_ 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."
Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the
cook's shoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and
portentous wink as though to emphasize his interrupted remark and
the need for me to be soft-spoken with the captain.
Hanging over the cook's arm was a loose and crumpled array of evil-
looking and sour-smelling garments.
"They was put aw'y wet, sir," he vouchsafed explanation. "But
you'll 'ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the fire."
Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and
aided by the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen
undershirt. On the instant my flesh was creeping and crawling from
the harsh contact. He noticed my involuntary twitching and
grimacing, and smirked:
"I only 'ope yer don't ever 'ave to get used to such as that in
this life, 'cos you've got a bloomin' soft skin, that you 'ave,
more like a lydy's than any I know of. I was bloomin' well sure
you was a gentleman as soon as I set eyes on yer."
I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me
this dislike increased. There was something repulsive about his
touch. I shrank from his hand; my flesh revolted. And between
this and the smells arising from various pots boiling and bubbling
on the galley fire, I was in haste to get out into the fresh air.
Further, there was the need of seeing the captain about what
arrangements could be made for getting me ashore.
A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured
with what I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a
running and apologetic fire of comment. A pair of workman's
brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a
pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully
ten inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg looked as
though the devil had there clutched for the Cockney's soul and
missed the shadow for the substance.
"And whom have I to thank for this kindness?" I asked, when I stood
completely arrayed, a tiny boy's cap on my head, and for coat a
dirty, striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back
and the sleeves of which reached just below my elbows.
The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating
smirk on his face. Out of my experience with stewards on the
Atlantic liners at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was
waiting for his tip. From my fuller knowledge of the creature I
now know that the posture was unconscious. An hereditary
servility, no doubt, was responsible.
"Mugridge, sir," he fawned, his effeminate features running into a
greasy smile. "Thomas Mugridge, sir, an' at yer service."
"All right, Thomas," I said. "I shall not forget you - when my
clothes are dry."
A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.
"Thank you, sir," he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
stepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.
A puff of wind caught me, - and I staggered across the moving deck
to a corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The
schooner, heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing
and plunging into the long Pacific roll. If she were heading
south-west as Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was
blowing nearly from the south. The fog was gone, and in its place
the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the water, I turned to
the east, where I knew California must lie, but could see nothing
save low-lying fog-banks - the same fog, doubtless, that had
brought about the disaster to the Martinez and placed me in my
present situation. To the north, and not far away, a group of
naked rocks thrust above the sea, on one of which I could
distinguish a lighthouse. In the south-west, and almost in our
course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some vessel's sails.
Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more
immediate surroundings. My first thought was that a man who had
come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited
more attention than I received. Beyond a sailor at the wheel who
stared curiously across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice
whatever.
Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.
There, on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully
clothed, though his shirt was ripped open in front. Nothing was to
be seen of his chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of
black hair, in appearance like the furry coat of a dog. His face
and neck were hidden beneath a black beard, intershot with grey,
which would have been stiff and bushy had it not been limp and
draggled and dripping with water. His eyes were closed, and he was
apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open, his breast,
heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
breath. A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a
matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the
end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its
contents over the prostrate man.
Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely
chewing the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had
rescued me from the sea. His height was probably five feet ten
inches, or ten and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the
man, was not of this, but of his strength. And yet, while he was
of massive build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not
characterize his strength as massive. It was what might be termed
a sinewy, knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry
men, but which, in him, because of his heavy build, partook more of
the enlarged gorilla order. Not that in appearance he seemed in
the least gorilla-like. What I am striving to express is this
strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical semblance.
It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive,
with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling
prototypes to have been - a strength savage, ferocious, alive in
itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion,
the elemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have
been moulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake
when the head is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or
which lingers in the shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and
quivers from the prod of a finger.
Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who
paced up and down. He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet
struck the deck squarely and with surety; every movement of a
muscle, from the heave of the shoulders to the tightening of the
lips about the cigar, was decisive, and seemed to come out of a
strength that was excessive and overwhelming. In fact, though this
strength pervaded every action of his, it seemed but the
advertisement of a greater strength that lurked within, that lay
dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, but which might
arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the rage of a
lion or the wrath of a storm.
The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned
encouragingly at me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the
direction of the man who paced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I
was given to understand that he was the captain, the "Old Man," in
the cook's vernacular, the individual whom I must interview and put
to the trouble of somehow getting me ashore. I had half started
forward, to get over with what I was certain would be a stormy five
minutes, when a more violent suffocating paroxysm seized the
unfortunate person who was lying on his back. He wrenched and
writhed about convulsively. The chin, with the damp black beard,
pointed higher in the air as the back muscles stiffened and the
chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive effort to get more
air. Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin was
taking on a purplish hue.
The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and
gazed down at the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle
become that the sailor paused in the act of flinging more water
over him and stared curiously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and
dripping its contents to the deck. The dying man beat a tattoo on
the hatch with his heels, straightened out his legs, and stiffened
in one great tense effort, and rolled his head from side to side.
Then the muscles relaxed, the head stopped rolling, and a sigh, as
of profound relief, floated upward from his lips. The jaw dropped,
the upper lip lifted, and two rows of tobacco-discoloured teeth
appeared. It seemed as though his features had frozen into a
diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.
Then a most surprising thing occurred. The captain broke loose
upon the dead man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips
in a continuous stream. And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or
mere expressions of indecency. Each word was a blasphemy, and
there were many words. They crisped and crackled like electric
sparks. I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I
have conceived it possible. With a turn for literary expression
myself, and a penchant for forcible figures and phrases, I
appreciated, as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiar
vividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors.
The cause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man,
who was mate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco,
and then had the poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage
and leave Wolf Larsen short-handed.
It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I
was shocked. Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been
repellent to me. I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the
heart, and, I might just as well say, a giddiness. To me, death
had always been invested with solemnity and dignity. It had been
peaceful in its occurrence, sacred in its ceremonial. But death in
its more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had
been unacquainted till now. As I say, while I appreciated the
power of the terrific denunciation that swept out of Wolf Larsen's
mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked. The scorching torrent was
enough to wither the face of the corpse. I should not have been
surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared
up in smoke and flame. But the dead man was unconcerned. He
continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery
and defiance. He was master of the situation. _