The Sea Wolf by Jack London (best classic literature .txt) 📖

He turned and walked aft to the wheel.  I went forward and took my station at the jibs.  Another whisper of wind, and another, passed by.  The canvas flapped lazily.

“Thank Gawd she’s not comin’ all of a bunch, Mr. Van Weyden,” was the Cockney’s fervent ejaculation.

And I was indeed thankful, for I had by this time learned enough to know, with all our canvas spread, what disaster in such event awaited us.  The whispers of wind became puffs, the sails filled, the Ghost moved.  Wolf Larsen put the wheel hard up, to port, and we began to pay off.  The wind was now dead astern, muttering and puffing stronger and stronger, and my head-sails were pounding lustily.  I did not see what went on elsewhere, though I felt the sudden surge and heel of the schooner as the wind-pressures changed to the jibing of the fore- and main-sails.  My hands were full with the flying-jib, jib, and staysail; and by the time this part of my task was accomplished the Ghost was leaping into the south-west, the wind on her quarter and all her sheets to starboard.  Without pausing for breath, though my heart was beating like a trip-hammer from my exertions, I sprang to the topsails, and before the wind had become too strong we had them fairly set and were coiling down.  Then I went aft for orders.

Wolf Larsen nodded approval and relinquished the wheel to me.  The wind was strengthening steadily and the sea rising.  For an hour I steered, each moment becoming more difficult.  I had not the experience to steer at the gait we were going on a quartering course.

“Now take a run up with the glasses and raise some of the boats.  We’ve made at least ten knots, and we’re going twelve or thirteen now.  The old girl knows how to walk.”

I contested myself with the fore crosstrees, some seventy feet above the deck.  As I searched the vacant stretch of water before me, I comprehended thoroughly the need for haste if we were to recover any of our men.  Indeed, as I gazed at the heavy sea through which we were running, I doubted that there was a boat afloat.  It did not seem possible that such frail craft could survive such stress of wind and water.

I could not feel the full force of the wind, for we were running with it; but from my lofty perch I looked down as though outside the Ghost and apart from her, and saw the shape of her outlined sharply against the foaming sea as she tore along instinct with life.  Sometimes she would lift and send across some great wave, burying her starboard-rail from view, and covering her deck to the hatches with the boiling ocean.  At such moments, starting from a windward roll, I would go flying through the air with dizzying swiftness, as though I clung to the end of a huge, inverted pendulum, the arc of which, between the greater rolls, must have been seventy feet or more.  Once, the terror of this giddy sweep overpowered me, and for a while I clung on, hand and foot, weak and trembling, unable to search the sea for the missing boats or to behold aught of the sea but that which roared beneath and strove to overwhelm the Ghost.

But the thought of the men in the midst of it steadied me, and in my quest for them I forgot myself.  For an hour I saw nothing but the naked, desolate sea.  And then, where a vagrant shaft of sunlight struck the ocean and turned its surface to wrathful silver, I caught a small black speck thrust skyward for an instant and swallowed up.  I waited patiently.  Again the tiny point of black projected itself through the wrathful blaze a couple of points off our port-bow.  I did not attempt to shout, but communicated the news to Wolf Larsen by waving my arm.  He changed the course, and I signalled affirmation when the speck showed dead ahead.

It grew larger, and so swiftly that for the first time I fully appreciated the speed of our flight.  Wolf Larsen motioned for me to come down, and when I stood beside him at the wheel gave me instructions for heaving to.

“Expect all hell to break loose,” he cautioned me, “but don’t mind it.  Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the fore-sheet.”

I managed to make my way forward, but there was little choice of sides, for the weather-rail seemed buried as often as the lee.  Having instructed Thomas Mugridge as to what he was to do, I clambered into the fore-rigging a few feet.  The boat was now very close, and I could make out plainly that it was lying head to wind and sea and dragging on its mast and sail, which had been thrown overboard and made to serve as a sea-anchor.  The three men were bailing.  Each rolling mountain whelmed them from view, and I would wait with sickening anxiety, fearing that they would never appear again.  Then, and with black suddenness, the boat would shoot clear through the foaming crest, bow pointed to the sky, and the whole length of her bottom showing, wet and dark, till she seemed on end.  There would be a fleeting glimpse of the three men flinging water in frantic haste, when she would topple over and fall into the yawning valley, bow down and showing her full inside length to the stern upreared almost directly above the bow.  Each time that she reappeared was a miracle.

The Ghost suddenly changed her course, keeping away, and it came to me with a shock that Wolf Larsen was giving up the rescue as impossible.  Then I realized that he was preparing to heave to, and dropped to the deck to be in readiness.  We were now dead before the wind, the boat far away and abreast of us.  I felt an abrupt easing of the schooner, a loss for the moment of all strain and pressure, coupled with a swift acceleration of speed.  She was rushing around on her heel into the wind.

