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BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING the storm had blown itself quite out,
and the Ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath
of wind. Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larsen
patrolled the poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea
to the northeast, from which direction the great trade-wind must
blow.
The men are all on deck and busy preparing their various boats
for the season's hunting. There are seven boats aboard, the captain's
dinghy and the six which the hunters will use. Three, a hunter,
a boat-puller, and a boat-steerer, compose a boat's crew. On board
the schooner the boat-pullers and steerers are the crew. The hunters,
too, are supposed to be in command of the watches, subject always
to the orders of Wolf Larsen.
All this, and more, I have learned. The Ghost is considered
the fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets.
In fact, she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed.
Her lines and fittings, though I know nothing about such things,
speak for themselves. Johnson was telling me about her in a short
chat I had with him during yesterday's second dog-watch. He spoke
most enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as
some men feel for horses. He is greatly disgusted with the outlook,
and I am given to understand that Wolf Larsen bears a very unsavory
reputation among the sealing-captains. It was the Ghost herself
that lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is already
beginning to repent.
As he told me, the Ghost is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably
fine model. Her beam, or width, is twenty-three feet, and her
length a little over ninety feet. A lead keel of fabulous but
unknown weight makes her very stable, while she carries an immense
spread of canvas. From the deck to the truck of the maintopmast
is something over a hundred feet, while the foremast with its
topmast is eight or ten feet shorter. I am giving these details
so that the size of this little floating world which holds twenty-two
men may be appreciated. It is a very little world, a mote, a speck,
and I marvel that men should dare to venture the sea on a contrivance
so small and fragile.
Wolf Larsen has also a reputation for reckless carrying on
of sail. I overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish,
a Californian, talking about it. Two years ago he dismasted the
Ghost in a gale in Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were
put in, which are stronger and heavier in every way. He is said
to have remarked, when he put them in, that he preferred turning
her over to losing the sticks.
Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansen, who is rather
overcome by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having
sailed on the Ghost. Half the men forward are deep-water sailors,
and their excuse is that they did not know anything about her
or her captain. And those who do know whisper that the hunters,
while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome
and rascally proclivities that they could not sign on any decent
schooner.
I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew. Louis
he is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman,
and a very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find
a listener. In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep
and I was peeling the everlasting potatoes, Louis dropped into
the galley for a 'yarn.' His excuse for being aboard was that
he was drunk when he signed. He assured me again and again that
it was the last thing in the world he would dream of doing in
a sober moment. It seems that he has been seal-hunting regularly
each season for a dozen years, and is accounted one of the two
or three very best boat-steerers in both fleets.
'Ah, my boy,'- he shook his head ominously at me,- ''t is the
worst schooner ye could iv selected; nor were ye drunk at the
time, as was I. 'T is sealin' is the sailor's paradise- on other
ships than this. The mate was the first, but, mark me words, there'll
be more dead men before the trip is done with. Hist, now, between
you an' meself an' the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a
regular devil, an' the Ghost'll be a hell-ship like she's always
be'n since he had hold iv her. Don't I know? Don't I know? Don't
I remember him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an'
shot four iv his men? Wasn't I a-layin' on the Emma L., not three
hundred yards away? An' there was a man the same year he killed
with a blow iv his fist. Yes, sir, killed 'im dead- oh. His head
must iv smashed like an egg-shell. 'T is the beast he is, this
Wolf Larsen- the great big beast mentioned iv in Revelations;
an' no good end will he ever come to. But I've said nothin' to
ye, mind ye; I've whispered never a word; for old fat Louis'll
live the voyage out, if the last mother's son of yez go to the
fishes.
'Wolf Larsen!' he snorted a moment later. 'Listen to the word,
will ye! Wolf- 't is what he is. He's not black-hearted, like
some men. 'T is no heart he has at all. Wolf, just wolf, 't is
what he is. D'ye wonder he's well named?'
'But if he is so well known for what he is,' I queried, 'how
is it that he can get men to ship with him?'
