“‘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 nightmare about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was
drowned in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in harbor. 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 the 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, but
first, and one of them jumped clean up into the air and came down again
close to my head.”
“How was that managed?”
“The moving galley’s bow was plunking them back through their own
oarholes, and I could hear the devil 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
traveled 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, he who had never been out of sight of a London omnibus, 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 mess 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 harbor where the fight was fought.”
“I didn’t dream about that. I know it was a harbor, 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 afterward. 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 flint
on the printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my voice that the
current might not be broken, and I know 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 redheaded 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. Afterward--years and years afterward--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 gentle 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.
Conceive yourself at the door of the world’s treasure-house guarded by a
child--an idle irresponsible child playing knuckle-bones--on whose favor
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 harbor 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-six-penny 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 lies
even when he desires to speak the truth.
I saw no more of him for nearly a week. When next I met him it was in
Gracechurch Street with a billbook 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 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 Skroelings 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 Skroelings?”
“Never heard of ‘em before. They sound like a new kind of seagull. 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 Skroelings?”
“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
Skroelings--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 walked round 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 honor 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 patronize 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 colors 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, 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 recognized a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law
student, called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to
become civilized. 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
_Sachi Durpan_, and intrigued with the wives of his 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 in 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 bang up _tulsi_ and feast the _purohit_, and take you back into
caste again and make a good _khuttrj_ of you again, you advanced social
Free-thinker. 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 _Malechk_--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 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, yes! 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 honor 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.”
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 speculations 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 talk 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, declaring 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 hypnotized boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me do that. But
I recognized Grish Chunder’s point of view and sympathized 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 book 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 ‘t 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 a 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 sharkskin; 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 oarblade, 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 notebook 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 harbor. 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 at 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 clean 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 burned coal gave way, and the fire settled down
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.”
“I remember now. It’s 25 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.
Had my eyes not been held I might have know that that broken muttering
over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the
prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the
Lords of Life and Death!
When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was nervous
and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his lips a
little parted.
“I’ve done a poem,” he said; and then quickly: “it’s the best I’ve ever
done. Read it.” He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the window.
I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to
criticise--that is to say praise--the poem sufficiently to please
Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his
favorite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier verse,
and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is what I read:
“The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where he bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!
“She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky;
Grey sea, she is mine alone!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!
“Mine! I have won her, O good brown earth,
Make merry! ‘Tis hard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the bind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing.”
“Yes, it’s the early harrowing, past a doubt,” I said, with a dread at
my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.
“Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me, O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!”
“Well?” said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.
I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid
a photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head,
and a foolish slack mouth.
“Isn’t it--isn’t it wonderful?” he whispered, pink to the tips of his
ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. “I didn’t know; I
didn’t think--it came like a thunderclap.”
“Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?”
“My God--she--she loves me!” He sat down repeating the last words to
himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already
bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in
his past lives.
“What will your mother say?” I asked, cheerfully.
“I don’t care a damn what she says.”
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told
him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described
to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve.
Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist’s assistant with a
weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already
that She had never been kissed by a man before.
Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I
understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully
behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not
so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.
“Now, about that galley-story,” I said, still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.
Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. “The galley--what galley?
Good heavens, don’t joke, man! This is serious! You don’t know how
serious it is!”
Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills
remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.