The Sea Wolf / Морской волк. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Wolf Larsen looked curiously at him, as though about to probe and vivisect him, then changed his mind, as from the foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe.

“Hump,” he said to me, elaborately polite, “kindly take Mr. Mugridge’s arm and help him up on deck. He is not feeling very well.”

“And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,” he added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.

I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors who had been told off for the purpose.

Mr. Mugridge was sleepily spluttering that he was a gentleman’s son. But as I descended the companion stairs to clear the table I heard him shriek as the first bucket of water struck him.

Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.

“One hundred and eighty-five dollars even,” he said aloud. “Just as I thought. The beggar came aboard without a cent.”

“And what you have won is mine, sir,” I said boldly.

He favoured me with a quizzical smile. “Hump, I have studied some grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.

�Was mine,’ you should have said, not �is mine.’”

“It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics,” I answered.

It was possibly a minute before he spoke.

“D’ye know, Hump,” he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it an indefinable strain of sadness, “that this is the first time I have heard the word �ethics’ in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on this ship who know its meaning.

”

“At one time in my life,” he continued, after another pause, “I dreamed that I might some day talk with men who used such language, that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as ethics. And this is the first time I have ever heard the word pronounced. Which is all by the way, for you are wrong. It is a question neither of grammar nor ethics, but of fact.

”

“I understand,” I said. “The fact is that you have the money.”

His face brightened. He seemed pleased at my perspicacity. “But it is avoiding the real question,” I continued, “which is one of right.”

“Ah,” he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, “I see you still believe in such things as right and wrong.”

“But don’t you? – at all?” I demanded.

“Not the least bit. Might is right, and that is all there is to it.