to 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.
"Then it is good to be an anarchist!" he cried. He, too, had risen, and
he stood facing her, where she had paused at the door of her room, as he
went on:
"'Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy; will not drive us hence;
Here we may reign secure; and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
It was the defiant cry of a mighty spirit. The cabin still rang with his
voice, as he stood there, swaying, his bronzed face shining, his head up
and dominant, and his eyes, golden and masculine, intensely masculine and
insistently soft, flashing upon Maud at the door.
Agai
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