'An' how is it ye can get men to do anything on God's earth
an' sea?' Louis demanded with Celtic fire. 'How d' ye find me
aboard if 't wasn't that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name
down? There's them that can't sail with better men, like the hunters,
an' them that don't know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers
for'ard there. But they'll come to it, they'll come to it, an'
be sorry the day they was born. I could weep for the poor creatures,
did I but forget poor old fat Louis and the troubles before him.
But 't is not a whisper I've dropped; mind ye, not a whisper.
'Them hunters is the wicked boys,' he broke forth again, for
he suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. 'But wait
till they get to cuttin' up iv jinks an' rowin' round. He's the
boy'll fix 'em. 'T is him that'll put the fear of God in their
rotten black hearts. Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner. "Jock"
Horner they call him, so quiet-like an' easy-goin'; soft-spoken
as a girl, till ye'd think butter wouldn't melt in the mouth iv
him. Didn't he kill his boat-steerer last year? 'T was called
a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama, an' the
straight iv it was given me. An' there's Smoke, the black little
devil- didn't the Roosians have him for three years in the salt-mines
of Siberia for poachin' on Copper Island, which is a Roosian preserve?
Shackled he was, hand an' foot, with his mate. An' didn't they
have words or a ruction of some kind? For 't was the other fellow
Smoke sent up in the buckets to the top of the mine; an' a piece
at a time he went up, a leg today, an' tomorrow an arm, the next
day the head, an' so on.'
'But you can't mean it!' I cried out, overcome with the horror
of it.
'Mean what?' he demanded, quick as a flash. ''T is nothin'
I've said. Deef I am, an' dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv
your mother; an' never once have I opened me lips but to say fine
things iv them an' him, God curse his soul! an' may he rot in
purgatory ten thousand years, an' then go down to the last an'
deepest hell iv all!'
Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard,
seemed the least equivocal of the men for'ard or aft. In fact,
there was nothing equivocal about him. One was struck at once
by his straightforwardness and manliness, which, in turn, were
tempered by a modesty which might be mistaken for timidity. But
timid he was not. He seemed rather to have the courage of his
convictions, the certitude of his manhood. It was this that made
him protest, at the beginning of our acquaintance, against being
called Yonson. And upon this and him Louis passed judgment and
prophecy.
''T is a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we've for'ard with
us,' he said. 'The best sailorman in the fo'c's'le. He's my boat-puller.
But it's to trouble he'll come with Wolf Larsen, as the sparks
fly upward. It's meself that knows. I can see it brewin' an' comin'
up like a storm in the sky. I've talked to him like a brother,
but it's little he sees in takin' in his lights or flyin' false
signals. He grumbles out when things don't go to suit him, an'
there'll be always some telltale carryin' word iv it aft to the
Wolf. The Wolf is strong, an' it's the way of a wolf to hate strength,
an' strength is is he'll see in Johnson- no knucklin' under, an'
a "Yes, sir; thank ye kindly, sir," for a curse or a
blow. Oh, she's a-comin'! She's a-comin'! An' God knows where
I'll get another boat-puller. What does the fool up an' say, when
the Old Man calls him Yonson, but "Me name is Johnson, sir,"
and' then spells it out, letter for letter. Ye should iv seen
the Old Man's face! I thought he'd let drive at him on the spot.
He didn't, but he will, an' he'll break that squarehead's heart,
or it's little I know iv the ways iv men on the ships iv the sea.'
Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to
mister him and to sir him with every speech. One reason for this
is that Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is
an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy
with the cook, but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing.
Two or three times he put his head into the galley and chaffed
Mugridge good-naturedly, and once, this afternoon, he stood by
the break of the poop and chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes.
When it was over, and Mugridge was back in the galley, he became
greasily radiant and went about his work humming Coster songs
in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto.
'I always get along with the officers,' he remarked to me in
a confidential tone. 'I know the w'y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted.
