The Works of Jack London: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs & Essays. Jack London
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plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass, And her ropes are taut with the dew, For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new.’”
“Eh, Hump? How’s it strike you?” he asked, after the due pause which words and setting demanded.
I looked into his face. It was aglow with light, as the sea itself, and the eyes were flashing in the starshine.
“It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should show enthusiasm,” I answered coldly.
“Why, man, it’s living! it’s life!” he cried.
“Which is a cheap thing and without value.” I flung his words at him.
He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in his voice.
“Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head, what a thing this life is. Of course life is valueless, except to itself. And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now—to myself. It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot help, for it is the life that is in me that makes the rating.”
He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought that was in him, and finally went on.
“Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But,” and his voice changed and the light went out of his face,—“what is this condition in which I find myself? this joy of living? this exultation of life? this inspiration, I may well call it? It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one’s digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well. It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the ferment—that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all, the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is alive. And—bah! To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays. And I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon, to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.”
He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with the weight and softness of a tiger. The Ghost ploughed on her way. I noted the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to it the effect of Wolf Larsen’s swift rush from sublime exultation to despair slowly left me. Then some deep-water sailor, from the waist of the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the “Song of the Trade Wind”:
“Oh, I am the wind the seamen love— I am steady, and strong, and true; They follow my track by the clouds above, O’er the fathomless tropic blue.
Through daylight and dark I follow the bark I keep like a hound on her trail; I’m strongest at noon, yet under the moon, I stiffen the bunt of her sail.”
Chapter VIII
Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has never arrived. And, finally, I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard ship. His tremendous virility and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him, even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.
I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost laughable to me who stood onlooker and who understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men. I know, with the possible exception of the incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when all the force of him is called into play.
While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon which I have already touched once or twice. The twelve o’clock dinner was over, one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin in order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended the companion stairs. Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-room opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to linger or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a day, a timid spectre.
“So you know how to play ‘Nap,’” Wolf Larsen was saying in a pleased sort of voice. “I might have guessed an Englishman would know. I learned it myself in English ships.”
Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so pleased was he at chumming thus with the captain. The little airs he put on and the painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified place in life would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous. He quite ignored my presence, though I credited him with being simply unable to see me. His pale, wishy-washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what blissful visions they beheld were beyond my imagination.
“Get the cards, Hump,” Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at the table. “And bring out the cigars and the whisky you’ll find in my berth.”
I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting broadly that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman’s son gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was a remittance man and was paid to keep away from England—“p’yed ‘ansomely, sir,” was the way he put it; “p’yed ‘ansomely to sling my ‘ook an’ keep slingin’ it.”
I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned, shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the tumblers. These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky—“a gentleman’s drink?” quoth Thomas Mugridge,—and they clinked their glasses to the glorious game of “Nap,” lighted cigars, and fell to shuffling and dealing the cards.
They played for money. They increased the amounts of the bets. They drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more. I do not know whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,—a thing he was thoroughly capable of doing,—but he won steadily. The cook made repeated journeys to his bunk for money. Each time he performed the journey with greater swagger, but he never brought more than a few dollars at a time. He grew maudlin, familiar, could hardly see the cards or sit upright. As a preliminary to another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larsen’s buttonhole with a greasy forefinger and vacuously proclaimed and reiterated, “I got money, I got money, I tell yer, an’ I’m a gentleman’s son.”
Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass, and if anything his glasses were fuller. There was no change in him. He did not appear even amused at the other’s antics.
In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman, the cook’s last money was staked on the game—and lost. Whereupon he leaned his head on his hands and wept. Wolf Larsen looked curiously at him, as though about to probe and vivisect him, then changed his mind, as from the foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe.