The Sea-Wolf
The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured 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 he was? And as though answering
my unspoken thought, he wailed:
“I never ’ad no chance, not ’arf a chance! ’Oo was there to send me to
school, or put tommy in my ’ungry belly, or wipe my bloody nose for me,
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! a bloody lie!” he shouted in my face, flinging off the hand.
“It’s a lie, and 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 yer
little belly gnawin’ an’ gnawin’, like a rat inside yer. It carn’t come
right. If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, ’ow would it
fill my belly for one time w’en I was a kiddy and it went empty?
“’Ow could it, I s’y? I was born to sufferin’ and sorrer. I’ve had 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 and was rotten with it six months in
Barbadoes. Smallpox in ’Onolulu, two broken legs in Shanghai, pnuemonia
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. His diagnosis was correct, however, for he was
seized with occasional sicknesses, during which he vomited blood and
suffered great pain. And as he said, it seemed God hated him too much to
let him die, for he ultimately grew better and waxed more malignant than
ever.
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 grovelled
to Johansen. Not so was the conduct of 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
imbedded 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 score of 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 such a magnificent animal as he should have headaches at all puzzles
me.
“’Tis the hand of God, I’m tellin’ you,” is the way Louis sees it. “’Tis
a visitation for his black-hearted deeds, and there’s more behind and
comin’, or else—”
“Or else,” I prompted.
“God is noddin’ and 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 does Thomas Mugridge continue to hate me, but he has 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 grey eyes, and shook his head
portentously. “She’s a-comin’, I tell you, and it’ll be sheets and
halyards, stand by all hands, when she begins to howl. I’ve had the feel
iv it this long time, and I can feel it now as plainly as I feel the
rigging iv a dark night. She’s close, she’s close.”
“Who goes first?” I queried.
“Not fat old Louis, I promise you,” he laughed. “For ’tis 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
lustreless, hopeless eyes into mine.
CHAPTER XIV
It has dawned upon me that I have never placed a proper valuation upon
womankind. For that matter, though not amative to any considerable
degree so far as I have discovered, I was never outside the atmosphere of
women until now. My mother and sisters were always about me, and I was
always trying to escape them; for they worried me to distraction with
their solicitude for my health and with their periodic inroads on my den,
when my orderly confusion, upon which I prided myself, was turned into
worse confusion and less order, though it looked neat enough to the eye.
I never could find anything when they had departed. But now, alas, how
welcome would have been the feel of their presence, the frou-frou and
swish-swish of their skirts which I had so cordially detested! I am
sure, if I ever get home, that I shall never be irritable with them
again. They may dose me and doctor me morning, noon, and night, and dust
and sweep and put my den to rights every minute of the day, and I shall
only lean back and survey it all and be thankful in that I am possessed
of a mother and some several sisters.
All of which has set me wondering. Where are the mothers of these twenty
and odd men on the _Ghost_? It strikes me as unnatural and unhealthful
that men should be totally separated from women and herd through the
world by themselves. Coarseness and savagery are the inevitable results.
These men about me should have wives, and sisters, and daughters; then
would they be capable of softness, and tenderness, and sympathy. As it
is, not one of them is married. In years and years not one of them has
been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or
redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature. There is
no balance in their lives. Their masculinity, which in itself is of the
brute, has been over-developed. The other and spiritual side of their
natures has been dwarfed—atrophied, in fact.
They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one another and
growing daily more calloused from the grinding. It seems to me
impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers. It would appear that
they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race apart, wherein there is
no such thing as sex; that they are hatched out by the sun like turtle
eggs, or receive life in some similar and sordid fashion; and that all
their days they fester in brutality and viciousness, and in the end die
as unlovely as they have lived.
Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with Johansen
last night—the first superfluous words with which he has favoured me
since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was eighteen, is now
thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has not been home once. He
had met a townsman, a couple of years before, in some sailor
boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his mother to be still alive.
“She must be a pretty old woman now,” he said, staring meditatively into
the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who was
steering a point off the course.
“When did you last write to her?”
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. “Eighty-one; no—eighty-two,
eh? no—eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years ago. From some
little port in Madagascar. I was trading.
“You see,” he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother across
half the girth of the earth, “each year I was going home. So what was
the good to write? It was only a year. And each year something
happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when I pay off at
’Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship myself on a
windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give me more money;
and then I will pay my passage from there home. Then she will not do any
more work.”
“But does she work? now? How old is she?”
“About seventy,” he answered. And then, boastingly, “We work from the
time we are born until we die, in my country. That’s why we live so
long. I will live to a hundred.”
I shall never forget this conversation. The words were the last I ever
heard him utter. Perhaps they were the last he did utter, too. For,
going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it was too stuffy to
sleep below. It was a calm night. We were out of the Trades, and the
_Ghost_ was forging ahead barely a knot an hour. So I tucked a blanket
and pillow under my arm and went up on deck.
As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into the
top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three points off.
Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape reprimand or
worse, I spoke to him. But he was not asleep. His eyes were wide and
staring. He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to reply to me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
breath.
“You’d better get on your course, then,” I chided.