 6 By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out, and the ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind. Occasional light airs were felt, however, and Wolf Larson patrolled the poop constantly, his eyes ever searching the sea to the northeastward, from which direction the great trade winds must blow. The men were all on deck and busily preparing their various boats for the season's hunting. There were seven boats aboard, the captain's dinghy, and the six which the hunters will use. Three, a hunter, a boat-poller, and a boat-steerer composed of boats crew. On board the schooner the boat-pollers and stirrers are the crew. The hunters, too, are supposed to be in command of the watch's subject, always, to the orders of Wolf Larson. All this and more I have learned. The ghost is considered the fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets. In fact, she was once a private yacht and was built for speed. Her lines and fittings, though I know nothing about such things, speak for themselves. Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat I had with him during yesterday's second dog watch. He spoke enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as some men feel for horses. He is greatly disgusted with the outlook, and I am given to understand that Wolf Larson bears a very unsavory reputation among the sealing captains. It was the ghost herself that lured Johnson into signing for the voyage, but he is already beginning to repent. As he told me, the ghost is an eighty-ton schooner of a remarkably fine model. Her beam, her width, is twenty-three feet, and her length a little over ninety feet. A lead keel of fabulous but unknown weight makes her very stable, while she carries an immense spread of canvas. From the deck to the trunk of the main top mast is something over a hundred feet, while the four mast, with its top mast, is eight or ten feet shorter. I am giving these details so that the size of this little floating world, which holds twenty-two men, may be appreciated. It is a very little world, a moat, a speck, and I marvel that men should dare to venture the sea on a contrivance so small and fragile. Bill Florison has also a reputation for reckless carrying on of sail. I overheard Henderson and another of the hunters, Standish, a Californian, talking about it. Two years ago he dismasted the ghost in a gale on Bering Sea, whereupon the present masts were put in, which are stronger and heavier in every way. He has said to have remarked when he put them in that he preferred turning her over to losing the sticks. Every man aboard, with the exception of Johansson, who is rather overcome by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the ghost. Half the men forward are deep-water sailors, and their excuse is that they did not know anything about her or her captain. And those who do know whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities that they could not sign on any decent schooner. I have made the acquaintance of another one of the crew, Lewis, he is called, a retunned and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener. In the afternoon, while the cook was below asleep and I was peeling the everlasting potatoes, Lewis dropped into the galley for a yarn. His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed. He assured me again and again that it was the last thing in the world he would dream of doing in a sober moment. It seems that he had been seal-hunting regularly each season for a dozen years, and is accounted one of the two or three very best boat-steers in both fleets. Ah, my boy, he shook his head ominously at me. It is the worst schooner ye could have selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was I. It is seal-hunting as the sailors' paradise on other ships than this. The mate was the first, but mark me words, there'll be more dead men before the trip is done with. Hissed now between you and me self in the stanchion there, this wolf-larsen is a regular devil, and the ghost will be a hell-ship like she's always been since he had hold of her. Don't I know? Don't I know? Don't I remember him and Hoketa two years gone when he had a row and shot four of his men? Wasn't I a lion on the Emma-El not three hundred yards away? And there was a man the same year he killed with a blow of his fist. Yes, sir, killed him dead-o. His head must have smashed like an egg shell. And wasn't there the governor of Kura Island and the chief of police, Japanese gentleman-sir, and didn't they come aboard the ghost as his guests are bringing their wives along? We in pretty old bits of things like you see him painted on fans, and as he was a get-and-under-way didn't the fond husbands get left a stern like in their Sam Pan as it might be by accident? And wasn't it a week later that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other side of the island with nothing before him but to walk home across the mountains under weenie-teenie-little-straw sandals which wouldn't hang together a mile? Don't I know? Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larson, who the great big beast mentioned in Revelation, and no good end will he ever come to. But I've said nothing to ye, mind ye. I've whispered never a word. For Fatal Lewis will live the voyage out if the last mother-son of ye's go to the fishes. Wolf Larson, he snorted a moment later. Listen to the word, will ye, Wolf, tis what he is. He's not blackhearted like some men, tis no heart he has at all. Wolf, just Wolf, tis what he is. Do ye wonder he's well-named? But if he is so well-known for what he is, I queried, how is it that he can get men to ship with him? And how is it ye can find men to do anything on God's earth and see, Lewis demanded with Celtic fire? How do ye find me aboard if it wasn't that I was drunk as a pig when I put me name down? There's them that can't sail with better men like the hunters, and them that don't know, like the poor devils of Windjammer's forward there. But they'll come to it, they'll come to it, and be sorry the day they was born. I could weep for the poor creatures, did I, but forget poor Fatal Lewis and the troubles before him. But tis not a whisper, I've dropped, mind ye, not a whisper. Them hunters is the wicked boys, he broke forth again, for he suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. But wait till they get to cutting up of jinx and rowing round. He's the boy I'll fix him. Tis him that'll put the fear of God in their rotten black hearts. Look at that hunter of mine, Horner. Jock Horner, they call him, so quiet like an easy-going, soft-spoken as a girl, till ye'd think butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of him. Didn't he kill his boat steerer last year? It was called a sad accident, but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama, and the straight of it was given me. Then there's Smoke, the black little devil. Didn't the Ruchians have him for three years in the salt mines of Siberia, for poaching on Copper Island, which is a Ruchian preserve? Shackled he was, hand and foot, with his mate. And didn't they have words or a ruckus of some kind? Hort was the other fellow, Smoke sent up in the buckets to the top of the mine, and a piece at a time he went up, a leg today, and tomorrow an arm, the next day the head, and so on. But you can't mean it, I cried out, overcome with the horror of it. Mean what? He demanded quick as a flash. Tis nothing I've said. Deaf I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake of your mother, and never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things of him, and him God-curses soul, and may he rot in purgatory ten thousand years, and then go down to the last and deepest hell ev'all. Johnson, the man who had shaped me raw when I first came aboard, seemed the least equivocal of the men forward or aft. In fact there was nothing equivocal about him. One was struck at once by a straightforwardness and manliness, which in turn were tempered by a modesty which might be mistaken for timidity. But timid he was not. He seemed rather to have the courage of his convictions, the certainty of his manhood. It was this that made him protest at the commencement of our acquaintance against being called Jonson, and upon this and him we was past judgment and prophecy. "'Tis a fine chap,' that squirre had Jonson, we've forwarded with this. He said, "'The best sailor man in the folk-soul. He's my boat-puller. But it's to trouble he'll come with Wolf-Larsen as the sparks fly upward. It's me self that knows. I can see it brewing and coming up like it's dormant in the sky. I've talked to him like a brother, but it's little he sees in taking in his lights or flying fault signals. He grumbles out when things don't go to suit him, and there'll always be some tell-tale-carrying word of it after the Wolf. The Wolf is strong, and it's the way of a Wolf to hate strength, and strength it is he'll see in Jonson. No knuckling under, and a yes, sir, thank ye kindly, sir, for a curse or a blow. Oh, she's a common. She's a common. And God knows where I'll get another boat-puller. And what does the fool up and say when the old man calls him Jonson, but my name is Jonson, sir, and then spells it out letter for letter? You should have seen the old man's face. I thought he'd let drive at him on the spot. He didn't, but he will, and he'll break that square head's heart, or it's little I know of the ways of men on the ships of the sea. Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to mister him and to serve him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larson seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for the captain to be chummy with a cook. But this is certainly what Wolf Larson is doing. Two or three times he put his head into the galley and shaved Mugridge good-naturedly. And once this afternoon he stood by the break of the poop and chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes. When it was over, and Mugridge was back in the galley, he became greasily radiant and went about his work, humming costar songs and nerve-wracking, and discordant falsetto. I always get along with the officers who remark to me in a confidential tone. I know the why I do, to Mike myself appreciated. There was my last gipper, why I thought nothing of dropping down in the cabin for a little chat in a friendly glass. Mugridge says he to me, Mugridge says he, you've missed your vocation, and how's that, says I. You should have been born a gentleman, and never had to work for your living. God strike me dead, ump, if that wasn't what he says, and me a-sittin' there in his own cabin, jolly-like and comfortable, as smokin' his cigars and drinkin' his rum. This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction. I never heard a voice, I hated so. His oily, insinuating tones, his greasy smile, and his monstrous self-conceit graded on my nerves, till sometimes I was all in a tremble. Positively, he was the most disgusting and loathsome person I have ever met. The filth of his cooking was indescribable, and as he cooked everything that was eatin' aboard, I was compelled to select what I ate with great circumspection, choosing from the least dirty of his concoctions. My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work. The nails were discolored and black, while the skin was already grained with dirt which even a scrubbing brush could not remove. Then blisters came, in a painful and never-ending procession, and I had a great burn in my forearm, acquired by losing my balance in the roll of the ship and pitching against the galley stove, nor was my knee any better. The swelling had not gone down, and the cap was still up on edge. Hobbling about on it from morning till night was not helping it any. What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get well. Rest. I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been resting all my life and did not know it. But now could I sit still for one half hour and do nothing, not even think it would be the most pleasurable thing in the world. But it is a revelation, on the other hand. I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working people hereafter. I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing. From half past five in the morning till ten o'clock at night I am everybody's slave, with not one moment to myself, except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog watch. Let me pause for a moment to look out over the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the gaff top sails, or running out the bow spirit, and I am sure to hear the hateful voice. Here are you, um, no soldierin, I've got my peepers on you. There are signs of rampant bad temper in the steerage, and the gossip is going around that Smoke and Henderson have had a fight. Henderson seems the best of the hunters, as slow going fellow and hard to rouse, but roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discolored eye, and looked particularly vicious when he came into the cabin for supper. A cruel thing happened just before supper, indicative of the callousness and brutishness of these men. There is one green hand in the crew, Harrison by name, the clumsy looking country boy, mastered, I imagine, by the spirit of adventure and making his first voyage. In the light baffling airs, the schooner had been tacking about a great deal, at which times the sails passed from one side to the other, and a man is sent aloft to shift over the foregap top sail. In some way, when Harrison was aloft, the sheet jammed in the block through which it runs at the end of the gaff. As I understood it, there were two ways of getting it cleared. First by lowering the foresail, which was comparatively easy and without danger, and second by climbing out the peak hollyards to the end of the gaff itself, and exceedingly hazard his performance. Johnson called out to Harrison to go out the hollyards. It was patent to everybody that the boy was afraid. And well he might be, eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking ropes. Had there been a steady breeze, it would not have been so bad, but the ghost was rolling emptily in a long sea, and with each roll the can was flapped and boomed, and the hollyard slacked and jerked taut. They were capable of snapping a man off like a fly from a whiplash. Harrison heard the order and understood what was demanded of him, but hesitated. It was probably the first time he had been aloft in his life. Johansson, who had got the contagion of Wolfhorsen's masterfulness, burst out with a volley of abuse and curses. "'That'll do, Johansson,' Wolfhorsen said brusquely. "'I'll have you know that I do the swearing on this ship. "'If I need your assistance, I'll call you in.' "'Yes, sir,' the mate acknowledged, submissively.' In the meantime Harrison had started out on the hollyards. I was looking up from the golly door, and I could see him trembling, as with Agu, in every limb. He proceeded very slowly and cautiously an inch at a time. Outlined against the clear blue of the sky, he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery of its web. It was a slight uphill climb for the foresail peak-tie, and the hollyards running through the various blocks on the gaff and mast gave him separate holds for hands and feet. But the trouble lay in that the wind was not strong enough, nor steady enough to keep the sail full. When he was halfway out, the ghost took a long roll to the windward and back again into the hollow between two seas. Harrison ceased his progress and held on tightly. Eighty feet below I could see the agonized strain of his muscles as he gripped for very life. The sail emptied and the gaff swung amid ships. The hollyard slackened, and though it all happened very quickly, I could see them sag beneath the weight of his body. When the gag swung to the side with an abrupt swiftness, the great sail boomed like a cannon, and the three rows of reef points slotted against the canvas like a volley of rifles. Harrison, clinging on, made the giddy rush through the air. This rush ceased abruptly. The hollyards became instantly taut. It was the snap of a whip. His clutch was broken. One hand was torn loose from its hold. The other lingered desperately for a moment and followed. His body pitched out and down, but in some way he managed to save himself with his legs. He was hanging by them, head downward. A quick effort brought his hands up to the hollyards again, but he was a long time regaining his former position, where he hung a pitable object. Albeit he has no appetite for supper, I heard Wolf Larson's voice, which came to me from around the corner of the galley. Stand out from under you, Johansson. Watch out. Here she comes. In truth Harrison was very sick, as a person is seasick, and for a long time he clung to his precarious perch without attempting to move. Johansson, however, continued violently to urge him on to the completion of his task. It is a shame. I heard Johansson growling and painfully slow and incorrect English. He was standing by the main rigging a few feet from me. The boy is willing enough. He will learn if he has a chance. But this is. He paused a while, for the word murder was his final judgment. Hissed will he, Lewis whispered to him. For the love of your mother, hold your mouth. But Johansson, looking on, still continued, is grumbling. Look here, the hunter Standish spoke to Wolf Larson. That's my boat-poller, and I don't want to lose him. That's all right, Standish, was a reply. He's your boat-poller when you've got him in the boat. But he's my sailor when I have him aboard. And I'll do what I damn well please with him. But that's no reason Standish began in the torrent of speech. That'll do. Easy as she goes, Wolf Larson counseled back. I've told you what's what, and let it stop at that. The man's mine, and I'll make soup of him and eat it, if I want to. There was an angry gleam in the hunter's eye, but he turned on his heel, and entered the storage companion-way, where he remained, looking upward. All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were aloft, where a human life was at grapples with death. The callousness of these men, to whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had lived out the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was carried on in such a fashion. Life had always seemed a particularly sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing. It was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. I must say, however, that the sailors themselves were sympathetic, as instanced the case of Johnson, but the masters, the hunters and the captain, were heartlessly indifferent. Even the protest of Stanley sure rose out of the fact that he did not wish to lose his boat-poller. Had it been some other hunter's boat-poller, he, like them, would have been no more than amused. But to return to Harrison, it took Johansson and Solding, and reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started again. A little later he made the end of the gaffe, where astride the spar itself, he had a better chance for holding on. He cleared the sheet, and was free to return slightly down hill now along the halyards to the mast. But he had lost his nerve. Unsafe, as was his present position, he was loathed to forsake it for the more unsafe position on the halyards. He looked along the airy path he must traverse, and then down to the deck. His eyes were wide and staring, and he was trembling violently. I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human face. Johansson called vainly for him to come down. At any moment he was liable to be snapped off the gaffe, but he was helpless with fright. Wolf Larson, walking up and down with smoke and in conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply once to the man at the wheel. You're off your course, my man. Be careful, unless you're looking for trouble. Aye-aye, sir, the helmsman responded, putting a couple of spokes down. He had been guilty of running the ghost several points off her course, in order that what little wind there was should fill the foresail and hold it steady. He had striven to help the unfortunate Harrison at the risk of incurring Wolf Larson's anger. Time went by, and the