“Yes, sir,” came the answer of a spirit cowed.
“And you?” I was asked.
“I’ll give you a thousand - “ I began, but was interrupted.
“Stow that! Are you going to take up your duties as cabin-boy? Or do I have to take you in hand?”
What was I to do? To be brutally beaten, to be killed perhaps, would not help my case. I looked steadily into the cruel grey eyes. They might have been granite for all the light and warmth of a human soul they contained. One may see the soul stir in some men’s eyes, but his were bleak, and cold, and grey as the sea itself.
“Well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Say ’yes, sir.’”
“Yes, sir,” I corrected.
“What is your name?”
“Van Weyden, sir.”
“First name?”
“Humphrey, sir; Humphrey Van Weyden.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-five, sir.”
“That’ll do. Go to the cook and learn your duties.”
And thus it was that I passed into a state of involuntary servitude to Wolf Larsen. He was stronger than I, that was all. But it was very unreal at the time. It is no less unreal now that I look back upon it. It will always be to me a monstrous, inconceivable thing, a horrible nightmare.
“Hold on, don’t go yet.”
I stopped obediently in my walk toward the galley.
“Johansen, call all hands. Now that we’ve everything cleaned up, we’ll have the funeral and get the decks cleared of useless lumber.”
While Johansen was summoning the watch below, a couple of sailors, under the captain’s direction, laid the canvas-swathed corpse upon a hatch-cover. On either side the deck, against the rail and bottoms up, were lashed a number of small boats. Several men picked up the hatch-cover with its ghastly freight, carried it to the lee side, and rested it on the boats, the feet pointing overboard. To the feet was attached the sack of coal which the cook had fetched.
I had always conceived a burial at sea to be a very solemn and awe- inspiring event, but I was quickly disillusioned, by this burial at any rate. One of the hunters, a little dark-eyed man whom his mates called “Smoke,” was telling stories, liberally intersprinkled with oaths and obscenities; and every minute or so the group of hunters gave mouth to a laughter that sounded to me like a wolf- chorus or the barking of hell-hounds. The sailors trooped noisily aft, some of the watch below rubbing the sleep from their eyes,