Wolf Larsen ceased swearing as suddenly as he had begun.He relighted his cigar and glanced around.His eyes chanced upon the cook.
"Well, Cooky?" he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the temper of steel.
"Yes, sir," the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and apologetic servility.
"Don't you think you've stretched that neck of yours just about enough?
It's unhealthy, you know.The mate's gone, so I can't afford to lose you too.You must be very, very careful of your health, Cooky.Understand?"His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his previous utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip.The cook quailed under it.
"Yes, sir," was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared into the galley.
At this sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, the rest of the crew became uninterested and fell to work at one task or another.Anumber of men, however, who were lounging about a companionway between the galley and the hatch, and who did not seem to be sailors, continued talking in low tones with one another.These, afterward learned, were the hunters, the men who shot the seals, and a very superior breed to common sailor-folk.
"Johansen!" Wolf Larsen called out.A sailor stepped forward obediently.
"Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up.You'll find some old canvas in the sail-locker.Make it do.""What'll I put on his feet, sir?" the man asked, after the customary "Ay, ay, sir.""We'll see to that," Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice in a call of "Cooky!"Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the- box.
"Go below and fill a sack with coal."
"Any of you fellows got a Bible or prayer-book?" was the captain's next demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the companionway.
They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I did not catch, but which raised a general laugh.
Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors.Bibles and prayer-books seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to pursue the quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with the information that there was none.
The captain shrugged his shoulders."Then we'll drop him over without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking cast-away has the burial service at sea by heart."By this time he 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 gray 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 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 vigor 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 pigeonhole 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 gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine;which is gray, dark and light, and greenish gray, 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, Iwas 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 Iever canvassed it.I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself had sillily stammered, "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 schoolmaster.
"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.