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

You’ll never see eighteen again.  Big for your age at that, with muscles like a horse.  Pack up your kit and go for’ard into the fo’c’sle.  You’re a boat-puller now.  You’re promoted; see?”

Without waiting for the boy’s acceptance, the captain turned to the sailor who had just finished the gruesome task of sewing up the corpse.  “Johansen, do you know anything about navigation?”

“No, sir,”

“Well, never mind; you’re mate just the same.  Get your traps aft into the mate’s berth.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” was the cheery response, as Johansen started forward.

In the meantime the erstwhile cabin-boy had not moved.  “What are you waiting for?” Wolf Larsen demanded.

“I didn’t sign for boat-puller, sir,” was the reply.  “I signed for cabin-boy.  An’ I don’t want no boat-pullin’ in mine.”

“Pack up and go for’ard.”

This time Wolf Larsen’s command was thrillingly imperative.  The boy glowered sullenly, but refused to move.

Then came another stirring of Wolf Larsen’s tremendous strength.  It was utterly unexpected, and it was over and done with between the ticks of two seconds.  He had sprung fully six feet across the deck and driven his fist into the other’s stomach.  At the same moment, as though I had been struck myself, I felt a sickening shock in the pit of my stomach.  I instance this to show the sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the time, and how unused I was to spectacles of brutality.  The cabin-boy—and he weighed one hundred and sixty-five at the very least—crumpled up.  His body wrapped limply about the fist like a wet rag about a stick.  He lifted into the air, described a short curve, and struck the deck alongside the corpse on his head and shoulders, where he lay and writhed about in agony.

“Well?” Larsen asked of me.  “Have you made up your mind?”

I had glanced occasionally at the approaching schooner, and it was now almost abreast of us and not more than a couple of hundred yards away.  It was a very trim and neat little craft.  I could see a large, black number on one of its sails, and I had seen pictures of pilot-boats.

“What vessel is that?” I asked.

“The pilot-boat Lady Mine,” Wolf Larsen answered grimly.  “Got rid of her pilots and running into San Francisco.  She’ll be there in five or six hours with this wind.”

“Will you please signal it, then, so that I may be put ashore.”

“Sorry, but I’ve lost the signal book overboard,” he remarked, and the group of hunters grinned.

I debated a moment, looking him squarely in the eyes.  I had seen the frightful treatment of the cabin-boy, and knew that I should very probably receive the same, if not worse.  As I say, I debated with myself, and then I did what I consider the bravest act of my life.  I ran to the side, waving my arms and shouting:

“Lady Mine ahoy!  Take me ashore!  A thousand dollars if you take me ashore!”

I waited, watching two men who stood by the wheel, one of them steering.  The other was lifting a megaphone to his lips.  I did not turn my head, though I expected every moment a killing blow from the human brute behind me.  At last, after what seemed centuries, unable longer to stand the strain, I looked around.  He had not moved.  He was standing in the same position, swaying easily to the roll of the ship and lighting a fresh cigar.

“What is the matter?  Anything wrong?”

This was the cry from the Lady Mine.

“Yes!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs.  “Life or death!  One thousand dollars if you take me ashore!”

“Too much ’Frisco tanglefoot for the health of my crew!” Wolf Larsen shouted after.  “This one”—indicating me with his thumb—“fancies sea-serpents and monkeys just now!”

The man on the Lady Mine laughed back through the megaphone.  The pilot-boat plunged past.

“Give him hell for me!” came a final cry, and the two men waved their arms in farewell.

I leaned despairingly over the rail, watching the trim little schooner swiftly increasing the bleak sweep of ocean between us.  And she would probably be in San Francisco in five or six hours!  My head seemed bursting.  There was an ache in my throat as though my heart were up in it.  A curling wave struck the side and splashed salt spray on my lips.  The wind puffed strongly, and the Ghost heeled far over, burying her lee rail.  I could hear the water rushing down upon the deck.

