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Show 1 ' . ' - " . . CORyi&Mr ay JACK LOAJPOr-J" I SYNOPSIS, i 4 Humphrey Van Weyden. critic and dilettante, dilet-tante, Ls thrown Into the water by the slnltinK of a ferryboat In a fog In San Francisco bay, and becomes unconscious before help reaches hlm. On coming to his senses he finds himself aboard the sealing schooner Ghost, Captain Wolf I.arsen, hound to Japan waters, witnesses the death of the first mate and hears the cnptnin curse the dead man for presuming to die at the beginning of the voyage. The captain refuses to put Humphrey ashore and makes him cabin boy "for the good of his soul." Humphrey sees the body of the mate dumped Into the sea. He begins to learn potato peeling nnd dish washing under the cockney cook, Mugrtdge. is caught by a heavy sea shipped over the quarter as he Is carrying tea aft and his knee Is seriously hurt, but no one pays any attention to his injury. CHAPTER V Continued. After breakfast I had another unenviable un-enviable experience. When 1 had finished fin-ished washing the dishes I cleaned the cabin stove and carried the ashes up on deck to empty them. Wolf Larsen and Henderson were standing near the wheel, deep in conversation. I passed them and flung the ashes over the side to windward. The wind drove them back, and not only over me but over Henderson and Wolf Larsen. The next instant the latter kicked me violently, vio-lently, as a cur is kicked. I reeled away from him and leaned against the cabin in a half-fainting condition. But Wolf Larsen did not follow me up. Brushing the ashes from his clothes, he had resumed his conversation with Henderson. Johansen, who had seen the affair from the break of the poop, sent a couple of sailors aft to clean tip the mess. Later in the morning 1 received a surprise of a totally different sort. Following the cook's instructions, I had gone into Wolf Larsen's stateroom state-room to put it to rights and make the bed. Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with , books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare. Tennyson, Poe and De Quincey. There were scientific works, too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor and Darwin. Dar-win. Astronomy and physics were represented, and I remarked Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," Shaw's "History of English and American Literature," and Johnson's "Natural History" in two large volumes. Then there were a number of grammars, such as Met calf's and Reed and Kellogg's; and I smiled as I saw a copy of "The Dean's English." I could not reconcile these books with the man from what I had seen of him, and 1 wondered if he could possibly read them. But when I came to make the bed I found, between the blankets, dropped apparently as if he had sunk off to sleep, a complete Browning, the Cambridge edition. It was open at "In a Balcony," and 1 noticed, here and there, passages underlined un-derlined in pencil. Further, letting drop the volume during a lurch of the ship, a sheet of paper fell out. It was scrawled over with geometrical " dia grams and calculations of some sort. This glimpse I had caught of his other side must have emboldened me, for I resolved to speak to him about the money I had lost. "I have been robbed." I said to him, a little later, when I found him pacing up and down the poop alone. "Sir," he corrected, not harshly, but sternly. "I have been robbed, sir," I amended. amend-ed. "How did it happen?" he asked. ' Then I told him the whole circumstance, circum-stance, how my clothes had been left to dry in the galley, and how, later, I was nearly beaten by the cook when I mentioned the matter. He smiled at my recital. "Pickings," he concluded; "Cooky's pickings And don't you think your miserable life worth the price? Besides, consider it a lesson. You'll learn in time how to take care of your money for yourself. I suppose, up to now, your lawye: has done it for you, or your business agent." I could feel the quiet sneer through his words, but demanded, "How can I get it back again?" "That's your lookout. You haven't any lawyer or business agent now. so you'll have to depend on yourself. When you get a dollar, hang on to it. A man who leaves his money lying around, the way you did, deserves to lose it. Besides, you have sinned. You have no right to put temptations In the way of your fellow-creatures. You tempted Cooky, and he fell. You have placed his immortal soul in Jeopardy. By the way, do you believe in the immortal soul?" His lids lifted lazily as he asked the question, and it seemed that the deeps were opening to me and that 1 was gazing into his soul. But it was an illusion. Far as it might have seemed, no man has ever seen very far into Wolf Larson's soul, or seen it at all of this I am convinced. It was a very lonely soul, I was to learn, that never unmasked, though at rare moments it played at doing so. "I read immortality in your eyes," I answered, dropping the "sir" an experiment, ex-periment, Tor 1 thought the intimacy .of the conversation warranted it. Hi' took tin nnJIcOj "Then to what end?" he demanded. "If I am immortal why?" I faltered. How could I explain my Idealism to this man? How could 1 put Into speech a something felt, a something like the strains of music beard in sleep, a something that convinced con-vinced yet transcended utterance? "What ''o you believe, then?" I countered. "I believe that life is a mess," he answered promptly. "It is like a yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that