The Sea-Wolf
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.
CHAPTER VII
At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the
north-east trades. I came on deck, after a good night’s rest in spite of
my poor knee, to find the _Ghost_ foaming along, wing-and-wing, and every
sail drawing except the jibs, with a fresh breeze astern. Oh, the wonder
of the great trade-wind! All day we sailed, and all night, and the next
day, and the next, day after day, the wind always astern and blowing
steadily and strong. The schooner sailed herself. There was no pulling
and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting of topsails, no work at
all for the sailors to do except to steer. At night when the sun went
down, the sheets were slackened; in the morning, when they yielded up the
damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled tight again—and that was
all.
Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time, is the
speed we are making. And ever out of the north-east the brave wind
blows, driving us on our course two hundred and fifty miles between the
dawns. It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving
San Francisco behind and with which we are foaming down upon the tropics.
Each day grows perceptibly warmer. In the second dog-watch the sailors
come on deck, stripped, and heave buckets of water upon one another from
overside. Flying-fish are beginning to be seen, and during the night the
watch above scrambles over the deck in pursuit of those that fall aboard.
In the morning, Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is
pleasantly areek with the odour of their frying; while dolphin meat is
served fore and aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing
beauties from the bowsprit end.
Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there or aloft at the
crosstrees, watching the _Ghost_ cleaving the water under press of sail.
There is passion, adoration, in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort of
trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake, and
the heave and the run of her over the liquid mountains that are moving
with us in stately procession.
The days and nights are “all a wonder and a wild delight,” and though I
have little time from my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze and
gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed.
Above, the sky is stainless blue—blue as the sea itself, which under the
forefoot is of the colour and sheen of azure satin. All around the
horizon are pale, fleecy clouds, never changing, never moving, like a
silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky.
I do not forget one night, when I should have been asleep, of lying on
the forecastle-head and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam thrust
aside by the _Ghost’s_ forefoot. It sounded like the gurgling of a brook
over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it lured
me away and out of myself till I was no longer Hump the cabin-boy, nor
Van Weyden, the man who had dreamed away thirty-five years among books.
But a voice behind me, the unmistakable voice of Wolf Larsen, strong with
the invincible certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the
words he was quoting, aroused me.
“‘O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light
That holds the hot sky tame,