ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written
word. I looked at him, wondering whether it were possible that he did
not know the originality, the power of the notion that had come in his
way? It was distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed
up with pride by ideas not a tithe as excellent and practicable. But
Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy
with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him
out to the end. It would be folly to allow his thought to remain in his
own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be
done indeed; but, oh so much!
‘What do you think?’ he said at last. ‘I fancy I shall call it “The
Story of a Ship.”’
‘I think the idea’s pretty good; but you won’t be able to handle it for
ever so long. Now I----’
‘Would it be of any use to you? Would you care to take it? I should be
proud,’ said Charlie promptly.
There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless,
hot-headed, intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman
in her blindest devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she
adores, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or
interlard her speech with his pet oaths. And Charlie did all these
things. Still it was necessary to salve my conscience before I
possessed myself of Charlie’s thoughts.
‘Let’s make a bargain. I’ll give you a fiver for the notion,’ I said.
Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.
‘Oh, that’s impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you
so, and speaking as a man of the world, I couldn’t. Take the notion if
it’s any use to you. I’ve heaps more.’
He had--none knew this better than I--but they were the notions of
other men.
‘Look at it as a matter of business--between men of the world,’ I
returned. ‘Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books.
Business is business, and you may be sure I shouldn’t give that price
unless----’
‘Oh, if you put it _that_ way,’ said Charlie, visibly moved by the
thought of the books. The bargain was clinched with an agreement that
he should at unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he
possessed, should have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned
right to inflict upon me all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I
said, ‘Now tell me how you came by this idea.’
‘It came by itself.’ Charlie’s eyes opened a little.
‘Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have
read before somewhere.’
‘I haven’t any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and
on Sundays I’m on my bicycle or down the river all day. There’s nothing
wrong about the hero, is there?’
‘Tell me again and I shall understand clearly. You say that your hero
went pirating. How did he live?’
‘He was on the lower deck of this ship-thing that I was telling you
about.’
‘What sort of ship?’
‘It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea spurts through the
oar-holes and the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then
there’s a bench running down between the two lines of oars and an
overseer with a whip walks up and down the bench to make the men work.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It’s in the tale. There’s a rope running overhead, looped to the upper
deck, for the overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. When the
overseer misses the rope once and falls among the rowers, remember the
hero laughs at him and gets licked for it. He’s chained to his oar of
course--the hero.’
‘How is he chained?’
‘With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a
sort of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He’s on the
lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from
the hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can’t you imagine the sunlight
just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling
about as the ship moves?’
‘I can, but I can’t imagine your imagining it.’
‘How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on
the upper deck are managed by four men to each bench, the lower ones by
three, and the lowest of all by two. Remember it’s quite dark on the
lowest deck and all the men there go mad. When a man dies at his oar
on that deck he isn’t thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and
stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces.’
‘Why?’ I demanded amazed, not so much at the information as the tone of
command in which it was flung out.
‘To save trouble and to frighten the others. It needs two overseers to
drag a man’s body up to the top deck; and if the men at the lower deck
oars were left alone, of course they’d stop rowing and try to pull up
the benches by all standing up together in their chains.’
‘You’ve a most provident imagination. Where have you been reading about
galleys and galley-slaves?’
‘Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But,
perhaps, if you say so, I may have read something.’
He went away shortly afterwards to deal with booksellers, and I
wondered how a bank-clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a
profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the
story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and
death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through
revolt against the overseers, to command of a ship of his own, and at
last to the establishment of a kingdom on an island ‘somewhere in the
sea, you know;’ and, delighted with my paltry five pounds, had gone
out to buy the notions of other men, that these might teach him how to
write. I had the consolation of knowing that this notion was mine by
right of purchase, and I thought that I could make something of it.
When next he came to me he was drunk--royally drunk on many poets for
the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words
tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations--as a
beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. Most of all was
he drunk with Longfellow.
‘Isn’t it splendid? Isn’t it superb?’ he cried, after hasty greetings.
‘Listen to this--
‘“Wouldst thou,”--so the helmsman answered,
“Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.”
By gum!
‘“Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery,”’
he repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting
me. ‘But _I_ can understand it too,’ he said to himself. ‘I don’t know
how to thank you for that fiver. And this; listen--
‘“I remember the black wharves and the slips
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.”’
I haven’t braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it.’
