The Sea Wolf | Page 7

first thought was that a man who had
come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more
attention than I received. Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared
curiously across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.
Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships. There,
on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully clothed,
though his shirt was ripped open in front. Nothing was to be seen of his
chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of black hair, in
appearance like the furry coat of a dog. His face and neck were hidden
beneath a black beard, intershot with grey, which would have been stiff
and bushy had it not been limp and draggled and dripping with water.
His eyes were closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his
mouth was wide open, his breast, heaving as though from suffocation
as he laboured noisily for breath. A sailor, from time to time and quite
methodically, as a matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the
ocean at the end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its
contents over the prostrate man.
Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely
chewing the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had
rescued me from the sea. His height was probably five feet ten inches,
or ten and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of
this, but of his strength. And yet, while he was of massive build, with
broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength as
massive. It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of the
kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because of his
heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order. Not that in
appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like. What I am striving to
express is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical
semblance. It was a strength we are wont to associate with things
primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our
tree-dwelling prototypes to have been--a strength savage, ferocious,
alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the
elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been
moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the

head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in
the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod
of a finger.
Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who
paced up and down. He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet struck
the deck squarely and with surety; every movement of a muscle, from
the heave of the shoulders to the tightening of the lips about the cigar,
was decisive, and seemed to come out of a strength that was excessive
and overwhelming. In fact, though this strength pervaded every action
of his, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater strength that lurked
within, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, but
which might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the
rage of a lion or the wrath of a storm.
The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned
encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the
direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I
was given to understand that he was the captain, the "Old Man," in the
cook's vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put to the
trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had half started forward, to get
over with what I was certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a
more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who
was lying on his back. He wrenched and writhed about convulsively.
The chin, with the damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the
back muscles stiffened and the chest swelled in an unconscious and
instinctive effort to get more air. Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I
knew that the skin was taking on a purplish hue.
The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and
gazed down at the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle become
that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over him and
stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping its
contents to the deck. The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch with his
heels,