The Mutiny of the Elsinore

by Jack London

  But to return. Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a blond Aryan. For’ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate blonds, the remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us are brunettes. They will not perish. According to Woodruff, they will inherit the earth, not because of their capacity for mastery and government, but because of their skin-pigmentation which enables their tissues to resist the ravages of the sun.

  And I look at the four of us at table—Captain West, his daughter, Mr. Pike, and myself—all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of our type on the earth. Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all peoples, disciplined them to obedience, taught them government, and dwelt in the palaces we have compelled them by the weight of our own right arms to build for us.

  The Elsinore depicts this in miniature. The best of the food and all spacious and beautiful accommodation is ours. For’ard is a pig-sty and a slave-pen.

  As a king, Captain West sits above all. As a captain of soldiers, Mr. Pike enforces his king’s will. Miss West is a princess of the royal house. And I? Am I not an honourable, noble-lineaged pensioner on the deeds and achievements of my father, who, in his day, compelled thousands of the lesser types to the building of the fortune I enjoy?

  CHAPTER XXIII

  The north-west trade carried us almost into the south-east trade, and then left us for several days to roll and swelter in the doldrums.

  During this time I have discovered that I have a genius for rifle-shooting. Mr. Pike swore I must have had long practice; and I confess I was myself startled by the ease of the thing. Of course, it’s the knack; but one must be so made, I suppose, in order to be able to acquire the knack.

  By the end of half an hour, standing on the heaving deck and shooting at bottles floating on the rolling swell, I found that I broke each bottle at the first shot. The supply of empty bottles giving out, Mr. Pike was so interested that he had the carpenter saw me a lot of small square blocks of hard wood. These were more satisfactory. A well-aimed shot threw them out of the water and spinning into the air, and I could use a single block until it had drifted out of range. In an hour’s time I could, shooting quickly and at short range, empty my magazine at a block and hit it nine times, and, on occasion, ten times, out of eleven.

  I might not have judged my aptitude as unusual, had I not induced Miss West and Wada to try their hands. Neither had luck like mine. I finally persuaded Mr. Pike, and he went behind the wheel-house so that none of the crew might see how poor a shot he was. He was never able to hit the mark, and was guilty of the most ludicrous misses.

  “I never could get the hang of rifle-shooting,” he announced disgustedly, “but when it comes to close range with a gat I’m right there. I guess I might as well overhaul mine and limber it up.”

  He went below and came back with a huge ’44 automatic pistol and a handful of loaded clips.

  “Anywhere from right against the body up to ten or twelve feet away, holding for the stomach, it’s astonishing, Mr. Pathurst, what you can do with a weapon like this. Now you can’t use a rifle in a mix-up. I’ve been down and under, with a bunch giving me the boot, when I turned loose with this. Talk about damage! It ranged them the full length of their bodies. One of them’d just landed his brogans on my face when I let’m have it. The bullet entered just above his knee, smashed the collarbone, where it came out, and then clipped off an ear. I guess that bullet’s still going. It took more than a full-sized man to stop it. So I say, give me a good handy gat when something’s doing.”

  “Ain’t you afraid you’ll use all your ammunition up?” he asked anxiously half an hour later, as I continued to crack away with my new toy.

  He was quite reassured when I told him Wada had brought along fifty thousand rounds for me.

  In the midst of the shooting, two sharks came swimming around. They were quite large, Mr. Pike said, and he estimated their length at fifteen feet. It was Sunday morning, so that the crew, except for working the ship, had its time to itself, and soon the carpenter, with a rope for a fish-line and a great iron hook baited with a chunk of salt pork the size of my head, captured first one, and then the other, of the monsters. They were hoisted in on the main deck. And then I saw a spectacle of the cruelty of the sea.

  The full crew gathered about with sheath knives, hatchets, clubs, and big butcher knives borrowed from the galley. I shall not give the details, save that they gloated and lusted, and roared and bellowed their delight in the atrocities they committed. Finally, the first of the two fish was thrown back into the ocean with a pointed stake thrust into its upper and lower jaws so that it could not close its mouth. Inevitable and prolonged starvation was the fate thus meted out to it.

