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Elisha Cuthbert Gallery Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
settle down upon us, seemingly
thicker than ever.
The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day,
were swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till
nightfall, and often not till long after, when they would creep in
like sea-wraiths, one by one, out of the grey. Wainwright--the
hunter whom Wolf Larsen had stolen with boat and men--took
advantage of the veiled sea and escaped. He disappeared one
morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we never saw
them again, though it was not many days when we learned that they
had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regained
their own.
This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the
opportunity never offered. It was not in the mates province to go
out in the boats, and though I manoeuvred cunningly for it, Wolf
Larsen never granted me the privilege. Had he done so, I should
have managed somehow to carry Miss Brewster away with me. As it
was, the situation was approaching a stage which I was afraid to
consider. I involuntarily shunned the thought of it, and yet the
thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting spectre.
I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of
course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I
learned, now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance
of such a situation--the thing the writers harped upon and
exploited so thoroughly. And here it was, now, and I was face to
face with it. That it should be as vital as possible, it required
no more than that the woman should be Maud Brewster, who now
charmed me in person as she had long charmed me through her work.
No one more out of environment could be imagined. She was a
delicate, ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and
graceful of movement. It never seemed to me that she walked, or,
at least, walked after the ordinary manner of mortals. Hers was an
extreme lithesomeness, and she moved with a certain indefinable
airiness, approaching one as down might float or as a bird on
noiseless wings.
She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually
impressed with what I may call her fragility. As at the time I
caught her arm when helping her below, so at any time I was quite
prepared, should stress or rough handling befall her, to see her
crumble away. I have never seen body and spirit in such perfect
accord. Describe her verse, as the critics have described it, as
sublimated and spiritual, and you have described her body. It
seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogous attributes, and to
link it to life with the slenderest of chains. Indeed, she trod
the earth lightly, and in her constitution there was little of the
robust clay.
She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen. Each was nothing that
the other was, everything that the other was not. I noted them
walking the deck together one morning, and I likened them to the
extreme ends of the human ladder of evolution--the one the
culmination of all savagery, the other the finished product of the
finest civilization. True, Wolf Larsen possessed intellect to an
unusual degree, but it was directed solely to the exercise of his
savage instincts and made him but the more formidable a savage. He
was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode with the
certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing
heavy about his stride. The jungle and the wilderness lurked in
the uplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and lithe,
and strong, always strong. I likened him to some great tiger, a
beast of prowess and prey. He looked it, and the piercing glitter
that arose at times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had
observed in the eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures
of the wild.
But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was
she who terminated the walk. They came up to where I was standing
by the entrance to the companion-way. Though she betrayed it by no
outward sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed. She
made some idle remark, looking at me, and laughed The Sea Wolf page 83 The Sea Wolf page 85 |