الفصل الفصل 11 · 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 season’s 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 Leach’s 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 Larsen over the pronunciation of his name. Johansen he

thrashed on the amidships deck the other night, since which time the mate

has called him by his proper name. But of course it is out of the

question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.

Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen, which

tallies with the captain’s brief description. We may expect to meet

Death Larsen on the Japan coast. “And look out for squalls,” is Louis’s

prophecy, “for they hate one another like the wolf whelps they are.”

Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing steamer in the fleet, the

_Macedonia_, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of the

schooners carry only six. There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of

strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium smuggling

into the States and arms smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open

piracy. Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a

lie, while he has a cyclopædic knowledge of sealing and the men of the

sealing fleets.

As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft, on

this veritable hell-ship. Men fight and struggle ferociously for one

another’s lives. The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any

moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed,

while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill the survivor of the

affair, if such affair comes off. He frankly states that the position he

takes is based on no moral grounds, that all the hunters could kill and

eat one another so far as he is concerned, were it not that he needs them

alive for the hunting. If they will only hold their hands until the

season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when all grudges can

be settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard and

arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea. I think even

the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness. Wicked men though they

be, they are certainly very much afraid of him.

Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go about in

secret dread of him. His is the courage of fear,—a strange thing I know

well of myself,—and at any moment it may master the fear and impel him to

the taking of my life. My knee is much better, though it often aches for

long periods, and the stiffness is gradually leaving the arm which Wolf

Larsen squeezed. Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in

splendid condition. My muscles are growing harder and increasing in

size. My hands, however, are a spectacle for grief. They have a

parboiled appearance, are afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are

broken and discoloured, and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a

fungoid sort of growth. Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the

diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in this manner before.

I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen reading

the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at the

beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate’s sea-chest. I

wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he read aloud to me from

Ecclesiastes. I could imagine he was speaking the thoughts of his own

mind as he read to me, and his voice, reverberating deeply and mournfully

in the confined cabin, charmed and held me. He may be uneducated, but he

certainly knows how to express the significance of the written word. I

can hear him now, as I shall always hear him, the primal melancholy

vibrant in his voice as he read:

“I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of

kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,

and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that

of all sorts.

“So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in

Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.

“Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the

labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and

vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

“All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous

and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;

to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the

good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an

oath.

“This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that

there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men

is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and

after that they go to the dead.

“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a

living dog is better than a dead lion.

“For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not

anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them

is forgotten.

“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;

neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is

done under the sun.”

“There you have it, Hump,” he said, closing the book upon his finger and

looking up at me. “The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem

thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this pessimism of

the blackest?—‘All is vanity and vexation of spirit,’ ‘There is no profit

under the sun,’ ‘There is one event unto all,’ to the fool and the wise,

the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event is

death, and an evil thing, he says. For the Preacher loved life, and did

not want to die, saying, ‘For a living dog is better than a dead lion.’

He preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness of

the grave. And so I. To crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to be as

the clod and rock, is loathsome to contemplate. It is loathsome to the

life that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the power of

movement, and the consciousness of the power of movement. Life itself is

unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.”

“You are worse off than Omar,” I said. “He, at least, after the

customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a

joyous thing.”

“Who was Omar?” Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day, nor

the next, nor the next.

In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubáiyát, and it was

to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered, possibly

two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder

without difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found

him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the

life of me, I could not discover myself. Possibly I recited with a

certain joyous lilt which was my own, for—his memory was good, and at a

second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own—he

recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate

revolt that was well-nigh convincing.

I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not

surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant’s irritability, and

quite at variance with the Persian’s complacent philosophy and genial

code of life:

“What, without asking, hither hurried _Whence_?

And, without asking, _Whither_ hurried hence!

Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine

Must drown the memory of that insolence!”

“Great!” Wolf Larsen cried. “Great! That’s the keynote. Insolence! He

could not have used a better word.”

In vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with

argument.

“It’s not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows that

it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help itself. The

Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and vexation, an

evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he

found an eviler thing. Through chapter after chapter he is worried by

the one event that cometh to all alike. So Omar, so I, so you, even you,

for you rebelled against dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you. You

were afraid to die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is

greater than you, did not want to die. You have talked of the instinct

of immortality. I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and

which, when death looms near and large, masters the instinct, so called,

of immortality. It mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a

crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.

“You are afraid of him now. You are afraid of me. You cannot deny it.

If I should catch you by the throat, thus,”—his hand was about my throat

and my breath was shut off,—“and began to press the life out of you thus,

and thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering, and your

instinct of life, which is longing for life, will flutter up, and you

will struggle to save yourself. Eh? I see the fear of death in your

eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength

to struggle to live. Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as

a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue

protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming. ‘To live! To

live! To live!’ you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now,

not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, eh? Ha! ha! You are not

sure of it. You won’t chance it. This life only you are certain is

real. Ah, it is growing dark and darker. It is the darkness of death,

the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is

gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes

are becoming set. They are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You

cannot see my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with

your legs. Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake’s. Your

chest heaves and strains. To live! To live! To live—”

I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so

graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor

and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old

familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.

“Well, have I convinced you?” he demanded. “Here take a drink of this.

I want to ask you some questions.”

I rolled my head negatively on the floor. “Your arguments are

too—er—forcible,” I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my

aching throat.

“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour,” he assured me. “And I promise I

won’t use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can sit on

a chair.”

And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the

Preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.