CHAPTER ONE.
I SCARCELY KNOW WHERE to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place
the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth's credit. He kept a summer
cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never
occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain. When summer came on,
he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to
toil incessantly. Had it not been my custom to run up to see him every
Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning, this
particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat on
San Francisco Bay.
Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the Martinez was a
new ferry-steamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run
between Sausalito and San Francisco. The danger lay in the heavy fog
which blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little
apprehension. In fact, I remember the placid exaltation with which I
took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly beneath the
pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my
imagination. A fresh breeze was blowing, and for a time I was alone in
the moist obscurity; yet not alone, for I was dimly conscious of the
presence of the pilot, and of what I took to be the captain, in the
glass house above my head.
I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor
which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and
navigation in order to visit my friend who lived across an arm of
the sea. It was good that men should be specialists, I mused. The
peculiar knowledge of the pilot and captain sufficed for many
thousands of people who knew no more of the sea and navigation than
I knew. On the other hand, instead of having to devote my energy to
the learning of a multitude of things, I concentrated it upon a few
particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe's
place in American literature, an essay of mine, by the way, in the
current 'Atlantic.' Coming aboard, as I passed through the cabin, I
had noticed with greedy eyes a stout gentleman reading the 'Atlantic,'
which was open at my very essay. And there it was again, the
division of labor, the special knowledge of the pilot and captain
which permitted the stout gentleman to read my special knowledge on
Poe while they carried him safely from Sausalito to San Francisco.
A red-faced man, slamming the cabin door behind him and stumping out
on the deck, interrupted my reflections, though I made a mental note
of the topic for use in a projected essay which I had thought of
calling 'The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.' The
red-faced man shot a glance up at the pilot-house, gazed around at the
fog, stumped across the deck and back (he evidently had artificial
legs), and stood still by my side, legs wide apart and with an
expression of keen enjoyment on his face. I was not wrong when I
decided that his days had been spent on the sea.
'It's nasty weather like this here that turns heads gray before
their time,' he said, with a nod toward the pilot-house.
'I had not thought there was any particular strain,' I answered. 'It
seems as simple as a-b-c. They know the direction by compass, the
distance, and the speed. I should not call it anything more than
mathematical certainty.'
'Strain!' he snorted. 'Simple as a-b-c! Mathematical certainty!'
He seemed to brace himself up and lean backward against the air as
he stared at me. 'How about this here tide that's rushin' out
through the Golden Gate?' he demanded, or bellowed, rather. 'How
fast is she ebbin'? What's the drift, eh? Listen to that, will you!
A bell-buoy, and we're atop of it! See 'em alterin' the course!'
From out of the fog came the mournful tolling of a bell, and I could
see the pilot turning the wheel with great rapidity. The bell, which
had seemed straight ahead, was now sounding from the side. Our own
whistle was blowing hoarsely, and from time to time the sound of other
whistles came to us from out of the fog.
'That's a ferryboat of some sort,' the newcomer said, indicating a
whistle off to the right. 'And there! D'ye hear that? Blown by
mouth. Some scow schooner, most likely. Better watch out, Mr.
Schooner-man. Ah, I thought so.'
The unseen ferryboat was blowing blast after blast, and the
mouth-blown horn was tooting in terror-stricken fashion.
'And now they're payin' their respects to each other and tryin' to
get clear,' the red-faced man went on, as the hurried whistling
ceased.
His face was shining, his eyes flashing with excitement, as he
translated into articulate language the speech of the horns and
sirens. 'That's a steam-siren a-goin' it over there to the left. And
you hear that fellow with a frog in his throat- a steam-schooner, as
near as I can judge, crawlin' in from the Heads against the tide.'
A shrill little whistle, piping as if gone mad, came from directly
ahead and from very near at hand. Gongs sounded on the Martinez. Our
paddlewheels stopped, their pulsing beat died away, and then they
started again. The shrill little whistle, like the chirping of a
cricket amid the cries of great beasts, shot through the fog from more
to the side and swiftly grew faint and fainter. I looked to my
companion for enlightenment.
'One of them daredevil launches,' he said. 'I almost wish we'd
sunk him, the little rip! They're the cause of more trouble. And
what good are they? Any jackass gets aboard one and thinks he can
run it, blowin' his whistle to beat the band and tellin' the rest of
the world to look out for him because he's comin' and can't look out
for himself. Because he's comin'! And you've got to look out, too.
Right of way! Common decency! They don't know the meanin' of it!'
I felt quite amused at his unwarranted choler, and while he
stumped moodily up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the
fog. And romantic it certainly was- the fog, like the gray shadow of
infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and
men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for
work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the
mystery, groping their way blindly through the unseen, and clamoring
and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with
incertitude and fear.
The voice of my companion brought me back to myself with a laugh. I,
too, had been groping and floundering, the while I thought I rode
clear-eyed through the mystery.
'Hello! Somebody comin' our way,' he was saying. 'And d'ye hear
that? He's comin' fast. Walkin' right along. Guess he don't hear us
yet. Wind's in wrong direction.'
The fresh breeze was blowing right down upon us, and I could hear
the whistle plainly, off to one side and a little ahead.
'Ferryboat?' I asked.
He nodded, then added: 'Or he wouldn't be keepin' up such a clip.'
He gave a short chuckle. 'They're gettin' anxious up there.'
I glanced up. The captain had thrust his head and shoulders out of
the pilot-house and was staring intently into the fog, as though by
sheer force of will he could penetrate it. His face was anxious, as
was the face of my companion, who had stumped over to the rail and was
gazing with a like intentness in the direction of the invisible
danger.
Then everything happened, and with inconceivable rapidity. The fog
seemed to break away as though split by a wedge, and the bow of a
steamboat emerged, trailing fog-wreaths on each side like seaweed on
the snout of Leviathan. I could see the pilot-house and a
white-bearded man leaning partly out of it, on his elbows. He was clad
in a blue uniform, and I remember noting how trim and quiet he was.
His quietness, under the circumstances, was terrible. He accepted
Destiny, marched hand in hand with it, and coolly measured the stroke.
As he leaned there, he ran a calm and speculative eye over us, as
though to determine the precise point of the collision, and took no
notice whatever when our pilot, white with rage, shouted, 'Now
you've done it!'
'Grab hold of something and hang on!' the red-faced man said to
me. All his bluster had gone, and he seemed to have caught the
contagion of preternatural calm. 'And listen to the women scream,'
he said grimly, almost bitterly, I thought, as though he had been
through the experience before.
The vessels came together before I could follow his advice. We
must have been struck squarely amidships, for I saw nothing, the
strange steamboat having passed beyond my line of vision. The Martinez
heeled over sharply, and there was a crashing and rending of timber. I
was thrown flat on the wet deck, and before I could scramble to my
feet I heard the screams of the women. This it was, I am certain,- the
most indescribable of bloodcurdling sounds,- that threw me into a
panic. I remembered the life-preservers stored in the cabin, but was
met at the door and swept backward by a wild rush of men and women.
What happened in the next few minutes I do not recollect, though I
have a clear remembrance of pulling down life-preservers from the
overhead racks while the red-faced man fastened them about the
bodies of an hysterical group of women. This memory is as distinct and
sharp as that of any picture I have seen. It is a picture, and I can
see it now- the jagged edges of the hole in the side of the cabin,
through which the gray fog swirled and eddied; the empty upholstered
seats, littered with all the evidences of sudden flight, such as
packages, hand-satchels, umbrellas, and wraps; the stout gentleman who
had been reading my essay, incased in cork and canvas, the magazine
still in his hand, and asking me with monotonous insistence if I
thought there was any danger; the red-faced man stumping gallantly
around on his artificial legs and buckling life-preservers on all
comers; and, finally, the screaming bedlam of women.
This it was, the screaming of the women, that most tried my
nerves. It must have tried, too, the nerves of the red-faced man,
for I have another picture which will never fade from my mind. The
stout gentleman is stuffing the magazine into his overcoat pocket
and looking on curiously. A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white
faces and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of lost souls; and
the red-faced man, his face now purplish with wrath, and with arms
extended overhead, as in the act of hurling thunderbolts, is shouting,
'Shut up! Oh, shut up!'
I remember the scene impelled me to sudden laughter, and in the next
instant I realized that I was becoming hysterical myself; for these
were women, of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the
fear of death upon them and unwilling to die. And I remember that
the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the
knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness of
the analogy. These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the
tenderest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming. They wanted
to live; they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they screamed.
The horror of it drove me out on deck. I was feeling sick and
squeamish, and sat down on a bench. In a hazy way I saw and heard
men rushing and shouting as they strove to lower the boats. It was
just as I had read descriptions of such scenes in books. The tackles
jammed. Nothing worked. One boat lowered away with the plugs out,
filled with women and children and then with water, and capsized.
Another boat had been lowered by one end and still hung in the
tackle by the other end where it had been abandoned. Nothing was to be
seen of the strange steamboat which had caused the disaster, though
I heard men saying that she would undoubtedly send boats to our
assistance.
I descended to the lower deck. The Martinez was sinking fast, for
the water was very near. Numbers of the passengers were leaping
overboard. Others, in the water, were clamoring to be taken aboard
again. No one heeded them. A cry arose that we were sinking. I was
seized by the consequent panic, and went over the side in a surge of
bodies. How I went over I do not know, though I did know, and
instantly, why those in the water were so desirous of getting back
on the steamer. The water was cold- so cold that it was painful. The
pang, as I plunged into it, was as quick and sharp as that of fire. It
bit to the marrow. It was like the grip of death. I gasped with the
anguish and shock of it, filling my lungs before the life-preserver
popped me to the surface. The taste of the salt was strong in my
mouth, and I was strangling with the acrid stuff in my throat and
lungs.
But it was the cold that was most distressing. I felt that I could
survive but a few minutes. People were struggling and floundering in
the water about me. I could hear them crying out to one another. And I
heard, also, the sound of oars. Evidently the strange steamboat had
lowered its boats. As the time went by I marveled that I was still
alive. I had no sensation whatever in my lower limbs, while a chilling
numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into it. Small
waves, with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and
into my mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.
The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing
chorus of screams in the distance and knew that the Martinez had
gone down. Later,- how much later I have no knowledge,- I came to
myself with a start of fear. I was alone, I could hear no calls or
cries- only the sound of the waves, made weirdly hollow and
reverberant by the fog. A panic in a crowd, which partakes of a sort
of community of interest, is not so terrible as a panic when one is by
oneself; and such a panic I now suffered. Whither was I drifting?
The red-faced man had said that the tide was ebbing through the Golden
Gate. Was I, then, being carried out to sea? And the life-preserver in
which I floated? was it not liable to go to pieces at any moment? I
had heard of such things being made of paper and hollow rushes,
which quickly became saturated and lost all buoyancy. I could not swim
a stroke, and I was alone, floating, apparently, in the midst of a
gray primordial vastness. I confess that a madness seized me, that I
shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and beat the water with my
numb hands.
How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness
intervened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled
and painful sleep. When I aroused, it was as after centuries of
time, and I saw, almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of
a vessel and three triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other
and filled with wind. Where the bow cut the water there was a great
foaming and gurgling, and I seemed directly in its path. I tried to
cry out, but was too exhausted. The bow plunged down, just missing
me and sending a swash of water clear over my head. Then the long
black side of the vessel began slipping past, so near that I could
have touched it with my hands. I tried to reach it, in a mad resolve
to claw into the wood with my nails; but my arms were heavy and
lifeless. Again I strove to call out, but made no sound.
The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a
hollow between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing
at a wheel, and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than
smoke a cigar. I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly
turned his head and glanced out over the water in my direction. It was
a careless, unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men
do when they have no immediate call to do anything in particular,
but act because they are alive and must do something.
But life and death were in that glance. I could see the vessel being
swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel, and
the head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze
struck the water and casually lifted along it toward me. His face wore
an absent expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that
if his eyes did light upon me he would nevertheless not see me. But
his eyes did light upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he
did see me, for he sprang to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside,
and whirled it round and round, hand over hand, at the same time
shouting orders of some sort. The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent
to its former course and to leap almost instantly from view into the
fog.
I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all
the power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and
darkness that was rising around me. A little later I heard the
stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.
When he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion: 'Why in-
don't you sing out?'
This meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose
over me.
CHAPTER TWO.
I SEEMED SWINGING IN A mighty rhythm through orbit vastness.
Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were
stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the
suns. As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back
on the counter-swing, a great gong struck, and thundered and
reverberated through abysmal space. For an immeasurable period,
quiescent, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and
pondered my tremendous flight.
But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told
myself it must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was jerked
from swing to counter-swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely
catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The
gong thundered more frequently and more furiously. I grew to await
it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I were being
dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun. This gave
place to a sense of intolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in
the torment of fire. The gong clanged and knelled. The sparkling
points of light flashed past me in an interminable stream, as though
the whole sidereal system were dropping into the void. I gasped,
caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes. Two men were
kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty rhythm was the lift and
forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The terrific gong was a
frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and clattered with
each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands were a man's
hard hands chafing my naked chest. I squirmed under the pain of it and
half lifted my head. My chest was raw and red, and I could see tiny
blood-globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.
'That'll do, Yonson,' one of the men said. 'Carn't yer see you've
bloomin' well rubbed all the gent's skin off?'
The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type,
ceased chafing me and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had
spoken to him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly
pretty, almost effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the
sound of Bow Bells with his mother's milk. A draggled muslin cap on
his head, and a dirty gunny-sack about his slim hips, proclaimed him
cook of the decidedly dirty ship's galley in which I found myself.
'An' 'ow yer feelin' now, sir?' he asked, with the subservient smirk
which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.
For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped
by Yonson to my feet. The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was
grating horribly on my nerves. I could not collect my thoughts.
Clutching the woodwork of the galley for support,- and I confess the
grease with which it was scummed put my teeth on edge,- I reached
across a hot cooking-range to the offending utensil, unhooked it,
and wedged it securely into the coal-box.
The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand
a steaming mug with an ''Ere, this'll do yer good.'
It was a nauseous mess,- ship's coffee,- but the heat of it was
revivifying. Between gulps of the molten stuff I glanced down at my
raw and bleeding chest and turned to the Scandinavian.
'Thank you, Mr. Yonson,' I said; 'but don't you think your
measures were rather heroic?'
It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than
of my words, that he held up his palm for inspection. It was
remarkably calloused. I passed my hand over the horny projections, and
my teeth went on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation
produced.
'My name is Johnson, not Yonson,' he said in very good, though slow,
English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.
There was mild protest in his pale-blue eyes, and, withal, a timid
frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.
'Thank you, Mr. Johnson,' I corrected, and reached out my hand for
his.
He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg
to the other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.
'Have you any dry clothes I may put on?' I asked the cook.
'Yes, sir,' he answered, with cheerful alacrity. 'I'll run down
an' tyke a look over my kit, if you've no objections, sir, to
wearin' my things.'
He dived out of the galley door, or glided, rather, with a swiftness
and smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as
oily. In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to
learn, was probably the most salient expression of his personality.
'And where am I?' I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be
one of the sailors. 'What vessel is this? And where is she bound?'
'Off the Farralones, heading about sou'west,' he answered slowly and
methodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidly
observing the order of my queries. 'The schooner Ghost; bound
seal-hunting to Japan.'
'And who is the captain? I must see him as soon as I am dressed?'
Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed. He hesitated while he groped
in his vocabulary and framed a complete answer. 'The cap'n is Wolf
Larsen, or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you
better speak soft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate-'
But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.
'Better sling yer 'ook out of 'ere, Yonson,' he said. 'The Old
Man'll be wantin' yer on deck, an' this ayn't no d'y to fall foul of
'im.'
Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the
cook's shoulder, favoring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous
wink, as though to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for
me to be soft-spoken with the captain.
Hanging over the cook's arm was a loose and crumpled array of
evil-looking and sour-smelling garments.
'They was put aw'y wet, sir,' he vouchsafed explanation. 'But you'll
'ave to make them do while I dry yours out by the fire.'
Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship,
and aided by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woolen
undershirt. On the instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from the
harsh contact. He noticed my involuntary twitching and grimacing,
and smirked:
'I only 'ope yer don't ever 'ave to get used to such as that in this
life, 'cos you've got a bloomin' soft skin, that you 'ave, more like a
lydy's than any I know of. I was bloomin' well sure you was a
gentleman as soon as I set eyes on yer.'
I had taken a dislike to him at the first, and as he helped to dress
me this dislike increased. There was something repulsive about his
touch. I shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted. And between this and
the smells arising from various pots boiling and bubbling on the
galley fire, I was in haste to get out into the fresh air. Further,
there was the need of seeing the captain about what arrangements could
be made for getting me ashore.
A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discolored with
what I took to be ancient bloodstains, was put on me amidst a
running and apologetic fire of comment. A pair of workman's brogans
incased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of
pale-blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully ten
inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg looked as though
the devil had there clutched for the Cockney's soul and missed the
shadow for the substance.
'And whom have I to thank for this kindness?' I asked, when I
stood completely arrayed, a tiny boy's cap on my head, and for coat
a dirty, striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back,
and the sleeves of which reached just below my elbows.
The cook drew himself up in smugly humble fashion, a deprecating
smirk on his face. Out of my experience with stewards on the
Atlantic liners at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was
waiting for his tip. From my fuller knowledge of the creature I now
know that the posture was unconscious. An hereditary servility, no
doubt, was responsible.
'Mugridge, sir,' he fawned, his effeminate features running into a
greasy smile. 'Thomas Mugridge, sir, an' at yer service.'
'All right, Thomas,' I said. 'I shall not forget you- when my
clothes are dry.'
A soft light suffused his face, and his eyes glistened, as though
somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.
'Thank you, sir,' he said very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
stepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion. A
puff of wind caught me, and I staggered across the moving deck to a
corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The schooner,
heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging
into the long Pacific roll. If she were heading southwest, as
Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly
from the south. The fog was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled
crisply on the surface of the water. I turned to the east, where I
knew California must lie, but could see nothing save low-lying
fog-banks- the same fog, doubtless, that had brought about the
disaster to the Martinez and placed me in my present situation. To the
north, not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust above the sea, on
one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse. In the southwest, and
almost in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some vessel's sails.
Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more
immediate surroundings. My first thought was that a man who had come
through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more
attention than I received. Beyond a sailor at the wheel, who stared
curiously across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.
Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amidships. There,
on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully clothed,
though his shirt was ripped open in front. Nothing was to be seen of
his chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of black hair, in
appearance like the furry coat of a dog. His face and neck were hidden
beneath a black beard, intershot with gray, which would have been
stiff and bushy had it not been limp and draggled and dripping with
water. His eyes were closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but
his mouth was wide open, his breast heaving as though from suffocation
as he labored noisily for breath. A sailor, from time to time and
quite methodically, as a matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket
into the ocean at the end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and
sluiced its contents over the prostrate man.
Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchway, and savagely
chewing the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had
rescued me from the sea. His height was probably five feet ten inches,
or ten and a half; but my first impression or feel of the man was
not of this, but of his strength. And yet, while he was of massive
build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize
his strength as massive. It was what might be termed a sinewy,
knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but
which, in him, because of his heavy build, partook more of the
enlarged gorilla order. Not that in appearance he seemed in the
least gorilla-like. What I am striving to express is this strength
itself, more as a thing apart from his physical semblance. It was a
strength we are wont to associate with things primitive, with wild
animals and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to
have been- a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the
essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental
stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have been molded.
Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who
paced up and down. He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet
struck the deck squarely and with surety: every movement of a
muscle, from the heave of the shoulders to the tightening of the
lips about the cigar, was decisive and seemed to come out of a
strength that was excessive and overwhelming. In fact, though this
strength pervaded every action of his, it seemed but the advertisement
of a greater strength that lurked within, that lay dormant and no more
than stirred from time to time, but which might arouse at any
moment, terrible and compelling, like the rage of a lion or the
wrath of a storm.
The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned
encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the
direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I was
given to understand that he was the captain, the 'Old Man,' in the
cook's vernacular, the person whom I must interview and put to the
trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had half started forward, to
get over with what I was certain would be a stormy quarter of an hour,
when a more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person
who was lying on his back. He writhed about convulsively. The chin,
with the damp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the back
muscles stiffened and the chest swelled in an unconscious and
instinctive effort to get more air.
The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing, and
gazed down at the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle
become that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water over
him, and stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and
dripping its contents to the deck. The dying man beat a tattoo on
the hatch with his heels, straightened out his legs, stiffened in
one great, tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side. Then
the muscles relaxed, the head stopped rolling, and a sigh, as of
profound relief, floated upward from his lips. The jaw dropped, the
upper lip lifted, and two rows of tobacco-discolored teeth appeared.
It seemed as though his features had frozen into a diabolical grin
at the world he had left and outwitted.
Then a most surprising thing occurred. The captain broke loose
upon the dead man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips in
a continuous stream. And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere
expressions of indecency. Each word was a blasphemy, and there were
many words. They crisped and crackled like electric sparks. I had
never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I have conceived it
possible. With a turn for literary expression myself, and a penchant
for forcible figures and phrases, I appreciated as no other
listener, I dare say, the peculiar vividness and strength and absolute
blasphemy of his metaphors. The cause of it all, as near as I could
make out, was that the man, who was mate, had gone on a debauch before
leaving San Francisco, and then had the poor taste to die at the
beginning of the voyage and leave Wolf Larsen short-handed.
It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I
was shocked. Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been
unutterably repellent to me. I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking
at the heart, and, I might just as well say, a giddiness. To me
death had always been invested with solemnity and dignity. It had been
peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial. But death in its
more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had been
unacquainted till now. As I say, while I appreciated the power of
the terrific denunciation that swept out of Wolf Larsen's mouth, I was
inexpressibly shocked. But the dead man continued to grin
unconcernedly with a sardonic humor, a cynical mockery and defiance.
He was master of the situation.
CHAPTER THREE.
WOLF LARSEN CEASED SWEARING as suddenly as he had begun. He
relighted his cigar and glanced around. His eyes chanced upon the
cook.
'Well, Cooky?' he began, with a suaveness that was cold and of the
temper of steel.
'Yes, sir,' the cook eagerly interpolated, with appeasing and
apologetic servility.
'Don't you think you've stretched that neck of yours just about
enough? It's unhealthy, you know. The mate's gone, so I can't afford
to lose you, too. You must be very, very careful of your health,
Cooky. Understand?'
His last word, in striking contrast with the smoothness of his
previous utterance, snapped like the lash of a whip. The cook
quailed under it.
'Yes, sir,' was the meek reply, as the offending head disappeared
into the galley.
At this rebuke the rest of the crew became uninterested and fell
to work at one task or another. A number of men, however, who were
lounging about a companionway between the galley and the hatch, and
who did not seem to be sailors, continued talking in low tones with
one another. These, I afterward learned, were the hunters, the men who
shot the seals, and a very superior breed to common sailor-folk.
'Johansen!' Wolf Larsen called out. A sailor stepped forward
obediently. 'Get your palm and needle and sew the beggar up. You'll
find some old canvas in the sail-locker. Make it do.'
'What'll I put on his feet, sir?' the man asked, after the customary
'Aye, aye, sir.'
'We'll see to that,' Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice in
a cal of 'Cooky!'
Thomas Mugridge popped out of his galley like a jack-in-the-box.
'Go below and fill a sack with coal.'
'Any of you fellows got a Bible or prayer-book?' was the captain's
next demand, this time of the hunters lounging about the companionway.
They shook their heads, and some one made a jocular remark which I
did not catch, but which raised a general laugh.
Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors. Bibles and
prayer-books seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to
pursue the quest among the watch below, returning in a minute with the
information that 'they ain't none.'
The captain shrugged his shoulders. 'Then we'll drop him over
without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the
burial service at sea by heart.'
By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me.
'You're a preacher, aren't you?' he asked.
The hunters- there were six of them- to a man turned and regarded
me. I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow. A laugh
went up at my appearance- a laugh that was not lessened or softened by
the dead man stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh
that was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose
out of coarse feelings and blunted sensibilities, from natures that
knew neither courtesy nor gentleness.
Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his gray eyes lighted with a
slight glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped
forward quite close to him, I received my first impression of the
man himself- of the man as apart from his body and from the torrent of
blasphemy I had heard. The face, with large features and strong lines,
of the square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at
first sight; but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to
vanish and a conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental
or spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping, in the deeps of his
being. The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and
swelling heavily above the eyes- these, while strong in themselves,
unusually strong, seemed to speak an immense vigor or virility of
spirit that lay behind and beyond and out of sight. There was no
sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and
bounds, or neatly classifying in some pigeonhole with others of
similar type.
The eyes- and it was my destiny to know them well- were large and
handsome, wide apart, as the true artist's are wide, sheltering
under a heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows. The eyes
themselves were of that baffling protean gray which is never twice the
same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk
in sunshine; which is gray, dark and light, and greenish gray, and
sometimes of the clear azure of the deep sea. They were eyes that
masked the soul with a thousand guises, and that sometimes opened,
at rare moments, and allowed it to rush up as though it were about
to fare forth nakedly into the world on some wonderful adventure- eyes
that could brood with the hopeless somberness of leaden skies; that
could snap and crackle points of fire like those that sparkle from a
whirling sword; that could grow chill as an arctic landscape, and
yet again, that could warm and soften and be all adance with
love-lights, intense and masculine, luring and compelling, which at
the same time fascinate and dominate women till they surrender in a
gladness of joy and of relief and sacrifice.
But to return. I told him that, unhappily for the burial service,
I was not a preacher, when he sharply demanded:
'What do you do for a living?'
I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I
ever canvassed it. I was quite taken aback, and, before I could find
myself, had sillily stammered: 'I am a gentleman.'
His lip curled in a swift sneer.
'I have worked, I do work,' I cried impetuously, as though he were
my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much
aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.
'For your living?'
There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was
quite beside myself- 'rattled,' as Furuseth would have termed it, like
a quaking child before a stern schoolmaster.
'Who feeds you?' was his next question.
'I have an income,' I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my
tongue the next instant. 'All of which, you will pardon my
observing, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you
about.'
But he disregarded my protest.
'Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead
men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk
alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for
three meals. Let me see your hand.'
His tremendous, dormant strength must have stirred swiftly and
accurately, or I must have slept a moment, for before I knew it he had
stepped two paces forward, gripped my right hand in his, and held it
up for inspection. I tried to withdraw it, but his fingers
tightened, without visible effort, till I thought mine would be
crushed. It is hard to maintain one's dignity under such
circumstances. I could not squirm or struggle like a schoolboy. Nor
could I attack such a creature, who had but to twist my arm to break
it. Nothing remained but to stand still and accept the indignity. I
had time to notice that the pockets of the dead man had been emptied
on the deck and that his body and his grin had been wrapped from
view in canvas, the folds of which the sailor Johansen was sewing
together with coarse white twine, shoving the needle through with a
leather contrivance fitted on the palm of his hand.
Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.
