Jack London - The Mutiny of the Elsinore

No; as I contemplate this roll-call of the dead which I have just made I see that we are not playing a boy’s game. Why, we have lost a third of us, and the bloodiest battles of history have rarely achieved such a percentage of mortality. Fourteen of us have gone overside, and who can tell the end?

Nevertheless, here we are, masters of matter, adventurers in the micro-organic, planet-weighers, sun-analysers, star-rovers, god-dreamers, equipped with the human wisdom of all the ages, and yet, quoting Mr. Pike, to come down to brass tacks, we are a lot of primitive beasts, fighting bestially, slaying bestially, pursuing bestially food and water, air for our lungs, a dry space above the deep, and carcasses skin-covered and intact. And over this menagerie of beasts Margaret and I, with our Asiatics under us, rule top-dog. We are all dogs—there is no getting away from it. And we, the fair-pigmented ones, by the seed of our ancestry rulers in the high place, shall remain top-dog over the rest of the dogs. Oh, there is material in plenty for the cogitation of any philosopher on a windjammer in mutiny in this Year of our Lord 1913.

Henry was the fourteenth of us to go overside into the dark and salty disintegration of the sea. And in one day he has been well avenged; for two of the mutineers have followed him. The steward called my attention to what was taking place. He touched my arm half beyond his servant’s self, as he gloated for’ard at the men heaving two corpses overside. Weighted with coal, they sank immediately, so that we could not identify them.

“They have been fighting,” I said. “It is good that they should fight among themselves.”

But the old Chinese merely grinned and shook his head.

“You don’t think they have been fighting?” I queried.

“No fight. They eat’m mollyhawk and albatross; mollyhawk and albatross eat’m fat pork; two men he die, plenty men much sick, you bet, damn to hell me very much glad. I savve.”

And I think he was right. While I was busy baiting the sea-birds the mutineers were catching them, and of a surety they must have caught some that had eaten of my various poisons.

The two poisoned ones went over the side yesterday. Since then we have taken the census. Two men only have not appeared, and they are Bob, the fat and overgrown feebling youth, and, of all creatures, the Faun. It seems my fate that I had to destroy the Faun—the poor, tortured Faun, always willing and eager, ever desirous to please. There is a madness of ill luck in all this. Why couldn’t the two dead men have been Charles Davis and Tony the Greek? Or Bert Rhine and Kid Twist? or Bombini and Andy Fay? Yes, and in my heart I know I should have felt better had it been Isaac Chantz and Arthur Deacon, or Nancy and Sundry Buyers, or Shorty and Larry.

The steward has just tendered me a respectful bit of advice.

“Next time we chuck’m overboard like Henry, much better we use old iron.”

“Getting short of coal?” I asked.

He nodded affirmation. We use a great deal of coal in our cooking, and when the present supply gives out we shall have to cut through a bulkhead to get at the cargo.

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.