________________________________________________
_ 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 gag
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 he 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. _
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