‘Dowse, he felt very highly flattered, and he slipped into the boat, not paying any attention to Challong. But Challong swum along to the ship after the boat. When Dowse was in the boat, he found, so he says, he couldn’t speak to the sailors ’cept to call them “white mice with chains about their neck”, and Lord knows he hadn’t seen or thought o’ white mice since he was a little bit of a boy with them in his handkerchief. So he kept himself quiet, and so they come to the survey ship; and the man in the boat hails the quarter-deck with something that Dowse could not rightly understand, but there was one word he spelt out again and again – m-a-d, mad – and he heard someone behind him saying of it backwards. So he had two words-m-a-d, mad, d-a-m, dam; and he put they two words together as he come on the quarter-deck, and he says to the captain very slowly, “I be damned if I am mad,” but all the time his eye was held like by the coils of rope on the belaying pins, and he followed those ropes up and up with his eye till he was quite lost and comfortable among the rigging, which ran criss-cross, and slopeways, and up and down, and any way but straight along under his feet north and south. The deck-seams, they ran that way, and Dowse daresn’t look at them. They was the same as the streaks of the water under the planking of the lighthouse.
‘Then he heard the captain talking to him very kind, and for the life of him he couldn’t tell why; and what he wanted to tell the captain was that Flores Strait was too streaky, like bacon, and the steamers only made it worse; but all he could do was to keep his eye very careful on the rigging and sing:
“I saw a ship a-sailing,
A-sailing on the sea;
And oh, it was all lading
With pretty things for me!”
‘Then he remembered that was foolishness, and he started off to say about the Ombay Passage, but all he said was: “The captain was a duck – meaning no offence to you, sir – but there was something on his back that I’ve forgotten.
“And when the ship began to move
The captain says, ‘Quack-quack!’”
‘He notices the captain turns very red and angry, and he says to himself, “My foolish tongue’s run away with me again. I’ll go forward;” and he went forward, and catched the reflection of himself in the binnacle brasses; and he saw that he was standing there and talking mother-naked in front of all them sailors, and he ran into the fo’c’s’le howling most grievous. He must ha’ gone naked for weeks on the Light, and Challong o’ course never noticed it. Challong was swimmin’ round and round the ship, sayin’ “dam” for to please the men and to be took aboard, because he didn’t know any better.
‘Dowse didn’t tell what happened after this, but seemingly our survey ship lowered two boats and went over to Dowse’s buoys. They took one sounding, and then finding it was all correct they cut the buoys that Dowse and Challong had made, and let the tide carry ’em out through the Loby Toby end of the strait; and the Dutch gunboat, she sent two men ashore to take care o’ the Wurlee Light, and the Britomarte, she went away with Dowse, leaving Challong to try to follow them, a-calling “dam – dam” all among the wake of the screw, and half heaving himself out of water and joining his webby-foot hands together. He dropped astern in five minutes, and I suppose he went back to the Wurlee Light. You can’t drown an Orange-Lord, not even in Flores Strait on flood-tide.
‘Dowse come across me when he came to England with the survey ship, after being more than six months in her, and cured of his streaks by working hard and not looking over the side more than he could help. He told me what I’ve told you, sir, and he was very much ashamed of himself; but the trouble on his mind was to know whether he hadn’t sent something or other to the bottom with his buoyings and his lightings and such like. He put it to me many times, and each time more and more sure he was that something had happened in the straits because of him. I think that distructed him, because I found him up at Fratton one day, in a red jersey, a-praying before the Salvation Army, which had produced him in their papers as a Reformed Pirate. They knew from his mouth that he had committed evil on the deep waters – that was what he told them-and piracy, which no one does now except Chineses, was all they knew of. I says to him: “Dowse, don’t be a fool. Take off that jersey and come along with me.” He says: “Fenwick, I’m a-saving of my soul; for I do believe that I have killed more men in Flores Strait than Trafalgar”. I says: “A man that thought he’d seen all the navies of the earth standing round in a ring to watch his foolish false wreck-buoys” (those was my very words I used) “ain’t fit to have a soul, and if he did he couldn’t kill a louse with it. John Dowse, you was mad then, but you are a damn sight madder now. Take off that there jersey!”
