a child--an idle irresponsible child playing knuckle-bones--on whose
favour depends the gift of the key, and you will imagine one-half my
torment. Till that evening Charlie had spoken nothing that might not
lie within the experiences of a Greek galley-slave. But now, or there
was no virtue in books, he had talked of some desperate adventure of
the Vikings, of Thorfin Karlsefne’s sailing to Wineland, which is
America, in the ninth or tenth century. The battle in the harbour he
had seen; and his own death he had described. But this was a much more
startling plunge into the past. Was it possible that he had skipped
half a dozen lives and was then dimly remembering some episode of a
thousand years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the worst of it
was that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person in
the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to
bed that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing that
was not possible if Charlie’s detestable memory only held good.
I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karlsefne as it had never been
written before, might tell the story of the first discovery of America,
myself the discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie’s mercy, and so
long as there was a three-and-sixpenny Bohn volume within his reach
Charlie would not tell. I dared not curse him openly; I hardly dared
jog his memory, for I was dealing with the experiences of a thousand
years ago, told through the mouth of a boy of to-day; and a boy of
to-day is affected by every change of tone and gust of opinion, so that
he must lie even when he most desires to speak the truth.
I saw no more of Charlie for nearly a week. When next I met him it was
in Gracechurch Street with a bill-book chained to his waist. Business
took him over London Bridge, and I accompanied him. He was very full
of the importance of that book and magnified it. As we passed over
the Thames we paused to look at a steamer unloading great slabs of
white and brown marble. A barge drifted under the steamer’s stern and
a lonely ship’s cow in that barge bellowed. Charlie’s face changed
from the face of the bank-clerk to that of an unknown and--though he
would not have believed this--a much shrewder man. He flung out his arm
across the parapet of the bridge and laughing very loudly, said:--
‘When they heard _our_ bulls bellow the Skrœlings ran away!’
I waited only for an instant, but the barge and the cow had disappeared
under the bows of the steamer before I answered.
‘Charlie, what do you suppose are Skrœlings?’
‘Never heard of ’em before. They sound like a new kind of sea-gull.
What a chap you are for asking questions!’ he replied. ‘I have to go to
the cashier of the Omnibus Company yonder. Will you wait for me and we
can lunch somewhere together? I’ve a notion for a poem.’
‘No, thanks. I’m off. You’re sure you know nothing about Skrœlings?’
‘Not unless he’s been entered for the Liverpool Handicap.’ He nodded
and disappeared in the crowd.
Now it is written in the Saga of Eric the Red or that of Thorfin
Karlsefne, that nine hundred years ago when Karlsefne’s galleys
came to Leif’s booths, which Leif had erected in the unknown land
called Markland, which may or may not have been Rhode Island, the
Skrœlings--and the Lord He knows who these may or may not have
been--came to trade with the Vikings, and ran away because they were
frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which Thorfin had brought
with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know
of that affair? I wandered up and down among the streets trying to
unravel the mystery, and the more I considered it, the more baffling it
grew. One thing only seemed certain, and that certainty took away my
breath for the moment. If I came to full knowledge of anything at all,
it would not be one life of the soul in Charlie Mears’s body, but half
a dozen--half a dozen several and separate existences spent on blue
water in the morning of the world!
Then I reviewed the situation.
Obviously if I used my knowledge I should stand alone and
unapproachable until all men were as wise as myself. That would be
something, but manlike I was ungrateful. It seemed bitterly unfair that
Charlie’s memory should fail me when I needed it most. Great Powers
Above--I looked up at them through the fog-smoke--did the Lords of Life
and Death know what this meant to me? Nothing less than eternal fame
of the best kind, that comes from One, and is shared by one alone.