‘You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen it?’
‘When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live in
Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,
‘“When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the Equinox.”’
He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion that was
shaking himself.
‘When that storm comes,’ he continued, ‘I think that all the oars in
the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their
chests smashed in by the oar-heads bucking. By the way, have you done
anything with that notion of mine yet?’
‘No. I was waiting to hear more of it from you. Tell me how in the
world you’re so certain about the fittings of the ship. You know
nothing of ships.’
‘I don’t know. It’s as real as anything to me until I try to write it
down. I was thinking about it only last night in bed, after you had
lent me _Treasure Island_; and I made up a whole lot of new things to
go into the story.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘About the food the men ate; rotten figs and black beans and wine in a
skin bag, passed from bench to bench.’
‘Was the ship built so long ago as _that_?’
‘As what? I don’t know whether it was long ago or not. It’s only a
notion, but sometimes it seems just as real as if it was true. Do I
bother you with talking about it?’
‘Not in the least. Did you make up anything else?’
‘Yes, but it’s nonsense.’ Charlie flushed a little.
‘Never mind; let’s hear about it.’
‘Well, I was thinking over the story, and after awhile I got out of bed
and wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men might be
supposed to scratch on their oars with the edges of their handcuffs. It
seemed to make the thing more life-like. It _is_ so real to me, y’know.’
‘Have you the paper on you?’
‘Ye--es, but what’s the use of showing it? It’s only a lot of
scratches. All the same, we might have ’em reproduced in the book on
the front page.’
‘I’ll attend to those details. Show me what your men wrote.’
He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of notepaper, with a single line of
scratches upon it, and I put this carefully away.
‘What is it supposed to mean in English?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean it to mean “I’m beastly tired.” It’s great
nonsense,’ he repeated, ‘but all those men in the ship seem as real as
real people to me. Do do something to the notion soon; I should like to
see it written and printed.’
‘But all you’ve told me would make a long book.’
‘Make it then. You’ve only to sit down and write it out.’
‘Give me a little time. Have you any more notions?’
‘Not just now. I’m reading all the books I’ve bought. They’re splendid.’
When he had left I looked at the sheet of notepaper with the
inscription upon it. Then I took my head tenderly between both hands,
to make certain that it was not coming off or turning round. Then
... but there seemed to be no interval between quitting my rooms and
finding myself arguing with a policeman outside a door marked _Private_
in a corridor of the British Museum. All I demanded, as politely as
possible, was ‘the Greek antiquity man.’ The policeman knew nothing
except the rules of the Museum, and it became necessary to forage
through all the houses and offices inside the gates. An elderly
gentleman called away from his lunch put an end to my search by holding
the notepaper between finger and thumb and sniffing at it scornfully.
‘What does this mean? H’mm,’ said he. ‘So far as I can ascertain it
is an attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part’--here he
glared at me with intention--‘of an extremely illiterate--ah--person.’
He read slowly from the paper, ‘_Pollock_, _Erckmann_, _Tauchnitz_,
_Henniker_’--four names familiar to me.
‘Can you tell me what the corruption is supposed to mean--the gist of
the thing?’ I asked.
‘I have been--many times--overcome with weariness in this particular
employment. That is the meaning.’ He returned me the paper, and I fled
without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.
I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men had
been given the chance to write the most marvellous tale in the world,
nothing less than the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told by
himself. Small wonder that his dreaming had seemed real to Charlie.
The Fates that are so careful to shut the doors of each successive
life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was
looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been
permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all, he
was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds;
and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand
metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include
Greek. He would supply me--here I capered among the dumb gods of
Egypt and laughed in their battered faces--with material to make my
tale sure--so sure that the world would hail it as an impudent and
vamped fiction. And I--I alone would know that it was absolutely and
literally true. I--I alone held this jewel to my hand for the cutting
and polishing! Therefore I danced again among the gods of the Egyptian
court till a policeman saw me and took steps in my direction.
It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there
was no difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of
poetry. He came to me time after time, as useless as a surcharged
phonograph--drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy
had been in his past lives, and desperately anxious not to lose one
word of his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and interest.
He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of Charlie
Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest in his
readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting
poetry--not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English
poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest
names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct
narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate them; but I choked
down my impatience until the first flood of enthusiasm should have
spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.
