The Sea-Wolf
a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue
protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming. ‘To live! To
live! To live!’ you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now,
not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, eh? Ha! ha! You are not
sure of it. You won’t chance it. This life only you are certain is
real. Ah, it is growing dark and darker. It is the darkness of death,
the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is
gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes
are becoming set. They are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You
cannot see my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with
your legs. Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake’s. Your
chest heaves and strains. To live! To live! To live—”
I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so
graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor
and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old
familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.
“Well, have I convinced you?” he demanded. “Here take a drink of this.
I want to ask you some questions.”
I rolled my head negatively on the floor. “Your arguments are
too—er—forcible,” I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my
aching throat.
“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour,” he assured me. “And I promise I
won’t use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can sit on
a chair.”
And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the
Preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.
CHAPTER XII
The last twenty-four hours have witnessed a carnival of brutality. From
cabin to forecastle it seems to have broken out like a contagion. I
scarcely know where to begin. Wolf Larsen was really the cause of it.
The relations among the men, strained and made tense by feuds, quarrels
and grudges, were in a state of unstable equilibrium, and evil passions
flared up in flame like prairie-grass.
Thomas Mugridge is a sneak, a spy, an informer. He has been attempting
to curry favour and reinstate himself in the good graces of the captain
by carrying tales of the men forward. He it was, I know, that carried
some of Johnson’s hasty talk to Wolf Larsen. Johnson, it seems, bought a
suit of oilskins from the slop-chest and found them to be of greatly
inferior quality. Nor was he slow in advertising the fact. The
slop-chest is a sort of miniature dry-goods store which is carried by all
sealing schooners and which is stocked with articles peculiar to the
needs of the sailors. Whatever a sailor purchases is taken from his
subsequent earnings on the sealing grounds; for, as it is with the
hunters so it is with the boat-pullers and steerers—in the place of wages
they receive a “lay,” a rate of so much per skin for every skin captured
in their particular boat.
But of Johnson’s grumbling at the slop-chest I knew nothing, so that what
I witnessed came with a shock of sudden surprise. I had just finished
sweeping the cabin, and had been inveigled by Wolf Larsen into a
discussion of Hamlet, his favourite Shakespearian character, when
Johansen descended the companion stairs followed by Johnson. The
latter’s cap came off after the custom of the sea, and he stood
respectfully in the centre of the cabin, swaying heavily and uneasily to
the roll of the schooner and facing the captain.
“Shut the doors and draw the slide,” Wolf Larsen said to me.
As I obeyed I noticed an anxious light come into Johnson’s eyes, but I
did not dream of its cause. I did not dream of what was to occur until
it did occur, but he knew from the very first what was coming and awaited
it bravely. And in his action I found complete refutation of all Wolf
Larsen’s materialism. The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by
principle, and truth, and sincerity. He was right, he knew he was right,
and he was unafraid. He would die for the right if needs be, he would be
true to himself, sincere with his soul. And in this was portrayed the
victory of the spirit over the flesh, the indomitability and moral
grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and rises above time and
space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else
than eternity and immortality.
But to return. I noticed the anxious light in Johnson’s eyes, but
mistook it for the native shyness and embarrassment of the man. The
mate, Johansen, stood away several feet to the side of him, and fully
three yards in front of him sat Wolf Larsen on one of the pivotal cabin
chairs. An appreciable pause fell after I had closed the doors and drawn
the slide, a pause that must have lasted fully a minute. It was broken
by Wolf Larsen.
“Yonson,” he began.
“My name is Johnson, sir,” the sailor boldly corrected.
“Well, Johnson, then, damn you! Can you guess why I have sent for you?”
“Yes, and no, sir,” was the slow reply. “My work is done well. The mate
knows that, and you know it, sir. So there cannot be any complaint.”
“And is that all?” Wolf Larsen queried, his voice soft, and low, and
purring.
“I know you have it in for me,” Johnson continued with his unalterable
and ponderous slowness. “You do not like me. You—you—”
“Go on,” Wolf Larsen prompted. “Don’t be afraid of my feelings.”
“I am not afraid,” the sailor retorted, a slight angry flush rising
through his sunburn. “If I speak not fast, it is because I have not been
from the old country as long as you. You do not like me because I am too
much of a man; that is why, sir.”
“You are too much of a man for ship discipline, if that is what you mean,
and if you know what I mean,” was Wolf Larsen’s retort.
“I know English, and I know what you mean, sir,” Johnson answered, his
flush deepening at the slur on his knowledge of the English language.
“Johnson,” Wolf Larsen said, with an air of dismissing all that had gone
before as introductory to the main business in hand, “I understand you’re
not quite satisfied with those oilskins?”
“No, I am not. They are no good, sir.”
“And you’ve been shooting off your mouth about them.”
