CHAPTER XLIX
The situation grows tense. There are no more sea-birds, and the
mutineers are starving. Yesterday I talked with Bert Rhine. To-day
I talked with him again, and he will never forget, I am certain, the
little talk we had this morning.
To begin with, last evening, at five o'clock, I heard his voice
issuing from between the slits of the ventilator in the after-wall of
the chart-house. Standing at the corner of the house, quite out of
range, I answered him.
"Getting hungry?" I jeered. "Let me tell you what we are going to
have for dinner. I have just been down and seen the preparations.
Now, listen: first, caviare on toast; then, clam bouillon; and
creamed lobster; and tinned lamb chops with French peas--you know,
the peas that melt in one's mouth; and California asparagus with
mayonnaise; and--oh, I forgot to mention fried potatoes and cold pork
and beans; and peach pie; and coffee, real coffee. Doesn't it make
you hungry for your East Side? And, say, think of the free lunch
going to waste right now in a thousand saloons in good old New York."
I had told him the truth. The dinner I described (principally coming
out of tins and bottles, to be sure) was the dinner we were to eat.
"Cut that," he snarled. "I want to talk business with YOU."
"Right down to brass tacks," I gibed. "Very well, when are you and
the rest of your rats going to turn to?"
"Cut that," he reiterated. "I've got you where 1 want you now. Take
it from me, I'm givin' it straight. I'm not tellin' you how, but
I've got you under my thumb. When I come down on you, you'll crack."
"Hell is full of cocksure rats like you," I retorted; although I
never dreamed how soon he would be writhing in the particular hell
preparing for him.
"Forget it," he sneered back. "I've got you where I want you. I'm
just tellin' you, that's all."
"Pardon me," I replied, "when I tell you that I'm from Missouri.
You'll have to show ME."
And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I
naturally sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to
make myself intelligible to him. The situation was bestial, with
sixteen of our complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I
employed, perforce, were terms of bestiality. And I thought, also,
of I who was thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the utopians,
the visions of the poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in
a discussion with this ripened product of the New York City inferno.
To him I must talk in the elemental terms of life and death, of food
and water, of brutality and cruelty.
"I give you your choice," he went on. "Give in now, an' you won't be
hurt, none of you."
"And if we don't?" I dared airily.
"You'll be sorry you was ever born. You ain't a mush-head, you've
got a girl there that's stuck on you. It's about time you think of
her. You ain't altogether a mutt. You get my drive?"
Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of
all I had ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at
Peking, and of the plans of the white men for their womenkind in the
event of the yellow hordes breaking through the last lines of
defence. Ay, and the old steward got it; for I saw his black eyes
glint murderously in their narrow, tilted slits. He knew the drift
of the gangster's meaning.
"You get my drive?" the gangster repeated.
And I knew anger. Not ordinary anger, but cold anger. And I caught
a vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the
ages in all lands, on all seas. I saw my kind, our women with us, in
forlorn hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in
jungle fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking
ships. And always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts. We
might die, our women with us; but, living, we had ruled. It was a
royal vision I glimpsed. Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the
ethic, which was the stuff of the fabric of which it was builded. It
was the sacred trust of the seed, the bequest of duty handed down
from all ancestors.
And I flamed more coldly. It was not red-brute anger. It was
intellectual. It was based on concept and history; it was the
philosophy of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in
their own strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the
rightness of the books, the relation of high thinking to high-
conduct, the transmutation of midnight thought into action in the
high place on the poop of a coal-carrier in the year nineteen-
thirteen, my woman beside me, my ancestors behind me, my slant-eyed
servitors under me, the beasts beneath me and beneath the heel of me.
God! I felt kingly. I knew at last the meaning of kingship.
My anger was white and cold. This subterranean rat of a miserable
human, crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and
mine! A rat in the shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-
like as any rat ever made! And it was in this spirit that I answered
the gangster.
"When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad
light of day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience,
and when you show by your every action that you like it and are glad
to do it, then, and not until then, will I talk with you."
Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate
of his kind at me through the slits in the ventilator. But I made no
reply. I listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew
why the English had blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of
cannon in India long years ago.
And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-
gallon carboy of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended
for it.