There was my last skipper- w'y, I thought nothin' of droppin'
down in the cabin for a little chat an' a friendly glass. "Mugridge,"
says 'e to me, "Mugridge," says 'e, "you've missed
yer vocytion." "an' ow's that?" says I. "Yer
should' a' been born a gentleman, an' never 'ad to work for yer
livin'." God strike me dead, 'Ump, if that ayn't wot 'e says,
an' me a-sittin' there in 'is own cabin, jolly- like an' comfortable,
a-smokin' 'is cigars an' drinkin' 'is rum.'
This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction. I never heard
a voice I hated so. His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile,
and his monstrous self-conceit grated on my nerves till sometimes
I was all in a tremble. Positively he was the most disgusting
and loathsome person I have ever met. The filth of his cooking
was indescribable; and as he cooked everything that was eaten
aboard, I was compelled to select with great circumspection what
I ate, choosing from the least dirty of his concoctions.
My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work.
The nails were discolored and black, while the skin was already
grained with dirt which even a scrubbing-brush could not remove.
Then blisters came, in a painful and never-ending procession,
and I had a great burn on my forearm, acquired by losing my balance
in a roll of the ship and pitching against the galley stove. Nor
was my knee any better. The swelling had not gone down, and the
cap was still up on edge. Hobbling about on it from morning to
night was not helping it any. What I needed was rest, if it were
ever to get well.
Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been
resting all my life and did not know it. But now could I sit still
for one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be
the most pleasurable thing in the world. But it is a revelation,
on the other hand. I shall be able to appreciate the lives of
the working-people hereafter. I did not dream that work was so
terrible a thing. From half-past five in the morning till ten
o'clock at night I am everybody's slave, with not one moment to
myself except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog-watch.
Let me pause for a minute to look out over the sea sparkling in
the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the gaff topsails
or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the hateful
voice, ''Ere, you, 'Ump! No sodgerin'! I've got my peepers on
yer.'
There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and
the gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a
fight. Henderson seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going fellow
and hard to rouse; but roused he must have been for Smoke had
a bruised and discolored eye and looked particularly vicious when
he came into the cabin for supper.
A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the
callousness and brutishness of these men. There is one green hand
in the crew, Harrison by name, a clumsy-looking country boy, mastered,
I imagine, by the spirit of adventure, and making his first voyage.
In the light, baffling airs, the schooner has been tacking about
a great deal, at which times the sails pass from one side to the
other, and a man is sent aloft to shift over the fore-gaff topsail.
In some way, when Harrison was aloft, the sheet jammed in the
block through which it runs at the end of the gaff. As I understood
it, there were two ways of getting it cleared- first, by lowering
the foresail, which was comparatively easy and without danger;
and, second, by climbing out on the peak-halyards to the end of
the gaff itself, a very hazardous performance.
Johansen called out to Harrison to go out on the halyards.
It was patent to everybody that the boy was afraid. And well he
might be, eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those
thin and jerking ropes. Had there been a steady breeze it would
not have been so bad, but the Ghost was rolling emptily in a long
sea, and with each roll the canvas flapped and boomed and the
halyards slacked and jerked taut. They were capable of snapping
a man off like a fly from a whiplash.
Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of
him, but hesitated. It was probably the first time in his life
he had been aloft. Johansen, who had caught the contagion of Wolf
Larsen's masterfulness, burst out with a volley of abuse and curses.
'That'll do, Johansen!' Wolf Larsen said brusquely. 'I'll have
you know that I do the swearing on this ship. If I need your assistance,
I'll call you in.'
'Yes, sir,' the mate acknowledged submissively.
In the meantime Harrison had started out on the halyards. I
was looking up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling
in every limb as with ague. He proceeded very slowly and cautiously,
an inch at a time. Outlined against the clear blue of the sky,
he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling along the
tracery of its web.
It was a slightly uphill climb, for the foresail peaked high;
and the halyards, running through various blocks on the gaff and
mast, gave him separate holds for hands and feet. But the trouble
lay in that the wind was not strong enough or steady enough to
keep the sail full. When he was halfway out, the Ghost took a
long roll to windward and back again into the hollow between two
seas. Harrison ceased his progress and held on tightly. Eighty
feet beneath I could see the agonized strain of his muscles as
he gripped for very life.
