“I haven’t any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and on Sundays I’m on my bicycle or down the river all day. There’s nothing wrong about the hero, is there?”
“Tell me again and I shall understand clearly. You say that your hero went pirating. How did he live?”
“He was on the lower deck of this ship-thing that I was telling you about.”
“What sort of ship?”
“It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea spurts through the oar-holes and the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then there’s a bench running down between the two lines of oars and an overseer with a whip walks up and down the bench to make the men work.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s in the tale. There’s a rope running overhead, looped to the upper deck, for the overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. When the overseer misses the rope once and falls among the rowers, remember the hero laughs at him and gets licked for it. He’s chained to his oar of course — the hero.”
“How is he chained?”
“With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a sort of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He’s on the lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can’t you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as the ship moves?”
“I can, but I can’t imagine your imagining it.”
“How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on the upper deck are managed by four men to each bench, the lower ones by three, and the lowest of all by two. Remember it’s quite dark on the lowest deck and all the men there go mad. When a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn’t thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces.”
“Why?” I demanded, amazed, not so much at the information as the tone of command in which it was flung out.
“To save trouble and to frighten the others. It needs two overseers to drag a man’s body up to the top deck; and if the men at the lower deck oars were left alone, of course they’d stop rowing and try to pull up the benches by all standing up together in their chains.”
“You’ve a most provident imagination. Where have you been reading about galleys and galley-slaves?”
“Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But, perhaps, if you say so, I may have read something.”
He went away shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the overseas, to command of a ship of his own, and ultimate establishment of a kingdom on an island “somewhere in the sea, you know”; and, delighted with my paltry five pounds, had gone out to buy the notions of other men, that these might teach him how to write. I had the consolation of knowing that this notion was mine by right of purchase, and I thought that I could make something of it.
When next he came to me he was drunk — royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations. Most of all was he drunk with Longfellow.
“Isn’t it splendid? Isn’t it superb?” he cried, after hasty greetings. “Listen to this —
“‘Wouldst thou,’ so the helmsman answered,
‘Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.’
By gum!
“‘Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.’”
he repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting me. “But I can understand it too,” he said to himself. “I don’t know how to thank you for that fiver. And this; listen —
“‘I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.’
“I haven’t braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it.”
“You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen it?”
“When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live in Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,
‘When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the Equinox.’”
He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion that was shaking himself.
“When that storm comes,” he continued, “I think that all the oars in the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their chests smashed in by the bucking oar-heads. By the way, have you done anything with that notion of mine yet?”
“No. I was waiting to hear more of it from you. Tell me how in the world you re so certain about the fittings of the ship. You know nothing of ships.”
“I don’t know. It’s as real as anything to me until I try to write it down. I was thinking about it only last night in bed, after you had loaned me ‘Treasure Island’; and I made up a a whole lot of new things to go into the story.”
“What sort of things?”
“About the food the men ate; rotten figs and black beans and wine in a skin bag, passed from bench to bench.”
“Was the ship built so long ago as that?”
“As what? I don’t know whether it was long ago or not. It’s only a notion, but sometimes it seems just as real as if it was true. Do I bother you with talking about it?”
“Not in the least. Did you make up anything else?”
“Yes, but it’s nonsense.” Charlie flushed a little.
“Never mind; let’s hear about it.”
“Well, I was thinking over the story, and after awhile I got out of bed and wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men might be supposed to scratch on their oars with the edges of their handcuffs. It seemed to make the thing more lifelike. It is so real to me, y’know.”
“Have you the paper on you?”
“Ye — es, but what’s the use of showing it? It’s only a lot of scratches. All the same, we might have ‘em reproduced in the book on the front page.”
“I’ll attend to those details. Show me what your men wrote.”
He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of note-paper, with a single line of scratches upon it, and I put this carefully away.
“What is it supposed to mean in English?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps it means ‘I’m beastly tired.’ It’s great nonsence,” he repeated, “but all those men in the ship seem as real people to me. Do do something to the notion soon; I should like to see it written and printed.”
“But all you’ve told me would make a long book.”
“Make it then. You’ve only to sit down and write it out.”
“Give me a little time. Have you any more notions?”
“Not just now. I’m reading all the books I’ve bought. They’re splendid.”
When he had left I looked at the sheet of note-paper with the inscription upon it. Then I took my head tenderly between both hands, to make certain that it was not coming off or turning round. Then... but there seemed to be no interval between quitting my rooms and finding myself arguing with a policeman outside a door marked Private in a corridor of the British Museum. All I demanded, as politely as possible, was “the Greek antiquity man.” The policeman knew nothing except the rules of the Museum, and it became necessary to forage through all the houses and offices inside the gates. An elderly gentleman called away from his lunch put an end to my search by holding the note-paper between finger and thumb and sniffing at it scornfully.
“What does this mean? H�
�mm,” said he. “So far as I can ascertain it is an attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part” — here he glared at me with intention — ”of an extremely illiterate-ah-person.” He read slowly from the paper, “Pollock, Erckman, Tauchnitz, Henniker” — four names familiar to me.
“Can you tell me what the corruption is supposed to mean — the gist of the thing?” I asked.
“I have been — many times — overcome with weariness in this particular employment. That is the meaning.” He returned me the paper, and I fled without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.
I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men had been given the chance to write the most marvelous tale in the world, nothing less than the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told by himself. Small wonder that his dreaming had seemed real to Charlie. The Fates that are so careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since Time began. Above all he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply me — here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their battered faces — with material to make my tale sure — so sure that the world would hail it as an impudent and vamped fiction. And I — I alone would know that it was absolutely and literally true. I — I alone held this jewel to my hand for the cutting and polishing. Therefore I danced again among the gods till a policeman saw me and took steps in my direction.
It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was no difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He came to me time after time, as useless as a surcharged phonograph — drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy had been in his past lives, and desperately anxious not to lose one word of his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting poetry — not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate them; but I choked down my impatience until the first flood of enthusiasm should have spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.
“What’s the use of my telling you what I think, when these chaps wrote things for the angels to read?” he growled, one evening. “Why don’t you write something like theirs?”
“I don’t think you’re treating me quite fairly,” I said, speaking under strong restraint.
“I’ve given you the story,” he said, shortly replunging into “Lara.”
“But I want the details.”
“The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley? They’re quite easy. You can just make ‘em up 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, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the muttered song 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 the whole of “The Saga of King Olaf!”
He listened open-mouthed, flushed his hands drumming on the back of the sofa where he lay, till I came to the Songs of Emar Tamberskelver and the verse:
“Emar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered: ‘That was Norway breaking
‘Neath thy hand, O King.’”
He gasped with pure delight of sound.
“That’s better than Byron, a little,” I ventured.
“Better? Why it’s true! How could he have known?”
I went back and repeated:
“‘What was that?’ said Olaf, standing
On the quarter-deck,
‘Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck.’”
“How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go z-zzp all along the line? Why only the other night.... But go back please and read ‘The Skerry of Shrieks’ again.”
“No, I’m tired. Let’s talk. What happened the other night?”
“I had an awful 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 l
ike?” 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?”
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 194