I would be content--remembering Clive, I stood astounded at my own
moderation--with the mere right to tell one story, to work out one
little contribution to the light literature of the day. If Charlie were
permitted full recollection for one hour--for sixty short minutes--of
existences that had extended over a thousand years--I would forego
all profit and honour from all that I should make of his speech. I
would take no share in the commotion that would follow throughout the
particular corner of the earth that calls itself ‘the world.’ The thing
should be put forth anonymously. Nay, I would make other men believe
that they had written it. They would hire bull-hided self-advertising
Englishmen to bellow it abroad. Preachers would found a fresh conduct
of life upon it, swearing that it was new and that they had lifted
the fear of death from all mankind. Every Orientalist in Europe would
patronise it discursively with Sanskrit and Pali texts. Terrible women
would invent unclean variants of the men’s belief for the elevation of
their sisters. Churches and religions would war over it. Between the
hailing and re-starting of an omnibus I foresaw the scuffles that would
arise among half a dozen denominations all professing ‘the doctrine of
the True Metempsychosis as applied to the world and the New Era’; and
saw, too, the respectable English newspapers shying, like frightened
kine, over the beautiful simplicity of the tale. The mind leaped
forward a hundred--two hundred--a thousand years. I saw with sorrow
that men would mutilate and garble the story; that rival creeds would
turn it upside down till, at last, the western world which clings to
the dread of death more closely than the hope of life, would set it
aside as an interesting superstition and stampede after some faith
so long forgotten that it seemed altogether new. Upon this I changed
the terms of the bargain that I would make with the Lords of Life and
Death. Only let me know, let me write, the story with sure knowledge
that I wrote the truth, and I would burn the manuscript as a solemn
sacrifice. Five minutes after the last line was written I would destroy
it all. But I must be allowed to write it with absolute certainty.
There was no answer. The flaming colours of an Aquarium poster caught
my eye, and I wondered whether it would be wise or prudent to lure
Charlie into the hands of the professional mesmerist then, and whether,
if he were under his power, he would speak of his past lives. If he
did, and if people believed him ... but Charlie would be frightened and
flustered, or made conceited by the interviews. In either case he would
begin to lie, through fear or vanity. He was safest in my own hands.
‘They are very funny fools, your English,’ said a voice at my elbow,
and turning round I recognised a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali
law student, called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England
to become civilised. The old man was a retired native official, and
on an income of five pounds a month contrived to allow his son two
hundred pounds a year, and the run of his teeth in a city where he
could pretend to be the cadet of a royal house, and tell stories of the
brutal Indian bureaucrats who ground the faces of the poor.
Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied Bengali, dressed with
scrupulous care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers, and tan
gloves. But I had known him in the days when the brutal Indian
Government paid for his university education, and he contributed cheap
sedition to the _Sachi Durpan_, and intrigued with the wives of his
fourteen-year-old schoolmates.
‘That is very funny and very foolish,’ he said, nodding at the poster.
‘I am going down to the Northbrook Club. Will you come too?’
I walked with him for some time. ‘You are not well,’ he said. ‘What is
there on your mind? You do not talk.’
‘Grish Chunder, you’ve been too well educated to believe in a God,
haven’t you?’
‘Oah, yes, _here_! But when I go home I must conciliate popular
superstition, and make ceremonies of purification, and my women will
anoint idols.’
‘And hang up _tulsi_ and feast the _purohit_, and take you back into
caste again and make a good _khuttri_ of you again, you advanced
Freethinker. And you’ll eat _desi_ food, and like it all, from the
smell in the courtyard to the mustard oil over you.’
‘I shall very much like it,’ said Grish Chunder unguardedly. ‘Once a
Hindu--always a Hindu. But I like to know what the English think they
know.’
‘I’ll tell you something that one Englishman knows. It’s an old tale to
you.’
I began to tell the story of Charlie in English, but Grish Chunder put
a question in the vernacular, and the history went forward naturally
in the tongue best suited for its telling. After all, it could never
have been told in English. Grish Chunder heard me, nodding from time to
time, and then came up to my rooms, where I finished the tale.
‘_Beshak_,’ he said philosophically. ‘_Lekin darwaza band hai_.
(Without doubt; but the door is shut.) I have heard of this remembering
of previous existences among my people. It is of course an old tale
with us, but, to happen to an Englishman--a cow-fed _Mlechh_--an
outcast. By Jove, that is _most_ peculiar!’
‘Outcast yourself, Grish Chunder! You eat cow-beef every day. Let’s
think the thing over. The boy remembers his incarnations.’
