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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
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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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]