________________________________________________
_ 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 ROLE I was destined to play. But I thought,
also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief. I was
among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered
body. I could see the 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. _
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