suspense, to me, was terrible. Thomas Mugridge, on the other hand, considered it a laughable affair, and was continuously bobbing his head out of the galley to make Jocos' remarks. How I hated him, and how my hatred for him grew and grew during that fearful time to Cyclopean dimensions. For the first time in my life I experienced the desire to murder. Saw a red, as some of our picturesque writers phrase it. Life in general might still be sacred, but life in the particular case of Thomas Mugridge had become very profane indeed. I was frightened when I became conscious that I was seeing red, and the thought fleshed through my mind was I, too, becoming painted by the brutality of my environment. I, who even in the most flagrant crimes had denied the justice and righteousness of capital punishment, fully half an hour went by, and then I saw Johnson and Lewis in some sort of altercation. It ended with Johnson flinging off Lewis' detaining arm and starting forward. He crossed the deck, sprang into the fore-rigging, and began to climb. But the quick eye of Wolfhorsen caught him. Here are you. What are you up to? He cried. Johnson's assent was arrested. He looked his captain in the eyes and replied slowly, I am going to get that boy down. You'll get down out of that rigging and damn lively about it. Do you hear? Get down. Johnson hesitated, but the long years of obedience to the masters of ships overpowered him, and he dropped sullenly to the deck and went on forward. At half-after-five I went below to set the cabin table, but I hardly knew what I did, for my eyes and my brain were filled with the vision of a man, white-faced and trembling, comically like a bug, clinging to the thrashing gaff. At six o'clock, when I served supper, going on deck to get the food from the galley, I saw Harrison still in the same position. The conversation at the table was of other things. No one seemed interested in the wantonly imperiled life. But making an extra trip to the galley a little later, I was gladdened by the sight of Harrison staggering weakly from the rigging to the forecastle scuttle. He had finally summoned the courage to descend. Before closing this incident, I must give a scrap of conversation I had with Wolf Larson in the cabin while I was washing the dishes. You were looking squeamish this afternoon, he began. What was the matter? I could see that he knew what had made me possibly as sick as Harrison, that he was trying to draw me, and I answered. It was because of the British treatment of that boy. He gave a short laugh, like seasickness, I suppose. Some men are subject to it, and others are not. Not so, I objected. Just so, he went on. The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion, and some men are made sick by the one and some by the other. That's the only reason. But you, who make a mock of human life, don't you place any value upon it, whatever? I demanded. Value? What value, he looked at me, and though his eyes were steady and motionless, there seemed a cynical smile in them. What kind of value? How do you measure it? Who values it? I do, I made answer. Then what is it worth to you? Another man's life, I mean. Come now. What is it worth? The value of life? How could I put a tangible value upon it? Somehow I, who have always had expression, lacked expression when with Wolf-Warsson, I have since determined that a part of it was due to the man's personality, but that the greater part was due to his totally different outlook. Unlike other materialists I have met, and with whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing in common with him. Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind that baffled me. He drove so directly to the core of the matter, divesting the question always of all superfluous details, and with such an era of finality that I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water with no footing under me. Value of life? How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment? The sacredness of life I had accepted is axomatic, that it was intrinsically value was a truism I had never questioned. But when he challenged the truism, I was speechless. We were talking about this yesterday, he said. I held that life was a ferment, a yeasty something which devoured life that it might live, and that living was merely successful piggishness. Why, if there was anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air, but life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our lines are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit in every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah, it has no value. Of cheap things, it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and its life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left. You have read Darwin, I said, but you're reading misunderstandingly when you conclude that the struggle for existence sanctions your wanton destruction of life. He shrugged his shoulders. You know you only mean that in relation to human life, for of the flesh and the fowl and the fish, you destroy as much as I or any other man. And human life is in no wise different, though you feel it is and think that you reason why it is. Why should I be parsimonious with this life which is cheap and without value? There are more sailors than there are ships on the sea for them, more workers than there are factories or machines for them. Why you who live on the land know that you house your poor people in the slums of city and lose famine and pestilence upon them, and that there still remains more poor people dying for want of a crust of bread and a bit of meat, which is life destroyed. Then you know what to do with. Have you ever seen the London Dockers fighting like wild beasts for a chance to work? He started for the companion stares but turned his head for a final word. Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself, and it is, of course, overestimated since it is of necessity, prejudice and its own favor. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds or rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large. To himself only was he of value, and to show how fictitious even this value was. Being dead he is unconscious that he has lost himself. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away with a bucket of seawater, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses knowledge of the loss. Don't you see? And what have you to say? That you are at least consistent, was all that I could say, and I went on washing the dishes. End of chapter 6. Chapter 7 of The Seawolf. This library of books recording is in the public domain. The Seawolf by Jack London. Chapter 7. At last, after three days of variable winds, we have caught the northeast trades. I came on deck after a good night's rest in spite of my poor knee, to find the ghost foaming along, wing and wing, and every sail drawing except the jibs with a fresh breeze of stern. Oh, the wonder of the great trade wind. All day we sailed, and all night, and the next day, after day the wind always is stern, and blowing steadily and strong. The schooner sailed herself. There was no pulling and hauling on sheets and tackles, no shifting the top sails, no work at all for the sailors to do except to steer. At night when the sun went down, the sheets were slackened, and the morning when they yielded up the damp of the dew and relaxed, they were pulled tight again. And that was all. 10 knots, 12 knots, 11 knots, varying from time to time as the speed we are making. And ever out of the northeast, the brave wind blows, driving us on our course 250 miles between the dons. It saddens me and gladdens me, the gait with which we are leaving San Francisco behind, and with which we were foaming down upon the tropics. Every day grows perceptively warmer, and the second dog watch the sailors come on deck stripped and heave buckets of water upon one another from over side. Flying fish are beginning to be seen, and during the night the watch above scrambles over the deck and pursuit of those that fall aboard. In the morning Thomas Mugridge being duly bribed, the galley is pleasantly a reek with the odor of their frying, while dolphin meat is served foreign aft on such occasions as Johnson catches the blazing beauties from the bowsprit end. Johnson seems to spend all his spare time there, or a loft at the cross trees, watching the ghost cleaving the water under press of sail. There is passion, adoration in his eyes, and he goes about in a sort of trance, gazing in ecstasy at the swelling sails, the foaming wake, and the heave and the run of her over the liquid mountains that are moving with this in stately procession. The days and nights are all a wonder and a wild delight, and though I have little time for my dreary work, I steal odd moments to gaze, and gaze at the unending glory of what I never dreamed the world possessed. Above the sky is stainless blue, blue is the sea itself, which under the forefoot is of the color and sheen of azure satin. All around the horizon are pale, fleecy clouds never changing, never moving, like a silver setting for the flawless turquoise sky. I do not forget one night when I should have been asleep, of lying on the forecastle head, and gazing down at the spectral ripple of foam thrust aside by the ghost forefoot. It sounded like the gurgling of a brick over mossy stones in some quiet dell, and the crooning song of it blurred me away and out of myself, till I was no longer humped, the cabin boy, nor van Wyden, the man who had dreamed away 35 years among bucks. But a voice behind me, the unmistakable voice of Wolf Larson, strung with the invincible certitude of the man and mellow with appreciation of the words he was quoting, aroused me. O the blazing, tropic night when the wakes a weld of light that holds the hot sky tame, and the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors, where the scared whale flukes in flame. Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass, and her ropes are taut with the dew. For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, we're sagging south on the long trail, the trail that is always new. Eh, hump, how's it strike you? he asked, after the dew-paws which the words and setting demanded. I looked into his face. It was a glow with light as the sea itself, and the eyes were flashing in the starshine. It strikes me as remarkable, to say the least, that you should go enthusiasm, I answered coldly. Why, man, it's living, it's life, he cried, which is a cheap thing and without value. I flung his words at him. He laughed, and it was the first time I had heard honest mirth in his voice. Ah, I cannot get you to understand, cannot drive it into your head what a thing this life is. Of course life is valueless except to itself, and I can tell you that my life is pretty valuable just now, to myself. It is beyond price, which you will acknowledge is a terrific overrating, but which I cannot help for it is the life that is in me that makes the rating. He appeared waiting for the words with which to express the thought that was in him, and finally went on. Do you know I am filled with a strange uplift. I feel as if all time were echoing through me as though all powers were mine. I know truth, divine good, from evil, right from wrong. My vision is far and clear. I could almost believe in God, but, and his voice changed and the light went out of his face, what is this condition in which I find myself, this joy of living, this exultation of life, this inspiration, I may well call it. It is what comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when his stomach is in trim and his appetite has an edge and all goes well. It is the bribe for living, the champagne of the blood, the effervescence of the ferment that makes some men think holy thoughts and other men to see God or to create him when they cannot see him. That is all the drunkenness of life, the stirring and crawling of the yeast, the babbling of the life that is insane with consciousness that is alive. And, ah, tomorrow I shall pay for it as the drunkard pays, and I shall know that I must die at sea most likely, sea-scrolling upon myself to be all accrued with the corruption of the sea, to be fed upon, to be currying, to yield up all the strength and the movement of my muscles that it may become strength and movement and fin and scale and the guts of fish. Bah! And bah, again! The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink. He left me as suddenly as he had come springing to the deck with the weight and softness of a tiger. The ghost plunged on her way. I noticed the gurgling forefoot was very like a snore, and as I listened to it the effect of wolf force and swift rush from sublime exultation to despair slowly left me. Then some deep-water sailor from the waist of the ship lifted a rich tenor voice in the song of the trade wind. Oh, I am the wind, the seamen love. I am steady and strong and true. They follow my track by the clouds above, or the fathomless, tropic blue. Through daylight and dark I follow the bark. I keep like a hound on a trail. I am the strongest at noon yet under the moon. I stiffen the bunt of her sail. End of chapter 7 Chapter 8 of The Seawolf This library of ox recording is in the public domain. The Seawolf by Jack London. Chapter 8. Sometimes I think wolf larsen mad, or half mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has never arrived. And finally I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years, or generations too late, and an anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he is very lonely. There is no congeniality between him and the rest of the men aboard ship. His tremendous virility and mental strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him, even the hunters. And as children he treats them, descending per force to their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist, groping about in their mental processes and examining their souls as though to see what soul stuff is made. I have seen him a score of times at table, insulting this hunter or that, with cool and level eyes, and with all, a certain error of interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost laughable to me who stood on looker and who understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main there are the habits of oppose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow men. I know, with the possible exception of the incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen him really angry, nor do I ever wish to see him in a genuine rage when all the force of him is called into play. While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident upon which I have already touched once or twice. The twelve o'clock dinner was over one day, and I had just finished putting the cabin in order when Wolf Larson and Thomas Mugridge descended the companion stairs. Though the cook had a cubbyhole of a stateroom opening off from the cabin, in the cabin itself he had never dared to linger or to be seen, and he flooded to and fro once or twice a day at timid specter. So you know how to play nap, Wolf Larson was saying in a pleased sort of voice. I might have guessed an Englishman would know. I learned it myself in English ships. Thomas Mugridge was beside himself, a blithering imbecile. So pleased was he at chumming thus with the captain. The little errors he put on and the painful striving to assume the easy carriage of a man born to a dignified place in life would have been sickening had they not been ludicrous. He quite ignored my presence, though I credited him with being simply unable to see me. His pale, wishy-washy eyes were swimming like lazy summer seas, though what blissful visions they beheld were beyond my imagination. Get the cards, hump, Wolf Larson ordered, as they took seats at the table, and bring out the cigars and the whisky you'll find in my birth. I returned with the articles in time to hear the cockney hinting broadly that there was a mystery about him, that he might be a gentleman's son gone wrong, or something or other. Also that he was a remittance man, and was paid to keep away from England. Bied omsonly, sir, was the way he put it, bied omsonly to sling my oak and keep slinging it. I had brought the customary liquor-glasses, but Wolf Larson frowned, shook his head, and signaled with his hands for me to bring the tumblers. These he filled two-thirds full with undilited whisky, a gentleman's drink, quote Thomas Mugridge, and they clinked their glasses to the glorious game of nap, lighted cigars, and fell to shuffling and deeling the cards. They played for money. They increased the amounts of the bets. They drank whisky, they drank it neat, and I fetched more. I do not know whether Wolf Larson cheated or not, a thing he was thoroughly capable of doing, but he won steadily. The cook made repeated journeys to his bunk for money. Each time he performed the journey with greater swagger, but he never brought more than a few dollars at a time. He grew modlin, familiar, could hardly see the cards or sit upright. As a preliminary to another journey to his bunk, he hooked Wolf Larson's buttonhole with a greasy forefinger and vacuously pronounced and reiterated. I got money. I got money, I tell you, and I'm a gentleman's son. Wolf Larson was unaffected by the drink, yet he drank glass for glass, and if anything, his glasses were fuller. There was no change in him. He did not appear even amused at the other's antics. In the end, with loud protestations that he could lose like a gentleman, the cook's last money was staked on the game and lost. Whereupon he leaned his head on his hands and wept. Wolf Larson looked curiously at him, as though about to probe and visitsect him, then changed his mind as from the foregone conclusion that there was nothing there to probe. Hump, he said to me, elaborately polite. Kindly take Mr. Mugridge's arm and help him up on deck. He is not feeling very well. And tell Johnson to douse him with a few buckets of saltwater, he added, in a lower tone, for my ear alone. I left Mr. Mugridge on deck in the hands of a couple of grinning sailors who had been told off for the purpose. Mr. Mugridge was sleepily sputtering that he was a gentleman's son. But as I descended the companion stares to clear the table, I heard him shriek as the first bucket of water hit him. Wolf Larson was counting his winnings. $185 even, he said aloud, just as I thought. The beggar came aboard without a cent. And what you have won is mine, sir, I said boldly. He favored me with a quizzical smile. Hump, I have studied some grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled. Was mine, you should have said. Not is mine. It is a question not of grammar, but of ethics, I answered. It was possibly a minute before he spoke. Do you know, hump? He said, with his slow seriousness, which had in it the undefinable strain of sadness, that this is the first time I have heard the word ethics in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on this ship who know its meaning. At one time in my life, he continued after another pause, I dreamed that I might someday talk with men who used such language that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as ethics. And this is the first time I have ever heard the word pronounced, which is all, by the way, for you are wrong. It is a question of neither grammar nor ethics, but of fact. I understand, I said, the fact is that you have the money. His face brightened. He seemed pleased at my perspicacity. But it is avoiding the real question, I said, which is one of right. Ah, he remarked, with a right pucker of his mouth, I see you still believe in such things as right and wrong. But don't you, at all, I demanded? Not the least bit. Might is right, and that is all there is to it. Weakness is wrong, which is a very poor way of saying that it is good for oneself to be strong and evil for oneself to be weak. Or better yet, it is pleasurable to be strong because of the profits, painful to be weak because of the penalties. Just now, the possession of this money is a pleasurable thing. It is good for one to possess it. Being able to possess it, I wrong myself in the life that is in me, if I give it to you and forego the pleasure of possessing it. But you wrong me by withholding it, I objected. Not at all. One man cannot wrong another man. He can only wrong himself. As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the interests of others. Don't you see? How can two particles of the yeast wrong each other by striving to devour each other? It is their inborn heritage to strive to devour and to strive not to be devoured. When they depart from this, they sin. Then you don't believe in altruism, I asked. He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, that we pondered it thoughtfully. Let me see. It means something about cooperation, doesn't it? Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection, I answered, unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary, which, like his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated man whom no one had directed into studies and who had thought much and talked little or none at all. An altruistic act is an act performed for the welfare of others. It is unselfish as opposed to an act performed for self, which is selfish. He nodded his head. Oh yes, I remember it now. I ran across it in Spencer. Spencer, I cried. Have you read him? Not very much, was his confession. I understood quite a bit of first principles, but his biology took the wind out of my sails and his psychology left me butting around in the daldrums for many a day. I honestly could not understand what he was driving at. I put it down to mental deficiency on my part, but since then I have decided that it was for want of preparation. I had no proper basis. Only Spencer and myself know how hard I hammered. But I did get something out of his data of ethics. That's where I ran across altruism and I remember now how it was used. I wondered what this man could have got from such a work. Spencer, I remembered enough to know that altruism was imperative to his ideal of highest conduct. Wolf Larson evidently had sifted the great philosopher's teaching, rejecting and selecting according to his needs and desires. What else did you run across? I asked. His brows drew in slightly with the mental effort of suitably phrasing thought which he had never before put into speech. I felt an elation of spirit. I was groping into his soul stuff as he made a practice of groping in the soul stuff of others. I was exploring virgin territory. A strange, a terribly strange region was unrolling itself before my eyes. In as few of words as possible he began. Spencer puts it something like this. First a man must act for his own benefit. To do this is to be moral and good. Next he must act for the benefit of his children. And third he must act for the benefit of his race. And the highest, finest right conduct I interjected is that act which benefits at the same time the man, his children, and his race. I wouldn't stand for that, he replied. Couldn't see the necessity for it nor the common sense. I cut out the race and the children. I would sacrifice nothing for them. It is just so much slush and sentiment and you must see it yourself, at least for one who does not believe in eternal life. With immortality before me, altruism would be a pain business proposition. I might elevate my soul to all kinds of altitudes. But with nothing eternal before me but death, given for a brief spell this yeasty crawling and squirming which is called life, why it would be a moral for me to perform any act that was a sacrifice. Any sacrifice that makes me lose one crawl or squirm is foolish. And not only foolish, for it is a wrong against myself and a wicked thing. I must not lose one crawl or squirm if I am to get the most out of the ferment, nor will the eternal movelessness that is coming to me be made easier or harder by the sacrifices or selfishness of the time when I was yeasty in the crawl. Then you are an individualist, a materialist and logically a hedonist. Big words, he smiled, but what is a hedonist? He nodded agreement when I had given the definition. And you are also, I continued, a man one could not trust in the least thing where it was possible for a selfish interest to intervene. Now you're beginning to understand, he said, brightening. You are a man utterly without what the world calls morals, that's it. A man of whom to be always afraid, that's the way to put it, as one is afraid of a snake or a tiger or a shark. Now you know me, he said, and you know me as I am generally known. Other men call me wolf. You are a sort of monster, I added audiciously. A caliban who has pondered satibus and who acts as you act in idle moments by whim and fancy. His brow clouded at the illusion. He did not understand, and I quickly learned that he did not know the poem. I'm just reading browning, he confessed, and it's pretty tough. I haven't gotten very far along, and as it is, I've about lost my bearings. Not to be tiresome, I shall say, that I fetched the book from a state room and read caliban aloud. He was delighted. It was a primitive mode of reasoning and of looking at things that he understood thoroughly. He interrupted again and again with comment and criticism. When I finished, he had me read it over a second time and a third. We fell into discussion, philosophy, science, evolution, religion. He betrayed the inaccuracies of the self-read man and it must be granted the sureness and directness of the primitive mind. The very simplicity of his reasoning was his strength and his materialism was far more compelling than the subtly complex materialism of Charlie Fourseth. Not that I, I confirmed, and as Fourseth phrased at the temperamental idealist, was to be compelled, but that Wolf Larson stormed the last strongholds of my faith with the vigor that received respect while not accorded conviction. Time passed. Suffer was at hand and the table not laid. I became restless and anxious, and when Thomas Mugridge glared down the companion way, sick and angry of continence, I prepared to go about my duties. But Wolf Larson cried out to him, Cookie, you've got to hustle tonight. I'm busy with hump and you'll do the best you can without him. And again, the unprecedented was established. That night I sat at table with the captain and the hunters, while Thomas Mugridge waited on us and watched the dishes afterwards. A whim, a caliban mood of Wolf Larson's and one that I first saw would bring me trouble. In the meantime, we talked and talked much to the disgust of the hunters who could not understand the word. End of chapter eight. Chapter nine of The Sea Wolf. This library of ox recording is in the public domain. The Sea Wolf by Jack London. Chapter nine. Three days of rest, three blessed days of rest are what I had with Wolf Larson. Eating at the cabin table and doing nothing but discuss life, literature and the universe. The wild Thomas Mugridge fumed and raged and did my work as well as his own. Watch out for squalls, as all I can say to you was Lewis's warning given during a spare half hour on deck while Wolf Larson was engaged in straightening out a row among the hunters. You can't tell what'll be happening, Lewis 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 of him. It is just as you're thinking you know him and are making a favorable slant along him that he whirls around dead ahead and comes howling down upon you and a-ripping all of your fine weather sails to rags. So I was not altogether surprised when the squall foretold by Lewis smote me. We had been having a heated discussion upon life, of course, and groan over bold. I was passing stiff strictures upon Wolf Larson and the life of Wolf Larson. In fact, I was vivisecting him and turning over his sole stuff as keenly and as 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 cotton slashed until the whole man of him was snarling. The dark sun-brons 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 bicep 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's stairs. Fair weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley. My left arm was numb as though paralyzed in days past 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 squeezed. 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 hand 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 Wyden, 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, penning 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 where, 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 Johansson and proceeded to sharpen the knife. He did it with great ostentation, glancing significantly at me the while. He went at it up and down all day long. Every odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out and was wetting 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 his edge somewhere. Then he would put it on stone again and wet, wet, wet, 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. Cookie 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 Leitch, the erstwhile cabin boy, ventured some rough pleasantry on the subject. Now it happened that Leitch was one of the sailors told off to douse Mugridge after his game of cards with the captain. Leitch had evidently done his task with the 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. Leitch laughed and hurled more of his telegraph hill billings gate and before either he or I knew what had happened his right arm had been ripped open from elbow to wrist with a quick slice of the knife. They cooked back away a fiendish expression on his face. The knife held before him in a position of defense. But Leitch took it quite calmly, though blood was spurting upon the deck as generously as water from a fountain. I'm going to get you, Cookie, 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 what he might expect sooner or later from the man he had stabbed. But his demeanor 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 from the side 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 the madness growing in Thomas Mugridge's eyes. And I confessed that I became afraid, very much afraid. Wet, wet, wet, it went all day long. The look in his eyes as he felt the keen edge and cleared 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 and meet thing on this ship of mad men 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 Larson 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 Larson 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 favoritism which had been shown me. Wolf Larson 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 fun foolishness. Why, my dear fellow, you will live forever. You are a God and God cannot be killed. Cookie 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 is lasting as space or time. It is impossible for you to diminish your principle. 