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Under the approaching smoke the hull and upper-works of a steamer were growing
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 our 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.
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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 iv 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 the fear of betraying myself. A 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 old-time 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 pay-day brings them - the women and the drink, the gorging and the
beastliness which so truly expresses 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 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:
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"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
yourself. 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 only knew 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 gives greater
delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight,
living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid 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 more gratifying than are my facts
to me."
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
"I often doubt, 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 a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools.
You have no facts in your pocketbook." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]