In the meantime I was devising another way to overcome that deadly
ventilator shaft. The scheme was so simple that I was shamed in that
it had not occurred to me at the very beginning. The slitted opening
was small. Two sacks of flour, in a wooden frame, suspended by ropes
from the edge of the chart-house roof directly above, would
effectually cover the opening and block all revolver fire.
No sooner thought than done. Tom Spink and Louis were on top the
chart-house with me and preparing to lower the flour, when we heard a
voice issuing from the shaft.
"Who's in there now?" I demanded. "Speak up."
"I'm givin' you a last chance," Bert Rhine answered.
And just then, around the corner of the house, stepped the steward.
In his hand he carried a large galvanized pail, and my casual thought
was that he had come to get rain-water from the barrels. Even as I
thought it, he made a sweeping half-circle with the pail and sloshed
its contents into the ventilator-opening. And even as the liquid
flew through the air I knew it for what it was--undiluted sulphuric
acid, two gallons of it from the carboy.
The gangster must have received the liquid fire in the face and eyes.
And, in the shock of pain, he must have released all holds and fallen
upon the coal at the bottom of the shaft. His cries and shrieks of
anguish were terrible, and I was reminded of the starving rats which
had squealed up that same shaft during the first months of the
voyage. The thing was sickening. I prefer that men be killed
cleanly and easily.
The agony of the wretch I did not fully realize until the steward,
his bare fore-arms sprayed by the splash from the ventilator slats,
suddenly felt the bite of the acid through his tight, whole skin and
made a mad rush for the water-barrel at the corner of the house. And
Bert Rhine, the silent man of soundless laughter, screaming below
there on the coal, was enduring the bite of the acid in his eyes!
We covered the ventilator opening with our flour-device; the screams
from below ceased as the victim was evidently dragged for'ard across
the coal by his mates; and yet I confess to a miserable forenoon. As
Carlyle has said: "Death is easy; all men must die"; but to receive
two gallons of full-strength sulphuric acid full in the face is a
vastly different and vastly more horrible thing than merely to die.
Fortunately, Margaret was below at the time, and, after a few
minutes, in which I recovered my balance, I bullied and swore all our
hands into keeping the happening from her.
Oh, well, and we have got ours in retaliation. Off and on, through
all of yesterday, after the ventilator tragedy, there were noises
beneath the cabin floor or deck. We heard them under the dining-
table, under the steward's pantry, under Margaret's stateroom.
This deck is overlaid with wood, but under the wood is iron, or steel
rather, such as of which the whole Elsinore is builded.
Margaret and I, followed by Louis, Wada, and the steward, walked
about from place to place, wherever the sounds arose of tappings and
of cold-chisels against iron. The tappings seemed to come from
everywhere; but we concluded that the concentration necessary on any
spot to make an opening large enough for a man's body would
inevitably draw our attention to that spot. And, as Margaret said:
"If they do manage to cut through, they must come up head-first, and,
in such emergence, what chance would they have against us?"
So I relieved Buckwheat from deck duty, placed him on watch over the
cabin floor, to be relieved by the steward in Margaret's watches.
In the late afternoon, after prodigious hammerings and clangings in a
score of places, all noises ceased. Neither in the first and second
dog-watches, nor in the first watch of the night, were the noises
resumed. When I took charge of the poop at midnight Buckwheat
relieved the steward in the vigil over the cabin floor; and as I
leaned on the rail at the break of the poop, while my four hours
dragged slowly by, least of all did I apprehend danger from the
cabin--especially when I considered the two-gallon pail of raw
sulphuric acid ready to hand for the first head that might arise
through an opening in the floor not yet made. Our rascals for'ard
might scale the poop; or cross aloft from mizzenmast to jigger and
descend upon our heads; but how they could invade us through the
floor was beyond me.
But they did invade. A modern ship is a complex affair. How was I
to guess the manner of the invasion?
It was two in the morning, and for an hour I had been puzzling my
head with watching the smoke arise from the after-division of the
for'ard-house and with wondering why the mutineers should have up
steam in the donkey-engine at such an ungodly hour. Not on the whole
voyage had the donkey-engine been used. Four bells had just struck,
and I was leaning on the rail at the break of the poop when I heard a
prodigious coughing and choking from aft. Next, Wada ran across the
deck to me.
