The Second Mate's Cup of Tea
Preview of Comrade Stalin Attends a Wedding
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The Second Mate's Cup of Tea
The Honourable Albert William George Frederick Rathbone, an Englishman and second mate of the Santianna, a Pacific Coast lumber schooner, sat alone at a small, square table. The table sported a dirty white cloth and occupied a dark corner in the dining room of the Grand Mariner Hotel in Garibaldi, Oregon.
Garibaldi held pride of place as one of the smaller lumber-and-fishing ports on the Oregon coast. In point of dismal fact, if the entrance to Tillamook Bay, and thus to Garibaldi, had been any worse, there wouldn't have been any grand mariners to patronize the hotel named in their honor, not sane ones, anyway.
Sane.
Rathbone turned the word over in his mind. When it came right down to it, would any sane man go to work in the lumber fleet in the first place, especially if he were qualified for grander things? A steamer, say?
Possibly.
More often than not, lumber schooners worked coastwise. This meant that their crews could enjoy reasonable home lives. Moreover, the ships tended to embrace informal ways of getting the job done, and their crews touted them as great feeders. Unless bound for a long voyage—out into the Pacific, say—they had no reason to shanghai anyone and almost never did.
Nevertheless, despite their charms, it remained unlikely that anyone with the qualifications for grander employment wouldn't leave the doughty lumber haulers and their weather-bound coasts behind.
Without a doubt, Rathbone was qualified for better things, more lucrative things, more noteworthy things, both by training and by influence, but here he was, working in the West Coast's lumber fleet, the so-called Scandinavian Navy due to the disproportionate numbers of Norwegians and Swedes in the fleet. And why was Rathbone so serving? For his sins, naturally. Old sins, forgotten sins, but so far they had remained resolutely indelible.
Admittedly, as noted, the work did have its attractions; however, Rathbone could not say that the Grand Mariner Hotel was to be found among them.
From the outside, the establishment looked as though someone had piled up a half dozen millworker's cottages in a pile two deep and three high, and had then tied them all together with a false front and a single coat of yellow paint. The trim was green.
From the inside, the hotel appeared to be pretentious and unkempt, as though the cottages were about to disassociate themselves from one another and go their separate ways. Or perhaps it was more as if brooms, dustpans, and paintbrushes were in short supply.
The dining room offered its own unique charm. All around Rathbone swirled the offensive odors of greasy American food, the stench of poorly trimmed kerosene lamps, and the clank and clink of abused cutlery and china. The nasal braying, shouts, and guffaws that passed for conversation pulsed in the fetid air. At times the reports actually echoed from the walls and windows.
The date was May 24, 1890, the Queen's seventy-first birthday, and at the moment, Rathbone, an English aristocrat through and through, felt very far away from the civilities of hearth and home, his English hearth and home.
The truth be told, he felt acutely distant from a decent, respectable cup of tea.
Ten minutes ago, the waitress, a razor-thin girl with oily, brown hair and dull-brown eyes, had crowded a teapot and the other tea things onto his table. She had then stared at him as though he were a madman, as though she expected him to foam at the mouth and rave at the top of his lungs.