Chapter 10

Chapter X

That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the table, while the Elsinore rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to her room.

"You won't see her for a couple of days," Captain West told me. "Her mother was the same way--a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of a voyage."

"It's the shaking down." Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest observation I had yet heard him utter at table. "Everybody has to shake down when they leave the land. We've got to forget the good times on shore, and the good things money'll buy, and start watch and watch, four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?"

I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.

"Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato, every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch."

"You don't like the sea?" I queried.

He sighed.

"I don't know. But of course the sea is all I know--"

"Except music," I threw in.

"Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of the music I oughta have had coming to me."

"I suppose you've heard Schumann Heink?"

"Wonderful, wonderful!" he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an eager wistfulness. "I've half-a-dozen of her records, and I've got the second dog-watch below. If Captain West don't mind . . . " (Captain West nodded that he didn't mind). "And if you'd want to hear them? The machine is a good one."

And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this hoary old relic of man-killing and man-driving days, battered waif of the sea that he was, carried in from his room a most splendid collection of phonograph records. These, and the machine, he placed on the table. The big doors were opened, making the dining-room and the main cabin into one large room. It was in the cabin that Captain West and I lolled in big leather chairs while Mr. Pike ran the phonograph. His face was in a blaze of light from the swinging lamps, and every shade of expression was visible to me.

In vain I waited for him to start some popular song. His records were only of the best, and the care he took of them was a revelation. He handled each one reverently, as a sacred thing, untying and unwrapping it and brushing it with a fine camel's hair brush while it revolved and ere he placed the needle on it. For a time all I could see was the huge brute hands of a brute-driver, with skin off the knuckles, that expressed love in their every movement. Each touch on the discs was a caress, and while the record played he hovered over it and dreamed in some heaven of music all his own.