"Big trouble with Buckwheat," he blurted at me. "You go quick."
I shoved him my rifle and left him on guard while I raced around the
chart-house. A lighted match, in the hands of Tom Spink, directed
me. Between the booby-hatch and the wheel, sitting up and rocking
back and forth with wringings of hands and wavings of arms, tears of
agony bursting from his eyes, was Buckwheat. My first thought was
that in some stupid way he had got the acid into his own eyes. But
the terrible fashion in which he coughed and strangled would quickly
have undeceived me, had not Louis, bending over the booby-companion,
uttered a startled exclamation.
I joined him, and one whiff of the air that came up from below made
me catch my breath and gasp. I had inhaled sulphur. On the instant
I forgot the Elsinore, the mutineers for'ard, everything save one
thing.
The next I know, I was down the booby-ladder and reeling dizzily
about the big after-room as the sulphur fumes bit my lungs and
strangled me. By the dim light of a sea-lantern I saw the old
steward, on hands and knees, coughing and gasping, the while he shook
awake Yatsuda, the first sail-maker. Uchino, the second sail-maker,
still strangled in his sleep.
It struck me that the air might be better nearer the floor, and I
proved it when I dropped on my hands and knees. I rolled Uchino out
of his blankets with a quick jerk, wrapped the blankets about my
head, face, and mouth, arose to my feet, and dashed for'ard into the
hall. After a couple of collisions with the wood-work I again
dropped to the floor and rearranged the blankets so that, while my
mouth remained covered, I could draw or withdraw, a thickness across
my eyes.
The pain of the fumes was bad enough, but the real hardship was the
dizziness I suffered. I blundered into the steward's pantry, and out
of it, missed the cross-hall, stumbled through the next starboard
opening in the long hall, and found myself bent double by violent
collision with the dining-room table.
But I had my bearings. Feeling my way around the table and bumping
most of the poisoned breath out of me against the rotund-bellied
stove, I emerged in the cross-hall and made my way to starboard.
Here, at the base of the chart-room stairway, I gained the hall that
led aft. By this time my own situation seemed so serious that,
careless of any collision, I went aft in long leaps.
Margaret's door was open. I plunged into her room. The moment I
drew the blanket-thickness from my eyes I knew blindness and a
modicum of what Bert Rhine must have suffered. Oh, the intolerable
bite of the sulphur in my lungs, nostrils, eyes, and brain! No light
burned in the room. I could only strangle and stumble for'ard to
Margaret's bed, upon which I collapsed.
She was not there. I felt about, and I felt only the warm hollow her
body had left in the under-sheet. Even in my agony and helplessness
the intimacy of that warmth her body had left was very dear to me.
Between the lack of oxygen in my lungs (due to the blankets), the
pain of the sulphur, and the mortal dizziness in my brain, I felt
that I might well cease there where the linen warmed my hand.
Perhaps I should have ceased, had I not heard a terrible coughing
from along the hall. It was new life to me. I fell from bed to
floor and managed to get upright until I gained the hall, where again
I fell. Thereafter I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the
stairway. By means of the newel-post I drew myself upright and
listened. Near me something moved and strangled. I fell upon it and
found in my arms all the softness of Margaret.
How describe that battle up the stairway? It was a crucifixion of
struggle, an age-long nightmare of agony. Time after time, as my
consciousness blurred, the temptation was upon me to cease all effort
and let myself blur down into the ultimate dark. I fought my way
step by step. Margaret was now quite unconscious, and I lifted her
body step by step, or dragged it several steps at a time, and fell
with it, and back with it, and lost much that had been so hardly
gained. And yet out of it all this I remember: that warm soft body
of hers was the dearest thing in the world--vastly more dear than the
pleasant land I remotely remembered, than all the books and all the
humans I had ever known, than the deck above, with its sweet pure air
softly blowing under the cool starry sky.
As I look back upon it I am aware of one thing: the thought of
leaving her there and saving myself never crossed my mind. The one
place for me was where she was.
