The Sea-Wolf
of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, with the fear of death upon
them and unwilling to die. And I remember that the sounds they made
reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the butcher, and
I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy. These women,
capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were
open-mouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless,
like rats in a trap, and they screamed.
The horror of it drove me out on deck. I was feeling sick and squeamish,
and sat down on a bench. In a hazy way I saw and heard men rushing and
shouting as they strove to lower the boats. It was just as I had read
descriptions of such scenes in books. The tackles jammed. Nothing
worked. One boat lowered away with the plugs out, filled with women and
children and then with water, and capsized. Another boat had been
lowered by one end, and still hung in the tackle by the other end, where
it had been abandoned. Nothing was to be seen of the strange steamboat
which had caused the disaster, though I heard men saying that she would
undoubtedly send boats to our assistance.
I descended to the lower deck. The _Martinez_ was sinking fast, for the
water was very near. Numbers of the passengers were leaping overboard.
Others, in the water, were clamouring to be taken aboard again. No one
heeded them. A cry arose that we were sinking. I was seized by the
consequent panic, and went over the side in a surge of bodies. How I
went over I do not know, though I did know, and instantly, why those in
the water were so desirous of getting back on the steamer. The water was
cold—so cold that it was painful. The pang, as I plunged into it, was as
quick and sharp as that of fire. It bit to the marrow. It was like the
grip of death. I gasped with the anguish and shock of it, filling my
lungs before the life-preserver popped me to the surface. The taste of
the salt was strong in my mouth, and I was strangling with the acrid
stuff in my throat and lungs.
But it was the cold that was most distressing. I felt that I could
survive but a few minutes. People were struggling and floundering in the
water about me. I could hear them crying out to one another. And I
heard, also, the sound of oars. Evidently the strange steamboat had
lowered its boats. As the time went by I marvelled that I was still
alive. I had no sensation whatever in my lower limbs, while a chilling
numbness was wrapping about my heart and creeping into it. Small waves,
with spiteful foaming crests, continually broke over me and into my
mouth, sending me off into more strangling paroxysms.
The noises grew indistinct, though I heard a final and despairing chorus
of screams in the distance, and knew that the _Martinez_ had gone down.
Later,—how much later I have no knowledge,—I came to myself with a start
of fear. I was alone. I could hear no calls or cries—only the sound of
the waves, made weirdly hollow and reverberant by the fog. A panic in a
crowd, which partakes of a sort of community of interest, is not so
terrible as a panic when one is by oneself; and such a panic I now
suffered. Whither was I drifting? The red-faced man had said that the
tide was ebbing through the Golden Gate. Was I, then, being carried out
to sea? And the life-preserver in which I floated? Was it not liable to
go to pieces at any moment? I had heard of such things being made of
paper and hollow rushes which quickly became saturated and lost all
buoyancy. And I could not swim a stroke. And I was alone, floating,
apparently, in the midst of a grey primordial vastness. I confess that a
madness seized me, that I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked, and
beat the water with my numb hands.
How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness intervened, of
which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and painful
sleep. When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw,
almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel, and three
triangular sails, each shrewdly lapping the other and filled with wind.
Where the bow cut the water there was a great foaming and gurgling, and I
seemed directly in its path. I tried to cry out, but was too exhausted.
The bow plunged down, just missing me and sending a swash of water clear
over my head. Then the long, black side of the vessel began slipping
past, so near that I could have touched it with my hands. I tried to
reach it, in a mad resolve to claw into the wood with my nails, but my
arms were heavy and lifeless. Again I strove to call out, but made no
sound.
The stern of the vessel shot by, dropping, as it did so, into a hollow
between the waves; and I caught a glimpse of a man standing at the wheel,
and of another man who seemed to be doing little else than smoke a cigar.
I saw the smoke issuing from his lips as he slowly turned his head and
glanced out over the water in my direction. It was a careless,
unpremeditated glance, one of those haphazard things men do when they
have no immediate call to do anything in particular, but act because they
are alive and must do something.
