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The Sea-Wolf

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #1074 · 599,436 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Sea-Wolf

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: October 1, 1997 [eBook #1074]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1074

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-WOLF ***

                               THE SEA-WOLF


                                    BY
                               JACK LONDON

                                AUTHOR OF
               “THE CALL OF THE WILD,” “THE FAITH OF MEN,”
                                   ETC.

                                * * * * *

                            _POPULAR EDITION_.

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                            WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                                   1917

                                * * * * *

_First published_, _November_ 1904.

_New Impression_, _December_ 1904, _April_ 1908.

_Popular Edition_, _July_ 1910; _New Impressions_, _March_ 1912,
_September_ 1912, _November_ 1913, _May_ 1915, _May_ 1916, _July_ 1917.

                                * * * * *

             _Copyright_, _London_, _William Heinemann_, 1904




CHAPTER I


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 labour 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 labour, 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 grey 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
a-top 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 ferry-boat of some sort,” the new-comer 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.  Now hell’s a poppin’ for somebody!”

The unseen ferry-boat 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
paddle-wheels 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 dare-devil 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 runs it from hell to
breakfast, 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
indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog.
And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey 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 clamouring 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.  Walking 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.

“Ferry-boat?” 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 either 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!”

On looking back, I realize that the remark was too obvious to make
rejoinder necessary.

“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
scream of the women.  This it was, I am certain,—the most indescribable
of blood-curdling 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 grey 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, encased 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 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 clamouring 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 marvelled 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.  And I could not swim a stroke.  And I was alone, floating,
apparently, in the midst of a grey 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 the 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 leapt
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 hell don’t you sing out?”  This
meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.




CHAPTER II


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.  For an immeasurable period, 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 orf?”

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 Farallones, 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, favouring 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 till 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 woollen 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 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 discoloured with
what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running and
apologetic fire of comment.  A pair of workman’s brogans encased 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 a 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 south-west 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, and not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust
above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse.  In the
south-west, 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 amid ships.  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 grey, 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 laboured 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 hatchways 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
moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when the
head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers in
the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prod
of a finger.

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
individual 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 five minutes, when a more violent
suffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who was lying on his
back.  He wrenched and 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.  Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin was
taking on a purplish hue.

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, and 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-discoloured 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 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.  The
scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse.  I should
not have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled
and flared up in smoke and flame.  But the dead man was unconcerned.  He
continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery and
defiance.  He was master of the situation.




CHAPTER III


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 sweeping rebuke, which the cook had only pointed, 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 companion-way between
the galley and 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 “Ay,
ay, sir.”

“We’ll see to that,” Wolf Larsen answered, and elevated his voice in a
call 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 companion-way.

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 amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with the information
that there was 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 grey 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
him spew forth.  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 vigour 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, nor neatly classifying in some
pigeon-hole 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 grey which is never twice the same; which runs
through many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine; which
is grey, dark and light, and greenish-grey, 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 sombreness of leaden skies; that could snap and crackle points
of fire like those which sparkle from a whirling sword; that could grow
chill as an arctic landscape, and yet again, that could warm and soften
and be all a-dance 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—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 school-master.

“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
dish-washing 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
south-west had grown larger and plainer.  They were of the same
schooner-rig as the _Ghost_, 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 grey and grown rougher, and was now tossing
foaming whitecaps to the sky.  We were travelling 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 companion-way 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 damn sight better.  Unless, very likely, there’s an
Irishman in your mother’s woodpile.”

I saw the young fellow’s hands clench at the insult, and the blood crawl
scarlet up his neck.

“But let that go,” Wolf Larsen 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 and Swanson.”

“Sir!” Wolf Larsen thundered.

“McCready and 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 damned 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’sle.
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 corpse.
“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.”

“Ay, ay, 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 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
alongside the corpse 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 hell 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 grey 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 grey 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 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
hatch-cover.  On either 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 wolf-chorus or the barking of
hell-hounds.  The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below
rubbing 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
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
bare-headed 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, damn you!  What the hell’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 jibs and make a good job
of it.  We’re in for a sou’-easter.  Better reef the jib and 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, dying obscenely,
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 on to 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, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
Pacific expanse.




CHAPTER IV


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 person.  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.  In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman
with a skin soft as a “lydy’s,” but only an ordinary and very worthless
cabin-boy.

He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, 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.  He refused to take into
consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was
accustomed to had been.  This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt
toward me; and I confess, ere 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.  In this connection I cannot
forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.

“Look sharp or you’ll get doused,” was Mr. Mugridge’s parting injunction,
as I left the galley with a big tea-pot 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 midships
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
companion-way 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 tea-pot was still in my
hand.  I limped to the galley and handed it to him.  But he was consumed
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 any’wy?  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 mamma’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 knee-cap 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, and swelling,
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 some time.”

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
from the foundering of the _Martinez_.  Under ordinary circumstances,
after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a
trained nurse.

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 would have been lying on the broad of my
back, with a surgeon attending on 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 and 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 precisely similar.  I
have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with
whom I was thrown in contact.  Intellectually they were children,
inhabiting the physical forms 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 sea-sick 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
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 labour, or scullion labour, 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
book-worm; 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 dish-washing.  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 myself in advance in the weak and
helpless _rôle_ 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
head-lines 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-bye 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 by-gone
years.  My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep.  And it was
a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.




CHAPTER V


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 had 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 semi-darkness, 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 you 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 you come, a pore
mis’rable specimen of ’uman scum, an’ I tykes yer into my galley an’
treats yer ’ansom, an’ this is wot I get for it.  Nex’ time you can go to
’ell, say I, an’ I’ve a good mind to give you what-for anyw’y.”

So saying, he put up his fists and started for me.  To my 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 mamma’s darling.  I
won’t ’it yer; 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 south-west into that
portion of the sea where he expected to pick up with the north-east
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 of the vessel.  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, and Darwin.  Astronomy and physics were
represented, 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’s,
and Reed and Kellogg’s; 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, the Cambridge Edition.  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 look-out.  You haven’t any lawyer or business agent now, so
you’ll have to depend on yourself.  When you get a dollar, hang on to it.
A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to
lose it.  Besides, you have sinned.  You have no right to put temptation
in the way of your fellow-creatures.  You tempted Cooky, and he fell.
You have placed his immortal soul in jeopardy.  By the way, do you
believe in the immortal soul?”

His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the
deeps were opening to me and that I was gazing into his soul.  But it was
an illusion.  Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far
into Wolf Larsen’s soul, or seen it at all,—of this I am convinced.  It
was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at
rare moments it played at doing so.

“I read immortality in your eyes,” I answered, dropping the “sir,”—an
experiment, for I thought the intimacy of the conversation warranted it.

He took no notice.  “By that, I take it, you see something that is alive,
but that necessarily does not have to live for ever.”

“I read more than that,” I continued boldly.

“Then you read consciousness.  You read the consciousness of life that it
is alive; but still no further away, no endlessness of life.”

How clearly he thought, and how well he expressed what he thought!  From
regarding me curiously, he turned his head and glanced out over the
leaden sea to windward.  A bleakness came into his eyes, and the lines of
his mouth grew severe and harsh.  He was evidently in a pessimistic mood.

“Then to what end?” he demanded abruptly, turning back to me.  “If I am
immortal—why?”

I halted.  How could I explain my idealism to this man?  How could I put
into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music heard
in sleep, a something that convinced yet transcended utterance?

“What do you believe, then?” I countered.

“I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly.  “It is like
yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour,
a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move.  The
big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the
weak that they may retain their strength.  The lucky eat the most and
move the longest, that is all.  What do you make of those things?”

He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors
who were working on some kind of rope stuff amidships.

“They move, so does the jelly-fish move.  They move in order to eat in
order that they may keep moving.  There you have it.  They live for their
belly’s sake, and the belly is for their sake.  It’s a circle; you get
nowhere.  Neither do they.  In the end they come to a standstill.  They
move no more.  They are dead.”

“They have dreams,” I interrupted, “radiant, flashing dreams—”

“Of grub,” he concluded sententiously.

“And of more—”

“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
mates 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, 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
favourable 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 to-day, 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 for ever.  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 men
amidships.




CHAPTER VI


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 north-eastward,
from which direction the great trade-wind must blow.

The men were all on deck and busy preparing their various boats for the
season’s hunting.  There are seven boats aboard, the captain’s dingey,
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 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 unsavoury 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 on
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, “’tis the worst schooner
ye could iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was I.  ’Tis
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 and the stanchion there,
this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an’ the _Ghost’ll_ be a hell-ship
like she’s always ben 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 eggshell.  An’ wasn’t there the Governor of Kura Island,
an’ the Chief iv Police, Japanese gentlemen, sir, an’ didn’t they come
aboard the _Ghost_ as his guests, a-bringin’ their wives along—wee an’
pretty little bits of things like you see ’em painted on fans.  An’ as he
was a-gettin’ under way, didn’t the fond husbands get left astern-like in
their sampan, as it might be by accident?  An’ wasn’t it a week later
that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other side of the
island, with nothin’ before ’em but to walk home acrost the mountains on
their weeny-teeny little straw sandals which wouldn’t hang together a
mile?  Don’t I know?  ’Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen—the great
big beast mentioned iv in Revelation; 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—’tis what he is.  He’s not black-hearted like some men.  ’Tis no
heart he has at all.  Wolf, just wolf, ’tis 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 ’twasn’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, and 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 ’tis 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
cutting up iv jinks and rowin’ ’round.  He’s the boy’ll fix ’em.  ’Tis
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?
’Twas 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 ’twas 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 to-day, an’ to-morrow 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.  “’Tis nothin’ I’ve said.
Deef I am, and 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, and
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 forward 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 certainty of
his manhood.  It was this that made him protest, at the commencement of
our acquaintance, against being called Yonson.  And upon this, and him,
Louis passed judgment and prophecy.

“’Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we’ve for’ard with us,” he
said.  “The best sailorman in the fo’c’sle.  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, and there’ll be always some tell-tale
carryin’ word iv it aft to the Wolf.  The Wolf is strong, and it’s the
way of a wolf to hate strength, an’ strength it is he’ll see in
Johnson—no knucklin’ under, and 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,’ an’ 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 and a friendly glass.  ‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e to me,
‘Mugridge,’ sez ’e, ‘you’ve missed yer vokytion.’  ‘An’ ’ow’s that?’ sez
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 sez, 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 what I
ate with great circumspection, choosing from the least dirty of his
concoctions.

My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.  The
nails were discoloured 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 till 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 discoloured 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 had 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 the peak-halyards to the
end of the gaff itself, an exceedingly hazardous performance.

Johansen called out to Harrison to go out 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 whip-lash.

Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him, but
hesitated.  It was probably the first time he had been aloft in his life.
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, as if with ague,
in every limb.  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 slight 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 nor steady enough to keep the sail full.  When he
was half-way 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
amid-ships.  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.  “Stand from
under, you, Johansen!  Watch out!  Here she comes!”

In truth, Harrison was very sick, as a person is sea-sick; and for a long
time he 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
is—”  He paused awhile, 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 damn 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 counselled 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 companion-way, 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!”

“Ay, ay, 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 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 damn 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 my 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 imperilled 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 sea-sickness, 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 eats 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 over-estimated since it is of necessity
prejudiced in its own favour.  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 VII


At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
north-east 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 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, is the
speed we are making.  And ever out of the north-east the brave wind
blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty miles between the
dawns.  It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving
San Francisco behind and with which we are foaming down upon the tropics.
Each day grows perceptibly warmer.  In the second dog-watch the sailors
come on deck, stripped, and heave buckets of water upon one another from
overside.  Flying-fish are beginning to be seen, and during the night the
watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of those that fall aboard.
In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is
pleasantly areek with the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat is
served fore and aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing
beauties from the bowsprit end.

Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the
crosstrees, watching the _Ghost_ cleaving the water under press of sail.
There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes 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 are moving
with us in stately procession.

The days and nights are “all a wonder and a wild delight,” and though I
have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze and
gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed.
Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the
forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin.  All around the
horizon are 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, nor
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!  To-morrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays.  And
I shall know that I must die, at sea most likely, cease crawling of
myself to be all a-crawl with the corruption of the sea; to be fed upon,
to be carrion, to yield up all the strength and movement of my muscles
that it 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 has 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_ ploughed on her way.  I
noted 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 deep-water 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.

                                  * * * * *

   Through daylight and dark I follow the bark
      I keep like a hound on her trail;
   I’m strongest at noon, yet under the moon,
      I stiffen the bunt of her sail.”




CHAPTER VIII


Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of his
strange moods and vagaries.  At other times I take him for a great man, a
genius who has never arrived.  And, finally, I am convinced that he is
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 is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced
type.  Not only that, but he is very lonely.  There is no congeniality
between him and the rest of the men aboard ship.  His tremendous virility
and mental strength wall him apart.  They are more like children to him,
even the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies.  Or else
he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in
their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see of what
soul-stuff is made.

I have 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 am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes
experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or
attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men.  I know, with the
possible exception of the incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen
him really angry; nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when
all the force of him is 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, a timid spectre.

“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 whisky 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 ’ansomely, sir,” was the way he
put it; “p’yed ’ansomely to sling my ’ook an’ keep slingin’ it.”

I had brought the customary liquor glasses, but Wolf Larsen frowned,
shook his head, and signalled with his hands for me to bring the
tumblers.  These he filled two-thirds full with undiluted whisky—“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 whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more.  I do not know
whether Wolf Larsen cheated or not,—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 Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of salt water,” he
added, in a lower tone for my ear alone.

I left Mr. Mugridge on deck, in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors
who had been told off for the purpose.  Mr. Mugridge was sleepily
spluttering that he was a gentleman’s son.  But as I descended the
companion stairs to clear the table I heard him shriek as the first
bucket of water struck him.

Wolf Larsen was counting his winnings.

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

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

He favoured me with a quizzical smile.  “Hump, I have studied some
grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.  ‘Was mine,’ you
should have said, not ’is mine.’”

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

It was possibly a minute before he spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

“But don’t you?—at all?” I demanded.

“Not the least bit.  Might is right, and that is all there is to it.
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 if it had a familiar ring, though he pondered it
thoughtfully.  “Let me see, it means something about coöperation, 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 into 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 sureness 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 vigour 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
companion-way, 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 to-night.  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 IX


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.  ’Tis
just as you’re thinkin’ you know him and are makin’ a favourable slant
along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and comes howlin’ down upon
you and 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 over-bold, 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 were 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 lucid 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 paralysed, 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
real 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 arm 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
defence.  But Leach took it quite calmly, though 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 demeanour 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 backwards—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 favouritism 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
for ever.  You are a god, and 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,
and 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 lazarette, 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.  I stuck it in, like
into soft butter, an’ the w’y ’e squealed was better’n a tu-penny gaff.”
He shot a glance in my direction to see if I was taking it in, and went
on.  “‘I didn’t mean it Tommy,’ ’e was snifflin’; ‘so ’elp me Gawd, I
didn’t mean it!’  ‘I’ll fix yer bloody well right,’ I sez, an’ kept right
after ’im.  I cut ’im in ribbons, that’s wot I did, an’ ’e a-squealin’
all the time.  Once ’e got ’is ’and on the knife an’ tried to ’old it.
‘Ad ’is fingers around it, but I pulled it through, cuttin’ to the bone.
O, ’e was a sight, I can tell yer.”

