Elisha Cuthbert gallery |
Elisha Cuthbert Gallery Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
damn you! What the hells the matter with
you?"
They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and,
like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the
sea. The coal at his feet dragged him down. He was gone.
"Johansen," Wolf Larsen said briskly to the new mate, "keep all
hands on deck now theyre here. Get in the topsails and jibs and
make a good job of it. Were in for a sou-easter. Better reef
the jib and mainsail too, while youre about it."
In a moment the decks were in commotion, Johansen bellowing orders
and the men pulling or letting go ropes of various sorts--all
naturally confusing to a landsman such as myself. But it was the
heartlessness of it that especially struck me. The dead man was an
episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas
covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her
work went on. Nobody had been affected. The hunters were laughing
at a fresh story of Smokes; the men pulling and hauling, and two
of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky
to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly,
and sinking down, down--
Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and
awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a
beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and
slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and
gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-
banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast. Rain-
squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog.
And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by
wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the
south-west, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.
CHAPTER IV What happened to me next on the sealing-schooner Ghost, as I strove to fit into my new environment, are matters of humiliation and pain. The cook, who was called "the doctor" by the crew, "Tommy" by the hunters, and "Cooky" by Wolf Larsen, was a changed person. The difference worked in my status brought about a corresponding difference in treatment from him. Servile and fawning as he had been before, he was now as domineering and bellicose. In truth, I was no longer the fine gentleman with a skin soft as a "lydys," but only an ordinary and very worthless cabin-boy. He absurdly insisted upon my addressing him as Mr. Mugridge, and his behaviour and carriage were insufferable as he showed me my duties. Besides my work in the cabin, with its four small state- rooms, I was supposed to be his assistant in the galley, and my colossal ignorance concerning such things as peeling potatoes or washing greasy pots was a source of unending and sarcastic wonder to him. He refused to take into consideration what I was, or, rather, what my life and the things I was accustomed to had been. This was part of the attitude he chose to adopt toward me; and I confess, ere the day was done, that I hated him with more lively feelings than I had ever hated any one in my life before. This first day was made more difficult for me from the fact that the Ghost, under close reefs (terms such as these I did not learn till later), was plunging through what Mr. Mugridge called an "owlin sou-easter." At half-past five, under his directions, I set the table in the cabin, with rough-weather trays in place, and then carried the tea and cooked food down from the galley. In this connection I cannot forbear relating my first experience with a boarding sea. "Look sharp or youll get doused," was Mr. Mugridges parting injunction, as I left the galley with a big tea-pot in one hand, and in the hollow of the other arm several loaves of fresh-baked bread. One of the hunters, a tall, loose-jointed chap named Henderson, was going aft at the time from the steerage (the name the hunters facetiously gave their midships sleeping quarters) to the cabin. Wolf Larsen was on the poop, smoking his everlasting cigar. "Ere she comes. Sling yer ook!" the cook cried. I stopped, for I did not know what was coming, and saw the galley door The Sea Wolf page 13 The Sea Wolf page 15 |