“I say what I think, sir,” the sailor answered courageously, not failing
at the same time in ship courtesy, which demanded that “sir” be appended
to each speech he made.
It was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Johansen. His big
fists were clenching and unclenching, and his face was positively
fiendish, so malignantly did he look at Johnson. I noticed a black
discoloration, still faintly visible, under Johansen’s eye, a mark of the
thrashing he had received a few nights before from the sailor. For the
first time I began to divine that something terrible was about to be
enacted,—what, I could not imagine.
“Do you know what happens to men who say what you’ve said about my
slop-chest and me?” Wolf Larsen was demanding.
“I know, sir,” was the answer.
“What?” Wolf Larsen demanded, sharply and imperatively.
“What you and the mate there are going to do to me, sir.”
“Look at him, Hump,” Wolf Larsen said to me, “look at this bit of
animated dust, this aggregation of matter that moves and breathes and
defies me and thoroughly believes itself to be compounded of something
good; that is impressed with certain human fictions such as righteousness
and honesty, and that will live up to them in spite of all personal
discomforts and menaces. What do you think of him, Hump? What do you
think of him?”
“I think that he is a better man than you are,” I answered, impelled,
somehow, with a desire to draw upon myself a portion of the wrath I felt
was about to break upon his head. “His human fictions, as you choose to
call them, make for nobility and manhood. You have no fictions, no
dreams, no ideals. You are a pauper.”
He nodded his head with a savage pleasantness. “Quite true, Hump, quite
true. I have no fictions that make for nobility and manhood. A living
dog is better than a dead lion, say I with the Preacher. My only
doctrine is the doctrine of expediency, and it makes for surviving. This
bit of the ferment we call ‘Johnson,’ when he is no longer a bit of the
ferment, only dust and ashes, will have no more nobility than any dust
and ashes, while I shall still be alive and roaring.”
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he questioned.
I shook my head.
“Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how
fares nobility. Watch me.”
Three yards away from Johnson he was, and sitting down. Nine feet! And
yet he left the chair in full leap, without first gaining a standing
position. He left the chair, just as he sat in it, squarely, springing
from the sitting posture like a wild animal, a tiger, and like a tiger
covered the intervening space. It was an avalanche of fury that Johnson
strove vainly to fend off. He threw one arm down to protect the stomach,
the other arm up to protect the head; but Wolf Larsen’s fist drove midway
between, on the chest, with a crushing, resounding impact. Johnson’s
breath, suddenly expelled, shot from his mouth and as suddenly checked,
with the forced, audible expiration of a man wielding an axe. He almost
fell backward, and swayed from side to side in an effort to recover his
balance.
I cannot give the further particulars of the horrible scene that
followed. It was too revolting. It turns me sick even now when I think
of it. Johnson fought bravely enough, but he was no match for Wolf
Larsen, much less for Wolf Larsen and the mate. It was frightful. I had
not imagined a human being could endure so much and still live and
struggle on. And struggle on Johnson did. Of course there was no hope
for him, not the slightest, and he knew it as well as I, but by the
manhood that was in him he could not cease from fighting for that
manhood.
It was too much for me to witness. I felt that I should lose my mind,
and I ran up the companion stairs to open the doors and escape on deck.
But Wolf Larsen, leaving his victim for the moment, and with one of his
tremendous springs, gained my side and flung me into the far corner of
the cabin.
“The phenomena of life, Hump,” he girded at me. “Stay and watch it. You
may gather data on the immortality of the soul. Besides, you know, we
can’t hurt Johnson’s soul. It’s only the fleeting form we may demolish.”
It seemed centuries—possibly it was no more than ten minutes that the
beating continued. Wolf Larsen and Johansen were all about the poor
fellow. They struck him with their fists, kicked him with their heavy
shoes, knocked him down, and dragged him to his feet to knock him down
again. His eyes were blinded so that he could not see, and the blood
running from ears and nose and mouth turned the cabin into a shambles.
And when he could no longer rise they still continued to beat and kick
him where he lay.
“Easy, Johansen; easy as she goes,” Wolf Larsen finally said.
But the beast in the mate was up and rampant, and Wolf Larsen was
compelled to brush him away with a back-handed sweep of the arm, gentle
enough, apparently, but which hurled Johansen back like a cork, driving
his head against the wall with a crash. He fell to the floor, half
stunned for the moment, breathing heavily and blinking his eyes in a
stupid sort of way.
“Jerk open the doors, Hump,” I was commanded.
I obeyed, and the two brutes picked up the senseless man like a sack of
rubbish and hove him clear up the companion stairs, through the narrow
doorway, and out on deck. The blood from his nose gushed in a scarlet
stream over the feet of the helmsman, who was none other than Louis, his
boat-mate. But Louis took and gave a spoke and gazed imperturbably into
the binnacle.