When I turned around, a moment later, I saw the cabin-boy staggering to his feet.  His face was ghastly white, twitching with suppressed pain.  He looked very sick.

“Well, Leach, are you going for’ard?” Wolf Larsen asked.

“Yes, sir,” came the answer of a spirit cowed.

“And you?” I was asked.

“I’ll give you a thousand—” I began, but was interrupted.

“Stow that!  Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy?  Or do I have to take you in hand?”

What was I to do?  To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not help my case.  I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes.  They might have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they contained.  One may see the soul stir in some men’s eyes, but his were bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea itself.

“Well?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Say ‘yes, sir.’”

“Yes, sir,” I corrected.

“What is your name?”

“Van Weyden, sir.”

“First name?”

“Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.”

“Age?”

“Thirty-five, sir.”

“That’ll do.  Go to the cook and learn your duties.”

And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to Wolf Larsen.  He was stronger than I, that was all.  But it was very unreal at the time.  It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it.  It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible nightmare.

“Hold on, don’t go yet.”

I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.

“Johansen, call all hands.  Now that we’ve everything cleaned up, we’ll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.”

While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under the captain’s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a hatch-cover.  On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up, were lashed a number of small boats.  Several men picked up the hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side, and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard.  To the feet was attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.

I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and awe-inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at any rate.  One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates called “Smoke,” was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf-chorus or the barking of hell-hounds.  The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and talked in low tones together.  There was an ominous and worried expression on their faces.  It was evident that they did not like the outlook of a voyage under such a captain and begun so inauspiciously.  From time to time they stole glances at Wolf Larsen, and I could see that they were apprehensive of the man.

He stepped up to the hatch-cover, and all caps came off.  I ran my eyes over them—twenty men all told; twenty-two including the man at the wheel and myself.  I was pardonably curious in my survey, for it appeared my fate to be pent up with them on this miniature floating world for I knew not how many weeks or months.  The sailors, in the main, were English and Scandinavian, and their faces seemed of the heavy, stolid order.  The hunters, on the other hand, had stronger and more diversified faces, with hard lines and the marks of the free play of passions.  Strange to say, and I noted it all once, Wolf Larsen’s features showed no such evil stamp.  There seemed nothing vicious in them.  True, there were lines, but they were the lines of decision and firmness.  It seemed, rather, a frank and open countenance, which frankness or openness was enhanced by the fact that he was smooth-shaven.  I could hardly believe—until the next incident occurred—that it was the face of a man who could behave as he had behaved to the cabin-boy.

At this moment, as he opened his mouth to speak, puff after puff struck the schooner and pressed her side under.  The wind shrieked a wild song through the rigging.  Some of the hunters glanced anxiously aloft.  The lee rail, where the dead man lay, was buried in the sea, and as the schooner lifted and righted the water swept across the deck wetting us above our shoe-tops.  A shower of rain drove down upon us, each drop stinging like a hailstone.  As it passed, Wolf Larsen began to speak, the bare-headed men swaying in unison, to the heave and lunge of the deck.

“I only remember one part of the service,” he said, “and that is, ‘And the body shall be cast into the sea.’  So cast it in.”

He ceased speaking.  The men holding the hatch-cover seemed perplexed, puzzled no doubt by the briefness of the ceremony.  He burst upon them in a fury.

“Lift up that end there, damn you!  What the hell’s the matter with you?”

They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea.  The coal at his feet dragged him down.  He was gone.

“Johansen,” Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, “keep all hands on deck now they’re here.  Get in the topsails and jibs and make a good job of it.  We’re in for a sou’-easter.  Better reef the jib and mainsail too, while you’re about it.”

In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts—all naturally confusing to a landsman such as myself.  But it was the heartlessness of it that especially struck me.  The dead man was an episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her work went on.  Nobody had been affected.  The hunters were laughing at a fresh story of Smoke’s; the men pulling and hauling, and two of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly, and sinking down, down—

Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me.  Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.  I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast.  Rain-squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog.  And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.

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