The Sea Wolf | Page 9

had swung fully around and was facing me. "You're a
preacher, aren't you?" he asked.
The hunters,--there were six of them,--to a man, turned and regarded
me. I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow. A laugh went
up at my appearance,--a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the
dead man stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that
was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of
coarse feelings and blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither
courtesy nor gentleness.
Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight
glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite
close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of the
man as apart from his body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I had
heard him spew forth. The face, with large features and strong lines, of
the square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first
sight; but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish,

and a conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or
spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being.
The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling
heavily above the eyes,--these, while strong in themselves, unusually
strong, seemed to speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay
behind and beyond and out of sight. There was no sounding such a
spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly
classifying in some pigeon-hole with others of similar type.
The eyes--and it was my destiny to know them well--were large and
handsome, wide apart as the true artist's are wide, sheltering under a
heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows. The eyes
themselves were of that baffling protean grey which is never twice the
same; which runs through many shades and colourings like intershot
silk in sunshine; which is grey, dark and light, and greenish-grey, and
sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea. They were eyes that
masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened, at
rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about to fare
forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure,--eyes that
could brood with the hopeless sombreness of leaden skies; that could
snap and crackle points of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling
sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that
could warm and soften and be all a-dance with love-lights, intense and
masculine, luring and compelling, which at the same time fascinate and
dominate women till they surrender in a gladness of joy and of relief
and sacrifice.
But to return. I told him that, unhappily for the burial service, I was not
a preacher, when he sharply demanded:
"What do you do for a living?"
I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I
ever canvassed it. I was quite taken aback, and before I could find
myself had sillily stammered, "I--I am a gentleman."
His lip curled in a swift sneer.

"I have worked, I do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my
judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware
of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
"For your living?"
There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was
quite beside myself--"rattled," as Furuseth would have termed it, like a
quaking child before a stern school-master.
"Who feeds you?" was his next question.
"I have an income," I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my
tongue the next instant. "All of which, you will pardon my observing,
has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about."
But he disregarded my protest.
"Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead
men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone
between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals.
Let me see your hand."
His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred, swiftly and
accurately, or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had
stepped two paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it up
for inspection. I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers tightened, without
visible effort, till I thought mine would be crushed. It is hard to
maintain one's dignity under such circumstances. I could not squirm or
struggle like a schoolboy. Nor could I attack such a creature who had
but to twist my arm to break it. Nothing remained but to stand