‘What’s the use of my telling you what _I_ think, when these chaps
wrote things for the angels to read?’ he growled, one evening. ‘Why
don’t you write something like theirs?’
‘I don’t think you’re treating me quite fairly,’ I said, speaking under
strong restraint.
‘I’ve given you the story,’ he said shortly, replunging into ‘Lara.’
‘But I want the details.’
‘The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley?
They’re quite easy. You can just make ’em up for yourself. Turn up the
gas a little, I want to go on reading.’
I could have broken the gas globe over his head for his amazing
stupidity. I could indeed make up things for myself did I only know
what Charlie did not know that he knew. But since the doors were shut
behind me I could only wait his youthful pleasure and strive to keep
him in good temper. One minute’s want of guard might spoil a priceless
revelation: now and again he would toss his books aside--he kept them
in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of
good money had she seen them--and launched into his sea-dreams. Again I
cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had
been overlaid, coloured, and distorted by that which he had read, and
the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like
the mutter and hum through a City telephone in the busiest part of the
day.
He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the ‘Bride of Abydos.’ He pointed the
experiences of his hero with quotations from ‘The Corsair,’ and threw
in deep and desperate moral reflections from ‘Cain’ and ‘Manfred,’
expecting me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow
were the jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was
speaking the truth as he remembered it.
‘What do you think of this?’ I said one evening, as soon as I
understood the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he
could expostulate, read him nearly the whole of ‘The Saga of King Olaf!’
He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his hands drumming on the back of
the sofa where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar Tamberskelver
and the verse:--
‘Einar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered, “That was Norway breaking
’Neath thy hand, O King.”’
He gasped with pure delight of sound.
‘That’s better than Byron, a little?’ I ventured.
‘Better! Why it’s _true_! How could he have known?’
I went back and repeated:--
‘“What was that?” said Olaf, standing
On the quarter-deck,
“Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck.”’
‘How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and
go _z-zzp_ all along the line? Why only the other night.... But go back
please and read “The Skerry of Shrieks” again.’
‘No, I’m tired. Let’s talk. What happened the other night?’
‘I had an awful dream about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was
drowned in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in harbour.
The water was dead still except where our oars whipped it up. You know
where I always sit in the galley?’ He spoke haltingly at first, under a
fine English fear of being laughed at.
‘No. That’s news to me,’ I answered meekly, my heart beginning to beat.
‘On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper deck.
There were four of us at that oar, all chained. I remember watching the
water and trying to get my handcuffs off before the row began. Then we
closed up on the other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our
bulwarks, and my bench broke and I was pinned down with the three other
fellows on top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs.’
‘Well?’ Charlie’s eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the
wall behind my chair.
‘I don’t know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back,
and I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars,
you know--began to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle,
and we spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was,
that there was a galley coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side.
I could just lift up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We
wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn
a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked herself on to
us and stopped our moving. Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our left
oars began to break as the other galley, the moving one y’know, stuck
her nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck
planking, butt first, and one of them jumped clear up into the air and
came down again close at my head.’
‘How was that managed?’
‘The moving galley’s bow was plunking them back through their own
oar-holes, and I could hear no end of a shindy in the decks below.
Then her nose caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways,
and the fellows in the right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and
ropes, and threw things on to our upper deck--arrows, and hot pitch or
something that stung, and we went up and up and up on the left side,
and the right side dipped, and I twisted my head round and saw the
water stand still as it topped the right bulwarks, and then it curled
over and crashed down on the whole lot of us on the right side, and I
felt it hit my back, and I woke.’
‘One minute, Charlie. When the sea topped the bulwarks, what did it
look like?’ I had my reasons for asking. A man of my acquaintance had
once gone down with a leaking ship in a still sea, and had seen the
water-level pause for an instant ere it fell on the deck.
‘It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay
there for years,’ said Charlie.
Exactly! The other man had said: ‘It looked like a silver wire laid
down along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break.’
He had paid everything except the bare life for this little valueless
piece of knowledge, and I had travelled ten thousand weary miles to
meet him and take his knowledge at second hand. But Charlie, the
bank-clerk on twenty-five shillings a week, who had never been out of
sight of a made road, knew it all. It was no consolation to me that
once in his lives he had been forced to die for his gains. I also must
have died scores of times, but behind me, because I could have used my
knowledge, the doors were shut.