In the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?" He swept his arm in an impatient gesture toward a number of the sailors sail-ors whowere working on some kind of rope stuff amidships. "They move; so does the jellyfish move. They move in order to eat'in order that they may keep moving. There you have it. They live for their belly's sake, and the belly is for their sake. It's a circle; you get nowhere. no-where. Neither do they. In the end they come to a standstill. They move no more. They are dead." "They have dreams," I interrupted, "radiant, flashing dreams " "Of grub," he - concluded senten-tiously. senten-tiously. "And of more " "Grub. Of a larger appetite and more luck in satisfying it." His voice sounded harsh. There was no levity in it "You and I are just like them. There is no difference, except that we have eaten more and better. I am eating them now, and you, too. But in the past you have eaten more than I have. You wear the warm clothes. They made the clothes, but they shiver in rags and ask you, the lawyer, or the business agent who handles your money, for a job." "But that is beside the matter," I cried. "Not at all." He was speaking rapidly, rap-idly, now, and his eyes were flashing. "It is piggishness, and it is life. Of what use or sense is an immortality of piggishness? What is the end? What is it all about? To be piggish as you and I have been all our lives does not seem to be just the thing for immortals to be doing. Again, what's It all about? Why have I kept you here? " "Because you are stronger," I managed man-aged to blurt out. "But why stronger?" he went on at once with his perpetual queries. "Because "Be-cause I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you? Don't you see? Don't you see?" "But the hopelessness of it," I protested. pro-tested. "I agree with you," he answered. "Then why move at all, since moving is living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness. But and here it is we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive forever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!" He abruptly turned on his heel and started forward. He stopped at the break of the poop and called me to him. "By the way, how much was It that Cooky got away with?" he asked. "One hundred and eighty-five dollars, dol-lars, sir," I answered. He nodded his head. A moment later, as I started down the companion stairs to lay the table for dinner, 1 heard him loudly cursing some men amidships. CHAPTER VI. By the following morning the storm had blown itself quite out and the Ghost was rolling slightly on a calm sea without a breath of wind. The men were all on deck and busy preparing pre-paring their various boats for the season's sea-son's hunting. There are seven boats aboard, the captain's dinghy, the six which the hunters will use. Three, a hunter, a boat puller, and a boat steerer, compose a boat's crew. On board the schooner the boat pullers and steerers are the crew. The hunters, hunt-ers, too, are supposed to be In command com-mand of the watches, subject, always, to the orders of Wolf Larsen. All this, and more, I have learned. The Ghost is considered the fastest schooner in both the San Francisco and Victoria fleets. In fact, she was once a private yacht, and was built for speed. Johnson was telling me about her in a short chat 1 had with him during yesterday's second dog watch. He spoke enthusiastically, with the love for a fine craft such as some men feci for horses Every man aboard, with the exception excep-tion of Johansen. who is rather overcome over-come by his promotion, seems to have an excuse for having sailed on the Ghost. Half of the men forward are I deep-water sailors, and their excuse is 1 "p HE STORY OfN ( 1 A MAN WHO j UN HIS OWNH XlTTLE WORLD AOADSiJTP WAS A LAW UNTOIMSELR that they did not know anything about her or her captain. And those who do know whisper that the hunters, while excellent shots, were so notorious for their quarrelsome and rascally proclivities pro-clivities that they could not sign on any decent schooner. I have made the acquaintance of en-other en-other one of the crew Louis, he is called, a rotund and jovial-faced Nova Scotia Irishman, and a very sociable fellow, prone to talk as long as he can find a listener. In the afternoon, while the cook was below and asleep and I was peeling the everlasting potatoes, po-tatoes, Louis dropped into the galley for a "yarn." His excuse for being aboard was that he was drunk when he signed.- He is accounted one of the two or three very best boat steerers in both fleets. "Ah, my boy" he shook his head ominously at me " 'tis the worst schooner ye could Iv selected, nor were ye drunk at the time as was I. Don't I remember him in Hakodate two years gone, when he had a row an' shot four iv his men? An' there was a man the same year he killed with a blow iv his fist. An' wasn't there the governor of Kura island, an' the chief iv police, Japanese gentlemen, gentle-men, sir, an' didn't they come aboard the Ghost as his guests, a-bringin' their wives along wee an' pretty little bits of things like you see 'em painted on fans. An' as he was a-get-tin' under way, didn't the fond husbands hus-bands get left astern-like in their sampan, sam-pan, as it might be by accident? An' wasn't it a week later that the poor little ladies was put ashore on the other side of the island, with nothin' before 'em but to walk home acrost the mountains on their weeny-teeny little straw sandals, which wouldn't hang together a mile? Don't I know? 