The Sea-Wolf
time, and how unused I was to spectacles of brutality. The cabin-boy—and
he weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least—crumpled up. His
body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick. He
lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck
alongside the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed
about in agony.
“Well?” Larsen asked of me. “Have you made up your mind?”
I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was now
almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards away.
It was a very trim and neat little craft. I could see a large, black
number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures of pilot-boats.
“What vessel is that?” I asked.
“The pilot-boat _Lady Mine_,” Wolf Larsen answered grimly. “Got rid of
her pilots and running into San Francisco. She’ll be there in five or
six hours with this wind.”
“Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.”
“Sorry, but I’ve lost the signal book overboard,” he remarked, and the
group of hunters grinned.
I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes. I had seen the
frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very
probably receive the same, if not worse. As I say, I debated with
myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life. I ran
to the side, waving my arms and shouting:
“_Lady Mine_ ahoy! Take me ashore! A thousand dollars if you take me
ashore!”
I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering.
The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips. I did not turn my head,
though I expected every moment a killing blow from the human brute behind
me. At last, after what seemed centuries, unable longer to stand the
strain, I looked around. He had not moved. He was standing in the same
position, swaying easily to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh
cigar.
“What is the matter? Anything wrong?”
This was the cry from the _Lady Mine_.
“Yes!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs. “Life or death! One thousand
dollars if you take me ashore!”
“Too much ’Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!” Wolf Larsen
shouted after. “This one”—indicating me with his thumb—“fancies
sea-serpents and monkeys just now!”
The man on the _Lady Mine_ laughed back through the megaphone. The
pilot-boat plunged past.
“Give him hell for me!” came a final cry, and the two men waved their
arms in farewell.
I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner
swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us. And she would
probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours! My head seemed
bursting. There was an ache in my throat as though my heart were up in
it. A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt spray on my lips.
The wind puffed strongly, and the _Ghost_ heeled far over, burying her
lee rail. I could hear the water rushing down upon the deck.
When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering to
his feet. His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed pain.
He looked very sick.
“Well, Leach, are you going for’ard?” Wolf Larsen asked.
“Yes, sir,” came the answer of a spirit cowed.
“And you?” I was asked.
“I’ll give you a thousand—” I began, but was interrupted.
“Stow that! Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy? Or do I
have to take you in hand?”
What was I to do? To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not
help my case. I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes. They might
have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they
contained. One may see the soul stir in some men’s eyes, but his were
bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea itself.
“Well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Say ‘yes, sir.’”
“Yes, sir,” I corrected.
“What is your name?”
“Van Weyden, sir.”
“First name?”
“Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-five, sir.”
“That’ll do. Go to the cook and learn your duties.”
And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to
Wolf Larsen. He was stronger than I, that was all. But it was very
unreal at the time. It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it.
It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible
nightmare.
“Hold on, don’t go yet.”
I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
“Johansen, call all hands. Now that we’ve everything cleaned up, we’ll
have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.”
While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under
the captain’s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a
hatch-cover. On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up,
were lashed a number of small boats. Several men picked up the
hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side, and
rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard. To the feet was
attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.
I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and
awe-inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at
any rate. One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates
called “Smoke,” was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths
and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth
to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf-chorus or the barking of
hell-hounds. The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below
rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together.
There was an ominous and worried expression on their faces. It was
evident that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a
captain and begun so inauspiciously. From time to time they stole
glances at Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of
the man.
He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off. I ran my eyes
over them—twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man at the wheel
and myself. I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it appeared my
fate to be pent up with them on this miniature floating world for I knew
not how many weeks or months. The sailors, in the main, were English and
Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order. The
hunters, on the other hand, had stronger and more diversified faces, with
hard lines and the marks of the free play of passions. Strange to say,
and I noted it at once, Wolf Larsen’s features showed no such evil
stamp. There seemed nothing vicious in them. True, there were lines,
but they were the lines of decision and firmness. It seemed, rather, a
frank and open countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by
the fact that he was smooth-shaven. I could hardly believe—until the
next incident occurred—that it was the face of a man who could behave as
he had behaved to the cabin-boy.
At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff struck
the schooner and pressed her side under. The wind shrieked a wild song
through the rigging. Some of the hunters glanced anxiously aloft. The
lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the sea, and as the
schooner lifted and righted the water swept across the deck wetting us
above our shoe-tops. A shower of rain drove down upon us, each drop
stinging like a hailstone. As it passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the
bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck.
“I only remember one part of the service,” he said, “and that is, ‘And
the body shall be cast into the sea.’ So cast it in.”
He ceased speaking. The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed,
puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony. He burst upon them in
a fury.
“Lift up that end there, damn you! What the hell’s the matter with you?”
They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a
dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea. The coal
at his feet dragged him down. He was gone.
“Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, “keep all hands on
deck now they’re here. Get in the topsails and jibs and make a good job
of it. We’re in for a sou’-easter. Better reef the jib and mainsail
too, while you’re about it.”
In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders and
the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts—all naturally
confusing to a landsman such as myself. But it was the heartlessness of
it that especially struck me. The dead man was an episode that was past,
an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal,
while the ship sped along and her work went on. Nobody had been
affected. The hunters were laughing at a fresh story of Smoke’s; the men
pulling and hauling, and two of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was
studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely,
buried sordidly, and sinking down, down—
Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly
and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I
held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across
the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San
Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls were driving in
between, and I could scarcely see the fog. And this strange vessel, with
its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and
out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely
Pacific expanse.
CHAPTER IV
What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner _Ghost_, as I strove to
fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain. The
cook, who was called “the doctor” by the crew, “Tommy” by the hunters,
and “Cooky” by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person. The difference worked
in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from
him. Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as
domineering and bellicose. In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman
with a skin soft as a “lydy’s,” but only an ordinary and very worthless
cabin-boy.
He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his
behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties.
Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state-rooms, I was
supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance
concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a
source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him. He refused to take into
consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was
accustomed to had been. This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt
toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with
more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before.
This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the
_Ghost_, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till
later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an “’owlin’
sou’-easter.” At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table
in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea
and cooked food down from the galley. In this connection I cannot
forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea.
“Look sharp or you’ll get doused,” was Mr. Mugridge’s parting injunction,
as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in the hollow of
the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread. One of the hunters, a
tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time from
the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships
sleeping quarters) to the cabin. Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking