I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparklingpoints of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew,and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reachedthe limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, agreat gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period, lapped inthe rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendousflight.

But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myselfit must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was jerked from swingto counter swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely catch mybreath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The gongthundered more frequently and more furiously. I grew to await it with anameless dread. Then it seemed as though I were being dragged overrasping sands, white and hot in the sun. This gave place to a sense ofintolerable anguish. My skin was scorching in the torment of fire. Thegong clanged and knelled. The sparkling points of light flashed past mein an interminable stream, as though the whole sidereal system weredropping into the void. I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and openedmy eyes. Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mightyrhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. Theterrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled andclattered with each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands werea man’s hard hands chafing my naked chest. I squirmed under the pain ofit, and half lifted my head. My chest was raw and red, and I could seetiny blood globules starting through the torn and inflamed cuticle.

“That’ll do, Yonson,” one of the men said. “Carn’t yer see you’vebloomin’ well rubbed all the gent’s skin orf?”

The man addressed as Yonson, a man of the heavy Scandinavian type, ceasedchafing me, and arose awkwardly to his feet. The man who had spoken tohim was clearly a Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almosteffeminate, face of the man who has absorbed the sound of Bow Bells withhis mother’s milk. A draggled muslin cap on his head and a dirtygunny-sack about his slim hips proclaimed him cook of the decidedly dirtyship’s galley in which I found myself.

“An’ ’ow yer feelin’ now, sir?” he asked, with the subservient smirkwhich comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors.

For reply, I twisted weakly into a sitting posture, and was helped byYonson to my feet. The rattle and bang of the frying-pan was gratinghorribly on my nerves. I could not collect my thoughts. Clutching thewoodwork of the galley for support,—and I confess the grease with whichit was scummed put my teeth on edge,—I reached across a hot cooking-rangeto the offending utensil, unhooked it, and wedged it securely into thecoal-box.

The cook grinned at my exhibition of nerves, and thrust into my hand asteaming mug with an “’Ere, this’ll do yer good.” It was a nauseousmess,—ship’s coffee,—but the heat of it was revivifying. Between gulpsof the molten stuff I glanced down at my raw and bleeding chest andturned to the Scandinavian.

“Thank you, Mr. Yonson,” I said; “but don’t you think your measures wererather heroic?”

It was because he understood the reproof of my action, rather than of mywords, that he held up his palm for inspection. It was remarkablycalloused. I passed my hand over the horny projections, and my teethwent on edge once more from the horrible rasping sensation produced.

“My name is Johnson, not Yonson,” he said, in very good, though slow,English, with no more than a shade of accent to it.

There was mild protest in his pale blue eyes, and withal a timidfrankness and manliness that quite won me to him.

“Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” I corrected, and reached out my hand for his.

He hesitated, awkward and bashful, shifted his weight from one leg to theother, then blunderingly gripped my hand in a hearty shake.

“Have you any dry clothes I may put on?” I asked the cook.

“Yes, sir,” he answered, with cheerful alacrity. “I’ll run down an’ tykea look over my kit, if you’ve no objections, sir, to wearin’ my things.”

He dived out of the galley door, or glided rather, with a swiftness andsmoothness of gait that struck me as being not so much cat-like as oily.In fact, this oiliness, or greasiness, as I was later to learn, wasprobably the most salient expression of his personality.

“And where am I?” I asked Johnson, whom I took, and rightly, to be one ofthe sailors. “What vessel is this, and where is she bound?”

“Off the Farallones, heading about sou-west,” he answered, slowly andmethodically, as though groping for his best English, and rigidlyobserving the order of my queries. “The schooner _Ghost_, boundseal-hunting to Japan.”

“And who is the captain? I must see him as soon as I am dressed.”

Johnson looked puzzled and embarrassed. He hesitated while he groped inhis vocabulary and framed a complete answer. “The cap’n is Wolf Larsen,or so men call him. I never heard his other name. But you better speaksoft with him. He is mad this morning. The mate—”

But he did not finish. The cook had glided in.

“Better sling yer ’ook out of ’ere, Yonson,” he said. “The old man’ll bewantin’ yer on deck, an’ this ayn’t no d’y to fall foul of ’im.”

Johnson turned obediently to the door, at the same time, over the cook’sshoulder, favouring me with an amazingly solemn and portentous wink asthough to emphasize his interrupted remark and the need for me to besoft-spoken with the captain.

Hanging over the cook’s arm was a loose and crumpled array ofevil-looking and sour-smelling garments.

“They was put aw’y wet, sir,” he vouchsafed explanation. “But you’ll’ave to make them do till I dry yours out by the fire.”

Clinging to the woodwork, staggering with the roll of the ship, and aidedby the cook, I managed to slip into a rough woollen undershirt. On theinstant my flesh was creeping and crawling from the harsh contact. Henoticed my involuntary twitching and grimacing, and smirked:

“I only ’ope yer don’t ever ’ave to get used to such as that in thislife, ’cos you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ’ave, more like alydy’s than any I know of. I was bloomin’ well sure you was a gentlemanas soon as I set eyes on yer.”

I had taken a dislike to him at first, and as he helped to dress me thisdislike increased. There was something repulsive about his touch. Ishrank from his hand; my flesh revolted. And between this and the smellsarising from various pots boiling and bubbling on the galley fire, I wasin haste to get out into the fresh air. Further, there was the need ofseeing the captain about what arrangements could be made for getting meashore.

A cheap cotton shirt, with frayed collar and a bosom discoloured withwhat I took to be ancient blood-stains, was put on me amid a running andapologetic fire of comment. A pair of workman’s brogans encased my feet,and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale blue, washed-outoveralls, one leg of which was fully ten inches shorter than the other.The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil had there clutched for theCockney’s soul and missed the shadow for the substance.

“And whom have I to thank for this kindness?” I asked, when I stoodcompletely arrayed, a tiny boy’s cap on my head, and for coat a dirty,striped cotton jacket which ended at the small of my back and the sleevesof which reached just below my elbows.

The cook drew himself up in a smugly humble fashion, a deprecating smirkon his face. Out of my experience with stewards on the Atlantic linersat 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 wasunconscious. An hereditary servility, no doubt, was responsible.

“Mugridge, sir,” he fawned, his effeminate features running into a greasysmile. “Thomas Mugridge, sir, an’ at yer service.”

“All right, Thomas,” I said. “I shall not forget you—when my clothes aredry.”

A soft light suffused his face and his eyes glistened, as thoughsomewhere in the deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened andstirred 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 Istepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion. Apuff of wind caught me,—and I staggered across the moving deck to acorner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The schooner, heeledover far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into thelong Pacific roll. If she were heading south-west as Johnson had said,the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from the south. The fogwas gone, and in its place the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of thewater, I turned to the east, where I knew California must lie, but couldsee nothing save low-lying fog-banks—the same fog, doubtless, that hadbrought about the disaster to the _Martinez_ and placed me in my presentsituation. To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks thrustabove the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse. In thesouth-west, and almost in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of somevessel’s sails.

Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediatesurroundings. My first thought was that a man who had come through acollision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than Ireceived. Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously across thetop of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.

Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships. There, on ahatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully clothed, thoughhis 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 likethe furry coat of a dog. His face and neck were hidden beneath a blackbeard, intershot with grey, which would have been stiff and bushy had itnot been limp and draggled and dripping with water. His eyes wereclosed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open,his breast, heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily forbreath. A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a matterof 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 prostrateman.

Pacing back and forth the length of the hatchways and savagely chewingthe end of a cigar, was the man whose casual glance had rescued me fromthe sea. His height was probably five feet ten inches, or ten and ahalf; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of this, butof his strength. And yet, while he was of massive build, with broadshoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength asmassive. It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of thekind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because of hisheavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order. Not that inappearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like. What I am striving toexpress is this strength itself, more as a thing apart from his physicalsemblance. It was a strength we are wont to associate with thingsprimitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine ourtree-dwelling prototypes to have been—a strength savage, ferocious, alivein itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, theelemental stuff itself out of which the many forms of life have beenmoulded; in short, that which writhes in the body of a snake when thehead is cut off, and the snake, as a snake, is dead, or which lingers inthe shapeless lump of turtle-meat and recoils and quivers from the prodof a finger.

Such was the impression of strength I gathered from this man who paced upand down. He was firmly planted on his legs; his feet struck the decksquarely and with surety; every movement of a muscle, from the heave ofthe shoulders to the tightening of the lips about the cigar, wasdecisive, and seemed to come out of a strength that was excessive andoverwhelming. In fact, though this strength pervaded every action ofhis, it seemed but the advertisement of a greater strength that lurkedwithin, that lay dormant and no more than stirred from time to time, butwhich might arouse, at any moment, terrible and compelling, like the rageof a lion or the wrath of a storm.

The cook stuck his head out of the galley door and grinned encouraginglyat me, at the same time jerking his thumb in the direction of the man whopaced up and down by the hatchway. Thus I was given to understand thathe was the captain, the “Old Man,” in the cook’s vernacular, theindividual whom I must interview and put to the trouble of somehowgetting me ashore. I had half started forward, to get over with what Iwas certain would be a stormy five minutes, when a more violentsuffocating paroxysm seized the unfortunate person who was lying on hisback. He wrenched and writhed about convulsively. The chin, with thedamp black beard, pointed higher in the air as the back muscles stiffenedand the chest swelled in an unconscious and instinctive effort to getmore air. Under the whiskers, and all unseen, I knew that the skin wastaking on a purplish hue.

The captain, or Wolf Larsen, as men called him, ceased pacing and gazeddown at the dying man. So fierce had this final struggle become that thesailor paused in the act of flinging more water over him and staredcuriously, the canvas bucket partly tilted and dripping its contents tothe deck. The dying man beat a tattoo on the hatch with his heels,straightened out his legs, and stiffened in one great tense effort, androlled his head from side to side. Then the muscles relaxed, the headstopped rolling, and a sigh, as of profound relief, floated upward fromhis lips. The jaw dropped, the upper lip lifted, and two rows oftobacco-discoloured teeth appeared. It seemed as though his features hadfrozen into a diabolical grin at the world he had left and outwitted.

Then a most surprising thing occurred. The captain broke loose upon thedead man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuousstream. And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions ofindecency. Each word was a blasphemy, and there were many words. Theycrisped and crackled like electric sparks. I had never heard anythinglike it in my life, nor could I have conceived it possible. With a turnfor literary expression myself, and a penchant for forcible figures andphrases, I appreciated, as no other listener, I dare say, the peculiarvividness and strength and absolute blasphemy of his metaphors. Thecause of it all, as near as I could make out, was that the man, who wasmate, had gone on a debauch before leaving San Francisco, and then hadthe poor taste to die at the beginning of the voyage and leave WolfLarsen short-handed.

It should be unnecessary to state, at least to my friends, that I wasshocked. Oaths and vile language of any sort had always been repellentto me. I felt a wilting sensation, a sinking at the heart, and, I mightjust as well say, a giddiness. To me, death had always been investedwith solemnity and dignity. It had been peaceful in its occurrence,sacred in its ceremonial. But death in its more sordid and terribleaspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted till now. As Isay, while I appreciated the power of the terrific denunciation thatswept out of Wolf Larsen’s mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked. Thescorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse. I shouldnot have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curledand flared up in smoke and flame. But the dead man was unconcerned. Hecontinued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery anddefiance. He was master of the situation.