'Tis the beast he is, this Wolf Larsen Lar-sen the great, big beast mentioned in Revelation; an' no good end will he ever come to. But I've said nothin' to ye, m-ind ye. I've whispered never a word; for old, fat Louis'U live the voyage voy-age out if the last mother's son of yez go to the fishes." "But if he is so well known for what he is," I queried, "how is it that he can get men to ship with him?" "An' how is it ye can get men to do anything on God's earth an' sea?" Louis demanded with Celtic fire. "There's them that can't sail with better bet-ter men, like the hunters, and them that don't know, like the poor devils of wind-jammers for'ard there." "Them hunters is the wicked boys." he broke forth again, for he suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. "But wait till they get to cutting up iv jinks and rowin' 'round He's the boy'll fix 'em. Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner. Didn't he kill his boat steerer last year? An' there's "They Live for Their Belly's Sake." Smoke, the black little devil didn't the Roosians have him for three years In the salt mines of Siberia, for poach-in' poach-in' on Copper island, which is a Roo-sian Roo-sian preserve? Shackled he was, hand an' foot, with his mate. An' didn't they have words or a ruction of some kind? for 'twas the other fellow Smoke sent up in the buckets to the top of the mine; an' a piece at the time he went up, a leg today, an' tomorrow an arm, the next day the head, an' so on." "But you can't mean It!" I cried out, overcome with the horror of it. "Mean what?" he demanded, quick as a flash. " 'Tis nothin' I've said. Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your mother; an' never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things Iv them an' him, God curse his soul, an' may he rot in purgatory ten thousand years, and (hen go down to the last an' deepest hell iv all!" Johnson seemed the least equivocal of the men forward or aft. He seemed to have the coinage of his convictions, convic-tions, the certainty of his manhood. It was this that made him protest, at the commencement of our acquaintance, againsl being called Yonson. And t."""":u unes. - vender upon this, and him, Louis passed judg ment and prophecy. " 'Tis a fine chap, that squarehead Johnson we've for'ard with us," he said. "The best sallorman In the fo'c'sle. He's my boat puller. But it'B to trouble he'll come with Wolf Larsen, as the sparks fly upward. The Woir is strong, and it's the way of a wolf to hate strength, an' strength it ls he'll see in Johnson no knucklin' under, and a 'Yes, sir' thank ye kindly, sir,' for a curse or a blow." Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. unen-durable. I am compelled to Mister him and Sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larsen Lar-sen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook; but this is certainly what Wolf Larsen is doing. Two or three times he put his head Into the galley and chaffed Mugridge good-naturedly, good-naturedly, and once, this afternoon, he stood by the break of the poop and chatted with him for fully fifteen minutes. min-utes. When it was over, and Mugridge Mug-ridge was back in the galley, he became be-came greasily radiant, and went about his work, humming the coster songs in a nerve-racking and discordant falsetto. fal-setto. "I always get along with the officers," offi-cers," he remarked to me in a confidential confi-dential tone. "1 know the w'y, I do, to myke myself uppreci-yted. There was my last skipper. 'Mugridge,' sez 'e to me, 'Mugridge,' sez 'e, 'you've missed yer vokytion.' 'An' 'ow's that? sez I. 'Yes should 'a' been born a gentleman, an' never 'ad to work for yer livin'.' God strike me dead, 'Ump if that ayn't wot 'e sez, an' me a-sittin' there in 'is own cabin, jolly-like an' comfortable, a-smokin' 'is cigars an drinkin' 'is rum." This chitter-chatter drove me to distraction. dis-traction. I never heard a voice I hated so. Positively, he was the most disgusting dis-gusting and loathsome person I have ever met. The filth of his cooking was indescribable, and, as he cooked everything every-thing that was eaten aboard, I was compelled to select what I ate with great circumspection, choosing from the least dirty of his concoctions. My hands bothered me a great deal, unused as they were to work. Nor was my knee any better. The "swelling had not gone down, and the cap was still up on edge. Hobbling about on it from morning to night was not helping it any. What I needed was rest, if it were ever to get well. Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been resting rest-ing all my life and did not know it. But now, from half past five in the morning till ten o'clock at night, I am everybody's slave, with not one moment to myself, except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog watch. Let me pause for a minute min-ute to look out over the sea sparkling in the sun, or to gaze at a sailor going aloft to the gaff-topsails, or running out the bowsprit, and I am sure to hear the hateful voice, " 'Ere, you 'Ump, no sodgerin'. I've got my peepers peep-ers on yer." There are signs of rampant bad temper tem-per in the steerage, and the gossip ls going around that Smoke and Henderson Hender-son have had a fight. Henderson seems the best of the hunters, a slow-going slow-going fellow, and hard to rouse; but roused he must have been, for Smoke had a bruised and discolored eye, and looked particularly vicious when he came into the cabin for supper. (TO BE CONTINUED.) |