_ Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the Ghost northward into
the seal herd. 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 nor 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, lowered day after day,
were swallowed up in the grey 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 grey. 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 when 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 manoeuvred 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 spectre.
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 a 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 described it, 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 uplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and 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 companion-way. 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 grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and
golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or
welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.
Perhaps it was to this that the golden colour was due; but golden
his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and
compelling, and speaking a demand and clamour 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
colour and the dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey 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
sceptical, my mind flew back to a small biographical note in the
red-bound WHO'S WHO, 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.
Symons's 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 aesthetic 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 could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my
post at the head of the companion-way 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.
"Sleep-walking, sunstroke, - what?" he barked.
"No; indigestion," I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
untoward had occurred. _