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FOR THREE DAYS I DID MY OWN work and Thomas Mugridge's too,
and I flatter myself that I did his work well. I know that it
won Wolf Larsen's approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction
during the brief time my regime lasted.
'The first clean bite since I come aboard Harrison said to
me at the galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans
from the forecastle. 'Somehow, Tommy's grub always tastes of grease,-
stale grease,- and I reckon he ain't changed his shirt since he
left 'Frisco.'
'I know he hasn't,' I answered.
'And I'll bet he sleeps in it,' Harrison added.
'And you won't lose,' I agreed. 'The same shirt, and he hasn't
had it off once in all this time.'
But three days were all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to
recover from the effects of the beating. On the fourth day, lame
and sore, scarcely able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was
haled from his bunk by the nape of the neck and set to his duty.
He sniffled and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless.
'And see that you serve no more slops,' was his parting injunction.
'No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally,
or you'll get a tow over the side. Understand?'
Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and
a short lurch of the Ghost sent him staggering. In attempting
to recover himself, he reached for the iron railing which surrounded
the stove and kept the pots from sliding off; but his missed the
railing, and his hand, with his weight behind it, landed squarely
on the hot surface.
'Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot 'ave I done?' he wailed, sitting down
in the coalbox and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth.
'W'y 'as all this come on me? It mykes me fair sick, it does,
an' I try so 'ard to go through life harmless an' 'urtin' nobody.'
The tears were running down his puffed and discolored cheeks,
and his face was drawn with pain. A savage expression flitted
across it.
'Oh, 'ow I 'ate 'im! 'Ow I 'ate 'im!' he gritted out.
'Whom?' I asked; but the poor wretch was weeping again over
his misfortunes. Less difficult it was to guess whom he hated
than whom he did not hate; for I had come to see a malignant devil
in him which impelled him to hate all the world. I sometimes thought
that he hated even himself, so grotesquely had life dealt with
him, and so monstrously. At such moments a great sympathy welled
up within me, and I felt shame that I had ever joyed in his discomfiture
or pain. Life had been unfair to him. It had played him a scurvy
trick when it fashioned him into the thing he was, and it had
played him scurvy tricks ever since. What chance had he to be
anything else than what he was? And as though answering my unspoken
thought, he wailed:
'I never 'ad no chance, nor 'arf a chance! 'Oo was there to
send me to school, or put tommy in my 'ungry bell w'en I was a
kiddy? 'Oo ever did anything for me, heh? 'oo, I s'y?'
'Never mind, Tommy,' I said, placing a soothing hand on his
shoulder. 'Cheer up. It'll all come right in the end. You've long
years before you, and you can make anything you please of yourself.'
'It's a lie!' he shouted in my face, flinging off the hand.
'It's a lie, an' you know it. I'm already myde, an' myde out of
leavin's an' scraps. It's all right for you, 'Ump. You was born
a gentleman. You never knew wot it was to go 'ungry, to cry yerself
asleep with a gnawin' an' gnawin', like a rat, inside yer. It
carn't come right. If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer,
low would it fill my belly for one time w'en I was a kiddy an'
it went empty?
''Ow could it, I s'y? I was born to sufferin' and' sorrer.
I've 'ad more cruel sufferin' than any ten men, I 'ave. I've been
in 'orspital 'arf my bleedin' life. I've 'ad the fever in Aspinwall,
in 'Avana, in New Orleans. I near died of the scurvy, an' rotten
with it six months in Barbados. Smallpox in 'Onolulu, two broken
legs in Shanghai, pneumonia in Unalaska, three busted ribs an'
my insides all twisted in 'Frisco. An' 'ere I am now. Look at
me! Look at me! My ribs kicked loose from my back again. I'll
be coughin' blood before eyght bells. 'Ow can it be myde up to
me, I arsk? 'Oo's goin' to do it? Gawd? 'Ow Gawd must 'ave 'ated
me w'en 'e signed me on for a voyage in this bloomin' world of
'is!'
This tirade against destiny went on for an hour or more, and
then he buckled to his work, limping and groaning, and in his
eyes a great hatred for all created things.
Several days more passed before Johnson crawled on deck and
went about his work in a half-hearted way. He was still a sick
man, and I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft
to a topsail or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel. But,
still worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken. He was abject
before Wolf Larsen, and almost groveled to Johansen. Not so Leach.
He went about the deck like a tiger-cub, glaring his hatred openly
at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
'I'll do for you yet, you slab-footed Swede.' I heard him say
to Johansen one night on deck.
The mate cursed him in the darkness, and the next moment some
missile struck the galley a sharp rap. There was more cursing,
and a mocking laugh, and when all was quiet I stole outside and
found a heavy knife embedded over an inch in the solid wood. A
few minutes later the mate came fumbling about in search of it,
but I returned it privily to Leach next day. He grinned when I
handed it over, yet it was a grin that contained more sincere
thanks than a multitude of the verbosities of speech common to
the members of my own class.
Unlike any one else in the ship's company, I now found myself
with no quarrels on my hands and in the good graces of all. The
hunters possibly no more than tolerated me, though none of them
disliked me; while Smoke and Henderson, convalescent under a deck
awning and swinging day and night in their hammocks, assured me
that I was better than any hospital nurse, and that they would
not forget me at the end of the voyage when they were paid off.
As though I stood in need of their money- I, who could have bought
them out, bag and baggage, and the schooner and its equipment,
a hundred times over! But upon me had devolved the task of tending
their wounds and pulling them through, and I did my best by them.
Wolf Larsen underwent another bad attack of headache, which
lasted two days. He must have suffered severely, for he called
me in and obeyed my commands like a sick child. But nothing I
could do seemed to relieve him. At my suggestion, however, he
gave up smoking and drinking, though why so magnificent an animal
as he should have headaches at all puzzled me.
''T is the hand of God, I'm tellin' you,' was the way Louis
saw it. ''T is a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, an' there's
more behind an' comin', or else-'
'Or else,' I prompted.
'God is noddin' an' not doin' his duty, though it's me as shouldn't
say it.' I was mistaken when I said that I was in the good graces
of all. Not only did Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but
he had discovered a new reason for hating me. It took me no little
while to puzzle it out, but I finally discovered that it was because
I was more luckily born than he- 'gentleman born,' he put it.
'And still no more dead men,' I twitted Louis, when Smoke and
Henderson, side by side, in friendly conversation, took their
first exercise on deck.
Louis surveyed me with his shrewd gray eyes and shook his head
portentously.
'She's a-comin', I tell you, an' it'll be sheets an' halyards,
stand by all hands, when she begins to howl. I've had the feel
iv it this long time, an' I can feel it now as plainly as I feel
the riggin' iv a dark night. She's close, she's close.'
'Who goes first?' I queried.
'Not old fat Louis, I promise you,' he laughed. 'For 't is
in the bones iv me I know that come this time next year I'll be
gazin' in the old mother's eyes, weary with watchin' iv the sea
for the five sons she gave to it.'
'Wot's'e been s'yin' to yer?' Thomas Mugridge demanded a moment
later.
'That he's going home some day to see his mother,' I answered
diplomatically.
'I never 'ad none,' was the Cockney's comment, as he gazed
with lusterless, hopeless eyes into mine.
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