As she arrived at right angles to the sea, the full force of the wind (from which we had hitherto run away) caught us.  I was unfortunately and ignorantly facing it.  It stood up against me like a wall, filling my lungs with air which I could not expel.  And as I choked and strangled, and as the Ghost wallowed for an instant, broadside on and rolling straight over and far into the wind, I beheld a huge sea rise far above my head.  I turned aside, caught my breath, and looked again.  The wave over-topped the Ghost, and I gazed sheer up and into it.  A shaft of sunlight smote the over-curl, and I caught a glimpse of translucent, rushing green, backed by a milky smother of foam.

Then it descended, pandemonium broke loose, everything happened at once.  I was struck a crushing, stunning blow, nowhere in particular and yet everywhere.  My hold had been broken loose, I was under water, and the thought passed through my mind that this was the terrible thing of which I had heard, the being swept in the trough of the sea.  My body struck and pounded as it was dashed helplessly along and turned over and over, and when I could hold my breath no longer, I breathed the stinging salt water into my lungs.  But through it all I clung to the one idea—I must get the jib backed over to windward.  I had no fear of death.  I had no doubt but that I should come through somehow.  And as this idea of fulfilling Wolf Larsen’s order persisted in my dazed consciousness, I seemed to see him standing at the wheel in the midst of the wild welter, pitting his will against the will of the storm and defying it.

I brought up violently against what I took to be the rail, breathed, and breathed the sweet air again.  I tried to rise, but struck my head and was knocked back on hands and knees.  By some freak of the waters I had been swept clear under the forecastle-head and into the eyes.  As I scrambled out on all fours, I passed over the body of Thomas Mugridge, who lay in a groaning heap.  There was no time to investigate.  I must get the jib backed over.

When I emerged on deck it seemed that the end of everything had come.  On all sides there was a rending and crashing of wood and steel and canvas.  The Ghost was being wrenched and torn to fragments.  The foresail and fore-topsail, emptied of the wind by the manœuvre, and with no one to bring in the sheet in time, were thundering into ribbons, the heavy boom threshing and splintering from rail to rail.  The air was thick with flying wreckage, detached ropes and stays were hissing and coiling like snakes, and down through it all crashed the gaff of the foresail.

The spar could not have missed me by many inches, while it spurred me to action.  Perhaps the situation was not hopeless.  I remembered Wolf Larsen’s caution.  He had expected all hell to break loose, and here it was.  And where was he?  I caught sight of him toiling at the main-sheet, heaving it in and flat with his tremendous muscles, the stern of the schooner lifted high in the air and his body outlined against a white surge of sea sweeping past.  All this, and more,—a whole world of chaos and wreck,—in possibly fifteen seconds I had seen and heard and grasped.

I did not stop to see what had become of the small boat, but sprang to the jib-sheet.  The jib itself was beginning to slap, partially filling and emptying with sharp reports; but with a turn of the sheet and the application of my whole strength each time it slapped, I slowly backed it.  This I know: I did my best.  I pulled till I burst open the ends of all my fingers; and while I pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split their cloths apart and thundered into nothingness.

Still I pulled, holding what I gained each time with a double turn until the next slap gave me more.  Then the sheet gave with greater ease, and Wolf Larsen was beside me, heaving in alone while I was busied taking up the slack.

“Make fast!” he shouted.  “And come on!”

As I followed him, I noted that in spite of rack and ruin a rough order obtained.  The Ghost was hove to.  She was still in working order, and she was still working.  Though the rest of her sails were gone, the jib, backed to windward, and the mainsail hauled down flat, were themselves holding, and holding her bow to the furious sea as well.

I looked for the boat, and, while Wolf Larsen cleared the boat-tackles, saw it lift to leeward on a big sea an not a score of feet away.  And, so nicely had he made his calculation, we drifted fairly down upon it, so that nothing remained to do but hook the tackles to either end and hoist it aboard.  But this was not done so easily as it is written.

In the bow was Kerfoot, Oofty-Oofty in the stern, and Kelly amidships.  As we drifted closer the boat would rise on a wave while we sank in the trough, till almost straight above me I could see the heads of the three men craned overside and looking down.  Then, the next moment, we would lift and soar upward while they sank far down beneath us.  It seemed incredible that the next surge should not crush the Ghost down upon the tiny eggshell.

But, at the right moment, I passed the tackle to the Kanaka, while Wolf Larsen did the same thing forward to Kerfoot.  Both tackles