‘Why, “of course,” Charlie?’ said I.
‘I don’t know. Are you making fun of me?’
The current was broken for the time being. I took up a note-book and pretended to make many entries in it.
‘It’s a pleasure to work with an imaginative chap like yourself,’ I said, after a pause. ‘The way that you’ve brought out the character of the hero is simply wonderful.’
‘Do you think so?’ he answered, with a pleased flush. ‘I often tell myself that there’s more in me than my mo — than people think.’
‘There’s an enormous amount in you.’
‘Then, won’t you let me send an essay on The Ways of Bank-Clerks to Tit-Bits, and get the guinea prize?’
‘That wasn’t exactly what I meant, old fellow perhaps it would be better to wait a little and go ahead with the galley-story.’
‘Ah, but I sha’n’t get the credit of that. Tit-Bits would publish my name and address if I win. What are you grinning at? They would.’
‘I know it. Suppose you go for a walk. I want to look through my notes about our story.’
Now this reprehensible youth who left me, a little hurt and put back, might for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of the Argo — had been certainly slave or comrade to Thorfin Karlsefne. Therefore he was deeply interested in guinea competitions. Remembering what Grish Chunder had said I laughed aloud. The Lords of Life and Death would never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his pasts, and I must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks.
I got together and placed on one file all my notes; and the net result was not cheering. I read them a second time. There was nothing that might not have been compiled at second-hand from other people’s books — except, perhaps, the story of the fight in the harbour. The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing, and though I wrote both, who could challenge or confirm the accuracy of my details? I might as well tell a tale of two thousand years hence. The Lords of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted. They would allow nothing to escape that might trouble or make easy the minds of men. Though I was convinced of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. Exaltation followed reaction, not once, but twenty times in the next few weeks. My moods varied with the March sunlight and flying clouds. By night or in the beauty of a spring morning I perceived that I could write that tale and shift continents thereby. In the wet windy afternoons, I saw that the tale might indeed be written, but would be nothing more than a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted piece of Wardour Street work in the end. Then I blessed Charlie in many ways — though it was no fault of his. He seemed to be busy with prize competitions, and I saw less and less of him as the weeks went by and the earth cracked and grew ripe to spring, and the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to read or talk of what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion in his voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met; but Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from which money was to be made.
‘I think I deserve twenty-five per cent, don’t I, at least?’ he said, with beautiful frankness. ‘I supplied all the ideas, didn’t I?’
This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed that it had been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking up the curious nasal drawl of the underbred City man.
‘When the thing’s done we’ll talk about it. I can’t make anything of it at present. Red-haired or black-haired heroes are equally difficult.’
He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. ‘I can’t understand what you find so difficult. It’s all as clear as mud to me,’ he replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the bars, took light, and whistled softly. ‘Suppose we take the red-haired hero’s adventures first, from the time that he came south to my galley and captured it and sailed to the Beaches.’
I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of pen and paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break the current. The gas jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie’s voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sailing of an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the curve of the one sail evening after evening when the galley’s beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and ‘we sailed by that for we had no other guide,’ quoth Charlie. He spoke of a landing on an island and explorations in its woods, where the crew killed three men whom they found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said, followed the galley, swimming and choking in the water, and the crew cast lots and threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to the strange gods whom they had offended. Then they ate sea-weed when their provisions failed, and their legs swelled, and their leader, the red-haired man, killed two rowers who mutinied, and after a year spent among the woods they set sail for their own country, and a wind that never failed carried them back so safely that they all slept at night. This, and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the voice fell so low that I could not catch the words, though every nerve was on the strain. He spoke of their leader, the red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of his God; for it was he who cheered them and slew them impartially as he thought best for their needs; and it was he who steered them for three days among floating ice, each floe crowded with strange beasts that ‘tried to sail with us,’ said Charlie, ‘and we beat them back with the handles of the oars.’
The gas jet went out, a burnt coal gave way, and the fire settled with a tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased speaking, and I said no word.
‘By Jove!’ he said at last, shaking his head. ‘I’ve been staring at the fire till I’m dizzy. What was I going to say?’
