第 十四 章 · 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.

He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing slowly to

N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.

I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on, when

some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail. A sinewy

hand, dripping with water, was clutching the rail. A second hand took

form in the darkness beside it. I watched, fascinated. What visitant

from the gloom of the deep was I to behold? Whatever it was, I knew that

it was climbing aboard by the log-line. I saw a head, the hair wet and

straight, shape itself, and then the unmistakable eyes and face of Wolf

Larsen. His right cheek was red with blood, which flowed from some wound

in the head.

He drew himself inboard with a quick effort, and arose to his feet,

glancing swiftly, as he did so, at the man at the wheel, as though to

assure himself of his identity and that there was nothing to fear from

him. The sea-water was streaming from him. It made little audible

gurgles which distracted me. As he stepped toward me I shrank back

instinctively, for I saw that in his eyes which spelled death.

“All right, Hump,” he said in a low voice. “Where’s the mate?”

I shook my head.

“Johansen!” he called softly. “Johansen!”

“Where is he?” he demanded of Harrison.

The young fellow seemed to have recovered his composure, for he answered

steadily enough, “I don’t know, sir. I saw him go for’ard a little while

ago.”

“So did I go for’ard. But you will observe that I didn’t come back the

way I went. Can you explain it?”

“You must have been overboard, sir.”

“Shall I look for him in the steerage, sir?” I asked.

Wolf Larsen shook his head. “You wouldn’t find him, Hump. But you’ll

do. Come on. Never mind your bedding. Leave it where it is.”

I followed at his heels. There was nothing stirring amidships.

“Those cursed hunters,” was his comment. “Too damned fat and lazy to

stand a four-hour watch.”

But on the forecastle-head we found three sailors asleep. He turned them

over and looked at their faces. They composed the watch on deck, and it

was the ship’s custom, in good weather, to let the watch sleep with the

exception of the officer, the helmsman, and the look-out.

“Who’s look-out?” he demanded.

“Me, sir,” answered Holyoak, one of the deep-water sailors, a slight

tremor in his voice. “I winked off just this very minute, sir. I’m

sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

“Did you hear or see anything on deck?”

“No, sir, I—”

But Wolf Larsen had turned away with a snort of disgust, leaving the

sailor rubbing his eyes with surprise at having been let off so easily.

“Softly, now,” Wolf Larsen warned me in a whisper, as he doubled his body

into the forecastle scuttle and prepared to descend.

I followed with a quaking heart. What was to happen I knew no more than

did I know what had happened. But blood had been shed, and it was

through no whim of Wolf Larsen that he had gone over the side with his

scalp laid open. Besides, Johansen was missing.

It was my first descent into the forecastle, and I shall not soon forget

my impression of it, caught as I stood on my feet at the bottom of the

ladder. Built directly in the eyes of the schooner, it was of the shape

of a triangle, along the three sides of which stood the bunks, in

double-tier, twelve of them. It was no larger than a hall bedroom in

Grub Street, and yet twelve men were herded into it to eat and sleep and

carry on all the functions of living. My bedroom at home was not large,

yet it could have contained a dozen similar forecastles, and taking into

consideration the height of the ceiling, a score at least.

It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp

I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots,

oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts. These swung

back and forth with every roll of the vessel, giving rise to a brushing

sound, as of trees against a roof or wall. Somewhere a boot thumped

loudly and at irregular intervals against the wall; and, though it was a

mild night on the sea, there was a continual chorus of the creaking

timbers and bulkheads and of abysmal noises beneath the flooring.

The sleepers did not mind. There were eight of them,—the two watches

below,—and the air was thick with the warmth and odour of their

breathing, and the ear was filled with the noise of their snoring and of

their sighs and half-groans, tokens plain of the rest of the animal-man.

But were they sleeping? all of them? Or had they been sleeping? This

was evidently Wolf Larsen’s quest—to find the men who appeared to be

asleep and who were not asleep or who had not been asleep very recently.

And he went about it in a way that reminded me of a story out of

Boccaccio.

He took the sea-lamp from its swinging frame and handed it to me. He

began at the first bunks forward on the star-board side. In the top one

lay Oofty-Oofty, a Kanaka and splendid seaman, so named by his mates. He

was asleep on his back and breathing as placidly as a woman. One arm was

under his head, the other lay on top of the blankets. Wolf Larsen put

thumb and forefinger to the wrist and counted the pulse. In the midst of

it the Kanaka roused. He awoke as gently as he slept. There was no

movement of the body whatever. The eyes, only, moved. They flashed wide

open, big and black, and stared, unblinking, into our faces. Wolf Larsen

put his finger to his lips as a sign for silence, and the eyes closed

again.

