“That’s your look-out. You haven’t any lawyer or business agent now, so you’ll have to depend on yourself. When you get a dollar, hang on to it. A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to lose it. Besides, you have sinned. You have no right to put temptation in the way of your fellow-creatures. You tempted Cooky, and he fell. You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy. By the way, do you believe in the immortal soul?” His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul. But it was an illusion. Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far into Wolf Larsen’s soul, or seen it at all,—of this I am convinced. It was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at rare moments it played at doing so. “I read immortality in your eyes,” I answered, dropping the “sir,”—an experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation warranted it. He took no notice. “By that, I take it, you see something that is alive, but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.” “I read more than that,” I continued boldly. “Then you read consciousness. You read the consciousness of life that it is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.” How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought! From regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the leaden sea to windward. A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of his mouth grew severe and harsh. He was evidently in a pessimistic mood. “Then to what end?” he demanded abruptly, turning back to me. “If I am immortal—why?” I halted. How could I explain my idealism to this man? How could I put into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended utterance? “What do you believe, then?” I countered. “I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?” He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships. “They move, so does the jelly-fish move. They move in order to eat in order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake. It’s a circle; you get nowhere. Neither do they. In the end they come to a standstill. They move no more. They are dead.” “They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams—” “Of grub,” he concluded sententiously. “And of more—”