Chapter XLIX
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.