In the lower bunk lay Louis, grossly fat and warm and sweaty, asleep

unfeignedly and sleeping laboriously. While Wolf Larsen held his wrist

he stirred uneasily, bowing his body so that for a moment it rested on

shoulders and heels. His lips moved, and he gave voice to this enigmatic

utterance:

“A shilling’s worth a quarter; but keep your lamps out for

thruppenny-bits, or the publicans ’ll shove ’em on you for sixpence.”

Then he rolled over on his side with a heavy, sobbing sigh, saying:

“A sixpence is a tanner, and a shilling a bob; but what a pony is I don’t

know.”

Satisfied with the honesty of his and the Kanaka’s sleep, Wolf Larsen

passed on to the next two bunks on the starboard side, occupied top and

bottom, as we saw in the light of the sea-lamp, by Leach and Johnson.

As Wolf Larsen bent down to the lower bunk to take Johnson’s pulse, I,

standing erect and holding the lamp, saw Leach’s head rise stealthily as

he peered over the side of his bunk to see what was going on. He must

have divined Wolf Larsen’s trick and the sureness of detection, for the

light was at once dashed from my hand and the forecastle was left in

darkness. He must have leaped, also, at the same instant, straight down

on Wolf Larsen.

The first sounds were those of a conflict between a bull and a wolf. I

heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach a

snarling that was desperate and blood-curdling. Johnson must have joined

him immediately, so that his abject and grovelling conduct on deck for

the past few days had been no more than planned deception.

I was so terror-stricken by this fight in the dark that I leaned against

the ladder, trembling and unable to ascend. And upon me was that old

sickness at the pit of the stomach, caused always by the spectacle of

physical violence. In this instance I could not see, but I could hear

the impact of the blows—the soft crushing sound made by flesh striking

forcibly against flesh. Then there was the crashing about of the

entwined bodies, the laboured breathing, the short quick gasps of sudden

pain.

There must have been more men in the conspiracy to murder the captain and

mate, for by the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly

reinforced by some of their mates.

“Get a knife somebody!” Leach was shouting.

“Pound him on the head! Mash his brains out!” was Johnson’s cry.

But after his first bellow, Wolf Larsen made no noise. He was fighting

grimly and silently for life. He was sore beset. Down at the very

first, he had been unable to gain his feet, and for all of his tremendous

strength I felt that there was no hope for him.

The force with which they struggled was vividly impressed on me; for I

was knocked down by their surging bodies and badly bruised. But in the

confusion I managed to crawl into an empty lower bunk out of the way.

“All hands! We’ve got him! We’ve got him!” I could hear Leach crying.

“Who?” demanded those who had been really asleep, and who had wakened to

they knew not what.

“It’s the bloody mate!” was Leach’s crafty answer, strained from him in a

smothered sort of way.

This was greeted with whoops of joy, and from then on Wolf Larsen had

seven strong men on top of him, Louis, I believe, taking no part in it.

The forecastle was like an angry hive of bees aroused by some marauder.

“What ho! below there!” I heard Latimer shout down the scuttle, too

cautious to descend into the inferno of passion he could hear raging

beneath him in the darkness.

“Won’t somebody get a knife? Oh, won’t somebody get a knife?” Leach

pleaded in the first interval of comparative silence.

The number of the assailants was a cause of confusion. They blocked

their own efforts, while Wolf Larsen, with but a single purpose, achieved

his. This was to fight his way across the floor to the ladder. Though

in total darkness, I followed his progress by its sound. No man less

than a giant could have done what he did, once he had gained the foot of

the ladder. Step by step, by the might of his arms, the whole pack of

men striving to drag him back and down, he drew his body up from the

floor till he stood erect. And then, step by step, hand and foot, he

slowly struggled up the ladder.

The very last of all, I saw. For Latimer, having finally gone for a

lantern, held it so that its light shone down the scuttle. Wolf Larsen

was nearly to the top, though I could not see him. All that was visible

was the mass of men fastened upon him. It squirmed about, like some huge

many-legged spider, and swayed back and forth to the regular roll of the

vessel. And still, step by step with long intervals between, the mass

ascended. Once it tottered, about to fall back, but the broken hold was

regained and it still went up.

“Who is it?” Latimer cried.

In the rays of the lantern I could see his perplexed face peering down.

“Larsen,” I heard a muffled voice from within the mass.

Latimer reached down with his free hand. I saw a hand shoot up to clasp

his. Latimer pulled, and the next couple of steps were made with a rush.

Then Wolf Larsen’s other hand reached up and clutched the edge of the

scuttle. The mass swung clear of the ladder, the men still clinging to

their escaping foe. They began to drop off, to be brushed off against

the sharp edge of the scuttle, to be knocked off by the legs which were

now kicking powerfully. Leach was the last to go, falling sheer back

from the top of the scuttle and striking on head and shoulders upon his

sprawling mates beneath. Wolf Larsen and the lantern disappeared, and we

were left in darkness.