JACK LONDON: All 22 Novels in One Illustrated Edition. Джек Лондон
oars and at the expense of much effort got the boat clear of the Ghost. Then I experimented with the sail. I had seen the boat-steerers and hunters set their spritsails many times, yet this was my first attempt. What took them possibly two minutes took me twenty, but in the end I succeeded in setting and trimming it, and with the steering-oar in my hands hauled on the wind.
“There lies Japan,” I remarked, “straight before us.”
“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, “you are a brave man.”
“Nay,” I answered, “it is you who are a brave woman.”
We turned our heads, swayed by a common impulse to see the last of the Ghost. Her low hull lifted and rolled to windward on a sea; her canvas loomed darkly in the night; her lashed wheel creaked as the rudder kicked; then sight and sound of her faded away, and we were alone on the dark sea.
Chapter XXVII
Day broke, grey and chill. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breeze and the compass indicated that we were just making the course which would bring us to Japan. Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, and they pained from the grip on the steering-oar. My feet were stinging from the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently that the sun would shine.
Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud. She, at least, was warm, for under her and over her were thick blankets. The top one I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but the vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from the covering and jewelled with moisture from the air.
Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only a man would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world. So insistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, the top fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavy with sleep.
“Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,” she said. “Have you sighted land yet?”
“No,” I answered, “but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles an hour.”
She made a moue of disappointment.
“But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles in twenty-four hours,” I added reassuringly.
Her face brightened. “And how far have we to go?”
“Siberia lies off there,” I said, pointing to the west. “But to the south-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should hold, we’ll make it in five days.”
“And if it storms? The boat could not live?”
She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, and thus she looked at me as she asked the question.
“It would have to storm very hard,” I temporized.
“And if it storms very hard?”
I nodded my head. “But we may be picked up any moment by a sealing-schooner. They are plentifully distributed over this part of the ocean.”
“Why, you are chilled through!” she cried. “Look! You are shivering. Don’t deny it; you are. And here I have been lying warm as toast.”
“I don’t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and were chilled,” I laughed.
“It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.”
She sat up and began making her simple toilet. She shook down her hair, and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders. Dear, damp brown hair! I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through my fingers, to bury my face in it. I gazed entranced, till the boat ran into the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to my duties. Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite of my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much of the physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritual bond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the flesh had little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’s hair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the light that shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips. After all, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only; nor could it express itself in terms of itself. Jehovah was anthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only in terms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image, as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which the mind of the Israelites could grasp.
And so I gazed upon Maud’s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learned more of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all their songs and sonnets. She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, and her face emerged, smiling.
“Why don’t women wear their hair down always?” I asked. “It is so much more beautiful.”
“If it didn’t tangle so dreadfully,” she laughed. “There! I’ve lost one of my precious hair-pins!”
I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again, such was my delight in following her every movement as she searched through the blankets for the pin. I was surprised, and joyfully, that she was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerism that was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy. For I had been elevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far from the plane of the human, and too far from me. I had been making of her a creature goddess-like and unapproachable. So I hailed with delight the little traits that proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the toss of the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for the pin. She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy of kind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and awe in which I knew I should always hold her.
She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attention more fully to my steering. I proceeded to experiment, lashing and wedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the wind without my assistance. Occasionally it came up too close, or fell off too freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main behaved satisfactorily.
“And now we shall have breakfast,” I said. “But first you must be more warmly clad.”
I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanket goods. I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it could resist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting. When she had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy’s cap she wore for a man’s cap, large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap was turned down, to completely cover her neck and ears. The effect was charming. Her face was of the sort that cannot but look well under all circumstances. Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nigh classic lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes, clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.
A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then. The boat was caught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave. It went over suddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketful or so of water. I was opening a can of tongue at the moment, and I sprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time. The sail flapped and fluttered, and the boat paid off. A few minutes of regulating sufficed to put it on its course again, when I returned to the preparation of breakfast.
“It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things nautical,” she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steering contrivance.
“But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,” I explained. “When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on the quarter, it will be necessary for me to steer.”
“I must say I don’t understand your technicalities,” she said, “but I do your conclusion,