‘Something about the galley-book.’
‘I remember now. It’s twenty-five per cent of the profits, isn’t it?’
‘It’s anything you like when I’ve done the tale.’
‘I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I’ve — I’ve an appointment.’ And he left me.
Had not my eyes 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, quicklv: ‘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 favourite 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;
Gray 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 maste
r 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 and most beautiful wooings. Were this 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.
HIS PRIVATE HONOUR
THE autumn batch of recruits for the Old Regiment had just been uncarted. As usual they were said to be the worst draft that had ever come from the Depôt. Mulvaney looked them over, grunted scornfully, and immediately reported himself very sick.
‘Is it the regular autumn fever?’ said the doctor, who knew something of Terence’s ways. Your temperature’s normal.’
‘‘Tis wan hundred and thirty-seven rookies to the bad, sorr. I’m not very sick now, but I will be dead if these boys are thrown at me in my rejuced condition. Doctor, dear, supposin’ you was in charge of three cholera camps an’ — ’
‘Go to hospital then, you old contriver,’ said the doctor, laughing.
Terence bundled himself into a blue bedgown — Dinah Shadd was away attending to a major’s lady, who preferred Dinah without a diploma to anybody else with a hundred, — put a pipe in his teeth, and paraded the hospital balcony, exhorting Ortheris to be a father to the new recruits.
‘They’re mostly your own sort, little man,’ he said, with a grin; ‘the top-spit av Whitechapel. I’ll interogue them whin they’re more like something they never will be, — an’ that’s a good honest soldier like me.’
Ortheris yapped indignantly. He knew as well as Terence what the coming work meant, and he thought Terence’s conduct mean. Then he strolled off to look at the new cattle, who were staring at the unfamiliar landscape with large eyes, and asking if the kites were eagles and the pariah-dogs jackals.
‘Well, you are a holy set of bean-faced beggars, you are,’ he said genially to a knot in the barrack square. Then, running his eye over them, — ’Fried fish an’ whelks is about your sort. Blimy if they haven’t sent some pink-eyed Jews too. You chap with the greasy ‘ed, which o’ the Solomons was ‘your father, Moses?’
‘My name’s Anderson,’ said a voice sullenly.
‘Oh, Samuelson! All right, Samuelson! An’ ‘ow many o’ the likes o’ you Sheenies are comin’ to spoil B Company?’
There is no scorn so complete as that of the old soldier for the new. It is right that this ‘should be so. A recruit must learn first that he is not a man but a thing, which in time, and by he mercy of Heaven, may develop into a soldier of the Queen if it takes care and attends to good advice. Ortheris’s tunic was open, his cap over-topped one eye, and his hands were behind his back as he walked round, growing more conemptuous at each step. The recruits did not dare to answer, for they were new boys in a strange school, who had called themselves soldiers at the Depôt in comfortable England.
‘Not a single pair o’ shoulders in the whole lot. I’ve seen some bad drafts in my time, — some bloomin’ bad drafts; but this ‘ere draft beats any’ draft I’ve ever known. Jock, come an’ look at these squidgy, ham-shanked beggars.’
Learoyd was walking across the square. He arrived slowly, circled round the knot as a whale circles round a shoal of small fry, said nothing, and went away whistling.
‘Yes, you may well look sheepy,’ Ortheris squeaked to the boys. ‘It’s the likes of you; breaks the ‘earts of the likes of us. We’ve got to lick you into shape, and never a ha’penny extry do we get for so doin’, and you ain’t never grateful neither. Don’t you go thinkin’ it’s the Colonel nor yet the company orf’cer that makes you. It’s us, you Johnnie Raws — you Johnnie bloomin’ Raws!’
A company officer had come up unperceived behind Ortheris at the end of this oration. ‘You may be right, Ortheris,’ he said quietly, ‘but I shouldn’t shout it.’ The recruits grinned as Ortheris saluted and collapsed.
