This is
different from the books and from what I know of existence. It is
revelation. Life is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter
flame that informs Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he--with no hope of any
profit, not a hero, not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to
God, but a mere filthy, malignant rat--how dare he, I ask myself, be
so defiant, so death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt
all the schools of the metaphysicians and the realists. No
philosophy has a leg to stand on that does not account for Mulligan
Jacobs. And all the midnight oil of philosophy I have burned does
not enable me to account for Mulligan Jacobs . . . unless he be
insane. And then I don't know.
Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these
humans with whom I am herded on the Elsinore?
And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is
another one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon.
He is the pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when
the men were routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass--the
man I so instantly adjudged a drug-fiend.
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