About five o'clock in the evening he awoke a new man. After a toilet
as careful as the absence of a razor and a hairbrush would permit, he
found his way to the common room. He felt extremely hungry, but the
outlay of another six-pence, brought him a pot of tea, some brown bread
and butter, and a slice of meat pie.
There was only one other patron in the common room, and he at once
attracted Henry Harper's curiosity. This individual was engaged in
toasting a muffin at the large and clear fire, and even with the
Sailor's experience of Miss Foldal in this kind, he had never seen one
of these delightful articles dealt with in a manner of such sacerdotal
delicacy.
A blue china plate was warming before the fire, and the muffin was
presently placed on it, soaked in butter in true Miss Foldal style, and
brought to table piping hot. The young man had chosen a place as near
the fire as he could get, and the muffin expert took a place opposite,
poured out a brew of tea from his own blue china teapot, and to the
Sailor's amazement squeezed a little lemon juice into it.
This Sybarite was eating his first piece of muffin with an air of
feminine elegance when he suddenly caught the young man's eye. The
limpid glance seemed to stimulate his own blue orb to a mild and calm
curiosity. The Sybarite looked the young man up and down, but
continued to eat his muffin with a kind of apostolic pleasantness,
which somehow recalled to Henry Harper the Reverend Rogers and a
certain famous tea-party at the Brookfield Street Mission Hall in his
distant youth.
Presently, to Henry Harper's grave surprise, the muffin eater was
pleased to discourse a little of men and things.
The Sailor in his genuine modesty was flattered, moreover he was
charmed. Never in all his wanderings had he heard a man discourse in
this way. It might have been Klondyke himself--at times there was an
odd resemblance to that immortal in the occasional grace notes of the
Sybarite. Yet it was a suggestion rather than a resemblance. This was
a kind of composite of Klondyke and the Reverend Rogers, a Klondyke
raised to a higher intellectual power.
Of course, this was only one aspect of the Sybarite, and that the least
important, because with every allowance for the sacred memory of the
Reverend Rogers, the person opposite was quite the most wonderful
talker Henry Harper had ever heard in his life.
Had the Sailor heard the music of Palestrina, which at that period was
a pleasure to come, he might have imagined he was listening to it. The
voice of the Sybarite was measured yet floating, his phrases were
endless yet perfectly rounded and definite, there was a note of
weariness, older than the world, yet there was a charm, a lucidity, a
mellow completeness that was perfectly amazing. The Sailor, with a
wonderful talisman now burning bright in his soul, was enchanted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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