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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 uppreciyted.
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 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. |