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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
childs 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 mans 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, ships boy
at fourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen,
and cock of the focsle, 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, isnt 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."
CHAPTER XI 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 seasons 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 Leachs 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 The Sea Wolf page 40 The Sea Wolf page 42 |