'Dead men's hands have kept it soft. Good for little else than
dishwashing and scullion-work.'
'I wish to be put ashore,' I said firmly, for I now had myself in
control.
'I shall pay you whatever you judge your delay and trouble to be
worth.'
He looked at me curiously. Mockery shone in his eyes.
'I have a counter-proposition to make, and for the good of your
soul. My mate's gone, and there'll be a lot of promotion. A sailor
comes aft to take mate's place, cabin-boy goes for'ard to take
sailor's place, and you take the cabin-boy's place, sign the
articles for the cruise, twenty dollars per month and found. Now, what
do you say? And mind you, it's for your own soul's sake. It will be
the making of you. You might learn in time to stand on your own legs
and perhaps to toddle along a bit.'
But I took no notice. The sails of the vessel I had seen off to
the southwest had grown larger and plainer. They were of the same
rig as the Ghost's, though the hull itself, I could see, was
smaller. She was a pretty sight, leaping and flying toward us, and
evidently bound to pass at close range. The wind had been
momentarily increasing, and the sun, after a few angry gleams, had
disappeared. The sea had turned a dull leaden gray and grown
rougher, and was now tossing foaming whitecaps to the sky. We were
traveling faster and heeled farther over. Once, in a gust, the rail
dipped under the sea, and the decks on that side were for the moment
awash with water that made a couple of the hunters hastily lift
their feet.
'That vessel will soon be passing us,' I said, after a moment's
pause. 'As she is going in the opposite direction, she is very
probably bound for San Francisco.'
'Very probably,' was Wolf Larsen's answer, as he turned partly
away from me and cried out, 'Cooky! Oh, Cooky!'
The Cockney popped out of the galley.
'Where's that boy? Tell him I want him.'
'Yes, sir,' and Thomas Mugridge fled swiftly aft and disappeared
down another companionway near the wheel. A moment later he emerged, a
heavy-set young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, with a glowering,
villainous countenance, trailing at his heels.
''Ere 'e, is, sir,' the cook said.
But Wolf Larsen ignored that worthy, turning at once to the
cabin-boy.
'What's your name, boy?'
'George Leach, sir,' came the sullen answer, and the boy's bearing
showed clearly that he divined the reason for which he had been
summoned.
'Not an Irish name,' the captain snapped sharply. 'O'Toole or
McCarthy would suit your mug a-sight better.
'But let that go,' he continued. 'You may have very good reasons for
forgetting your name, and I'll like you none the worse for it as
long as you toe the mark. Telegraph Hill, of course, is your port of
entry. It sticks out all over your mug. Tough as they make them and
twice as nasty. I know the kind. Well, you can make up your mind to
have it taken out of you on this craft. Understand? Who shipped you,
anyway?'
'McCready & Swanson.'
'Sir!' Wolf Larsen thundered.
'McCready & Swanson, sir,' the boy corrected, his eyes burning
with a bitter light.
'Who got the advance money?'
'They did, sir.'
'I thought as much. And devilish glad you were to let them have
it. Couldn't make yourself scarce too quick, with several gentlemen
you may have heard of looking for you.'
The boy metamorphosed into a savage on the instant. His body bunched
together as though for a spring, and his face became as an
infuriated beast's as he snarled, 'It's a-'
'A what?' Wolf Larsen asked, a peculiar softness in his voice, as
though he were overwhelmingly curious to hear the unspoken word.
The boy hesitated, then mastered his temper. 'Nothin', sir. I take
it back.'
'And you have shown me I was right.' This with a gratified smile.
'How old are you?'
'Just turned sixteen, sir.'
'A lie. You'll never see eighteen again. Big for your age at that,
with muscles like a horse. Pack up your kit and go for'ard into the
fo'c's'le. You're a boat-puller now. You're promoted; see?'
Without waiting for the boy's acceptance, the captain turned to
the sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the
body. 'Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?'
'No, sir.'
'Well, never mind; you're mate just the same. Get your traps aft
into the mate's berth.'
'Aye, aye, sir,' was the cheery response, as Johansen started
forward.
In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.
'What are you waiting for?' Wolf Larsen demanded.
'I didn't sign for boat-puller, sir,' was the reply. 'I signed for
cabin-boy. An' I don't want no boat-pullin' in mine.'
'Pack up and go for'ard.'
This time Wolf Larsen's command was thrillingly imperative. The
boy glowered sullenly, but refused to move.
Then came another vague stirring of Wolf Larsen's tremendous
strength. It was utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with
between the ticks of two seconds. He had sprung fully six feet
across the deck and driven his fist into the other's stomach. At the
same moment, as though I had been struck myself, I felt a sickening
shock in the pit of my stomach. I instance this to show the
sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the time and how unused
I was to spectacles of brutality. The cabin-boy- and he weighed one
hundred and sixty-five at the very least- crumpled up. His body
wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick. He
lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck on
his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed about in agony.
'Well?' Larsen asked of me. 'Have you made up your mind?'
I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was
now almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards
away. It was a very trim and neat little craft. I could see a large
black number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures of
pilot-boats.
'What vessel is that?' I asked.
'The pilot-boat Lady Mine,' Wolf Larsen answered grimly. 'Got rid of
her pilots and running into San Francisco. She'll be there in five
or six hours with this wind.'
'Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore?'
'Sorry, but I've lost the signal-book overboard,' he remarked, and
the group of hunters grinned.
I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes. I had seen the
frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very
probably receive the same, if not worse. As I say, I debated with
myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life. I
ran to the side, waving my arms and shouting:
'Lady Mine, ahoy! Take me ashore! A thousand dollars if you take
me ashore!'
I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them
steering. The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips. I did not
turn my head, though I expected every moment a killing blow from the
human brute behind me. At last, after what seemed centuries, unable
longer to stand the strain, I looked around. He had not moved. He
was standing in the same position, swaying easily to the roll of the
ship and lighting a fresh cigar.
'What is the matter? Anything wrong?'
This was the cry from the Lady Mine.
'Yes!' I shouted at the top of my lungs. 'Life or death! One
thousand dollars if you take me ashore!'
'Too much 'Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!' Wolf Larsen
shouted after. 'This one'- indicating me with his thumb- 'fancies
sea-serpents and monkeys just now.'
The man on the Lady Mine laughed back through the megaphone. The
pilot-boat plunged past.
'Give him- for me!' came a final cry, and the two men waved their
arms in farewell.
I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little
schooner swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us. And
she would probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours! My head
seemed bursting. There was an ache in my throat as though my heart
were up in it. A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt
spray on my lips. The wind puffed strongly, and the Ghost heeled far
over, burying her lee rail. I could hear the water rushing down upon
the deck.
When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering
to his feet. His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed
pain. He looked very sick.
'Well, Leach, are you going for'ard?' Wolf Larsen asked.
'Yes, sir,' came the answer of a spirit cowed.
'And you?' I was asked.
'I'll give you a thousand-' I began, but was interrupted.
'Stow that! Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy? Or do
I have to take you in hand?'
What was I to do? To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would
not help my case. I looked steadily into the cruel gray eyes. They
might have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul
they contained. One may see the soul stir in some men's eyes, but
his were bleak and cold and gray as the sea itself.
'Well?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Say "Yes, sir."'
'Yes, sir,' I corrected.
'What is your name?'
'Van Weyden, sir.'
'First name?'
'Humphrey, sir- Humphrey Van Weyden.'
'Age?'
'Thirty-five, sir.'
'That'll do. Go to the cook and learn your duties.'
And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary
servitude to Wolf Larsen. He was stronger than I, that was all. But it
was very unreal at the time. It is no less unreal now that I look back
upon it. It will always be to me as a monstrous, inconceivable
thing, a horrible nightmare.
'Hold on; don't go yet.'
I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
'Johansen, call all hands. Now that we've everything cleaned up,
we'll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.'
While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors,
under the captain's direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a
hatchcover. On each side the deck, against the rail, and bottoms up,
were lashed a number of small boats. Several men picked up the
hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side,
and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard. To the feet
was attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.
I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and
awe-inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial
at any rate. One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates
called 'Smoke,' was telling stories liberally intersprinkled with
oaths and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters
gave mouth to a laughter that sounded to me like a chorus of wolves.
The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below running the
sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together. There was
an ominous and worried expression on their faces. It was evident
that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a captain
and begun so inauspiciously. From time to time they stole glances at
Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of the man.
He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off. I ran my
eyes over them- twenty men all told, twenty-two, including the man
at the wheel and myself. I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it
appeared my fate to be pent up with them on this miniature floating
world for I knew not how many weeks or months. The sailors, in the
main, were English and Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of the
heavy, stolid order. The hunters, on the other hand, had stronger
and more diversified faces, with hard lines and the marks of the
free play of passions. Strange to say, and I noted it at once, Wolf
Larsen's features showed no such evil stamp. There seemed nothing
vicious in them. True, there were lines, but they were the lines of
decision and firmness. It seemed, rather, a frank and open
countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by the fact that
he was smooth-shaven. I could hardly believe, until the next
incident occurred, that it was the face of a man who could behave as
he had behaved to the cabin-boy.
At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff
struck the schooner and pressed her side under. The wind shrieked a
wild song through the rigging. Some of the hunters glanced anxiously
aloft. The whole lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the
sea, and as the schooner lifted and righted, the water swept across
the deck, wetting us above our shoe-tops. A shower of rain drove
down upon us, each drop stinging like a hailstone. As it passed,
Wolf Larsen began to speak, the bareheaded men swaying in unison to
the heave and lunge of the deck.
'I only remember one part of the service,' he said, 'and that is,
"And the body shall be cast into the sea." So cast it in.'
He ceased speaking. The men holding the hatch-cover seemed
perplexed, puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony. He burst
upon them in a fury.
'Lift up that end there! What the - 's the matter with you?'
They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and,
like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the
sea. The coal at his feet dragged him down. He was gone.
'Johansen,' Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, 'keep all
hands on deck now they're here. Get in the topsails and outer jibs.
We're in for a sou'easter. Reef the jib and the mainsail, too, while
you're about it.'
In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders
and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts- all
naturally confusing to a landsman such as myself. But it was the
heartlessness of it that especially struck me. The dead man was an
episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas
covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her work
went on. Nobody had been affected. The hunters were laughing at a
fresh story of Smoke's; the men pulling and hauling, and two of them
climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky to windward;
and the dead man, buried sordidly, and sinking down, down-
Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly
and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I
held onto the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San
Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls were driving in
between, and I could scarcely see the fog. And this strange vessel,
with its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever
leaping up and out, as for very life, was heading away into the
southwest, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.
CHAPTER FOUR.
WHAT HAPPENED TO ME NEXT on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as I
strove to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation
and pain. The cook, who was called 'the doctor' by the crew, 'Tommy'
by the hunters, and 'Cooky' by Wolf Larsen, was a changed personage.
The difference worked in my status brought about a corresponding
difference in treatment from him. Servile and fawning as he had been
before, he was now as domineering and bellicose.
He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
behavior and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small staterooms, I was
supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal
ignorance concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy
pots was a source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him. This was
part of the attitude he chose to adopt toward me; and I confess,
before the day was done, that I hated him with more lively feelings
than I had ever hated any one in my life before.
This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
Ghost, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an ''owlin'
sou'easter.' At half-past five, under his directions, I set the
table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then
carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley.
'Look sharp or you'll get doused,' was Mr. Mugridge's parting
injunction as I left the galley with a big teapot in one hand and in
the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread. One
of the hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was
going aft at the time from the steerage (the name the hunters
facetiously gave their amidships sleeping-quarters) to the cabin. Wolf
Larsen was on the poop, smoking his everlasting cigar.
''Ere she comes! Sling yer 'ook!' the cook cried.
I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley
door slide shut with a bang. Then I saw Henderson leaping like a
madman for the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till
he was many feet higher than my head. Also, I saw a great wave,
curling and foaming, poised far above the rail. I was directly under
it. My mind did not work quickly, everything was so new and strange. I
grasped that I was in danger, but that was all. I stood still, in
trepidation. Then Wolf Larsen shouted from the poop:
'Grab hold something, you- you Hump!'
But it was too late. I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might
have clung, and was met by the descending wall of water. What happened
after that was very confusing. I was beneath the water, suffocating
and drowning. My feet were out from under me, and I was turning over
and over and being swept along I knew not where. Several times I
collided against hard objects, once striking my right knee a
terrible blow. Then the flood seemed suddenly to subside, and I was
breathing the good air again. I had been swept against the galley
and around the steerage companionway from the weather side into the
lee scuppers. The pain from my hurt knee was agonizing. I could not
put my weight on it, or at least I thought I could not put my weight
on it; and I felt sure the leg was broken. But the cook was after
me, shouting through the lee galley door:
''Ere, you! Don't tyke all night about it! Where's the pot? Lost
overboard? Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!'
I managed to struggle to my feet. The great teapot was still in my
hand. I limped to the galley and handed it to him. But he was
consuming with indignation, real or feigned.
'Gawd blime me if you ayn't a slob. Wot're you good for, anyw'y, I'd
like to know. Eh? Wot're you good for, anyw'y? Cawn't even carry a bit
of tea aft without losin' it. Now I'll 'ave to boil some more.
'An' wot're you snifflin' about?' he burst out at me with renewed
rage. ''Cos you've 'urt yer pore little leg, pore little mama's
darlin'!'
I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and
twitching from the pain. But I called up all my resolution, set my
teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin, and cabin to
galley, without further mishap. Two things I had acquired by my
accident: an injured kneecap that went undressed and from which I
suffered for weary months, and the name of 'Hump,' which Wolf Larsen
had called me from the poop. Thereafter, fore and aft, I was known
by no other name, until the term became a part of my thought processes
and I identified it with myself, thought of myself as Hump, as
though Hump were I and had always been I.
It was no easy task waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf
Larsen, Johansen, and the six hunters. The cabin was small, to begin
with, and to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier
by the schooner's violent pitching and wallowing. But what struck me
most forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men
whom I served. I could feel my knee through my clothes swelling up
to the size of an apple, and I was sick and faint from the pain of it.
I could catch glimpses of my face, white and ghastly, distorted with
pain, in the cabin mirror. All the men must have seen my condition,
but not one spoke or took notice of me, till I was almost grateful
to Wolf Larsen later on (I was washing the dishes) when he said:
'Don't let a little thing like that bother you. You'll get used to
such things in time. It may cripple you some, but, all the same,
you'll be learning to walk. That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?'
he added.
He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary 'Yes,
sir.'
'I suppose you know a bit about literary things? Eh? Good. I'll have
some talks with you sometime.'
And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and
went up on deck.
That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was
sent to sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk. I was
glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off
my feet. To my surprise, my clothes had dried on me, and there
seemed no indications of catching cold either from the last soaking or
from the prolonged soaking after the foundering of the Martinez. Under
ordinary circumstances, after all that I had undergone I should have
been a fit subject for a funeral.
But my knee was bothering me terribly. As well as I could make
out, the kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the
swelling. As I sat in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all
in the steerage, smoking, and talking in loud voices), Henderson
took a passing glance at it.
'Looks nasty,' he commented. 'Tie a rag around it, and it'll be
all right.'
That was all. And on the land I should have been lying on the
broad of my back, with a surgeon attending me, and with strict
injunctions to do nothing but rest. But I must do these men justice.
Callous as they were to my suffering, they were equally callous to
their own when anything befell them. And this was due, I believe,
first to habit and second to the fact that they were less
sensitively organized. I really believe that a finely organized,
high-strung man would suffer twice or thrice as much as they from a
like injury.
Tired as I was, exhausted in fact, I was prevented from sleeping
by the pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from groaning
aloud. At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish, but
this new and elemental environment seemed to call for a savage
repression. Like the savage, the attitude of these men was stoical
in great things, childish in little things. I remember, later in the
voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a finger by
having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the
expression on his face. Yet I have seen the same man, time and
again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.
He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another
hunter as to whether a seal-pup knew instinctively how to swim. He
held that it did; that it could swim the moment it was born. The other
hunter, Latimer, a lean Yankee-looking fellow, with shrewd,
narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise; held that the seal-pup was born
on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim; that
its mother was compelled to teach it to swim, as birds were
compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or
lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists. But
they were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently
took sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their
voices surged back and forth in waves of sound like mimic
thunder-rolls in the confined space. Childish and immaterial as the
topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish
and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at
all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and
denunciation. They proved that a seal-pup could swim or not swim at
birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following
it up with an attack on the opposing man's judgment, common sense,
nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was similar in all respects.
I have related this in order to show the mental caliber of the men
with whom I was thrown in contact. Intellectually they were
children, inhabiting the physical bodies of men.
And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
offensive-smelling tobacco. The air was thick and murky with the smoke
of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she
struggled through the storm, would surely have made me seasick had I
been a victim to that malady. As it was, it made me quite squeamish,
though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and my
exhaustion.
As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my
situation. It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van
Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things
artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea
seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any hard manual
labor, or scullion labor, in my life. I had lived a placid, uneventful
sedentary existence all my days- the life of a scholar and a recluse
on an assured and comfortable income. Violent life and athletic sports
had never appealed to me. I had always been a bookworm; so my
sisters and father had called me during my childhood. I had gone
camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at its
start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof. And
here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting,
potato-peeling, and dishwashing. And I was not strong. The doctors had
always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never
developed it or my body through exercise. My muscles were small and
soft, like a woman's, or so the doctors had said time and again in the
course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for
physical-culture fads. But I had preferred to use my head rather
than my body; and here I was, in no fit condition for the rough life
in prospect.
These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind,
and are related for the sake of vindicating in advance the weak and
helpless role I was destined to play. But I thought also of my
mother and sisters, and pictured their grief. I was among the
missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered body. I could
see the headlines in the papers, the fellows at the University Club
and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, 'Poor Chap!' And I
could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-by to him that morning,
lounging in a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window-couch and
delivering himself of oracular and pessimistic epigrams.
And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving
mountains and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the
schooner Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart
of the Pacific- and I was on her. I could hear the wind above. It came
to my ears as a muffled roar. Now and again feet stamped overhead.
An endless creaking was going on all about me, the woodwork and the
fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys.
The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human,
amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths and indecent
expressions. I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality
distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps,
which rocked back and forth with the ship. Through the dim
smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping-dens of animals in a
menagerie. Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the walls, and
here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the racks. It
was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of bygone years. My
imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep. And it was a
long, long night, weary and dreary and long.
CHAPTER FIVE.
BUT MY FIRST NIGHT IN the hunters' steerage was also my last. Next
day Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen
and sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took
possession of the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first day of
the voyage, had already had two occupants. The reason for this
change was quickly learned by the hunters and became the cause of a
deal of grumbling on their part. It seemed that Johansen, in his
sleep, lived over each night the events of the day. His incessant
talking and shouting and bellowing of orders had been too much for
Wolf Larsen, who accordingly foisted the nuisance upon his hunters.
After a sleepless night, I arose, weak and in agony, to hobble
through my second day on the Ghost. Thomas Mugridge routed me out at
half-past five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed
out his dog. But Mr. Mugridge's brutality to me was paid back in
kind and with interest. The unnecessary noise he made (I had lain
wide-eyed the whole night) must have awakened one of the hunters;
for a heavy shoe whizzed through the semidarkness, and Mr. Mugridge,
with a sharp howl of pain, humbly begged everybody's pardon. Later on,
in the galley, I noticed that his ear was bruised and swollen. It
never went entirely back to its normal shape, and was called a
'cauliflower ear' by the sailors.
The day was filled with miserable variety. I had taken my dried
clothes down from the galley the night before, and the first thing I
did was to exchange the cook's garments for them. I looked for my
purse. In addition to some small change (and I have a good memory
for such things), it had contained one hundred and eighty-five dollars
in gold and paper. The purse I found, but its contents, with the
exception of the small silver, had been abstracted. I spoke to the
cook about it, when I went on deck to take up my duties in the galley;
and though I had looked forward to a surly answer, I had not
expected the belligerent harangue that I received.
'Look 'ere, 'Ump', he began, a malicious light in his eyes and a
snarl in his throat, 'd' ye want yer nose punched? If yer think I'm
a thief, just keep it to yerself, or you'll find 'ow bloody well
mistyken you are. Strike me blind if this ayn't gratitude for yer!
'Ere yer come, a pore mis'rable specimen of 'uman scum, an' I tykes
yer into my galley an' treats yer 'andsome, an' this is wot I get
for it. Nex' time yer can go to 'ell, say I, an' I've a good mind to
give yer what-for, anyw'y.'
So saying, he put up his fists and started for me. To my eternal
shame be it, I cowered away from the blow and ran out the galley door.
What else was I to do? Force, nothing but force, obtained on this
brute-ship. Moral suasion was a thing unknown. Picture it to yourself:
a man of ordinary stature, slender of build and with weak, undeveloped
muscles, who has lived a peaceful, placid life, and is unused to
violence of any sort- what could such a man possibly do? There was
no more reason that I should stand and face these human beasts than
that I should stand and face an infuriated bull.
So I thought it out at the time, feeling the need for vindication,
and desiring to be at peace with my conscience. But this vindication
did not satisfy. Nor to this day can I permit my manhood to look
back upon those events and feel entirely exonerated. The situation was
something that really exceeded rational formulas for conduct, and
demanded more than the cold conclusions of reason. When viewed in
the light of formal logic, there is not one thing of which to be
ashamed, but, nevertheless, a shame rises within me at the
recollection, and in the pride of my manhood I feel that my manhood
has in unaccountable ways been smirched and sullied.
All of which is neither here nor there. The speed with which I ran
from the galley caused excruciating pain in my knee, and I sank down
helplessly at the break of the poop. But the Cockney had not pursued
me.
'Look at 'im run! Look at 'im run!' I could hear him crying. 'An'
with a gyme leg at that! Come on back, you pore little mama's darlin'!
I won't 'it her; no, I won't.'
I came back and went on with my work, and here the episode ended for
the time, though further developments were yet to take place. I set
the breakfast table in the cabin, and at seven o'clock waited on the
hunters and officers. The storm had evidently broken during the night,
though a huge sea was still running and a stiff wind blowing. Sail had
been made in the early watches, so that the Ghost was racing along
under everything except the two topsails and the flying jib. These
three sails, I gathered from the conversation, were to be set
immediately after breakfast. I learned, also, that Wolf Larsen was
anxious to make the most of the storm, which was driving him to the
southwest, into that portion of the sea where he expected to pick up
with the northeast trades. It was before this steady wind that he
hoped to make the major portion of the run to Japan, curving south
into the tropics and north again as he approached the coast of Asia.
After breakfast I had another unenviable experience. When I had
finished washing the dishes, I cleaned the cabin stove and carried the
ashes up on deck to empty them. Wolf Larsen and Henderson were
standing near the wheel, deep in conversation. The sailor Johnson
was steering. As I started toward the weather side, I saw him make a
sudden motion with his head, which I mistook for a token of
recognition and good morning. In reality he was attempting to warn
me to throw my ashes over the lee side. Unconscious of my blunder, I
passed by Wolf Larsen and the hunter, and flung the ashes over the
side to windward. The wind drove them back, and not only over me,
but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen. The next instant the latter kicked
me violently, as a cur is kicked. I had not realized there could be so
much pain in a kick. I reeled away from him and leaned against the
cabin in a half-fainting condition. Everything was swimming before
my eyes, and I turned sick. The nausea overpowered me, and I managed
to crawl to the side in time to save the deck. But Wolf Larsen did not
follow me up. Brushing the ashes from his clothes, he had resumed
his conversation with Henderson. Johansen, who had seen the affair
from the break of the poop, sent a couple of sailors aft to clean up
the mess.
Later in the morning I received a surprise of a totally different
sort. Following the cook's instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen's
state-room to put it to rights and make the bed. Against the wall,
near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced
over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare,
Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works, too, among
which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, Darwin, and I
remarked Bulfinch's 'Age of Fable,' Shaw's 'History of English and
American Literature,' and Johnson's 'Natural History' in two large
volumes. Then there were a number of grammars, such as Metcalf and
Reed & Kellogg; and I smiled as I saw a copy of 'The Dean's English.'
I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had
seen of him, and I wondered if he could possibly read them. But when I
came to make the bed, I found, between the blankets, dropped
apparently as he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning. It was
open at 'In a Balcony,' and I noticed here and there passages
underlined in pencil. Further, letting drop the volume during a
lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper fell out. It was scrawled over
with geometrical diagrams and calculations of some sort.
It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as
one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of
brutality. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his
nature was perfectly comprehensible, but both sides together were
bewildering. I had already remarked that his language was excellent,
marred with an occasional slight inaccuracy. Of course, in common
speech with the sailors and hunters, it sometimes fairly bristled with
errors, which was due to the vernacular itself; but in the few words
he had held with me it had been clear and correct.
This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me,
for I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost.
'I have been robbed,' I said to him a little later, when I found him
pacing up and down the poop alone.
'Sir,' he corrected, not harshly, but sternly.
'I have been robbed, sir,' I amended.
'How did it happen?' he asked.
Then I told him the whole circumstance: how my clothes had been left
to dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the
cook when I mentioned the matter.
He smiled at my recital.
'Pickings,' he concluded; 'Cooky's pickings. And don't you think
your miserable life worth the price? Besides, consider it a lesson.
You'll learn in time how to take care of your money for yourself. I
suppose, up to now, your lawyer has done it for you, or your
business agent.'
I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, 'How
can I get it back again?'
'That's your lookout. 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 forever.'
'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 jellyfish 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- '
'Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it.' His
voice sounded harsh. There was no levity in it. 'For, look you, they
dream of making lucky voyages which will bring them more money, of
becoming the masters of ships, of finding fortunes- in short, of being
in a better position for preying on their fellows, of having all night
in, good grub, and somebody else to do the dirty work. You and I are
just like them. There is no difference, except that we have eaten more
and better. I am eating them now, and you, too. But in the past you
have eaten more than I have. You have slept in soft beds, and worn
fine clothes, and eaten good meals. Who made those beds, and those
clothes, and those meals? Not you. You never made anything in your own
sweat. You live on an income which your father earned. You are like
a frigate-bird swooping down upon the boobies and robbing them of
the fish they have caught. You are one with a crowd of men who have
made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other
men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat
themselves. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they
shiver in rags and ask you, or the lawyer or business agent who
handles your money, for a job.'
'But that is beside the matter,' I cried.
'Not at all.' He was speaking rapidly now, and his eyes were
flashing. 'It is piggishness, and it is life. Of what use or sense
is an immortality of piggishness? What is the end? What is it all
about? You have made no food, yet the food you have eaten or wasted
might have saved the lives of a score of wretches who made the food,
but did not eat it. What immortal end did you serve? Or did they?
Consider yourself and me. What does your boasted immortality amount to
when your life runs foul of mine? You would like to go back to the
land, which is a favorable place for your kind of piggishness. It is a
whim of mine to keep you aboard this ship, where my piggishness
flourishes. And keep you I will. I may make or break you. You may
die today, this week, or next month. I could kill you now, with a blow
of my fist, for you are a miserable weakling. But if we are
immortal, what is the reason for this? To be piggish as you and I have
been all our lives does not seem to be just the thing for immortals to
be doing. Again, what's it all about? Why have I kept you here?'
