"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 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 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
oar-holes, 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 him 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 gallies 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. 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 billhook 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 hang up _tulsi_ and feast the _purohit_, and take you back into caste
again and make a good _khuttri_ 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 _Malechh_--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, 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 Christian, 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 to 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 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."
Charles 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 bandies 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 secondhand 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 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 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 known 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 hind 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.