meditating an outbreak more terrible than any I had seen.
As I say, he discovered himself in splendid trim when I entered the cabin. He had had no headaches for weeks, his eyes were clear blue as the sky, his bronze was beautiful with perfect health; life swelled through his veins in full and magnificent flood. While waiting for me he had engaged Maud in animated discussion. Temptation was the topic they had hit upon, and from the few words I heard I made out that he was contending that temptation was temptation only when a man was seduced by it and fell.
“For look you,” he was saying, “as I see it, a man does things because of desire. He has many desires. He may desire to escape pain, or to enjoy pleasure. But whatever he does, he does because he desires to do it.”
“But suppose he desires to do two opposite things, neither of which will permit him to do the other?” Maud interrupted.
“The very thing I was coming to,” he said.
“And between these two desires is just where the soul of the man is manifest,” she went on. “If it is a good soul, it will desire and do the good action, and the contrary if it is a bad soul. It is the soul that decides.”
“Bosh and nonsense!” he exclaimed impatiently. “It is the desire that decides. Here is a man who wants to, say, get drunk. Also, he doesn’t want to get drunk. What does he do? How does he do it? He is a puppet. He is the creature of his desires, and of the two desires he obeys the strongest one, that is all. His soul hasn’t anything to do with it. How can he be tempted to get drunk and refuse to get drunk? If the desire to remain sober prevails, it is because it is the strongest desire. Temptation plays no part, unless-” he paused while grasping the new thought which had come into his mind-“unless he is tempted to remain sober.
“Ha! ha!” he laughed. “What do you think of that, Mr. Van Weyden?”
“That both of you are hair-splitting,” I said. “The man’s soul is his desires. Or, if you will, the sum of his desires is his soul. Therein you are both wrong. You lay the stress upon the desire apart from the soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire, and in point of fact soul and desire are the same thing.
“However,” I continued, “Miss Brewster is right in contending that temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome. Fire is fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely. So is desire like fire. It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of the thing desired, or by a new and luring description or comprehension of the thing desired. There lies the temptation. It is the wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to mastery. That’s temptation. It may not fan sufficiently to make the desire overmastering, but in so far as it fans at all, that far is it temptation. And, as you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil.”
I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table. My words had been decisive. At least they had put an end to the discussion.
But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen him before. It was as though he were bursting with pent energy which must find an outlet somehow. Almost immediately he launched into a discussion on love. As usual, his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud’s was the idealistic. For myself, beyond a word or so of suggestion or correction now and again, I took no part.
He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread of the conversation through studying her face as she talked. It was a face that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed and vivacious. Her wit was playing keenly, and she was enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf Larsen, and he was enjoying it hugely. For some reason, though I know not why in the argument, so utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of one stray brown lock of Maud’s hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel, where she says:
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 companion-way 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
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
“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 figure-head. He stood on his own legs. He was an individual.”
“The first Anarchist,” Maud laughed, rising and preparing to withdraw to her state-room.
