The Sea Wolf by Jack London (best classic literature .txt) 📖

“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.”

The Ghost has attained the southernmost point of the arc she is describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away to the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumoured, where she will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season’s hunt along the coast of Japan.  The hunters have experimented and practised with their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pullers and steerers have made their spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so that they will make no noise when creeping on the seals, and put their boats in apple-pie order—to use Leach’s homely phrase.

His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain all his life.  Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is afraid to venture on deck after dark.  There are two or three standing quarrels in the forecastle.  Louis tells me that the gossip of the sailors finds its way aft, and that two of the telltales have been badly beaten by their mates.  He shakes his head dubiously over the outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same boat with him.  Johnson has been guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and has collided two or three times with Wolf Larsen over the pronunciation of his name.  Johansen he thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which time the mate has called him by his proper name.  But of course it is out of the question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.

Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen, which tallies with the captain’s brief description.  We may expect to meet Death Larsen on the Japan coast.  “And look out for squalls,” is Louis’s prophecy, “for they hate one another like the wolf whelps they are.”  Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing steamer in the fleet, the Macedonia, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of the schooners carry only six.  There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling into the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy.  Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a lie, while he has a cyclopædic knowledge of sealing and the men of the sealing fleets.

As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft, on this veritable hell-ship.  Men fight and struggle ferociously for one another’s lives.  The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed, while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill the survivor of the affair, if