‘Does he know that?’ said Grish Chunder quietly, swinging his legs as
he sat on my table. He was speaking in his English now.
‘He does not know anything. Would I speak to you if he did? Go on!’
‘There is no going on at all. If you tell that to your friends they
will say you are mad and put it in the papers. Suppose, now, you
prosecute for libel.’
‘Let’s leave that out of the question entirely. Is there any chance of
his being made to speak?’
‘There is a chance. Oah, yess! But _if_ he spoke it would mean that all
this world would end now--_instanto_--fall down on your head. These
things are not allowed, you know. As I said, the door is shut.’
‘Not a ghost of a chance?’
‘How can there be? You are a Christi-án, and it is forbidden to eat, in
your books, of the Tree of Life, or else you would never die. How shall
you all fear death if you all know what your friend does not know that
he knows? I am afraid to be kicked, but I am not afraid to die, because
I know what I know. You are not afraid to be kicked, but you are afraid
to die. If you were not, by God! you English would be all over the shop
in an hour, upsetting the balances of power, and making commotions. It
would not be good. But no fear. He will remember a little and a little
less, and he will call it dreams. Then he will forget altogether. When
I passed my First Arts Examination in Calcutta that was all in the
cram-book on Wordsworth. “Trailing clouds of glory,” you know.’
‘This seems to be an exception to the rule.’
‘There are no exceptions to rules. Some are not so hard-looking as
others, but they are all the same when you touch. If this friend of
yours said so-and-so and so-and-so, indicating that he remembered all
his lost lives, or one piece of a lost life, he would not be in the
bank another hour. He would be what you called sack because he was mad,
and they would send him to an asylum for lunatics. You can see that, my
friend.’
‘Of course I can, but I wasn’t thinking of him. His name need never
appear in the story.’
‘Ah! I see. That story will never be written. You can try.’
‘I am going to.’
‘For your own credit and for the sake of money, _of_ course?’
‘No. For the sake of writing the story. On my honour that will be all.’
‘Even then there is no chance. You cannot play with the gods. It is a
very pretty story now. As they say, Let it go on that--I mean at that.
Be quick; he will not last long.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What I say. He has never, so far, thought about a woman.’
‘Hasn’t he, though!’ I remembered some of Charlie’s confidences.
‘I mean no woman has thought about him. When that comes;
_bus_--_hogya_--all up! I know. There are millions of women here.
Housemaids, for instance. They kiss you behind doors.’
I winced at the thought of my story being ruined by a housemaid. And
yet nothing was more probable.
Grish Chunder grinned.
‘Yes--also pretty girls--cousins of his house, and perhaps _not_ of his
house. One kiss that he gives back again and remembers will cure all
this nonsense, or else----’
‘Or else what? Remember he does not know that he knows.’
‘I know that. Or else, if nothing happens he will become immersed in
the trade and the financial speculation like the rest. It must be so.
You can see that it must be so. But the woman will come first, _I_
think.’
There was a rap at the door, and Charlie charged in impetuously. He
had been released from office, and by the look in his eyes I could see
that he had come over for a long talk; most probably with poems in his
pockets. Charlie’s poems were very wearying, but sometimes they led him
to speak about the galley.
Grish Chunder looked at him keenly for a minute.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Charlie said uneasily; ‘I didn’t know you had any
one with you.’
‘I am going,’ said Grish Chunder.
He drew me into the lobby as he departed.
‘That is your man,’ he said quickly. ‘I tell you he will never speak
all you wish. That is rot--bosh. But he would be most good to make to
see things. Suppose now we pretend that it was only play’--I had never
seen Grish Chunder so excited--‘and pour the ink-pool into his hand.
Eh, what do you think? I tell you that he could see _anything_ that a
man could see. Let me get the ink and the camphor. He is a seer and he
will tell us very many things.’
‘He may be all you say, but I’m not going to trust him to your gods and
devils.’
‘It will not hurt him. He will only feel a little stupid and dull when
he wakes up. You have seen boys look into the ink-pool before.’