'Because you are stronger,' I managed to blurt out.
'But why stronger?' he went on at once with his perpetual queries.
'Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you. Don't you see?
Don't you see?'
'But the hopelessness of it,' I protested.
'I agree with you,' he answered. 'Then why move at all, since moving
is living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be
no hopelessness. But- and there it is- we want to live and move,
though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the
nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it
were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that
is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in
you is alive and wants to go on being alive forever. Bah! An
eternity of piggishness!'
He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward. He stopped at
the break of the poop and called me to him.
'By the way, how much was it that Cooky got away with?' he asked.
'One hundred and eighty-five dollars, sir,' I answered.
He nodded his head. A moment later, as I started down the
companion-stairs to lay the table for dinner, I heard him loudly
cursing some man amidships.
CHAPTER SIX.
BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING the storm had blown itself quite out, and
the Ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind.
Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen patrolled
the poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the northeast,
from which direction the great trade-wind must blow.
The men are all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for
the season's hunting. There are seven boats aboard, the captain's
dinghy and the six which the hunters will use. Three, a hunter, a
boat-puller, and a boat-steerer, compose a boat's crew. On board the
schooner the boat-pullers and steerers are the crew. The hunters, too,
are supposed to be in command of the watches, subject always to the
orders of Wolf Larsen.
All this, and more, I have learned. The Ghost is considered the
fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets. In
fact, she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed. Her lines
and fittings, though I know nothing about such things, speak for
themselves. Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat I had
with him during yesterday's second dog-watch. He spoke most
enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as some men feel
for horses. He is greatly disgusted with the outlook, and I am given
to understand that Wolf Larsen bears a very unsavory reputation
among the sealing-captains. It was the Ghost herself that lured
Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is already beginning to
repent.
As he told me, the Ghost is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably
fine model. Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a
little over ninety feet. A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight
makes her very stable, while she carries an immense spread of
canvas. From the deck to the truck of the maintopmast is something
over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its topmast is eight or
ten feet shorter. I am giving these details so that the size of this
little floating world which holds twenty-two men may be appreciated.
It is a very little world, a mote, a speck, and I marvel that men
should dare to venture the sea on a contrivance so small and fragile.
Wolf Larsen has also a reputation for reckless carrying on of
sail. I overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a
Californian, talking about it. Two years ago he dismasted the Ghost in
a gale in Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which
are stronger and heavier in every way. He is said to have remarked,
when he put them in, that he preferred turning her over to losing
the sticks.
Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather
overcome by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed
on the Ghost. Half the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their
excuse is that they did not know anything about her or her captain.
And those who do know whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots,
were so notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that
they could not sign on any decent schooner.
I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew. Louis he is
called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very
sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener. In
the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the
everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into the galley for a 'yarn.'
His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed. He
assured me again and again that it was the last thing in the world
he would dream of doing in a sober moment. It seems that he has been
seal-hunting regularly each season for a dozen years, and is accounted
one of the two or three very best boat-steerers in both fleets.
'Ah, my boy,'- he shook his head ominously at me,- ''t is the
worst schooner ye could iv selected; nor were ye drunk at the time, as
was I. 'T is sealin' is the sailor's paradise- on other ships than
this. The mate was the first, but, mark me words, there'll be more
dead men before the trip is done with. Hist, now, between you an'
meself an' the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil,
an' the Ghost'll be a hell-ship like she's always be'n since he had
hold iv her. Don't I know? Don't I know? Don't I remember him in
Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an' shot four iv his men?
Wasn't I a-layin' on the Emma L., not three hundred yards away? An'
there was a man the same year he killed with a blow iv his fist.
Yes, sir, killed 'im dead- oh. His head must iv smashed like an
egg-shell. 'T is the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen- the great big
beast mentioned iv in Revelations; an' no good end will he ever come
to. But I've said nothin' to ye, mind ye; I've whispered never a word;
for old fat Louis'll live the voyage out, if the last mother's son
of yez go to the fishes.
'Wolf Larsen!' he snorted a moment later. 'Listen to the word,
will ye! Wolf- 't is what he is. He's not black-hearted, like some
men. 'T is no heart he has at all. Wolf, just wolf, 't is what he
is. D'ye wonder he's well named?'
'But if he is so well known for what he is,' I queried, 'how is it
that he can get men to ship with him?'
'An' how is it ye can get men to do anything on God's earth an'
sea?' Louis demanded with Celtic fire. 'How d' ye find me aboard if 't
wasn't that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down? There's them
that can't sail with better men, like the hunters, an' them that don't
know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers for'ard there. But
they'll come to it, they'll come to it, an' be sorry the day they
was born. I could weep for the poor creatures, did I but forget poor
old fat Louis and the troubles before him. But 't is not a whisper
I've dropped; mind ye, not a whisper.
'Them hunters is the wicked boys,' he broke forth again, for he
suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. 'But wait till they
get to cuttin' up iv jinks an' rowin' round. He's the boy'll fix
'em. 'T is him that'll put the fear of God in their rotten black
hearts. Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner. "Jock" Horner they call
him, so quiet-like an' easy-goin'; soft-spoken as a girl, till ye'd
think butter wouldn't melt in the mouth iv him. Didn't he kill his
boat-steerer last year? 'T was called a sad accident, but I met the
boat-puller in Yokohama, an' the straight iv it was given me. An'
there's Smoke, the black little devil- didn't the Roosians have him
for three years in the salt-mines of Siberia for poachin' on Copper
Island, which is a Roosian preserve? Shackled he was, hand an' foot,
with his mate. An' didn't they have words or a ruction of some kind?
For 't was the other fellow Smoke sent up in the buckets to the top of
the mine; an' a piece at a time he went up, a leg today, an'
tomorrow an arm, the next day the head, an' so on.'
'But you can't mean it!' I cried out, overcome with the horror of
it.
'Mean what?' he demanded, quick as a flash. ''T is nothin' I've
said. Deef I am, an' dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your
mother; an' never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things iv
them an' him, God curse his soul! an' may he rot in purgatory ten
thousand years, an' then go down to the last an' deepest hell iv all!'
Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard,
seemed the least equivocal of the men for'ard or aft. In fact, there
was nothing equivocal about him. One was struck at once by his
straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were tempered by
a modesty which might be mistaken for timidity. But timid he was
not. He seemed rather to have the courage of his convictions, the
certitude of his manhood. It was this that made him protest, at the
beginning of our acquaintance, against being called Yonson. And upon
this and him Louis passed judgment and prophecy.
''T is a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we've for'ard with
us,' he said. 'The best sailorman in the fo'c's'le. He's my
boat-puller. But it's to trouble he'll come with Wolf Larsen, as the
sparks fly upward. It's meself that knows. I can see it brewin' an'
comin' up like a storm in the sky. I've talked to him like a
brother, but it's little he sees in takin' in his lights or flyin'
false signals. He grumbles out when things don't go to suit him, an'
there'll be always some telltale carryin' word iv it aft to the
Wolf. The Wolf is strong, an' it's the way of a wolf to hate strength,
an' strength is is he'll see in Johnson- no knucklin' under, an' a
"Yes, sir; thank ye kindly, sir," for a curse or a blow. Oh, she's
a-comin'! She's a-comin'! An' God knows where I'll get another
boat-puller. What does the fool up an' say, when the Old Man calls him
Yonson, but "Me name is Johnson, sir," and' then spells it out, letter
for letter. Ye should iv seen the Old Man's face! I thought he'd let
drive at him on the spot. He didn't, but he will, an' he'll break that
squarehead's heart, or it's little I know iv the ways iv men on the
ships iv the sea.'
Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to mister
him and to sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf
Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented
thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook, but this
is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing. Two or three times he put
his head into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly, and
once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted
with him for fully fifteen minutes. When it was over, and Mugridge was
back in the galley, he became greasily radiant and went about his work
humming Coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.
'I always get along with the officers,' he remarked to me in a
confidential tone. 'I know the w'y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted.
There was my last skipper- w'y, I thought nothin' of droppin' down
in the cabin for a little chat an' a friendly glass. "Mugridge,"
says 'e to me, "Mugridge," says 'e, "you've missed yer vocytion." "an'
ow's that?" says I. "Yer should' a' been born a gentleman, an' never
'ad to work for yer livin'." God strike me dead, 'Ump, if that ayn't
wot 'e says, an' me a-sittin' there in 'is own cabin, jolly- like
an' comfortable, a-smokin' 'is cigars an' drinkin' 'is rum.'
This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction. I never heard a
voice I hated so. His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile, and
his monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes I was
all in a tremble. Positively he was the most disgusting and
loathsome person I have ever met. The filth of his cooking was
indescribable; and as he cooked everything that was eaten aboard, I
was compelled to select with great circumspection what I ate, choosing
from the least dirty of his concoctions.
My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.
The nails were discolored and black, while the skin was already
grained with dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.
Then blisters came, in a painful and never-ending procession, and I
had a great burn on my forearm, acquired by losing my balance in a
roll of the ship and pitching against the galley stove. Nor was my
knee any better. The swelling had not gone down, and the cap was still
up on edge. Hobbling about on it from morning to night was not helping
it any. What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get well.
Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been
resting all my life and did not know it. But now could I sit still for
one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most
pleasurable thing in the world. But it is a revelation, on the other
hand. I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working-people
hereafter. I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing. From
half-past five in the morning till ten o'clock at night I am
everybody's slave, with not one moment to myself except such as I
can steal near the end of the second dog-watch. Let me pause for a
minute to look out over the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at
a sailor going aloft to the gaff topsails or running out the bowsprit,
and I am sure to hear the hateful voice, ''Ere, you, 'Ump! No
sodgerin'! I've got my peepers on yer.'
There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the
gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight.
Henderson seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow and
hard to rouse; but roused he must have been for Smoke had a bruised
and discolored eye and looked particularly vicious when he came into
the cabin for supper.
A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the
callousness and brutishness of these men. There is one green hand in
the crew, Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered,
I imagine, by the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage. In
the light, baffling airs, the schooner has been tacking about a
great deal, at which times the sails pass from one side to the
other, and a man is sent aloft to shift over the fore-gaff topsail.
In some way, when Harrison was aloft, the sheet jammed in the
block through which it runs at the end of the gaff. As I understood
it, there were two ways of getting it cleared- first, by lowering
the foresail, which was comparatively easy and without danger; and,
second, by climbing out on the peak-halyards to the end of the gaff
itself, a very hazardous performance.
Johansen called out to Harrison to go out on the halyards. It was
patent to everybody that the boy was afraid. And well he might be,
eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking
ropes. Had there been a steady breeze it would not have been so bad,
but the Ghost was rolling emptily in a long sea, and with each roll
the canvas flapped and boomed and the halyards slacked and jerked
taut. They were capable of snapping a man off like a fly from a
whiplash.
Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him,
but hesitated. It was probably the first time in his life he had
been aloft. Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf Larsen's
masterfulness, burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.
'That'll do, Johansen!' Wolf Larsen said brusquely. 'I'll have you
know that I do the swearing on this ship. If I need your assistance,
I'll call you in.'
'Yes, sir,' the mate acknowledged submissively.
In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards. I was
looking up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling in
every limb as with ague. He proceeded very slowly and cautiously, an
inch at a time. Outlined against the clear blue of the sky, he had the
appearance of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery of its
web.
It was a slightly uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high; and
the halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and mast,
gave him separate holds for hands and feet. But the trouble lay in
that the wind was not strong enough or steady enough to keep the
sail full. When he was halfway out, the Ghost took a long roll to
windward and back again into the hollow between two seas. Harrison
ceased his progress and held on tightly. Eighty feet beneath I could
see the agonized strain of his muscles as he gripped for very life.
The sail emptied and the gaff swung amidships. The halyards
slackened, and, though it all happened very quickly, I could see
them sag beneath the weight of his body. Then the gaff swung to the
side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed like a cannon,
and the three rows of reef-points slatted against the canvas like a
volley of rifles. Harrison, clinging on, made the giddy rush through
the air. This rush ceased abruptly. The halyards became instantly
taut. It was the snap of the whip. His clutch was broken. One hand was
torn loose from its hold. The other lingered desperately for a moment,
and followed. His body pitched out and down, but in some way he
managed to save himself with his legs. He was hanging by them, head
downward. A quick effort brought his hands up to the halyards again;
but he was a long time regaining his former position, where he hung, a
pitiable object.
'I'll bet he has no appetite for supper,' I heard Wolf Larsen's
voice, which came to me from around the corner of the galley. 'Look at
his gills.'
In truth Harrison was very sick, as a person is seasick; and for a
long time clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move.
Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on to the
completion of his task.
'It is a shame,' I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow and
correct English. He was standing by the main rigging, a few feet
away from me. 'The boy is willing enough. He will learn if he has a
chance. But this- ' He paused a while, for the word 'murder' was his
final judgment.
'Hist, will ye!' Louis whispered to him. 'For the love iv your
mother, hold your mouth!'
But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.
'Look here,'- the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen,- 'that's
my boat-puller, and I don't want to lose him.'
'That's all right, Standish,' was the reply. 'He's your
boat-puller when you've got him in the boat, but he's my sailor when I
have him aboard, and I'll do what I well please with him.'
'But that's no reason- ' Standish began in a torrent of speech.
'That'll do; easy as she goes,' Wolf Larsen counseled back. 'I've
told you what's what, and let it stop at that. The man's mine, and
I'll make soup of him and eat it if I want to.'
There was an angry gleam in the hunter's eye, but he turned on his
heel and entered the steerage companionway, where he remained, looking
upward. All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were aloft, where a
human life was at grapples with death. The callousness of these men,
to whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other
men, was appalling. I, who had lived out of the whirl of the world,
had never dreamed that its work was carried on in such fashion. Life
had always seemed a peculiarly sacred thing; but here it counted for
nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. I must say,
however, that the sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instance the
case of Johnson; but the masters (the hunters and the captain) were
heartlessly indifferent. Even the protest of Standish arose out of the
fact that he did not wish to lose his boat-puller. Had it been some
other hunter's boat-puller, he, like them, would have been no more
than amused.
But to return to Harrison. It took Johansen, insulting and
reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started
again. A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride
the spar itself, he had a better chance for holding on. He cleared the
sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill now, along the
halyards to the mast. But he had lost his nerve. Unsafe as was his
present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more unsafe
position on the halyards.
He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the
deck. His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling
violently. I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human
face. Johansen called vainly for him to come down. At any moment he
was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with
fright. Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in
conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply,
once, to the man at the wheel:
'You're off your course, my man! Be careful, unless you're looking
for trouble.'
'Aye, aye, sir,' the helmsman responded, putting a couple of
spokes down.
He had been guilty of running the Ghost several points off her
course, in order that what little wind there was should fill the
foresail and hold it steady. He had striven to help the unfortunate
Harrison at the risk of incurring Wolf Larsen's anger.
The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible. Thomas
Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was
continually bobbing his head out of the galley door to make jocose
remarks. How I hated him! And how my hatred for him grew and grew,
during that fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions! For the first
time in my life I experienced the desire to murder- 'saw red,' as some
of our picturesque writers phrase it. Life in general might still be
sacred, but life in the particular case of Thomas Mugridge had
become very profane indeed. I was frightened when I became conscious
that I was seeing red, and the thought flashed through my mind: Was I,
too, becoming tainted by the brutality of my environment?- I, who even
in the most flagrant crimes had denied the justice and righteousness
of capital punishment.
Fully half an hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis in some
sort of altercation. It ended with Johnson flinging off Louis's
detaining arm and starting forward. He crossed the deck, sprang into
the fore rigging, and began to climb. But the quick eye of Wolf Larsen
caught him.
'Here, you, what are you up to?' he cried.
Johnson's ascent was arrested. He looked his captain in the eyes and
replied slowly:
'I am going to get that boy down.'
'You'll get down out of that rigging, and- lively about it! D'ye
hear! Get down!'
Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters of
ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went on
forward.
At half after five I went below to set the cabin table; but I hardly
knew what I did, for my eyes and brain were filled with the vision
of a man, white-faced and trembling, comically, like a bug, clinging
to the thrashing gaff. At six o'clock, when I served supper, going
on deck to get the food from the galley, I saw Harrison, still in
the same position. The conversation at the table was of other
things. Nobody seemed interested in the wantonly imperiled life.
But, making an extra trip to the galley a little later, I was
gladdened by the sight of Harrison staggering weakly from the
rigging to the forecastle scuttle. He had finally summoned the courage
to descend.
Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation
I had with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.
'You were looking squeamish this afternoon,' he began. 'What was the
matter?'
I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as
Harrison, that he was trying to draw me, and I answered: 'It was
because of the brutal treatment of that boy.'
He gave a short laugh. 'Like seasickness, I suppose. Some men are
subject to it, and others are not.'
'Not so,' I objected.
'Just so,' he went on. 'The earth is as full of brutality as the sea
is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some
by the other. That's the only reason.'
'But you who make a mock of human life, don't you place any value
upon it whatever?' I demanded.
'Value? What value? He looked at me, and though his eyes were steady
and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them. 'What kind of
value? How do you measure it? Who values it?'
'I do,' I made answer.
'Then what is it worth to you? Another man's life, I mean. Come,
now, what is it worth?'
The value of life? How could I put a tangible value upon it? Somehow
I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf
Larsen. I have since determined that a part of it was due to the man's
personality, but that the greater part was due to his totally
different outlook. Unlike other materialists I had met, and with
whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing in common
with him. Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind
that baffled me. He drove so directly to the core of the matter,
divesting a question always of all superfluous details, and with
such an air of finality, that I seemed to find myself struggling in
deep water with no footing under me. Value of life? How could I answer
the question on the spur of the moment? The sacredness of life I had
accepted as axiomatic. That it was intrinsically valuable was a truism
I had never questioned. But when he challenged the truism I was
speechless.
'We were talking about this yesterday,' he said. 'I held that life
was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might
live, and that living was merely successful piggishness. Why, if there
is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the
world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but
the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a
spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that
matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of
millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and
utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us,
we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents.
Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest.
Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand.
Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and
it's life eat life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.'
'You have read Darwin,' I said. 'But you read him misunderstandingly
when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your
wanton destruction of life.'
He shrugged his shoulders. 'You know you only mean that in
relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish you
destroy as much as I or any other man. And human life is in no wise
different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why it
is. Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and
without value? There are more sailors than there are ships on the
sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines for
them. Why, you who live on the land know that you house your poor
people in the slums of cities and loose famine and pestilence upon
them, and that there still remain more poor people, dying for want
of a crust of bread and a bit of meat (which is life destroyed),
than you know what to do with. Have you ever seen the London dockers
fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work?'
He started for the companion-stairs, but turned his head for a final
word. 'Do you know, the only value life has is what life puts upon
itself; and it is of course overestimated, since it is of necessity
prejudiced in its own favor. Take that man I had aloft. He held on
as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or
rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself, yes. But I do not
accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty
more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains
upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no
loss to the world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is
too large. To himself only was he of value, and to show how fictitious
even this value was, being dead, he is unconscious that he has lost
himself. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds
and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a
bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and
rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of
himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don't you see? And what have
you to say?'
'That you are at least consistent,' was all I could say, and I
went on washing the dishes.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
AT LAST, AFTER THREE DAYS of variable winds, we caught the northeast
trades. I came on deck, after a good night's rest in spite of my
poor knee, to find the Ghost foaming along, wing-and-wing and with
every sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern. Oh,
the wonder of the great trade-wind! All day we sailed, and all
night, and the next day, and the next, day after day, the wind
always astern and blowing steadily and strong. The schooner sailed
herself. There was no pulling and hauling on sheets and tackles, no
shifting of topsails, no work at all for the sailors to do except to
steer. At night, when the sun went down, the sheets were slackened; in
the morning, when they yielded up the damp of the dew and relaxed,
they were pulled tight again- and that was all.
Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time,
was the speed we were making; and ever out of the northeast the
brave wind blew, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty
miles between the dawns. It saddened me and gladdened me, the gait
with which we were leaving San Francisco behind and with which we were
foaming down upon the tropics. Each day grew perceptibly warmer. In
the second dog-watch the sailors came on deck, stripped, and threw
buckets of water upon one another from overside. Flying-fish were
beginning to be seen, and during the night the watch above scrambled
over the deck in pursuit of those that fell aboard. In the morning,
Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley was pleasantly areek
with the odor of their frying, while dolphin meat was served fore
and aft on such occasions as Johnson caught the blazing beauties
from the bowsprit end.
Johnson seemed to spend all his spare time there, or aloft at the
cross-trees, watching the Ghost cleaving the water under her press
of sail. There was passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he went
about in a sort of trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails,
the foaming wake, and the heave and the run of her over the liquid
mountains that were moving with us in stately procession.
The days and nights were all 'a wonder and a wild delight,' and
though I had little time from my dreary work, I stole odd moments to
gaze and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the
world possessed. Above, the sky was stainless blue- blue as the sea
itself, which, under the forefoot, was of the color and sheen of azure
satin. All around the horizon were pale, fleecy clouds, never
changing, never moving, like a silver setting for the flawless
turquoise sky.
I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of
lying on the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of
foam thrust aside by the Ghost's forefoot. It sounded like the
gurgling of a brook over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the
crooning song of it lured me away and out of myself till I was no
longer Hump the cabin-boy, or Van Weyden the man who had dreamed
away thirty-five years among books. But a voice behind me, the
unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with the invincible
certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the words he
was quoting, aroused me.
O the blazing tropic night, when the wake's a welt of light
That holds the hot sky tame,
And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors
Where the scared whale flukes in flame.
Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
And her ropes are taut with the dew,
For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out
trail,
We're sagging south on the Long Trail- the trail that is always
new.
'Eh, Hump? How's it strike you?' he asked, after the due pause which
words and setting demanded.
I looked into his face. It was aglow with light, as the sea
itself, and the eyes were flashing in the starshine.
'It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should show
enthusiasm,' I answered coldly.
'Why, man, it's living; it's life!' he cried.
'Which is a cheap thing and without value.' I flung his words at
him.
He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in
his voice.
'Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head,
what a thing this life is. Of course life is valueless, except to
itself. And I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now-
to myself. It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a
terrific overrating, but which I cannot help, for it is the life
that is in me that makes the rating.'
He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the
thought that was in him, and finally went on:
'Do you know, I am filled with a strange uplift; I feel as if all
time were echoing through me, as though all powers were mine. I know
truth, divine good from evil, right from wrong. My vision is clear and
far. I could almost believe in God. But'- and his voice changed, and
the light went out of his face- 'what is this condition in which I
find myself- this joy of living, this exultation of life, this
inspiration, I may well call it? It is what comes when there is
nothing wrong with one's digestion, when his stomach is in trim, and
his appetite has an edge, and all goes well. It is the bribe for
living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the
ferment, that makes some men think holy thoughts, and other men to see
God or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all- the
drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the
babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that it is
alive. And- bah! Tomorrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays,
as the miser clutching for a pot of gold pays on waking to penury. And
I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely; cease crawling of
myself, to be all acrawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed
upon, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles, that
they may become strength and movement in fin and scale and the guts of
fishes. Bah! And bah! again. The champagne is already flat. The
sparkle and bubble have gone out, and it is a tasteless drink.'
He left me as suddenly as he had come, springing to the deck with
the weight and softness of a tiger. The Ghost plowed on her way. I
noted that the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I
listened to it the effect of Wolf Larsen's swift rush from sublime
exultation to despair slowly left me. Then some deepwater sailor, from
the waist of the ship, lifted a rich tenor voice in the 'Song of the
Trade-wind':
Oh, I am the wind the seamen love-
I am steady, and strong, and true;
They follow my track by the clouds above,
O'er the fathomless tropic blue.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
SOMETIMES I THOUGHT Wolf Larsen mad, or half mad at least, what with
his strange moods and vagaries. At other times I took him for a
great man, a genius who had never arrived. And, finally, I was
convinced that he was the perfect type of the primitive man, born a
thousand years or generations too late, and an anachronism in this
culminating century of civilization. He was certainly an individualist
of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he was very lonely.
There was no congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard
ship; his tremendous virility and mental strength walled him apart.
They were more like children to him, even the hunters, and as children
he treated them, descending perforce to their level and playing with
them as a man plays with puppies. Or else he probed them with the
cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental
processes and examining their souls as though to see of what this
soul-stuff was made.
I had seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter
or that with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of
interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a
curiosity almost laughable to me who stood onlooker and who
understood. Concerning his own rages, I was convinced that they were
not real, that they were sometimes experiments, but that in the main
they were the habits of a pose or attitude he had seen fit to take
toward his fellowmen. I knew, with the possible exception of the
incident of the dead mate, that I had not seen him really angry; nor
did I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when all the force of
him would be called into play.
While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident
upon which I have already touched once or twice. The twelve o'clock
dinner was over, one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin in
order, when Wolf Larsen and Thomas Mugridge descended the
companion-stairs. Though the cook had a cubby-hole of a state-room
opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared
to linger or to be seen, and he flitted to and fro, once or twice a
day, like a timid specter.
'So you know how to play Nap,' Wolf Larsen was saying in a pleased
sort of voice. 'I might have guessed an Englishman would know. I
learned it myself in English ships.'
Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile, so
pleased was he at chumming thus with the captain. The little airs he
put on, and the painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a
man born to a dignified place in life, would have been sickening had
they not been ludicrous. He quite ignored my presence, though I
credited him with being simply unable to see me. His pale, wishy-washy
eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what blissful visions
they beheld were beyond my imagination.
'Get the cards, Hump,' Wolf Larsen ordered, as they took seats at
the table, 'and bring out the cigars and the whiskey you'll find in my
berth.'
I returned with the articles in time to hear the Cockney hinting
broadly that there was a mystery about him- that he might be a
gentleman's son gone wrong or something or other; also, that he was
a remittance-man, and was paid to keep away from- England- 'p'yed
'an'somely, sir,' was the way he put it; 'p'yed 'an'somely to sling my
'ook an' keep slingin' it.'
I had brought the customary liquor-glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned,
shook his head, and signaled with his hands for me to bring the
tumblers. These he filled two thirds full with undiluted whiskey,-
'a gentleman's drink,' quoth Thomas Mugridge,- and they clinked
their glasses to the glorious game of Nap, lighted cigars, and fell to
shuffling and dealing the cards.
They played for money. They increased the amounts of the bets.
They drank whiskey, they drank it neat, and I fetched more. I do not
know whether Wolf Larsen cheated,- a thing he was thoroughly capable
of doing,- but he won steadily. The cook made repeated journeys to his
bunk for money. Each time he performed the journey with greater
swagger, but he never brought more than a few dollars at a time. He
grew maudlin, familiar, could hardly see the cards or sit upright.