But life and death were in that glance. I could see the vessel being
swallowed up in the fog; I saw the back of the man at the wheel, and the
head of the other man turning, slowly turning, as his gaze struck the
water and casually lifted along it toward me. His face wore an absent
expression, as of deep thought, and I became afraid that if his eyes did
light upon me he would nevertheless not see me. But his eyes did light
upon me, and looked squarely into mine; and he did see me, for he sprang
to the wheel, thrusting the other man aside, and whirled it round and
round, hand over hand, at the same time shouting orders of some sort.
The vessel seemed to go off at a tangent to its former course and leapt
almost instantly from view into the fog.
I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power
of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was
rising around me. A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing
nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man. When he was very near I heard
him crying, in vexed fashion, “Why in hell don’t you sing out?” This
meant me, I thought, and then the blankness and darkness rose over me.
CHAPTER II
I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparkling
points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew,
and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reached
the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a
great gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period, lapped in
the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous
flight.
But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself
it must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was jerked from swing
to counter swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely catch my
breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The gong
thundered more frequently and more furiously. I grew to await it with a
nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I were being dragged over
rasping sands, white and hot in the sun. This gave place to a sense of
intolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in the torment of fire. The
gong clanged and knelled. The sparkling points of light flashed past me
in an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system were
dropping into the void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened
my eyes. Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty
rhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The
terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and
clattered with each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands were
a man’s hard hands chafing my naked chest. I squirmed under the pain of
it, and half lifted my head. My chest was raw and red, and I could see
tiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.
“That’ll do, Yonson,” one of the men said. “Carn’t yer see you’ve
bloomin’ well rubbed all the gent’s skin orf?”
The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceased
chafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken to
him was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost
effeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with
his mother’s milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirty
gunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirty
ship’s galley in which I found myself.
“An’ ’ow yer feelin’ now, sir?” he asked, with the subservient smirk
which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.
For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped by
Yonson to my feet. The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was grating
horribly on my nerves. I could not collect my thoughts. Clutching the
woodwork of the galley for support,—and I confess the grease with which
it was scummed put my teeth on edge,—I reached across a hot cooking-range
to the offending utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it securely into the
coal-box.
The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand a
steaming mug with an “’Ere, this’ll do yer good.” It was a nauseous
mess,—ship’s coffee,—but the heat of it was revivifying. Between gulps
of the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and bleeding chest and
turned to the Scandinavian.
“Thank you, Mr. Yonson,” I said; “but don’t you think your measures were
rather heroic?”
It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than of my
words, that he held up his palm for inspection. It was remarkably
calloused. I passed my hand over the horny projections, and my teeth
went on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation produced.
“My name is Johnson, not Yonson,” he said, in very good, though slow,
English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.
There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timid
frankness and manliness that quite won me to him.
“Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” I corrected, and reached out my hand for his.
He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg to the
other, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.
“Have you any dry clothes I may put on?” I asked the cook.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, with cheerful alacrity. “I’ll run down an’ tyke
a look over my kit, if you’ve no objections, sir, to wearin’ my things.”
He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness and
smoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily.
In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to learn, was
probably the most salient expression of his personality.
“And where am I?” I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be one of
the sailors. “What vessel is this, and where is she bound?”
“Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,” he answered, slowly and
methodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidly
observing the order of my queries. “The schooner _Ghost_, bound
seal-hunting to Japan.”
“And who is the captain? I must see him as soon as I am dressed.”
Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed. He hesitated while he groped in
his vocabulary and framed a complete answer. “The cap’n is Wolf Larsen,
or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speak
soft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate—”
But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.
“Better sling yer ’ook out of ’ere, Yonson,” he said. “The old man’ll be
wantin’ yer on deck, an’ this ayn’t no d’y to fall foul of ’im.”