The Sea Wolf, Jack London [best memoirs of all time TXT] 📗

a steel trap about my wrist.  I cried aloud in awful fear, a wild inarticulate cry; and I caught one glimpse of his face, malignant and triumphant, as his other hand compassed my body and I was drawn down to him in a terrible grip.

My wrist was released, but his other arm, passed around my back, held both my arms so that I could not move.  His free hand went to my throat, and in that moment I knew the bitterest foretaste of death earned by one’s own idiocy.  Why had I trusted myself within reach of those terrible arms?  I could feel other hands at my throat.  They were Maud’s hands, striving vainly to tear loose the hand that was throttling me.  She gave it up, and I heard her scream in a way that cut me to the soul, for it was a woman’s scream of fear and heart-breaking despair.  I had heard it before, during the sinking of the Martinez.

My face was against his chest and I could not see, but I heard Maud turn and run swiftly away along the deck.  Everything was happening quickly.  I had not yet had a glimmering of unconsciousness, and it seemed that an interminable period of time was lapsing before I heard her feet flying back.  And just then I felt the whole man sink under me.  The breath was leaving his lungs and his chest was collapsing under my weight.  Whether it was merely the expelled breath, or his consciousness of his growing impotence, I know not, but his throat vibrated with a deep groan.  The hand at my throat relaxed.  I breathed.  It fluttered and tightened again.  But even his tremendous will could not overcome the dissolution that assailed it.  That will of his was breaking down.  He was fainting.

Maud’s footsteps were very near as his hand fluttered for the last time and my throat was released.  I rolled off and over to the deck on my back, gasping and blinking in the sunshine.  Maud was pale but composed,—my eyes had gone instantly to her face,—and she was looking at me with mingled alarm and relief.  A heavy seal-club in her hand caught my eyes, and at that moment she followed my gaze down to it.  The club dropped from her hand as though it had suddenly stung her, and at the same moment my heart surged with a great joy.  Truly she was my woman, my mate-woman, fighting with me and for me as the mate of a caveman would have fought, all the primitive in her aroused, forgetful of her culture, hard under the softening civilization of the only life she had ever known.

“Dear woman!” I cried, scrambling to my feet.

The next moment she was in my arms, weeping convulsively on my shoulder while I clasped her close.  I looked down at the brown glory of her hair, glinting gems in the sunshine far more precious to me than those in the treasure-chests of kings.  And I bent my head and kissed her hair softly, so softly that she did not know.

Then sober thought came to me.  After all, she was only a woman, crying her relief, now that the danger was past, in the arms of her protector or of the one who had been endangered.  Had I been father or brother, the situation would have been in nowise different.  Besides, time and place were not meet, and I wished to earn a better right to declare my love.  So once again I softly kissed her hair as I felt her receding from my clasp.

“It was a real attack this time,” I said: “another shock like the one that made him blind.  He feigned at first, and in doing so brought it on.”

Maud was already rearranging his pillow.

“No,” I said, “not yet.  Now that I have him helpless, helpless he shall remain.  From this day we live in the cabin.  Wolf Larsen shall live in the steerage.”

I caught him under the shoulders and dragged him to the companion-way.  At my direction Maud fetched a rope.  Placing this under his shoulders, I balanced him across the threshold and lowered him down the steps to the floor.  I could not lift him directly into a bunk, but with Maud’s help I lifted first his shoulders and head, then his body, balanced him across the edge, and rolled him into a lower bunk.

But this was not to be all.  I recollected the handcuffs in his state-room, which he preferred to use on sailors instead of the ancient and clumsy ship irons.  So, when we left him, he lay handcuffed hand and foot.  For the first time in many days I breathed freely.  I felt strangely light as I came on deck, as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.  I felt, also, that Maud and I had drawn more closely together.  And I wondered if she, too, felt it, as we walked along the deck side by side to where the stalled foremast hung in the shears.

CHAPTER XXXVII

At once we moved aboard the Ghost, occupying our old state-rooms and cooking in the galley.  The imprisonment of Wolf Larsen had happened most opportunely, for what must have been the Indian summer of this high latitude was gone and drizzling stormy weather had set in.  We were very comfortable, and the inadequate shears, with the foremast suspended from them, gave a business-like air to the schooner and a promise of departure.

And now that we had Wolf Larsen in irons, how little did we need it!  Like his first attack, his second had been accompanied by serious disablement.  Maud made the discovery in the afternoon while trying to give him nourishment.  He had shown signs of consciousness, and she had spoken to him, eliciting no response.  He was lying on his left side at the time, and in evident pain.  With a restless movement he rolled his head around, clearing his left ear from the pillow against which it had been pressed.  At once he heard and answered her, and at once she came to me.