‘That is the reason why I am not going to see it any more. You’d better
go, Grish Chunder.’
He went, insisting far down the staircase that it was throwing away my
only chance of looking into the future.
This left me unmoved, for I was concerned for the past, and no peering
of hypnotised boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me to that.
But I recognised Grish Chunder’s point of view and sympathised with it.
‘What a big black brute that was!’ said Charlie, when I returned to
him. ‘Well, look here, I’ve just done a poem; did it instead of playing
dominoes after lunch. May I read it?’
‘Let me read it to myself.’
‘Then you miss the proper expression. Besides, you always make my
things sound as if the rhymes were all wrong.’
‘Read it aloud, then. You’re like the rest of ’em.’
Charlie mouthed me his poem, and it was not much worse than the average
of his verses. He had been reading his books faithfully, but he was not
pleased when I told him that I preferred my Longfellow undiluted with
Charlie.
Then we began to go through the MS. line by line; Charlie parrying
every objection and correction with:
‘Yes, that may be better, but you don’t catch what I’m driving at.’
Charlie was, in one way at least, very like one kind of poet.
There was a pencil scrawl at the back of the paper and ‘What’s that?’ I
said.
‘Oh that’s not poetry at all. It’s some rot I wrote last night before I
went to bed, and it was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so I made
it a sort of blank verse instead.
Here is Charlie’s ‘blank verse’:--
‘We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were
low.
_Will you never let us go?_
We ate bread and onions when you took towns, or ran aboard quickly
when you were beaten back by the foe,
The captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing
songs, but we were below,
We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we
were idle for we still swung to and fro.
_Will you never let us go?_
The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to
the bone with salt cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and
our lips were cut to our gums and you whipped us because we could not
row.
_Will you never let us go?_
But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water
runs along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after
us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up
the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho!
_Will you never let us go?_’
‘H’m. What’s oar-thresh, Charlie?’
‘The water washed up by the oars. That’s the sort of song they might
sing in the galley y’ know. Aren’t you ever going to finish that story
and give me some of the profits?’
‘It depends on yourself. If you had only told me more about your hero
in the first instance it might have been finished by now. You’re so
hazy in your notions.’
‘I only want to give you the general notion of it--the knocking about
from place to place and the fighting and all that. Can’t you fill in
the rest yourself? Make the hero save a girl on a pirate-galley and
marry her or do something.’
‘You’re a really helpful collaborator. I suppose the hero went through
some few adventures before he married.’
‘Well then, make him a very artful card--a low sort of man--a sort
of political man who went about making treaties and breaking them--a
black-haired chap who hid behind the mast when the fighting began.’
‘But you said the other day that he was red-haired.’
‘I couldn’t have. Make him black-haired of course. You’ve no
imagination.’
Seeing that I had just discovered the entire principles upon which the
half-memory falsely called imagination is based, I felt entitled to
laugh, but forbore, for the sake of the tale.
‘You’re right. _You’re_ the man with imagination. A black-haired chap
in a decked ship,’ I said.
‘No, an open ship--like a big boat.’
This was maddening.
‘Your ship has been built and designed, closed and decked in; you said
so yourself,’ I protested.
‘No, no, not that ship. That was open or half-decked because---- By
Jove, you’re right. You made me think of the hero as a red-haired chap.
Of course if he were red, the ship would be an open one with painted
sails.’
Surely, I thought, he would remember now that he had served in two
galleys at least--in a three-decked Greek one under the black-haired
‘political man,’ and again in a Viking’s open sea-serpent under the
man ‘red as a red bear’ who went to Markland. The devil prompted me to
speak.
‘Why, “of course,” Charlie?’ said I.
‘I don’t know. Are you making fun of me?’
The current was broken for the time being. I took up a note-book and
pretended to make many entries in it.
‘It’s a pleasure to work with an imaginative chap like yourself,’ I
said, after a pause. ‘The way that you’ve brought out the character of
the hero is simply wonderful.’
‘Do you think so?’ he answered, with a pleased flush. ‘I often tell
myself that there’s more in me than my mo----than people think.’
‘There’s an enormous amount in you.’