Some days afterwards I was privileged to look over the new batch, and they were everything that Ortheris had said, and more. B Company had been devastated by forty or fifty of them; and B Company’s drill on parade was a sight to shudder at. Ortheris asked them lovingly whether they had not been sent out by mistake, and whether they had not better post themselves back to their friends. Learoyd thrashed them methodically one by one, without haste but without slovenliness; and the older soldiers took the remnants from Learoyd and went over them in their own fashion. Mulvaney stayed in hospital, and grinned from the balcony when Ortheris called him a shirker and other worse names.
‘By the grace av God we’ll brew men av them yet,’ Terence said one day. ‘Be vartuous an’ parsevere, me son. There’s the makin’s av colonels in that mob if we only go deep enough — wid a belt.’
‘We!’ Ortheris replied, dancing with rage. ‘I just love you and your “we’s.” ‘Ere’s B Company drillin’ like a drunk Militia reg’ment.’
‘So I’ve been officially acquent,’ was the answer from on high; ‘but I’m too sick this tide to make certain.’
‘An’ you, you fat H’irishman, sniftin’ an’ shirkin’ up there among the arrerroot an the sago!’
‘An’ the port wine, — you’ve forgot the port wine, Orth’ris: ‘Tis none so bad.’ Terence smacked his lips provokingly.
‘And we’re wore off’ our feet with these ‘ere — kangaroos. Come out o’ that, an’ earn your pay. Come on down outer that, an’ do somethin’, ‘stead o’ grinnin’ up there like a Jew monkey, you frowsy — ’eaded Fenian!’
‘When I’m better av my various complaints I’ll have a little private talkin’ wid you. In the meanwhile, — duck!’
Terence flung an empty medicine bottle at Ortheris’s head and dropped into a long chair, and Ortheris came to tell me his opinion of Mulvaney three times over, — each time entirely varying all the words.
‘There’ll be a smash one o’ these days,’ he concluded. ‘Well, it’s none o’ my fault, but it’s ‘ard on B Company.’
It was very hard on B Company, for twenty seasoned men cannot push twice that number of fools into their places and keep their own places at the same time. The recruits should have been more evenly distributed through the regiment, but it seemed good to the Colonel to mass them in
a company where there was a fair proportion of old soldiers. He found his reward early one morning when the battalion was advancing by companies in echelon from the right. The order was given to form company squares, which are compact little bricks of men very unpleasant for a line of charging cavalry to deal with. B Company was on the left flank, and had ample time to know what was going on. For that reason, presumably, it gathered itself into a thing like a decayed aloe-clump, the bayonets pointing anywhere in general and nowhere in particular; and in that clump, roundel, or mob, it stayed till the dust had gone down and the Colonel could see and speak. He did both, and the speaking part was admitted by the regiment to be the finest thing that the ‘old man’ had ever risen to since one delightful day at a sham-fight, when a cavalry division had occasion to walk over his line of skirmishers. He said, almost weeping, that he had given no order for rallying groups, and that he preferred to see a little dressing among the men occasionally. He then apologised for having mistaken B Company for men. He said that they were but weak little children, and that since he could not offer them each a perambulator and a nursemaid (this may sound comic to read, but B Company heard it by word of mouth and winced) perhaps the best thing for them to do would be to go back to squad-drill. To that end he proposed sending them, out of their turn, to garrison duty in Fort Amara, five miles away, — D Company were next for this detestable duty and nearly cheered the Colonel. There he devoutly hoped that their own subalterns would drill them to death, as they were of no use in their present life.
It was an exceedingly painful scene, and I made haste to be near B Company barracks when parade was dismissed and the men were free to talk. There was no talking at first, because each old soldier took a new draft and kicked him very severely. The non-commissioned officers had neither eyes nor ears for these accidents. They left the barracks to themselves, and Ortheris improved the occasion by a speech. I did not hear that speech, but fragments of it were quoted for weeks afterwards. It covered the birth, parentage, and education of every man in the company by name: it gave a complete account of Fort Amara from a sanitary and social point of view; and it wound up with an abstract of the whole duty of a soldier, each recruit his use in life, and Ortheris’s views on the use and fate of the recruits of B Company.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 248