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, the shaking off of the flesh and soaring of the imprisoned spirit. Cookie 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 yet, why not boost Cookie? According to your ideas, he too must be an immortal millionaire. You cannot bankrupt him. His people will always circulate at par. You cannot diminish the length of his living by killing him for he is without beginning or end. He's bound to go on living somewhere somehow. Then boost him, stick a knife in him and let his spirit free. As it is, it's in a nasty prison and you'll do him only a kindness by breaking down the door. And who knows? It may be a very beautiful spirit that will go soaring up into the blue from that ugly carcass. Boost him along and I'll promote you to his place and he's getting $45 a month. It was plain that I could look for no help or mercy from Wolf Larson. Whatever was to be done I must do for myself and out of the courage of fear I evolved the plan of fighting Thomas Mugridge with his own weapons. I borrowed a whetstone from Johansson. Lewis, the boat steerer, had already bagged me for condensed milk and sugar. The lazarette where such delicacies were stored was situated beneath the cabin floor. Watching my chance I stole five cans of the milk and that night when it was Lewis's watch on deck I traded them with him for a dirk as lean and cruel looking as Thomas Mugridge's vegetable knife. It was rusty and dull but I turned the grindstone while Lewis gave it an edge. I slept more soundly than usual that night. Next morning after breakfast Thomas Mugridge began his whet, whet, whet. I glanced warily at him for I was on my knees taking the ashes from the stove. When I returned from throwing them over side he was talking to Harrison whose honest yokel's face was filled with fascination and wonder. Yes, Mugridge was saying, and what does his worship do but give me two years in readying? But blimey, if I cared. The other mug was fixed plenty. Shoulda seen him. Knife just like this. I stuck it in like into soft butter and the why he squealed was better than a two-penny gaff. He shot a glance in my direction to see if I was taking it in and went on. I didn't mean it, Tommy, he was sniffling. So help me God, I didn't mean it. I'll fix your bloody well right, I says and kept right after him. I got him to ribbons, that's what I did and he is squealing all the time. Once he got his ant on the knife and tried to hold it, I had his fingers around it, but I pulled it through, cutting to the bone. Oh, he was a sight, I can tell here. A call from the mate interrupted the gory narrative and Harrison went aft. Mugridge sat down on the raised threshold of the galley and went on with his knife-sharpening. I put the shovel away and calmly sat down on the coal box facing him. He favored me with a vicious stare. Still calmly, though my heart was going pit-a-pat, I pulled out the Lewis's dirk and began to whet it on the stone. I had looked for almost any sort of explosion on the cockney's part, but to my surprise he did not appear aware of what I was doing. He went on whetting his knife, so did I. And for two hours we sat there face to face, whet, whet, whet, till the news of it spread abroad and half the ship's company was crowding the galley doors to see the sight. Encouragement and advice were freely tendered and Jack Horner, the quiet, self-spoken hunter who looked as though he would not harm a mouse, advised me to leave the ribs alone and to thrust upward for the abdomen at the same time giving what he called the Spanish twist to the blade. Leech, his bandage arm prominently to the floor, begged me to leave a few remnants of the cook for him. And Wolf Larson paused once or twice at the break of the poop to glance curiously at what must have been to him a stirring and crawling of the yeasty thing he knew his life. And I make free to say that for the time being, life assumed the same sordid value to me. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing divine, only two cowardly moving things that sat wetting steel upon stone and a group of other moving things cowardly and otherwise that looked on. Half of them, I am sure, were anxious to see a shedding each other's blood. It would have been entertainment. And I do not think there was one who would have interfered had we closed into that struggle. On the other hand, the whole thing was laughable and childish, wet, wet, wet. Humphrey Van Wyden sharpening his knife in a chips galley and trying its edge with his thumb. Of all situations, this was the most inconceivable. I knew that my own kind could not have believed it possible. I had not been called Sissy Van Wyden all my days without reason, and that Sissy Van Wyden should be capable of doing this thing was a revelation to Humphrey Van Wyden, who knew not whether to be exultant or ashamed. But nothing happened. At the end of two hours Thomas Mugridge put away knife and stone and held out his hand. What's the good of making a holy show of ourselves for them mugs, he demanded. They don't love us, and bloody well glad they'd be a scene as cut in our throats. You're not half bad, Humphrey. You've got spunk as you yank, sigh. And I like your in a way. So come on and shyke. Coward that I might be, I was less a coward than he. It was a distinct victory I had gained, and I refused to forego any of it by shaking his detestable hand. All right, he said, pridelessly, tack it or leave it, I'll like your none the less for it. And to save his face he turned fiercifully upon the onlookers, get out of my galley doors, as you bloom in swabs. This command was reinforced by a steaming kettle of water, and outside of it the sailor scrambled out of the way. This was a sort of a victory for Thomas Mugridge, and enabled him to accept more gracefully the defeat I had given him, though of course he was too discreet to attempt to drive the hunters away. I see cookies finish, I heard smoke say to Horner. That was the reply. Hump runs the galley from now on, and cookie pulls in his horns. Mugridge heard and shot a swift glance at me, but I gave no sign that the conversation had reached me. I had not thought my victory was so far reaching and complete, but I resolved to let go nothing I had gained. As the days went by, smoke's prophecy was verified. The cockney became more humble and slavish to me than even to Wolf Larson. I mistured him and served him no longer, washed no more greasy pots, and peeled no more potatoes. I did my own work and my own work only, and when and in what fashion I saw fit. Also I carried the dirk in a sheath at my hip, sailor fashion, and maintained towards Thomas Mugridge a constant attitude, which was composed of equal parts of domineering, insult, and contempt. End of chapter nine. Chapter 10 of The Seawolf. This library of books recording is in the public domain. The Seawolf by Jack London. Chapter 10. My intimacy with Wolf Larson increases, if by intimacy may be denoted, those relations which exist between master and man or better yet between king and jester. I am to him no more than a toy, and he values me no more than a child values a toy. My function is to amuse, and so long as I am used all goes well. But let him become bored, or let him have one of his black moods come upon him, and at once I am relegated from cabin table to galley, while at the same time I am fortunate to escape with my life and a whole body. The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard, but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise. He seems consuming with the tremendous power that is in him, and that seems never to have found adequate expression in works. He is, as Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit bandaged to a society of soulless Tomlisonian ghosts. This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but to make it worse, he is oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I review the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. The white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon were of the same fiber as he. The frivolity of the laughter-loving Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it is from a humor that is nothing else than ferocious, but he laughs rarely, he is too often sad. And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race. It is the race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded, clean-lived, and fanatically moral, and which in this latter connection has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy. In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been religion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensation of such religions are denied, Wolf Larson. His brutal materialism will not permit it. So when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him but to be devilish. Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorry for him, as instance three mornings ago when I went into his state room to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon him. He did not see me. His head was buried in his hands and his shoulders were heaving convulsively as with sobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As I softly withdrew, I could hear him groaning, God, God, God. Not that he was calling upon God, it was a mere expletive, but it came from his soul. At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening, strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin. I've never been sick in my life, hump, he said, as I guided him to his room. Nor did I ever have a headache, except the time my head was healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar. For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered his wild animal suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer without plaint, without sympathy, utterly alone. This morning, however, upon entering his state-room to make the bed and put things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table and bunk were littered with designs and calculations. On a large transparent sheet, compass and square in hand, he was copying what appeared to be a scale of some sort or other. Hello, hump, he greeted me genially. I'm just finishing the finishing touches. Want to see it work? But what is it, I asked. A labor-saving device for Mariner's navigation reduced to kindergarten simplicity, he answered gaily. From today a child will be able to navigate a ship. No more long-winded calculations. All you need is one star in the sky on the dirty night to know instantly where you are. Look, I placed the transparent scale on this star map, revolving the scale on the North Pole. On the scale I've worked out the circles of altitude and the lines of bearing. All I do is put it on the star, revolve the scale until it is opposite those figures on the map underneath and presto. There you are, the ship's precise location. There was a ring of triumph in his voice and his eyes, clear blue this morning as the sea, were sparkling with light. You must be well up in mathematics, I said. Where did you go to school? Never saw the inside of one. Worst luck was the answer. I had to dig it out for myself. And why do you think I have made this thing? He demanded, abruptly, dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time. He laughed one of his horrible mocking laughs. Not at all, to get it patented, to make money from it, to revel in pigishness with all night in while other men do the work. That's my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working it out. The creative joy, I murmured. I guess that's what it ought to be called, which is another way of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast, because it is yeast that crawls. I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his invenerate materialism, and went about making the bed. He continued copying lines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring the utmost nice city and precision, and I could not but admire the way he tempered his strength to the finest and delicacy of the need. When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man, beautiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness in his face. It was the face, I am convinced, of a man who did no wrong. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no conscience. I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it. He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the borne nature. He was not immoral, but simply un-moral. As I have said, in the masculine sense, his was a beautiful face. Smooth as shaven, every line was distinct, and it was cut as clear and sharp as a cameo. While sea and sun had tanned the naturally fair skin to a dark bronze, which bespoke struggle and battle, and added both to his savagery and his beauty. The lips were full, yet possessed of a firmness, almost harshness, which is characteristic of thin lips. The set of his mouth, his chin, his jaw, was lacklaced, firm, or harsh, with all the fierceness and indominableness of the male. The nose also. It was the nose of a being born to conquer and command. It just hinted of the eagle beak. It might have been Grecian, it might have been Roman. Only it was a shade too massive for the one, a shade too delicate for the other. And while the whole face was the incarnation of fierceness and strength, the primal melancholy from which he suffered seemed to greaten the lines of mouth and eye and brow, seemed to give a largeness and completeness which otherwise the face would have lacked. And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot say how greatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What was he? How would he happen to be? All power seemed his, all potentialities. Why, then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted seals? My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech. Why is it that you have not done great things in this world? With the power that is yours, you might have risen to any height. Unpossessed of conscious or moral instinct, you might have mastered the world, broken it to your hand. And yet here you are at the top of your life to where diminishing and dying began, living an obscure and sordid existence, hunting sea animals for the satisfaction of woman's vanity and love of decoration, rebelling in a piggishness to use your own words, which is anything and everything except splendid. Why, with all that wonderful strength, have you not done something? There was nothing to stop you, nothing that could stop you. What was wrong? Did you lack ambition? Did you fall under temptation? What was the matter? What was the matter? He had lifted his eyes to me at the commencement of my outburst and followed me complacently until I had done instead before him breathless and dismayed. He waited a moment as though seeking where to begin and then said, Hump, do you know the parable of the sower who went forth to sow? If you will remember, some of the seed fell upon stony places where there was not much earth and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth. And when the sun was up they were scorched and because they had no roots they withered away. And some fell among thorns and the thorns sprung up and choked them. Well, I said. Well, he quiet half-petulently. It was not well. I was one of those seeds. He dropped his head to the scale and resumed the copying. I finished my work and had opened the door to leave when he spoke to me. Hump, if you will look on the west coast of the map of Norway, you will see an indentation called Rumsdel Fjord. I was born within 100 miles of that stretch of water but I was not born Norwegian. I am a Dane. My mother and father were Danes and how they ever came to that bleak bite of land on the west coast I do not know. I never heard. Outside of that there is nothing mysterious. They were poor people and unlettered. They came of generations of poor unlettered people, peasants of the sea who sowed their sons on the waves as it has been their customs since time began. There is no more to tell. But there is, I objected. It is still obscure to me. What can I tell you, he demanded with a recredescence of ferretsness, of the meagerness of a child's life, of fish diet and coarse living, of going out with the boats from the time I could crawl, of my brothers who went away one by one to the deep sea farming and never came back, of myself unable to read or write, cabin boy at the mature age of 10 on the coast wise old country ships, of the rough fare and rougher usage where kicks and blows were bed and breakfast and took the place of speech and fear and hatred and pain were my only soul experiences. I do not care to remember. A madness comes up in my brain even now as I think of it. But there were coast wise skippers I would have returned and killed when a man's strength came to me. Only the lines of my life were cast at the time and other places. I did return not long ago, but unfortunately the skippers were dead. All but one, a mate in the old days, a skipper when I met him and when I left him a cripple who would never walk again. But you who read Spencer and Darwin and have never seen the inside of a school, how did you learn to read and write, I queried, in the English Merchant Service, Kevin Boy at 12, Schipps Boy at 14, Ordinary Seaman at 16, Abel Seaman at 17, in Cocker the Fooka Soul, Infinite Ambition and Infinite Loneliness, receiving neither help nor sympathy. I did it all for myself, navigation, mathematics, science, literature and whatnot. And of what use has it been? Master and owner of a ship at the top of my life, as you say, when I am beginning to diminish and die. Poultry, isn't it? And when the sun was up I was scorched and because I had no root I whithered away. But history tells of slaves who rose to the purple, I chided. And history tells of opportunities that came to slaves who rose to the purple, he answered grimly. No man makes opportunity. All the great men ever did was to know it when it came to them. The Corsican knew. I have dreamed as greatly as the Corsican. I should have known the opportunity, but it never came. The thorns sprung up and choked me. And hump, I can tell you that you know more about me than any living man except my own brother. And what is he and where is he? Master of the steamship Macedonia, Seal Hunter, was the answer. We will meet him most probably on the Japan coast. Men call him Death Larson. Death Larson, I involuntarily cried. Is he like you? Hardly. He is a lump of an animal without any head. He has all my my brutishness, I suggested. Yes, thank you for the word, all my brutishness. But he can scarcely read or write. And he has never philosophized on life, I added. No, Wolf Larson answered with an indescribable air of sadness, and he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books. End of chapter 10. Chapter 11 of The Seawolf. This library box recording is in the public domain. The Seawolf by Jack London. Chapter 11. The ghost has attained the southernmost point of the ark she is describing across the Pacific, and is already beginning to eduate to the west and north toward some lone island, it is rumored, where she will fill her water casks before proceeding to the season's hunt along the coast of Japan. The hunters have experimented and practiced with their rifles and shotguns till they are satisfied, and the boat-pollers and stirrers have made their spritz sails, bound the oars and rollox and leather and senate so they will make no noise when creeping on the seals and put their boats in apple pie order to use Leach's homely phrase. His arm, by the way, has healed nicely, though the scar will remain all his life. Thomas Mugridge lives in mortal fear of him, and is