There was a deal of cursing and groaning
as the men at the bottom of the ladder crawled to
their feet.
“Somebody strike a light, my
thumb’s out of joint,” said one of the
men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer
in Standish’s boat, in which Harrison was puller.
“You’ll find it knockin’
about by the bitts,” Leach said, sitting down
on the edge of the bunk in which I was concealed.
There was a fumbling and a scratching
of matches, and the sea-lamp flared up, dim and smoky,
and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about
nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts.
Oofty-Oofty laid hold of Parsons’s thumb, pulling
it out stoutly and snapping it back into place.
I noticed at the same time that the Kanaka’s
knuckles were laid open clear across and to the bone.
He exhibited them, exposing beautiful white teeth
in a grin as he did so, and explaining that the wounds
had come from striking Wolf Larsen in the mouth.
“So it was you, was it, you
black beggar?” belligerently demanded one Kelly,
an Irish-American and a longshoreman, making his first
trip to sea, and boat-puller for Kerfoot.
As he made the demand he spat out
a mouthful of blood and teeth and shoved his pugnacious
face close to Oofty-Oofty. The Kanaka leaped
backward to his bunk, to return with a second leap,
flourishing a long knife.
“Aw, go lay down, you make me
tired,” Leach interfered. He was evidently,
for all of his youth and inexperience, cock of the
forecastle. “G’wan, you Kelly.
You leave Oofty alone. How in hell did he know
it was you in the dark?”
Kelly subsided with some muttering,
and the Kanaka flashed his white teeth in a grateful
smile. He was a beautiful creature, almost feminine
in the pleasing lines of his figure, and there was
a softness and dreaminess in his large eyes which
seemed to contradict his well-earned reputation for
strife and action.
“How did he get away?” Johnson asked.
He was sitting on the side of his
bunk, the whole pose of his figure indicating utter
dejection and hopelessness. He was still breathing
heavily from the exertion he had made. His shirt
had been ripped entirely from him in the struggle,
and blood from a gash in the cheek was flowing down
his naked chest, marking a red path across his white
thigh and dripping to the floor.
“Because he is the devil, as
I told you before,” was Leach’s answer;
and thereat he was on his feet and raging his disappointment
with tears in his eyes.
“And not one of you to get a
knife!” was his unceasing lament.
But the rest of the hands had a lively
fear of consequences to come and gave no heed to him.
“How’ll he know which
was which?” Kelly asked, and as he went on he
looked murderously about him “unless
one of us peaches.”
“He’ll know as soon as
ever he claps eyes on us,” Parsons replied.
“One look at you’d be enough.”
“Tell him the deck flopped up
and gouged yer teeth out iv yer jaw,” Louis
grinned. He was the only man who was not out
of his bunk, and he was jubilant in that he possessed
no bruises to advertise that he had had a hand in
the night’s work. “Just wait till
he gets a glimpse iv yer mugs to-morrow, the gang
iv ye,” he chuckled.
“We’ll say we thought
it was the mate,” said one. And another,
“I know what I’ll say that
I heered a row, jumped out of my bunk, got a jolly
good crack on the jaw for my pains, and sailed in myself.
Couldn’t tell who or what it was in the dark
and just hit out.”
“An’ ’twas me you
hit, of course,” Kelly seconded, his face brightening
for the moment.
Leach and Johnson took no part in
the discussion, and it was plain to see that their
mates looked upon them as men for whom the worst was
inevitable, who were beyond hope and already dead.
Leach stood their fears and reproaches for some time.
Then he broke out:
“You make me tired! A
nice lot of gazabas you are! If you talked less
with yer mouth and did something with yer hands, he’d
a-ben done with by now. Why couldn’t
one of you, just one of you, get me a knife when I
sung out? You make me sick! A-beefin’
and bellerin’ ’round, as though he’d
kill you when he gets you! You know damn well
he wont. Can’t afford to. No shipping
masters or beach-combers over here, and he wants yer
in his business, and he wants yer bad. Who’s
to pull or steer or sail ship if he loses yer?
It’s me and Johnson have to face the music.
Get into yer bunks, now, and shut yer faces; I want
to get some sleep.”
“That’s all right all
right,” Parsons spoke up. “Mebbe
he won’t do for us, but mark my words, hell
’ll be an ice-box to this ship from now on.”
All the while I had been apprehensive
concerning my own predicament. What would happen
to me when these men discovered my presence?
I could never fight my way out as Wolf Larsen had
done. And at this moment Latimer called down
the scuttles:
“Hump! The old man wants you!”
“He ain’t down here!” Parsons called
back.
“Yes, he is,” I said,
sliding out of the bunk and striving my hardest to
keep my voice steady and bold.
The sailors looked at me in consternation.
Fear was strong in their faces, and the devilishness
which comes of fear.
“I’m coming!” I shouted up to Latimer.
“No you don’t!”
Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder, his
right hand shaped into a veritable strangler’s
clutch. “You damn little sneak!
I’ll shut yer mouth!”
“Let him go,” Leach commanded.
“Not on yer life,” was the angry retort.
Leach never changed his position on
the edge of the bunk. “Let him go, I say,”
he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and
metallic.
