The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘ “I have been – many times – overcome with weariness in this particular employment.” That is the meaning.’ He returned me the paper, and I fled without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.

  I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men had been given the chance to write the most marvellous tale in the world, nothing less than the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told by himself. Small wonder that his dreaming had seemed real to Charlie! The Fates that are so careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all, he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis,5 and a sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply me – here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered faces – with material to make my tale sure – so sure that the world would hail it as an impudent and vamped fiction. And I – I alone would know that it was absolutely and literally true. I – I alone held this jewel to my hand for the cutting and polishing! Therefore I danced again among the gods of the Egyptian Court till a policeman saw me and took steps in my direction.

  It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was no difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He came to me time after time, as useless as a surcharged phonograph – drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy had been in his past lives, and desperately anxious not to lose one word of his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking-point by reciting poetry – not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate them; but I choked down my impatience until the first flood of enthusiasm should have spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.

  ‘What’s the use of my telling you what I think, when these chaps wrote things for the angels to read?’ he growled, one evening. ‘Why don’t you write something like theirs?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re treating me quite fairly,’ I said, speaking under strong restraint.

  ‘I’ve given you the story,’ he said shortly, replunging into ‘Lara’.6

  ‘But I want the details.’

  ‘The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley? They’re quite easy. You can just make ’em up for yourself. Turn up the gas a little; I want to go on reading.’

  I could have broken the gas-globe over his head for his amazing stupidity. I could indeed make up things for myself did I only know what Charlie did not know that he knew. But since the doors were shut behind me I could only wait his youthful pleasure and strive to keep him in good temper. One minute’s want of guard might spoil a priceless revelation: now and again he would toss his books aside – he kept them in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them – and launched into his sea-dreams. Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, coloured, and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the mutter and hum through a City telephone in the busiest part of the day.

  He talked of the galley – his own galley had he but known it – with illustrations borrowed from ‘The Bride of Abydos’. He pointed the experiences of his hero with quotations from ‘The Corsair’, and threw in deep and desperate moral reflections from ‘Cain’ and ‘Manfred’, expecting me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow were the jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was speaking the truth as he remembered it.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ I said one evening, as soon as I understood the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could expostulate, read him nearly the whole of ‘The Saga of King Olaf’!7

  He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his hands drumming on the back of the sofa where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar Tamberskelver and the verse:

  ‘Einar then, the arrow taking

  From the loosened string,

  Answered, “That was Norway breaking

  From thy hand, O King!” ’

  He gasped with pure delight of sound.

  ‘That’s better than Byron, a little?’ I ventured.

  ‘Better! Why, it’s true! How could he have known?’ I went back and repeated:

  ‘ “What was that?” said Olaf, standing

  On the quarter-deck.

  “Something heard I like the stranding

  Of a shattered wreck.” ’

  ‘How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go z-zzp all along the line? Why, only the other night … But go back, please, and read “The Skerry of Shrieks” again.’

  ‘No, I’m tired. Let’s talk. What happened the other night?’

  ‘I had an awful dream about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was drowned in a fight. You see, we ran alongside another ship in harbour. The water was dead still except where our oars whipped it up. You know where I always sit in the galley?’ He spoke haltingly at first, under a fine English fear of being laughed at.

  ‘No. That’s news to me,’ I answered meekly, my heart beginning to beat.

  ‘On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper deck. There were four of us at that oar, all chained. I remember watching the water and trying to get my handcuffs off before the row began. Then we closed up on the other ship, and all their fighting-men jumped over our bulwarks, and my bench broke and I was pinned down with the three other fellows on top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs.’

  ‘Well?’ Charlie’s eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall behind my chair.

  ‘I don’t know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side – tied to their oars, you know – began to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we spun round like a cockchafer,8 and I knew, lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up bow-on to ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving. Then, by Gum! there was a crash! Our left oars began to break as the other galley, the moving one, y’know, stuck her nose into them. Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck planking, butt first, and one of them jumped clear up into the air and came down again close at my head.’

  ‘How was that managed?’

