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CHAPTER XXIII
Brave winds,
blowing fair, swiftly drove the Ghost
northward into the seal herd. We encountered it well up to the
forty-fourth parallel, in a raw and stormy sea across which the wind harried
the fog-banks in eternal flight. For days at a time we could never see
the sun nor take an observation; then the wind would sweep the face of the
ocean clean, the waves would ripple and flash, and we would learn where we
were. A day of clear weather might follow, or three days or four, and
then the fog would 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 mate’s 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 lightly enough; but I saw her eyes return to his,
involuntarily, as though fascinated; then they fell, but not swiftly enough to
veil the rush of terror that filled them. It was in
his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily grey and
cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all a-dance with
tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the full orbs were flooded
with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this that the golden colour
was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time
luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamour of the blood which no
woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand. Her own
terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear — the most terrible fear a
man can experience — I knew that in inexpressible ways she was dear to
me. The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with the terror, and
with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my blood at the same time
to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by a power without me and
beyond me, and found my eyes returning against my will to gaze into the eyes of
Wolf Larsen. But he had recovered himself. The golden colour and
the dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey and glittering they were as he
bowed brusquely and turned away. “I am
afraid,” she whispered, with a shiver. “I am so afraid.” I, too, was
afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to me my mind was in a
turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly: “All will
come right, Miss Brewster. Trust me, it will come right.” She answered
with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding, and started to
descend the companion-stairs. For a long
while I remained standing where she had left me. There was imperative
need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of the changed aspect of
things. It had come, at last, love had come, when I least expected it and
under the most forbidding conditions. Of course, my philosophy had always
recognized the inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years
of bookish silence had made me inattentive and unprepared. And now it
had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to that first thin
little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in the concrete, the
row of thin little volumes on my library shelf. How I had welcomed each
of them! Each year one had come from the press, and to me each was the
advent of the year. They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and
as such I had received them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place
was in my heart. My
heart? A revulsion of feeling came over me. I seemed to stand
outside myself and to look at myself incredulously. Maud Brewster!
Humphrey Van Weyden, “the cold-blooded fish,” the “emotionless monster,” the
“analytical demon,” of Charley Furuseth’s christening, in love! And then,
without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a small
biographical note in the red-bound Who’s Who,
and I said to myself, “She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years
old.” And then I said, “Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy
free?” But how did I know she was fancy free? And the pang of
new-born jealousy put all incredulity to flight. There was no doubt about
it. I was jealous; therefore I loved. And the woman I loved was
Maud Brewster. I, Humphrey
Van Weyden, was in love! And again the doubt assailed me. Not that
I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it. On the contrary,
idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, my philosophy had always
recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thing in the world, the aim and
the summit of being, the most exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which
life could thrill, the thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken
into the heart. But now that it had come I could not believe. I
could not be so fortunate. It was too good, too good to be true.
Symons’s lines came into my head: “I wandered
all these years among A world of women, seeking you.”
And then I had
ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing in the world, I
had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an “emotionless
monster,” a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring in sensations only
of the mind. And though I had been surrounded by women all my days, my
appreciation of them had been aesthetic and nothing more. I had actually,
at times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the
eternal or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others.
And now it had come! Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come. In
what could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the
companion-way and started along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful
lines of Mrs. Browning: “I lived
with visions for my company Instead of men and women years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me.”
But the
sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and oblivious to all
about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me. “What the
hell are you up to?” he was demanding. I had
strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to myself to find
my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot. “Sleep-walking,
sunstroke, — what?” he barked. “No;
indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing untoward had
occurred. |