A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative, 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 favoured me with a vicious stare.  Still
calmly, though my heart was going pitapat, 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, whet, till 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, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse,
advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen,
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 outa my galley-doors, 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 X


My intimacy with Wolf Larsen increases—if by intimacy may be denoted
those relations which exist between master and man, or, better yet,
between king and jester.  I am to him no more than a toy, and he values
me no more than a child values a toy.  My function is to amuse, and so
long as I amuse all goes well; but let him become bored, or let him have
one of his black moods come upon him, and at once I am relegated from
cabin table to galley, while, at the same time, I am fortunate to escape
with my life and a whole body.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me.  There is not
a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not
despise.  He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him and
that seems never to have found adequate expression in works.  He is as
Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished to a society of
soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.

This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is
oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race.  Knowing him, I review
the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding.  The
white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon
were of the same fibre as he.  The frivolity of the laughter-loving
Latins is no part of him.  When he laughs it is from a humour that is
nothing else than ferocious.  But he laughs rarely; he is too often sad.
And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race.  It is the
race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection,
has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.

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 are denied Wolf Larsen.  His brutal materialism will not permit
it.  So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him, but to be
devilish.  Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorry
for him, as instance three mornings ago, when I went into his stateroom
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 finishing the finishing
touches.  Want to see it work?”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“A labour-saving device for mariners, navigation reduced to kindergarten
simplicity,” he answered gaily.  “From to-day a child will be able to
navigate a ship.  No more long-winded calculations.  All you need is one
star in the sky on a 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 to 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 am inclined 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 both to 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 amongst 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, revelling 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 commencement of my outburst, and
followed me complacently until I had done and stood before him breathless
and dismayed.  He waited a moment, as though seeking 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 meagreness 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 returned 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’sle, 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 XI


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 rumoured, where she
will fill her water-casks before proceeding to the season’s hunt along
the coast of Japan.  The hunters have experimented and practised with
their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pullers
and steerers have made their spritsails, 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, the
_Macedonia_, which carries fourteen boats, whereas the rest of 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 blackbirding and open
piracy.  Yet I cannot but believe for I have never yet caught him in a
lie, while he has a cyclopædic 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.  They have a
parboiled appearance, are afflicted with hang-nails, while the nails are
broken and discoloured, and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a
fungoid sort of growth.  Also, I am suffering from boils, due to the
diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in this manner 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:

    “I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of
    kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers,
    and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments, and that
    of all sorts.

    “So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
    Jerusalem; also my wisdom returned with me.

    “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the
    labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and
    vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

    “All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous
    and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
    to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the
    good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
    oath.

    “This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
    there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men
    is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and
    after that they go to the dead.

    “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a
    living dog is better than a dead lion.

    “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
    anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them
    is forgotten.

    “Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;
    neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is
    done under the sun.”

“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, nor the next.

In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubáiyát, 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 was 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 should catch you by the throat, thus,”—his hand was about my throat
and my breath was shut off,—“and began 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 XII


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, and evil passions
flared up in flame like prairie-grass.

Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer.  He has been attempting
to curry favour 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, 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 a shock of sudden surprise.  I had just finished
sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a
discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian 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 centre 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.

As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson’s eyes, but I
did not dream of its cause.  I did not dream of what was to occur until
it did occur, but he knew from the very first what was coming and awaited
it bravely.  And in his action I found complete refutation of all Wolf
Larsen’s materialism.  The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by
principle, and truth, and sincerity.  He was right, he knew he was right,
and he was unafraid.  He would die for the right if needs be, he would be
true to himself, sincere with his soul.  And in this was portrayed the
victory of the spirit over the flesh, the indomitability and moral
grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and rises above time and
space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else
than eternity and immortality.

But to return.  I noticed the 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 pivotal 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, damn 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.  “If I speak not fast, it is because I have not been
from the old country as long as you.  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.”

“Look at him, Hump,” Wolf Larsen said to me, “look at this bit of
animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and
defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something
good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such as righteousness
and honesty, and that will live up to them in spite of all personal
discomforts and menaces.  What do you think of him, Hump?  What do you
think of him?”