The Irishman wavered. I made
to step by him, and he stood aside. When I had
gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal
and malignant faces peering at me through the semi-darkness.
A sudden and deep sympathy welled up in me.
I remembered the Cockney’s way of putting it.
How God must have hated them that they should be tortured
so!
“I have seen and heard nothing,
believe me,” I said quietly.
“I tell yer, he’s all
right,” I could hear Leach saying as I went up
the ladder. “He don’t like the old
man no more nor you or me.”
I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin,
stripped and bloody, waiting for me. He greeted
me with one of his whimsical smiles.
“Come, get to work, Doctor.
The signs are favourable for an extensive practice
this voyage. I don’t know what the Ghost
would have been without you, and if I could only cherish
such noble sentiments I would tell you her master
is deeply grateful.”
I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest
the Ghost carried, and while I was heating
water on the cabin stove and getting the things ready
for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and
chatting, and examining his hurts with a calculating
eye. I had never before seen him stripped, and
the sight of his body quite took my breath away.
It has never been my weakness to exalt the flesh far
from it; but there is enough of the artist in me to
appreciate its wonder.
I must say that I was fascinated by
the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen’s figure, and
by what I may term the terrible beauty of it.
I had noted the men in the forecastle. Powerfully
muscled though some of them were, there had been something
wrong with all of them, an insufficient development
here, an undue development there, a twist or a crook
that destroyed symmetry, legs too short or too long,
or too much sinew or bone exposed, or too little.
Oofty-Oofty had been the only one whose lines were
at all pleasing, while, in so far as they pleased,
that far had they been what I should call feminine.
But Wolf Larsen was the man-type,
the masculine, and almost a god in his perfectness.
As he moved about or raised his arms the great muscles
leapt and moved under the satiny skin. I have
forgotten to say that the bronze ended with his face.
His body, thanks to his Scandinavian stock, was fair
as the fairest woman’s. I remember his
putting his hand up to feel of the wound on his head,
and my watching the biceps move like a living thing
under its white sheath. It was the biceps that
had nearly crushed out my life once, that I had seen
strike so many killing blows. I could not take
my eyes from him. I stood motionless, a roll
of antiseptic cotton in my hand unwinding and spilling
itself down to the floor.
He noticed me, and I became conscious
that I was staring at him.
“God made you well,” I said.
“Did he?” he answered.
“I have often thought so myself, and wondered
why.”
“Purpose ” I began.
“Utility,” he interrupted.
“This body was made for use. These muscles
were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things
that get between me and life. But have you thought
of the other living things? They, too, have
muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and
tear, and destroy; and when they come between me and
life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy
them. Purpose does not explain that. Utility
does.”
“It is not beautiful,” I protested.
“Life isn’t, you mean,”
he smiled. “Yet you say I was made well.
Do you see this?”
He braced his legs and feet, pressing
the cabin floor with his toes in a clutching sort
of way. Knots and ridges and mounds of muscles
writhed and bunched under the skin.
“Feel them,” he commanded.
They were hard as iron. And
I observed, also, that his whole body had unconsciously
drawn itself together, tense and alert; that muscles
were softly crawling and shaping about the hips, along
the back, and across the shoulders; that the arms
were slightly lifted, their muscles contracting, the
fingers crooking till the hands were like talons; and
that even the eyes had changed expression and into
them were coming watchfulness and measurement and
a light none other than of battle.
“Stability, equilibrium,”
he said, relaxing on the instant and sinking his body
back into repose. “Feet with which to clutch
the ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand,
while with arms and hands, teeth and nails, I struggle
to kill and to be not killed. Purpose?
Utility is the better word.”
I did not argue. I had seen
the mechanism of the primitive fighting beast, and
I was as strongly impressed as if I had seen the engines
of a great battleship or Atlantic liner.
I was surprised, considering the fierce
struggle in the forecastle, at the superficiality
of his hurts, and I pride myself that I dressed them
dexterously. With the exception of several bad
wounds, the rest were merely severe bruises and lacerations.
The blow which he had received before going overboard
had laid his scalp open several inches. This,
under his direction, I cleansed and sewed together,
having first shaved the edges of the wound.
Then the calf of his leg was badly lacerated and looked
as though it had been mangled by a bulldog. Some
sailor, he told me, had laid hold of it by his teeth,
at the beginning of the fight, and hung on and been
dragged to the top of the forecastle ladder, when he
was kicked loose.
“By the way, Hump, as I have
remarked, you are a handy man,” Wolf Larsen
began, when my work was done. “As you know,
we’re short a mate. Hereafter you shall
stand watches, receive seventy-five dollars per month,
and be addressed fore and aft as Mr. Van Weyden.”
“I I don’t understand navigation,
you know,” I gasped.
“Not necessary at all.”
“I really do not care to sit
in the high places,” I objected. “I
find life precarious enough in my present humble situation.
I have no experience. Mediocrity, you see,
has its compensations.”
He smiled as though it were all settled.
“I won’t be mate on this hell-ship!”
I cried defiantly.
I saw his face grow hard and the merciless
glitter come into his eyes. He walked to the
door of his room, saying:
“And now, Mr. Van Weyden, good-night.”
“Good-night, Mr. Larsen,” I answered weakly.