin, and then said:
"Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow?
If you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places,
where there was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up
because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up
they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered
away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and
choked them."
"Well?" I said.
"Well?" he queried, half petulantly. "It was not well. I was one
of those seeds."
He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. I
finished my work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to
me.
"Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you
will see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within a
hundred miles of that stretch of water. But I was not born
Norwegian. I am a Dane. My father and mother were Danes, and how
they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do
not know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothing
mysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came of
generations of poor unlettered people - peasants of the sea who
sowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom since time
began. There is no more to tell."
"But there is," I objected. "It is still obscure to me."
"What can I tell you?" he demanded, with a recrudescence of
fierceness. "Of the meagreness of a child's life? of fish diet and
coarse living? of going out with the boats from the time I could
crawl? of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea
farming and never came back? of myself, unable to read or write,
cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country
ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows
were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and
hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences? I do not care to
remember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of
it. But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned and
killed when a man's strength came to me, only the lines of my life
were cast at the time in other places. I did return, not long ago,
but unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in
the old days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a
cripple who would never walk again."
"But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside
of a school, how did you learn to read and write?" I queried.
"In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship's boy
at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen,
and cock of the fo'c'sle, infinite ambition and infinite
loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for
myself - navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and what
not. And of what use has it been? Master and owner of a ship at
the top of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish and
die. Paltry, isn't it? And when the sun was up I was scorched,
and because I had no root I withered away."
"But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple," I chided.
"And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who
rose to the purple," he answered grimly. "No man makes
opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it
came to them. The Corsican knew. I have dreamed as greatly as the
Corsican. I should have known the opportunity, but it never came.
The thorns sprung up and choked me. And, Hump, I can tell you that
you know more about me than any living man, except my own brother."
"And what is he? And where is he?"
"Master of the steamship Macedonia, seal-hunter," was the answer.
"We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him
'Death' Larsen."
"Death Larsen!" I involuntarily cried. "Is he like you?"
"Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all
my - my - "
"Brutishness," I suggested.
"Yes, - thank you for the word, - all my brutishness, but he can
scarcely read or write."
"And he has never philosophized on life," I added.
"No," Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.
"And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy
living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the
books." _