I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen of him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them. But when I came to make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge Edition. It was open at “In a Balcony,” and I noticed, here and there, passages underlined in pencil. Further, letting drop the volume during a lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper fell out. It was scrawled over with geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.
It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering. I had already remarked that his language was excellent, marred with an occasional slight inaccuracy. Of course, in common speech with the sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly bristled with errors, which was due to the vernacular itself; but in the few words he had held with me it had been clear and correct.
This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me, for I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.
“I have been robbed,” I said to him, a little later, when I found him pacing up and down the poop alone.
“Sir,” he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.
“I have been robbed, sir,” I amended.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
Then I told him the whole circumstance, how my clothes had been left to dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook when I mentioned the matter.
He smiled at my recital. “Pickings,” he concluded; “Cooky’s pickings. And don’t you think your miserable life worth the price? Besides, consider it a lesson. You’ll learn in time how to take care of your money for yourself. I suppose, up to now, your lawyer has done it for you, or your business agent.”
I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, “How can I get it back again?”
“That’s your look-out. You haven’t any lawyer or business agent now, so you’ll have to depend on yourself. When you get a dollar, hang on to it. A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to lose it. Besides, you have sinned. You have no right to put temptation in the way of your fellow-creatures. You tempted Cooky, and he fell. You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy. By the way, do you believe in the immortal soul?”
His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul. But it was an illusion. Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far into Wolf Larsen’s soul, or seen it at all, – of this I am convinced. It was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at rare moments it played at doing so.
“I read immortality in your eyes,” I answered, dropping the “sir,” – an experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation warranted it.
He took no notice. “By that, I take it, you see something that is alive, but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.”
“I read more than that,” I continued boldly.
“Then you read consciousness. You read the consciousness of life that it is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.”
How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought! From regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the leaden sea to windward. A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of his mouth grew severe and harsh. He was evidently in a pessimistic mood.
“Then to what end?” he demanded abruptly, turning back to me. “If I am immortal – why?”
I halted. How could I explain my idealism to this man? How could I put into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended utterance?
“What do you believe, then?” I countered.
“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?”
He swept his am in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.
“They move, so does the jelly-fish move. They move in order to eat in order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake. It’s a circle; you get nowhere. Neither do they. In the end they come to a standstill. They move no more. They are dead.”
“They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams – “
“Of grub,” he concluded sententiously.
“And of more – “
“Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.” His voice sounded harsh. There was no levity in it. “For, look you, they dream of making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of becoming the mates of ships, of finding fortunes – in short, of being in a better position for preying on their fellows, of having all night in, good grub and somebody else to do the dirty work. You and I are just like them. There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better. I am eating them now, and you too. But in the past you have eaten more than I have. You have slept in soft beds, and worn fine clothes, and eaten good meals. Who made those beds? and those clothes? and those meals? Not you. You never made anything in your own sweat. You live on an income which your father earned. You are like a frigate bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of the fish they have caught. You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or business agent who handles your money, for a job.”
“But that is beside the matter,” I cried.
“Not at all.” He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were flashing. “It is piggishness, and it is life. Of what use or sense is an immortality of piggishness? What is the end? What is it all about? You have made no food. Yet the food you have eaten or wasted might have saved the lives of a score of wretches who made the food but did not eat it. What immortal end did you serve? or did they? Consider yourself and me. What does your boasted immortality amount to when your life runs foul of mine? You would like to go back to the land, which is a favourable place for your kind of piggishness. It is a whim of mine to keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness flourishes. And keep you I will. I may make or break you. You may die to-day, this week, or next month. I could kill you now, with a blow of my fist, for you are a miserable weakling. But if we are immortal, what is the reason for this? To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be just the thing for immortals to be doing. Again, what’s it all about? Why have I kept you here? – “
“Because you are stronger,” I managed to blurt out.
“But why stronger?” he went on at once with his perpetual queries. “Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you? Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
“But the hopelessness of it,” I protested.
“I agree with you,” he answered. “Then why move at all, since moving is living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness. But, – and there it is, – we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!”