Truly, this which I write seems absurd and purple; yet it was not
absurd during those long minutes on the chart-room stairway. One
must taste death for a few centuries of such agony ere he can receive
sanction for purple passages.
And as I fought my screaming flesh, my reeling brain, and climbed
that upward way, I prayed one prayer: that the chart-house doors out
upon the poop might not be shut. Life and death lay right there in
that one point of the issue. Was there any creature of my creatures
aft with common sense and anticipation sufficient to make him think
to open those doors? How I yearned for one man, for one proved
henchman, such as Mr. Pike, to be on the poop! As it was, with the
sole exception of Tom Spink and Buckwheat, my men were Asiatics.
I gained the top of the stairway, but was too far gone to rise to my
feet. Nor could I rise upright on my knees. I crawled like any
four-legged animal--nay, I wormed my way like a snake, prone to the
deck. It was a matter of several feet to the doorway. I died a
score of times in those several feet; but ever I endured the agony of
resurrection and dragged Margaret with me. Sometimes the full
strength I could exert did not move her, and I lay with her and
coughed and strangled my way through to another resurrection.
And the door was open. The doors to starboard and to port were both
open; and as the Elsinore rolled a draught through the chart-house
hall my lungs filled with pure, cool air. As I drew myself across
the high threshold and pulled Margaret after me, from very far away I
heard the cries of men and the reports of rifle and revolver. And,
ere I fainted into the blackness, on my side, staring, my pain gone
so beyond endurance that it had achieved its own anaesthesia, I
glimpsed, dream-like and distant, the sharply silhouetted poop-rail,
dark forms that cut and thrust and smote, and, beyond, the mizzen-
mast brightly lighted by our illuminators.
Well, the mutineers failed to take the poop. My five Asiatics and
two white men had held the citadel while Margaret and I lay
unconscious side by side.
The whole affair was very simple. Modern maritime quarantine demands
that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-
carriers. In the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a
complete fumigating apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and
fasten the pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the
double-deck of steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and
begin to pump. Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the
strangling sulphur fumes. We in the high place had been smoked out
by our rascals like so many rats.
It was Wada who had opened one of the doors. The old steward had
opened the other. Together they had attempted the descent of the
stairway and been driven back by the fumes. Then they had engaged in
the struggle to repel the rush from for'ard.
Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves
the lungs sore. Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we
draw breath in anything that resembles comfort. But still my lungs
were not so sore as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she
meant to me. And yet she is only a woman--I tell her so; I tell her
that there are at least seven hundred and fifty millions of two-
legged, long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like
her on the planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity of
numbers of her sex and kind. But I tell her something more. I tell
her that of all of them she is the only one. And, better yet, to
myself and for myself, I believe it. I know it. The last least part
of me and all of me proclaims it.
Love IS wonderful. It is the everlasting and miraculous amazement.
Oh, trust me, I know the old, hard scientific method of weighing and
calculating and classifying love. It is a profound foolishness, a
cosmic trick and quip, to the contemplative eye of the philosopher--
yes, and of the futurist. But when one forsakes such intellectual
flesh-pots and becomes mere human and male human, in short, a lover,
then all he may do, and which is what he cannot help doing, is to
yield to the compulsions of being and throw both his arms around love
and hold it closer to him than is his own heart close to him. This
is the summit of his life, and of man's life. Higher than this no
man may rise. The philosophers toil and struggle on mole-hill peaks
far below. He who has not loved has not tasted the ultimate sweet of
living. I know. I love Margaret, a woman. She is desirable.Previous chapter:Next chapter THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE - by Jack London. CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI CHAPTER XXVII CHAPTER XXVIII CHAPTER XXIX CHAPTER XXX CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXII CHAPTER XXXIII CHAPTER XXXIV CHAPTER XXXV CHAPTER XXXVI CHAPTER XXXVII CHAPTER XXXVIII CHAPTER XXXIX CHAPTER XL CHAPTER XLI CHAPTER XLII CHAPTER XLIII CHAPTER XLIV CHAPTER XLV CHAPTER XLVI CHAPTER XLVII CHAPTER XLVIII CHAPTER XLIX CHAPTER L Book list. |
(Friday, 29 March, 2024.)