“I think that he is a better man than you are,” I answered, impelled,
somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the wrath I felt
was about to break upon his head.  “His human fictions, as you choose to
call them, make for nobility and manhood.  You have no fictions, no
dreams, no ideals.  You are a pauper.”

He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness.  “Quite true, Hump, quite
true.  I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood.  A living
dog is better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher.  My only
doctrine is the doctrine of expediency, and it makes for surviving.  This
bit of the ferment we call ‘Johnson,’ when he is no longer a bit of the
ferment, only dust and ashes, will have no more nobility than any dust
and ashes, while I shall still be alive and roaring.”

“Do you know what I am going to do?” he questioned.

I shook my head.

“Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how
fares nobility.  Watch me.”

Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down.  Nine feet!  And
yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a standing
position.  He left the chair, just as he sat in it, squarely, springing
from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a tiger, and like a tiger
covered the intervening space.  It was 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 axe.  He almost
fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his
balance.

I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
followed.  It was too revolting.  It turns me sick even now when I think
of it.  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 phenomena 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.  Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the poor
fellow.  They struck him with their fists, kicked him with their heavy
shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his feet to knock him down
again.  His eyes were blinded so that he could not see, and the blood
running from ears and nose and mouth turned the cabin into a shambles.
And when he 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,” I was 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
doorway, and out on deck.  The blood from his nose gushed in a scarlet
stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was none other than Louis, his
boat-mate.  But Louis took and gave a spoke and gazed imperturbably into
the binnacle.

Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy.  Fore
and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more than his
consequent behaviour.  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.  Johnson, as Johnson, was
unrecognizable; and not only that, for his features, as human features at
all, were unrecognizable, so discoloured and swollen had they become in
the few minutes which had elapsed between the beginning of the beating
and the dragging forward of the body.

But of Leach’s behaviour—By the time I had finished cleansing the cabin
he had taken care of Johnson.  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.

“May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell’s too good for
you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!” was his opening salutation.

I was thunderstruck.  I looked for his instant annihilation.  But it was
not Wolf Larsen’s whim to annihilate him.  He 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.

And the boy indicted 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 in 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 savoured of a mediæval
excommunication of the Catholic Church.  He ran the gamut of
denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost
Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest and most
indecent abuse.

His rage was a madness.  His lips were flecked with a soapy froth, and
sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate.  And through it
all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf
Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity.  This wild stirring of yeasty
life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed
and interested him.

Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him 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!  Damn sight better dead and outa
your reach than alive and in your clutches!  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, though mad, stark mad.  He turned to Leach, saying:

“Such langwidge!  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 pummelling 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 never changed.  He did not change his position either,
but continued to gaze down with a great curiosity.  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, of discerning in its
maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to
its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.

But the beating!  It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed in the
cabin.  The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated
boy.  And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin.  He rolled
toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down.
But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity.  He was knocked about
like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and
kicked as he lay helpless on the deck.  And no one interfered.  Leach
could have killed him, 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
programme.  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 anæsthetics and
with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.

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 which 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 were wound up by a fight between
Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer.  It was caused by
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.

As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare.  The day had been like
some horrible dream.  Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming
passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another’s
lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.  My nerves were
shocked.  My mind itself was shocked.  All my days had been passed in
comparative ignorance of the animality of man.  In fact, I had known life
only in its intellectual phases.  Brutality I had experienced, but it was
the brutality of the intellect—the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth,
the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
undergraduate days.

That was all.  But that men should wreak their anger on others by the
bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely
and fearfully new to me.  Not for nothing had I been called “Sissy” Van
Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one
nightmare and another.  And it seemed to me that my innocence of the
realities of life had been complete indeed.  I laughed bitterly to
myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen’s forbidding philosophy a more
adequate explanation of life than I found in my own.

And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought.
The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect.  It bid
fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life.  My
reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill
thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in
it.  And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it
was,—I chuckled with an insane delight.  I was no longer Humphrey Van
Weyden.  I was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner _Ghost_.  Wolf Larsen was
my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was
receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them all.




CHAPTER XIII


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 _régime_ 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 was 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 

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