Chapter XIV
Such a cleaning up and turning over! For two nights, one in the chart-
room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep, and I am
now almost stupid with excess of sleep. The land seems very far away. By
some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or months, have
passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March morning. And yet it
was March 28, and this is only the first week in April.
I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West. She is the
most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered. What
passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she
was convinced that he was not the erring one. In some strange way, my
two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of
vermin. Under Miss West’s instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all
superficial woodwork have been ripped out. She worked the carpenter from
daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of the
sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches on the
cleansing operations. The carpenter is now busy rebuilding my rooms.
Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days I expect to be
settled back in my quarters.
Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been
four. Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to
the work. The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name,
is an interesting fellow. I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West
sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.
This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea. How he
happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not
explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the
Elsinore. But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on
the sea. He is a small man, but most powerfully built. His shoulders
are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and yet he is
slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked. This last, however, is
not due to sickness or ill-health. Tyro as he is on the sea, Steve
Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked. He has a way of
looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet it
is at such moments I get most strongly the impression of crookedness. But
he is a man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned with. In ways he
suggests a kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a
prejudice against–Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine. And I have
already noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve
Roberts chums.
The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work
for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature
of the spine. But before she sent him packing other things occurred in
which I was concerned. I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first came
in to go to work, and I could not help observing the startled, avid
glance he threw at my big shelves of books. He advanced on them in the
way a robber might advance on a secret hoard of gold, and as a miser
would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these book-titles with his
eyes.
And such eyes! All time bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the
man possessed was there in his eyes. They were small, pale-blue, and
gimlet-pointed with fire. His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to
ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils. The man
was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in learning that he
hated all things except books.
“Would you care to read some of them?” I said hospitably.
All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head
to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.
“It’s hell, ain’t it?–you with a strong body and servants to carry for
you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts the
pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?”
How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he uttered
these words? I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the hall past
my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety. Being alone in
the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were locked in a cage
with a tiger-cat. The devilishness, the wickedness, and, above all, the
pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me and addressed me, were
most unpleasant. I swear I knew fear–not calculated caution, not timid
apprehension, but blind, panic, unreasoned terror. The malignancy of the
creature was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it
poured from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his
withered, twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked
talons of hands. And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and
repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take the
throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the
malformed life out of it.
But there was little encouragement in such thought–no more than a man
might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush
them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison
into him. And so with this Mulligan Jacobs. My fear of him was the fear
of being infected with his venom. I could not help it; for I caught a
quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his mouth
sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid,
destroying me.
One thing was very clear. In the creature was no fear. Absolutely, he
did not know fear. He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads
underfoot in nightmares. Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a
nightmare.
“You suffer pain often?” I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by the
calculated use of sympathy.
“The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an’ burn,”
was his reply. “But by what damnable right do you have all these books,
and time to read ’em, an’ all night in to read ’em, an’ soak in them,
when me brain’s on fire, and I’m watch and watch, an’ me broken spine
won’t let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?”
Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to
modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what
were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the
writers he preferred. His library, he told me, among other things
included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a complete
Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full hall-dozen
he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of Lecky, Winwood
Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, several of Carlyle, and eight or ten of Zola.
Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a prime favourite.
He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently mad
from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him about books
and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He liked O. Henry.
George Moore was a cad and a four–flusher. Edgar Saltus’ Anatomy of
Negation was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a mystic frump.
Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen’s Ghosts was the stuff, though Ibsen
was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He preferred
Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the
best of the Russian boiling. John Masefield knew what he was writing
about, and Joseph Conrad was living too fat to turn out the stuff he
first turned out.
And so it went, the most amazing running commentary on literature I had
ever heard. I was hugely interested, and I quizzed him on sociology.
Yes, he was a Red, and knew his Kropotkin, but he was no anarchist. On
the other hand, political action was a blind-alley leading to reformism
and quietism. Political socialism had gone to pot, while industrial
unionism was the logical culmination of Marxism. He was a direct
actionist. The mass strike was the thing. Sabotage, not merely as a
withdrawal of efficiency, but as a keen destruction-of-profits policy,
was the weapon. Of course he believed in the propaganda of the deed, but
a man was a fool to talk about it. His job was to do it and keep his
mouth shut, and the way to do it was to shoot the evidence. Of course,
he talked; but what of it? Didn’t he have curvature of the spine? He
didn’t care when he got his, and woe to the man who tried to give it to
him.
And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he talked
about and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was
patent that he was self-educated. When I asked him how it was he had
come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as hot one place
as another. He unbent enough to tell me that he had been an athlete,
when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer in Eastern Canada. And
then his disease had come upon him, and for a quarter of a century he had
been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of a personal
acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any man that
ever existed.
It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour look
of disapprobation. Mr. Pike’s countenance is almost petrified. Any
expression seems to crack it–with the exception of sourness. But when
Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His
hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he
condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs’s time. To Mulligan Jacobs he
said in his customary snarl:
“Go on an’ get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch below.”
And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I had
already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was
manifested. I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather,
did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.
“Aw, go to hell, you old stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs.
If ever I had seen murder in a man’s eyes, I saw it then in the mate’s.
He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open but
clenched. One stroke of that bear’s paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all the
poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake
on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant.
More than that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted neck to
meet the blow.
It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that frail,
crippled, repulsive thing.
“It’s me that can call you the stiff,” said Mulligan Jacobs. “I ain’t no
Larry. G’wan an’ hit me. Why don’t you hit me?”
And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose whole
career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, could
not strike this fractured splinter of a man. I swear that Mr. Pike
actually struggled with himself to strike. I saw it. But he could not.
“Go on to your work,” he ordered. “The voyage is young yet, Mulligan.
I’ll have you eatin’ outa my hand before it’s over.”
And Mulligan Jacobs’s face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
into incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that
consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it. All he could do
was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should not have been
surprised had he spat poison in the mate’s face.
And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
beaten.
* * * * *
I can’t get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the cripple
facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is different
from the books and from what I know of existence. It is revelation. Life
is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter flame that informs
Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he–with no hope of any profit, not a hero,
not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to God, but a mere filthy,
malignant rat–how dare he, I ask myself, be so defiant, so
death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt all the schools of
the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg to stand on
that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil of
philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan
Jacobs . . . unless he be insane. And then I don’t know.
Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans
with whom I am herded on the Elsinore?
* * * * *
And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is another
one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon. He is the
pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the men were
routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass–the man I so instantly
adjudged a drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.
I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.
“White slaver,” was his answer. “Had to skin outa New York to save his
skin. He’ll be consorting with those other three larrakins I gave a
piece of my mind to.”
“And what do you make of them?” I asked.
“A month’s wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lookin’ for
’em right now. I’d like to have the cash somebody’s put up in New York
to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed.”
“Gangsters?” I queried.
“That’s what. But I’ll trim their dirty hides. I’ll trim ’em. Mr.
Pathurst, this voyage ain’t started yet, and this old stiff’s a long way
from his last legs. I’ll give them a run for their money. Why, I’ve
buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And I’ll bury
some of them that think me an old stiff.”
He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
“Mr. Pathurst, I’ve heard you’re a writing man. And when they told me at
the agents’ you were going along passenger, I made a point of going to
see your play. Now I’m not saying anything about that play, one way or
the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you’ll get
stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell’s going to pop,
believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that’ll do a lot of
the poppin’. Some several and plenty’s going to learn who’s an old
stiff.”
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