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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
have I to thank for this kindness?" I asked, when I stood
completely arrayed, a tiny boys cap on my head, and for coat a
dirty, striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back
and the sleeves of which reached just below my elbows.
The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating
smirk on his face. Out of my experience with stewards on the
Atlantic liners at the end of the voyage, I could have sworn he was
waiting for his tip. From my fuller knowledge of the creature I
now know that the posture was unconscious. An hereditary
servility, no doubt, was responsible.
"Mugridge, sir," he fawned, his effeminate features running into a
greasy smile. "Thomas Mugridge, sir, an at yer service."
"All right, Thomas," I said. "I shall not forget you--when my
clothes are dry."
A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as though
somewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.
"Thank you, sir," he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.
Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
stepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion.
A puff of wind caught me,--and I staggered across the moving deck
to a corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The
schooner, heeled over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing
and plunging into the long Pacific roll. If she were heading
south-west as Johnson had said, the wind, then, I calculated, was
blowing nearly from the south. The fog was gone, and in its place
the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the water, I turned to
the east, where I knew California must lie, but could see nothing
save low-lying fog-banks--the same fog, doubtless, that had brought
about the disaster to the Martinez and placed me in my present
situation. To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks
thrust above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a
lighthouse. In the south-west, and almost in our course, I saw the
pyramidal loom of some vessels sails.
Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more
immediate surroundings. My first thought was that a man who had
come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited
more attention than I received. Beyond a sailor at the wheel who
stared curiously across the top of the cabin, I attracted no notice
whatever.
Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships.
There, on a hatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully
clothed, though his shirt was ripped open in front. Nothing was to
be seen of his chest, however, for it was covered with a mass of
black hair, in appearance like the furry coat of a dog. His face
and neck were hidden beneath a black beard, intershot with grey,
which would have been stiff and bushy had it not been limp and
draggled and dripping with water. His eyes were closed, and he was
apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open, his breast,
heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
breath. A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a
matter of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the
end of a rope, hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its
contents over the prostrate man.
Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely
chewing the end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had
rescued me from the sea. His height was probably five feet ten
inches, or ten and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the
man, was not of this, but of his strength. And yet, while he was
of massive build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not
characterize his strength as massive. It was what might be termed
a sinewy, knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry
men, but which, in him, because of his heavy build, partook more of
the enlarged gorilla order. Not that in appearance he seemed in
the least gorilla-like. What I am striving to express is this
strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physical semblance.
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