The Sea Wolf, Jack London [best memoirs of all time TXT] 📗

Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest, are what I had with Wolf Larsen, eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss life, literature, and the universe, the while Thomas Mugridge fumed and raged and did my work as well as his own.

“Watch out for squalls, is all I can say to you,” was Louis’s warning, given during a spare half-hour on deck while Wolf Larsen was engaged in straightening out a row among the hunters.

“Ye can’t tell what’ll be happenin’,” Louis went on, in response to my query for more definite information.  “The man’s as contrary as air currents or water currents.  You can never guess the ways iv him.  ’Tis just as you’re thinkin’ you know him and are makin’ a favourable slant along him, that he whirls around, dead ahead and comes howlin’ down upon you and a-rippin’ all iv your fine-weather sails to rags.”

So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Louis smote me.  We had been having a heated discussion,—upon life, of course,—and, grown over-bold, I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf Larsen and the life of Wolf Larsen.  In fact, I was vivisecting him and turning over his soul-stuff as keenly and thoroughly as it was his custom to do it to others.  It may be a weakness of mine that I have an incisive way of speech; but I threw all restraint to the winds and cut and slashed until the whole man of him was snarling.  The dark sun-bronze of his face went black with wrath, his eyes were ablaze.  There was no clearness or sanity in them—nothing but the terrific rage of a madman.  It was the wolf in him that I saw, and a mad wolf at that.

He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm.  I had steeled myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly; but the enormous strength of the man was too much for my fortitude.  He had gripped me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud.  My feet went out from under me.  I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.  The muscles refused their duty.  The pain was too great.  My biceps was being crushed to a pulp.

He seemed to recover himself, for a lucid gleam came into his eyes, and he relaxed his hold with a short laugh that was more like a growl.  I fell to the floor, feeling very faint, while he sat down, lighted a cigar, and watched me as a cat watches a mouse.  As I writhed about I could see in his eyes that curiosity I had so often noted, that wonder and perplexity, that questing, that everlasting query of his as to what it was all about.

I finally crawled to my feet and ascended the companion stairs.  Fair weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley.  My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed before I could use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness and pain went out of it.  And he had done nothing but put his hand upon my arm and squeeze.  There had been no wrenching or jerking.  He had just closed his hand with a steady pressure.  What he might have done I did not fully realize till next day, when he put his head into the galley, and, as a sign of renewed friendliness, asked me how my arm was getting on.

“It might have been worse,” he smiled.

I was peeling potatoes.  He picked one up from the pan.  It was fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled.  He closed his hand upon it, squeezed, and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy streams.  The pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared with me had the monster put his real strength upon me.

But the three days’ rest was good in spite of it all, for it had given my knee the very chance it needed.  It felt much better, the swelling had materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending into its proper place.  Also, the three days’ rest brought the trouble I had foreseen.  It was plainly Thomas Mugridge’s intention to make me pay for those three days.  He treated me vilely, cursed me continually, and heaped his own work upon me.  He even ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was becoming animal-like myself, and I snarled in his face so terribly that it must have frightened him back.  It is no pleasant picture I can conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van Weyden, in that noisome ship’s galley, crouched in a corner over my task, my face raised to the face of the creature about to strike me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog’s, my eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of fear and helplessness.  I do not like the picture.  It reminds me too strongly of a rat in a trap.  I do not care to think of it; but it was elective, for the threatened blow did not descend.

Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I glared.  A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and showing our teeth.  He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I had not quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to intimidate me.  There was only one galley knife that, as a knife, amounted to anything.  This, through many years of service and wear, had acquired a long, lean blade.  It was unusually cruel-looking, and at first I had shuddered every time I used it.  The cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and proceeded to sharpen the knife.  He did it with great ostentation, glancing significantly at me the while.  He whetted it up and down all day long.  Every odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out and was whetting away.  The steel acquired a razor edge.  He tried it with the ball of his thumb or across the nail.  He shaved hairs from the back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge somewhere.  Then he would put it on the stone again and whet, whet, whet, till I could have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.

