The Mutiny of the Elsinore

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.

During this time Captain West lay back and smoked a cigar.  His face was expressionless, and he seemed very far away, untouched by the music.  I almost doubted that he heard it.  He made no remarks between whiles, betrayed no sign of approbation or displeasure.  He seemed preternaturally serene, preternaturally remote.  And while I watched him I wondered what his duties were.  I had not seen him perform any.  Mr. Pike had attended to the loading of the ship.  Not until she was ready for sea had Captain West come on board.  I had not seen him give an order.  It looked to me that Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire did the work.  All Captain West did was to smoke cigars and keep blissfully oblivious of the Elsinore’s crew.

When Mr. Pike had played the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Messiah , and “He Shall Feed His Flock,” he mentioned to me, almost apologetically, that he liked sacred music, and for the reason, perhaps, that for a short period, a child ashore in San Francisco, he had been a choir boy.

“And then I hit the dominie over the head with a baseball bat and sneaked off to sea again,” he concluded with a harsh laugh.

And thereat he fell to dreaming while he played Meyerbeer’s “King of Heaven,” and Mendelssohn’s “O Rest in the Lord.”

When one bell struck, at quarter to eight, he carried his music, all carefully wrapped, back into his room.  I lingered with him while he rolled a cigarette ere eight bells struck.

“I’ve got a lot more good things,” he said confidentially: “Coenen’s ‘Come Unto Me,’ and Faure’s ‘Crucifix’; and there’s ‘O Salutaris,’ and ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ by the Trinity Choir; and ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’ would just melt your heart.  I’ll play ’em for you some night.”

“Do you believe in them?” I was led to ask by his rapt expression and by the picture of his brute-driving hands which I could not shake from my consciousness.

He hesitated perceptibly, then replied:

“I do . . . when I’m listening to them.”

* * * * *

My sleep that night was wretched.  Short of sleep from the previous night, I closed my book and turned my light off early.  But scarcely had I dropped into slumber when I was aroused by the recrudescence of my hives.  All day they had not bothered me; yet the instant I put out the light and slept, the damnable persistent itching set up.  Wada had not yet gone to bed, and from him I got more cream of tartar.  It was useless, however, and at midnight, when I heard the watch changing, I partially dressed, slipped into my dressing-gown, and went up on to the poop.

I saw Mr. Mellaire beginning his four hours’ watch, pacing up and down the port side of the poop; and I slipped away aft, past the man at the wheel, whom I did not recognize, and took refuge in the lee of the wheel- house.

Once again I studied the dim loom and tracery of intricate rigging and lofty, sail-carrying spars, thought of the mad, imbecile crew, and experienced premonitions of disaster.  How could such a voyage be possible, with such a crew, on the huge Elsinore , a cargo-carrier that was only a steel shell half an inch thick burdened with five thousand tons of coal?  It was appalling to contemplate.  The voyage had gone wrong from the first.  In the wretched unbalance that loss of sleep brings to any good sleeper, I could decide only that the voyage was doomed.  Yet how doomed it was, in truth, neither I nor a madman could have dreamed.

I thought of the red-blooded Miss West, who had always lived and had no doubts but what she would always live.  I thought of the killing and driving and music-loving Mr. Pike.  Many a haler remnant than he had gone down on a last voyage.  As for Captain West, he did not count.  He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of his own creating.

Next I remembered the self-wounded Greek, sewed up by Mr. Pike and lying gibbering between the steel walls of the ’midship-house.  This picture almost decided me, for in my fevered imagination he typified the whole mad, helpless, idiotic crew.  Certainly I could go back to Baltimore .  Thank God I had the money to humour my whims.  Had not Mr. Pike told me, in reply to a question, that he estimated the running expenses of the Elsinore at two hundred dollars a day?  I could afford to pay two hundred a day, or two thousand, for the several days that might be necessary to get me back to the land, to a pilot tug, or any inbound craft to Baltimore .

I was quite wholly of a mind to go down and rout out Captain West to tell him my decision, when another presented itself: Then are you, the thinker and philosopher, the world-sick one, afraid to go down, to cease in the darkness ?  Bah!  My own pride in my life-pridelessness saved Captain West’s sleep from interruption.  Of course I would go on with the adventure, if adventure it might be called, to go sailing around Cape Horn with a shipload of fools and lunatics—and worse; for I remembered the three Babylonish and Semitic ones who had aroused Mr. Pike’s ire and who had laughed so terribly and silently.

Night thoughts!  Sleepless thoughts!  I dismissed them all and started below, chilled through by the cold.  But at the chart-room door I encountered Mr. Mellaire.

“A pleasant evening, sir,” he greeted me.  “A pity there’s not a little wind to help us off the land.”

“What do you think of the crew?” I asked, after a moment or so.

Mr. Mellaire shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve seen many queer crews in my time, Mr. Pathurst.  But I never saw one as queer as this—boys, old men, cripples and—you saw Tony the Greek go overboard yesterday?  Well, that’s only the beginning.  He’s a sample.