The sail emptied and the gaff swung amidships. The halyards
slackened, and, though it all happened very quickly, I could see
them sag beneath the weight of his body. Then the gaff swung to
the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed like
a cannon, and the three rows of reef-points slatted against the
canvas like a volley of rifles. Harrison, clinging on, made the
giddy rush through the air. This rush ceased abruptly. The halyards
became instantly taut. It was the snap of the whip. His clutch
was broken. One hand was torn loose from its hold. The other lingered
desperately for a moment, and followed. His body pitched out and
down, but in some way he managed to save himself with his legs.
He was hanging by them, head downward. A quick effort brought
his hands up to the halyards again; but he was a long time regaining
his former position, where he hung, a pitiable object.
'I'll bet he has no appetite for supper,' I heard Wolf Larsen's
voice, which came to me from around the corner of the galley.
'Look at his gills.'
In truth Harrison was very sick, as a person is seasick; and
for a long time clung to his precarious perch without attempting
to move. Johansen, however, continued violently to urge him on
to the completion of his task.
'It is a shame,' I heard Johnson growling in painfully slow
and correct English. He was standing by the main rigging, a few
feet away from me. 'The boy is willing enough. He will learn if
he has a chance. But this- ' He paused a while, for the word 'murder'
was his final judgment.
'Hist, will ye!' Louis whispered to him. 'For the love iv your
mother, hold your mouth!'
But Johnson, looking on, still continued his grumbling.
'Look here,'- the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larsen,- 'that's
my boat-puller, and I don't want to lose him.'
'That's all right, Standish,' was the reply. 'He's your boat-puller
when you've got him in the boat, but he's my sailor when I have
him aboard, and I'll do what I well please with him.'
'But that's no reason- ' Standish began in a torrent of speech.
'That'll do; easy as she goes,' Wolf Larsen counseled back.
'I've told you what's what, and let it stop at that. The man's
mine, and I'll make soup of him and eat it if I want to.'
There was an angry gleam in the hunter's eye, but he turned
on his heel and entered the steerage companionway, where he remained,
looking upward. All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were
aloft, where a human life was at grapples with death. The callousness
of these men, to whom industrial organization gave control of
the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had lived out of
the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was carried
on in such fashion. Life had always seemed a peculiarly sacred
thing; but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic
of commerce. I must say, however, that the sailors themselves
were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but the masters
(the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly indifferent. Even
the protest of Standish arose out of the fact that he did not
wish to lose his boat-puller. Had it been some other hunter's
boat-puller, he, like them, would have been no more than amused.
But to return to Harrison. It took Johansen, insulting and
reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started
again. A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride
the spar itself, he had a better chance for holding on. He cleared
the sheet, and was free to return, slightly downhill now, along
the halyards to the mast. But he had lost his nerve. Unsafe as
was his present position, he was loath to forsake it for the more
unsafe position on the halyards.
He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down
to the deck. His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling
violently. I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human
face. Johansen called vainly for him to come down. At any moment
he was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless
with fright. Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in
conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply,
once, to the man at the wheel:
'You're off your course, my man! Be careful, unless you're
looking for trouble.'
'Aye, aye, sir,' the helmsman responded, putting a couple of
spokes down.
He had been guilty of running the Ghost several points off
her course, in order that what little wind there was should fill
the foresail and hold it steady. He had striven to help the unfortunate
Harrison at the risk of incurring Wolf Larsen's anger.
The time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible. Thomas
Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair,
and was continually bobbing his head out of the galley door to
make jocose remarks. How I hated him! And how my hatred for him
grew and grew, during that fearful time, to cyclopean dimensions!
For the first time in my life I experienced the desire to murder-
'saw red,' as some of our picturesque writers phrase it. Life
in general might still be sacred, but life in the particular case
of Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed. I was frightened
when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and the thought
flashed through my mind: Was I, too, becoming tainted by the brutality
of my environment?- I, who even in the most flagrant crimes had
denied the justice and righteousness of capital punishment.
