In the Sargasso Sea by Thomas A. Janvier (smart books to read .TXT) 📖

my place in it, and lie

with all those unhidden others wasting away slowly in the open light

of day. I got so sick as these horrid thoughts pressed upon me that I

turned to the table and poured out for myself a stiff drink of

gin-and-water—being careful first to rinse the glass well—and I was

glad that I thought of it, for it did me good.

 

My movement about the cabin roused up the dying fellow and he hailed

me to give him some more gin. His voice was so thick that I knew that

the drink already had fuddled him; and after he had swiped off what I

gave him he began to talk again. But the liquor had taken such hold

upon him that he called me “Jack,” not recognizing me, and evidently

fancying that I was his mate—the man whom he had killed.

 

At first he rambled on about the storm that had wrecked them; and then

about their chance of falling in with a passing vessel; and then about

some woman named Hannah who would be worrying about him because he did

not come home. As well as I could make out he went over in this

fashion most of what had happened—and it was little enough, in one

way—from the time that the two found themselves alone upon the hulk

until they began to get among the weed, and realized pretty well

what that meant for them.

 

“It ain’t no use now, Jack,” he rambled on. “It ain’t no use now

thinkin’ about gettin’ home, an’ Hannah may as well stop lookin’ fur

me. This is th’ Dead Man’s Sea we’re gettin’ into; an’ I knows it

well, an’ you knows it well, both on us havin’ heerd it talked about

by sailormen ever sence we come afloat as boys. Down in th’ middle of

it is all th’ old dead wrecks that ever was sence ships begun sailin’;

and all th’ old dead sailormen is there too. It’s a orful place,

Jack, that me an’ you’s goin’ to—more damn orful, I reckon, than we

can hev any idee. Gin’s all thet’s lef’ to us, and it’s good luck we

hev such swashins of it aboard. Here’s at you, Jack an’ gimme some

more out o’ the kag, you damn starin’ owl.”

 

There was an angry tone in his voice as he spoke these last words; and

the tone was sharper a moment later when he went on: “Can’t you keep

your owl eyes shet, you beast? Don’t look at me like that, or I’ll

stick a knife into you. No, I’m not starin’ at you; it’s you who’s

starin’ at me, damn you. Stop it! Stop it, I say, you—” and he broke

out with a volley of foul names and curses; and partly raised himself,

as though he thought that a fight was coming on. And then the pain

which this movement caused him made him fall back again with a groan.

 

Without his asking for it I gave him another drink, which quieted

him a little; and then put fresh strength into him, so that he burst

out again with his curses and abuse. “Cut the heart out of me, will

you—you scum of rottenness? I’d have you to know that cuttin’ hearts

out is a game two can play at. Take that, damn you! An’ that! An’

that! Them’s fur your starin’—you damn fat-faced blinkin’ owl. And I

mean now t’ keep on till I stop you. No more of your owl-starin’ fur

me! Take it agen, you stinkin’ starin’ owl. So! An’ so! An’ so!”

 

He fairly raised himself up in the berth as he rushed out his words,

and at the same time thrust savagely with his right hand as though he

had a knife in it. For a minute or more he kept his position, cursing

with a strong voice and thrusting all the time. Suddenly he gave a

yell of pain and fell on his back again, crying brokenly: “Hell! It’s

you who’ve finished me!” And then he gave two or three short sharp

gasps, and after that there was a little gurgling in his throat, and

then he was still—lying there as dead as any man could be.

 

This quick ending of him came so suddenly that it staggered me; but I

must say that my first feeling, when I fairly realized what had

happened, was thankfulness that his life was gone—for I had had

enough of him to know that having much more of him would drive me mad.

 

In the telling of it, of course, most of what made all this horrible

slips away from me, and it don’t seem much to strain a man, after all.

But it really was pretty bad: what with the shadowy light in the

stateroom, for even with the port uncovered it still was dusky; and

the horrid smell there; and the vividness with which the fellow

somehow managed to make me feel those days and weeks of his half-crazy

half-drunken life, while he and the other man stared at each other

until neither of them could bear it any longer—and so took to

fighting from sheer heart-breaking horror of loneliness and killed

each other out of hand. And back of all that I had the feeling that I

was caught in the same fate that had shut in upon them; and was even

worse off than they had been, since I had no one to fight my life away

with but must take it myself when I found my solitude in that rotten

desolation more than I could stand.

