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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
his back and
went up on deck.
That night, when I had finished an endless amount of work, I was
sent to sleep in the steerage, where I made up a spare bunk. I was
glad to get out of the detestable presence of the cook and to be
off my feet. To my surprise, my clothes had dried on me and there
seemed no indications of catching cold, either from the last
soaking or from the prolonged soaking from the foundering of the
Martinez. Under ordinary circumstances, after all that I had
undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a trained nurse.
But my knee was bothering me terribly. As well as I could make
out, the kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the
swelling. As I sat in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were
all in the steerage, smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson
took a passing glance at it.
"Looks nasty," he commented. "Tie a rag around it, and itll be
all right."
That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad
of my back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict
injunctions to do nothing but rest. But I must do these men
justice. Callous as they were to my suffering, they were equally
callous to their own when anything befell them. And this was due,
I believe, first, to habit; and second, to the fact that they were
less sensitively organized. I really believe that a finely-
organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as much as
they from a like injury.
Tired as I was,--exhausted, in fact,--I was prevented from sleeping
by the pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from
groaning aloud. At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my
anguish; but this new and elemental environment seemed to call for
a savage repression. Like the savage, the attitude of these men
was stoical in great things, childish in little things. I
remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the
hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did
not even murmur or change the expression on his face. Yet I have
seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous
passion over a trifle.
He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with
another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to
swim. He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was
born. The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow
with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the
seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it
could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim
as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table
or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two
antagonists. But they were supremely interested, for every little
while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at
once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound
like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space. Childish and
immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was
still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very
little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of
assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal
pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very
bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing
mans judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history.
Rebuttal was precisely similar. I have related this in order to
show the mental calibre of the men with whom I was thrown in
contact. Intellectually they were children, inhabiting the
physical forms of men.
And they smoked, incessantly smoked, using a coarse, cheap, and
offensive-smelling tobacco. The air was thick and murky with the
smoke of it; and this, combined with the violent movement of the
ship as she struggled through the storm, would surely have made me
sea-sick had I been a victim to that malady. As it was, it made me
quite squeamish, though this nausea might have been The Sea Wolf page 15 The Sea Wolf page 17 |