‘Then, won’t you let me send an essay on The Ways of Bank-Clerks to
_Tit-Bits_, and get the guinea prize?’
‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant, old fellow: perhaps it would be
better to wait a little and go ahead with the galley-story.’
‘Ah, but I sha’n’t get the credit of that. _Tit-Bits_ would publish my
name and address if I win. What are you grinning at? They _would_.’
‘I know it. Suppose you go for a walk. I want to look through my notes
about our story.’
Now this reprehensible youth who left me, a little hurt and put back,
might for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of the Argo--had
been certainly slave or comrade to Thorfin Karlsefne. Therefore
he was deeply interested in guinea competitions. Remembering what
Grish Chunder had said I laughed aloud. The Lords of Life and Death
would never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his
pasts, and I must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor
inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks.
I got together and placed on one file all my notes; and the net
result was not cheering. I read them a second time. There was nothing
that might not have been compiled at second-hand from other people’s
books--except, perhaps, the story of the fight in the harbour. The
adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history
of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing, and though I wrote both, who
could challenge or confirm the accuracy of my details? I might as well
tell a tale of two thousand years hence. The Lords of Life and Death
were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted. They would allow nothing
to escape that might trouble or make easy the minds of men. Though I
was convinced of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. Exaltation
followed reaction, not once, but twenty times in the next few weeks.
My moods varied with the March sunlight and flying clouds. By night or
in the beauty of a spring morning I perceived that I could write that
tale and shift continents thereby. In the wet windy afternoons, I saw
that the tale might indeed be written, but would be nothing more than
a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted piece of Wardour Street work in
the end. Then I blessed Charlie in many ways--though it was no fault of
his. He seemed to be busy with prize competitions, and I saw less and
less of him as the weeks went by and the earth cracked and grew ripe to
spring, and the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to read
or talk of what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion
in his voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met;
but Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from
which money was to be made.
‘I think I deserve twenty-five per cent, don’t I, at least?’ he said,
with beautiful frankness. ‘I supplied all the ideas, didn’t I?’
This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed that
it had been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking up the
curious nasal drawl of the underbred City man.
‘When the thing’s done we’ll talk about it. I can’t make anything of
it at present. Red-haired or black-haired hero are equally difficult.’
He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. ‘_I_ can’t
understand what you find so difficult. It’s all as clear as mud to
me,’ he replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the bars, took light,
and whistled softly. ‘Suppose we take the red-haired hero’s adventures
first, from the time that he came south to my galley and captured it
and sailed to the Beaches.’
I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of
pen and paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break the
current. The gas-jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie’s voice dropped
almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sailing of an open
galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the
curve of the one sail evening after evening when the galley’s beak was
notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and ‘we sailed by that
for we had no other guide,’ quoth Charlie. He spoke of a landing on an
island and explorations in its woods, where the crew killed three men
whom they found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said,
followed the galley, swimming and choking in the water, and the crew
cast lots and threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to
the strange gods whom they had offended. Then they ate sea-weed when
their provisions failed, and their legs swelled, and their leader, the
red-haired man, killed two rowers who mutinied, and after a year spent
among the woods they set sail for their own country, and a wind that
never failed carried them back so safely that they all slept at night.
This, and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the voice fell so low that
I could not catch the words, though every nerve was on the strain. He
spoke of their leader, the red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of his
God; for it was he who cheered them and slew them impartially as he
thought best for their needs; and it was he who steered them for three
days among floating ice, each floe crowded with strange beasts that
‘tried to sail with us,’ said Charlie, ‘and we beat them back with the
handles of the oars.’
The gas-jet went out, a burnt coal gave way, and the fire settled with
a tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased speaking, and I
said no word.
‘By Jove!’ he said at last, shaking his head. ‘I’ve been staring at the
fire till I’m dizzy. What was I going to say?’
‘Something about the galley-book.’
‘I remember now. It’s twenty-five per cent of the profits, isn’t it?’
‘It’s anything you like when I’ve done the tale.’
‘I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I’ve--I’ve an
appointment.’ And he left me.