The Sea-Wolf - Jack London (the read aloud family txt) 📗

As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging triumph and exultation, into Swinburne’s lines. And he read rightly, and he read well. He had hardly ceased reading when Louis put his head into the companionway and whispered down:

“Be easy, will ye? The fog’s lifted, an’ ’tis the port light iv a steamer that’s crossin’ our bow this blessed minute.”

Wolf Larsen sprang on deck, and so swiftly that by the time we followed him he had pulled the steerage slide over the drunken clamour and was on his way forward to close the forecastle scuttle. The fog, though it remained, had lifted high, where it obscured the stars and made the night quite black. Directly ahead of us I could see a bright red light and a white light, and I could hear the pulsing of a steamer’s engines. Beyond a doubt it was the Macedonia.

Wolf Larsen had returned to the poop, and we stood in a silent group, watching the lights rapidly cross our bow.

“Lucky for me he doesn’t carry a searchlight,” Wolf Larsen said.

“What if I should cry out loudly?” I queried in a whisper.

“It would be all up,” he answered. “But have you thought upon what would immediately happen?”

Before I had time to express any desire to know, he had me by the throat with his gorilla grip, and by a faint quiver of the muscles⁠—a hint, as it were⁠—he suggested to me the twist that would surely have broken my neck. The next moment he had released me and we were gazing at the Macedonia’s lights.

“What if I should cry out?” Maud asked.

“I like you too well to hurt you,” he said softly⁠—nay, there was a tenderness and a caress in his voice that made me wince.

“But don’t do it, just the same, for I’d promptly break Mr. Van Weyden’s neck.”

“Then she has my permission to cry out,” I said defiantly.

“I hardly think you’ll care to sacrifice the Dean of American Letters the Second,” he sneered.

We spoke no more, though we had become too used to one another for the silence to be awkward; and when the red light and the white had disappeared we returned to the cabin to finish the interrupted supper.

Again they fell to quoting, and Maud gave Dowson’s “Impenitentia Ultima.” She rendered it beautifully, but I watched not her, but Wolf Larsen. I was fascinated by the fascinated look he bent upon Maud. He was quite out of himself, and I noticed the unconscious movement of his lips as he shaped word for word as fast as she uttered them. He interrupted her when she gave the lines:

“And her eyes should be my light while the sun went out behind me,
And the viols in her voice be the last sound in my ear.”

“There are viols in your voice,” he said bluntly, and his eyes flashed their golden light.

I could have shouted with joy at her control. She finished the concluding stanza without faltering and then slowly guided the conversation into less perilous channels. And all the while I sat in a half-daze, the drunken riot of the steerage breaking through the bulkhead, the man I feared and the woman I loved talking on and on. The table was not cleared. The man who had taken Mugridge’s place had evidently joined his comrades in the forecastle.

If ever Wolf Larsen attained the summit of living, he attained it then. From time to time I forsook my own thoughts to follow him, and I followed in amaze, mastered for the moment by his remarkable intellect, under the spell of his passion, for he was preaching the passion of revolt. It was inevitable that Milton’s Lucifer should be instanced, and the keenness with which Wolf Larsen analysed and depicted the character was a revelation of his stifled genius. It reminded me of Taine, yet I knew the man had never heard of that brilliant though dangerous thinker.

“He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God’s thunderbolts,” Wolf Larsen was saying. “Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten. A third of God’s angels he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no! God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater. But Lucifer was a free spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility. He did not care to serve God. He cared to serve nothing. He was no figurehead. He stood on his own legs. He was an individual.”

“The first Anarchist,” Maud laughed, rising and preparing to withdraw to her stateroom.

“Then it is good to be an anarchist!” he cried. He, too, had risen, and he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of her room, as he went on:

“Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit. The cabin still rang with his voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up and dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely masculine and insistently soft, flashing upon Maud at the door.

Again that unnamable and unmistakable terror was in her eyes, and she said, almost in a whisper, “You are Lucifer.”

The door closed and she was gone. He stood staring after her for a minute, then returned to himself and to me.

“I’ll relieve Louis at the wheel,” he said shortly, “and call upon you to relieve at midnight. Better turn in now and get some sleep.”

He pulled on