Then my courage left me. The difference between that photograph and our life at home, between the "Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli" and the stately, severe Count Heinrich von Luckner, my father, came vividly upon me and made my heart sink. I put the picture back in my sea chest.
The remembrance came back to me how my father expected me to become an officer in the Imperial Service, and how I had vowed that I would never go back until I was a naval officer in the Imperial Service. Let them think me dead until I was able to go home clad in the Imperial naval uniform.
When I did return home as a naval officer, I jokingly showed my father the photograph of the Champion Wrestler of Sankt Pauli. He took it from me and for years carried it proudly in his wallet.
VI
THE TRAGIC CRUISE OF THE CÆSAREA
By Joe, I've got a real sea yarn to tell you now. Wait a minute till I light my pipe, and I'll tell you about the voyage of the Cæsarea.
She was my first German ship. With a cargo bound for Melbourne, we set sail from Hamburg. My friend Nauke was aboard, and again we were comrades. The captain was a clever sailor, but an old skinflint. The cook, who on German ships is called "Smutje"—smudgy, smutty—was a good fellow, but was keen to please the miserly captain. Together, they did wonders in skimping our food. On Monday we got peas, on Tuesday beans, on Wednesday, for a change, yellow peas, on Thursday brown beans, on Friday "blue Henry," which looked like coffee beans, but smaller, on Saturday corned beef (bully beef), and on Sunday, as a Sabbatical delicacy, we got a special dish called "plum and dumplings." The fare never changed, and we were always hungry. Very good, Smutje, you were an excellent fellow at heart, but that penny-squeezing captain made a son-of-a-gun of a sea cook out of you, and you are the hero of this tale.
One day I was sitting on a topyard. I could hear Smutje down in the galley whistling "My Heart Is Like a Beehive," which was a song hit of those days. I whistled along with him. My heart was like a bee-hive, and girls were the bees and one of them was the queen bee. I could see her floating in front of me. Yes, it was the same fairy princess of my dreams whom I had seen in imagination from the deck of the Niobe on that first voyage when we sighted the Isle of Fuerteventura in the Canaries. My fairy princess lived on that distant tropic island of waving palms and white houses. So I whistled as loud as I could the same tune that Smutje was whistling, "My Heart Is Like a Beehive."
"What is that?"
I couldn't trust my eyes. I saw two arms thrust from the galley. They supported a big tray, which they thrust on to the skylight of the galley. The tray was heaped with a big stack of pancakes. What? A thousand miles out at sea, and pancakes fresh and warm?