 

Even the gin-and-water, though I took another big drink of it, could

not hearten me; but it did give me the courage to rid myself of the

two dead brutes by casting them overboard; and, indeed, getting rid of

them was a necessity, for their presence seemed to me so befouling

that I found it hard to breathe.

 

With the man on deck—except that touching him was hateful to me—I

did not have much trouble. I just made fast to him a couple of heavy

iron bars that I found down in the engine-room—pokers, they seemed to

be, for serving the boiler fires—and then dragged him along the deck

to a place where the bulwarks were gone and there shot him overboard.

And luckily the weed was thinnish there, and he went down like a stone

into it and through it and so disappeared.

 

But with the man in the cabin I had a harder job. In his horridly cut

condition I could not bring myself to touch him, and the best that I

could do was to make a sort of bundle of him and the mattress and the

bedclothes all together—with a bit of light line whipped around and

around the whole mass until it was snug and firm. When it was finished

I worked it out of the stateroom, and rolled it fairly easily along

the floor of the cabin to the companionway—and there it stuck fast.

Budge it I could not; for it was too long to roll up the stair, and

too heavy for me to haul it up after me or to push it up before me,

though I tried both ways and tried hard. But in the end I managed to

get it up by means of a purchase that I rigged from a ringbolt in the

deck just outside the companionway door; and once having it on deck I

could manage it again easily, for there I could roll it along.

 

Yet I did not at once cast it overboard; for I had no more iron bars

with which to weight it, and I knew that such a bunch of stuff would

not sink through the weed—and that I should have it still

loathsomely with me, lying only partly hidden in the weed right

alongside. In the end I got up a big iron cinder-bucket that I filled

with coal—making sure that the coal would stay in it by lashing a

piece of canvas over the top—and this I made fast to the bundle by a

rope three or four fathoms long. Then I cast the bucket overboard

through the break in the bulwarks, and as it shot downward I rolled

the bundle after it—and I had the comfort of seeing the whole go down

through the weed and away from my sight forever into the hidden

water below.

 

And then I sat down on the deck and rested; for what little cheering

and strength I had got from the gin-and-water had left me and I was

utterly miserable and tired as a dog. But I was well quit of both my

dead men, and that was a good job well done.

XVII

HOW I WALKED MYSELF INTO A MAZE

 

Sitting there with the splotches of fresh blood on the deck all around

me was more than I could stomach for very long. The sight of them

brought back to me with a horrid distinctness everything that I had

seen since I came aboard the hulk: the dead man lying on the deck, the

other man with his frightful wounds and his wild talk and his death in

the midst of his passionate ravings, and the disgusting work that I

had been forced to do before I could hide their two bodies from my

sight in the sea-depths beneath the tangled weed. And so, presently, I

scrambled to my feet, thinking to get back to the Hurst Castle

again—where there was no taint of blood to bring up haunting visions

and where, though it seemed a long while past to me, I had been in the

company of honest and kindly men.

 

But when I turned toward this poor escape from my misery—which at

best was but a change from a foul prison to a clean one—I saw that I

could not easily compass it; for in the time that had passed since I

had made my jump in the morning—noon being by then upon me—the

Hurst Castle had swung around a little, being caught I suppose upon

some bit of sunken wreckage, so that where the two ships were nearest

to each other there was an open reach of twenty feet or more

across the weed.

 

This was too great a distance for a jump, seeing that it must be made

from rail to rail without a run to give me a send-off; and yet it was

so short that my not being able to cross it never even entered my

mind. Had there been a mast standing on the hulk, with a yard fast to

it, I could have rigged a rope from the yard-arm and swung myself

across in a moment; but the decks being sea-swept, with nothing left

standing on them, that way was not open to me; nor could I find a

light spar—even the flag-staff at the stern being snapt away—that I

could stretch across from one rail to the other and make a bridge of.

The only other thing that occurred to me was to tear off some of the

doors in the cabin and to make of them a little raft that I could pass

by, though I saw well enough that pushing a raft through so dense a

tangle even for that short distance would be a hard job. And then I

had the thought that perhaps on the sailing-ship lying beside me I

might find a sound boat, which would better answer my purpose since it

could be the more easily moved through the weed. In point of fact I

could not have moved a boat a single foot through that thicket without

cutting a passage for it, and I might have thrown overboard three or

four doors