  “I’ll show you something, boys,” Andy Fay cried, as they prepared to handle the second shark.

  The Maltese Cockney had been a most capable master of ceremonies with the first one. More than anything else, I think, was I hardened against these brutes by what I saw them do. In the end, the maltreated fish thrashed about the deck entirely eviscerated. Nothing remained but the mere flesh-shell of the creature, yet it would not die. It was amazing the life that lingered when all the vital organs were gone. But more amazing things were to follow.

  Mulligan Jacobs, his arms a butcher’s to the elbows, without as much as “by your leave,” suddenly thrust a hunk of meat into my hand. I sprang back, startled, and dropped it to the deck, while a gleeful howl went up from the two-score men. I was shamed, despite myself. These brutes held me in little respect; and, after all, human nature is so strange a compound that even a philosopher dislikes being held in disesteem by the brutes of his own species.

  I looked at what I had dropped. It was the heart of the shark, and as I looked, there under my eyes, on the scorching deck where the pitch oozed from the seams, the heart pulsed with life.

  And I dared. I would not permit these animals to laugh at any fastidiousness of mine. I stooped and picked up the heart, and while I concealed and conquered my qualms I held it in my hand and felt it beat in my hand.

  At any rate, I had won a mild victory over Mulligan Jacobs; for he abandoned me for the more delectable diversion of torturing the shark that would not die. For several minutes it had been lying quite motionless. Mulligan Jacobs smote it a heavy blow on the nose with the flat of a hatchet, and as the thing galvanized into life and flung its body about the deck the little venomous man screamed in ecstasy:

  “The hooks are in it!—the hooks are in it!—and burnin’ hot!”

  He squirmed and writhed with fiendish delight, and again he struck it on the nose and made it leap.

  This was too much, and I beat a retreat—feigning boredom, or cessation of interest, of course; and absently carrying the still throbbing heart in my hand.

  As I came upon the poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket, emerging from the port door of the chart-house. The deck-chairs were on that side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-house in order to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I carried. But, drying on the surface in the tropic heat and still pulsing inside, it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad cast. Instead of clearing the railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck there in the shade, and as I opened the door to go below and wash my hands, with a last glance I saw it pulse where it had fallen.

  When I came back it was still pulsing. I heard a splash overside from the waist of the ship, and knew the carcass had been flung overboard. I did not go around the chart-house and join Miss West, but stood enthralled by the spectacle of that heart that beat in the tropic heat.

  Boisterous shouts from the sailors attracted my attention. They had all climbed to the top of the tall rail and were watching something outboard. I followed their gaze and saw the amazing thing. That long-eviscerated shark was not dead. It moved, it swam, it thrashed about, and ever it strove to escape
from the surface of the ocean. Sometimes it swam down as deep as fifty or a hundred feet, and then, still struggling to escape the surface, struggled involuntarily to the surface. Each failure thus to escape fetched wild laughter from the men. But why did they laugh? The thing was sublime, horrible, but it was not humorous. I leave it to you. What is there laughable in the sight of a pain-distraught fish rolling helplessly on the surface of the sea and exposing to the sun all its essential emptiness?

  I was turning away, when renewed shouting drew my gaze. Half a dozen other sharks had appeared, smaller ones, nine or ten feet long. They attacked their helpless comrade. They tore him to pieces they destroyed him, devoured him. I saw the last shred of him disappear down their maws. He was gone, disintegrated, entombed in the living bodies of his kind, and already entering into the processes of digestion. And yet, there, in the shade on the pin-rail, that unbelievable and monstrous heart beat on.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The voyage is doomed to disaster and death. I know Mr. Pike, now, and if ever he discovers the identity of Mr. Mellaire, murder will be done. Mr. Mellaire is not Mr. Mellaire. He is not from Georgia . He is from Virginia . His name is Waltham —Sidney Waltham. He is one of the Walthams of Virginia, a black sheep, true, but a Waltham . Of this I am convinced, just as utterly as I am convinced that Mr. Pike will kill him if he learns who he is.