‘He took it off and come along with me, but he never got rid o’ that suspicion that he’d sunk some ships a-cause of his foolishness at Flores Straits; and now he’s a wherryman from Portsmouth to Gosport, where the tides run crossways and you can’t row straight for ten strokes together…So late as all this! Look!’
Fenwick left his chair, passed to the Light, touched something that clicked, and the glare ceased with a suddenness that was pain. Day had come, and the Channel needed St Cecilia no longer. The sea-fog rolled back from the cliffs in trailed wreaths and dragged patches, as the sun rose and made the dead sea alive and splendid. The stillness of the morning held us both silent as we stepped on the balcony. A lark went up from the cliffs behind St Cecilia, and we smelt a smell of cows in the lighthouse pastures below.
Then we were both at liberty to thank the Lord for another day of clean and wholesome life.
‘The Finest Story in the World’
Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave.
W.E. Henley
HIS name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and was full of aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his first name, and he called the marker ‘Bullseye’. Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.
That was our first step towards better acquaintance. He would call on me sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must, he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above sending stories of love and death to the penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man are almost as holy as those of a maiden. Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honourable, but at the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way about the world as befitted a bank-clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed ‘dove’ with ‘love’ and ‘moon’ with ‘June’, and devoutly believed that they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on, seeing all that he intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already done, and turned to me for applause.
I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations; and I know that his writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he told me almost at the outset of our acquaintance – when he was ravaging my bookshelves, and a little before I was implored to speak the truth as to his chances of ‘writing something really great, you know’. Maybe I encouraged him too much, for, one night, he called on me, his eyes flaming with excitement, and said breathlessly:
‘Do y
ou mind – can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won’t interrupt you, I won’t really. There’s no place for me to write at my mother’s.’
‘What’s the trouble?’ I said, knowing well what that trouble was.
‘I’ve a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was ever written. Do let me write it out here. It’s such a notion!’
There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked me, but plunged into his work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in the world would not come forth.
‘It looks such awful rot now,’ he said mournfully. ‘And yet it seemed so good when I was thinking about it. What’s wrong?’
I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: ‘Perhaps you don’t feel in the mood for writing.’
‘Yes I do – except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!’
‘Read me what you’ve done,’ I said.
He read, and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.
‘It needs compression,’ I suggested cautiously.
‘I hate cutting my things down. I don’t think you could alter a word here without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing it.’
‘Charlie, you’re suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week.’
‘I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?’
‘How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in your head.’
Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him, wondering whether it were possible that he did not know the originality, the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by ideas not a tithe as excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his thought to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so much!
‘What do you think?’ he said at last. ‘I fancy I shall call it “The Story of a Ship”.’
‘I think the idea’s pretty good; but you won’t be able to handle it for ever so long. Now I—‘
‘Would it be of any use to you? Would you care to take it? I should be proud,’ said Charlie promptly.
There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hot-headed, intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in her blindest devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she adores, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or interlard her speech with his pet oaths. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was necessary to salve my conscience before I possessed myself of Charlie’s thoughts.
‘Let’s make a bargain. I’ll give you a fiver for the notion,’ I said.
Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.
Oh, that’s impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you so, and speaking as a man of the world, I couldn’t. Take the notion if it’s any use to you. I’ve heaps more.’
He had – none knew this better than I – but they were the notions of other men.
‘Look at it as a matter of business – between men of the world,’ I returned. ‘Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books. Business is business, and you may be sure I shouldn’t give that price unless—‘
‘Oh, if you put it that way,’ said Charlie, visibly moved by the thought of the books. The bargain was clinched with an agreement that he should at unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he possessed, should have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned right to inflict upon me all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, ‘Now tell me how you came by this idea.’
‘It came by itself.’ Charlie’s eyes opened a little.
‘Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have read before somewhere.’
‘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 afterwards 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 overseers, to command of a ship of his own, and at last to the 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 – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors. 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 secre
t 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 slips
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 know 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 oar-heads bucking. 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 lent me Treasure Island; and I made up 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.’
The Wish House and Other Stories Page 24