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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
mothers of these
twenty and odd men on the Ghost? It strikes me as unnatural and
unhealthful that men should be totally separated from women and
herd through the world by themselves. Coarseness and savagery are
the inevitable results. These men about me should have wives, and
sisters, and daughters; then would they be capable of softness, and
tenderness, and sympathy. As it is, not one of them is married.
In years and years not one of them has been in contact with a good
woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly
radiates from such a creature. There is no balance in their lives.
Their masculinity, which in itself is of the brute, has been over-
developed. The other and spiritual side of their natures has been
dwarfed--atrophied, in fact.
They are a company of celibates, grinding harshly against one
another and growing daily more calloused from the grinding. It
seems to me impossible sometimes that they ever had mothers. It
would appear that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a race
apart, wherein there is no such thing as sex; that they are hatched
out by the sun like turtle eggs, or receive life in some similar
and sordid fashion; and that all their days they fester in
brutality and viciousness, and in the end die as unlovely as they
have lived.
Rendered curious by this new direction of ideas, I talked with
Johansen last night--the first superfluous words with which he has
favoured me since the voyage began. He left Sweden when he was
eighteen, is now thirty-eight, and in all the intervening time has
not been home once. He had met a townsman, a couple of years
before, in some sailor boarding-house in Chile, so that he knew his
mother to be still alive.
"She must be a pretty old woman now," he said, staring meditatively
into the binnacle and then jerking a sharp glance at Harrison, who
was steering a point off the course.
"When did you last write to her?"
He performed his mental arithmetic aloud. "Eighty-one; no--eighty-
two, eh? no--eighty-three? Yes, eighty-three. Ten years ago.
From some little port in Madagascar. I was trading.
"You see," he went on, as though addressing his neglected mother
across half the girth of the earth, "each year I was going home.
So what was the good to write? It was only a year. And each year
something happened, and I did not go. But I am mate, now, and when
I pay off at Frisco, maybe with five hundred dollars, I will ship
myself on a windjammer round the Horn to Liverpool, which will give
me more money; and then I will pay my passage from there home.
Then she will not do any more work."
"But does she work? now? How old is she?"
"About seventy," he answered. And then, boastingly, "We work from
the time we are born until we die, in my country. Thats why we
live so long. I will live to a hundred."
I shall never forget this conversation. The words were the last I
ever heard him utter. Perhaps they were the last he did utter,
too. For, going down into the cabin to turn in, I decided that it
was too stuffy to sleep below. It was a calm night. We were out
of the Trades, and the Ghost was forging ahead barely a knot an
hour. So I tucked a blanket and pillow under my arm and went up on
deck.
As I passed between Harrison and the binnacle, which was built into
the top of the cabin, I noticed that he was this time fully three
points off. Thinking that he was asleep, and wishing him to escape
reprimand or worse, I spoke to him. But he was not asleep. His
eyes were wide and staring. He seemed greatly perturbed, unable to
reply to me.
"Whats the matter?" I asked. "Are you sick?"
He shook his head, and with a deep sign as of awakening, caught his
breath.
"Youd better get on your course, then," I chided.
He put a few spokes over, and I watched the compass-card swing
slowly to N.N.W. and steady itself with slight oscillations.
I took a fresh hold on my bedclothes and was preparing to start on,
when some movement caught my eye and I looked astern to the rail.
A sinewy hand, dripping with water, was clutching The Sea Wolf page 51 The Sea Wolf page 53 |