‘And then?’ I said, trying to put away the devil of envy.
‘The funny thing was, though, in all the row I didn’t feel a bit
astonished or frightened. It seemed as if I’d been in a good many
fights, because I told my next man so when the row began. But that cad
of an overseer on my deck wouldn’t unloose our chains and give us a
chance. He always said that we’d all be set free after a battle, but we
never were; we never were.’ Charlie shook his head mournfully.
‘What a scoundrel!’
‘I should say he was. He never gave us enough to eat, and sometimes
we were so thirsty that we used to drink salt-water. I can taste that
salt-water still.’
‘Now tell me something about the harbour where the fight was fought.’
‘I didn’t dream about that. I know it was a harbour, though; because we
were tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the stone
under water was covered with wood to prevent our ram getting chipped
when the tide made us rock.’
‘That’s curious. Our hero commanded the galley, didn’t he?’
‘Didn’t he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good ’un. He
was the man who killed the overseer.’
‘But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren’t you?’
‘I can’t make that fit quite,’ he said, with a puzzled look. ‘The
galley must have gone down with all hands, and yet I fancy that the
hero went on living afterwards. Perhaps he climbed into the attacking
ship. I wouldn’t see that, of course. I was dead, you know.’
He shivered slightly and protested that he could remember no more.
I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in
ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him
to Mortimer Collins’s _Transmigration_, and gave him a sketch of the
plot before he opened the pages.
‘What rot it all is!’ he said frankly, at the end of an hour. ‘I don’t
understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King, and the
rest of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again.’
I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember of
his description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to time
for confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without raising
his eyes from the book, as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay
before him on the printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my
voice that the current might not be broken, and I knew that he was not
aware of what he was saying, for his thoughts were out on the sea with
Longfellow.
‘Charlie,’ I asked, ‘when the rowers on the galleys mutinied how did
they kill their overseers?’
‘Tore up the benches and brained ’em. That happened when a heavy sea
was running. An overseer on the lower deck slipped from the centre
plank and fell among the rowers. They choked him to death against the
side of the ship with their chained hands quite quietly, and it was too
dark for the other overseer to see what had happened. When he asked, he
was pulled down too and choked, and the lower deck fought their way up
deck by deck, with the pieces of the broken benches banging behind ’em.
How they howled!’
‘And what happened after that?’
‘I don’t know. The hero went away--red hair and red beard and all. That
was after he had captured our galley, I think.’
The sound of my voice irritated him, and he motioned slightly with his
left hand as a man does when interruption jars.
‘You never told me he was red-headed before, or that he captured your
galley,’ I said, after a discreet interval.
Charlie did not raise his eyes.
‘He was as red as a red bear,’ said he abstractedly. ‘He came from
the north; they said so in the galley when he looked for rowers--not
slaves, but free men. Afterwards--years and years afterwards--news came
from another ship, or else he came back----’
His lips moved in silence. He was rapturously retasting some poem
before him.
‘Where had he been, then?’ I was almost whispering that the sentence
might come gently to whichever section of Charlie’s brain was working
on my behalf.
‘To the Beaches--the Long and Wonderful Beaches!’ was the reply after a
minute of silence.
‘To Furdurstrandi?’ I asked, tingling from head to foot.
‘Yes, to Furdurstrandi,’ he pronounced the word in a new fashion. ‘And
I too saw----’ The voice failed.
‘Do you know what you have said?’ I shouted incautiously.
He lifted his eyes, fully roused now. ‘No!’ he snapped. ‘I wish you’d
let a chap go on reading. Hark to this:--
‘“But Othere, the old sea captain,
He neither paused nor stirred
Till the king listened, and then
Once more took up his pen
And wrote down every word.
‘“And to the King of the Saxons
In witness of the truth,
Raising his noble head,
He stretched his brown hand and said,
‘Behold this walrus tooth.’”
By Jove, what chaps those must have been, to go sailing all over the
shop never knowing where they’d fetch the land! Hah!’
‘Charlie,’ I pleaded, ‘if you’ll only be sensible for a minute or two
I’ll make our hero in our tale every inch as good as Othere.’
‘Umph! Longfellow wrote that poem. I don’t care about writing things
any more. I want to read.’ He was thoroughly out of tune now, and
raging over my own ill-luck, I left him.