My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases—if by intimacy may be denotedthose relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet,between king and jester. I am to him no more than a toy, and he valuesme no more than a child values a toy. My function is to amuse, and solong as I amuse all goes well; but let him become bored, or let him haveone of his black moods come upon him, and at once I am relegated fromcabin table to galley, while, at the same time, I am fortunate to escapewith my life and a whole body.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is nota man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does notdespise. He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him andthat seems never to have found adequate expression in works. He is asLucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished to a society ofsoulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.

This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he isoppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I reviewthe old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. Thewhite-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheonwere of the same fibre as he. The frivolity of the laughter-lovingLatins is no part of him. When he laughs it is from a humour that isnothing else than ferocious. But he laughs rarely; he is too often sad.And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race. It is therace heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection,has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.

In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has beenreligion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensations of suchreligion are denied Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism will not permitit. So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him, but to bedevilish. Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorryfor him, as instance three mornings ago, when I went into his stateroomto fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon him. He did not seeme. His head was buried in his hands, and his shoulders were heavingconvulsively as with sobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As Isoftly withdrew I could hear him groaning, “God! God! God!” Not thathe was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from hissoul.

At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening,strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin.

“I’ve never been sick in my life, Hump,” he said, as I guided him to hisroom. “Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head washealing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar.”

For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as wildanimals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without plaint,without sympathy, utterly alone.

This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed and putthings in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table and bunk werelittered with designs and calculations. On a large transparent sheet,compass and square in hand, he was copying what appeared to be a scale ofsome sort or other.

“Hello, Hump,” he greeted me genially. “I’m just finishing the finishingtouches. Want to see it work?”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to kindergartensimplicity,” he answered gaily. “From to-day a child will be able tonavigate a ship. No more long-winded calculations. All you need is onestar in the sky on a dirty night to know instantly where you are. Look.I place the transparent scale on this star-map, revolving the scale onthe North Pole. On the scale I’ve worked out the circles of altitude andthe lines of bearing. All I do is to put it on a star, revolve the scaletill it is opposite those figures on the map underneath, and presto!there you are, the ship’s precise location!”

There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue thismorning as the sea, were sparkling with light.

“You must be well up in mathematics,” I said. “Where did you go toschool?”

“Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,” was the answer. “I had to digit out for myself.”

“And why do you think I have made this thing?” he demanded, abruptly.“Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?” He laughed one ofhis horrible mocking laughs. “Not at all. To get it patented, to makemoney from it, to revel in piggishness with all night in while other mendo the work. That’s my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working it out.”

“The creative joy,” I murmured.

“I guess that’s what it ought to be called. Which is another way ofexpressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movementover matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast becauseit is yeast and crawls.”

I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveteratematerialism and went about making the bed. He continued copying linesand figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring theutmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way hetempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.

When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in afascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man—beautiful in themasculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked thetotal lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face. Itwas the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong. And by this Ido not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face ofa man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience,or who had no conscience. I am inclined to the latter way of accountingfor it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that hewas of the type that came into the world before the development of themoral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

As I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharpas a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to adark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle and added both to hissavagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet possessed of thefirmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips. Theset of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or harsh, with allthe fierceness and indomitableness of the male—the nose also. It was thenose of a being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eaglebeak. It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman, only it wasa shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for the other. Andwhile the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength, theprimal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines ofmouth and eye and brow, seemed to give a largeness and completeness whichotherwise the face would have lacked.

And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot say howgreatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What was he? Howhad he happened to be? All powers seemed his, all potentialities—why,then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schoonerwith a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who huntedseals?

My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.

“Why is it that you have not done great things in this world? With thepower that is yours you might have risen to any height. Unpossessed ofconscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered the world, brokenit to your hand. And yet here you are, at the top of your life, wherediminishing and dying begin, living an obscure and sordid existence,hunting sea animals for the satisfaction of woman’s vanity and love ofdecoration, revelling in a piggishness, to use your own words, which isanything and everything except splendid. Why, with all that wonderfulstrength, have you not done something? There was nothing to stop you,nothing that could stop you. What was wrong? Did you lack ambition?Did you fall under temptation? What was the matter? What was thematter?”

He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst, andfollowed me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathlessand dismayed. He waited a moment, as though seeking where to begin, andthen said:

“Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow? Ifyou will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places, where therewas not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had nodeepness of earth. And when the sun was up they were scorched, andbecause they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns,and the thorns sprung up and choked them.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well?” he queried, half petulantly. “It was not well. I was one ofthose seeds.”

He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. I finished mywork and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to me.

“Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you willsee an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within a hundredmiles of that stretch of water. But I was not born Norwegian. I am aDane. My father and mother were Danes, and how they ever came to thatbleak bight of land on the west coast I do not know. I never heard.Outside of that there is nothing mysterious. They were poor people andunlettered. They came of generations of poor unlettered people—peasantsof the sea who sowed their sons on the waves as has been their customsince time began. There is no more to tell.”

“But there is,” I objected. “It is still obscure to me.”

“What can I tell you?” he demanded, with a recrudescence of fierceness.“Of the meagreness of a child’s life? of fish diet and coarse living? ofgoing out with the boats from the time I could crawl? of my brothers, whowent away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back? ofmyself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten onthe coastwise, old-country ships? of the rough fare and rougher usage,where kicks and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place ofspeech, and fear and hatred and pain were my only soul-experiences? I donot care to remember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I thinkof it. But there were coastwise skippers I would have returned andkilled when a man’s strength came to me, only the lines of my life werecast at the time in other places. I did return, not long ago, butunfortunately the skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in the olddays, a skipper when I met him, and when I left him a cripple who wouldnever walk again.”

“But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside of aschool, how did you learn to read and write?” I queried.

“In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship’s boy atfourteen, ordinary seamen at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen, and cockof the fo’c’sle, infinite ambition and infinite loneliness, receivingneither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself—navigation,mathematics, science, literature, and what not. And of what use has itbeen? Master and owner of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, whenI am beginning to diminish and die. Paltry, isn’t it? And when the sunwas 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 tothe purple,” he answered grimly. “No man makes opportunity. All thegreat men ever did was to know it when it came to them. The Corsicanknew. I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have knownthe 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 livingman, except my own brother.”

“And what is he? And where is he?”

“Master of the steamship _Macedonia_, seal-hunter,” was the answer. “Wewill 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 scarcelyread or write.”

“And he has never philosophized on life,” I added.

“No,” Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness. “Andhe is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living itto think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books.”