As a preliminary to another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf
Larsen's buttonhole with a greasy forefinger and vacuously
proclaimed and reiterated: 'I got money. I got money, I tell yer,
an' I'm a gentleman's son.'
Wolf Larsen was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for
glass, and, if anything, his glasses were fuller. There was no
change in him. He did not appear even amused at the other's antics.
In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a
gentleman, the cook's last money was staked on the game and lost.
Whereupon he leaned his head on his hands and wept. 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 Johansen 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 favored 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 conversations 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's 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. Weakness is wrong. Which is a very poor way of saying that it is
good for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak, or,
better yet, it is pleasurable to be strong, because of the profits;
painful to be weak, because of the penalties. just now the
possession of this money is a pleasurable thing. It is good for one to
possess it. Being able to possess it, I wrong myself and the life that
is in me if I give it to you and forego the pleasure of possessing
it.'
'But you wrong me by withholding it,' I objected.
'Not at all. One man cannot wrong another man. He can only wrong
himself. As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the
interests of others. Don't you see? How can two particles of the yeast
wrong each other by striving to devour each other? It is their
inborn heritage to strive to devour, and to strive not to be devoured.
When they depart from this they sin.'
'Then you don't believe in altruism?' I asked.
He received the word as though it had a familiar ring, though he
pondered it thoughtfully. 'Let me see; it means something about
cooperation, doesn't it?'
Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,' I
answered, unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary,
which, like his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read,
self-educated man whom no one had directed in his studies, and who had
thought much and talked little or not at all. 'An altruistic act is an
act performed for the welfare of others. It is unselfish, as opposed
to an act performed for self, which is selfish.'
He nodded his head. 'Oh, yes, I remember it now. I ran across it
in Spencer.'
'Spencer!' I cried. 'Have you read him?'
'Not very much,' was his confession. 'I understood quite a good deal
of "First Principles," but his "Biology" took the wind out of my
sails, and his "Psychology" left me butting around in the doldrums for
many a day. I honestly could not understand what he was driving at.
I put it down to mental deficiency on my part, but since then I have
decided that it was for want of preparation. I had no proper basis.
Only Spencer and myself know how hard I hammered. But I did get
something out of his "Data of Ethics." There's where I ran across
"altruism," and I remember now how it was used.'
I wondered what this man could have got from such a work. Spencer
I remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his
ideal of highest conduct. Wolf Larsen evidently had sifted the great
philosopher's teachings, rejecting and selecting according to his
needs and desires.
'What else did you run across?' I asked.
His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably
phrasing thoughts which he had never before put into speech. I felt an
elation of spirit. I was groping in his soul-stuff, as he made a
practice of groping in the soul-stuff of others. I was exploring
virgin territory. A strange, a terribly strange region was unrolling
itself before my eyes.
'In as few words as possible,' he began, 'Spencer puts it
something like this: First, a man must act for his own benefit- to
do this is to be moral and good. Next, he must act for the benefit
of his children. And third, he must act for the benefit of his race.'
'And the highest, finest right conduct,' I interjected, 'is that act
which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his race.'
'I wouldn't stand for that,' he replied. 'Couldn't see the necessity
for it, nor the common sense. I cut out the race and the children. I
would sacrifice nothing for them. It's just so much slush and
sentiment, and you must see it yourself, at least for one who does not
believe in eternal life. With immortality before me, altruism would be
a paying business proposition. I might elevate my soul to all kinds of
altitudes. But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a
brief spell this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life,
why, it would be immoral for me to perform any act that was a
sacrifice. Any sacrifice that makes me lose one crawl or squirm is
foolish; and not only foolish, for it is a wrong against myself, and a
wicked thing. I must not lose one crawl or squirm if I am to get the
most out of the ferment. Nor will the eternal movelessness that is
coming to me be made easier or harder by the sacrifices or
selfishnesses of the time when I was yeasty and acrawl.'
'Then you are an individualist, a materialist, and, logically, a
hedonist.'
'Big words,' he smiled. 'But what is a hedonist?'
He nodded agreement when I had given the definition.
'And you are also,' I continued, 'a man one could not trust in the
least thing where it was possible for a selfish interest to
intervene?'
'Now you're beginning to understand,' he said, brightening.
'You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals?'
'That's it.'
'A man of whom to be always afraid-'
'That's the way to put it.'
'As one is afraid of a snake, or a tiger, or a shark?'
'Now you know me,' he said. 'And you know me as I am generally
known. Other men call me "Wolf."'
'You are a sort of monster,' I added audaciously, 'a Caliban who has
pondered Setebos, and who acts as you act, in idle moments, by whim
and fancy.'
His brow clouded at the allusion. He did not understand, and I
quickly learned that he did not know the poem.
'I'm just reading Browning,' he confessed, 'and it's pretty tough. I
haven't got very far along, and as it is, I've about lost my
bearings.'
Not to be tiresome, I shall say that I fetched the book from his
state-room and read 'Caliban' aloud. He was delighted. It was a
primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he
understood thoroughly. He interrupted again and again with comment and
criticism. When I finished, he had me read it over a second time,
and a third. We fell into discussion- philosophy, science,
evolution, religion. He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read
man, and, it must be granted, the certitude and directness of the
primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was its strength,
and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex
materialism of Charley Furuseth. Not that I, a confirmed, and, as
Furuseth phrased it, a temperamental, idealist, was to be compelled;
but that Wolf Larsen stormed the last strongholds of my faith with a
vigor that received respect while not accorded conviction.
Time passed. Supper was at hand and the table not laid. I became
restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the
companionway, sick and angry of countenance, I prepared to go about my
duties. But Wolf Larsen cried out to him':
'Cooky, you've got to hustle tonight. I'm busy with Hump, and you'll
do the best you can without him.'
And again the unprecedented was established. That night I sat at
table with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited
on us and washed the dishes afterward- a whim, a Caliban-mood of
Wolf Larsen's, and one I foresaw would bring me trouble. In the
meantime we talked and talked, much to the disgust of the hunters, who
could not understand a word.
CHAPTER NINE.
THREE DAYS OF REST, THREE blessed days of rest, are what I had
with Wolf Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but
discuss life, literature, and the universe, the while Thomas
Mugridge fumed and raged and did my work as well as his own.
'Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,' was Louis's
warning, given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen
was engaged in straightening out a row among the hunters.
'Ye can't tell what'll be happenin',' Louis went on, in response
to my query for more definite information. 'The man's as contrary as
air-currents or water-currents. You can never guess the ways iv him.
'T is just as you're thinkin' you know him an' are makin' a
favorable slant along him that he whirls around, dead ahead, an' comes
howlin' down upon you an' a-rippin' all iv your fine-weather sails
to rags.'
So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by
Louis smote me. We had been having a heated discussion,- upon life, of
course,- and, grown overbold, I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf
Larsen and the life of Wolf Larsen. In fact, I was vivisecting him and
turning over his soul-stuff as keenly and thoroughly as it was his
custom to do it to others. It may be a weakness of mine that I have an
incisive way of speech, but I threw all restraint to the winds and cut
and slashed until the whole man of him was snarling. The dark
sun-bronze of his face went black with wrath; his eyes became
ablaze. There was no clearness or sanity in them- nothing but the
terrific rage of a madman. It was the wolf in him that I saw, and a
mad wolf at that.
He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm. I had steeled
myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the
enormous strength of the man was too much for my fortitude. He had
gripped me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip
tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud. My feet went out from under me.
I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony. The muscles
refused their duty. The pain was too great. My biceps was being
crushed to a pulp.
He seemed to recover himself, for a lurid gleam came into his
eyes, and he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like
a growl. I fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down,
lighted a cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse. As I writhed
about I could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often noted,
that wonder and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting query of
his as to what it was all about.
I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion-stairs. Fair
weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the
galley. My left arm was numb, as though paralyzed, and days passed
before I could use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness
and pain went out of it. And he had done nothing but put his hand upon
my arm and squeeze. There had been no wrenching or jerking. He had
just closed his hand with a steady pressure. What he might have done I
did not fully realize till next day, when he put his head into the
galley, and, as a sign of renewed friendliness, asked me how my arm
was getting on.
'It might have been worse,' he smiled.
I was peeling potatoes. He picked one up from the pan. It was
fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled. He closed his hand upon it,
squeezed, and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy
streams. The pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned
away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared with me
had the monster put his strength upon me.
But the three days' rest was good, in spite of it all, for it had
given my knee the very chance it needed. It felt much better, the
swelling had materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending
into its proper place. Also, the three days' rest brought the
trouble I had foreseen. It was plainly Thomas Mugridge's intention
to make me pay for those three days. He treated me vilely, cursed me
continually, and heaped his own work upon me. He even ventured to
raise his fist to me, but I was becoming animal-like myself, and I
snarled in his face so terribly that it must have frightened him back.
It is no pleasant picture I can conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van
Weyden, in that noisome ship's galley, crouched in a corner over my
task, my face raised to the face of the creature about to strike me,
my lips lifted and snarling like a dog's, my eyes gleaming with fear
and helplessness and the courage that comes of fear and
helplessness. I do not like the picture. It reminds me too strongly of
a rat in a trap. I do not care to think of it; but it was effective,
for the threatened blow did not descend.
Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I
glared. A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and
showing our teeth. He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I
had not quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to
intimidate me. There was only one galley knife that as a knife
amounted to anything. This, through many years of service and wear,
had acquired a long, lean blade. It was unusually cruel-looking, and
at first I had shuddered every time I used it. The cook borrowed a
stone from Johansen and proceeded to sharpen the knife. He did it with
great ostentation, glancing significantly at me the while. He
whetted it up and down all day long. Every odd moment he could find he
had the knife and stone out and was whetting away. The steel
acquired a razor-edge. He tried it with the ball of his thumb or
across the nail, he shaved hairs from the back of his hand, glanced
along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and found, or feigned
that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge somewhere. Then
he would put it on the stone again, and whet, whet, whet, till I could
have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.
It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using
it, that under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice,
like mine, that would impel him to do the very thing his whole
nature protested against doing and was afraid of doing. 'Cooky's
sharpening his knife for Hump,' was being whispered about among the
sailors, and some of them twitted him about it. This he took in good
part, and was really pleased, nodding his head with direful
foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the erstwhile
cabin-boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.
Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to
douse Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain. Leach had
evidently done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not
forgiven, for words followed, and evil names involving smirched
ancestries. Mugridge menaced with the knife he was sharpening for
me. Leach laughed and hurled more of his Telegraph Hill
billingsgate, and before either he or I knew what had happened, his
right forearm had been ripped open from elbow to wrist by a quick
slash of the knife. The cook backed away, a fiendish expression on his
face, the knife held before him in a position of defense. But Leach
took it quite calmly, though his blood was spouting upon the deck as
generously as water from a fountain.
'I'm goin' to get you, Cooky,' he said, 'and I'll get you hard.
And I won't be in no hurry about it. You'll be without that knife when
I come for you.'
So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward. Mugridge's face was
livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect sooner
or later from the man he had stabbed. But his demeanor toward me was
more ferocious than ever. In spite of his fear at the reckoning he
must expect to pay for what he had done, he could see that it had been
an object-lesson to me, and he became more domineering and exultant.
Also, there was a lust in him, akin to madness, which had come with
sight of the blood he had drawn. He was beginning to see red in
whatever direction he looked. The psychology of it is sadly tangled,
and yet I could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though
it were a printed book.
Several days went by, the Ghost still foaming down the trades, and I
could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge's eyes. And I
confess that I became afraid, very much afraid. Whet, whet, whet, it
went, all day long. The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge
and glared at me was positively carnivorous. I was afraid to turn my
shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I went out backward- to
the amusement of the sailors and hunters, who made a point of
gathering in groups to witness my exit. The strain was too great. I
sometimes thought my mind would give way under it- a meet thing on
this ship of madmen and brutes. Every hour, every minute, of my
existence was in jeopardy. I was a human soul in distress, and yet
no soul, fore or aft, betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to my
aid. At times I thought of throwing myself on the mercy of Wolf
Larsen; but the vision of the mocking devil in his eyes that
questioned life and sneered at it would come strong upon me and compel
me to refrain. At other times I seriously contemplated suicide, and
the whole force of my hopeful philosophy was required to keep me
from going over the side in the darkness of night.
Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion,
but I gave him short answers and eluded him. Finally, he commanded
me to resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook do
my work. Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring from
Thomas Mugridge because of the three days of favoritism which had been
shown me. Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.
'So you're afraid, eh?' he sneered.
'Yes,' I said defiantly and honestly, 'I am afraid.'
'That's the way with you fellows,' he cried half angrily;
'sentimentalizing about your immortal souls, and afraid to die. At
sight of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney, the clinging of life to
life overcomes all your fond foolishness. Why, my dear fellow, you
will live forever. You are a god, and a god cannot be killed. Cooky
cannot hurt you. You are sure of your resurrection. What's there to be
afraid of?
'You have eternal life before you. You are a millionaire in
immortality, a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose fortune
is less perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or time.
It is impossible for you to diminish your principal. Immortality is
a thing without beginning or end. Eternity is eternity, and though you
die here and now, you will go on living somewhere else and
hereafter. And it is all very beautiful, this shaking off of the flesh
and soaring of the imprisoned spirit. Cooky cannot hurt you. He can
only give you a boost on the path you eternally must tread.
'Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just yet, why not boost Cooky?
According to your ideas, he too must be an immortal millionaire. You
cannot bankrupt him. His paper will always circulate at par. You
cannot diminish the length of his living by killing him, for he is
without beginning or end. He's bound to go on living, somewhere,
somehow. Then boost him. Stick a knife in him and let his spirit free.
As it is, it's in a nasty prison, and you'll do him only a kindness by
breaking down the door. And who knows? It may be a very beautiful
spirit that will go soaring up into the blue from that ugly carcass.
Boost him along, and I'll promote you to his place, and he's getting
forty-five dollars a month.'
It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf
Larsen. Whatever was to be done I must do for myself; and out of the
courage of fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with
his own weapons. I borrowed a whetstone from Johansen. Louis, the
boat-steerer, had already begged me for condensed milk and sugar.
The lazaret, where such delicacies were stored, was situated beneath
the cabin floor. Watching my chance, I stole five cans of the milk,
and that night, when it was Louis's watch on deck, I traded them
with him for a dirk, as lean and cruel-looking as Thomas Mugridge's
vegetable-knife. It was rusty and dull, but I turned the grindstone
while Louis gave it an edge. I slept more soundly than usual that
night.
Next morning, after breakfast, Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet,
whet. I glanced warily at him, for I was on my knees taking the
ashes from the stove. When I returned from throwing them overside,
he was talking to Harrison, whose honest yokel's face was filled
with fascination and wonder.
'Yes,' Mugridge was saying, 'an' wot does 'is worship do but give me
two years in Reading. But blimey if I cared. The other mug was fixed
plenty. Should 'a' seen 'im. Knife just like this.' He shot a glance
in my direction to see if I was taking it in, and went on with a
gory narrative of his prowess.
A call from the mate interrupted him, and Harrison went aft.
Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold to the galley and went on
with his knife-sharpening. I put the shovel away and calmly sat down
on the coal-box, facing him. He favored me with a vicious stare. Still
calmly, though my heart was going pit-a-pat, I pulled out Louis's dirk
and began to whet it on the stone. I had looked for almost any sort of
explosion on the Cockney's part, but, to my surprise, he did not
appear aware of what I was doing. He went on whetting his knife; so
did I; and for two hours we sat there, face to face, whet, whet, the
news of it spread abroad, and half the ship's company was crowding the
galley doors to see the sight.
Encouragement and advice were freely tendered, and Jock Horner,
the quiet, soft-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a
mouse, advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward, at the
same time giving what he called the 'Spanish twist' to the blade.
Leach, his bandaged arm prominently to the fore, begged me to leave
a few remnants of the cook for him, and Wolf Larsen paused once or
twice at the break of the poop to glance curiously at what must have
been to him a stirring and crawling of the yeasty thing he knew as
life.
And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same
sordid values to me. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing
divine- only two cowardly moving things that sat whetting steel upon
stone, and a group of other moving things, cowardly and otherwise,
that looked on. Half of them, I am sure, were anxious to see us
shedding each other's blood. It would have been entertainment. And I
do not think there was one who would have interfered had we closed
in a death-struggle.
On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish. Whet,
whet, whet- Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in a ship's
galley and trying its edge with his thumb. Of all situations this
was the most inconceivable. I know that my own kind could not have
believed it possible. I had not been called 'Sissy' Van Weyden all
my days without reason, and that 'Sissy' Van Weyden should be
capable of doing this thing was a revelation to Humphrey Van Weyden,
who knew not whether to be exultant or ashamed.
But nothing happened. At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put
away knife and stone and held out his hand.
'Wot's the good of mykin' a 'oly show of ourselves for them mugs?'
he demanded. 'They don't love us, an' bloody well glad they'd be
a-seein' us cuttin' our throats. Yer not 'arf bad, 'Ump. You've got
spunk, as you Yanks s'y, an' I like yer in a w'y. So come on an'
shyke.'
Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he. It was a
distinct victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by
shaking his detestable hand.
'All right,' he said pridelessly; 'tyke it or leave it. I'll like
yer none the less for it.' And, to save his face, he turned fiercely
upon the onlookers. 'Get outer my galley door, you bloomin' swabs!'
This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and at
sight of it the sailors scrambled out of the way. This was a sort of
victory for Thomas Mugridge and enabled him to accept more
gracefully the defeat I had given him, though, of course, he was too
discreet to attempt to drive the hunters away.
'I see Cooky's finish,' I heard Smoke say to Horner.
'You bet,' was the reply. 'Hump runs the galley from now on, and
Cooky pulls in his horns.'
Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign
that the conversation had reached me. I had not thought my victory was
so far-reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I had
gained. As the days went by, Smoke's prophecy was verified. The
Cockney became more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf Larsen.
I mistered him and sirred him no longer, washed no more greasy pots,
and peeled no more potatoes. I did my own work, and my own work
only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit. Also, I carried the dirk
in a sheath at my hip, sailor-fashion, and maintained toward Thomas
Mugridge a constant attitude which was composed of equal parts of
domineering, insult, and contempt.
CHAPTER TEN.
MY INTIMACY WITH Wolf Larsen increased, if by intimacy may be
denoted those relations which exist between master and man, or, better
yet, between king and jester. I was to him no more than a toy, and
he valued me no more than a child values a toy. My function was to
amuse, and so long as I amused all went well; but let him become
bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon him, and at
once I was relegated from cabin table to galley, while, at the same
time, I was fortunate to escape with my life and a whole body.
The loneliness of the man was slowly being borne in upon me. There
was not a man aboard but hated or feared him, nor was there a man whom
he did not despise. He seemed consuming with the tremendous power that
was in him and that seemed never to have found adequate expression
in works. He was as Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit
banished to a society of soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.
This loneliness was bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse,
he was oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him,
I reviewed the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.
The white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible
pantheon were of the same fiber as he. The frivolity of the
laughter-loving Latins was no part of him. When he laughed it was from
a humor that was nothing else than ferocious. But he laughed rarely;
he was too often sad. And it was a sadness as deep-reaching as the
roots of the race. It was the race heritage, the sadness which had
made the race sober-minded, clean-lived, and fanatically moral.
In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has
been religion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensations of
such religion were denied Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism would
not permit it. So, when his blue moods came on, nothing remained for
him but to be devilish. Had he not been so terrible a man, I could
sometimes have felt sorry for him, as, for instance, one morning
when I went into his state-room to fill his water-bottle and came
unexpectedly upon him. He did not see me. His head was buried in his
hands, and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as with sobs. He
seemed torn by some mighty grief. As I softly withdrew, I could hear
him groaning, 'God! God! God!' Not that he was calling upon God; it
was a mere expletive, but it came from his soul.
At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by
evening, strong man that he was, he was half blind, and reeling
about the cabin.
'I've never been sick in my life, Hump,' he said, as I guided him to
his room. 'Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head was
healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar.'
For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as
wild animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without
plaint, without sympathy, utterly alone.
This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed
and put things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table
and bunk were littered with designs and calculations. On a large
transparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying what
appeared to be a scale of some sort or other.
'Hello, Hump!' he greeted me genially. 'I'm just finished the
finishing touches. Want to see it work?'
'But what is it?' I asked.
'A labor-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to
kindergarten simplicity,' he answered gaily. 'From today a child
will be able to navigate a ship. No more long-winded calculations. All
you need is one star in the sky on dirty night to know instantly where
you are. Look. I place the transparent scale on this star-map,
revolving the scale on the North Pole. On the scale I've worked out
the circles of altitude and the lines of bearing. All I do is put it
on a star, revolve the scale till it is opposite those figures on
the map underneath, and presto, there you are, the ship's precise
location!'
There was a ring of triumph in his voice, and his eyes, clear blue
this morning as the sea, were sparkling with light.
'You must be well up in mathematics,' I said. 'Where did you go to
school?' 'Never saw the inside of one, worse luck,' was the answer. 'I
had to dig it out for myself.
'And why do you think I have made this thing?' he demanded abruptly.
'Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?' He laughed one of
his horrible mocking laughs. 'Not at all. To get it patented, to
make money from it, to revel in piggishness, with all night in while
other men do the work. That's my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working
it out.'
'The creative joy,' I murmured.
'I guess that's what it ought to be called. Which is another way
of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of
movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the
yeast because it is yeast and crawls.'
I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate
materialism, and went about making the bed. He continued copying lines
and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring the
utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he
tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.
When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a
fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man- beautiful
in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I
remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or
sinfulness, in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who
did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I
mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing
contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no
conscience. I incline to the latter way of accounting for it. 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 I have said, in the masculine sense his was a beautiful face.
Smooth-shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and
sharp as a cameo; while sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin
to a dark bronze which bespoke struggle and battle, and added to
both his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet possessed of
the firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin
lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was likewise firm or
harsh, with all the fierceness and indomitableness of the male; the
nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command.
It just hinted of the eagle beak. It might have been Grecian, it might
have been Roman, only it was a shade too massive for the one, a
shade too delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the
incarnation of fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from
which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and
brow, seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise
the face would have lacked.
And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot
say how greatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What
was he? How had he happened to be? All powers seemed his, all
potentialities; why, then, was he no more than the obscure master of a
seal-hunting schooner, with a reputation for frightful brutality among
the men who hunted seals?
My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech:
'Why is it that you have not done great things in this world? With
the power that is yours you might have risen to any height.
Unpossessed of conscience or moral instinct, you might have mastered
the world, broken it to your hand. And yet here you are, at the top of
your life, where diminishing and dying begin, living an obscure and
sordid existence hunting sea-animals for the satisfaction of woman's
vanity and love of decoration, reveling in a piggishness, to use
your own words, which is anything and everything except splendid. Why,
with all that wonderful strength, have you not done something? There
was nothing to stop you, nothing that could stop you. What was
wrong? Did you lack ambition? Did you fall under temptation? What
was the matter? What was the matter?'
He had lifted his eyes to me at the beginning of my outburst and
followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him
breathless and dismayed. He waited a moment, as though seeing where to
begin, and then said:
'Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow?
If you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places, where
there was not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they
had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up, they were scorched;
and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among
thorns, and the thorns sprung up and choked them.'
'Well?' I said.
'Well?' he queried half petulantly. 'It was not well. I was one of
those seeds.'
He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. I finished
my work, and had opened the door to leave, when he spoke to me.
'Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway you
will see an indentation called Romsdal Fiord. I was born within a
hundred miles of that stretch of water. But I was not born
Norwegian. I am a Dane. My father and mother were Danes, and how
they ever came to that bleak bight of land on the west coast I do
not know. I never heard. Outside of that, there is nothing mysterious.
They were poor people and unlettered. They came of generations of
poor, unlettered people- peasants of the sea who sowed their sons on
the waves as has been their custom since time began. There is no
more to tell.'
'But there is,' I objected. 'It is still obscure to me.'
'What can I tell you,' he demanded, with a recrudescence of
fierceness, 'of the meagerness of a child's life- of fish diet and
coarse living; of going out with the boats from the time I could
crawl; of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea
farming and never came back; of myself, unable to read or write,
cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country
ships; of the rough fare and rougher usage, where kicks and blows were
bed and breakfast and took the place of speech, and fear and hatred
and pain were my only soul-experiences? I do not care to remember. A
madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of it. But there were
coastwise skippers I would have sought and killed when a man's
strength came to me, only the lines of my life were cast at the time
in other places. I did return, not long ago, but unfortunately the
skippers were dead, all but one, a mate in the old days, a skipper
when I met him, and when I left him, a cripple who would never walk
again.'
'But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the
inside of a school, how did you learn to read and write?' I queried.
'In the English merchant service. Cabin-boy at twelve, ship's boy at
fourteen, ordinary seaman at sixteen, able seaman at seventeen and
cock of the fo'c's'le; infinite ambition and infinite loneliness,
receiving neither help nor sympathy, I did it all for myself-
navigation, mathematics, science, literature, and what not. And of
what use has it been? Master and owner of a ship at the top of my
life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish and die. Paltry,
isn't it? And when the sun was up I was scorched, and because I had no
root I withered away.'
'But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple,' I chided.
'And history tells of opportunities that came to the slaves who rose
to the purple,' he answered grimly. 'No man makes opportunity. All the
great men ever did was to know it when it came to them. The Corsican
knew. I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have known
the opportunity, but it never came. The thorns sprung up and choked
me. And, Hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any
living man except my own brother.'
'And what is he? And where is he?'
'Master of the steamship Macedonia, seal-hunter,' was the answer.
'We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him
"Death" Larsen.'
'Death Larsen!' I involuntarily cried. 'Is he like you?'
'Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all
my- my-'
'Brutishness,' I suggested.
'Yes, thank you for the word- all my brutishness; but he can
scarcely read or write.'
'And he has never philosophized on life,' I added.
'No,' Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.
'And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy
living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the
books.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
THE GHOST HAS ATTAINED the southernmost point of the arc she is
describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to edge away
to the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumored, where
she will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season's hunt
along the coast of Japan. The hunters have experimented and
practiced with their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied,
and the boat-pullers and steerers have made their sprit-sails, bound
the oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so that they will make
no noise when creeping on the seals, and put their boats in
apple-pie order, to use Leach's homely phrase.
His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will
remain all his life. Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him,
and is afraid to venture on deck after dark. There are two or three
standing quarrels in the forecastle. Louis tells me that the gossip of
the sailors finds its way aft, and that two of the telltales have been
badly beaten by their mates. He shakes his head dubiously over the
outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-puller in the same boat
with him. Johnson has been guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and
has collided two or three times with Wolf Larsen over the
pronunciation of his name. Johansen he thrashed on the amidships
deck the other night, since which time the mate has called him by
his proper name. But of course it is out of the question that
Johnson should thrash Wolf Larsen.