  ‘The moving galley’s bow was plunking them back through their own oar-holes, and I could hear no end of a shindy on 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. 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 s
ilver wire laid down along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break.’ He had paid everything except the bare life for this little valueless piece of knowledge, and I had travelled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and take his knowledge at second hand. But Charlie, the bank-clerk on twenty-five shillings a week, who had never been out of sight of a made road, knew it all. It was no consolation to me that once in his lives he had been forced to die for his gains. I also must have died scores of times, but behind me, because I could have used my knowledge, the doors were shut.

  ‘And then?’ I said, trying to put away the devil of envy.

  ‘The funny thing was, though, in all the row I didn’t feel a bit astonished or frightened. It seemed as if I’d been in a good many fights, because I told my next man so when the row began. But that cad of an overseer on my deck wouldn’t unloose our chains and give us a chance. He always said that we’d all be set free after a battle, but we never were – we never were.’ Charlie shook his head mournfully.

  ‘What a scoundrel!’

  ‘I should say he was. He never gave us enough to eat, and sometimes we were so thirsty that we used to drink salt water. I can taste that salt water still.’

  ‘Now tell me something about the harbour where the fight was fought.’

  ‘I didn’t dream about that. I know it was a harbour, though; because we were tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the stone under water was covered with wood to prevent our ram getting chipped when the tide made us rock.’

  ‘That’s curious. Our hero commanded the galley, didn’t he?’

  ‘Didn’t he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good ’un. He was the man who killed the overseer.’

  ‘But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren’t you?’

  ‘I can’t make that fit quite,’ he said, with a puzzled look. ‘The galley must have gone down with all hands, and yet I fancy that the hero went on living afterwards. Perhaps he climbed into the attacking ship. I wouldn’t see that, of course. I was dead, you know.’

  He shivered slightly and protested that he could remember no more.

  I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to Mortimer Collins’s Transmigration,9 and gave him a sketch of the plot before he opened the pages.

  ‘What rot it all is!’ he said frankly, at the end of an hour. ‘I don’t understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King, and the rest of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again.’

  I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember of his description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to time for confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without raising his eyes from the book, as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay before him on the printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my voice that the current might not be broken, and I knew that he was not aware of what he was saying, for his thoughts were out on the sea with Longfellow.

  ‘Charlie,’ I asked, ‘when the rowers on the galleys mutinied how did they kill their overseers?’

  ‘Tore up the benches and brained ’em. That happened when a heavy sea was running. An overseer on the lower deck slipped from the centre plank and fell among the rowers. They choked him to death against the side of the ship with their chained hands quite quietly, and it was too dark for the other overseer to see what had happened. When he asked, he was pulled down too and choked, and the lower deck fought their way up deck by deck, with the pieces of the broken benches banging behind ’em. How they howled!’

  ‘And what happened after that?’

  ‘I don’t know. The hero went away – red hair and red beard and all. That was after he had captured our galley, I think.’

  The sound of my voice irritated him, and he motioned slightly with his left hand as a man does when interruption jars.

  ‘You never told me he was red-headed before, or that he captured your galley,’ I said, after a discreet interval.

  Charlie did not raise his eyes.

  ‘He was as red as a red bear,’ said he abstractedly. ‘He came from the North; they said so in the galley when he asked for rowers – not slaves, but free men. Afterwards – years and years afterwards – news came from another ship, or else he came back –’

  His lips moved in silence. He was rapturously retasting some poem before him.

  ‘Where had he been, then?’ I was almost whispering that the sentence might come gently to whichever section of Charlie’s brain was working on my behalf.

  ‘To the Beaches – the Long and Wonderful Beaches!’ was the reply after a minute of silence.

  ‘To Furdurstrandi?’10 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!’ ”11

  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-bones12 – on whose favour depends the gift of the key, and you will imagine onehalf 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 Thorfinn Karlsefne’s sailing to Wineland,13 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 Thorfinn 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 volume14 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 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-book15 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-cler
k 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 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 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 Thorfinn 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 Thorfinn 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,16 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 forgo 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 restarting 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 up-side-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.