afraid to venture on deck after dark. There are two or three standing quarrels in the forecastle. Lewis tells me that the gossip of the sailors finds its way aft, and that two of the tell-tales have been badly beaten by their mates. He shakes his head dubiously over the outlook for the man Johnson, who is boat-poller in the same boat with him. Johnson has been guilty of speaking his mind too freely, and has collided two or three times with Wolf Larson over the pronunciation of his name. Johansson, he thrashed on the Admit ship's deck the other night, since which time the mate has called him by his proper name. But, of course, it is out of the question that Johnson should thrash Wolf Larson. Lewis has also given me additional information about Death Larson, which tell is with the captain's brief description. We may expect to meet Death Larson on the Japan coast. And look out for squalls, as Lewis's prophecy, for they hate one another like the wolf-whelps they are. Death Larson is in command of the only-ceiling steamer in the fleet, the Macedonia, which carries 14 boats, whereas the rest of the schooners carry only six. There is wild talk of cannon aboard, and of strange raids and expeditions she may make, ranging from opium-smuggling into the States, and arm-smuggling into China, to blackbirding and open piracy. Yet I cannot but believe, for I have never yet caught him in a lie, while he has a psychopathic knowledge of sealing and the men of the sealing fleets. As it is forward and in the galley, so it is in the steerage and aft on this venerable hellship. Men fight and struggle ferociously for one another's lives. The hunters are looking for a shooting scrape at any moment between Smoke and Henderson, whose old quarrel has not healed. While Wolf Larson says positively, he will kill the survivor of the affair if such affair comes off. He frankly states that the position he takes is based on no moral grounds, that all the hunters could kill and eat one another so far as he is concerned, were it not that he needs them alive for the hunting. If they will only hold their hands until the season is over, he promises them a royal carnival when all grudges can be settled and the survivors may toss the non-survivors overboard, and arrange a story as to how the missing men were lost at sea. I think even the hunters are appalled at his cold-bloodedness. Wicked men, though they be, they are certainly very much afraid of him. Thomas Mugridge is curlike in his subjection to me while I go about in secret dread of him. His is the courage of fear, a strange thing I know well of myself, and at any moment it may master the fear and impel him to the taking of my life. My knee is much better, though it often aches for long periods, and the stiffness is gradually leaving the arm with wool floors and squeezed. Otherwise I am in splendid condition, feel that I am in splendid condition. My muscles are growing harder and increasing in size. My hands, however, are aspectacle for grief. They have a parboiled appearance or afflicted with hanged nails while the nails are broken and discolored and the edges of the quick seem to be assuming a fungoid sort of growth. Also I am suffering from boils due to the diet, most likely, for I was never afflicted in this manner before. I was amused a couple of evenings back by seeing wool floors and reading the Bible, a copy of which, after the feudal search for one at the beginning of the voyage, had been found in the dead mate's sea-chest. I wondered what Wolf Larson could get from it and he read aloud to me from ecclesiasties. I could imagine he was speaking the thoughts of his own mind as he read to me and his voice reverberating deeply and mournfully in the confined cabin, charmed and held me. He may be uneducated, but he certainly knows how to express the significance of the written word. I can hear him now, as I shall always hear him. The primal melancholy vibrant in his voice as he read. I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces. I got me men singers and women singers and the delights of the sons of men as musical instruments and that of all sorts. So I was great and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom returned with me. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the labor that I had labored to do, and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit and there was no profit under the sun. All things come alike to all. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked, to the good and to the clean and to the unclean, and to him that sacrificeeth and to him that sacrificeeth not, as is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth as he that ferreth an oath. This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all, yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil and madness is in their heart while they live and after that they go to the dead. For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and their hatred, their envy, is now perished, neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun. There you have it, hump, he said, closing the book upon his finger and looking up at me. The preacher who was king over Israel and Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is this not pessimism of the blackest? All is vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no profit unto the sun. There is one event unto all, to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event is death and an evil thing, he says. For the preacher loved life and did not want to die, saying, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. He preferred the vanity and vexation to the silence and unmovableness of the grave. And so why? To crawl is pigish, but to not crawl, to be as the clod and rock is loathsome to contemplate. It is loathsome to the life that is in me, the very essence of which is movement, the power of movement, and the consciousness of the power of movement. Life itself is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction. You are worse off than Omar, I said. He, at least after the customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a joyous thing. Who was Omar, Wolf Larson asked, and I did no more work that day, nor the next, nor the next. In his random reading he had never chanced upon the ruby-out, and it was to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered, possibly two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to peace out the remainder without difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the life of me, I could not discover myself. Possibly I recited with a certain joyous wilt, which was my own. For his memory was good, and as a second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own. He recited the same line, and invested them with an unrest and passionate revolt it was well nigh convincing. I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's irritability, and quite at variance with the Persian's complacent philosophy and genial code of life. But without asking hither hurried whence, and without asking whither hurried hence, O many a cup of this forbidden wine must drown the memory of that insolence. Great, Wollflorsen cried. Great, that's the key word, insolence. He could not have used a better word. And vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with argument. It's not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life when it knows that it must cease living will always rebel. It cannot help itself. The preacher found life and the works of life all of vanity and vexation and evil thing. But death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he found an evil or a thing. Through chapter after chapter he is worried by the one event that cometh to all alike. So, O more so I, so you, even you, for you rebelled against the dine when cookie sharpened a knife for you. You were afraid to die the life that was in you that composes you that is greater than you did not want to die. You have talked of the instinct of immortality. I talk of the instinct of life which is to live and which when death looms near and large masters the instinct so-called of immortality. It mastered in you, you cannot deny it, because a crazy cockney cook sharpened the knife. You are afraid of him now. You are afraid of me. You cannot deny it. If I should catch you by the throat, thus, his hand was about my throat and my breath was cut off, and begin to press the life out of you, thus and thus, your instinct of immortality will go glimmering and your instinct of life which is longing for life will flutter up and you will struggle to save yourself. Yeah? I see the fear of death in your eyes. You beat the air with your arms. You exert all your puny strength to struggle to live. Your hand is clutching my arm lightly, it feels, as a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin turning black, your eyes swimming. To live, to live, to live, you are crying, and you are crying to live here and now, not here after. You doubt your immortality, huh? You are not sure of it. You won't chance it. This life only you are certain is real. Ah, it is growing darker and darker. It is the darkness of death, the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes are becoming set, they are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You cannot see my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with your legs. Your body draws itself up and nods like it snakes. Your chest heaves and strains. To live, to live, to live. I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor and he was smoking a cigar, and regarding me thoughtfully with that old familiar light of curiosity in his eyes. Well, have I convinced you, he demanded? Here, take a drink of this. I want to ask you some questions. I rolled my head negatively on the floor. Your arguments are too forceful, I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my aching throat. You'll be all right in half an hour, he assured me, and I promise you I won't use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can sit on a chair. And toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.