Louis has also given me additional information about Death Larsen,
which tallies with the captain's brief description. We may expect to
meet Death Larsen on the Japan coast. 'And look out for squalls,' is
Louis's prophecy, 'for they hate one another like the wolf-whelps they
are.' Death Larsen is in command of the only sealing-steamer in the
fleet, which carries fourteen boats, where the schooners carry only
six. There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange raids and
expeditions she may make, ranging from opium-smuggling into the States
and arms-smuggling into China, to black-birding and open piracy. Yet I
cannot but believe Louis, for I have never yet caught him in a lie,
while he has a cyclopedic knowledge of sealing and the men of the
sealing-fleets.
As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and
aft, on this veritable hell-ship. Men fight and struggle ferociously
for one another's lives. The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape
at any moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not
healed, while Wolf Larsen says positively that he will kill the
survivor of the affair if such affair comes off. He frankly states
that the position he takes is based on no moral grounds, that all
the hunters could kill and eat one another, so far as he is concerned,
were it not that he needs them alive for the hunting. If they will
only hold their hands until the season is over, he promises them a
royal carnival, when all grudges can be settled and the survivors
may toss the non-survivors overboard and arrange a story as to how the
missing men were lost at sea. I think even the hunters are appalled at
his cold-bloodedness. Wicked men though they be, they are certainly
very much afraid of him.
Thomas Mugridge is cur-like in his subjection to me, while I go
about in secret dread of him. His is the courage of fear, a strange
thing I know well of myself, and at any moment it may master the
fear and impel him to the taking of my life. My knee is much better,
though it often aches for long periods, and the stiffness is gradually
leaving the arm which Wolf Larsen squeezed. Otherwise I am in splendid
condition, feel that I am in splendid condition. My muscles are
growing harder and increasing in size. My hands, however, are a
spectacle for grief. Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the
diet most likely, for I was never so afflicted before.
I was amused, a couple of evenings back, by seeing Wolf Larsen
reading the Bible, a copy of which, after the futile search for one at
the beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate's
sea-chest. I wondered what Wolf Larsen could get from it, and he
read aloud to me from Ecclesiastes. I could imagine he was speaking
the thoughts of his own mind as he read to me, and his voice,
reverberating deeply and mournfully in the confined cabin, charmed and
held me. He may be uneducated, but he certainly knows how to express
the significance of the written word. I can hear him now, as I shall
always hear him, the primal melancholy vibrant in his voice, as he
read from Ecclesiastes the passage beginning: 'I gathered me also
silver and gold.'
'There you have it, Hump,' he said, closing the book upon his finger
and looking up at me. 'The Preacher who was king over Israel in
Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this
pessimism of the blackest?- 'all is vanity and vexation of spirit';
'there is no profit under the sun'; 'there is one event unto all,'
to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and
the saint; and that event is death, and an evil thing, he says. For
the Preacher loved life, and did not want to die, saying, 'For a
living dog is better than a dead lion.' He preferred the vanity and
vexation to the silence and unmovableness of the grave. And so I. To
crawl is piggish; but to not crawl, to be as the clod and rock, is
loathsome to contemplate. It is loathsome to the life that is in me,
the very essence of which is movement, the power of movement, and
the consciousness of the power of movement. Life itself is
unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.'
'You are worse off than Omar,' I said. 'He, at least, after the
customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his
materialism a joyous thing.'
'Who was Omar?' Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that
day, nor the next, or next.
In his random reading he had never chanced upon the 'Rubaiyat,'
and it was to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered,
possibly two thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the
remainder without difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas,
and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion
which for the life of me I could not discover myself. Possibly I
recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own, for- his memory
was good, and at a second rendering, very often the first, he made a
quatrain his own- he recited the same lines and invested them with
an unrest and passionate revolt that were well-nigh convincing.
I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was
not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's
irritability and quite at variance with the Persian's complacent
philosophy and genial code of life:
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
'Great!' Wolf Larsen cried. 'Great! That's the keynote. Insolence!
He could not have used a better word.'
In vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
argument.
'It's not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows
that it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help itself.
The Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and
vexation, an evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be
vain and vexed, he found an eviler thing. Through chapter after
chapter he is worried by the one event that cometh to all alike. So
Omar, so I, so you, even you, for you rebelled against dying when
Cooky sharpened a knife for you. You were afraid to die; the life that
was in you, that composes you, that is greater than you, did not
want to die. You have talked of the instinct of immortality. I talk of
the instinct of life, which is to live, and which, when death looms
near and large, masters the instinct, so called, of immortality. It
mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a crazy Cockney
cook sharpened a knife.
'You are afraid of him now. You are afraid of me. You cannot deny
it. If I catch you by the throat thus,'- his hand was about my throat,
and my breath was shut off,- 'and begin to press the life out of
you, thus, and thus, your instinct of immortality will go
glimmering, and your instinct of life, which is longing for life, will
flutter up, and you will struggle to save yourself. Eh? I see the fear
of death in your eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert
all your puny strength to struggle to live. Your hand is clutching
my arm; lightly it feels as a butterfly resting there. Your chest is
heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes
swimming. "To live! To live! To live!" you are crying; and you are
crying to live here and now, not hereafter. You doubt your
immortality, eh? Ha! ha! You are not sure of it. You won't chance
it. This life only you are certain is real. Ah, it is growing dark and
darker. It is the darkness of death, the ceasing to be, the ceasing to
feel, the ceasing to move, that is gathering about you, descending
upon you, rising around you. Your eyes are becoming set. They are
glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You cannot see my face. And
still you struggle in my grip. You kick with your legs. Your body
draws itself up in knots like a snake's. Your chest heaves and
strains. To live! To live! To live- '
I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he
had so graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on
the floor, and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully
with that old, familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.
'Well, have I convinced you?' he demanded. 'Here, take a drink of
this. I want to ask you some questions.'
I rolled my head negatively on the floor. 'Your arguments are too-
er- forcible,' I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my
aching throat.
'You'll be all right in half an hour,' he assured me. 'And I promise
I won't use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can
sit on a chair.'
And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and
the Preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS have witnessed a carnival of brutality.
From cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion.
I scarcely know where to begin. Wolf Larsen was really the cause of
it. The relations among the men, strained and made tense by feuds,
quarrels, and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium. Wolf
Larsen disturbed the equilibrium, and evil passions flared up like
flame in prairie-grass.
Thomas Mugridge was proving himself a sneak, a spy, an informer.
He attempted to curry favor and reinstate himself in the good graces
of the captain by carrying tales of the men forward. He it was, I
know, that carried some of Johnson's hasty talk to Wolf Larsen.
Johnson, it seems, had bought a suit of oilskins from the slop-chest
and found them to be of greatly inferior quality. Nor was he slow in
advertising the fact. The slop-chest is a sort of miniature
dry-goods store which is carried by all sealing-schooners and which is
stocked with articles peculiar to the needs of the sailors. Whatever a
sailor purchases is taken from his subsequent earnings on the
sealing-grounds; for, as it is with the hunters, so it is with the
boat-pullers and steerers: in the place of wages, they receive a
'lay,' a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured in their
particular boat.
But of Johnson's grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that
what I witnessed came with the shock of sudden surprise. I had just
finished sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen
into a discussion of Hamlet, his favorite Shakespearean character,
when Johansen descended the companion-stairs, followed by Johnson. The
latter's cap came off, after the custom of the sea, and he stood
respectfully in the middle of the cabin, swaying heavily and
uneasily to the roll of the schooner, and facing the captain.
'Shut the doors and draw the slide,' Wolf Larsen said to me.
I noticed an anxious light in Johnson's eyes, but mistook it for the
native shyness and embarrassment of the man. The mate, Johansen, stood
away several feet to the side of him, and fully three yards in front
of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the revolving cabin chairs. An
appreciable pause fell after I had closed the doors and drawn the
slide- a pause that must have lasted fully a minute. It was broken
by Wolf Larsen.
'Yonson,' he began.
'My name is Johnson, sir,' the sailor boldly corrected.
'Well, Johnson, then,- you! Can you guess why I have sent for you?'
'Yes, and no, sir,' was the slow reply. 'My work is done well. The
mate knows that, and you know it, sir. So there cannot be any
complaint.'
'And is that all?' Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft and low and
purring.
'I know you have it in for me,' Johnson continued with his
unalterable and ponderous slowness. 'You do not like me. You- you-'
'Go on,' Wolf Larsen prompted. 'Don't be afraid of my feelings.'
'I am not afraid,' the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush
rising through his sunburn. 'You do not like me because I am too
much of a man, that is why, sir.'
'You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what
you mean, and if you know what I mean,' was Wolf Larsen's retort.
'I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,' Johnson answered,
his flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English
language.
'Johnson,' Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that
had gone before as introductory to the main business in hand, 'I
understand you're not quite satisfied with those oilskins.'
'No, I am not. They are no good, sir.'
'And you've been shooting off your mouth about them.'
'I say what I think, sir,' the sailor answered courageously, not
failing at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that 'sir'
be appended to each speech he made.
It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen. His
big fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was
positively fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson. I
noticed a black discoloration, still faintly visible, under Johansen's
eye, a mark of the thrashing he had received a few nights before
from the sailor. For the first time I began to divine that something
terrible was about to be enacted- what, I could not imagine.
'Do you know what happens to men who say what you've said about my
slop-chest and me?' Wolf Larsen was demanding.
'I know, sir,' was the answer.
'What?' Wolf Larsen demanded sharply and imperatively.
'What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.'
At this Larsen sprang from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a
tiger, and like a tiger covered the intervening space in an
avalanche of fury that Johnson strove vainly to fend off. He threw one
arm down to protect the stomach, the other arm up to protect the head;
but Wolf Larsen's fist drove midway between, on the chest, with a
crushing, resounding impact. Johnson's breath, suddenly expelled, shot
from his mouth, and as suddenly checked, with the forced, audible
expiration of a man wielding an ax. He almost fell backward, and
swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his balance.
Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was no match for Wolf
Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate. It was frightful. I
had not imagined a human being could endure so much and still live and
struggle on. And struggle on Johnson did. Of course there was no
hope for him, not the slightest, and he knew it as well as I, but by
the manhood that was in him he could not cease from fighting for
that manhood.
It was too much for me to witness. I felt that I should lose my
mind, and I ran up the companion-stairs to open the doors and escape
on deck. But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the moment, and
with one of his tremendous springs, gained my side, and flung me
into the far corner of the cabin.
'The phenomenon of life, Hump,' he girded at me. 'Stay and watch it.
You may gather data on the immortality of the soul. Besides, you know,
we can't hurt Johnson's soul. It's only the fleeting form we may
demolish.'
It seemed centuries, possibly it was no more than ten minutes,
that the beating continued. And when Johnson could no longer rise,
they still continued to beat and kick him where he lay.
'Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,' Wolf Larsen finally said.
But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm,
gentle enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a cork,
driving his head against the wall with a crash. He fell to the
floor, half stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and blinking his
eyes in a stupid sort of way.
'Jerk open the doors, Hump,' Larsen commanded.
I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack
of rubbish and hove him clear up the companion-stairs, through the
narrow doors, and out on deck. Louis, his boat-mate, gave a turn of
the wheel and gazed imperturbably into the binnacle.
Not so George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy. Fore and aft there was
nothing that could have surprised us more than his consequent
behavior. He it was that came up on the poop, without orders, and
dragged Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his wounds as
well as he could and making him comfortable.
I had come up on deck for a breath of fresh air and to try to get
some repose for my overwrought nerves. Wolf Larsen was smoking a cigar
and examining the patent log which the Ghost usually towed astern, but
which had been hauled in for some purpose. Suddenly Leach's voice came
to my ears. It was tense and hoarse with an overmastering rage. I
turned and saw him standing just beneath the break of the poop on
the port side of the galley. His face was convulsed and white, his
eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead, as the boy
hurled his imprecations recklessly full in the face of the captain,
who had sauntered slowly forward to the break of the poop, and leaning
his elbow on the corner of the cabin, gazed down thoughtfully and
curiously at the excited boy.
Leach went on, indicting Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted
before. The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the
forecastle scuttle, and watched and listened. The hunters piled
pell-mell out of the steerage, but as Leach's tirade continued I saw
that there was no levity in their faces. Even they were frightened,
not at the boy's terrible words, but at his terrible audacity. It
did not seem possible that any living creature could thus beard Wolf
Larsen to his teeth. I know for myself that I was shocked into
admiration of the boy, and I saw in him the splendid invincibleness of
immortality rising above the flesh and the fears of the flesh, as in
the prophets of old, to condemn unrighteousness.
And such condemnation! He haled forth Wolf Larsen's soul naked to
the scorn of men. He rained upon it curses from God and high heaven,
and withered it with a heat of invective that savored of a medieval
excommunication of the Catholic Church. He ran the gamut of
denunciation, rising to heights of wrath, and from sheer exhaustion
sinking to the most indecent abuse.
Everybody looked for Larsen to leap upon the boy and destroy him.
But it was not his whim. His cigar went out, and he continued to
gaze silently and curiously.
Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.
'Pig! Pig! Pig!' he was reiterating at the top of his lungs. 'Why
don't you come down and kill me, you murderer? You can do it. I
ain't afraid. There's no one to stop you! Come on, you coward! Kill
me! Kill me! Kill me!'
It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge's erratic soul brought him
into the scene. He had been listening at the galley door, but he now
came out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously
to see the killing he was certain would take place. He smirked
greasily up into the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him.
But the Cockney was unabashed, and turned to Leach, saying:
'Such language! Shockin'!'
Leach's rage was no longer impotent. Here at last was something
ready to hand, and for the first time since the stabbing the Cockney
had appeared outside the galley without his knife. The words had
barely left his mouth when he was knocked down by Leach. Three times
he struggled to his feet, striving to gain the galley, and each time
was knocked down.
'Oh, Lord!' he cried. ''Elp! 'Elp! Tyke 'im aw'y, carn't yer? Tyke
'im aw'y!'
The hunters laughed from sheer relief. Tragedy had dwindled, the
farce had begun. The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and
shuffling, to watch the pommeling of the hated Cockney. And even I
felt a great joy surge up within me. I confess that I delighted in
this beating Leach was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was as
terrible, almost, as the one Mugridge had caused to be given to
Johnson. But the expression of Wolf Larsen's face did not change,- nor
did his position. For all his pragmatic certitude, it seemed as if
he watched the play and movement of life in the hope of discovering
something more about it. And no one interfered. Leach could have
killed the Cockney, but, having evidently filled the measure of his
vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering and
wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.
But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day's
program. In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each other,
and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed by a
stampede of the other four hunters for the deck. A column of thick,
acrid smoke, the kind always made by black powder, was arising through
the open companion-way, and down through it leaped Wolf Larsen. The
sound of blows and scuffling came to our ears. Both men were
wounded, and he was thrashing them both for having disobeyed his
orders and crippled themselves in advance of the hunting season. In
fact, they were badly wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded
to operate upon them in a rough surgical fashion and to dress their
wounds. I served as assistant while he probed and cleansed the
passages made by the bullets, and I saw the two men endure his crude
surgery without anesthetics and with no more to uphold them than a
stiff tumbler of whiskey.
Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the
forecastle. It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing
that had been the cause of Johnson's beating, and from the noise we
heard, and from the sight of the bruised men next day, it was patent
that half the forecastle had soundly drubbed the other half.
The second dog-watch and the day wound up with a fight between
Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer. It was caused
by some remarks of Latimer's concerning the noises made by the mate in
his sleep, and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage awake
for the rest of the night while he blissfully slumbered and fought the
fight over and over again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
FOR THREE DAYS I DID MY OWN work and Thomas Mugridge's too, and I
flatter myself that I did his work well. I know that it won Wolf
Larsen's approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during
the brief time my regime lasted.
'The first clean bite since I come aboard Harrison said to me at the
galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the
forecastle. 'Somehow, Tommy's grub always tastes of grease,- stale
grease,- and I reckon he ain't changed his shirt since he left
'Frisco.'
'I know he hasn't,' I answered.
'And I'll bet he sleeps in it,' Harrison added.
'And you won't lose,' I agreed. 'The same shirt, and he hasn't had
it off once in all this time.'
But three days were all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to
recover from the effects of the beating. On the fourth day, lame and
sore, scarcely able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from
his bunk by the nape of the neck and set to his duty. He sniffled
and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless.
'And see that you serve no more slops,' was his parting
injunction. 'No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt
occasionally, or you'll get a tow over the side. Understand?'
Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a
short lurch of the Ghost sent him staggering. In attempting to recover
himself, he reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove
and kept the pots from sliding off; but his missed the railing, and
his hand, with his weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot
surface.
'Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot 'ave I done?' he wailed, sitting down in the
coalbox and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth. 'W'y 'as
all this come on me? It mykes me fair sick, it does, an' I try so 'ard
to go through life harmless an' 'urtin' nobody.'
The tears were running down his puffed and discolored cheeks, and
his face was drawn with pain. A savage expression flitted across it.
'Oh, 'ow I 'ate 'im! 'Ow I 'ate 'im!' he gritted out.
'Whom?' I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over his
misfortunes. Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated than whom he
did not hate; for I had come to see a malignant devil in him which
impelled him to hate all the world. I sometimes thought that he
hated even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with him, and so
monstrously. At such moments a great sympathy welled up within me, and
I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture or pain. Life
had been unfair to him. It had played him a scurvy trick when it
fashioned him into the thing he was, and it had played him scurvy
tricks ever since. What chance had he to be anything else than what he
was? And as though answering my unspoken thought, he wailed:
'I never 'ad no chance, nor 'arf a chance! 'Oo was there to send
me to school, or put tommy in my 'ungry bell w'en I was a kiddy? 'Oo
ever did anything for me, heh? 'oo, I s'y?'
'Never mind, Tommy,' I said, placing a soothing hand on his
shoulder. 'Cheer up. It'll all come right in the end. You've long
years before you, and you can make anything you please of yourself.'
'It's a lie!' he shouted in my face, flinging off the hand. 'It's
a lie, an' you know it. I'm already myde, an' myde out of leavin's an'
scraps. It's all right for you, 'Ump. You was born a gentleman. You
never knew wot it was to go 'ungry, to cry yerself asleep with a
gnawin' an' gnawin', like a rat, inside yer. It carn't come right.
If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, low would it fill
my belly for one time w'en I was a kiddy an' it went empty?
''Ow could it, I s'y? I was born to sufferin' and' sorrer. I've
'ad more cruel sufferin' than any ten men, I 'ave. I've been in
'orspital 'arf my bleedin' life. I've 'ad the fever in Aspinwall, in
'Avana, in New Orleans. I near died of the scurvy, an' rotten with
it six months in Barbados. Smallpox in 'Onolulu, two broken legs in
Shanghai, pneumonia in Unalaska, three busted ribs an' my insides
all twisted in 'Frisco. An' 'ere I am now. Look at me! Look at me!
My ribs kicked loose from my back again. I'll be coughin' blood before
eyght bells. 'Ow can it be myde up to me, I arsk? 'Oo's goin' to do
it? Gawd? 'Ow Gawd must 'ave 'ated me w'en 'e signed me on for a
voyage in this bloomin' world of 'is!'
This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and then he
buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his eyes a great
hatred for all created things.
Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and went
about his work in a half-hearted way. He was still a sick man, and I
more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail or
drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel. But, still worse, it seemed
that his spirit was broken. He was abject before Wolf Larsen, and
almost groveled to Johansen. Not so Leach. He went about the deck like
a tiger-cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
'I'll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede.' I heard him say to
Johansen one night on deck.
The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some
missile struck the galley a sharp rap. There was more cursing, and a
mocking laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and found a
heavy knife embedded over an inch in the solid wood. A few minutes
later the mate came fumbling about in search of it, but I returned
it privily to Leach next day. He grinned when I handed it over, yet it
was a grin that contained more sincere thanks than a multitude of
the verbosities of speech common to the members of my own class.
Unlike any one else in the ship's company, I now found myself with
no quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all. The hunters
possibly no more than tolerated me, though none of them disliked me;
while Smoke and Henderson, convalescent under a deck awning and
swinging day and night in their hammocks, assured me that I was better
than any hospital nurse, and that they would not forget me at the
end of the voyage when they were paid off. As though I stood in need
of their money- I, who could have bought them out, bag and baggage,
and the schooner and its equipment, a hundred times over! But upon
me had devolved the task of tending their wounds and pulling them
through, and I did my best by them.
Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache, which lasted
two days. He must have suffered severely, for he called me in and
obeyed my commands like a sick child. But nothing I could do seemed to
relieve him. At my suggestion, however, he gave up smoking and
drinking, though why so magnificent an animal as he should have
headaches at all puzzled me.
''T is the hand of God, I'm tellin' you,' was the way Louis saw
it. ''T is a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, an' there's
more behind an' comin', or else-'
'Or else,' I prompted.
'God is noddin' an' not doin' his duty, though it's me as
shouldn't say it.' I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good
graces of all. Not only did Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but
he had discovered a new reason for hating me. It took me no little
while to puzzle it out, but I finally discovered that it was because I
was more luckily born than he- 'gentleman born,' he put it.
'And still no more dead men,' I twitted Louis, when Smoke and
Henderson, side by side, in friendly conversation, took their first
exercise on deck.
Louis surveyed me with his shrewd gray eyes and shook his head
portentously.
'She's a-comin', I tell you, an' it'll be sheets an' halyards, stand
by all hands, when she begins to howl. I've had the feel iv it this
long time, an' I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the riggin' iv a
dark night. She's close, she's close.'
'Who goes first?' I queried.
'Not old fat Louis, I promise you,' he laughed. 'For 't is in the
bones iv me I know that come this time next year I'll be gazin' in the
old mother's eyes, weary with watchin' iv the sea for the five sons
she gave to it.'
'Wot's'e been s'yin' to yer?' Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment
later.
'That he's going home some day to see his mother,' I answered
diplomatically.
'I never 'ad none,' was the Cockney's comment, as he gazed with
lusterless, hopeless eyes into mine.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
IT DAWNED UPON ME THAT I had never placed a proper valuation upon
womankind. For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
degree, so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the
atmosphere of women until now. My mother and sisters were always about
me, and I was always trying to escape them, for they worried me to
distraction with their solicitude for my health, and with their
periodic inroads on my den, when my orderly confusion, upon which I
prided myself, was turned into worse confusion and less order,
though it looked neat enough to the eye. I never could find anything
when they had departed. But now, alas! how welcome would have been the
feel of their presence, the frou-frou and swish-swish of their skirts,
which I had so cordially detested! I am sure, if I ever get home, that
I shall never be irritable with them again. They may dose me and
doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust and sweep and put my
den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall only lean back
and survey it all and be thankful that I am possessed of a mother
and some several sisters.
All of which has set me wondering. Where are the mothers of these
twenty and odd men on the Ghost? It strikes me as unnatural and
unhealthful that men should be totally separated from women and herd
through the world by themselves. Coarseness and savagery are the
inevitable results. These men about me should have sisters and wives
and daughters; then would they be capable of softness and tenderness
and sympathy. As it is, not one of them is married. In years and years
not one of them has been in contact with a good woman, or within the
influence, or redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a
creature. There is no balance in their lives. Their masculinity, which
in itself is of the brute, has been overdeveloped. The other and
spiritual side of their natures has been dwarfed- atrophied, in fact.
Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with
Johansen last night- the first superfluous words with which he has
favored me since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was
eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not
been home once. He had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in
some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to
be still alive.
'She must be a pretty old woman now,' he said, staring
meditatively into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at
Harrison, who was steering a point off the course.
'When did you last write to her?'
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. 'Eighty-one; no-
eighty-two, eh? no- eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years ago.
From some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.'
'You see,' he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother
across half the girth of the earth, 'each year I was going home. So
what was the good to write? It was only a year. And each year
something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate now, and when I
pay off at 'Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship
myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me
more money; and then I will pay my passage from there home. Then she
will not do any more work.'
'But does she work? Now? How old is she?'
'About seventy,' he answered. And then, boastingly: 'We work from
the time we are born until we die, in my country. That's why we live
so long. I will live to a hundred.'
I shall never forget this conversation. The words were the last I
ever heard him utter. Perhaps they were the last he did utter, too.
Going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it was too
stuffy to sleep below. It was a calm night. We were out of the trades,
and the Ghost was forging ahead barely a knot an hour. So I tucked a
blanket and pillow under my arm and went up on deck.
As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built
into the top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three
points off. Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape
reprimand or worse, I spoke to him. But he was not asleep. His eyes
were wide and staring. He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to reply to
me.
'What's the matter?' I asked. 'Are you sick?'
He shook his head, and with a deep sigh, as of awakening, caught his
breath.
'You better get on your course, then,' I chided.
He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing
slowly to NNW and steady itself with slight oscillations.
I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start
on, when some movement caught my eye, and I looked astern to the rail.
A sinewy hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail. A second
hand took form in the darkness beside it. I watched, fascinated.
What visitant from the gloom of the deep was I to behold? Whatever
it was, I knew that it was climbing aboard by the log-line. I saw a
head, the hair wet and straight, shape itself, and then the
unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf Larsen. His right cheek was red
with blood, which flowed from some wound in the head.
He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and rose to his feet,
glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though
to assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to fear
from him. The sea-water was streaming from him.
'All right, Hump,' he said in a low voice. 'Where's the mate?'
I shook my head.
'Johansen!' he called softly. 'Johansen!'
'Where is he?' he demanded of Harrison.
The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he
answered steadily enough:
'I don't know, sir. I saw him go for'ard a little while ago.'
'So did I go for'ard; but you will observe that I didn't come back
the way I went. Can you explain it?'
'You must have been overboard, sir.'
'Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?' I asked.
Wolf Larsen shook his head.
'You wouldn't find him, Hump. But you'll do. Come on. Never mind
your bedding. Leave it where it is.'
I followed at his heels. There was nothing stirring amidships.
'Those cursed hunters!' was his comment. 'Too fat and lazy to
stand a four-hour watch.'
But on the forecastle head we found three sailors asleep. He
turned them over and looked at their faces. They composed the watch on
deck, and it was the ship's custom, in good weather, to let the
watch sleep, with the exception of the officer, the helmsman, and
the lookout.
'Who's lookout?' he demanded.
'Me, sir,' answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a slight
tremor in his voice. 'I winked off just this very minute, sir. I'm
sorry, sir. It won't happen again.'
'Did you hear or see anything on deck?'
'No, sir; I-'
But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving the
sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let off so
easily.
'Softly, now,' Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled his
body into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.
I followed with a quaking heart. What was to happen I knew no more
than did I know what had happened. But blood had been shed, and it was
through no whim of Wolf Larsen's that he had gone over the side with
his scalp laid open. Besides, Johansen was missing.
It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon
forget my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom
of the ladder. Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it was of
the shape of a triangle, along the three sides of which stood the
bunks, in double tier- twelve of them. It was no larger than a hall
bedroom in Grub street, and yet twelve men were herded into it, to eat
and sleep and carry on all the functions of living. My bedroom at home
was not large, yet it could have contained a dozen similar
forecastles, and taking into consideration the height of the
ceiling, a score at least.
