📔 The Sea-Wolf

Quotes from this book

"I understand," I said. "The fact is that you have the money." His face brightened. He seemed pleased at my perspicacity. “But you read him misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life.” We shivered miserably throughout the night. Now and again fitfully slept, but the pain of the cold always aroused me. In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is pleasantly areek with the odor of their [the flying-fish] frying; The fog seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on either side like seaweed on the snout of Leviathan. 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. I think I have read something about them. Dr. Jordan's book, I believe. They are the young bulls, not old enough to have harems of their own. He called them the holluschickie, or something like that. The deck was continually awash with the sea which came inboard over the rail and through the scuppers. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral. As he made the demand he spat out a mouthful of blood and teeth and shoved his pugnacious face close to Oofty-Oofty.