The Sea-Wolf
Not so was the conduct of George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy. Fore
and aft there was nothing that could have surprised us more than his
consequent behaviour. He it was that came up on the poop without orders
and dragged Johnson forward, where he set about dressing his wounds as
well as he could and making him comfortable. Johnson, as Johnson, was
unrecognizable; and not only that, for his features, as human features at
all, were unrecognizable, so discoloured and swollen had they become in
the few minutes which had elapsed between the beginning of the beating
and the dragging forward of the body.
But of Leach’s behaviour—By the time I had finished cleansing the cabin
he had taken care of Johnson. I had come up on deck for a breath of
fresh air and to try to get some repose for my overwrought nerves. Wolf
Larsen was smoking a cigar and examining the patent log which the _Ghost_
usually towed astern, but which had been hauled in for some purpose.
Suddenly Leach’s voice came to my ears. It was tense and hoarse with an
overmastering rage. I turned and saw him standing just beneath the break
of the poop on the port side of the galley. His face was convulsed and
white, his eyes were flashing, his clenched fists raised overhead.
“May God damn your soul to hell, Wolf Larsen, only hell’s too good for
you, you coward, you murderer, you pig!” was his opening salutation.
I was thunderstruck. I looked for his instant annihilation. But it was
not Wolf Larsen’s whim to annihilate him. He sauntered slowly forward to
the break of the poop, and, leaning his elbow on the corner of the cabin,
gazed down thoughtfully and curiously at the excited boy.
And the boy indicted Wolf Larsen as he had never been indicted before.
The sailors assembled in a fearful group just outside the forecastle
scuttle and watched and listened. The hunters piled pell-mell out of the
steerage, but as Leach’s tirade continued I saw that there was no levity
in their faces. Even they were frightened, not at the boy’s terrible
words, but at his terrible audacity. It did not seem possible that any
living creature could thus beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth. I know for
myself that I was shocked into admiration of the boy, and I saw in him
the splendid invincibleness of immortality rising above the flesh and the
fears of the flesh, as in the prophets of old, to condemn
unrighteousness.
And such condemnation! He haled forth Wolf Larsen’s soul naked to the
scorn of men. He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and
withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a mediæval
excommunication of the Catholic Church. He ran the gamut of
denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost
Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest and most
indecent abuse.
His rage was a madness. His lips were flecked with a soapy froth, and
sometimes he choked and gurgled and became inarticulate. And through it
all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf
Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity. This wild stirring of yeasty
life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed
and interested him.
Each moment I looked, and everybody looked, for him to leap upon the boy
and destroy him. But it was not his whim. His cigar went out, and he
continued to gaze silently and curiously.
Leach had worked himself into an ecstasy of impotent rage.
“Pig! Pig! Pig!” he was reiterating at the top of his lungs. “Why
don’t you come down and kill me, you murderer? You can do it! I ain’t
afraid! There’s no one to stop you! Damn sight better dead and outa
your reach than alive and in your clutches! Come on, you coward! Kill
me! Kill me! Kill me!”
It was at this stage that Thomas Mugridge’s erratic soul brought him into
the scene. He had been listening at the galley door, but he now came
out, ostensibly to fling some scraps over the side, but obviously to see
the killing he was certain would take place. He smirked greasily up into
the face of Wolf Larsen, who seemed not to see him. But the Cockney was
unabashed, though mad, stark mad. He turned to Leach, saying:
“Such langwidge! Shockin’!”
Leach’s rage was no longer impotent. Here at last was something ready to
hand. And for the first time since the stabbing the Cockney had appeared
outside the galley without his knife. The words had barely left his
mouth when he was knocked down by Leach. Three times he struggled to his
feet, striving to gain the galley, and each time was knocked down.
“Oh, Lord!” he cried. “’Elp! ’Elp! Tyke ’im aw’y, carn’t yer? Tyke
’im aw’y!”