  Let me tell how I have discovered all this. It was last night, shortly before midnight, when I came up on the poop to enjoy a whiff of the south-east trades in which we are now bowling along, close-hauled in order to weather Cape San Roque. Mr. Pike had the watch, and I paced up and down with him while he told me old pages of his life. He has often done this, when not “sea-grouched,” and often he has mentioned with pride—yes, with reverence—a master with whom he sailed five years. “Old Captain Somers,” he called him—“the finest, squarest, noblest man I ever sailed under, sir.”

  Well, last night our talk turned on lugubrious subjects, and Mr. Pike, wicked old man that he is, descanted on the wickedness of the world and on the wickedness of the man who had murdered Captain Somers.

  “He was an old man, over seventy years old,” Mr. Pike went on. “And they say he’d got a touch of palsy—I hadn’t seen him for years. You see, I’d had to clear out from the coast because of trouble. And that devil of a second mate caught him in bed late at night and beat him to death. It was terrible. They told me about it. Right in San Francisco , on board the Jason Harrison , it happened, eleven years ago.

  “And do you know what they did? First, they gave the murderer life, when he should have been hanged. His plea was insanity, from having had his head chopped open a long time before by a crazy sea-cook. And when he’d served seven years the governor pardoned him. He wasn’t any good, but his people were a powerful old Virginian family, the Walthams—I guess you’ve heard of them—and they brought all kinds of pressure to bear. His name was Sidney Waltham.”

  At this moment the warning bell, a single stroke fifteen minutes before the change of watch, rang out from the wheel and was repeated by the look-out on the forecastle head. Mr. Pike, under his stress of feeling, had stopped walking, and we stood at the break of the poop. As chance would have it, Mr. Mellaire was a quarter of an hour ahead of time, and he climbed the poop-ladder and stood beside us while the mate concluded his tale.

  “I didn’t mind it,” Mr. Pike continued, “as long as he’d got life and was serving his time. But when they pardoned him out after only seven years I swore I’d get him. And I will. I don’t believe in God or devil, and it’s a rotten crazy world anyway; but I do believe in hunches. And I know I’m going to get him.”

  “What will you do?” I queried.

  “Do?” Mr. Pike’s voice was fraught with surprise that I should not know. “Do? Well, what did he do to old Captain Somers? Yet he’s disappeared these last three years now. I’ve heard neither hide nor hair of him. But he’s a sailor, and he’ll drift back to the sea, and some day . . . ”

  In the illumination of a match with which the second mate was lighting his pipe I saw Mr. Pike’s gorilla arms and huge clenched paws raised to heaven, and his face convulsed and working. Also, in that brief moment of light, I saw that the second mate’s hand which held the match was shaking.

  “And I ain’t never seen even a photo of him,” Mr. Pike added. “But I’ve got a general idea of his looks, and he’s got a mark unmistakable. I could know him by it in the dark. All I’d have to do is feel it. Some day I’ll stick my fingers into that mark.”

  “What did you say, sir, was the captain’s name?” Mr. Mellaire asked casually.

  “Somers—old Captain Somers,” Mr. Pike answered.

  Mr. Mellaire repeated the name aloud several times, and then hazarded:

  “Didn’t he command the Lammermoor thirty years ago?”

  “That’s the man.”

  “I thought I recognized him. I lay at anchor in a ship next to his in Table Bay that time ago.”

  “Oh, the wickedness of the world, the wickedness of the world,” Mr. Pike muttered as he turned and strode away.

  I said good-night to the second mate and had started to go below, when he called to me in a low voice, “Mr. Pathurst!”

  I stopped, and then he said, hurriedly and confusedly:

  “Never mind, sir . . . I beg your pardon . . . I—I changed my mind.”

  Below, lying in my bunk, I found myself unable to read. My mind was bent on returning to what had just occurred on deck, and, against my will, the most gruesome speculations kept suggesting themselves.

