Chương Chương 4 · 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

his everlasting cigar.

“’Ere she comes. Sling yer ’ook!” the cook cried.

I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door

slide shut with a bang. Then I saw Henderson leaping like a madman for

the main rigging, up which he shot, on the inside, till he was many feet

higher than my head. Also I saw a great wave, curling and foaming,

poised far above the rail. I was directly under it. My mind did not

work quickly, everything was so new and strange. I grasped that I was in

danger, but that was all. I stood still, in trepidation. Then Wolf

Larsen shouted from the poop:

“Grab hold something, you—you Hump!”

But it was too late. I sprang toward the rigging, to which I might have

clung, and was met by the descending wall of water. What happened after

that was very confusing. I was beneath the water, suffocating and

drowning. My feet were out from under me, and I was turning over and

over and being swept along I knew not where. Several times I collided

against hard objects, once striking my right knee a terrible blow. Then

the flood seemed suddenly to subside and I was breathing the good air

again. I had been swept against the galley and around the steerage

companion-way from the weather side into the lee scuppers. The pain from

my hurt knee was agonizing. I could not put my weight on it, or, at

least, I thought I could not put my weight on it; and I felt sure the leg

was broken. But the cook was after me, shouting through the lee galley

door:

“’Ere, you! Don’t tyke all night about it! Where’s the pot? Lost

overboard? Serve you bloody well right if yer neck was broke!”

I managed to struggle to my feet. The great tea-pot was still in my

hand. I limped to the galley and handed it to him. But he was consumed

with indignation, real or feigned.

“Gawd blime me if you ayn’t a slob. Wot ’re you good for anyw’y, I’d

like to know? Eh? Wot ’re you good for any’wy? Cawn’t even carry a bit

of tea aft without losin’ it. Now I’ll ’ave to boil some more.

“An’ wot ’re you snifflin’ about?” he burst out at me, with renewed rage.

“’Cos you’ve ’urt yer pore little leg, pore little mamma’s darlin’.”

I was not sniffling, though my face might well have been drawn and

twitching from the pain. But I called up all my resolution, set my

teeth, and hobbled back and forth from galley to cabin and cabin to

galley without further mishap. Two things I had acquired by my accident:

an injured knee-cap that went undressed and from which I suffered for

weary months, and the name of “Hump,” which Wolf Larsen had called me

from the poop. Thereafter, fore and aft, I was known by no other name,

until the term became a part of my thought-processes and I identified it

with myself, thought of myself as Hump, as though Hump were I and had

always been I.

It was no easy task, waiting on the cabin table, where sat Wolf Larsen,

Johansen, and the six hunters. The cabin was small, to begin with, and

to move around, as I was compelled to, was not made easier by the

schooner’s violent pitching and wallowing. But what struck me most

forcibly was the total lack of sympathy on the part of the men whom I

served. I could feel my knee through my clothes, swelling, and swelling,

and I was sick and faint from the pain of it. I could catch glimpses of

my face, white and ghastly, distorted with pain, in the cabin mirror.

All the men must have seen my condition, but not one spoke or took notice

of me, till I was almost grateful to Wolf Larsen, later on (I was washing

the dishes), when he said:

“Don’t let a little thing like that bother you. You’ll get used to such

things in time. It may cripple you some, but all the same you’ll be

learning to walk.

“That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?” he added.

He seemed pleased when I nodded my head with the customary “Yes, sir.”

“I suppose you know a bit about literary things? Eh? Good. I’ll have

some talks with you some time.”

And then, taking no further account of me, he turned his back and went up

on deck.

That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was sent to

sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk. I was glad to get

out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be off my feet. To my

surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there seemed no indications of

catching cold, either from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking

from the foundering of the _Martinez_. Under ordinary circumstances,

after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a

trained nurse.

But my knee was bothering me terribly. As well as I could make out, the

kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling. As I sat

in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage,

smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at

it.

“Looks nasty,” he commented. “Tie a rag around it, and it’ll be all

right.”

That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my

back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do

nothing but rest. But I must do these men justice. Callous as they were

to my suffering, they were equally callous to their own when anything

befell them. And this was due, I believe, first, to habit; and second,

to the fact that they were less sensitively organized. I really believe

that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as

much as they from a like injury.

Tired as I was,—exhausted, in fact,—I was prevented from sleeping by the

pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud. At

home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new and

elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression. Like the

savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things, childish

in little things. I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot,

another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly;

and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face. Yet I

have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous

passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and

cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another

hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim. He held

that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born. The other

hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd,

narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on

the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother

was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their

nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay

in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists. But they

were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took

sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged

back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined

space. Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their

reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was

very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion,

assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal pup could swim or

not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then

following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common

sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar. I

have related this in order to show the mental calibre of the men with

whom I was thrown in contact. Intellectually they were children,

inhabiting the physical forms of men.

And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and

offensive-smelling tobacco. The air was thick and murky with the smoke

of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the ship as she

struggled through the storm, would surely have made me sea-sick had I

been a victim to that malady. As it was, it made me quite squeamish,

though this nausea might have been due to the pain of my leg and

exhaustion.

As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my situation.

It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar

and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should

be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had

never done any hard manual labour, or scullion labour, in my life. I had

lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a

scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income. Violent life

and athletic sports had never appealed to me. I had always been a

book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my childhood. I

had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left the party almost at

its start and returned to the comforts and conveniences of a roof. And

here I was, with dreary and endless vistas before me of table-setting,

potato-peeling, and dish-washing. And I was not strong. The doctors had

always said that I had a remarkable constitution, but I had never

developed it or my body through exercise. My muscles were small and

soft, like a woman’s, or so the doctors had said time and again in the

course of their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture

fads. But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I

was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.

These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and are

related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the weak and

helpless _rôle_ I was destined to play. But I thought, also, of my

mother and sisters, and pictured their grief. I was among the missing

dead of the _Martinez_ disaster, an unrecovered body. I could see the

head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the University Club and the

Bibelot shaking their heads and saying, “Poor chap!” And I could see

Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-bye to him that morning, lounging in

a dressing-gown on the be-pillowed window couch and delivering himself of

oracular and pessimistic epigrams.

And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains and

falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner _Ghost_ was

fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of the Pacific—and I

was on her. I could hear the wind above. It came to my ears as a

muffled roar. Now and again feet stamped overhead. An endless creaking

was going on all about me, the woodwork and the fittings groaning and

squeaking and complaining in a thousand keys. The hunters were still

arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed. The air was

filled with oaths and indecent expressions. I could see their faces,

flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly

yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.

Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens of

animals in a menagerie. Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging from the

walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested securely in the

racks. It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and pirates of by-gone

years. My imagination ran riot, and still I could not sleep. And it was

a long, long night, weary and dreary and long.