It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging
sea-lamp I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with
sea-boots, oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various
sorts. These swung back and forth with every roll of the vessel,
giving rise to a brushing sound, as of trees against a roof or wall.
Somewhere a boot thumped loudly and at irregular periods against the
wall; and, though it was a mild night on the sea, there was a
continual chorus of the creaking timbers and bulkheads, and of abysmal
noises beneath the flooring.
The sleepers did not mind. There were eight of them,- the two
watches below,- and the air was thick with the warmth and odor of
their breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their
snoring, and of their sighs and half-groans- tokens plain of the
rest of the animal-man. But were they sleeping- all of them? Or had
they been sleeping? This was evidently Wolf Larsen's quest- to find
the men who appeared to be asleep, and who were not asleep or who
had not been asleep very recently. And he went about it in a way
that reminded me of a story out of Boccaccio.
He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me. He
began at the first bunks forward on the starboard side. In the top one
lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and a splendid seaman, so named by his
mates. He was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly as a woman.
One arm was under his head, the other lay on top of the blankets. Wolf
Larsen put thumb and forefinger to the wrist and counted the pulse. In
the midst of it the Kanaka roused. He awoke as gently as he slept.
There was no movement of the body whatever. Only the eyes moved.
They flashed wide open, big and black, and stared unblinking into
our faces. Wolf Larsen put his finger to his lips as a sign for
silence, and the eyes closed again.
In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep
unfeignedly, and sleeping laboriously. While Wolf Larsen held his
wrist he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it
rested on shoulders and heels. His lips moved, and he gave voice to
this enigmatic utterance:
'A shilling's worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for
thruppenny bits, or the publicans'll shove 'em on you for sixpence.'
Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:
'A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob, but what a pony is
I don't know.'
Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka's sleep, Wolf
Larsen passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied
top and bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and
Johnson.
As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson's
pulse, I, standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach's head
raise stealthily as he peered over the side of his bunk to see what
was going on. He must have divined Wolf Larsen's trick and the
sureness of detection, for the light was at once dashed from my hand
and the forecastle left in darkness. He must have leaped, also, at the
same instant, straight down on Wolf Larsen.
The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf.
I heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from
Leach a snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling. Johnson must
have joined him immediately, so that his abject and groveling
conduct on deck for the last few days had been no more than planned
deception.
I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned
against the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend. And upon me was
that old sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by the
spectacle of physical violence. In this instance I could not see,
but I could hear the impact of the blows- the soft crushing sound made
by flesh striking forcibly against flesh. Then there was the
crashing about of the entwined bodies, the labored breathing, the
short quick gasps of sudden pain.
There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the
captain and the mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and
Johnson had been quickly reinforced.
'Get a knife, somebody!' Leach was shouting.
'Pound him on the head! Mash his brains out!' was Johnson's cry.
But after his first bellow Wolf Larsen made no noise. He was
fighting grimly and silently for very life. Down at the very first, he
had been unable to gain his feet, and for all of his tremendous
strength I felt that there was no hope for him.
The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me, for
I was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised. But in
the confusion I managed to crawl into a lower bunk out of the way.
'All hands! We've got him! We've got him!' I could hear Leach
crying.
'Who?' asked those who had been asleep.
'It's the bloody mate!' was Leach's crafty answer. The words were
strained from him in a smothered sort of way.
This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen
had seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part
in it. The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees.
'What's the row there?' I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle,
too cautious to descend into the inferno.
'Won't somebody get a knife?' Leach pleaded in the first interval of
comparative silence.
The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion. They
blocked their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single
purpose, achieved his. This was to fight his way across the floor to
the ladder. Though in total darkness, I followed his progress by its
sound. No man less than a giant could have done what he did, once he
had gained the foot of the ladder. Step by step, by the might of his
arms, the whole pack of men striving to drag him back and down, he
drew his body up from the floor till he stood erect. And then, step by
step, hand and foot, he slowly struggled up the ladder.
The very last of all, I saw. For Latimer, having finally gone for
a lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle. Wolf
Larsen was nearly to the top, though I could not see him. All that was
visible was the mass of men fastened upon him. It squirmed about, like
some huge, many-legged spider, and swayed back and forth to the
regular roll of the vessel. And still, step by step, with long
intervals between, the mass ascended. Once it tottered, about to
fall back, but the broken hold was regained, and it still went up.
'Who is it?' Latimer cried.
'Larsen,' I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.
Latimer reached down with his free hand. I saw a hand shoot up to
clasp his. Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made with
a rush. Then Wolf Larsen's other hand reached up and clutched the edge
of the scuttle. The mass swung clear of the ladder, the men still
clinging to their escaping foe. They began to drop off, to be
brushed off against the sharp edge of the scuttle, to be knocked off
by the legs, which were now kicking powerfully. Leach was the last
to go, falling sheer back from the top of the scuttle and striking
on head and shoulders upon his sprawling mates. Larsen and the lantern
disappeared, and we were left in darkness.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
THERE WAS A DEAL OF CURSING and groaning as the men at the bottom of
the ladder crawled to their feet.
'Somebody strike a light; my thumb's out of joint,' said one of
the men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, steerer in Standish's
boat, in which Harrison was puller.
'You'll find it knockin' about by the bitts,' Leach said, sitting
down on the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.
There was a fumbling and a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp
flared up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved
about, nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts. Oofty-Oofty
laid hold of Parsons' thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it
back into place. I noticed at the same time that the Kanaka's knuckles
were laid open clear across and to the bone. Exposing his beautiful
white teeth in a grin, he explained that the wounds had come from
striking Wolf Larsen in the mouth.
'So it was you, was it, you black beggar?' belligerently demanded
Kelly, an Irish-American and a longshoreman making his first trip, and
puller for Kerfoot.
As he made the demand he shoved his pugnacious face close to
Oofty-oofty. The Kanaka leaped backward to his bunk, to return with
a leap, flourishing a long knife.
'Aw, go lay down; you make me tired,' Leach interfered. He was
evidently, for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the
forecastle. 'G'wan, you Kelly. You leave Oofty alone. How in- did he
know it was you in the dark?'
Kelly subsided with some muttering, and the Kanaka flashed his white
teeth in a grateful smile. He was a beautiful creature, almost
feminine in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was a softness
and dreaminess in his large eyes which seemed to contradict his
reputation for strife and action.
'How did he get away?' said Johnson.
He was sitting on the side of his bunk, the whole pose of his figure
indicating utter dejection and hopelessness. He was still breathing
heavily from the exertion he had made. His shirt had been ripped
entirely from him in the struggle.
'Because he is the devil, as I told you before,' was Leach's answer,
and thereat he was on his feet and raging his disappointment with
tears in his eyes.
'And not one of you to get a knife!' was his unceasing lament.
But the rest had a lively fear of consequences, and gave no heed
to him.
'How'll he know which was which?' Kelly asked, and as he went on
he looked murderously about him- 'unless one of us peaches.'
'He'll know as soon as ever he claps eyes on us,' Parsons replied.
'One look at you'd be enough.'
'Tell him the deck flopped up an' gouged yer teeth out iv yer
jaw,' Louis grinned. He was the only man who was not out of his
bunk, and he was jubilant in that he possessed no bruises to advertise
that he had had a hand in the night's work. 'Just wait till he gets
a glimpse iv yer mugs tomorrow- the gang iv ye,' he chuckled.
'We'll say we thought it was the mate,' said one. And another: 'I
know what I'll say- that I heared a row, jumped out of my bunk, got
a jolly good crack on the jaw for my pains, an' sailed in myself.
Couldn't tell who or what it was in the dark an' just hit out.'
'An' 't was me you hit, of course,' Kelly seconded, his face
brightening.
Leach and Johnson took no part in the discussion, and it was plain
to see that their mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was
inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead. Leach stood their
fears and reproaches for some time. Then he broke out:
'You make me tired! A nice lot of gazabas you are! If you talked
less with yer mouth an' did something with yer hands, he'd 'a' be'n
done with by now. Why couldn't one of you, just one of you, get me a
knife when I sung out? You make me sick! A-beefin' an' bellerin' round
as though he'd kill you when he gets you! You know he won't. Can't
afford to. No shippin'-masters or beachcombers over here, an' he wants
yer in his business, an' he wants yer bad. Who's to pull or steer or
sail ship if he loses yer? It's me an' Johnson have to face the music.
Get into yer bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want to get some
sleep.'
'That's all right, all right,' Parsons spoke up. 'Mebbe he won't
do for us, but mark my words, hell'll be an ice-box to this ship
from now on.'
All the while I had been apprehensive. What would happen to me
when these men discovered my presence? I could never fight my way
out as Wolf Larsen had done. And at this moment Latimer called down
the scuttle:
'Hump, the Old Man wants you.'
'He ain't down here!' said Parsons.
'Yes, he is,' I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my
hardest to keep my voice steady and bold.
The sailors looked at me in consternation. Fear was strong in
their faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.
'I'm coming!' I shouted up to Latimer.
'No, you don't!' Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder,
his right hand shaped into a veritable strangler's clutch. 'You sneak!
I'll shut yer mouth!'
'Let him go!' Leach commanded.
'Not on yer life!' was the angry retort.
Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk. 'Let him
go, I say,' he repeated, but this time his voice was gritty and
metallic.
The Irishman wavered. I made to step by him, and he stood aside.
When I had gained the ladder I turned to the circle of brutal and
malignant faces peering at me through the semi-darkness. A sudden
and deep sympathy welled up in me.
'I have seen and heard nothing, believe me,' I said quietly.
'I tell yer, he's all right,' I could hear Leach say as I went up.
'He don't like the Old Man no more nor you or me.'
I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for
me. He greeted me with his whimsical smile.
'Come, get to work, doctor. The signs are favorable for an extensive
practice this voyage. I don't know what the Ghost would have been
without you, and if I could cherish such noble sentiments, I'd tell
you that her master is deeply grateful.'
I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the Ghost carried, and
while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things
ready for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and
chatting, and examining his hurts with a calculating eye. I had
never before seen him stripped, and the sight of his body quite took
my breath away.
I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf
Larsen's figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it. I
had noted the men in the forecastle. Powerfully muscled though some of
them were, Oofty-Oofty had been the only one whose lines were at all
pleasing, while, in so far as they pleased, had they been what I
should call feminine.
But Wolf Larsen was the man type, the masculine, and almost a god in
his perfectness. As he moved about or raised his arms, the great
muscles leapt and moved under the satiny skin. I have forgotten to say
that the bronze ended with his face. His body, thanks to his
Scandinavian stock, was fair as the fairest woman's. I remember his
putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his head, and my
watching the biceps move like a living thing under its white sheath.
He noticed me, and I became aware that I was staring at him.
'God made you well,' I said.
'Did he?' he answered. 'I have often thought so myself, and wondered
why.'
'Purpose-' I began.
'Utility,' he interrupted. 'This body was made for use. These
muscles were made to grip and tear and destroy living things that
get between me and life. Feel them,' he commanded.
They were as hard as iron. And I observed, also, that his whole body
had unconsciously drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles
were softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along the back, and
across the shoulders; that the arms were slightly lifted, their
muscles contracting, the fingers crooking till the hands were like
talons; and that even the eyes had changed expression and into them
were coming watchfulness and measurement and a light none other than
of battle.
'Stability, equilibrium,' he said, relaxing on the instant and
sinking his body back into repose. 'Feet with which to clutch the
ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and
hands, teeth and nails, I struggle to kill and not to be killed.
Purpose? Utility is the word.'
I did not argue. I had seen the mechanism of the primitive
fighting beast, and I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the
engines of a battleship or Atlantic liner.
I was surprised, considering the fierce struggle in the
forecastle, at the superficiality of his hurts, and I pride myself
that I dressed them dexterously. With the exception of two bad wounds,
the rest were merely severe bruises and lacerations. The blow which he
had received before going overboard had laid his scalp open several
inches. This, under his direction, I cleansed and sewed together.
'By the way, Hump, as I have remarked, you are a handy man,' Wolf
Larsen began when my work was done. 'As you know, we're short a
mate. Hereafter you shall stand watches, receive seventy-five
dollars per month, and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van Weyden.'
'I- I don't understand navigation, you know,' I gasped.
'Not necessary at all.'
'I really do not care to sit in the high places,' I objected. 'I
find life precarious enough in my present humble situation. I have
no experience. Mediocrity, you see, has its compensations.'
He smiled as though it were all settled.
'I won't be mate on this hell-ship!' I cried defiantly.
I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his
eyes. He walked to the door of his room, saying:
'And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good night.'
'Good night, Mr. Larsen,' I answered weakly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
I CANNOT SAY THAT THE POSITION Of mate carried with it anything more
joyful than that there were no more dishes to wash. I was ignorant
of the simplest duties of mate, and would have fared badly indeed
had not the sailors sympathized with me. I knew nothing of the
minutiae of ropes and rigging, of the trimming and setting of sails;
but the sailors took pains to put me to rights, Louis proving a
specially good teacher, and I had little trouble with those under me.
With the hunters it was otherwise. Familiar in varying degree with
the sea, they took me as a sort of joke. In truth, it was a joke to me
that I, the veriest landsman, should be filling the office of mate;
but to be taken as a joke by others was a different matter. I made
no complaint, but Wolf Larsen demanded the must punctilious
sea-etiquette in my case,- far more than poor Johansen had ever
received,- and at the expense of several rows, threats, and much
grumbling, he brought the hunters to time. I was 'Mr. Van Weyden' fore
and aft, and only Wolf Larsen himself ever addressed me as 'Hump.'
It was amusing. Perhaps the wind would haul a few points while we
were at dinner, and as I left the table he would say, 'Mr. Van Weyden,
will you kindly put about on the port tack?' And I would go on deck,
beckon Louis to me, and learn from him what was to be done. Then, a
few minutes later, having digested his instructions and thoroughly
mastered the maneuver, I would proceed to issue my orders. I
remember an early instance of this kind, when Wolf Larsen appeared
on the scene just as I had begun to give orders. He smoked his cigar
and looked on quietly till the thing was done, and then paced aft by
my side along the weather poop.
'Hump,' he said,- 'I beg pardon, Mr. Van Weyden,- I congratulate
you. I think you can now fire your father's legs back into the grave
to him. You've discovered your own, and learned to stand on them. A
little rope-work, sail-making, and experience with storms and such
things, and by the end of the voyage you could ship on any coasting
schooner.'
It was during this period, between the death of Johansen and the
arrival on the sealing-grounds, that I passed my pleasantest hours
on the Ghost. Wolf Larsen was considerate, the sailors helped me,
and I was no longer in irritating contact with Thomas Mugridge. And
I make free to say, as the days went by, that I found I was taking a
certain secret pride in myself. Fantastic as the situation was,- a
landlubber second in command,- I was nevertheless carrying it off
well; and during that brief time I was proud of myself, and I grew
to love the heave and roll of the Ghost under my feet as she
wallowed north and west through the tropic sea to the islet where we
filled our water-casks.
But my happiness was not unalloyed. It was comparative, a period
of less misery slipped in between a past of great miseries and a
future of great miseries. For the Ghost, so far as the seamen were
concerned, was a hell-ship of the worst description. They never had
a moment's rest or peace. Wolf Larsen treasured against them the
attempt on his life and the drubbing he had received in the
forecastle, and morning, noon, and night, and all night as well, he
devoted himself to making life unlivable for them.
He knew well the psychology of the little thing, and it was the
little things by which he kept the crew worked up to the verge of
madness. I have seen Harrison called from his bunk to put properly
away a misplaced paint-brush, and the two watches below haled from
their tired sleep to accompany him and see him do it. A little
thing, truly, but when multiplied by the thousand ingenious devices of
such a mind, the mental state of the men in the forecastle may be
slightly comprehended.
Of course much grumbling went on, and little outbursts were
continually occurring. Blows were struck, and there were always two or
three men nursing injuries at the hands of the human beast who was
their master. Concerted action was impossible in face of the heavy
arsenal of weapons carried in the steerage and cabin. Leach and
Johnson were the two particular victims of Wolf Larsen's diabolic
temper, and the look of profound melancholy which had settled on
Johnson's face and in his eyes made my heart bleed.
With Leach it was different. There was too much of the fighting
beast in him. He seemed possessed by an insatiable fury which gave
no time for grief. His lips had become distorted into a permanent
snarl, which, at mere sight of Wolf Larsen, broke out in sound,
horrible and menacing, and, I do believe, unconsciously. I have seen
him follow Wolf Larsen about with his eyes, like an animal its keeper,
the while the animal-like snarl sounded deep in his throat and
vibrated forth between his teeth.
I remember once, on deck, in bright day, touching him on the
shoulder as preliminary to giving an order. His back was toward me,
and at the first feel of my hand he leaped upright in the air and away
from me, snarling and turning his head as he leaped. He had for the
moment mistaken me for the man he hated.
Both he and Johnson would have killed Wolf Larsen at the slightest
opportunity, but the opportunity never came. Wolf Larsen was too
wise for that, and, besides, they had no adequate weapons. With
their fists alone they had no chance whatever. Time and again he
fought it out with Leach, who fought back always, like a wildcat,
tooth and nail and fist, until stretched exhausted or unconscious on
the deck. And he was never averse to another encounter. All the
devil that was in him challenged the devil in Wolf Larsen. They had
but to appear on deck at the same time, when they would be at it,
cursing, snarling, striking; and I have seen Leach fling himself
upon Wolf Larsen without warning or provocation. Once he threw his
heavy sheath-knife, missing Wolf Larsen's throat by an inch. Another
time he dropped a steel marlinespike from the main-crosstree. It was a
difficult cast to make on a rolling ship, but the sharp point of the
spike, whistling seventy-five feet through the air, barely missed Wolf
Larsen's head as he emerged from the cabin companionway, and drove its
length two inches and over into the solid deck-planking. Still another
time he stole into the steerage, possessed himself of a loaded
shotgun, and was making a rush for the deck with it when caught by
Kerfoot and disarmed.
I often wondered why Wolf Larsen did not kill him and make an end of
it. But he only laughed and seemed to enjoy it. There seemed a certain
spice about it, such as men must feel who take delight in making
pets of ferocious animals.
'It gives a thrill to life,' he explained to me, 'when life is
carried in one's hand. Man is a natural gambler, and life is the
biggest stake he can lay. The greater the odds, the greater the
thrill. Why should I deny myself the joy of exciting Leach's soul to
fever-pitch? For that matter, I do him a kindness. The greatness of
sensation is mutual. He is living more royally than any man for'ard,
though he does not know it. For he has what they have not- purpose,
something to do and be done, an all-absorbing end to strive to attain,
the desire to kill me, the hope that he may kill me. Really, Hump,
he is living deep and high. I doubt that he has ever lived so
swiftly and keenly before, and I honestly envy him, sometimes, when
I see him raging at the summit of passion and sensibility.'
'Ah, but it is cowardly, cowardly,' I cried. 'You have all the
advantage.'
'Of the two of us, you and I, who is the greater coward?' he asked
seriously. 'If the situation is unpleasing, you compromise with your
conscience when you make yourself a party to it. If you were really
great, really true to yourself, you would join forces with Leach and
Johnson. But you are afraid, you are afraid. You want to live. The
life that is in you cries out that it must live, no matter what the
cost; so you live ignominiously, untrue to the best you dream of,
sinning against your whole pitiful little code, and, if there were a
hell, heading your soul straight for it. Bah! I play the braver
part. I do no sin, for I am true to the promptings of the life that is
in me. I am sincere with my soul at least, and that is what you are
not.'
There was a sting in what he said. Perhaps, after all, I was playing
a cowardly part. And the more I thought about it the more it
appeared that my duty to myself lay in doing what he had advised,
lay in joining forces with Johnson and Leach and working for his
death. Right here, I think, entered the austere conscience of my
Puritan ancestry, impelling me toward lurid deeds and sanctioning even
murder as right conduct. I dwelt upon the idea. It would be a most
moral act to rid the world of such a monster. Humanity would be better
and happier for it, life fairer and sweeter.
I pondered it long, lying sleepless in my bunk and reviewing in
endless procession the facts of the situation. I talked with Johnson
and Leach during the night watches when Wolf Larsen was below. But
both men had lost hope, Johnson because of temperamental
despondency, Leach because he had beaten himself out in the vain
struggle and was exhausted. But he caught my hand in a passionate grip
one night, saying:
'I think ye're square, Mr. Van Weyden. But stay where you are an'
keep yer mouth shut. Say nothin', but saw wood. We're dead men, I know
it; but, all the same, you might be able to do us a favor sometime
when we need it damn bad.'
It was only next day, when Wainwright Island loomed to windward,
close abeam, that Wolf Larsen opened his mouth in prophecy. He had
attacked Johnson, been attacked by Leach, and had just finished
whipping the pair of them.
'Leach,' he said, 'you know I'm going to kill you sometime or other,
don't you?'
A snarl was the answer.
'And as for you, Johnson, you'll get so tired of life before I'm
through with you that you'll fling yourself over the side. See if
you don't.'
'That's suggestion,' he added, in an aside to me. 'I'll bet you a
month's pay he acts upon it.'
I had cherished a hope that his victims would find an opportunity to
escape while filling our water-barrels, but Wolf Larsen had selected
his spot well. The Ghost lay half a mile beyond the surf-line of a
lonely beach. Here debouched a deep gorge, with precipitous,
volcanic walls which no man could scale. And here, under his direct
supervision,- for he went ashore himself,- Leach and Johnson filled
the small casks and rolled them down to the beach. They had no
chance to make a break for liberty in one of the boats.
Harrison and Kelly, however, made such an attempt. They composed the
crew of one of the boats, and their task was to play between the
schooner and the shore, carrying a single cask each trip. Just
before dinner, starting for the beach with an empty barrel, they
altered their course and bore away to the left to round the promontory
which jutted into the sea between them and liberty. Beyond its foaming
base lay the pretty villages of the Japanese colonists and smiling
valleys which penetrated deep into the interior. Once in the
fastnesses they promised, and the two men could defy Wolf Larsen.
I had observed Henderson and Smoke loitering about the deck all
morning, and I now learned why they were there. Procuring their
rifles, they opened fire in a leisurely manner upon the deserters.
It was a most cold-blooded exhibition of marksmanship. At first
their bullets zipped harmlessly along the surface of the water on each
side the boat; but, as the men continued to pull lustily, they
struck closer and closer.
'Now watch me take Kelly's right oar,' Smoke said, drawing a more
careful aim.
I was looking through the glasses, and I saw the oar-blade shattered
as he shot. Henderson duplicated his feat, selecting Harrison's
right oar. The boat slued around. The two remaining oars were
quickly broken. The men tried to row with the spinters, and had them
shot out of their hands. Kelly ripped up a bottom-board and began
paddling, but dropped it with a cry of pain as its splinters drove
into his hands. Then they gave up, letting the boat drift till a
second boat, sent from the shore by Wolf Larsen, took them in tow
and brought them aboard.
Late that afternoon we hove up anchor and got away. Nothing was
before us but the three or four months' hunting on the
sealing-grounds. The outlook was black indeed, and I went about my
work with a heavy heart. An almost funereal gloom seemed to have
descended upon the Ghost. Wolf Larsen had taken to his bunk with one
of his strange splitting headaches. Harrison stood listlessly at the
wheel, half supporting himself by it, as though wearied by the
weight of his flesh. The rest of the men were morose and silent. I
came upon Kelly crouching in the lee of the forecastle scuttle, his
head on his knees, his arms about his head, in an attitude of
unutterable despondency.
Johnson I found lying full-length on the forecastle head, staring at
the troubled churn of the forefoot, and I remembered with horror the
suggestion Wolf Larsen had made. It seemed likely to bear fruit. I
tried to break in on the man's morbid thoughts by calling him away;
but he smiled sadly at me, and refused to obey.
Leach approached me as I returned aft.
'I want to ask a favor, Mr. Van Weyden,' he said. 'If it's yer
luck to ever make 'Frisco once more, will you hunt up Matt McCarthy?
He's my old man. He lives on the Hill, back of the Mayfair bakery,
runnin' a cobbler's shop that everybody knows, an' you'll have no
trouble. Tell him I lived to be sorry for the trouble I brought him
an' the things I done, an'- an' just tell him "God bless him," for
me.'
I nodded my head, but said:
'We'll all win back to San Francisco, Leach, and you'll be with me
when I go to see Matt McCarthy.'
'I'd like to believe you,' he answered, shaking my hand, 'but I
can't. Wolf Larsen'll do for me, I know it, and all I can hope is
he'll do it quick.'
And as he left me I was aware of the same desire at my heart.
Since it was to be done, let it be done with despatch. The general
gloom had gathered me into its folds. The worst appeared inevitable;
and as I paced the deck hour after hour, I found myself afflicted with
Wolf Larsen's repulsive ideas. What was it all about? Where was the
grandeur of life that it should permit such wanton destruction of
human souls? It was a cheap and sordid thing, after all, this life,
and the sooner over the better. Over and done with! Over and done
with! I, too, leaned upon the rail and gazed longingly into the sea,
with the certitude that sooner or later I should be sinking down,
down, through the cool green depths of its oblivion.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.
STRANGE TO SAY, IN SPITE of the general foreboding, nothing of
especial moment happened on the Ghost. We ran on to the north and west
till we raised the coast of Japan and picked up with the great seal
herd. Coming from no man knew where in the illimitable Pacific, it was
traveling north on its annual migration to the rookeries of Bering
Sea. And north we traveled with it, ravaging and destroying,
flinging the naked carcasses to the shark, and salting down the skins,
so that they might later adorn the fair shoulders of the women of
the cities.
It was wanton slaughter, and all for woman's sake. No man ate of the
seal-meat or the oil. After a good day's killing I have seen our decks
covered with hides and bodies, slippery with fat and blood, the
scuppers running red; masts, ropes, and rails splattered high with the
sanguinary color; and the men, like butchers plying their trade, naked
and red of arm and hand, hard at work with ripping- and
flensing-knives, removing the skins from the pretty sea-creatures they
had killed.
It was my task to tally the pelts as they came aboard from the
boats, to oversee the skinning, and afterward the cleansing of the
decks and bringing things shipshape again. It was not pleasant
work,- my soul and my stomach revolted at it,- and yet, in a way, this
handling and directing of many men was good for me. It developed
what little executive ability I possessed, and I was aware of a
toughening or hardening which I was undergoing and which could not
be anything but wholesome for 'Sissy' Van Weyden.
One thing I was beginning to feel, and that was that I could never
again be quite the same man I had been. While my hope and faith in
human life still survived Wolf Larsen's destructive criticism, he
had nevertheless been a cause of change in minor matters. He had
opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known virtually
nothing, and from which I had always shrunk. I had learned to look
more closely at life as it is lived, to recognize that there were such
things as facts in the world; to emerge from the realm of mind and
idea, and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases
of existence.