  And then came Mr. Mellaire. He had slipped down the booby hatch into the big after-room and thence through the hallway to my room. He entered noiselessly, on clumsy tiptoes, and pressed his finger warningly to his lips. Not until he was beside my bunk did he speak, and then it was in a whisper.

  “I beg your pardon, sir, Mr. Pathurst . . . I—I beg your pardon; but, you see, sir, I was just passing, and seeing you awake I . . . I thought it would not inconvenience you to . . . you see, I thought I might just as well prefer a small favour . . . seeing that I would not inconvenience you, sir . . . I . . . I . . . ”

  I waited for him to proceed, and in the pause that ensued, while he licked his dry lips with his tongue, the thing ambushed in his skull peered at me through his eyes and seemed almost on the verge of leaping out and pouncing upon me.

  “Well, sir,” he began again, this time more coherently, “it’s just a little thing—foolish on my part, of course—a whim, so to say—but you will remember, near the beginning of the voyage, I showed you a scar on my head . . . a really small affair, sir, which I contracted in a misadventure. It amounts to a deformity, which it is my fancy to conceal. Not for worlds, sir, would I care to have Miss West, for instance, know that I carried such a deformity. A man is a man, sir—you understand—and you have not spoken of it to her?”

  “No,” I replied. “It just happens that I have not.”

  “Nor to anybody else?—to, say, Captain West?—or, say, Mr. Pike?”

  “No, I haven’t mentioned it to anybody,” I averred.

  He could not conceal the relief he experienced. The perturbation went out of his face and manner, and the ambushed thing drew back deeper into the recess of his skull.

  “The favour, sir, Mr. Pathurst, that I would prefer is that you will not mention that little matter to anybody. I suppose” (he smiled, and his voice was superlatively suave) “it is vanity on my part—you understand, I am sure.”

  I nodded, and made a restless movement with my book as evidence that I desired to resume my reading.

  “I can depend upon you for that, Mr. Pathurst?” His whole voice and manner had changed. It was practically a command, and I could almost see fangs, bared and menacing, sprouting in the jaws of that thing I fancied dwelt behind his eyes.

  “Certainly,” I answered coldly.

  “Thank you, sir—I thank you,” he said, and, without more ado, tiptoed from the room.

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sp; Of course I did not read. How could I? Nor did I sleep. My mind ran on, and on, and not until the steward brought my coffee, shortly before five, did I sink into my first doze.

  One thing is very evident. Mr. Pike does not dream that the murderer of Captain Somers is on board the Elsinore . He has never glimpsed that prodigious fissure that clefts Mr. Mellaire’s, or, rather, Sidney Waltham’s, skull. And I, for one, shall never tell Mr. Pike. And I know, now, why from the very first I disliked the second mate. And I understand that live thing, that other thing, that lurks within and peers out through the eyes. I have recognized the same thing in the three gangsters for’ard. Like the second mate, they are prison birds. The restraint, the secrecy, and iron control of prison life has developed in all of them terrible other selves.

  Yes, and another thing is very evident. On board this ship, driving now through the South Atlantic for the winter passage of Cape Horn , are all the elements of sea tragedy and horror. We are freighted with human dynamite that is liable at any moment to blow our tiny floating world to fragments.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The days slip by. The south-east trade is brisk and small splashes of sea occasionally invade my open ports. Mr. Pike’s room was soaked yesterday. This is the most exciting thing that has happened for some time. The gangsters rule in the forecastle. Larry and Shorty have had a harmless fight . The hooks continue to burn in Mulligan Jacobs’s brain. Charles Davis resides alone in his little steel room, coming out only to get his food from the galley. Miss West plays and sings, doctors Possum, launders, and is for ever otherwise busy with her fancy work. Mr. Pike runs the phonograph every other evening in the second dog-watch. Mr. Mellaire hides the cleft in his head. I keep his secret. And Captain West, more remote than ever, sits in the draught of wind in the twilight cabin.