Kabanata Kabanata 23 · 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 manœuvred 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 æsthetic 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.