"The Sea-Wolf" by Jack London, Chapters 18–25

Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the Cisco, and, to Wolf Larsen’s huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke, with Nilson and Leach, from the San Diego.

Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life, was soon limping about again and performing his double duties of cook and cabin-boy.

The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity.

We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf Larsen, who was too evidently disappointed in that it was not his own boat with the two victims of his malice.

Indeed, she was a slender, delicate woman as women go, but to me she was so ethereally slender and delicate that I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my grasp.

She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor’s blankets, her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf Larsen’s bunk.

Louis gave a spoke and temporized. “They’d never iv made the land, sir, I’m thinkin’.”

I know not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of a knife when he mentioned her. I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely shrugged my shoulders in answer.

“Then here’s a compact,” he went on, consummate actor. “If I promise not to lay my hands upon Leach will you promise, in turn, not to attempt to kill me?”

The boat was close at hand now, and in desperate plight. Johnson was steering, Leach bailing.

I did not see into the eyes of Leach, for he was looking at Wolf Larsen, the old and implacable snarl of hatred strong as ever on his face.

The spritsail filled with the wind, suddenly, careening the frail open craft till it seemed it would surely capsize.

For Johnson and Leach the travail of existence had ceased.

While really very estimable, Mr. Van Weyden is sometimes—how shall I say?—er—quarrelsome, and harsh measures are necessary.

People eat, therefore they must procure the wherewithal. These men here shoot seals in order to live; for the same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden, for the present at any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me.

“Yes, I have,” she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud at his crestfallen visage.

She was too unused as yet to the whims of the man to accept them with equanimity.

The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster and me in the conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion, and it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim.

Mugridge’s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning crew in pursuit.

“As I was saying,” he went on, as though nothing unwonted had happened, “the shark was not in the reckoning. It was—ahem—shall we say Providence?”

We have not the strength with which to fight this man; we must dissimulate, and win, if win we can, by craft.

Don’t arouse this man’s animosity. Be quite friendly with him, talk with him, discuss literature and art with him—he is fond of such things.

“And it was a newspaper poem,” she said glibly.

He was cat-footed, and lithe, and strong, always strong.

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.

“Sleep-walking, sunstroke,—what?” he barked.
“No; indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing untoward had occurred.

“About what?” he asked, so innocently that Wolf Larsen was disconcerted, while the others smiled.

We knew she carried fourteen boats to our five (we were one short through the desertion of Wainwright), and she began dropping them far to leeward of our last boat, continued dropping them athwart our course, and finished dropping them far to windward of our first weather boat.

“Their innate sense of right has been violated,” Maud Brewster said, joining the conversation.

A boy’s cap was perched on her head, and her hair, light brown and arranged in a loose and fluffy order that caught the sun, seemed an aureole about the delicate oval of her face.

Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate.

He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.

The sailors must have learned whatever project was on hand, and the vim and snap they put into their work attested their enthusiasm.

“To gam,” among the sealing-schooners, is a substitute for the verbs “to visit,” “to gossip.” It expresses the garrulity of the sea, and is a pleasant break in the monotony of the life.

But he reassured himself with a glance down at his host—a big man himself but dwarfed by the propinquity of the giant.

“Who knows? you may have to sail with me for a time,” he said, quite softly, with a silken threat that belied the softness, as they moved slowly to comply, “and we might as well start with a friendly understanding. Lively now! Death Larsen makes you jump better than that, and you know it!”

It is because I am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my mind because I do not wish to die. But my spirit masters the trembling flesh and the qualms of the mind.

Our men, clustering amidships, waved their hats and raised a derisive cheer.

The grey mist drove by us like a rain. Every woollen filament of our garments, every hair of our heads and faces, was jewelled with a crystal globule.

And what little there was,—the slapping of a few reef-points and the creaking of a sheave in a block or two,—was ghostly under the hollow echoing pall in which we were swathed.