The hunters laughed from sheer relief. Tragedy had dwindled, the farce
had begun. The sailors now crowded boldly aft, grinning and shuffling,
to watch the pummelling of the hated Cockney. And even I felt a great
joy surge up within me. I confess that I delighted in this beating Leach
was giving to Thomas Mugridge, though it was as terrible, almost, as the
one Mugridge had caused to be given to Johnson. But the expression of
Wolf Larsen’s face never changed. He did not change his position either,
but continued to gaze down with a great curiosity. For all his pragmatic
certitude, it seemed as if he watched the play and movement of life in
the hope of discovering something more about it, of discerning in its
maddest writhings a something which had hitherto escaped him,—the key to
its mystery, as it were, which would make all clear and plain.
But the beating! It was quite similar to the one I had witnessed in the
cabin. The Cockney strove in vain to protect himself from the infuriated
boy. And in vain he strove to gain the shelter of the cabin. He rolled
toward it, grovelled toward it, fell toward it when he was knocked down.
But blow followed blow with bewildering rapidity. He was knocked about
like a shuttlecock, until, finally, like Johnson, he was beaten and
kicked as he lay helpless on the deck. And no one interfered. Leach
could have killed him, but, having evidently filled the measure of his
vengeance, he drew away from his prostrate foe, who was whimpering and
wailing in a puppyish sort of way, and walked forward.
But these two affairs were only the opening events of the day’s
programme. In the afternoon Smoke and Henderson fell foul of each other,
and a fusillade of shots came up from the steerage, followed by a
stampede of the other four hunters for the deck. A column of thick,
acrid smoke—the kind always made by black powder—was arising through the
open companion-way, and down through it leaped Wolf Larsen. The sound of
blows and scuffling came to our ears. Both men were wounded, and he was
thrashing them both for having disobeyed his orders and crippled
themselves in advance of the hunting season. In fact, they were badly
wounded, and, having thrashed them, he proceeded to operate upon them in
a rough surgical fashion and to dress their wounds. I served as
assistant while he probed and cleansed the passages made by the bullets,
and I saw the two men endure his crude surgery without anæsthetics and
with no more to uphold them than a stiff tumbler of whisky.
Then, in the first dog-watch, trouble came to a head in the forecastle.
It took its rise out of the tittle-tattle and tale-bearing which had been
the cause of Johnson’s beating, and from the noise we heard, and from the
sight of the bruised men next day, it was patent that half the forecastle
had soundly drubbed the other half.
The second dog-watch and the day were wound up by a fight between
Johansen and the lean, Yankee-looking hunter, Latimer. It was caused by
remarks of Latimer’s concerning the noises made by the mate in his sleep,
and though Johansen was whipped, he kept the steerage awake for the rest
of the night while he blissfully slumbered and fought the fight over and
over again.
As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare. The day had been like
some horrible dream. Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming
passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another’s
lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy. My nerves were
shocked. My mind itself was shocked. All my days had been passed in
comparative ignorance of the animality of man. In fact, I had known life
only in its intellectual phases. Brutality I had experienced, but it was
the brutality of the intellect—the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth,
the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
undergraduate days.
That was all. But that men should wreak their anger on others by the
bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely
and fearfully new to me. Not for nothing had I been called “Sissy” Van
Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one
nightmare and another. And it seemed to me that my innocence of the
realities of life had been complete indeed. I laughed bitterly to
myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen’s forbidding philosophy a more
adequate explanation of life than I found in my own.
And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought.
The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect. It bid
fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life. My
reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill
thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in
it. And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it
was,—I chuckled with an insane delight. I was no longer Humphrey Van
Weyden. I was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner _Ghost_. Wolf Larsen was
my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was
receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them all.
CHAPTER XIII
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 _régime_ 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 was 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 he missed the railing, and his hand, with his
weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot surface. There was a sizzle
and odour of burning flesh, and a sharp cry of pain.
“Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot ’ave I done?” he wailed; sitting down in the
coal-box 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 ’armless an’ ’urtin’ nobody.”