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due to the pain
of my leg and exhaustion.
As I lay there thinking, I naturally dwelt upon myself and my
situation. It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van
Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things
artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-
hunting schooner. Cabin-boy! I had never done any hard manual
labour, or scullion labour, in my life. I had lived a placid,
uneventful, sedentary existence all my days--the life of a scholar
and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income. Violent life
and athletic sports had never appealed to me. I had always been a
book-worm; so my sisters and father had called me during my
childhood. I had gone camping but once in my life, and then I left
the party almost at its start and returned to the comforts and
conveniences of a roof. And here I was, with dreary and endless
vistas before me of table-setting, potato-peeling, and dish-
washing. And I was not strong. The doctors had always said that I
had a remarkable constitution, but I had never developed it or my
body through exercise. My muscles were small and soft, like a
womans, or so the doctors had said time and again in the course of
their attempts to persuade me to go in for physical-culture fads.
But I had preferred to use my head rather than my body; and here I
was, in no fit condition for the rough life in prospect.
These are merely a few of the things that went through my mind, and
are related for the sake of vindicating myself in advance in the
weak and helpless role I was destined to play. But I thought,
also, of my mother and sisters, and pictured their grief. I was
among the missing dead of the Martinez disaster, an unrecovered
body. I could see the head-lines in the papers; the fellows at the
University Club and the Bibelot shaking their heads and saying,
"Poor chap!" And I could see Charley Furuseth, as I had said good-
bye to him that morning, lounging in a dressing-gown on the be-
pillowed window couch and delivering himself of oracular and
pessimistic epigrams.
And all the while, rolling, plunging, climbing the moving mountains
and falling and wallowing in the foaming valleys, the schooner
Ghost was fighting her way farther and farther into the heart of
the Pacific--and I was on her. I could hear the wind above. It
came to my ears as a muffled roar. Now and again feet stamped
overhead. An endless creaking was going on all about me, the
woodwork and the fittings groaning and squeaking and complaining in
a thousand keys. The hunters were still arguing and roaring like
some semi-human amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths
and indecent expressions. I could see their faces, flushed and
angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow
of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.
Through the dim smoke-haze the bunks looked like the sleeping dens
of animals in a menagerie. Oilskins and sea-boots were hanging
from the walls, and here and there rifles and shotguns rested
securely in the racks. It was a sea-fitting for the buccaneers and
pirates of by-gone years. My imagination ran riot, and still I
could not sleep. And it was a long, long night, weary and dreary
and long.
CHAPTER V But my first night in the hunters steerage was also my last. Next day Johansen, the new mate, was routed from the cabin by Wolf Larsen, and sent into the steerage to sleep thereafter, while I took possession of the tiny cabin state-room, which, on the first day of the voyage, had already had two occupants. The reason for this change was quickly learned by the hunters, and became the cause of a deal of grumbling on their part. It seemed that Johansen, in his sleep, lived over each night the events of the day. His incessant talking and shouting and bellowing of orders had been too much for Wolf Larsen, who had accordingly foisted the nuisance upon his hunters. After a sleepless night, I arose weak and in agony, to hobble through my second day on the Ghost. Thomas Mugridge routed me out at half-past five, much in the fashion that Bill Sykes must have routed out The Sea Wolf page 16 The Sea Wolf page 18 |