Pressing the pillow against his left ear, I asked him if he heard me, but he gave no sign.  Removing the pillow and, repeating the question he answered promptly that he did.

“Do you know you are deaf in the right ear?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered in a low, strong voice, “and worse than that.  My whole right side is affected.  It seems asleep.  I cannot move arm or leg.”

“Feigning again?” I demanded angrily.

He shook his head, his stern mouth shaping the strangest, twisted smile.  It was indeed a twisted smile, for it was on the left side only, the facial muscles of the right side moving not at all.

“That was the last play of the Wolf,” he said.  “I am paralysed.  I shall never walk again.  Oh, only on the other side,” he added, as though divining the suspicious glance I flung at his left leg, the knee of which had just then drawn up, and elevated the blankets.

“It’s unfortunate,” he continued.  “I’d liked to have done for you first, Hump.  And I thought I had that much left in me.”

“But why?” I asked; partly in horror, partly out of curiosity.

Again his stern mouth framed the twisted smile, as he said:

“Oh, just to be alive, to be living and doing, to be the biggest bit of the ferment to the end, to eat you.  But to die this way.”

He shrugged his shoulders, or attempted to shrug them, rather, for the left shoulder alone moved.  Like the smile, the shrug was twisted.

“But how can you account for it?” I asked.  “Where is the seat of your trouble?”

“The brain,” he said at once.  “It was those cursed headaches brought it on.”

“Symptoms,” I said.

He nodded his head.  “There is no accounting for it.  I was never sick in my life.  Something’s gone wrong with my brain.  A cancer, a tumour, or something of that nature,—a thing that devours and destroys.  It’s attacking my nerve-centres, eating them up, bit by bit, cell by cell—from the pain.”

“The motor-centres, too,” I suggested.

“So it would seem; and the curse of it is that I must lie here, conscious, mentally unimpaired, knowing that the lines are going down, breaking bit by bit communication with the world.  I cannot see, hearing and feeling are leaving me, at this rate I shall soon cease to speak; yet all the time I shall be here, alive, active, and powerless.”

“When you say you are here, I’d suggest the likelihood of the soul,” I said.

“Bosh!” was his retort.  “It simply means that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched.  I can remember, I can think and reason.  When that goes, I go.  I am not.  The soul?”

He broke out in mocking laughter, then turned his left ear to the pillow as a sign that he wished no further conversation.

Maud and I went about our work oppressed by the fearful fate which had overtaken him,—how fearful we were yet fully to realize.  There was the awfulness of retribution about it.  Our thoughts were deep and solemn, and we spoke to each other scarcely above whispers.

“You might remove the handcuffs,” he said that night, as we stood in consultation over him.  “It’s dead safe.  I’m a paralytic now.  The next thing to watch out for is bed sores.”

He smiled his twisted smile, and Maud, her eyes wide with horror, was compelled to turn away her head.

“Do you know that your smile is crooked?” I asked him; for I knew that she must attend him, and I wished to save her as much as possible.

“Then I shall smile no more,” he said calmly.  “I thought something was wrong.  My right cheek has been numb all day.  Yes, and I’ve had warnings of this for the last three days; by spells, my right side seemed going to sleep, sometimes arm or hand, sometimes leg or foot.”

“So my smile is crooked?” he queried a short while after.  “Well, consider henceforth that I smile internally, with my soul, if you please, my soul.  Consider that I am smiling now.”

And for the space of several minutes he lay there, quiet, indulging his grotesque fancy.

The man of him was not changed.  It was the old, indomitable, terrible Wolf Larsen, imprisoned somewhere within that flesh which had once been so invincible and splendid.  Now it bound him with insentient fetters, walling his soul in darkness and silence, blocking it from the world which to him had been a riot of action.  No more would he conjugate the verb “to do in every mood and tense.”  “To be” was all that remained to him—to be, as he had defined death, without movement; to will, but not to execute; to think and reason and in the spirit of him to be as alive as ever, but in the flesh to be dead, quite dead.

And yet, though I even removed the handcuffs, we could not adjust ourselves to his condition.  Our minds revolted.  To us he was full of potentiality.  We knew not what to expect of him next, what fearful thing, rising above the flesh, he might break out and do.  Our experience warranted this state of mind, and we went about our work with anxiety always upon us.

I had solved the problem which had arisen through the shortness of the shears.  By means of the watch-tackle (I had made a new one), I heaved the butt of the foremast across the rail and then lowered it to the deck.  Next, by means of the shears, I hoisted the main boom on board.  Its forty feet of length would supply the height necessary properly to swing the mast.  By means of a secondary tackle I had attached to the shears, I swung the boom to a nearly perpendicular position, then lowered the butt to the deck, where, to prevent slipping, I spiked great cleats around it.  The single block of my original