Chapter 10

by Jack London

　　Chapter X

　　My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases - if by intimacy may bedenoted those relations which exist between master and man, or,better yet, between king and jester. I am to him no more than atoy, and he values me no more than a child values a toy. Myfunction is to amuse, and so long as I amuse all goes well; but lethim become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come uponhim, and at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while,at the same time, I am fortunate to escape with my life and a wholebody.

　　The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. Thereis not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whomhe does not despise. He seems consuming with the tremendous powerthat is in him and that seems never to have found adequateexpression in works. He is as Lucifer would be, were that proudspirit banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.

　　This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, heis oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, Ireview the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. Thewhite-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terriblepantheon were of the same fibre as he. The frivolity of thelaughter-loving Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it isfrom a humour that is nothing else than ferocious. But he laughsrarely; he is too often sad. And it is a sadness as deep-reachingas the roots of the race. It is the race heritage, the sadnesswhich has made the race sober-minded, clean-lived and fanaticallymoral, and which, in this latter connection, has culminated amongthe English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.

　　In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has beenreligion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensations ofsuch religion are denied Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism willnot permit it. So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remainsfor him, but to be devilish. Were he not so terrible a man, Icould sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago,when I went into his stateroom to fill his water-bottle and cameunexpectedly upon him. He did not see me. His head was buried inhis hands, and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as withsobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As I softly withdrew Icould hear him groaning, "God! God! God!" Not that he wascalling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from hissoul.

　　At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and byevening, strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reelingabout the cabin.

　　"I've never been sick in my life, Hump," he said, as I guided himto his room. "Nor did I ever have a headache except the time myhead was healing after having been laid open for six inches by acapstan-bar."

　　For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered aswild 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 bedand put things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Tableand bunk were littered with designs and calculations. On a largetransparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying whatappeared to be a scale of some sort or other.

　　"Hello, Hump," he greeted me genially. "I'm just finishing thefinishing touches. Want to see it work?"

　　"But what is it?" I asked.

　　"A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced tokindergarten simplicity," he answered gaily. "From to-day a childwill 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 knowinstantly where you are. Look. I place the transparent scale onthis star-map, revolving the scale on the North Pole. On the scaleI'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 isopposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto! there youare, the ship's precise location!"

　　There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear bluethis morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.

　　"You must be well up in mathematics," I said. "Where did you go toschool?"

　　"Never saw the inside of one, worse luck," was the answer. "I hadto 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?" Helaughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. "Not at all. To getit patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness withall 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 wayof expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph ofmovement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of theyeast because it is yeast and crawls."

　　I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveteratematerialism and went about making the bed. He continued copyinglines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a taskrequiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not butadmire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness anddelicacy of the need.

　　When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in afascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man -beautiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failingwonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, orsinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a manwho 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 nothingcontrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had noconscience. I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it.He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he wasof the type that came into the world before the development of themoral 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 andsharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fairskin to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and addedboth to his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yetpossessed of the firmness, almost harshness, which ischaracteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, hisjaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with all the fierceness andindomitableness of the male - the nose also. It was the nose of abeing born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eaglebeak. It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, onlyit was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate forthe other. And while the whole face was the incarnation offierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which hesuffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow,seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise theface would have lacked.

　　And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannotsay how greatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? Whatwas he? How had he happened to be? All powers seemed his, allpotentialities - why, then, was he no more than the obscure masterof a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightfulbrutality 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? Withthe power that is yours you might have risen to any height.Unpossessed of conscience or moral instinct, you might havemastered the world, broken it to your hand. And yet here you are,at the top of your life, where diminishing and dying begin, livingan obscure and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for thesatisfaction of woman's vanity and love of decoration, revelling ina piggishness, to use your own words, which is anything andeverything 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 lackambition? 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 himbreathless and dismayed. He waited a moment, as though seekingwhere 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 upbecause they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was upthey were scorched, and because they had no root they witheredaway. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up andchoked them."

　　"Well?" I said.

　　"Well?" he queried, half petulantly. "It was not well. I was oneof those seeds."

　　He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. Ifinished my work and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke tome.

　　"Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway youwill see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within ahundred miles of that stretch of water. But I was not bornNorwegian. I am a Dane. My father and mother were Danes, and howthey ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I donot know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothingmysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came ofgenerations of poor unlettered people - peasants of the sea whosowed their sons on the waves as has been their custom since timebegan. 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 offierceness. "Of the meagreness of a child's life? of fish diet andcoarse living? of going out with the boats from the time I couldcrawl? of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-seafarming and never came back? of myself, unable to read or write,cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-countryships? of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blowswere bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear andhatred and pain were my only soul-experiences? I do not care toremember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think ofit. But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned andkilled when a man's strength came to me, only the lines of my lifewere cast at the time in other places. I did return, not long ago,but unfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate inthe old days, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him acripple who would never walk again."

　　"But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the insideof a school, how did you learn to read and write?" I queried.

　　"In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship's boyat fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen,and cock of the fo'c'sle, infinite ambition and infiniteloneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all formyself - navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and whatnot. And of what use has it been? Master and owner of a ship atthe top of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish anddie. 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 whorose to the purple," he answered grimly. "No man makesopportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when itcame to them. The Corsican knew. I have dreamed as greatly as theCorsican. I should have known the opportunity, but it never came.The thorns sprung up and choked me. And, Hump, I can tell you thatyou 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 allmy - my - "

　　"Brutishness," I suggested.

　　"Yes, - thank you for the word, - all my brutishness, but he canscarcely 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 busyliving it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening thebooks."