I saw more of Wolf Larsen than ever when we had gained the
grounds; for when the weather was fair and we were in the midst of the
herd, all hands were away in the boats, and left on board were only he
and I, and Thomas Mugridge, who did not count. But there was no play
about it. The six boats, spreading out fanwise from the schooner until
the first weather boat and the last lee boat were anywhere from ten to
twenty miles apart, cruised along a straight course over the sea
till nightfall or bad weather drove them in. It was our duty to sail
the Ghost well to leeward of the last lee boat, so that all the
boats would have fair wind to run for us in case of squalls for
threatening weather.
It is no slight matter for two men, particularly when a stiff wind
has sprung up, to handle a vessel like the Ghost, steering, keeping
lookout for the boats, and setting or taking in sail, so it devolved
upon me to learn, and learn quickly. Steering I picked up easily,
but running aloft to the crosstrees, and swinging my whole, weight
by my arms when I left the ratlines and climbed still higher, was more
difficult. This, too, I learned, and quickly, for I felt somehow a
wild desire to vindicate myself in Wolf Larsen's eyes, to prove my
right to live in ways other than of the mind. Nay, the time came
when I took joy in the run to the masthead, and in the clinging on
by my legs at that precarious height while I swept the sea with the
glasses in search of the boats.
I remember one beautiful day, when the boats left early and the
reports of the hunters' guns grew dim and distant and died away as
they scattered far and wide over the sea. There was just the
faintest wind from the westward; but it breathed its last by the
time we managed to get to leeward of the last lee boat. One by one-
I was at the masthead and saw- the six boats disappeared over the
bulge of the earth as they followed the seal into the west. We lay,
scarcely rolling on the placid sea, unable to follow. Wolf Larsen
was apprehensive. The barometer was down, and the sky to the east
did not please him. He studied it with unceasing vigilance.
'If she comes out of there,' he said, 'hard and snappy, putting us
to windward of the boats, it's likely there'll be empty bunks in
steerage and f'c's'le.'
By eleven o'clock the sea had became glass. By midday, though we
were well up in the northerly latitudes, the heat was sickening. There
was no freshness in the air. It was sultry and oppressive, reminding
me of what the old Californians term 'earthquake weather.' There was
something ominous about it, and in intangible ways one was made to
feel that the worst was about to come. Slowly the whole eastern sky
filled with clouds that overtowered us like some black sierra of the
infernal regions. So clearly could one see canon, gorge, and
precipice, and the shadows that lay therein, that one looked
unconsciously for the white surf-line and bellowing caverns where
the sea charges forever on the land. And still we rocked gently, and
there was no wind.
'It's no squall,' Wolf Larsen said. 'Old Mother Nature's going to
get up on her hind legs and howl for all that's in her, and it'll keep
up jumping, Hump, to pull through with half our boats. You'd better
run up and loosen the topsails.'
'But if it is going to howl, and there are only two of us?' I asked,
a note of protest in my voice.
'Why, we've got to make the best of the first of it and run down
to our boats before our canvas is ripped out of us. After that I don't
give a rap what happens. The sticks'll stand it, and you and I will
have to, though we've plenty cut out for us.'
Still the calm continued. We ate dinner, a hurried and anxious
meal for me, with eighteen men abroad on the sea and beyond the
bulge of the earth, and with that heaven-rolling mountain range of
clouds moving slowly down upon us. Wolf Larsen did not seem
affected, however, though I noticed, when we returned to the deck, a
slight twitching of the nostrils, a perceptible quickness of movement.
His face was stern, the lines of it had grown hard, and yet in his
eyes- blue, clear blue this day- there was a strange brilliancy, a
bright, scintillating light. It struck me that he was joyous in a
ferocious sort of way; that he was glad there was an impending
struggle; that he was thrilled and upborne with knowledge that one
of the great moments of living, when the tide of life surges up in
flood, was upon him.
Once, and unwitting that he did so or that I saw, he laughed aloud
mockingly and defiantly at the advancing storm. I see him yet,
standing there like a pygmy out of the 'Arabian Nights' before the
huge front of some malignant jinnee. He was daring destiny, and he was
unafraid.
He walked to the galley.
'Cooky,' I heard him say, 'by the time you've finished pots and pans
you'll be wanted on deck. Stand ready for a call.'
'Hump,' he said, becoming cognizant of the fascinated gaze I bent
upon him, 'this beats whiskey, and is where your Omar misses. I
think he only half lived, after all.'
The western half of the sky had by now grown murky. The sun had
dimmed and faded out of sight. It was two in the afternoon, and a
ghostly twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had
descended upon us, and Wolf Larsen's face glowed in the purplish
light. We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all about us
were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement. The sultry heat
had become unendurable. The sweat was standing on my forehead, and I
could feel it trickling down my nose. I felt as though I should faint,
and reached out to the rail for support.
And then, just then, the faintest possible whisper of air passed by.
It was from the east, and like a whisper it came and went. The
drooping canvas was not stirred, and yet my face had felt the air
and been cooled.
'Cooky,' Wolf Larsen called in a low voice (Thomas Mugridge turned a
pitiable, scared face), 'let go that fore-boom- tackle and pass it
across, and when she's willing let go the sheet and come in snug
with the tackle. And if you make a mess of it, it will be the last you
ever make. Understand?'
'Mr. Van Weyden, stand by to pass the head-sails over. Then jump for
the topsails and spread them quick as God'll let you- the quicker
you do it, the easier you'll find it. As for Cooky, if he isn't
lively, bat him between the eyes.'
I was aware of the compliment and pleased in that no threat had
accompanied my instructions. We were lying head to northwest, and it
was his intention to jibe over with the first puff.
'We'll have the breeze on our quarter,' he explained to me. 'By
the last guns the boats were bearing away slightly to the south'ard.'
He turned and walked aft to the wheel. I went forward and took my
station at the jibs. Another whisper of wind, and another, passed
by. The canvas flapped lazily.
'Thank Gawd she's not comin' all of a bunch, Mr. Van Weyden!' was
the Cockney's fervent ejaculation.
And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough
to know, with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event
awaited us. The whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the
Ghost moved. Wolf Larsen put the wheel hard up to port, and we began
to pay off. The wind was now dead astern, muttering and puffing
stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were pounding lustily. I
did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the sudden surge and
heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed to the jibing of
the fore-and main-sails. My hands were full with the flying jib,
jib, and staysail, and by the time this part of my task was
accomplished the Ghost was leaping into the southwest, the wind on her
quarter and all her sheets to starboard. Without pausing for breath,
though my heart was beating like a trip-hammer from my exertions, I
sprang to the topsails, and before the wind had become too strong we
had them fairly set and were coiling down. Then I went aft for orders.
Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me. The
wind strengthening steadily and the sea rising for an hour I
steered, each moment becoming more difficult. I had not the experience
to steer at the gait we were going on a quartering course.
'Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.
We've made at least ten knots, and we're going twelve or thirteen now.
The old girl knows how to walk. Might as well get some of that
head-sail off of her,' Larsen added, and turned to Mugridge: 'Cooky,
run down that flying jib and staysail, and make the downhauls good and
fast.'
I contented myself with the fore-crosstrees, some seventy feet above
the deck. As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I
comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any
of our men. Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which we
were running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat. It did not
seem possible that so frail craft could survive such stress of wind
and water.
I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running
with it, but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the
Ghost and apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply
against the foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life.
Sometimes she would lift and send across some great wave, burying
her starboard rail from view and covering her deck to the hatches with
the boiling ocean. At such moments, starting from a windward roll, I
would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I
clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which,
between the greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more. Once
the terror this giddy sweep overpowered me, and for a while I clung
on, hand and foot, weak and trembling, unable to search the sea for
the missing boats or to behold aught of the sea but that which
roared beneath and strove to overwhelm the Ghost.
But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my
quest for them I forgot myself. For an hour I saw nothing but the
naked, desolate sea. And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight
struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a
small black speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up. I
waited patiently. Again the tiny point of black projected itself
through the wrathful blaze, a couple of points off our port bow. I did
not attempt to shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen by
waving my arm. He changed the course, and I signaled affirmation
when the speck showed dead ahead.
It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully
appreciated the speed of our flight. Wolf Larsen motioned for me to
come down, and when I stood beside him at the wheel he gave me
instructions for heaving to.
'Expect all hell to break loose,' he cautioned me, 'but don't mind
it. Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the
fore-sheet.'
I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of
sides, for the weather rail seemed buried as often as the lee.
Having instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered
into the fore rigging a few feet. The boat was now very close, and I
could make out plainly that it was lying head to wind and sea and
dragging on its mast and sail, which had been thrown overboard and
made to serve as a sea-anchor. The three men were bailing. Each
rolling mountin whelmed them from view, and I would wait with
sickening anxiety, fearing that they would never appear again. Then,
and with black suddenness, the boat would shoot clear through the
foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky and the whole length of her
bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on end. There would be a
fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water in frantic haste,
when she would topple over and fall into the yawning valley, bow
down and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared almost
directly above the bow. Each time that she reappeared was a
recurrent miracle.
The Ghost suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came
to me with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as
impossible. Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to, and
dropped to the deck to be in readiness. We were now dead before the
wind, the boat far away and abreast of us. I felt an abrupt easing
of the schooner, a loss for the moment of all strain and pressure
coupled with a swift acceleration of speed. She was rushing around
on her heel into the wind.
As she arrived at right-angles to the sea, the full force of the
wind, from which we had hitherto run away, caught us. I was
unfortunately and ignorantly facing it. It stood up against me like
a wall, filling my lungs with air which I could not expel. And as I
choked and strangled, and as the Ghost wallowed for an instant,
broadside on and rolling straight over and far into the wind, I beheld
a huge sea rise far above my head. I turned aside, caught my breath,
and looked again. The wave overtopped the Ghost, and I gazed sheer
up and into it. A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl, and I
caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by a milky
smother of foam.
Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at
once. I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular
and yet everywhere. My hold had been broken loose, I was under
water, and the thought passed through my mind that this was the
terrible thing of which I had heard, the being swept in the trough
of the sea. My body struck and pounded as it was dashed helplessly
along and turned over and over, and when I could hold my breath no
longer I breathed the stinging salt water into my lungs. But through
it all I clung to the one idea- I must get the jib backed over to
windward. I had no fear of death. I had no doubt but that I should
come through somehow. And as this idea of fulfilling Wolf Larsen's
order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I seemed to see him
standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter, pitting his
will against the will of the storm and defying it.
I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed,
and breathed the sweet air again. I tried to rise, but struck my head,
and was knocked back on hands and knees. By some freak of the waters I
had been swept clear under the forecastle head and into the eyes. As I
scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge,
who lay in a groaning heap. There was no time to investigate. I must
get the jib backed over.
When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had
come. On all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and
steel and canvas. The Ghost was being wrenched and torn to
fragments. The foresail and foretopsail, emptied of the wind by the
maneuver, and with no one to bring in the sheet in time, were
thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom thrashing and splintering from
rail to rail. The air was thick with flying wreckage, detached ropes
and stays were hissing and coiling like snakes, and down through it
all crashed the gaff of the foresail.
The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred
me to action. Perhaps the situation was not hopeless. I remembered
Wolf Larsen's caution. He had expected 'all hell to break loose,'
and here it was. And where was he? I caught sight of him toiling at
the mainsheet, heaving it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the
stern of the schooner lifted high in the air, and his body outlined
against a white surge of sea sweeping past. All this and more- a whole
world of chaos and wreck- in possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and
heard and grasped.
I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but
sprang to the jibsheet. The jib itself was beginning to slap, partly
filling and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet,
and the application of my whole strength each time it slapped, I
slowly backed it. This I know: I did my best. Either the downhauls had
been carelessly made fast by Mugridge, or else the pins carried
away, for, while I pulled till I burst open the ends of all my
fingers, the flying jib and staysail filled and fluttered with the
wind, split their cloths apart, and thundered into nothingness.
Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn
until the next slap gave me more. Then the sheet gave with greater
ease, and Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was
busied taking up the slack.
'Make fast,' he shouted, 'and come on!'
As I followed him, I noted that, in spite of wrack and ruin, a rough
order obtained. The Ghost was hove to. She was still in working order,
and she was still working. Though the rest of her sails were gone, the
jib, backed to windward, and the mainsail, hauled down flat, were
themselves holding, and holding her bow to the furious sea as well.
I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the
boat-tackles, saw it lift to leeward on a big sea and not a score of
feet away. And, so nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted
fairly down upon it, so that nothing remained to do but hook the
tackles to each end and hoist it aboard. But this was not done so
easily as it is written.
In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly
amidships. As we drifted closer, the boat would rise on a wave while
we sank in the trough, till, almost straight above me, I could see the
heads of the three men craned overside and looking down. Then, the
next moment, we would lift and soar upward while they sank far down
beneath us. It seemed incredible that the next surge should not
crush the Ghost down upon the tiny eggshell.
But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while
Wolf Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot. Both tackles were
hooked in a trice, and the three men, deftly timing the roll, made a
simultaneous leap aboard the schooner. As the Ghost rolled her side
out of water, the boat was lifted snugly against her, and before the
return roll came we had heaved it in over the side and turned it
bottom up on the deck. I noticed blood spouting from Kerfoot's left
hand. In some way the third finger had been crushed to a pulp. But
he gave no sign of pain, and with his single right hand helped us lash
the boat in its place.
'Stand by to let that jib over, you Oofty,' Wolf Larsen commanded,
the very second we had finished with the boat. 'Kelly, come aft and
slack off the mainsheet. You, Kerfoot, go for'ard and see what's
become of Cooky. Mr. Van Weyden, run aloft again, and cut away any
stray stuff in your way.'
And having commanded, he went aft, with his peculiar tigerish leaps,
to the wheel. While I toiled up the fore-shrouds the Ghost slowly paid
off. This time, as we went into the trough of the sea and were
swept, there were no sails to carry away. And halfway to the
crosstrees, and flattened against the rigging by the full force of the
wind, so that it would have been impossible for me to have fallen,
with the Ghost almost on her beam-ends, and the masts parallel with
the water, I looked, not down, but at right angles from the
perpendicular, to the deck of the Ghost. But I saw not the deck, but
where the deck should have been, for it was buried beneath a wild
tumbling of water. Out of this water I could see the two masts rising,
and that was all. The Ghost, for the moment, was buried beneath the
sea. As she squared off more and more, escaping from the side
pressure, she righted herself and broke her deck, like a whale's back,
through the ocean surface.
Then we raced, and wildly, across the wild sea, the while I hung
like a fly in the crosstrees and searched for the other boats. In half
an hour I sighted the second one, swamped and bottom up, to which were
desperately clinging Jock Horner, fat Louis, and Johnson. This time
I remained aloft, and Wolf Larsen succeeded in heaving to without
being swept. As before, we drifted down upon the boat. Tackles were
made fast and lines flung to the men, who scrambled aboard like
monkeys. The boat itself was crushed and splintered against the
schooner's side as it came inboard; but the wreck was securely lashed,
for it could be patched and made whole again.
Once more the Ghost bore away before the storm, this time so
submerging herself that for some seconds I thought she would never
reappear. Even the wheel, quite a deal higher than the waist, was
covered and swept again and again. At such moments I felt strangely
alone with God, and watching the chaos of his wrath. And then the
wheel would reappear, and Wolf Larsen's broad shoulders, his hands
gripping the spokes and holding the schooner to the course of his
will, himself an earth-god, dominating the storm, flinging its
descending waters from him, and riding it to his own ends. And oh, the
marvel of it, the marvel of it, that tiny men should live and
breathe and work, and drive so frail a contrivance of wood and cloth
through so tremendous an elemental strife!
As before, the Ghost swung out of the trough, lifting her deck again
out of the sea, and dashed before the howling blast. It was now
half-past five, and half an hour later, when the last of the day
lost itself in a dim and furious twilight, I sighted a third boat.
It was bottom up, and there was no sign of its crew. Wolf Larsen
repeated his maneuver, holding off and then rounding up to windward
and drifting down upon it. But this time he missed by forty feet,
the boat passing astern.
'No. 4 boat!' Oofty-Oofty cried, his keen eyes reading its number in
the one second when it lifted clear of the foam and upside down.
It was Henderson's boat, and with him had been lost Holyoak and
Williams, another of the deep-water crowd. Lost they indubitably were;
but the boat remained, and Wolf Larsen made one more reckless effort
to recover it. I had come down to the deck, and I saw Horner and
Kerfoot vainly protest against the attempt.
'By God, I'll not be robbed of my boat by any storm that ever blew
out of hell!' he shouted, and though we four stood with our heads
together that we might hear, his voice seemed faint and far, as though
removed from us an immense distance.
'Mr. Van Weyden,' he cried, and I heard through the tumult as one
might hear a whisper, 'stand by that jib with Johnson and Oofty! The
rest of you tail aft to the main-sheet! Lively now, or I'll sail you
all into kingdom come! Understand?'
And when he put the wheel hard over and the Ghost's bow swung off,
there was nothing for the hunters to do but obey and make the best
of a risky chance. How great the risk I realized when I was once
more buried beneath the pounding seas and clinging for life to the
pin-rail at the foot of the foremast. My fingers were torn loose,
and I was swept across to the side and over the side into the sea. I
could not swim, but before I could sink I was swept back again. A
strong hand gripped me, and when the Ghost finally emerged I found
that I owed my life to Johnson. I saw him looking anxiously about him,
and noted that Kelly, who had come forward at the last moment, was
missing.
This time, having missed the boat, and not being in the same
position as in the previous instances, Wolf Larsen was compelled to
resort to a different maneuver. Running off before the wind with
everything to starboard, he came about and returned close-hauled on
the port tack.
'Grand!' Johnson shouted in my ear, as we successfully came
through the attendant deluge; and I knew he referred, not to Wolf
Larsen's seamanship, but to the performance of the Ghost herself.
It was now so dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf
Larsen held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by
unerring instinct. This time, though we were continually
half-buried, there was no trough in which to be swept, and we
drifted squarely down upon the upturned boat, badly smashing it as
it was heaved inboard.
Two hours of terrible work followed, in which all hands of us- two
hunters, three sailors, Wolf Larsen, and I- reefed, first one and then
the other, the jib and mainsail. Hove to under this short canvas,
our decks were comparatively free of water, while the Ghost bobbed and
ducked among the combers like a cork.
I had burst open the ends of my fingers at the very first, and
during the reefing I had worked with tears of pain running down my
cheeks. And when all was done, I gave up like a woman and rolled. upon
the deck in the agony of exhaustion.
In the meantime, Thomas Mugridge, like a drowned rat, was being
dragged out from under the forecastle head, where he had cravenly
ensconced himself. I saw him pulled aft to the cabin, and noted with a
shock of surprise that the galley had disappeared. A clean space of
deck showed where it had stood.
In the cabin I found all hands assembled, sailors as well, and while
coffee was being cooked over the small stove we drank whiskey and
crunched hardtack. Never in my life had food been so welcome, and
never had hot coffee tasted so good. So violently did the Ghost
pitch and toss and tumble that it was impossible for even the
sailors to move about without holding on, and several times, after a
cry of 'Now she takes it!' we were heaped upon the wall of the port
cabin as though it had been the deck.
'To- with a lookout,' I heard Wolf Larsen say when we had eaten
and drunk our fill. 'There's nothing can be done on deck. If
anything's going to run us down, we couldn't get out of its way.
Turn in, all hands, and get some sleep.'
The sailors slipped forward, setting the side-lights as they went,
while the two hunters remained to sleep in the cabin, it not being
deemed advisable to open the slide to the steerage companionway.
Wolf Larsen and I, between us, cut off Kerfoot's crushed finger and
sewed up the stump. Mugridge, who, during all the time he had been
compelled to cook and serve coffee and keep the fire going, had
complained of internal pains, now swore that he had a broken rib or
two. On examination we found that he had three. But his case was
deferred to next day, principally for the reason that I did not know
anything about broken ribs, and would first have to read it up.
'I don't think it was worth it,' I said to Wolf Larsen, 'a broken
boat for Kelly's life.'
'But Kelly didn't amount to much,' was the reply. 'Good night.'
After all that had passed, suffering intolerable anguish in my
finger-ends, and with three boats missing, to say nothing of the
wild capers the Ghost was cutting, I would have thought it
impossible to sleep. But my eyes must have closed the instant my
head touched the pillow, and in utter exhaustion I slept throughout
the night, the while the Ghost, lonely and undirected, fought her
way through the storm.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
THE NEXT DAY, WHILE THE STORM was blowing itself out, Wolf Larsen
and I 'crammed' anatomy and surgery and set Mugridge's ribs. Then,
when the storm broke, Wolf Larsen cruised back and forth over that
portion of the ocean where we had encountered it, and somewhat more to
the westward, while the boats were being repaired and new sails made
and bent. Also, a new galley was being constructed out of odds and
ends of lumber from the hold. Sealing-schooner after
sealing-schooner we sighted and boarded, most of which were in
search of lost boats, and most of which were carrying boats and
crews that they had picked up and that did not belong to them. For the
thick of the fleet had been to the westward of us, and the boats,
scattered far and wide, had headed in mad flight for the nearest
refuge.
Two of our boats, with men all safe, we took off the Cisco, and,
to Wolf Larsen's huge delight and my own grief, he culled Smoke,
with Nilson and Leach, from the San Diego. So that, at the end of five
days, we found ourselves short but four men, Henderson, Holyoak,
Williams, and Kelly, and were once more hunting on the flanks of the
herd.
As we followed north, we began to encounter the dreaded sea-fogs.
Day after day the boats were lowered and swallowed up almost before
they touched the water, while we on board pumped the horn at regular
intervals, and every fifteen minutes fired the bomb-gun. Boats were
continually being lost and found, it being the custom for a boat to
hunt, on lay, with whatever schooner picked it up, until such time
as it was recovered by its own schooner. But Wolf Larsen, as was to be
expected, being a boat short, took possession of the first stray one
and compelled its men to hunt with the Ghost, not permitting them to
return to their own schooner when we sighted it. I remember how he
forced the hunter and his two men below, a rifle at their breasts,
when their captain passed by at biscuit-toss and hailed us for
information.
Thomas Mugridge, so strangely and pertinaciously clinging to life,
was soon limping about again and performing his double duties of
cook and cabin-boy. Johnson and Leach were bullied and beaten as
much as ever, and they looked for their lives to end with the end of
the hunting season; while the rest of the crew lived the lives of dogs
and were worked like dogs by their pitiless master. As for Wolf Larsen
and me, we got along fairly well, though I could not quite rid
myself of the idea that right conduct for me lay in killing him. He
fascinated me immeasurably, and I feared him immeasurably; and yet I
could not imagine him lying prone in death. There was an endurance, as
of perpetual youth, about him, which rose up and forbade the
picture. I could see him only as living always and dominating
always, fighting and destroying, himself surviving.
One diversion of his, when we were in the midst of the herd and
the sea was too rough to lower the boats, was to lower with two
boat-pullers and a steerer and go out himself. He was a good shot,
too, and brought many a skin aboard under what the hunters termed
'impossible hunting conditions.' It seemed the breath of his nostrils,
this carrying his life in his hands and struggling for it against
tremendous odds.
I was learning more and more seamanship, and one clear day, a
thing we rarely encountered now, I had the satisfaction of running and
handling the Ghost and picking up the boats myself. Wolf Larsen had
been smitten with one of his headaches, and I stood at the wheel
from morning until evening, sailing across the ocean after the last
lee boat, and heaving to and picking it and the other five up
without command or suggestion from him.
Gales we encountered now and again, for it was a raw and stormy
region, and, in the middle of June, a typhoon most memorable to me,
and most important because of the changes wrought through it upon my
future. We must have been caught nearly at the center of this circular
storm, and Wolf Larsen ran out of it and to the southward, first under
a double-reefed jib, and finally under bare poles. Never had I
imagined so great a sea. The seas previously encountered were as
ripples compared with these, which ran a half-mile from crest to crest
and which upreared, I am confident, above our masthead. So great was
it that Wolf Larsen himself did not dare heave to, though he was being
driven far to the southward and out of the seal herd.
We must have been well in the path of the transpacific steamships
when the typhoon moderated, and here, to the surprise of the
hunters, we found ourselves in the midst of seals- a second herd, or
sort of rear-guard, they declared, and a most unusual thing. But it
was 'Boats over!' the boom, boom of guns, and pitiful slaughter
through the long day.
It was at this time that I was approached by Leach. I had just
finished tallying the skins of the last boat aboard when he came to my
side, in the darkness, and said in a low tone:
'Can you tell me, Mr. Van Weyden, how far we are off the coast,
and what the bearings of Yokohama are?'
My heart leaped with gladness, for I knew what he had in mind, and I
gave him the bearings- west-northwest and five hundred miles away.
'Thank you, sir,' was all he said as he slipped back into the
darkness.
Next morning No. 3 boat and Johnson and Leach were missing. The
waterbreakers and grub-boxes from all the other boats were likewise
missing, as were the beds and sea-bags of the two men. Wolf Larsen was
furious. He set sail and bore away into the west-northwest, two
hunters constantly at the mastheads, and sweeping the sea with
glasses, himself pacing the deck like an angry lion. He knew too
well my sympathy for the runaways to send me aloft as lookout.
The wind was fair but fitful, and it was like looking for a needle
in a haystack to raise that tiny boat out of the blue immensity. But
he put the Ghost through her best paces, so as to get between the
deserters and the land. This accomplished, he cruised back and forth
across what he knew must be their course.
On the morning of the third day, shortly after eight bells, a cry
that the boat was sighted came down from Smoke at the masthead. All
hands lined the rail. A snappy breeze was blowing from the west,
with the promise of more wind behind it; and there, to leeward, in the
troubled silver of the rising sun, appeared and disappeared a black
speck.
We squared away and ran for it. My heart was as lead. I felt
myself turning sick in anticipation; and as I looked at the gleam of
triumph in Wolf Larsen's eyes, his form swam before me, and I felt
almost irresistibly impelled to fling myself upon him. So unnerved was
I by the thought of impending violence to Leach and Johnson that my
reason must have left me. I know that I slipped down into the
steerage, in a daze, and that I was just beginning the ascent to the
deck, a loaded shotgun in my hands, when I heard the startled cry:
'There's five men in that boat!'
I supported myself in the companion-way, weak and trembling, while
the observation was being verified by the remarks of the rest of the
men. Then my knees gave from under me, and I sank down, myself
again, but overcome by shock at knowledge of what I had so nearly
done. Also, I was very thankful as I put the gun away and slipped back
on deck.
No one had remarked my absence. The boat was near enough for us to
make out that it was larger than any sealing-boat and built on
different lines. As we drew closer, the sail was taken in and the mast
unstepped. Oars were shipped, and its occupants waited for us to heave
to and take them aboard.
Smoke, who had descended to the deck and was now standing by my
side, began to chuckle in a significant way. I looked at him
inquiringly.
'Talk of a mess!' he giggled. 'It's a pretty one we've got now.'
'What's wrong?' I demanded.
Again he chuckled. 'Don't you see there, in the stern- sheets, on
the bottom? May I never shoot a seal again if that ain't a woman!'
