| BRAVE WINDS, BLOWING FAIR, swiftly drove the Ghost northward
into the sealherd. 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 or 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 were lowered day after
day, were swallowed up in the gray 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 gray.
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 before 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 maneuvered 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 specter.
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 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, 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 lift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed,
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 companionway. 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 gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft
and golden, and all adance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded,
or welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a flowing radiance.
Perhaps it was to this that the golden color was due; but golden
his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring
and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor 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
color and the dancing lights were gone. Cold and gray 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 skeptical, my
mind flew back to a small note in a biographical directory, 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. These 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
esthetic 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 would have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at
the head of the companionway 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.
'Sleepwalking, sunstroke- what?' he barked.
'No; indigestion,' I retorted, and continued my walk as if
nothing untoward had occurred.
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