Fully half an hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Louis
in some sort of altercation. It ended with Johnson flinging off
Louis's detaining arm and starting forward. He crossed the deck,
sprang into the fore rigging, and began to climb. But the quick
eye of Wolf Larsen caught him.
'Here, you, what are you up to?' he cried.
Johnson's ascent was arrested. He looked his captain in the
eyes and replied slowly:
'I am going to get that boy down.'
'You'll get down out of that rigging, and- lively about it!
D'ye hear! Get down!'
Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters
of ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck
and went on forward.
At half after five I went below to set the cabin table; but
I hardly knew what I did, for my eyes and brain were filled with
the vision of a man, white-faced and trembling, comically, like
a bug, clinging to the thrashing gaff. At six o'clock, when I
served supper, going on deck to get the food from the galley,
I saw Harrison, still in the same position. The conversation at
the table was of other things. Nobody seemed interested in the
wantonly imperiled life. But, making an extra trip to the galley
a little later, I was gladdened by the sight of Harrison staggering
weakly from the rigging to the forecastle scuttle. He had finally
summoned the courage to descend.
Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation
I had with Wolf Larsen in the cabin, while I was washing the dishes.
'You were looking squeamish this afternoon,' he began. 'What
was the matter?'
I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick
as Harrison, that he was trying to draw me, and I answered: 'It
was because of the brutal treatment of that boy.'
He gave a short laugh. 'Like seasickness, I suppose. Some men
are subject to it, and others are not.'
'Not so,' I objected.
'Just so,' he went on. 'The earth is as full of brutality as
the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one,
and some by the other. That's the only reason.'
'But you who make a mock of human life, don't you place any
value upon it whatever?' I demanded.
'Value? What value? He looked at me, and though his eyes were
steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them. 'What
kind of value? How do you measure it? Who values it?'
'I do,' I made answer.
'Then what is it worth to you? Another man's life, I mean.
Come, now, what is it worth?'
The value of life? How could I put a tangible value upon it?
Somehow I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when
with Wolf Larsen. I have since determined that a part of it was
due to the man's personality, but that the greater part was due
to his totally different outlook. Unlike other materialists I
had met, and with whom I had something in common to start on,
I had nothing in common with him. Perhaps, also, it was the elemental
simplicity of his mind that baffled me. He drove so directly to
the core of the matter, divesting a question always of all superfluous
details, and with such an air of finality, that I seemed to find
myself struggling in deep water with no footing under me. Value
of life? How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment?
The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic. That it was
intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned. But
when he challenged the truism I was speechless.
'We were talking about this yesterday,' he said. 'I held that
life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that
it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness.
Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest
thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth,
so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless.
Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of
eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the
possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and
opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn
life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and
populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things
it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills
it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she
sows a thousand lives, and it's life eat life till the strongest
and most piggish life is left.'
'You have read Darwin,' I said. 'But you read him misunderstandingly
when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your
wanton destruction of life.'
He shrugged his shoulders. 'You know you only mean that in
relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the
fish you destroy as much as I or any other man. And human life
is in no wise different, though you feel it is and think that
you reason why it is. Why should I be parsimonious with this life
which is cheap and without value? There are more sailors than
there are ships on the sea for them, more workers than there are
factories or machines for them. Why, you who live on the land
know that you house your poor people in the slums of cities and
loose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remain
more poor people, dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit
of meat (which is life destroyed), than you know what to do with.
Have you ever seen the London dockers fighting like wild beasts
for a chance to work?'
He started for the companion-stairs, but turned his head for
a final word. 'Do you know, the only value life has is what life
puts upon itself; and it is of course overestimated, since it
is of necessity prejudiced in its own favor. Take that man I had
aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond
diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself,
yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself.
There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen
and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb,
there would have been no loss to the world. He was worth nothing
to the world. The supply is too large. To himself only was he
of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was, being
dead, he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated
himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone,
spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water,
and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone.
He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses
the knowledge of loss. Don't you see? And what have you to say?'
'That you are at least consistent,' was all I could say, and
I went on washing the dishes.
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