It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it, that under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like mine, that would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against doing and was afraid of doing.  “Cooky’s sharpening his knife for Hump,” was being whispered about among the sailors, and some of them twitted him about it.  This he took in good part, and was really pleased, nodding his head with direful foreknowledge and mystery, until George Leach, the erstwhile cabin-boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject.

Now it happened that Leach was one of the sailors told off to douse Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain.  Leach had evidently done his task with a thoroughness that Mugridge had not forgiven, for words followed and evil names involving smirched ancestries.  Mugridge menaced with the knife he was sharpening for me.  Leach laughed and hurled more of his Telegraph Hill Billingsgate, and before either he or I knew what had happened, his right arm had been ripped open from elbow to wrist by a quick slash of the knife.  The cook backed away, a fiendish expression on his face, the knife held before him in a position of defence.  But Leach took it quite calmly, though blood was spouting upon the deck as generously as water from a fountain.

“I’m goin’ to get you, Cooky,” he said, “and I’ll get you hard.  And I won’t be in no hurry about it.  You’ll be without that knife when I come for you.”

So saying, he turned and walked quietly forward.  Mugridge’s face was livid with fear at what he had done and at what he might expect sooner or later from the man he had stabbed.  But his demeanour toward me was more ferocious than ever.  In spite of his fear at the reckoning he must expect to pay for what he had done, he could see that it had been an object-lesson to me, and he became more domineering and exultant.  Also there was a lust in him, akin to madness, which had come with sight of the blood he had drawn.  He was beginning to see red in whatever direction he looked.  The psychology of it is sadly tangled, and yet I could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though it were a printed book.

Several days went by, the Ghost still foaming down the trades, and I could swear I saw madness growing in Thomas Mugridge’s eyes.  And I confess that I became afraid, very much afraid.  Whet, whet, whet, it went all day long.  The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge and glared at me was positively carnivorous.  I was afraid to turn my shoulder to him, and when I left the galley I went out backwards—to the amusement of the sailors and hunters, who made a point of gathering in groups to witness my exit.  The strain was too great.  I sometimes thought my mind would give way under it—a meet thing on this ship of madmen and brutes.  Every hour, every minute of my existence was in jeopardy.  I was a human soul in distress, and yet no soul, fore or aft, betrayed sufficient sympathy to come to my aid.  At times I thought of throwing myself on the mercy of Wolf Larsen, but the vision of the mocking devil in his eyes that questioned life and sneered at it would come strong upon me and compel me to refrain.  At other times I seriously contemplated suicide, and the whole force of my hopeful philosophy was required to keep me from going over the side in the darkness of night.

Several times Wolf Larsen tried to inveigle me into discussion, but I gave him short answers and eluded him.  Finally, he commanded me to resume my seat at the cabin table for a time and let the cook do my work.  Then I spoke frankly, telling him what I was enduring from Thomas Mugridge because of the three days of favouritism which had been shown me.  Wolf Larsen regarded me with smiling eyes.

“So you’re afraid, eh?” he sneered.

“Yes,” I said defiantly and honestly, “I am afraid.”

“That’s the way with you fellows,” he cried, half angrily, “sentimentalizing about your immortal souls and afraid to die.  At sight of a sharp knife and a cowardly Cockney the clinging of life to life overcomes all your fond foolishness.  Why, my dear fellow, you will live for ever.  You are a god, and God cannot be killed.  Cooky cannot hurt you.  You are sure of your resurrection.  What’s there to be afraid of?

“You have eternal life before you.  You are a millionaire in immortality, and a millionaire whose fortune cannot be lost, whose fortune is less perishable than the stars and as lasting as space or time.  It is impossible for you to diminish your principal.  Immortality is a thing without beginning or end.  Eternity is eternity, and though you die here and now you will go on living somewhere else and hereafter.  And it is all very beautiful, this shaking off of the flesh and soaring of the imprisoned spirit.  Cooky cannot hurt you.  He can only give you a boost on the path you eternally must tread.

“Or, if you do not wish to be boosted just