I looked closely, but was not sure until exclamation broke out on
all sides. The boat contained four men, and its fifth occupant was
certainly a woman.
We were agog with excitement, all except Wolf Larsen, who was too
evidently disappointed in that it was not his own boat with the two
victims of his malice.
We ran down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to windward and
the mainsheet flat, and came up into the wind. The oars struck the
water, and with a few strokes the boat was alongside. I now caught
my first fair glimpse of the woman. She was wrapped in a long
ulster, for the morning was raw, and I could see nothing but her
face and a mass of light-brown hair escaping from under the seaman's
cap on her head. The eyes were large and brown and lustrous, the mouth
sweet and sensitive, and the face itself a delicate oval, though sun
and exposure to briny wind had burned the face scarlet.
She seemed to me like a being from another world. I was aware of a
hungry outreaching for her, as of a starving man for bread. But then I
had not seen a woman for a very long time. I know that I was lost in a
great wonder, almost a stupor,- this, then, was a woman?- so that I
forgot myself and my mate's duties, and took no part in helping the
newcomers aboard. For when one of the sailors lifted her into Wolf
Larsen's down-stretched arms, she looked up into our curious faces and
smiled amusedly and sweetly, as only a woman can smile, and as I had
seen no one smile for so long that I had forgotten such smiles
existed.
'Mr. Van Weyden!'
Wolf Larsen's voice brought me sharply back to myself.
'Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort? Make up that
spare port cabin. Put Cooky to work on it. And see what you can do for
that face. It's burned badly.'
He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new
men. The boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a
'bloody shame,' with Yokohama so near.
I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft.
Also, I was awkward. It seemed to me that I was realizing for the
first time what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is, and as I
caught her arm to help her down the companion-stairs, I was startled
by its smallness and softness. Indeed, she was a slender, delicate
woman, as women go, but to me she was so ethereally slender and
delicate that I was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in my grasp.
All this in frankness, to show my first impression, after long
deprivation, of women in general and of Maud Brewster in particular.
'No need to go to any great trouble for me,' she protested, when I
had seated her in Wolf Larsen's armchair, which I had dragged
hastily from his cabin. 'The men were looking for land at any moment
this morning, and the vessel should be in by night, don't you think
so?'
Her simple faith in the immediate future took me aback. How could
I explain to her the situation, the strange man who stalked the sea
like Destiny, all that it had taken me months to learn? But I answered
honestly:
'If it were any other captain except ours, I should say you would be
ashore in Yokohama tomorrow. But our captain is a strange man, and I
beg of you to be prepared for anything- understand?- for anything.'
'I- I confess I hardly do understand,' she hesitated, a perturbed
but not frightened expression in her eyes. 'Or is it a misconception
of mine that shipwrecked people are always shown every
consideration? This is such a little thing, you know, we are so
close to land.'
'Candidly, I do not know,' I strove to reassure her. 'I wished
merely to prepare you for the worst, if the worst is to come. This
man, this captain, is a brute, a demon, and one can never tell what
will be his next fantastic act.'
I was growing excited, but she interrupted me with an 'Oh, I see,'
and her voice sounded weary. To think was patently an effort. She
was clearly on the verge of physical collapse.
She asked no further questions, and I vouchsafed no remarks,
devoting myself to Wolf Larsen's command, which was to make her
comfortable. I bustled about in quite housewifely fashion, procuring
soothing lotions for her sunburn, raiding Wolf Larsen's private stores
for a bottle of port I knew to be there, and directing Thomas Mugridge
in the preparation of the spare state-room.
The wind was freshening rapidly, the Ghost heeling over more and
more, and by the time the state-room was ready she was dashing through
the water at a lively clip. I had quite forgotten the existence of
Leach and Johnson, when suddenly, like a thunder-clap, 'Boat ho!' came
down the open companionway. It was Smoke's unmistakable voice,
crying from the masthead. I shot a glance at the woman, but she was
leaning back in the armchair, her eyes closed, unutterably tired. I
doubted that she had heard, and I resolved to prevent her seeing the
brutality I knew would follow the capture of the deserters. She was
tired. Very good. She should sleep.
There were swift commands on deck, a stamping of feet and a slapping
of reefpoints, as the Ghost shot into the wind and about on the
other tack. As she filled away and heeled, the armchair began to slide
across the cabin floor, and I sprang for it just in time to prevent
the rescued woman from being spilled out.
Her eyes were too heavy to suggest more than a hint of the sleepy
surprise that perplexed her as she looked up at me, and she half
stumbled, half tottered as I led her to her cabin. Mugridge grinned
insinuatingly in my face as I shoved him out and ordered him back to
his galley work, and he won his revenge by spreading glowing reports
among the hunters as to what an excellent 'Lydy's-myde' I was
proving myself to be.
She leaned heavily against me, and I do believe that she had
fallen asleep again between the armchair and the state-room. This I
discovered when she nearly fell into the bunk during a sudden lurch of
the schooner. She aroused, smiled drowsily, and was off to sleep
again; and asleep I left her, under a heavy pair of sailor's blankets,
her head resting on a pillow I had appropriated from Wolf Larsen's
bunk.
CHAPTER NINETEEN.
I CAME ON DECK TO FIND THE GHOST heading up close on the port tack
and cutting in to windward of a familiar sprit-sail close-hauled on
the same tack ahead of us. All hands were on deck, for they knew
that something was to happen when Leach and Johnson were dragged
aboard.
It was four bells. Louis came aft to relieve the wheel. There was
a dampness in the air, and I noticed he had on his oilskins.
'What are we going to have?' I asked him.
'A healthy young slip of a gale from the breath of it, sir,' he
answered, 'with a splatter of rain just to wet our gills an' no more.'
'Too bad we sighted them,' I said, as the Ghost's bow was flung
off a point by a large sea, and the boat leaped for a moment past
the jibs and into our line of vision.
Louis turned a spoke of the wheel and temporized.
'They'd never of made the land, sir, I'm thinkin'.'
'Think not?' I queried.
'No, sir. Did you feel that?' A puff had caught the schooner, and he
was forced to put the wheel up rapidly to keep her out of the wind.
''T is no eggshell'll float on this sea an hour come. An' it's a
stroke of luck for them we're here to pick 'em up.'
Wolf Larsen strode aft from amidships, where he had been talking
with the rescued men. The cat-like springiness in his tread was a
little more pronounced than usual, and his eyes were bright and
snappy.
'Three oilers and a fourth engineer,' was his greeting. 'But we'll
make sailors out of them, or boat-pullers, at any rate. Now, what of
the lady?'
I knew not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang, like the cut of
a knife, when he mentioned her. I thought it a certain silly
fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I
merely shrugged my shoulders in answer.
Wolf Larsen pursed his lips in a long quizzical whistle.
'What's her name, then?' he demanded.
'I don't know,' I replied. 'She is asleep. She was very tired. In
fact, I am waiting to hear the news from you. What vessel was it?'
'Mail-steamer,' he answered shortly. 'The City of Tokio, from
'Frisco, bound for Yokohama. Disabled in that typhoon. Old tub. Opened
up top and bottom like a sieve. They were adrift four days. And you
don't know who or what she is, eh- maid, wife, or widow? Well, well.'
He shook his head in a bantering way and regarded me with laughing
eyes.
'Are you- ' I began. It was on the verge of my tongue to ask if he
were going to take the castaways in to Yokohama.
'Am I what?' he asked.
'What do you intend doing with Leach and Johnson?'
He shook his head.
'Really, Hump, I don't know. You see, with these additions I've
about all the crew I want.'
'And they've about all the escaping they want,' I said. 'Why not
give them a change of treatment? Take them aboard and deal gently with
them. Whatever they have done, they have been hounded into doing.'
'By me?'
'By you,' I answered steadily. 'And I give you warning, Wolf Larsen,
that I may forget the love of my own life in the desire to kill you if
you go too far in maltreating those poor wretches.'
'Bravo!' he cried. 'You do me proud, Hump! You've found your legs
with a vengeance. You're quite an individual. You were unfortunate
in having your life cast in easy places, but you're developing, and
I like you the better for it.'
His voice and expression changed. His face was serious. 'Do you
believe in promises?' he asked. 'Are they sacred things?'
'Of course,' I answered.
'Then here's a compact,' he went on, consummate actor that he was.
'If I promise not to lay hands upon Leach and Johnson, will you
promise, in turn, not to attempt to kill me? Oh, not that I'm afraid
of you, not that I'm afraid of you,' he hastened to add.
I could hardly believe my ears. What was coming over the man?
'Is it a go?' he asked impatiently.
'A go,' I answered.
His hand went out to mine, and as I shook it heartily I could have
sworn I saw the mocking devil shine up for a moment in his eyes.
We strolled across the poop to the lee side. The boat was close at
hand now and in desperate plight. Johnson was steering, Leach bailing.
We overhauled them about two feet to their one. Wolf Larsen motioned
Louis to keep off slightly, and we dashed abreast of the boat not a
score of feet to windward.
It was at this moment that Leach and Johnson looked up into the
faces of their shipmates who lined the rail amidships. There was no
greeting. They were as dead men in their comrades' eyes, and between
them was the gulf that parts the living and the dead.
The next instant they were opposite the poop, where stood Wolf
Larsen and I. We were falling in the trough, and they were rising on
the surge. Johnson looked at me, and I could see that his face was
worn and haggard. I waved my hand to him, and he answered the
greeting, but with a wave that was hopeless and despairing. It was
as if he were saying farewell. I did not see into the eyes of Leach,
for he was looking at Wolf Larsen, the old and implacable snarl of
hatred as strong as ever on his face.
Then they were gone astern. The sprit-sail filled with the wind
suddenly, careening the frail, open craft till it seemed it would
surely capsize.
Wolf Larsen barked a short laugh in my ear and strode away to the
weather side of the poop. I expected him to give orders for the
Ghost to heave to, but she kept on her course and he made no sign.
Louis tood imperturbably at the wheel, but I noticed the grouped
sailors forward turning troubled faces in our direction. Still the
Ghost tore along till the boat dwindled to a speck, when Wolf Larsen's
voice rang out in command, and we went about on the starboard tack.
Back we held, two miles and more to windward of the struggling
cockleshell, when the flying jib was run down and the schooner hove
to. In all that wild waste there was no refuge for Leach and Johnson
save on the Ghost, and they resolutely began the windward beat. At the
end of an hour and a half they were nearly alongside, standing past
our stern on the last leg out, aiming to fetch us on the next leg
back.
'So you've changed your mind?' I heard Wolf Larsen mutter, half to
himself, half to them, as though they could hear. 'You want to come
aboard, eh? Well, then, just keep a-coming. Hard up with that helm!'
he commanded Oofty-Oofty, the Kanaka, who had in the meantime relieved
Louis at the wheel.
Command followed command. As the schooner paid off, the fore-and
main-sheets were slacked away for fair wind. And before the wind we
were, and leaping, when Johnson, easing his sheet at imminent peril,
cut across our wake a hundred feet away. Again Wolf Larsen laughed, at
the same time beckoning them with his arm to follow. It was
evidently his intention to play with them- a lesson, I took it, in
lieu of a beating, though a dangerous lesson, for the frail craft
stood in momentary danger of being overwhelmed.
''T is the fear of death at the hearts of them,' Louis muttered in
my ear as I passed forward to see to taking in the flying jib and
staysail.
'Oh, he'll heave to in a little while and pick them up,' I
answered cheerfully.
Louis looked at me shrewdly. 'Think so?' he asked.
'Surely,' I answered. 'Don't you?'
'I think nothing but of my own skin, these days,' was his answer.
'An' 't is with wonder I'm filled as to the workin' out of things. A
pretty mess that 'Frisco whisky got me into, an' a prettier mess
that woman's got you into aft there. Ah, it's myself that knows ye for
a blitherin' fool.'
'What do you mean?' I demanded; for, having sped his shaft, he was
turning away.
'What do I mean?' he cried. 'An' it's you that asks me! 'T is not
what I mean, but what the Wolf'll mean. The Wolf, I said, the Wolf!'
'If trouble comes, will you stand by?' asked impulsively, for he had
voiced my own fear.
'Stand by? 'T is old fat Louis I stand by, an' trouble enough
it'll be. We're at the beginnin' of things, I'm tellin' ye, the bare
beginnin' of things.'
'I had not thought you so great a coward,' I sneered.
He favored me with a contemptuous stare.
'If I raised never a hand for that poor fool,'- pointing astern to
the tiny sail,- 'd' ye think I'm hungerin' for a broken head for a
woman I never laid me eyes upon before this day?'
I turned scornfully away and went aft.
'Better get in those topsails, Mr. Van Weyden,' Wolf Larsen said, as
I came on the poop.
I felt relief, at least as far as the two men were concerned. I
had scarcely opened my mouth to issue the necessary commands, when
eager men were springing to halyards and downhauls, and others were
racing aloft. This eagerness on their part was noted by Wolf Larsen
with a grim smile.
Still we increased our lead, and when the boat had dropped astern
several miles we hove to and waited. All eyes watched it coming,
even Wolf Larsen's; but he was the only unperturbed man aboard. Louis,
gazing fixedly, betrayed a trouble in his face he was not quite able
to hide.
The boat drew closer and closer, hurling along through the
seething green like a thing alive, lifting and sending and uptossing
across the huge-backed breakers, or disappearing behind them only to
rush into sight again and shoot skyward. It seemed impossible that
it could continue to live, yet with each dizzying sweep it did achieve
the impossible. A rain-squall drove past, and out of the flying wet
the boat emerged, almost upon us.
'Hard up, there!' Wolf Larsen shouted, himself springing to the
wheel and whirling it over.
Again the Ghost sprang away and raced before the wind, and for two
hours Johnson and Leach pursued us. We hove to and ran away, hove to
and ran away; and ever astern the struggling patch of sail tossed
skyward and fell into the rushing valleys. It was a quarter of a
mile away when a thick squall of rain veiled it from view. It never
emerged. The wind blew the air clear again, but no patch of sail broke
the troubled surface. I thought I saw, for an instant, the boat's
bottom show black in a breaking crest. At the best, that was all.
For Johnson and Leach the travail of existence had ceased.
The men remained grouped amidships. No one had gone below, and no
one was speaking. Nor were any looks being exchanged. Each man
seemed stunned- deeply contemplative, as it were, and, not quite sure,
trying to realize just what had taken place. Wolf Larsen gave them
little time for thought. He at once put the Ghost upon her course- a
course which meant the seal-herd and not Yokohama harbor. But the
men were no longer eager as they pulled and hauled, and I heard curses
among them which left their lips smothered and as heavy and lifeless
as were they. Not so was it with the hunters. Smoke the
irrepressible related a story, and they descended into the steerage
bellowing with laughter.
As I passed to leeward of the galley on my way aft, I was approached
by the engineer we had rescued. His face was white, his lips were
trembling.
'Good God! sir, what kind of a craft is this?' he cried.
'You have eyes; you have seen,' I answered almost brutally, what
of the pain and fear at my own heart.
'Your promise?' I said to Wolf Larsen.
'I was not thinking of taking them aboard when I made that promise,'
he answered. 'And, anyway, you'll agree I've not laid my hands upon
them. Far from it, far from it,' he laughed a moment later.
I made no reply. I was incapable of speaking, my mind was too
confused. I must have time to think, I knew. This woman, sleeping even
now in the spare cabin, was a responsibility which I must consider,
and the only rational thought that flickered through my mind was
that I must do nothing hastily if I were to be any help to her at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY.
THE REMAINDER OF THE DAY passed uneventfully. The young slip of a
gale, having wetted our gills, proceeded to moderate. The fourth
engineer and the three oilers, after a warm interview with Wolf
Larsen, were furnished with outfits from the slop-chest, assigned
places under the hunters in the various boats and watches on the
vessel, and bundled forward into the forecastle. They went
protestingly, but their voices were not loud. They were awed by what
they had already seen of Wolf Larsen's character, while the tale of
woe they speedily heard in the forecastle took the last bit of
rebellion out of them.
Miss Brewster- we had learned her name from the engineer- slept on
and on. At supper I requested the hunters to lower their voices, so
she was not disturbed; and it was not till next morning that she
made her appearance. It had been my intention to have her meals served
apart, but Wolf Larsen put down his foot. Who was she that she
should be too good for cabin table and cabin society? had been his
demand.
But her coming to the table had something amusing in it. The hunters
fell as silent as clams. Jock Horner and Smoke alone were unabashed,
stealing stealthy glances at her now and again, and even taking part
in the conversation. The other four men glued their eyes on their
plates and chewed steadily and with thoughtful precision, their ears
moving and wabbling, in time with their jaws, like the ears of so many
animals.
Wolf Larsen had little to say at first, doing no more than reply
when he was addressed. Not that he was abashed. Far from it. This
woman was a new type to him, a different breed from any he had ever
known, and he was curious. He studied her, his eyes rarely leaving her
face, unless to follow the movements of her hands or shoulders. I
studied her myself, and though it was I who maintained the
conversation, I know that I was a bit shy, not quite self-possessed.
His was the perfect poise, the supreme confidence in self which
nothing could shake; and he was no more timid of a woman than he was
of storm and battle.
'And when shall we arrive at Yokohama?' she asked, turning to him
and looking him square in the eyes.
There it was, the question flat. The jaws stopped working, the
ears ceased wabbling, and though eyes remained on plates, each man
listened greedily for the answer.
'In four months, possibly three, if the season closes early,' Wolf
Larsen said. She caught her breath and stammered:
'I- I thought- I was given to understand that Yokohama was only a
day's sail away. It- ' Here she paused and looked about the table at
the circle of unsympathetic faces staring hard at the plates. 'It is
not right,' she concluded.
'That is a question you must settle with Mr. Van Weyden there,' he
replied, bowing to me with a mischievous twinkle. 'Mr. Van Weyden is
what you may call an authority on such things as rights. Now I, who am
only a sailor, would look upon the situation somewhat differently.
It may possibly be your misfortune that you have to remain with us,
but it is certainly our good fortune.'
He regarded her smilingly. Her eyes fell before his gaze, but she
lifted them again, and defiantly, to mine. I read the unspoken
question there: Was it right? But I had decided that the part I was to
play must be a neutral one, so I did not answer.
'What do you think?' she demanded.
'It is unfortunate,' I said, 'especially if you have any engagements
falling due in the course of the next several months. But, since you
say that you were voyaging to Japan for your health, I can assure
you that it will improve no better anywhere than aboard the Ghost.'
I saw her eyes flash with indignation, and this time it was I who
dropped mine, while I felt my face flushing under her gaze. It was
cowardly, but what else could I do?
'Mr. Van Weyden speaks with the voice of authority.' Wolf Larsen
laughed.
I nodded my head and she, having recovered herself, waited
expectantly.
'Not that he is much to speak of now,' Wolf Larsen went on; 'but
he has improved wonderfully. You should have seen him when he came
on board. A more scrawny, pitiful specimen of humanity one could
hardly conceive. Isn't that so, Kerfoot?'
Kerfoot, thus directly addressed, was startled into dropping his
knife on the floor, though he managed to grunt affirmation.
'Developed himself by peeling potatoes and washing dishes. Eh,
Kerfoot?'
Again that worthy grunted.
'Look at him now. True, he is not what you would term muscular,
but still he has muscles, which is more than he had when he came
aboard. Also, he has legs to stand on. You would not think so to
look at him, but he was quite unable to stand alone at first.'
The hunters were snickering, but she looked at me with a sympathy in
her eyes which more than compensated for Wolf Larsen's nastiness. In
truth, it had been so long since I had received sympathy that I was
softened, and I became then, and gladly, her willing slave. But I
was angry with Wolf Larsen. He was challenging my manhood with his
slurs, challenging the very legs he claimed to be instrumental in
getting for me.
'I may have learned to stand on my own legs,' I retorted. 'But I
have yet to stamp upon others with them.'
He looked at me insolently. 'Your education is only half
completed, then,' he said dryly, and turned to her. 'We are very
hospitable upon the Ghost. Mr. Van Weyden has discovered that. We do
everything to make our guests feel at home, eh, Mr. Van Weyden?'
'Even to the peeling of potatoes and the washing of dishes,' I
answered, 'to say nothing of wringing their necks, out of very
fellowship.'
'I beg of you not to receive false impressions of us from Mr. Van
Weyden,' he interposed with mock anxiety. 'You will observe, Miss
Brewster, that he carries a dirk in his belt, a- ahem- a most
unusual thing for a ship's officer to do. While really very estimable,
Mr. Van Weyden is sometimes- how shall I say?- er- quarrelsome, and
harsh measures are necessary. He is quite reasonable and fair in his
calm moments, and as he is calm now, he will not deny that only
yesterday he threatened my life.'
I was well-nigh choking, and my eyes were certainly fiery. He drew
attention to me.
'Look at him now. He can scarcely control himself in your
presence. He is not accustomed to the presence of ladies, anyway. I
shall have to arm myself before I dare go on deck with him.'
He shook his head sadly, murmuring, 'Too bad, too bad,' while the
hunters burst into guffaws of laughter.
The deep sea-voices of these men, rumbling and bellowing in the
confined space, produced a wild effect. The whole setting was wild,
and for the first time, regarding this strange woman and realizing how
incongruous she was in it, I was aware of how much a part of it I
was myself. I knew these men and their mental processes, was one of
them myself, living the seal-hunting life, eating the seal-hunting
fare, thinking largely the seal-hunting thoughts. There was no
strangeness to it, to the rough clothes, the coarse faces, the wild
laughter, and the lurching cabin walls and swaying sea-lamps.
As I buttered a piece of bread and my eyes chanced to rest upon my
hand. The knuckles were skinned and inflamed clear across, the fingers
swollen, the nails rimmed with black. I felt the mattress-like
growth of beard on my neck, knew that the sleeve of my coat was
ripped, that a button was missing from the throat of the blue shirt
I wore. The dirk mentioned by Wolf Larsen rested in its sheath on my
hip. It was very natural that it should be there- how natural I had
not imagined until now, when I looked upon it with her eyes and knew
how strange it and all that went with it must appear to her.
But she divined the mockery in Wolf Larsen's words, and again
favored me with a sympathetic glance. But there was a look of
bewilderment also in her eyes. That it was mockery made the
situation more puzzling to her.
'I may be taken off by some passing vessel, perhaps,' she suggested.
'There will be no passing vessels, except other
sealing-schooners,' Wolf Larsen made answer.
'I have no clothes, nothing,' she objected. 'You hardly realize,
sir, that I am not a man, or that I am unaccustomed to the vagrant,
careless life which you and your men seem to lead.'
'The sooner you get accustomed to it the better,' he said. 'I'll
furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,' he added. 'I hope it
will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make yourself a dress
or two.'
She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her
ignorance of dressmaking. That she was frightened and bewildered,
and that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.
'I suppose you're like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having
things done for you. Well, I think doing a few things for yourself
will hardly dislocate any joints. By the way, what do you for a
living?'
She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.
'I mean no offense, believe me. People eat, therefore they must
procure the wherewithal. These men here shoot seals in order to
live; for the same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden,
for the present at any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me. Now
what do you do?'
She shrugged her shoulders.
'Do you feed yourself, or does some one else feed you?'
'I'm afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,' she
laughed, trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing,
though I could see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she
watched Wolf Larsen.
'And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?'
'I have made beds,' she replied.
'Very often?'
She shook her head with mock ruefulness.
'Do you know what they do to poor men in the States who, like you,
do not work for their living?'
'I am very ignorant,' she pleaded. 'What do they do to the poor
men who are like me?'
'They send them to jail. The crime of not earning a living, in their
case, is called vagrancy. If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who harps
eternally on questions of right and wrong, I'd ask, By what right do
you live when you do nothing to deserve living?'
'But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don't have to answer, do I?'
She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos
of it cut me to the heart. I felt that I must in some way break in and
lead the conversation into other channels.
'Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labor?' he demanded,
certain of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.
'Yes, I have,' she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud
at his crestfallen visage. 'I remember my father giving me a dollar
once, when I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely quiet for
five minutes.'
He smiled indulgently.
'But that was long ago,' she continued. 'And you would scarcely
demand a little girl of nine to earn her own living. At present,
however,' she said, after another slight pause, 'I earn about eighteen
hundred dollars a year.'
With one accord all eyes left the plates and settled on her. A woman
who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking at.
Wolf Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.
'Salary or piece-work?' he asked.
'Piece-work,' she answered promptly.
'Eighteen hundred,' he calculated. 'That's a hundred and fifty
dollars a month. Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about the
Ghost. Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain with
us.'
She made no acknowledgment. She was too unused as yet to the whims
of the man to accept them with equanimity.
'I forgot to inquire,' he went on suavely, 'as to the nature of your
occupation. What commodities do you turn out? What tools and materials
do you require?'
'Paper and ink,' she laughed. 'And, oh! also a typewriter.'
'You are Maud Brewster,' I said slowly and with certainty, almost as
though I were charging her with a crime.
Her eyes lifted curiously to mine.
'How do you know?'
'Aren't you?' I demanded.
She acknowledged her identity with a nod. It was Wolf Larsen's
turn to be puzzled. The name and its magic signified nothing to him. I
was proud that it did mean something to me, and for the first time
in a weary while I was convincingly conscious of a superiority over
him.
'I remember writing a review of a thin little volume-' I had begun
carelessly, when she interrupted me.
'You!' she cried. 'You are-'
She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.
I nodded my identity, in turn.
'Humphrey Van Weyden,' she concluded; then added, with a sigh of
relief and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf Larsen, 'I
am so glad.'
'I remember the review,' she went on hastily, becoming aware of
the awkwardness of her remark, 'that too, too flattering review.'
'Not at all,' I denied valiantly. 'You impeach my sober judgment and
make my canons of little worth, Besides, all my brother critics were
with me.'
'You are very kind, I am sure, she murmured; and the very
conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of
associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the
world, gave me a quick thrill- rich with rememberance but stinging
sharp with homesickness.
'And you are Maud Brewster,' I said solemnly, gazing across at her.
'And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,' she said, gazing back at me
with equal solemnity and awe. 'How unusual! I don't understand. We
surely are not to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your
sober pen.'
'No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,' was my answer. 'I
have neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction.'
'Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?' she
next asked. 'It has not been kind of you. We of the East have seen
so very little of you- too little indeed of the Dean of American
Letters the Second.'
I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment.
'I nearly met you, once, in Philadelphia, some Browning affair or
other- you were to lecture, you know. My train was four hours late.'
And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded
and silent in the midst of our flood of gossip. The hunters left the
table and went on deck, and still we talked. Wolf Larsen alone
remained. Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning back from the
table and listening curiously to our alien speech of a world he did
not know.
I broke short off in the middle of a sentence. The present, with all
its perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force. It smote
Miss Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing into her
eyes as she regarded Wolf Larsen.
He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly. The sound of it was
metallic.
'Oh, don't mind me,' he said, with a self-depreciatory wave of his
hand.
'I don't count. Go on, go on, I pray you.'
But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the
table and laughed awkwardly.
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