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

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 séances of spiritualists for a dollar admission.

“But I am still here, all here,” the 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 Hindoo 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,” sceptical 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 slightly, 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 will know for 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, the “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 sail-maker.  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 text-books 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 fainter 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 his 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 XXXIX

The day came for our departure.  There was no longer anything to detain us on Endeavour 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 a phrase, also, of your father.”

She laughed and shook her head, 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 honour,” 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.  Wilfully had it disobeyed and won my eyes to speech, and now it was winning my tongue—ay, 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,” was 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 manœuvre 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 cove, 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 cove.  Once again about, and the Ghost headed out to open sea.  She had now caught the bosom-breathing of the ocean, and was herself a-breath 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 Endeavour Island brightened under the sun.  Even the grim south-western 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 said, “Dear, dear Endeavour 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 that may fall to man and woman.

“And it’s slack off the sheets for