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

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